Page 120 of Marry in Haste
He’d also given the nod to Cal’s sisters’ suggestions of willow bark tea, reputed to be good for counteracting fever.Apparently they’d picked up a smattering of sickroom remedies from conversations in the Pump Room.
“Would you mind if I left you now? I have some business to attend to.”
She nodded sleepily. “I’m ridiculously tired. I think I’ll have a nap.” She grimaced. “Another one.”
***
Cal went first to Whitehall.
“So, you meant it about resigning your commission,” Radcliffe said.
“I did.” Cal handed him the signed papers.
“Because you have a family to care for now. How’s your wife, by the way?”
“Recovering well, thank you.”
Cal blamed himself for her injury. If he hadn’t come hunting for the assassin in the first place... He’d never have met and married her.
He just wished she and the girls hadn’t been there when Gimble shot at him.
But if they hadn’t, Cal would probably be dead.
“Have the Gimble family been released?”
Radcliffe nodded. “A few hours ago.”
“Not yesterday? Or the day Gimble was killed?”
Radcliffe shrugged. “There were things to follow up. The funeral to arrange.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
Radcliffe looked up in surprise. “The funeral?”
Cal nodded. “They don’t have much. They’ll need every penny they have to get to America.” He hadn’t told Radcliffe about the money Gimble had on him. Radcliffe would want to confiscate it. “I’m going to pay their fares to America too.”
“Good lord. What’s gotten into you? Founding an assassin’s benevolent society?”
“Just balancing the score. The wife and children weren’t responsible for what he did.”
Radcliffe gave him a shrewd look. “You’re not feeling guilty, are you? Because guilt is pointless for the likes of us.”
Cal didn’t agree. “I think the ‘likes of us’ haven’t been doing as good a job as we should. That’s partly why I’ve resigned my commission. Europe is one thing, but there are things to be done in England, a future to be forged.”
“Very laudable.”
Cal didn’t bother trying to explain the deep disillusion he’d felt, seeing what had become of England’s former soldiers. For so long he’d hated Gimble, hated him with a righteous passion, but as his enemy lay dying, Cal saw that he was just a man like any other, who loved his wife and children and worried about their future.
A murderer, but not wholly evil. And perhaps it wasn’t entirely Gimble’s fault.
This country had taken men like Bert and Joe Gimble—and the others Cal had met—taught them to shoot and to kill, and then, when the war was over, tossed them back to their former lives—into a country in dire economic turmoil—without care whether they starved or not.
Could he really blame Gimble for using the only skill he had to try to earn enough money to give his family a fresh start in a young country?
But Radcliffe would never see it like that.
“They’ll be at the aunt’s house, then?”
