Page 23 of A Debt Inherited

“Mr Evans. He has earned the attempt.” The commander’s hand left the rail. “I shall have the orders drawn at once.”

A light step near the door. “Sir?” The corporal again, with a whisper that pretended it was not heard. “They’ve set the men to sweeping the yard. The casks are damp, but whole.”

“Good. Send a runner to the harbour-master. I want a berth reserved on the packet for a convalescent officer and an attendant. Give my name to him.”

“Yes, Major.”

Silence eked itself out after they were gone. The rain altered its tune and fell more gently; a draught found the crack in the shutter and laid a cooler finger across the room. Bennet felt it on his face and thought, England, and could not say why the word made the breath catch.

The surgeon’s chair creaked. “Sleep now if you are able,” he said, somewhere above the pulse that throbbed in Bennet’s ear. “We will change the dressings at dawn.”

Bennet’s hand found the edge of the sheet and closed there. He fixed his gaze upon the slant of light beneath the door, watched it thin to nothing until only the sound of the rain remained. Then the commander’s voice again, from the doorway, quiet as if not to wake him and sure that he heard:

“England, then. First ship north.”

Chapter 11

Glenbride Castle, Berwickshire, November 1786

Elspeth had opened the linen press and not closed it.

Marjorie watched her in the dressing glass. The maid stood with one hand upon the drawer, her fingers resting among the folded cloths as if she had forgotten what she had come to fetch.

Outside, November light lay thin against the windows. The coal fire had sunk low enough to show red through ash. On the table beside the glass sat a saucer of hairpins, a folded kerchief, black gloves, and the little ivory-handled scissors Marjorie never used but always kept sharp.

“What is it?” Marjorie asked.

Elspeth’s fingers moved once over the folded cloths, then stopped.

“My lady.”

That was not an answer. Marjorie turned from the glass.

Elspeth kept her eyes lowered. “There has been no cloth sent down.”

Marjorie looked at the drawer, the basin of cooling water, the strip of carpet between her slippers and Elspeth’s shoes. The mind, when threatened, sought stupid things to count. Six faded roses worked into the border before the pattern turned beneath the dressing table.

“No cloth,” she said.

“Not for two months.”

Two months.

Marjorie turned back to the glass. Her reflection offered nothing useful: black gown, white throat, hair drawn too tightly from the temples, face composed because faces had learnt what bodies would not.

“There may have been a mistake in the laundry.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Elspeth’s obedience hurt more than contradiction.

Marjorie set one hand lightly against the front of her gown. There was no swelling fit to name. No stranger would have looked twice. But her stays, drawn to their accustomed notch, had begun to feel like accusation. Her breasts had ached when she woke. The smell of boiled mutton three nights before had sent her from the dining room with one hand against the wall. She had blamed the candles, the grief, the house, the old draught that came beneath the east passage door.

Marjorie looked at the bedchamber door. It stood closed. It had stood closed that night as well. Not locked. Locks were vulgar admissions. A door did not need a lock if every servant in the corridor knew whose hand had closed it.

Rain had been at the windows then, not frost. A hard rain, thrown against the glass in sudden gusts. The lamp had smoked. She remembered that. The wick had been cut badly, and the flame had bent and recovered, bent and recovered, as if even fire must learn submission at Glenbride.

Wine had been on his breath.