I’ll leave.’
‘No.’ Of course, he thought she was saying she could not make love to him. He was not a mind reader. But thank goodness he had stopped before things had gone any further. ‘You do not need to do that. It takes two to be as imprudent as we have just been. I take responsibility for my actions. And reactions,’ she added with a smile in the hope of easing the tension that showed in his jaw and clenched hands. Yes, this time, I will take responsibility and I will think of the consequences.
‘Thank you.’ Avery turned and ran one hand through his hair. ‘I was feeling a trifle blue devilled, not that it is any excuse for attempting to ravish you on the desk.’
She was never sure afterwards what she had intended to say to him. Laura looked up and saw the portrait on the wall behind him and the words simply dried in her mouth. Piers.
Avery turned to follow her gaze. ‘That is my cousin Piers Falconer,’ he said. ‘I inherited this estate from him. I do not wonder that you look surprised. It is uncanny, is it not? People often take it for a picture of me and remark that they hadn’t realised I had ever been in the army.’ He did not appear to find it amusing.
Laura looked into the clear green eyes in the youthful, unlined face in the painting and her feet took her, with no conscious volition, to stand on the hearth where she could reach up and touch the hilt of the sword. Go away, she willed Avery, but he did not move. ‘He was killed in battle?’ She knew the answer, but she had to say something.
‘A stupid, unnecessary skirmish with the enemy where they were not supposed to be because of a failure in communications. Ironic that a man who dreamed of glory and great epic battles should die defending a ford over a stream that shouldn’t even have needed defending.’
‘Ironic indeed.’ That was what you left me for, Piers, she thought. I was so angry with you. ‘He was a romantic about war?’ Her fingers slid off the leather of the hilt, still too new to have lost its grooves or to have softened and moulded to the hand of its owner.
‘Piers was army-mad. But he was an only child, the heir. His father died when he was seventeen and I became his trustee, although I was not that much older—four years. I pointed out that he could not join, that he had responsibilities, that his mother would be desperately anxious, but he only laughed. She would be proud, he said, and of course he would not be killed. He thought himself immortal, I suppose. He was very young in some ways.’ Avery sounded bone-weary, perhaps with the memory of endless arguments.
‘But he joined anyway.’
‘Oh, yes. As soon as he was twenty and came into some money from his godfather he went to London and bought himself a commission. There was nothing I could do and his mother, who had always indulged him, hid her fear. She died six months later. I suppose I cannot blame him for it, he never knew Aunt Alice’s heart was weak.’ Avery had wandered across to the window and stood leaning his shoulder against the frame, staring out over the parkland. ‘He came back to England on sick leave. A combination of a minor wound and a fever. They gave him three months to recover and to settle affairs after his mother’s death, although I’d handled that already.’ He shrugged one shoulder as if to push away the memory. ‘She was more like a mother to me than an aunt.’
‘That is why Alice is named as she is.’ Piers had never told her his mother’s name or that she had died such a short time before they met. It seemed strange, she had thought they had shared everything. How little she had known him.
‘Yes. Anyway, he recovered his health well and he was due to return on the next troop carrier, two days hence, when he told me he was going to make some excuse and delay.’
‘Why?’ Laura breathed, knowing full well why.
‘He had become entangled with some air-headed chit and wanted to stay with her. I pointed out that by the terms of his father’s will he could not marry without the consent of his trustees until he was twenty-one in six weeks’ time and I was not giving my approval. He said in that case he would suffer a relapse and miss the ship.’
‘She was so ineligible?’ Laura asked. By some miracle she kept the shake out of her voice.
‘No.’ Again that shrug. ‘Excellent family, no doubt a perfectly adequate dowry. But she was too young and he most certainly was, and they’d known each other a matter of weeks.’
Five weeks. Four weeks as lovers, long enough to create a child.
‘Piers became very agitated, said he’d go sick for six years if it took that, let alone the six weeks until he could marry.’
‘But he went back.’ Laura held on to the back of the nearest chair. Piers had left, with only a brief note. I have to go back to Spain. We cannot marry yet, but wait for me. I do not know how long it will be... She had sat with it in her hand that morning, the morning when she had realised what the non-appearance of her monthly courses—usually as regular as clockwork—meant. She was pregnant and her lover had abandoned her.
‘The boy was a romantic. A buffle-headed, muddle-brained romantic,’ Avery said bitterly. ‘He had broken his mother’s heart by joining up, he had sworn an oath of allegiance, and the moment he fancied himself in love he would throw the whole thing over. He would lie to stay in England, pretend to be sick when his comrades went back to fight.
‘I told him that to do what he was suggesting would be dishonourable, that his oath as an officer preceded any entanglement with some girl who could perfectly well wait for him—and if she could not, then she would be no wife for a soldier in any case. I asked him,’ he said, his voice hard, ‘if this was an excuse and he was too afraid to go back.’
Laura sat down, her legs boneless. ‘You called him a coward?’
‘By implication, yes.’
‘And so he went back to Spain, abandoned the girl and was killed almost as soon as he returned?’
‘Yes.’ The stark word in the warm air of the room scented by the breeze from the garden was like the crack of a gunshot.
She had fallen from her horse once and the air had been knocked clean out of her. She had felt hollow then, but not as empty as she felt now. Laura stared at the dark head, still so firmly turned from her. What had that been? A confession? But he sounded angry, not remorseful, as though getting killed was Piers’s fault.
Piers’s sword rested almost within arm’s reach. Laura saw herself pick it up and run it through that broad back as vividly as in a dream. She felt the jar as the steel hit bone and solid muscle, she felt the gush of hot blood on her hands. She blinked and it was still in its rack, she was still sitting down, her heart racing. When she spoke her voice came from a long way away and she wondered if she was going to faint. ‘Do you regret it?’
‘It was a matter of honour, it had to be said.’
‘And you did not concern yourself with the girl he loved?’
‘No.’
I had lain with a man I loved, because we loved. I was foolish and heedless, but does that make me worthless? It seemed that in Avery Falconer’s eyes it did. Hypocrite, she thought. I was... I thought I liked you. Now she knew she had been right all along. He was arrogant, ruthless, judgemental
