stables, eat breakfast, shave, dress and then, when the hour was decent and he could put it off no longer, he would call on the Duke of Cowden.
* * *
‘Fortis is dead, Your Grace.’ As it turned out, there was no decent hour at which to tell an ageing man his son had been killed. Cam stood ramrod-straight at attention, bringing all his sense of military ceremony to the announcement. Cam would honour his fallen friend with every ounce of pomp and pride in him. Fortis’s family deserved as much and Cam had promised. It was not a promise he’d ever thought to keep. They’d been half-drunk the night he’d made the pledge years ago in India on their first posting. They’d been immortal then.
The Duke of Cowden received the news with as much aplomb as it was delivered with, but it was a Herculean task for them both to maintain the stiff upper lip demanded by social etiquette—an etiquette that maintained a man did not fall apart over loss: loss of money, loss of life, the loss of a child. A man carried on.
‘Will you join me in a drink to him, then?’ Cowden moved to the side board holding a cut-crystal decanter full of brandy. His hand trembled as he poured. Cam moved to take the tumbler before the older man could drop it. He’d not seen Cowden in nearly eight years, not since Fortis’s hasty wedding to Avaline Panshawe, a marriage Fortis barely acknowledged. Cowden’s hair was white and his face was lined, although his back was straight. He was still a tall, commanding man if one did not look too closely, but the age was showing in small ways: the shaking hand, the long pauses before he spoke.
Cowden raised his glass, his voice firm. ‘To my son, Fortis, who lived as he wanted and died as he wished.’ They drank, long, deep swallows to cover the emotion. It was exactly how Fortis had wished to die: in the saddle, in the heat of battle, exhilaration thrumming through his veins. Cam hoped it had lived up to Fortis’s expectations.
Cowden refilled his glass and gestured to a chair, his tone shifting. ‘There, now that’s done. We’ve fulfilled our social obligations. Perhaps you would sit and tell me the details, tell an old man about the last moments of his son’s life?’ Grey eyebrows lifted at the request, his blue eyes not as sharp as Cam remembered them. The Duke had always been a formidable figure to him, but a friendly one. Cowden was older than Cam’s father, but younger than his grandfather. He’d been a happy medium in Cam’s life while he was growing up. He’d always been welcome at Fortis’s home. He’d never thought he’d have to repay those years of kindnesses like this.
‘Should we call the others?’ Cam made a gesture towards the door of Cowden’s study. ‘Should we include them?’
Cowden shook his head. ‘Let them think Fortis is alive awhile longer. Besides, you needn’t sanitise the details with me,’ he offered knowingly. ‘The news will be upsetting enough as it is.’ The whole Cowden crew was in town at the moment even though the Season would not be fully under way for a few weeks yet: Frederick, the heir, who had always been so jealous of Fortis’s freedom to serve his country; Helena, his wife, and their five boys; Ferris, his wife, Anne, and new baby, and Avaline, Fortis’s widow—a woman Fortis had spent only three weeks of married life with before he’d returned to his troops. Had he loved Avaline? Had Avaline loved him? Fortis had said little of his marriage. But Cam knew she had written to him dutifully for seven years. Cam did not relish telling her the news.
He sat, thankful for Cowden’s offer of informality. He could be himself here. He could be a friend, talking to another about a mutual friend instead of being the officer. He would return the Duke’s gift with the very best of Fortis: stories of Fortis in camp, how well his men liked him, how well the other officers respected him, the brilliance of his strategies, the successes of his warcraft, his daring in the Battle of Alma, the one preceding Balaclava. No father could be prouder. No friend could be luckier than to have Fortis by his side. In truth, it felt good to reminisce this way, to remember Fortis as he’d been in life with someone who knew him well.
‘And at Balaclava?’ the Duke asked at last, too sharp to overlook the one omission in the tales Cam had so carefully chosen. Some of the elation the stories had created ebbed from the room. ‘All that brilliance, all that courage, could not save him?’
Cam shook his head ruefully. ‘It was a series of missteps from the beginning. Raglan should have been using the cavalry to cut off the Russians at the Causeway, but he refused to take action.’ Fortis had been furious at the Lieutenant General’s refusal to put the Light Brigade into play. ‘Major General Cardigan was angry by the time he saw the Russians going after our cannon. He might have stood around all day while others saw action, but he would be damned if he would hold back his troops while the Russians stole our guns off the ridge.’ There had been other mistakes, too. Like sending the note for permission to strike with a messenger who believed too heartily in what a mounted cavalry could do and there’d been a mistake in the route Cardigan used. They should not have cut through the valley. That route had drawn the fire of the entire Russian army. ‘Fortis was ready for the charge. He was magnificent on that stallion of his, his sabre overhead as he called his troops to him. We were the right flank, the second line.’ Cam let the euphoria of battle fill him as he told the tale, how they’d driven through the Russian artillery, how they’d persisted, meeting the Russian cavalry in combat, pushing them back. There had been heady moments, glorious moments! He would not forget how gallant, how fearless his friend had looked. But they hadn’t the strength or numbers to hold the position. They’d been forced to withdraw.
Some of the euphoria let him. ‘We took the worst of it in retreat, in my opinion. We couldn’t withdraw to safety. That’s when Fortis fell.’ When had Fortis realised they’d crossed the valley of death? That the mission was impossible? That they might have achieved smashing through the lines, but that victory was their very downfall. They were exposed with no hope of shelter.
‘The papers said only one hundred and ninety-three returned,’ Cowden said quietly, reverently. ‘That fifty-five of the Fourth’s regiment were killed and four officers.’ But not Lieutenant Colonel Lord George Paget, or Major Camden Lithgow. Guilt swamped him for having survived.
‘Yes,’ Cam replied sombrely. Six-hundred-and-seventy-three men had charged the valley. He’d been one of the one hundred and ninety-three. He still grappled with that reality. How was it that he’d emerged unscathed while those around him fell—officers, good men who knew how to handle themselves in battle—cut down while he had not a scratch? No one could explain it, not the generals who had sent him home, not the priests who’d prayed with him over the dead and now he had to explain to the Duke of Cowden. Why had he lived when Fortis had fallen?
The Duke shook his head and put a fatherly hand on his leg. ‘No, don’t do that. Don’t blame yourself for being spared. At least one of you lived to come home and tell the tales. Fortis was a soldier. He knew the risks. He embraced them.’
Cowden drew a breath to ask the only question that remained. ‘Did you see the body?’
‘I saw him fall. He was only a few yards away from me. Khan, his big black, went down. The Russians shot his horse out from under him.’ Perhaps a horse had made a difference. Perhaps that was why he’d survived. Cam and his strong grey stallion, Hengroen, had both remained miraculously intact. ‘I pushed towards Fortis the moment I saw.’ Cam remembered turning Hengroen towards the fallen Khan, but he couldn’t get close; it was an impossible horizontal movement in a vertical charge. All around him, men and horses were falling, blocking his way. He could do nothing but push forward.
‘And afterwards? Did you see his body then?’ Cowden pressed. It was the question Cam didn’t want to answer, a question that raised all his old hopes and fears when it came to Fortis—that somehow Fortis had survived, that he wasn’t dead.
‘No, Your Grace, I did not. I had orders to carry out and
