Elliot laughed. ‘Yes, I was.’
‘Good grief! No wonder civilian life bores you. You must tell me—I wish you will tell me—I don’t know—anything, all of it—no, I don’t expect you can tell me all of it. Goodness, what secrets you must know.’ Deborah chuckled. ‘How horrified the likes of Jacob would be if they knew. You are quite right, Elliot, it is irony past price. Can you tell me more? Were you a master of subterfuge?’
Danger, even if it was vicarious, certainly brought her to life. ‘I’m afraid it was rather more mundane than that. If anything, I was a master of patience.’ He told her a few choice stories because he liked to see her laugh, because he found her laughter infectious, and he told her a few more because returning to the subject in hand was too painful, but he underestimated her.
‘He must have been more like a brother than a friend. Henry, I mean,’ Deborah said suddenly, interrupting him in the middle of a story. ‘What happened?’
‘He was wounded in the Pyrenees during the siege on San Sebastian. He took a bullet in the leg, above the knee. It smashed the bone—he’d have lost his leg, but it shouldn’t have been fatal. Only they couldn’t reach him because there were no carts and no mules.’
‘Oh God.’ Deborah covered her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.
Elliot’s knuckles were white. ‘For more than a week, he lay in agony in the blistering sun with his wound festering. He died of a fever a few days after they finally got him to the field hospital. I was with him, at the end, though he hardly recognised me. He died for want of a mule. A mule!’ He thumped his fist down hard on the chair. ‘But what do those bastards in the War Office with their lists and their budgets know of that? What does it matter, when a man with one leg would have been no bloody use to them anyway? What do they know of the suffering, the agonies that Henry and thousands like him went through, and what do they care now for the survivors?’
‘But you care,’ Deborah said, shaken by the cold rage. ‘You care enough to steal from them, to make reparations for them, is that it?’
‘The money goes to a charity which helps the survivors.’ Now that he had opened the floodgates his bitter anger, so long pent-up, demanded expression. ‘Someone has to help them,’ Elliot said furiously. ‘While they fought for their country, their country learned how to do very well without them. Now that the Government no longer needs them to surrender their lives, their limbs and their hearts on the battlefield, it has decided it has no need to reward them with employment, back pay, pensions. It is not just the men, it is their widows and children who suffer.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ Deborah said falteringly.
‘Few people do. All they see is a beggar. Just another beggar. Proud men, reduced to holding out a cup for alms! Can you imagine what that does to them? No wonder so many cannot face their families. And they are portrayed as deserters, drunkards, criminals.’
The scar which bisected his eyebrow stood out white against his tan. The other one, which followed the hairline of his forehead, seemed to pulse. How many other, invisible scars did he bear? His suffering made hers seem so trite in comparison. The grooves at the side of his mouth were etched deep. His eyes were fierce, hard. Deborah trembled at the sorrow and pain they hid, such depths, which made shallows of her own suffering. ‘I just didn’t know,’ she said simply. ‘I am quite ashamed.’ The truth was so awful, it made her conscience seem like a paltry consideration. ‘I wish now that we had taken more from that house in Grosvenor Square.’
Her vehemence drew a bark of laughter from Elliot. ‘Believe me, over the last two years, the Peacock has taken a great deal more.’
‘So it is a war of attrition that the Peacock is waging, is that it? And of vengeance?’
Deborah’s perception made Elliot deeply uncomfortable. He was not accustomed to thinking about his motivations, never mind discussing them. ‘What do you know of vengeance?’ he asked roughly.
Enough to recognise it. Deborah hesitated, surprised at the strength of her urge to confide, but the very idea of comparing their causes appalled her. Besides, his voice held an undertone of aggression that warned her to tread lightly. He obviously thought he had said too much already. She could easily empathise with that. ‘The painting that we stole,’ she said, seeking to lighten the subject, ‘you knew about it because of your spying, didn’t you?’
‘You’ve no idea how much ransacking and looting goes on in the higher echelons in wartime. That painting was a bribe.’
To Deborah’s relief, some of the grimness left his mouth. She asked him to explain; when he did, she encouraged him to tell her of other bribes, relieved to see the grooves around his mouth relaxing, the sadness leaving his eyes. The battered armchair in which he sat, she had rescued from a lumber room at Kinsail Manor. His legs, in their tight-knit pantaloons, stretched out in front of him. If she reached, she could touch her toe to his Hessian boots.
‘I’ve said too much,’ Elliot said, interrupting himself in the middle of a story, realising abruptly how much he had revealed, how little he had talked to anyone of his old life before. It had been too easy to talk to Deborah. He wasn’t sure what he thought of that, accustomed as he was to keep his own counsel. His instincts were to retreat. ‘I must go,’ he said, getting to his feet.
How did he close his expression off like that? Ignoring the flicker of disappointment, Deborah rose, too. ‘You have certainly said enough to make me realise how shockingly ignorant I am. I shall not look on those poor souls with their begging bowls in the same way again.’
Outside, it was grown dark. Elliot lit a spill from the fire and began to light the candles on the mantel. ‘I’d like to call on you again,’ he said.
Deborah bit her lip. It would have been so much easier, had he not chosen to confide in her, if he had not given her so many reasons to wish to know more about him. To like him. In another world, in another life, Elliot was the kind of man she would have …
But there was absolutely no point whatsoever in thinking like that. Slowly, she shook her head. The pang of loss was physical, a pain in her stomach. ‘I live a very secluded life.’
‘I’m not suggesting we attend Almack’s together. We could go for a drive.’
Why did he have to make it so difficult? ‘I can’t, Elliot. I am perfectly content with my own company.’
‘So content that you need to break into houses and climb down ropes to make you feel alive?’
Deborah flinched. ‘I thought you understood. That was an escape from reality, merely.’
‘I don’t understand you.’ Elliot cast the spill into the fire. ‘One minute, you are hanging on my every word, the next, you imply that you never want to see me again.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think that you would expect—I never considered us continuing our acquaintance after last night. I should not have encouraged you to confide in me, but I was so caught up in what you said and—I should not have,’ Deborah said wretchedly. ‘I’m sorry, Elliot.’
‘And what about last night? You are sorry about that, too, I suppose? Dammit, I was not imagining it, the strength of attraction between us. Why are you hell bent on ignoring it?’ Frustrated and confused, Elliot pulled her roughly towards him. ‘You can’t deny it! I can feel your heart beating. I can see it in your eyes that you want to kiss me just as much
