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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 and deeply unfair.

      The clock struck, a thin, silvery note. ‘My goodness, look at the time,’ Laura said and stood up, half-expecting to find her legs would not support her. ‘I must go and...and fetch something from the village. Something I promised Mab,’ she added. She had the doorknob in her hand before he turned and she was out of the room before he spoke.

      ‘Caroline—’

      ‘Tomorrow,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really must go now.’

      * * *

      He had shocked her. First by taking her instinctive concern as an excuse to kiss her and then by talking of battlefields and death. Avery watched the garden, but there was no sign of Caroline, so she must have taken the front path to the village lane. Tomorrow he would apologise. Now he had to shake off this mood before Alice came home.

      Do you regret it? Caroline had asked. Regret was hardly the word, furious resentment was more like it. Damn it, he was not going to be plunged into this mental morass every time he came into this room to get a book. He could remove the portrait and the sword to the attic, but that would be cowardly. This had been Piers’s home and his mother would have wanted them there. Alice must grow up knowing what her...her cousin looked like, hearing stories of his courage.

      He had failed Piers when he could not stop him buying a commission and, somehow, he had failed him if the younger man had been capable of such muddle-headed thinking about where his duty lay. Avery found the book he had been looking for and deliberately sat down at the desk to check the reference he was looking for instead of taking it to his study. If he had caved in and let Piers stay and marry Lady Laura Campion, he might have been killed in the next skirmish after he landed in Spain. He could have drowned on the transport ship. He could have contracted a fever and died of that.

      And he would have been leg-shackled to a chit of a girl who had been loose enough to throw her hat over the windmill for a handsome face in a scarlet coat and who then hadn’t the backbone to cope with what being an officer’s wife would mean. He had read the few bloodstained tatters that were all that remained of the letter that Piers had in his breast pocket when he was killed: nothing but anger and petulance. And yet his cousin had kept it against his heart and it was probably the last thing he read. No soldier deserved to have those words ringing in his ears as he fought and died. Coward...betrayal...I hate...I’m pregnant...fault...Laura.

      There were not many young ladies by that name and fewer still who vanished from the social scene because of a family crisis at a distant estate. He had gone to find Lady Laura, telling himself that Piers would have wanted him to, driven by grief and anger at the fates and at himself. When he tracked her down, the word locally was that Lady Laura was not well and consumption was feared. That was enough to keep visitors away.

      Avery had had to return to his duties abroad, so he had bided his time, watched the calendar, paid a skilful agent to spy, to intercept the mails before they reached the receiving office. The girl had sent the baby away, far away, he learned. After that it was simple. Wait a short while, then a few weeks’ leave and he was back in Vienna with Alice.

      The agent was rewarded well for his discretion and for the reports he continued to send about Lady Laura Campion. She had returned to London society, but not heartbroken, not crushed by the shame or by giving away her child. Of course she’d had to do it, no lady in her position could have survived it becoming public knowledge that she had given birth out of wedlock. Her reputation would have been shredded if she had kept the baby.

      But surely she could have kept the child close and found a respectable family where she could visit without suspicion to watch over her growing daughter? To have sent her to the other end of the country, to a remote dale and the hard life of a small farmer’s child, that argued a complete lack of concern for anything but a swift removal of an embarrassment.

      Scandal’s Virgin they call her, Lambton had written. She’s the fastest of all the débutantes, she spends money like water and they say she leaves broken hearts behind her like so much smashed crockery. The chaperons shake their heads, the matrons are scandalised, the gossip sheets love her and the men pursue. The betting books in the clubs are full of her name—but no one can claim on the wagers because, it seems, she always stops just this side of ruin. An arrant flirt...

      Avery

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