It was almost worth it when she gave him such a look of gladness. He wondered brief ly what it would be like to deserve it. He took her cool hand for a moment, then released her.
"Well, I will not weasel you about Lady Callie," she said contritely. "But perhaps you will… consider what I say."
"Weasel me?"
"Yes, as they bait and persecute those… poor crea tures in their burrows, you know."
"'Badger' me," he corrected. "You will not badger me."
"Oh. But I may weasel you, then?"
"I feel quite certain that you will, Maman," he said.
Seven
THE NATURE OF HIS CONNECTION TO MAJOR STURGEON occurred to Trev over his morning coffee. It struck him full blown, apropos of nothing but a chipped white cup that reminded him of one he'd used in the Peninsula.
"Putain," he muttered slowly, looking up, his eyebrows lifted.
Jock turned round, his big head bent down to clear the low beam over the hearth. "You know yer mama won't like you to be saying them filthy words in French."
Trev took a sip and grimaced. "I'm sorry to sully your pretty caulif lower ears with my language lessons, 'Jacques,' old son, but your coffee deserves it." He always gave his manservant's name that little Gallic moue of accent, partly to encourage the unlikely impression that he was actually French, and partly just to torment him.
Jock snorted and returned to clattering with black pots and skillets. Sleet pattered against the small square window, promising an ugly day, but Jock had not stinted on the coal fire. The huge hearth gave out a steady heat. Trev stared at his valet's massive back, drinking the foul brew and frowning pensively.
Salamanca. It was easy to recall everything because it had been at Salamanca. The scalding sun of July, the dust and smoke-it seemed dreamlike now in the wet chill of an English autumn. Trev had been a new prisoner, brought in under Geordie Hixson's guard, both of them still panting from exertion and heat in the British cavalry officer's tent. Geordie had started to say something about sending Trev to the rear, but the words were interrupted by a new barrage of shelling from the dead ground to the west, exploding so close that a handful of spent shot pelted against the canvas. A pair of aides and a sentinel ran out to discover the range, leaving the tent empty but for Geordie and his commanding officer, both of them bent over the map in grim discussion of the reconnaissance.
Trev hadn't known the field officer's name or given a damn. He'd just been relieved and ashamed and sick of starving; sick of the sound of artillery and what he had become. He wasn't even concerned about the guns so close; it had seemed no more than a pretty irony to be killed by French cannon a bare half hour after his surrender. When Wellington's wounded courier had staggered in, covered in blood and black soot, with orders to attack immediately into the teeth of the unseen battery, Trev had barely taken note of the dying man's words. The courier had expired almost at his feet, but all he'd felt was that numb wonder at how the poor bastard had managed to make it so far after being shot in the chest.
He remembered a brief silence from the guns, and the blood from the courier's mouth. Then Geordie's officer had ordered the body carried back outside and laid by the man's horse.
The strangeness of that order had not penetrated Trev's mind. It was only Geordie's protest and expres sion of shock that had even caused him to look up at the field officer. Into that same challenging, pale-eyed stare he had met yesterday.
Trev remembered Sturgeon.
Trev and Geordie had carried the corpse, left it as if the courier had fallen from his saddle. As if the orders to attack the battery had never arrived.
When they returned, Geordie stood at attention, staring expectantly at his commanding officer. The guns thundered again, and Sturgeon ordered him to call for the tent to be repositioned behind the knoll. Geordie stood still and then requested permission to speak. Sturgeon snapped at him to shut up and strike the tent. The young aides galloped in a few minutes afterward from their reconnoiter, cursed at the courier's death wounds, and hauled the body into the shade of a tree while the tent was struck.
Nothing else happened. No attack on the French guns had been mounted. They moved down behind the safety of the hillside. Not long after, Trev had been taken in a set of light irons to join the other prisoners in the rear.
He had never heard any more of it or given the incident particular thought. There had been far more pressing concerns on his mind than some nameless British officer's decision in the heat of battle, as long as it didn't include shooting at him. He'd put the memory away along with all the other things he didn't care to dwell upon. Wellington had soundly crushed the French at Salamanca, so it made no difference to anyone, except perhaps a few French and British soldiers who would have died and hadn't.
But here and now-Trev suddenly appreciated that he had been a witness to a court-martial offense. Sturgeon had been ordered to attack, and he had acted as if he'd never received the order.
"Son of a…" Jock dropped the coffeepot with a hiss and clang, sending dark liquid over the f loor. He added several more colorful words, holding his fingers in his other hand and blowing on them. Then he looked down at his stained trousers-the fashionable yellow ones-and let out a string of expletives that would have burned the ears off a bosun's mate. "My buttercup cossacks!" Jock's deep bass cracked. He grabbed a dish towel, daubing in a frenzy of vigor.
Trev squinted one eye at the stain on Jock's billowing trousers. "I fear they're past hope," he said, heartlessly honest.
"Thirty guineas!" The valet's voice reached a pitch that Trev had not supposed it could attain.
Trev put down his cup. "Damme, you spent thirty guineas on those things?"
"Worth every groat, sir," Jock snarled.
Trev would admit that they made the big man look quite the Cossack. All he required was a saber and some tassels hanging off his ears to be fit to ravage a town. But Trev made it a strict policy never to mock his valet's sense of style. He did not care to have one of those ham-sized fists in his teeth.
"You'd better take them down to the inn directly and find out a launderer," he advised. "Perhaps they can be boiled."
"And shrink to nothin', and bleach besides," Jock mourned.
"Then you can give them to me," Trev said sooth ingly. "I'll wear them to bed, like a sultan's pajamas."
Jock made a rumbling growl, stalking toward the kitchen door.
"You're certain this doctor has our right direction?" Trev asked after him.
"No, sir, I told 'im to go to Madrid," Jock snapped, holding the door in his giant paw so that a gust of freezing wind blew in Trev's face.
"You're so fetching when you're savage," Trev murmured.
The door closed with a solid thud, shutting out the sleet. Trev contemplated the dark splay of liquid trickling across the stone f loor, oozing its way toward his polished boot. He heaved a sigh and got up to find a mop.
Callie had been out to feed the orphan calf and back to change long before her sister and Lady Shelford joined her in the breakfast room. She sat beside the window, gazing out at the drooping trees and sleeting rain, trying not to dwell upon the empty gate where one large and placid bull had not been awaiting his morning treat.
"It's my sister's personal correspondence, ma'am." Hermey paused by the door, allowing Lady Shelford to precede her into the room. "She is quite mature enough to dispense with anyone's approval of any letters she may receive."
The countess was carrying a sealed missive. She ignored Hermione and held it up, looking at Callie. "I do not think it suitable for Lady Callista Tallefaire to be in clandestine communication with a bachelor, however mature she may be. Not in this house!"