Without occupation or acquaintance in town or camp, and reluctant to go into the house himself, William found himself at loose ends. The last thing he wanted was to encounter anyone he knew, in any case. He pulled the black slouch hat well down over his brow and forced himself to stroll, rather than stride, through the town toward camp. The place was full of private soldiers, sutlers, and support troops; it would be easy to escape notice.
“William!”
He stiffened at the shout, but smothered the momentary impulse to run. He recognized that voice—just as the owner of it had undoubtedly recognized his height and figure. He turned reluctantly to greet his uncle, the Duke of Pardloe, who had emerged from a house directly behind him.
“Hallo, Uncle Hal,” he said, with what grace he could muster. He supposed it didn’t matter; Lord John would tell his brother about William’s and John Cinnamon’s presence, in any case.
“What are you doing here?” his uncle inquired—mildly, for him. His sharp glance took in everything from William’s mud-caked boots to the stained rucksack on his shoulder and the worn cloak over his arm. “Come to enlist?”
“Haha,” William said coldly, but felt immediately better. “No. I came with a—friend, who had business in camp.”
“Seen your father?”
“Not really.” He didn’t elucidate, and after a thoughtful pause, Hal shook out his own gray military cloak and slung it over his shoulders.
“I’m going down to the river for a bit of air before supper. Come along?”
William shrugged. “Why not?”
They made their way out of the town and down from the bluffs without being accosted, and William felt the tightness between his shoulder blades ease. His uncle didn’t indulge in idle conversation, and didn’t mind silence in the least. They reached the edge of the narrow beach without exchanging a word, and made their way slowly through scrubby pines and yaupon bushes to the clean, solid sand of the tidal zone.
William placed his feet just so, enjoying making prints in the silty gray sand. The summer sky was vast and blue above them, a blazing yellow sun coming slowly down into the waves. They followed the curve of the beach, ending on a tiny spit of sandy gravel inhabited by a gang of orange-billed oystercatchers, who eyed them coldly and gave way with ill grace, turning their heads and glaring as they waddled sideways.
Here they stood for some minutes, looking out into the water.
“Do you miss England?” Hal asked abruptly.
“Sometimes,” William answered honestly. “But I don’t think about it much,” he added, with less honesty.
“I do.” His uncle’s face looked relaxed, almost wistful in the fading light. “But you haven’t a wife there, or children. No establishment of your own, yet.”
“No.”
The sounds of slaves working in the fields behind them were still audible, but muted by the rhythm of the surf at their feet, the passage of the silent clouds above their heads.
The trouble with silence was that it allowed the thoughts in his head to take on a tiresome insistence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room. Cinnamon’s company, disturbing as it occasionally was, had allowed him to escape them when he needed to.
“How does one go about renouncing a title?”
He hadn’t actually been intending to ask that just yet, and was surprised to hear the words emerge from his mouth. Uncle Hal, by contrast, didn’t seem surprised at all.
“You can’t.”
William glared down at his uncle, who was still looking imperturbably downriver toward the sea, the wind pulling strands of his dark hair from his queue.
“What do you mean, I can’t? Whose business is it whether I renounce my title or not?”
Uncle Hal looked at him with an affectionate impatience.
“I’m not speaking rhetorically, blockhead. I mean it literally. You can’t renounce a peerage. There’s no means set down in law or custom for doing it; ergo, it can’t be done.”
“But you—” William stopped, baffled.
“No, I didn’t,” his uncle said dryly. “If I could have at the time, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. The most I could do was to stop using the title of ‘Duke,’ and threaten to physically maim anyone who used it in reference or address to me. It took me several years to make it clear that I meant that,” he added offhandedly.
“Really?” William asked cynically. “Who did you maim?”
He actually had supposed his uncle to be speaking rhetorically, and was taken aback when the once and present duke furrowed his brow in the effort of recall.
“Oh … several scribblers—they’re like roaches, you know; crush one and the others all rush off into the shadows, but by the time you turn round, there are throngs of them back again, happily feasting on your carcass and spreading filth over your life.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words, Uncle?”
“Yes,” his uncle said briefly. “But beyond punching a few journalists, I called out George Mumford—he’s the Marquess of Clermont now, but he wasn’t then—Herbert Villiers, Viscount Brunton, and a gentleman named Radcliffe. Oh, and a Colonel Phillips, of the Thirty-fourth—cousin to Earl Wallenberg.”
“Duels, do you mean? And did you fight them all?”
“Certainly. Well—not Villiers, because he caught a chill on the liver and died before I could, but otherwise … but that’s beside the point.” Hal caught himself and shook his head to clear it. Evening was coming on, and the onshore breeze was brisk. He wrapped his cloak about his body and nodded toward the town.
“Let’s go. The tide’s coming in and I’m dining with General Prévost in half an hour.”
They made their way slowly through the twilight, the rough marram grass rasping at their boots.
“Besides,” his uncle went on, head down against the wind, “I had another title—one without taint. Refusing to use the Pardloe title meant I also refused to use the income from the title’s estates, but it meant almost nothing in terms of my daily life, bar a bit of eye-rolling from society. My friends largely remained my friends, I was received in most of the places I was accustomed to go, and—the important point—I continued doing what I intended to do: raise and command a regiment. You—” He glanced at William, running an appraising eye over him from slouch hat to clodhopper boots.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, William—it might be easier to ask what it is you want to do, rather than asking how not to do what you don’t.”
William stopped, closed his eyes, and just stood, listening to the water for a few moments of blessed relief from the tick-tock thoughts. Absolutely nothing was happening inside his head.
“Right,” he said at last, taking a deep breath and opening his eyes. “Were you born knowing that’s what you wanted to do?” he asked curiously.
“I suppose so,” his uncle answered slowly, beginning to walk again. “I can’t recall ever thinking of being anything save a soldier. As to wanting it, though … I don’t think that question ever occurred to me.”
“Exactly,” said William, with a certain dryness. “You were born into a family where that’s what the oldest son did, and that happened to suit you. I was raised believing that my sacred duty was to care for my lands and tenants, and it never occurred to me for an instant that what I wanted came into it—no more than it did to you.