“I was a prisoner! I couldn’t tell her anything. Not until—until it was done.” Ben had been glaring at him, but at this, looked away. “I—I wrote to her then. Of course. Told her what I’d done. She wasn’t pleased,” he added bleakly.
“Do tell,” said William, with as much sarcasm as he could manage. “Was it her idea to pretend you were dead? I can’t say I blame her, if so.”
“It was,” Ben said stiffly. His eyes were still fixed on the open black mouth of a nearby cannon. “She said … that I couldn’t let it be known that I was a traitor. Not just for her or my father’s sake—for Trevor’s. Father would—would get over me being dead, especially if I’d died as a soldier. He’d never get over me …”
“Being a traitor,” William finished helpfully. “No, he bloody wouldn’t. And little Trev wouldn’t have a good time of it as your heir, either, once he was old enough to understand what people were saying about you—and him. You’ve smeared your whole family with your excrement, haven’t you?” He was suddenly warm, his blood rising.
“Shut up!” Ben snapped. “That’s why I changed my name and had official word sent that I’d died, for God’s sake! I even went so far as to have a grave in Middlebrook Encampment marked with my name, should anyone come looking!”
“Someone did,” William said, anger hot in his chest. “I did, you bastard! I dug up the body in that grave, in the middle of the night, in the fucking rain. If you hadn’t picked a thief to bury in your stead, you might have got away with it, damn you—and I wish to God you had!”
Underneath the anger was a sharp pain in his chest. Just where the Hercules beetle had been, and Amaranthus’s long slim finger.
“Your wife—”
“It’s not your fucking business!” Ben snarled, red in the face. “Why couldn’t you keep your nose out? And what about my wife? What the hell do you have to do with her?”
“You want to know?” William’s voice came low and venomous, and he leaned toward Ben, fists clenched. “You want to know what I’ve had to do with her?”
Ben hit him. Hard, in the belly. He grabbed Ben by the arm and punched him in the nose. It broke with a satisfying crunch and hot blood spurted over his knuckles.
Ben was shorter and slighter, but he had the Grey family’s inclination to fight like badgers and count the cost later. William crashed backward onto one of the big guns, Ben at his throat, and heard the blue coat rip as his cousin tried seriously to throttle him. William was furious; Ben was insane.
With difficulty, William got a knee up between them and managed to break Ben’s grip long enough to rabbit-punch him in the back of the neck. Ben made a noise like a gut-shot panther, and lowering his head, butted William in the chest, knocking him over, then fell on him with both knees in William’s stomach. They were crushed together, wrestling in the narrow space between two gun carriages, and William’s knuckles were barked from hitting wood and metal as much as from hitting Ben in the mouth.
There was one moment, when he caught sight of his cousin’s face in a ray of light, when he truly believed that Ben meant to kill him.
Then, suddenly, the flurry of punches stopped and the weight lifted. Ben was standing up, swaying over him, dripping blood, and William realized, through the daze of fighting and the shadows of the cannon, that the light was coming through the open door of the shed, and there were voices.
“A saboteur,” Ben rasped, and spat blood. It struck one of the cannon and dripped slowly down the cold iron curve, falling onto William’s wrist. “Take him to the stockade. He’s to speak to no one. Take him, I said!”
WILLIAM WAS NOT a fussy eater, by any means, and the lukewarm beans and dry corn bread offered him after a very cold night in the stockade were ambrosia—and not too hard to chew, even with a sore jaw.
It really was a stockade, though a small one, with a block containing half a dozen brick-built cells inside a palisade fence and a guardhouse outside. There was no more than a six-inch hole in the bricks to provide light and air, and the cell might have been sunk in a wintry sea, the air cold, dim, and damp, swirling with mist that seeped in from the outer world. He swiped the last bit of corn bread round his wooden trencher and then licked the last of the bean juice off his fingers. He could have eaten three times as much, had it been available, but as it was, he washed it down with the quart of very small beer he’d been given, belched, tightened his belt, and sat down to wait on the wooden bench that composed the sole furniture of the cell.
He had bruises and scrapes aplenty, and his ribs hurt him when he breathed, but he’d slept the night through from sheer exhaustion and washed his face from a bucket this morning without flinching, though he’d had to break a solid half inch of ice on it first. The small injuries were nothing to bother him much. Other than as a reminder of his cousin Ben.
Logically, Ben should have William executed as a saboteur. This was obvious, as the only certain way to keep him from revealing the sordid truth about Brigadier Bleeker—to Uncle Hal, Aunt Minerva, Ben’s regiment, the London papers …?
Well, not the papers, no. Letting it become an open scandal would—as he’d told Brigadier Bleeding Bleeker—destroy the whole family.
He hadn’t been overstating it when he’d told Ben that he’d get Adam into trouble, either. Wait ’til Sir Henry found out that Adam had been conversing on the quiet with an enemy combatant! Because he would find out if they kept doing it, and the fact that said enemy was Adam’s brother would just make it worse. If that was known, it would be assumed by everyone that Adam was a turncoat as well, passing information to his brother.
He had a dim memory of his father telling him that a secret remained a secret only so long as just one person knew it.
The memory came with a vision of a deep, deep lavender sky, and Venus a bright jewel just above the horizon. That was it; they’d been lying on the quay at Mount Josiah, watching the stars come out while Manoke cleaned and grilled the fresh fish they’d just caught.
He breathed in nostalgically, half expecting to smell the dusty scent of flax and the mouthwatering richness of fish rolled in cornmeal and fried in butter. The lingering taste of the corn bread gave it to him for a moment, before withdrawing and leaving him with the smell of the slop bucket in the corner of his cell. He got up and used it, then straightened his clothes and splashed another handful of water onto his face.
The only thing he was sure of was that he wouldn’t have to wait too long. Ben wouldn’t dare keep him for long where people could become curious.
“And you couldn’t think of anything better than to call me a saboteur,” he said aloud to his cousin. “That’ll make everybody curious, you nit.”
William was curious, too, about what might happen next—but in fact not really worried that Ben would have him formally executed, much as he might like to. William’s mind paused on the picture of Ben’s face when Amaranthus had entered the conversation. Yes, he definitely had wanted to kill William right then and undoubtedly still did.
The thought of Amaranthus summoned her as though she stood before him physically, blue-gray eyes creasing with her smile. Tall and buxom, smelling of grape leaves, with a faint sweet aroma of rice powder and baby poo. And her long, slender, water-cool fingers touching his …