“No,” Jeremy replied. “You and I haven’t spoken in many months,” he added. “Have you been well?” The marquess looked older, his nose beakier, his eyes paler blue than a year ago.
“Yes. Other than the fact I have worried about you.” He turned to Betsy. “I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable by answering so truthfully. I can see you are my son’s dear friend.”
“I am honored,” Betsy said.
The carriage was quiet for a moment. Jeremy and his father hadn’t spoken since shortly after he staggered off the boat from America, shuddering at the faintest sound, waves of shame and grief cutting him to the bone on a daily basis. They had quarreled within days of his landing in England, and after that, Jeremy couldn’t face him.
“You are so bloody effective,” Jeremy said, forcing the words out of his mouth. “If you’d been there, in the colonies, the whole thing would have been done right. You’d have brought your men home.”
The marquess shook his head, his eyes unreadable in the dim light in the carriage. “There is no right in war. There’s only what happened.”
“I followed orders,” Jeremy said, a swell of bitterness riding his tongue. “You wouldn’t have followed orders. It wasn’t fair of me to blame you for it.”
The marquess frowned.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jeremy said. “You would have marched your men out of there and discovered that the colonel in charge had fled. Your men would be home with their wives now. I just kept running across that field, from side to side.”
“Had I taken an oath to serve in His Majesty’s forces, I would have followed orders,” his father stated. “The fact that the War Office decided not to court-martial that blasted colonel is an outrage, an affront to every man who fell on the field.”
Jeremy quirked up the side of his mouth in a failed attempt at a smile. “Be that as it may, I shouldn’t have blamed you for my failures.”
“You thought I would have succeeded where you failed—but you didn’t fail,” the marquess said.
“He did,” Betsy said suddenly.
The coach went silent again, but for the slush of the wheels on snow.
The marquess’s eyes narrowed and if he’d looked confused before, now he looked at Betsy with daggerlike contempt. “I assure you, Lady Boadicea, that I have read the reports of my son’s service myself. He kept his men together in battle, in the face of insurmountable odds. Had the coward’s battalion joined them, as planned, Jeremy’s actions likely would have turned the fate of that particular battle.”
“I know that,” Betsy said.
“My son received an honorable mention in the dispatches,” the marquess barked.
The carriage was drawing to a halt, but Betsy leaned forward like a gladiator about to whip up her steeds. “A true leader feels he has failed every man he loses,” she said, contained anger equal to the marquess’s in her voice. “My brother North is such a leader. And your son is such a leader.”
Jeremy’s mouth twitched, an involuntary movement.
“If you ask him, Jeremy will deny it,” Betsy said.
Jeremy opened his mouth. “Because—”
Betsy cut him off. “He will say that North is a better man. The guilt is intolerable. You couldn’t understand it. If you say his experience was not a failure, you ignore his feelings.”
“Balderdash!” his father barked. He turned to Jeremy, his eyebrows nearly meeting. “Do you think that I know nothing of guilt?”
The wind had picked up and was rocking the carriage.
“An entire platoon was lost,” Betsy said. “With all due respect, Lord Thurrock, no guilt you feel could equal that which your son experienced.”
Jeremy’s mouth curled in a genuine smile. “I can fight this particular battle,” he said to Betsy. “If not the other.”
“You did fight,” Betsy said. “You just didn’t win. You tried. To my mind, every battle is a failure.”
“You have a point.” The knowledge settled into his bones with surprising warmth.
“I know guilt,” his father said stubbornly.
Without any of the three of them noticing, the carriage had halted. Now the door opened, letting in a swirl of freezing air. Outside the door a groom in red livery stood stiffly next to a mounting box rapidly turning white with snow.
Betsy bent forward and left the carriage without a word to Jeremy or the marquess, holding out her gloved hand for the groom’s aid.
His father made no move to leave. “I don’t know why you thought I blamed you, Jeremy, but I didn’t. God knows I never would.”
“I didn’t truly think that,” Jeremy said, touched despite himself. “I was an idiot, that’s all. I’ve always thought of you as one of the most competent men I’ve ever met.”
His father’s mouth wobbled.
“I couldn’t help making the comparison. I didn’t look outside the battlefield, you see. On one level I followed orders. But on another, I should have realized that something had gone wrong. I should have sent someone to investigate. Instead, I just kept running across that bloody field.”
“And what were you running toward?”
“My men kept falling, one after another,” Jeremy said, swallowing.
“If you had left the field, your men would have fallen without notice,” his father said. “A general watches the battle as a whole, but you were told to watch over your men. You did that, Jeremy. You did that. The fact your colonel shamefully deserted his post is not your responsibility.”
Jeremy clenched his jaw because the English language didn’t seem to have the words for what he felt. Or what he should say.
“We can’t leave your warrior queen out in the snow.” The marquess’s hand closed tightly around Jeremy’s knee for a second before he bent forward and stepped out the door.
Jeremy sat still, capturing the whiff of linen and tobacco in his memory. He finally jolted himself out of the carriage and gave the shivering footman a shilling.
By the time he entered the inn, the marquess and Betsy were seated on opposite sides of a private parlor, which wasn’t as awkward as it might have been because Lady Knowe, Thaddeus, and the duchess were crowded around the fireplace with them.
Apparently, they had appropriated the entire inn.
“Isn’t this marvelous?” Lady Knowe called, flying to meet him. “We are warming up, and then we shall retire upstairs for baths. We can feel as comfortable as if we were in Lindow Castle. There was only one guest for the night, and he was perfectly happy to go off to the Honeypot. I’m paying for his stay, of course.”
She burbled on, but Jeremy looked to Betsy. She looked back at him, wide mouth solemn and one eyebrow arched, so delicious that Jeremy moved directly toward her.
A hand on his arm stopped him. “Lord Jeremy,” the duchess said, “I wish to apologize.”
“There is no need,” Jeremy said mechanically, bowing. He had no idea what she was talking about.
“I left you and Lady Boadicea at a teahouse unchaperoned. Naturally you both felt uncomfortable, which forced you out into a winter storm. What a marvelous piece of luck that you found your father’s carriage when needed!”