Page 24 of The Governess and the Rogue (Somerset Stories #6)

Chapter Twenty-One

B ea stared at him. Of all the replies she’d been expecting, it hadn’t been that . “I thought you were going to say it was your leg.”

“Two problems, then,” Jack acknowledged. “Likely more if I took the time to identify them.”

Bea studied his face, striving to understand. He looked so closed off. So hard and alone. It wasn’t like Jack. Not the Jack she had come to know.

“I don’t know why you’d say such a thing in the first place,” she said. “To claim you aren’t a hero? What nonsense.” A thought occurred to her. “It’s not… That is, it isn’t because of how you were injured, is it?”

“It is,” he admitted.

Her lips thinned in reproof. “Just because your horse fell on you in battle doesn’t make your sacrifice any less heroic. You were still fighting for Queen and country, weren’t you? And all injuries in service to the Crown are?—”

Jack cut her off. “That’s not what happened.”

Bea stilled. “But you said?—”

“I said my horse fell on me during a skirmish.”

“During a battle, I thought. At…” Her brows knit. What had he called it? “Mohammerah?”

He gave a terse nod.

“Yet, that’s not the whole of it,” she concluded. “You’re saying there was more.”

“There was. But… It’s not anything I can talk about.”

“Why not?” She sunk her voice. “Is it a secret?”

“Something like that.”

Bea could think of no better place to confide one than here beside the stream in the shelter of trees, with forget-me-nots blanketing the sloping banks around them.

The secluded spot was a secret in itself.

No one else seemed to exist here but her and Jack.

Just the two of them on the ancient fallen tree, side-by-side, just as they’d been in their railway compartment on their journey from Marseilles.

A scrap of birdsong broke the silence—a sweet, melodic sound. It was carried away on the breeze. Only the sound of the rippling water remained.

“You’re the one who brought it up,” Bea pointed out.

“I often find myself telling you far more than I should,” Jack said. “Why is that, do you suppose?” His voice took on a sardonic edge. “Is it because you’re so extraordinarily sympathetic?”

Bea suppressed a huff of amusement. “I’m not un sympathetic.”

“Pragmatic, I should have said. Unless someone wrongs you one too many times. Or unless they wrong one of your friends. In which case, all bets are off.”

Amusement fading, Bea regarded him with unusual solemnity. They’d been through so much together in so short a time. All those hours on the Pera, on the train across France, and on the steamer over the Channel. All those miles traveled, shoulder-to-shoulder and hand-in-hand.

“I count you as a friend,” she said.

A rare glimmer of vulnerability flickered at the back of Jack’s gaze. “Do you, Bea?”

“I do,” she said. “Which is why I won’t interrogate you on the subject of your last battle, or skirmish, or whatever you’d like to call it. I’ve no wish for you to put your honor at risk revealing the clandestine operations of the British government.”

A bitter smile edged Jack’s mouth. “It’s not a military secret,” he said. “Merely a shameful one.”

Her brows lifted in question. But she didn’t press him. She merely waited.

Jack set his hand on the curved handle of his cane.

He looked at it for several weighted seconds before he spoke.

“The fighting at Mohammerah lasted less than a week,” he said at last. “Our forces ultimately prevailed, but on the final night, when we took the city, two of our men fired on us as we were chasing down the retreating Persian army.”

Bea’s eyes went wide. “Your own men?”

“It was later determined to be an accident.”

“But how?—?”

“It was dark and all was in chaos,” Jack said.

His attention remained on his cane. “My horse went down and me along with him. It broke my leg. Partially crushed it. I must have fainted, for when I next opened my eyes, I was in a field hospital and some boy-child of a surgeon was doing his best for me. Regrettably, his best wasn’t very good.

Which was all of a piece with the whole wretched affair. When I think of it…”

Bea waited for him to finish his thought, but he did not. “Why would you call it shameful?” she asked when the silence between them had stretched too long for her comfort.

“What else to call it? I was fired at by my own men. Injured by my own horse. And everything made worse by a too-green surgeon. And now I’ve come home, and I’m meant to let everyone fete me as the conquering hero? I can’t conceive of anything more distasteful.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s certainly one point of view.”

“There can be no other.”

“There can,” she said.

Jack gave her a dark look.

Bea didn’t allow it to intimidate her. “Even if all you say is true, it doesn’t negate your being a hero,” she said. “You must have plenty of heroic moments in your past.”

“In the past, precisely,” Jack replied. “No one cares a whit about those heroics. People only care about what a chap has done lately. It doesn’t matter how extraordinarily he did something before if his most recent endeavor has blown up in his face.”

She privately acknowledged the truth of his words. But it wouldn’t do to encourage him. Not when he was in his current frame of mind. “You speak of people in general terms. Yet, we’re talking of your family.”

A gentle wind drifted over the banks of the stream, rustling the leaves in the trees and making the forget-me-nots dance in the grass.

“With family, it’s worse,” Jack said.

“How so?” Bea asked, wrapping her cashmere shawl more firmly about her.

“Your family perpetually judges you for your latest accomplishments, while at the same time forcing you to serve a lifelong sentence for the idiocies of your youth.” Jack stabbed the tip of his cane into the grass.

“I could be promoted countless times, receive a passel of medals for bravery, and James would still see me as the same witless scoundrel who used to meddle with village girls and engage in ill-conceived wagers.”

Meddle with village girls?

Bea drew back. “Er, what do you mean?—”

“I was a lad. I did what lads do. And far less, I might add, than most of the chaps that have been under my command in the army. But there’s no shedding one’s reputation with one’s own family. And after what happened at Mohammerah… And what’s happened with you… That reputation will be even worse.”

“Forget me for a moment,” Bea said.

Jack glared at her. “As if I could.”

Bea’s heart skipped a beat. She ignored the sensation. “It’s your wrong-headed ideas about how you were injured that trouble me.”

“Wrong-headed, you call them?”

“Indeed. What does it matter how you were injured if that injury took place while you were?—”

“Because,” he interrupted crossly, “I’d rather it had been our enemy who put an end to my glorious military career, not one of my own men. And not my bloody horse. Forget the fact that I swooned like a woman?—”

Bea bristled. “Women aren’t the only ones who swoon. It’s a human reaction.”

“Yes, very human. I’m sure there will be ballads written about it in my honor.”

It was her turn to glare. “You should be grateful to be alive.”

“Alive and returning to Somerset? To farm, I daresay. How excessively exciting.”

“Some might say you’ve had enough excitement.”

“Some don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“You crave more of it?” Bea flourished her hand. “More danger? More death on the battlefields of far-off lands?”

“I enjoy feeling alive,” Jack said. “Don’t you?”

“I am alive,” she replied. “Enjoyment isn’t guaranteed.”

“So you’ve said. You do what you must to survive. This included.”

This.

Her throat tightened. She supposed it had been about survival.

At least, initially. That’s why she’d agreed to his proposition, to save herself from the ignominy of being sacked mid-voyage and left destitute—or worse.

But there had been more to it even then.

Bea wasn’t too proud to admit it, if only to herself.

Jack Beresford was, and would always be, a hero in her eyes.

He was the only person in memory who had ever come to Bea’s rescue. The only one who’d willingly stood between her and the harsh forces of the world that had been chipping away at her defenses, day by day and year by year, since she’d first struck out on her own at the age of seventeen.

No one else had ever defended her. Had ever seen to her comforts, or cared a single jot if she was too cold.

That there had been a time limit on it all didn’t negate what it meant to her.

“I daresay you think it unwise of me to have agreed to such a ruse,” she said. “The risk is great. More so for me than it is for you.”

“But you took it anyway,” Jack said. “Why?”

Bea didn’t have to search her mind for the answer. It was staring her straight in the face. “Perhaps,” she said, “you and I aren’t so very different after all.”

* * *

Jack uttered a dry chuckle. Her assertion was comical on its surface. And yet… She wasn’t entirely wrong. “No,” he acknowledged. “We’re not, are we?”

“Rather strange,” she said.

He regarded her in the morning sunlight that filtered through the trees. “Rather nice, actually.”

A delicate blush seeped into Bea’s cheeks.

She was wearing the shawl he’d given her.

It softened her appearance. And there was something about her hair too.

It wasn’t in its usual severe coil of tightly secured plaits.

It was in a loose knot at her nape, with stray tendrils left to frame her face.

Sitting beside him, here at Beasley, in the clear light that glittered off the trickling stream?—

She looked beautiful.

She was beautiful.