Page 28

“I know all about Jemima Fawr with her pitchfork.” Anne tossed her head, reminding him of his mare that morning, kicking up her heels as the wind frisked with her mane. “And if you’re Welsh, Hewitt Vaughn, I am a Frenchwoman.”

“ Bonjour, mademoiselle, ” Hew teased further. “ Je suis enchanté de faire votre connaissance.” He was delighted to make her acquaintance.

“Monsieur Vaughn ,” she returned with a flawless accent. “ Le plaisir de la rencontre est à vous .”

The pleasure of the encounter was all his. Hew tilted his head back and laughed.

She swayed on the bench seat beside him, as if startled by the sound he made. Hew was startled, too. He hadn’t laughed since … since the West Indies.

Oh, there had been the ribald jokes aboard ship as the Navy sailed them to the Mediterranean and Acre.

There had been the usual jests about the hardtack, the rum rations, the lack of women.

There had been crows of delight when Smith’s men captured French boats and confiscated their artillery.

There were bitter, satisfied chuckles when the French army with all their bluster and rage had failed in their assaults on the city, and took sick with plague besides.

But a laugh, a true, honest laugh, born of pleasure—that was a gift he’d been lacking for a long time.

Hew turned toward her, ready to extend the jest, and pleasure flickered and died at the tight frown on her face.

“Do you wish for children?” she asked in a rush.

She had him off his guard, and he answered without his usual reserve.

“I always hoped I would have them, someday.” It was the kind of distant dream a soldier allowed himself in his bunk at night: the promise of dry land somewhere with good and plentiful food, entertainments instead of duty, a woman’s curves tucked beside him at night, and children to raise to their name and place in the world.

She turned to stare at the shadowy mass of Twym Barlwm, ever-present on the horizon. As a boy Hew believed the legends that a giant was buried there, the mound the swell of his enormous belly, the hump at the top his belly button.

Six years ago, he could have been bound to this woman.

He could have been the one who came forth as her protector against the hard winds of the world.

The husband who indulged his genteel lady with compliments and pin money, who gave her a fine home and gowns and children, and who let her oversee the household accounts to her liking and suffered house parties and dinners with her friends.

Instead, he’d run off to the West Indies to fight and drink and man artillery for no-flint Grey and naval commander Sir John Jervis, recently made the Earl of St. Vincent. And Anne knew he hadn’t wanted her.

The thought of those six lost years sat like a brick on Hew’s throat.

What if he had said yes? What if he had traveled to Llanfyllin and said their vows in her parish church before all the friends who had known her from birth, with meadowsweet strewn over the church floor and champagne flowing at their wedding breakfast. What if Anne had been lodged at Greenfield all this time, drowsing in the walled garden like a pollen-drunk bee, sitting down to table with his mother and father, safe under their roof and untouched while her father’s fortune vanished and her brother lost himself in gambling and bad bets.

Hew wouldn’t have been home any more frequently. He would have left her there at Greenfield, his bride, alone with Calvin. And his brother would have respected Anne’s marriage vows to Hewitt as little as Hew had respected the bond binding Calvin and Anne.

“Do you wish for children?” he ventured to ask. He knew so little of this woman.

“I have names picked out for nine of them. Four boys and five girls.” She twined the string of her reticule around her fingers, the string digging into the kid of her gloves.

“But today I saw what that entails, and I—” Her voice was high and thin.

“What I saw is pain and blood and terror. Gwen’s child died.

Leah’s still could. I do not know how women bear it. ”

“If I do not have children, then Calvin will inherit Greenfield,” Hew said slowly, keeping his eyes on the road. He did not understand what she was telling him.

She straightened her shoulders in that way she had of steeling herself. “I am only saying, that could be a reason. That you refuse me.”

“You were found in my bed, Anne. I am not going to refuse you.”

“I suppose you are right. I must be the one to cry off.” The string pulled so tight about her slender hands that her fingertips must be going numb.

The brick moved down his gullet to Hew’s chest, lodging there.

His heart pulsed against it, painfully. He would rather be standing with his back bare, wrists tied to the ladder, dozens of silent men watching him bleed as the only sound in his ears was the hiss of the cat-o’-nine-tails through the air and the dull smack as it sank into flesh.

He would rather be flogged again than hear Anne Sutton say she did not want him.

That she did not want him to touch her again.

“Wait,” he said dully.

“I-I beg your pardon?”

“Wait. A few days more.” They passed the high mound of the ancient hillfort and rounded Pye Corner into the intersection of Bassaleg, where the old roads spouted a new tramway.

Another venture Hew supported, had invested in.

He felt he might fall and be buried under the weight of all he must do, but the most important was to keep Anne from bolting just yet.

“It has only been a day,” he reminded her, surprised to realize that was true.

He felt he were living lifetimes in the span of hours, so deep was the upheaval she had brought to his life.

“You might let some time elapse. Decide where you can go. Wait for the carriage to return, so I might take you there. Come up with a reason to end things that …”

He trailed off. She wanted to end things. And he did not want her to leave.

But neither could he give her what she wanted. Certainly not what she deserved, a whole man who could come to her with honor in his clean hands and a soul free of scars.

“Very well.” Her words were a whisper, snatched away by the breeze. They might be in for another storm. She untangled her reticule from her hands, head bent, gaze focused on her task as if it might save her.

They were nearly to the old heap that was Rogerstone Castle when her voice came again, a gentle hum on the breeze. “I hope, after all this is over … we might remain friends?”

“No, Anne.”

That much was clear to him. This woman, in the blink of an eye, had uprooted everything he believed about himself.

She’d torn the dull, unformed thoughts he’d had for his future into shreds.

He was alone on a storm-tossed sea. Standing in the middle of a walled garden while the army beyond battered at his walls.

Left again to die in an Ottoman prison, of plague or infection or rat bite, whatever took him first.

He didn’t have the goodness, the nobility in him to wish her well upon leaving him. To watch her go gladly into the future she wanted, without him. He turned his face away, hardening his expression, hardening his heart.

“No,” he said again. “I wish you well. I will do whatever you ask of me. But you and I can never be friends .”