“Gwyn?”
But no command to flee had been on Mr. Whittier’s lips. She drew in a breath, measuring it out into a careful inhale—exhale. Nay, the fallen sailor had spoken far different words. Which made far less sense. “How is his family?”
“They are grieving, of course. And they are proud of his service. Otherwise, they are maintaining a very stoic facade.”
She risked a blinding from the sun in order to look up into his face. He appeared stoic himself but for his eyes. Those churned with contemplation. “Have they need of any aid? Will they be able to get on?”
A blink, and his eyes cleared and brightened as he smiled down at her. “They are well enough situated, what with his father’s shop supporting them.”
Her nod did little to quell the questions that had been niggling at the corners of her mind for the past week. Still they pushed their way forward, following the route the bilious words had earlier. “Why did he not go home in his final moments? Why did he come to you?”
Thad’s only response was a delayed, unamused breath of a laugh.
They turned at the corner, the same one she had watched Thad round last evening, and headed down the same street on which Rosie had told her the Whittiers resided. The street the man had ridden directly past, though home had been no farther away than Thad’s house, so far as she could discern.
“He obviously knew he hadn’t much time left. And he obviously loved his family. Why, then, would he choose to give you that message of affection for them rather than see them a final time and leave with them the message for you about the pending attack?”
Something shifted in the man beside her. Subtle, but with an undeniable effect. ’Twas as if he stood even taller, broader, just by tilting his chin.
Confound it, she would have to do another sketch.
“Perhaps,” he said so quietly she could scarcely hear him over the rumble of a passing carriage, “his thinking was muddled with pain. Perhaps he thought he had time enough to see us both.”
“He did not.” She had heard him insisting his time was short.
His gaze tugged until hers met it, and then he held her captive. “Perhaps it was because he knew I could be trusted to give them his message, but was not so certain they would remember to give me mine.”
“But—”
“Is it so beyond reckoning that a family struck by sudden loss would forget to relay something to a mere acquaintance?”
Gwyneth struggled for a breath and tore her gaze away. If she let him look any longer into her eyes, surely he would see within her the answer to that rhetorical question. That so many clouds obscured parts of her mind, so many holes gaped. So many simple answers escaped her, while some details stood out in stark relief.
Had she forgotten anything important from her father’s last moments? She didn’t know. Couldn’t know. And she hated it.
So then, she would focus on those details still so clear. “Are you in the military, Thad?”
His gait hitched. “Pardon?”
“You certainly do not seem to be, and that is something about which I can boast a bit of knowledge. So why, then, did he come to you to pass along this information about the target of the fleet’s next attack?” She did her best to look at him as Mama would have, with an arched brow and pursed lips that said I know something is amiss.
Except he was not supposed to smile in the face of it. “I am a member of one of the local militias.”
“A militia.”
Now he turned the look around on her. “You needn’t say it with such disdain. It was our militias as well as our general army that sent you Redcoats packing once before.”
Of all the… “But a mere ‘member of one of the local militias’ is by no means the authority one runs to when one overhears sensitive information, Thaddeus.”
He came to a halt, forcing her to one as well. He regarded her for a long moment in utter stillness before sighing and pulling her onward again, past a line of elegant town houses. “Alain likes to say I know everyone in these United States. An obvious exaggeration, but he says it because I do know most of the leading families. Between my parents’ connections with them and the ones I have made myself…I make friends, Miss Fairchild, ’tis my best gift. And so when one friend has a need to let some other friend with whom he is not acquainted know something, he comes to me. There is no mystery. I simply have friends in Washington City that Whittier did not.”
Did he really take her for such a simpleton? There was more to Thaddeus Lane than a friendly demeanor. A plethora of acquaintances alone did not give one’s chin that angle. Though she couldn’t think what did.
“Paper.”
“Pardon?”