“You expected your husband to be in my place,” he said. “You expected to be the countess.”
“If I did,” she said, “I have had plenty of time in which to adjust my expectations. My husband has been dead for longer than eight years.”
“Eight?” he said. “Yet you have not remarried?”
“And you have not married?” she asked in return. At first it seemed like a non sequitur, but then he understood the point she was making.
“It is surely different for a woman,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. “Because a woman cannot function in life without a man to protect her and order her life for her?”
“Is that what your husband did?” he asked. “Order your life? Did he leave you to go off to war and order you to stay behind, playing the part of patient, dutiful wife while you awaited his return?”
“Dicky was my friend,” she told him. “My dearest friend. We were equal companions. He did not leave me behind when he went to war. He took me with him. No, correction. I went with him. I was with him to the end.”
“Ah, a woman who followed the drum,” he said, turning his head to look at her. Yes, he could imagine it. This was a woman who would not wilt under harsh conditions or flinch in the face of danger. “Admirable. He died in battle, did he?”
She was staring straight ahead, her chin raised. Gulls were screeching about somewhere below the level of his feet. He found it a mite disturbing.
“He died in captivity,” she said. “He was a reconnaissance officer. A spy.”
Ah, poor devil. But were not captured officers treated with dignity and honor and courtesy, provided they gave their parole—that is, their promise as gentlemen not to try to escape? Unless, that was, they were out of uniform when caught, as a reconnaissance officer might well have been. He would not ask. He did not want to know. But—
“You were with him to the end?” He frowned.
“I went partway into the hills with him at the start of that particular mission,” she said, “as I often did when it was deemed safe enough. His batman would have escorted me back. We were still well behind our own lines. We were both captured.”
“And the batman?”
“He was foraging for firewood at the time,” she said, “and was able to make his escape.”
One captive had survived and one had not. Suddenly he saw her marble demeanor in a wholly new light. What had happened to her during her captivity? Especially if her husband had not been in uniform? It was really too ghastly to think about and he was not going to do it. He certainly was not going to ask any more questions. He did not want to know.
“And so you returned to England alone,” he said. “Did you move immediately to the dower house?”
“I went home,” she said, “to my father’s house twenty miles from here. But I would not speak or sleep or leave my room. Or eat. My mother is a cousin of the Duke of Stanbrook. He lives at Penderris Hall on the eastern side of Cornwall. He had opened his home to military officers who had returned from the wars severely wounded in one way or another, and he had hired a skilled physician and other people to nurse them. My mother wrote to him out of despair, and he came to fetch me. I was there for three years. There were six of us who stayed that long, seven counting George—the duke, that is. We called ourselves the Survivors’ Club. We still do. We still get together for three weeks of every year during March.”
They had stopped walking. There was a break in the cliff face here, he noticed, and what appeared to be a zigzagging path down to the beach below—a rather steep and surely dangerous descent. The dog sat down beside him, its head against the side of Percy’s boot.
“When one imagines oneself striding about one’s land, faithful hound at heel,” he said, “one tends to picture a robust and intelligent sheepdog or some such.”
She looked at Hector. “Perhaps,” she said, “when a dog imagines following upon the heels of its master, it pictures kind words and a gentle touch.”
Touché. She had a wicked tongue.
“I am not its master,” he said.
“Ah,” she said, “but who gets to choose?”
“Three years,” he said. “You were at Penderris for three years?”