“You know, Avery,” Harry said cheerfully as he surveyed himself in the long pier glass in his dressing room. “I think maybe this was the best thing that could have happened to me. While I was my father’s only son and heir, I could not even think of joining the military. I certainly could not do so after his death. But I have always envied those fellows who could, and now I can be one of them with a clear conscience. It is all going to be a great lark. And I am going to like wearing a green rather than a scarlet coat. Every officer and his dog wear scarlet. This will turn heads. Female heads, that is. Do you not think?” He turned to grin at his guardian.
The boy did indeed look dashing in the uniform of the 95th Rifles. And Avery did not doubt his enthusiasm, though there was definitely a slight edge of hysteria to it. Harry would do well—if he remained alive. And perhaps indeed what had happened would be the making of him. He was speaking with a forced bravado now, but he would make it reality. There was something admirable about Harry, after all.
“I do believe you will always turn female heads,” Avery said, looking his ward over without the aid of his quizzing glass, “the color of your coat notwithstanding. You are ready?”
Harry was leaving today to join his regiment, or the small part of it that was in England, replenishing its numbers after losses in battle. Within a day or two they would be embarking for the Peninsula and the war against Napoleon Bonaparte. There would be no time for the boy to ease his way gently into his new role. He might find himself in a pitched battle within days of his arrival.
“Aunt Louise will not shed buckets of tears over me, will she?” Harry asked uneasily. “Leaving my mother and the girls a week ago was one of the hardest things I have had to do in my entire life. Worse than watching my father die.”
“Her Grace will keep a stiff upper lip,” Avery assured him. “Jessica will be another matter.”
Harry winced.
“Her mother has allowed her out of the schoolroom,” Avery told him. “If she were not allowed to say farewell to you, she would probably run away to sea as a deckhand or some such thing and I would have to exert myself to go and fetch her home.”
“As you did with me when I enlisted with that sergeant,” Harry said. “Did I tell you how much you made me think of David confronting Goliath, but with a quizzing glass rather than a slingshot? Devil take it, Avery, but I wish I could simply click my fingers and find myself with my regiment. Not that I do not love my relatives. Just the opposite, in fact. Love is the damnedest thing.”
Was it? But it was indeed hard to be sending Harry off, possibly to his death. “I shall try my utmost to contain my own tears,” he said.
Harry gave a bark of laughter.
The duchess and Jessica were awaiting them in the drawing room. So was Anna.
Avery eyed her with displeasure. She had actually quarreled with him two evenings ago. She had found his company tedious and had stalked away from him, regardless of the curiosity she was stirring among those gathered in their vicinity. He would wager half his fortune that fashionable drawing rooms had been buzzing with the story yesterday and probably would again today unless someone had been obliging enough to wear a yellow waistcoat with a purple coat or elope with a handsome, brawny footman or otherwise arouse some new scandal. And now here she was to sob all over Harry when he least needed it.
“You look very smart, Harry,” the duchess said with hearty good cheer, getting to her feet as she looked him over. “Goodbye, my boy. I will not ask you to make us all proud of you. I know you will.”
“Thank you, Aunt Louise,” he said, shaking hands with her. “I will. I promise.”
Predictably, Jessica dashed into his arms, wailing horribly.
“You will be ruining Harry’s new uniform, Jessica,” her mother said after a few moments, and Jess hopped back and rubbed her hand over the slightly damp patch below one of his shoulders.
“I will n-never accept that you are no longer the Earl of Riverdale,” she told him, “and I will n-never forgive Uncle Humphrey, though one is not s-supposed to speak ill of the d-dead. Nor will I forgive the f-family he hid away while he was alive. They were n-never his real family. You were and A-Abby and Camille and Aunt Viola. But I promised Mama that I would not m-make a scene, and I will not even though she is here and Mama would not send her away. Harry, it hurts my heart to see you g-go and to know you are g-going into such d-danger.”