Page 90 of The Spy and the Nightingale
“Nay, never. Da was a bookseller in Glasgow, a successful one, but there was a smallpox outbreak in the city. We moved to Kirkcudbright”—she gestured vaguely west, where Kirkcudbright was some miles distant—“and he set up shop there. Ran a printing press there too. There was cleaner air for Maman. She was consumptive and already ill by then. But this cottage and the property... Da bought them from a cousin when he married Maman, to settle on her, collecting the rents on it during their lifetime. He was older than her, you see—thirteen years older—and he’d anticipated that she’d far outlive him and wanted her provided for when the time came.” She took a quick breath, for it hadn’t worked out like that at all, what Da had envisioned. Her eyes stung. “It’s passed to me now, as her elder daughter. He saw to that detail as well.” How strange, somehow, that they’d never spoken of this. “Do you still have people in Kent?”
Sunlight struck bronze off Nathaniel’s dark hair as he shook his head. “Not anymore. My mother died when I was young, my father quite suddenly when I was sixteen. I’d just completed a term at Eton. My father was proud that he’d been able to send me despite not being a gentleman. Disease took my grandfather and the rest a handful of years later, while I was in South America with the Rifles.” He plucked a stem of grass and twirled it between his fingers.
As ever, her eyes were drawn to the movement of his hand.
“I visited Kent before I left England,” he said. “The family plot, specifically, in the parish churchyard. Did I tell you?”
She shook her head.
“I hadn’t been back since just after my father was buried. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d even gone.”
“How long ago wasthat? Your father’s death.”
He considered it a minute. “Fourteen years, give or take? No, more than that. I suppose it’s closer to fifteen now.”
She did the mental calculation. It put him at thirty or so. She hadn’t known that in France either.
“Would you have chosen a military career, had your father lived?” Even with his hair longer than he’d worn it last autumn, she would not have mistaken him for anything but a former military man, having known Jamie’s fellow officers. He’d intentionally masked those traits while acting as Beaumont, but as himself, it was evident in his bearing, his posture, his watchfulness.
He made an amused sound in his throat. “Nay. Probably I’d have gone on to Oxford on scholarship and likely even now be steward in my father’s place. Or working alongside him if he still lived.”
Howstriking, to think he’d been meant to peacefully manage the land instead of taking up a soldier’s life. She had no doubt he’d been formidable as an officer; certainly he was so as an intelligence agent. She’d thought him dangerous during that long-ago fiacre ride—and he was. But she’d also learned, not too many days later, that he was a man with a startling capacity for gentleness, both giving and receiving.
Perhaps the land would have suited him more. “Such was your dream, to follow behind him?”
“It was always my father’s more than my own. Although I do not doubt I’d have settled to it.”
Would he have smiled more, had that been his life? Would he even now be raising his own children in a home near the sea?
He caught something of her thoughts. “I’d have been content enough, I expect. It was another lifetime ago though. I cannot picture it anymore. Will you tell me about Jamie?”
Surprise brought her up short; she stumbled, and he reached out a hand to steady her. “My own lifetime ago, in its way.”
“Aye.” Then, “Only if you’d like. If it’s toopainful?—”
“No, you took me by surprise. That’s all.” She drew a deep breath. “I do not remember what I told you in October,” she said slowly.
How odd humans were, that it had felt more natural to speak about Jamie to Nathaniel when he was a stranger than now, when he’d become something... Well,more. If Nathaniel felt a similar delicacy, it was not on his face. Although, she thought with sudden amusement, it likely wouldn’t be anyway. And hehadasked and by all appearances was sincere in wanting an answer.
“You told me Jamie was a captain in the Scots Greys,” Nathaniel said. “That you loved and respected him, and he, you. You were married... five years?”
“Nearly six.”
“You were young when you married, then.”
She shook her head. “Not so very young. Eighteen at our wedding.” Her twenty-sixth birthday had fallen just after she and Lucy reached London in December. Her wedding felt so long ago now, as did the whole of her marriage, as did Jamie’s death. A different lifetime, indeed. “You truly wish to hear about Jamie?”
“Aye.” Nathaniel’s eyes were softer than usual.
“We met at a social function when I was sixteen, in Edinburgh that summer, staying with Da’s sister’s family. Da was having Maman seen by doctors there. The Greys were quartered at the Piershill Barracks. I was quite dazzled by Jamie when we met. He was tall, of course, like all the Greys.” Nearly a requirement of cavalrymen, that they be well above average height, and Jamie had been no exception.
“He also spoke with an aristocratic English accent and wore a dashing dress uniform and grinned quite a lot. And was all of twenty-three besides, the absolute pinnacle of maturity.” She laughed softly. “Younger than I am now by several years. Peculiar, to frame it like that. Da was reluctant to allow Jamie to court me, not least on account of his age, but I argued, successfully, that Dahadn’t much of a leg to stand on given he married Maman when she was seventeen and himself the grand age of thirty.”
She smiled, remembering that conversation. “He needn’t have worried. Jamie behaved quite properly. Before we returned to Kirkcudbright that autumn, he secured permission from Da and Maman—and me, of course—to write. His courtship for most of two years was conducted largely by letter. After he purchased captain—the Greys were in Dublin by then—he secured his superior officer’s permission to marry. He wrote to Da and then came in person on home leave to offer for me. We married that summer, and I went with him to Dublin. That was 1809. After a year in Ireland, it was Yorkshire next, then Newcastle-upon-Tyne after that. Or was Manchester next? It all runs together now. We moved frequently, wherever the Greys were sent on home service.”
“No house of your own?”
“No. But I did not feel that lack. Truthfully, it was exciting, moving around and seeing new places. I was young, and I wanted only to be with Jamie, wherever that meant. If we’d... If there had ever been a child, I imagine I’d have wished to be more settled. But we were never blessed in that way.” She looked out across the bay. “Had Jamie survived Waterloo, likely I’d have followed him into France for those next months. The Greys were at Harfleur for a time after the allied army took Paris.”
