Page 85 of Baron Bolt

Across the table his wife glanced up. Her eyes found his left one, the traitor, the favorite, and stayed there a private half-second before returning demurely to her toast.

Outside, the soft rain went on falling over the meadows. It sounded like rain. It sounded like home.

Damian Archer sat at the head of his own breakfast table. Dead man. Baron. Husband. The old cry of the house settled in his chest at last. There was no wall left anywhere to keep it out.

He is alive.

It was true. He was.

EPILOGUE

The cold of March persevered like an unpaid creditor. Frost in the hedgerows, fires burning in every grate as if it were Christmas. The vicar muttering in the village that the sun itself had gone wrong. Damian felt the season in his seams. Every stitched line the cellar had left him ached in weather like this. A dull, sullen pull across chest and shoulder.

But inside, Hartleigh was warm and loud. Coppers of water going up the back stairs. Maids on the landing with their arms full of linen. Candles everywhere. Kitchen fires roaring at two in the morning. The whole house awake and turned to one purpose, like a ship’s company at quarters.

Damian had stood sentry in the corridor outside his wife’s chamber since yesterday afternoon.

He was in his shirtsleeves. His cravat was somewhere, long forgotten. He had a vague memory of dragging it off around midnight and no memory at all of where it had gone. His collar hung open. Half the household had walked past him in this state and the world had failed to end. Last year he would sooner have stood before them stripped of his skin than of his coat. Now the housekeeper had seen his forearms twice tonight and merely offered him a tea tray.

He had not taken the tea.

Through the door, Ophelia was laboring hard. It had gone on too long. He knew nothing of these matters, less than nothing, but he knew the sound of men who had been fighting since dawn, and that was the sound. Her cries came in bouts. Then the midwife’s voice under them, firm as a good sergeant’s. “There now, my lady. Again. You’ve the strength for it, again.”

His mother had spent the night going between the chamber and the corridor. In and out. She could not settle. Just now she was on his side of the door, talking. She had been talking for some time.

“Two full days with Edward, two days, and your father pacing the library and drinking the cellar dry, and then you, of course, you came in five hours and in a temper, screaming fit to raise the parish, you were born cross, my darling, I have always said so. She should take the caudle, I told them she must take the caudle between the pains, my mother swore by it.” Her hands flew as she spoke, drawing caudle, pains, the parish, the whole of her worry in the candlelight.

Once, that river of words would have scraped him raw. Tonight he stood in it and let it run. It was evidence of life. It was something to stand in. Warm. And it was, most importantly, distracting. She pressed a cup of tea into his hands at some point. The china sat heavy against his palm. He held it until it went cold and could not have said what became of it.

At three, the midwife herself came to the door, wiping her hands, and suggested with great tact that his lordship might be easier downstairs. That these things took their own time. That there was nothing to be gained.

“No,” said Damian.

“My lord⁠—”

“Madam, Bonaparte’s whole artillery could not shift me from a field.” He heard the grin arrive in his own voice, sudden, out of nowhere, the way it always came. “You are welcome to try, but I would save your strength for better work.”

The midwife blinked at him. Somewhere behind him a maid smothered a laugh in her apron. The midwife’s mouth twitched. She went back in. The door clicked shut behind her.

The click went through him like a bayonet.

He stopped. Rain was driving hard against the long windows at the corridor’s end and had been for an hour. Now, far off over the downs, thunder rolled. One long low tumble of it. The sky clearing its throat. Every hair on his arms rose. His left eye stung and watered. It never had agreed with lightning, that eye. And he was there again, all at once, in his body if not his mind. The weight of dead men on his chest. The smell of them. Digging himself out by inches with his own grave-dirt under his nails. The mutter of a madman at a table. A door clicking shut at the top of a stair. The rod taking the strike and the whole house jumping like a struck drum. Running through rain barefoot with his heart going like a galloped horse.

He was walking before he had decided to walk.

Forty feet of corridor. Turn. Forty feet back. The old bestial instinct that had carried him up out of that cellar and across the breadth of France was awake in him and roaring, and there was nothing on earth to spend it on. No door to break. No enemy to fight. Nothing to dig, nothing to carry, no dark to cross. Only carpet, and candlelight, and the rain, and his wife’s cries on the other side of English oak, fighting a battle he could not assist her with.

Forty feet. Turn. Forty feet.

Toward dawn the cries changed. Climbing. Urgent. And then came a thing worse than any cry. Quiet.

Damian stopped with his palm flat against the door. The wood was warm. His hand shook on it. He watched it shake with a sort of astonishment, because his hands had been sure at Badajoz.

And the fear came up out of the place he kept it, the one fear he had never spoken aloud. Not to the vicar. Not to God, with whom his correspondence remained irregular even as he accepted his place in the world. Not even to her, and he had told her everything else. It was unreason. He had told himself so nightly, for months, in the voice he used on frightened men.

Reason had no vote tonight. The quiet went on, and on, and Damian Archer stood with his hand on the door and did not breathe.

Then the cry.