Page 73 of The Duke Undone

She spoke slowly, watching his face. “Conspicuous inebriation.”

“Yardley said I was drunk?” His throat constricted. You don’t have to explain. He had thought Yardley assumed the best of him, not the worst of him. “I was charged with theft and desertion. Theft of the officers’ rum rations, of course. Are you satisfied?”

“You told me you didn’t drink before . . .”

“Before my brother died? I didn’t.”

She fit her knuckle between her teeth and bit down. She wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to believe him. The realization shook him queerly. He took another deep breath through his nose, thinking of those scorching, dust-choked days, the things he’d seen and couldn’t forget, though he’d never put them into words.

“You were at the Battle of Maiwand,” she ventured. “I believe . . . it was a defeat?”

A defeat.

“My God,” he said. “It was a rout.”

In the moment, it had seemed an apocalypse. The end of the world. Would he really talk about this now, speak of that horror for the first time, to her, in a reeking alley? He struggled to find his way. How to begin?

“It was . . . senseless. Dust, blood, smoke, ceaseless flashes of light. Squadrons broke in all directions. By the time the general sounded the retire, we had no formation. Men were trampled by camels, fell onto their own bayonets. Some had made it as far as the village gardens and died fighting or huddled against the wall.”

“Where were you?” She barely breathed it.

“The gardens,” he said. “You talked of flayed men cast for anatomical study. That day I saw bodies peeled apart, ligaments and bones laid bare.”

He stopped short. Began again.

“We made our way back to Kandahar, fifty miles, harassed by the Afghan cavalry, no food or forage. The wounded rode on the guns or in wagons, on camels, donkeys. A few of us had horses. We came to a spring on the main road, but it was dry. The infantrymen broke into the mess supplies and drank what they could, the medicine, the officers’ stores of liquor.”

He read the question in her eyes.

“If I’d walked those twenty miles to that dry spring, with the prospect of thirty more to go, I might have done it too. They were mad with thirst. I wasn’t.”

He hadn’t taken a sip from the plundered bottles.

“The general ordered us to leave the ones too drunk to walk in the road. They’d have been butchered.”

She gave a little nod. “You tried to wake them.”

“I roused who I could. We’d hardly started after the column when we came under fire. Mizoa, my horse, was shot out from beneath me.”

He exhaled. She was gnawing her knuckle again, eyes haunted.

“I hit my head, lost consciousness. One of those infantrymen dragged me behind the rocks, stayed with me while the rest scattered. When the two of us reached Kandahar at last, we were arrested.”

“But you were innocent of the charges!” She uttered it with warmth. “That infantryman could have told them.”

How peculiar: now she was his champion. He shook his head.

“Humphreys wasn’t in any to position to speak.” In addition to sharing the charges, he was nearly dead when they reached the garrison, hallucinating from dehydration. “But regardless, if I was innocent of theft, drunkenness, and desertion, my only defense was insubordination. I disobeyed direct orders to help those men.”

“It’s not the same.” She’d pushed out her lower jaw. “You obeyed the dictates of your conscience. That’s a higher order. If conscience goes unheeded, we’re lost. Sometimes humanity demands insubordination.”

Her stubbornness had the power to charm when deployed on his behalf.

“I’d like to hear you say that to a military judge,” he said dryly.

“He wouldn’t like it when I was through with him.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He laughed, scrubbing a hand across his forehead. He could picture it.