Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) (11 page)

• • •

True was glad Lady Leathorne had declared a day of inactivity. It was hot and humid, and she did not want to spend the day in enforced games or sports. The sky was lowering and dark after luncheon; Arabella had gone back upstairs to lie down—humidity always gave her a headache—but True needed to get out of the house, needed to be alone for once. She was aware that she still had come to no decision regarding Mr. Bottleby’s proposal, and she must decide soon. He was leaving for the north in a little over a month and a half, and he had wanted to marry before that. They would need three Sundays for the banns to be read, but other than that she did not anticipate much in the way of a wedding celebration.

Marriage! True slipped from the house with her oldest bonnet—or at least the oldest one she had brought with her—on her head and a basket on her bare arm. She had come to know Lea Park and took a shortcut toward the river where she had promised to gather some cress for the cook. Would she really marry after all these years?

Mr. Bottleby—Arthur she would have to call him if she accepted his proposal—was a good man. He genuinely felt the call of the church. Her father had been impressed, in the time the young man had been his curate, by his fervor and true devotion to the downtrodden. His methodistical leanings had disturbed Mr. Becket, but still, both father and daughter had agreed that Mr. Bottleby was the best kind of man of God, one who really believed in Him and wanted to do His work.

And did his proposal mean that she was chosen by God, as he was, to do His work? She didn’t know. She enjoyed helping the people of her village, doctoring the sick when they couldn’t afford medicine, instructing the children when the teacher of the village charity school was sick, visiting the elderly. As her mother had died when True was just twelve, she had taken the duties of the vicar’s wife upon herself, and now it felt like second nature to her. Marrying Mr. Bottleby and going north would mean new challenges, new people to care for, by the side of a man she truly respected, but it was a familiar role, one she knew herself to be capable of and trained for. But in thinking of marriage to Mr. Bottleby she found herself focusing almost entirely on the challenges of the job ahead and ignoring what marriage to the man would mean. She liked him. She esteemed him. She
respected
him.

Was it wrong to want love and . . . and passion, too?

Inevitably, thoughts of passion led her back to Lord Drake. He was everything Mr. Bottleby was not: gallant, handsome, a soldier who had proven his courage on the battlefield. His kiss had left her feeling weak in the knees. She was drawn to him, and wanted so very badly to soothe his troubled brow.

But it was not her place. Even if, by some miracle, he fell in love with her, they were socially so far apart as to be on opposite sides of a stone wall. Well, perhaps not
opposite
sides. Her father was a gentleman, an Oxford man, and though not rich was a member of the landed gentry, and her mother had been related to a baron and a marquess. So she was not completely removed from his social sphere, though she was certainly his inferior in standing.

It did not change her upbringing, though. Wycliffe Prescott, Viscount Drake, needed a wife of breeding, a woman who had been raised to grace the position of countess. He did not need a vicar’s daughter who knew about making preserves, haggling with the butcher, and doctoring villagers with her own herbal remedies. True knew how to run a household—a very small household—but she would be lost if she had to plan a party for two hundred!

She had been wandering through the meadow on a meandering route toward the river. Her destination was in sight, and she headed down the sloping bank toward the sluggish, winding waterway. From a previous walk she knew there was an old oak tree that overhung the bank, and on the other side of that a narrow rushing stream where the best cress, tender, green and fresh, could be found.

But who was that reclined on the bank under the oak? If it was some local gentleman, a stranger, she did not want to disturb him. And yet, this was Lea Park land. It would not be a stranger unless he was trespassing.

She swished through the weedy grass, quietly approaching, until she saw that the gentleman dozing on the bank, a fishing rod discarded beside him, was Lord Drake. She crept closer and stood gazing down at him, serene in sleep. Even more casual than usual, he was dressed in a pair of disreputable breeches and a shirt with no cravat, and had a slouchy hat pulled down over his eyes. To her he looked perfectly splendid, stretched out at his ease, his long muscular legs crossed at the ankle. His open shirt exposed a triangle of pale skin with a swirl of golden hair, the most of any gentleman’s body she had ever seen, and she felt a heated flush rise in her cheeks.

And she had no right to be standing there gawking at him like a lackwit. She longed to join him, to sit down at his side on the peaceful riverbank, watching him sleep and thinking of all the tomorrows she would never have with him, all the tomorrows they
could
have if their situations were more equal.

Lord Drake’s hand twitched, and it was as though an electric surge pulsed through him. He cried out and flailed, shouting, “Up the hill, gentlemen, we must take the hill!”

He thrashed from side to side as True stood wondering what to do.

And then he stiffened, his whole body arching as though he suffered some incredible pain, and he wailed, a keening so mournful that the small hairs on the back of True’s neck stood up.

“Dead, I am . . . oh, God! Dead . . . I am gone.”

With a cry, True dropped her basket and rushed to Drake, horrified to know that he was in the depths of one of his hideous nightmares. What to do? Oh, Lord, what should she do? She dropped to her knees beside him and pulled off his hat, now wildly askew. Drake’s gaunt face was twisted in a grimace and tears rolled down his cheeks as he moaned and thrashed.

One should be gentle with someone in a nightmare and not awaken them too abruptly, True remembered.
Oh, Lord
, she prayed,
let me help him, let me do the right thing.

Awkwardly, she put her arms around him, but he savagely fought her. He struggled in a nightmare battle with phantom enemies, clutching at her arms with a powerful, bruising grip. She was suddenly afraid; what did she know about this, about how to bring someone out of this kind of a state? But she would do what she could. She would surround him with her peace, she thought desperately, trying to twist her arms out of his grip. He released her. “Hush, Wy, hush. You are safe,” she murmured as he settled somewhat. She stroked his face and talked, pulling him closer as he stilled, cradling him in her arms. It was awkward. He was so very large compared to her, but her arms were long enough and she would let love comfort him.

With a great sigh, he went limp. And then, as quickly as it started, the nightmare ended and his eyes opened.

Chapter Eight

His eyes bleary and clouded, he stared up at her from his place in her arms and the drying tears on his cheek were joined by a fresh stream. He reached up and touched her face, his hand gentle, his touch wondering. True thought that he might not know where he was, or even who she was, his eyes were so unfocused.

And then he wept, great gusty sobs that wracked his body. He encircled her waist with his powerful arms and laid his head on her bosom and cried, murmuring incoherently at first, mumbling. But then she could make out words, and it was like a prayer for forgiveness, she thought, rocking him and soothing him.

“I killed him, poor f-fellow,” he cried. “He didn’t even have ammunition but I shot him, watched him die. And . . . and he had a little picture, wife and baby, I think, and she never saw him again. Never saw her poor husband again! Not right! Not fair.”

A surge of tenderness coursed through her as she held him, rocked him and listened to his confession while she stroked his face and ran her fingers through his golden curls. “But you didn’t know that, didn’t know that he had no ammunition,” she murmured, hazarding a guess.

“No, but still, he was dead, and his poor wife and fatherless babe . . . not right.” He wept again, his whole body shuddering with a searing pain that had been suppressed for years under the needs of battle, the exterior of a warrior. “And all the others . . . sons, husbands, fathers, all! Dead. I killed them.”

His tears were soaking the bodice of her gown; she could feel the wetness on her skin. She rubbed and massaged his shaking shoulders, kneading the knotted muscles of his neck, holding him to her. No one had ever been so close to her before, not even Harry, but this felt utterly right, holding him like this. She wondered at the welter of confused emotions that were coursing through her brain and heart as she stroked and touched him, but then she turned away from her own feelings. There would be time to think, to contemplate, later. Right now he needed her.

If she could just infuse him with some of her faith and peace, it would be worth any price, even . . . even the destruction of her reputation if they were found like this.

She glanced around, up the riverbank and across to the other side. No one in sight. Not that it would make any difference to her actions if there was someone, for she felt needed in a way she never had before. She was overwhelmed by her desire to give this man in her arms whatever she had that would ease his acute suffering. His heart pain was so deep it was almost like a physical wound, she thought. What do we do to our men and boys, she wondered, murmuring comforting words. How can we send them off to kill or be killed? And yet when they return, we expect them to be fine, to suffer not at all, to not feel all the fear and horror and pain of what they have had to do. We call them heroes but expect them to be the same young men we sent off to war, untainted by all the violence and death that surrounded them for so long. It was not right, she thought. After the celebration was over these men were sent back to their families to resume their lives as if nothing had happened in the interim.

“Wy, you could do nothing but what you did.” She spoke in her gentlest tone and smoothed the hair back from his damp brow, laying a kiss there. “As long as governments start wars, they will send their best and brightest men out to fight, to kill or be killed, and you were one of them. You went out a boy, eager for the glory, and came back a man, saddened by all you had witnessed. But you could do nothing less, once on that battlefield. You could do nothing less, for you were protecting your men and yourself.”

She talked on for a few minutes, sharing what she had just been thinking, and then realized that his tight grip around her waist had loosened and he slept, peacefully and with a look of sweet relief on his handsome face.

The afternoon advanced. The lowering skies cleared, eventually, and the sun came out, though they sat in deep shade under the old oak tree. A breeze, cleaner and cooler than any in the past days, riffled over the top of the long grass in the meadow, setting the daisies to dance. And Wy slept on, the deep, dreamless sleep of a relaxed and unburdened heart.

Through the long afternoon True felt her limbs numb from staying in one place so long, but she would not move for the world. Her mind wandered far afield at first, over her own dilemma. To marry or not to marry? But it was a subject that curiously could not hold her attention. Instead she thought of Wy, and his pain. What could he do to soothe the ache in his heart? The one thing that had given him the most joy, it seemed, since he had been back, was helping Stanley, the ex-soldier amputee, and the other former soldiers he had hired to rebuild his library. Perhaps if he found others to help, and he did have the resources to do it, he could find solace in the lives he was helping to mend.

He needed something to look forward to. He had been a soldier for so long, it was hard for him to be idle, she thought. As he was rebuilding his library, so he needed to rebuild his life, from the very basics, tear it all apart and start over again. He had long defined himself as a soldier, and he was not that anymore. What was he?
Who
was he? He would need to answer those questions before he could find comfort.

The shadows lengthened. Those at the house must be wondering where they were. Could she say she lost her way? She did not think a lie was a sin in a case like this. She knew in her heart that she had done nothing but what she ought, so there was no guilt associated with her actions. But no one else would understand, least of all her cousins. Arabella was there to win Lord Drake’s hand, and she would either swoon or go into a rage to see Drake and True at that moment. As much as she loved her younger cousin, she still knew Arabella well enough to know that she would see it as True poaching in her woods. Ah well, True thought. There was nothing she could do about that.

• • •

Drake stirred, stretched and yawned. He nuzzled his pillow, feeling like he had slept better than any time since he had come home. It was a foreign feeling, this sensation of rested wellness. Turning slightly, he looked up, directly into the smiling eyes of Miss Truelove Becket!

He scrambled away from her. Her cheeks were pink, but her blue eyes were calm, as though it was quite an everyday occurrence to cradle a gentleman in her lap while he slept. “True! Er, Miss Becket, what . . . ?”

She stretched her legs out awkwardly, her movements as clumsy as a newborn calf. With a rueful grimace she rubbed her legs. “I am afraid it was not just you who fell asleep, Wy. My legs seem to have done the same.”

Memory flooded back to him. Another tortured nightmare! He had started to dream of the first advance of the day—of
that
day, Sunday, June 18, 1815—but it had swiftly turned into the old nightmare of pain and death, and hands clutching at him, pulling him, demons dragging him down to hell for his misdeeds. Mortified, he remembered it all, remembered awakening to find her gazing down at him with a look of tenderness and pity so powerfully sweet that he had burst into tears, as half asleep as he was at that moment, and on her bosom he . . . God help him, he had babbled all his pain and torment, all his shameful weakness, all his dark hatred of what he had become on the battlefields of Europe.