The Duke Is Mine

Page 62

His mother swallowed hard. “Canterwick would not do the same for you.”
“As with Evangeline’s death, that is irrelevant. We will put to sea at Dover, and the voyage should be a mere four hours with a good wind. I expect to be home tomorrow. Smugglers do this every day, you know.”
“I am afraid of that water,” the dowager said, her voice tight as a violin string. “I almost lost you to it before.”
Quin nodded; they both knew there was more than one way to be lost.
He picked up his mother’s hand and brought it to his lips. “You raised me to be a duke, Mother. I would disgrace my own title if I allowed a man of my rank to die on a foreign shore through my own cowardice.”
“I wish I’d raised you to be a peasant,” his mother said, her voice low.
“Your Grace,” he said, bowing with a low sweep that signaled his deep respect for his mother.
She raised her chin, and then slowly descended into a curtsy of her own. “I would prefer not to be proud of a son who is walking into clear danger,” she remarked. Her eyes were shining with tears.
“I will take your blessing with me,” Quin said, ignoring her words and answering the look in her eyes. That was something he was learning from Olivia. If he concentrated, he could tell what people were feeling, just from looking carefully at their eyes.
His mother turned and swept up the stairs, her shoulders rigid, her head high.
Twenty-six
The Dangers of Poetry under the Moon
It was almost three hours since they left the port at Dover in a vessel named the Day Dream, a schooner with a small cabin lying just above the surface of the water. Olivia stood at the porthole, watching black water fall restlessly behind their prow, as if it had somewhere to go.
“We’ll take the rowboat up an inlet, if I understand you,” Quin said from behind Olivia’s shoulder. He was pouring over a detailed map of the French coast with Sergeant Grooper, the soldier who had come to fetch them. Though to be exact, Grooper had come to fetch Rupert’s father.
Poor Canterwick. He still lay as if dead. Olivia had visited him before they set out, and had told him that she was going to France to find Rupert and bring him home. Perhaps he heard her.
“Aye,” Grooper said. “The hut is just here.” His stubby finger landed on a tiny inlet. “I memorized that town: Wizard.” His finger moved again.
“Wissant,” Quin corrected him. “I believe it means ‘white sands.’ ”
Olivia hugged her cloak tighter around her. Quin had been interrogating Grooper for more than two hours, grilling him on the exact route up the French coast taken by Rupert’s men. They’d been in a sloop, desperate to avoid capture. They had faced no problems until Rupert’s condition became so precarious that they were afraid to keep travelling.
“Burning up,” Grooper said from behind her. “Babbling of green fields and the like. And a lady he left behind.”
Olivia turned and smiled faintly at the soldier. “May I inquire whether he was asking for someone named Lucy?”
“That’s it! All the way down the coast, it seemed. Lucy, and more Lucy.” He eyed her. “I’m thinking your Christian name might be Lucy, ma’am?”
“No, Mr. Grooper, this is Lucy.” She gestured toward the little dog sleeping in a basket at her feet.
Grooper’s bushy eyebrows flew up. “First time I’ve heard a man make such a fuss over a dog, I don’t mind telling you that.”
Olivia felt no need to explain Rupert, nor his devotion to Lucy, and merely nodded. Quin was bent over the map, evidently memorizing every tiny crevice on the coastline. His coat was pulled tight over his shoulders, emphasizing their breadth. His cheekbones stood out more prominently than usual. And that white shock of hair fell over his brow.
“What worries me most is that there’s a garrison here, damn close to the hut,” Quin said, his finger sliding over from the inlet where Rupert could be found. “Have you seen soldiers conducting drills thereabouts?”
“I wasn’t there but half an hour,” Grooper said. “I’m not a man who’s a dab hand at the sickbed. I set out for England the moment we had the major settled on a pallet. He hadn’t much time.” He shook his head. “I still see his father every time I close my eyes, just listing to the side like that, and then falling on the floor. I should have told his lordship more gentle-like. I just blurted it out.”
“It wasn’t you,” Olivia said. “It was the distressing news, not you. No matter how you had phrased it, the duke stands to lose his only son, whom he loves very much.”
“I saw that,” Grooper said. “And I don’t mind telling you that every man in the company feels the same about the major. ‘The Forlorn Hope,’ that’s what they called us. Cause we weren’t supposed to come to nothing and”—he stuck out his jaw—“we was the men that no one else wanted; did you know that?”
Olivia shook her head.
“The other recruiters for the army wouldn’t take us, and we were just left behind, for one reason or another. They thought I was too old, though I know the battlefield as well if not better than any man. There was a few who had been lamed in the service, and they were told they should just go home.”
Olivia made a sympathetic noise.
“Go home! Go home and do what? Take up knitting? You don’t tell a soldier to go home just because he lost a few toes or has a gammy leg.”
“But the marquess didn’t agree?” she prompted.
“In the beginning, I was as nervous as any. He doesn’t think the same as the rest of us, that was plain. But then I saw what he was about. And once I saw that, I would have followed him anywhere.”
Olivia beamed at him. “Up the ramparts, in fact?”
“That’s right. See, the other companies as had tried before, they always went in the middle of the night, thinking to surprise the Frogs. But of course they didn’t. Well, the major, he said we would just walk up there around noon or so and do it. He didn’t seem to be worried about it at all, and so none of us were either.”
“That’s the attitude of a born leader,” Quin said. He had straightened, pushed the map to the side, and now leaned on the table, listening.
Grooper nodded. “By then we’d marched across Portugal to Badajoz, and we knew he was a decent chap. Listened to us, he did. And told us what he thought, and didn’t talk down.” He paused. “Mind you, he was an odd thinker.”
That was a kind way of putting it, to Olivia’s mind. “So you took the fort.”
“Easy as pie,” Grooper said, his chest swelling with pride. “See, the Frogs was all eating. And when they eat . . . they eat. They go three courses, four, five. All of them, even down to the lowest soldier. The major, he worked it out. He’d had a French tutor, see, and he knew what they were like. And he told us in a way so we could all understand it, too.”
Olivia smiled. She loved thinking of Rupert being greeted with respect rather than less-than-thinly-veiled contempt.
“We knocked out a few sentries right off, and then we just took the fort. And we didn’t kill many of them French soldiers either; we let them run straight from the lunch table to San Cristobal. The major, he doesn’t hold with killing, not unless you have to save your own life.”