A Debutante In Disguise. Eleanor Webster

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      ‘I need to go to the country.’

      ‘Then go. You do not need my permission.’

      ‘I wanted to talk to you first. Provided I could catch you in a moment of sobriety.’

      He glared. ‘Fine. We will chat, but for goodness sake, wait outside while I make myself decent.’

      ‘Very well, I will see you in the breakfast room, but do not think you can lope off again.’

      With those words, his younger sister gave a decisive nod and, thankfully, left the room, the door shutting firmly behind her.

      He again flinched, glaring irritably at the closed door. Truthfully, he had been avoiding her. Her presence reminded him too much of the gaping holes within their family.

      As well, there was this peculiar, detached feeling. He knew her to be his sister and knew that he loved her, yet could not seem to find the emotion.

      He lay back on the bed, staring between half-closed eyes at a crack in the ceiling. Even the concept of rising felt exhausting.

      And his bloody head hurt.

      ‘My lord?’ Mason said, clearing his throat.

      Tony groaned.

      ‘She will be back.’

      He nodded, pulling himself upright. His sister had always been persistent. ‘Stubborn and obstinate as a mule,’ their brother had said.

      While George, her husband, had called her ‘steadfast’ and ‘resolute’.

      But she was his family. Even though he couldn’t find the emotion, he knew he loved her, or had loved her. He knew he had been best man at her wedding. He could see himself. He could see George. He could see Elsie.

      But everything felt distant. As though recalling something he had observed—a wedding that was pretty, charming, happy, but in no way closely connected to himself.

      Perhaps that was it. Everything felt distant. Both the wedding and that which had come next: the cannons, the corpses, the smell, the blood...

      And Elsie and George and Edgar and his father, the happy and the sad, all seemed intertwined, so that he wanted only to shove them from his mind and lie within the dark, oblivion of this room.

      * * *

      Shaved and dressed, Tony exited his bedchamber. He still had a headache. As always, movement hurt. It was not excruciating any more, but rather a raw tautening, as his skin and muscles moved where the bullet had lodged within his ribcage.

      He was already looking forward to his next drink.

      Elsie glanced up as he entered the drawing room. As always, she wore the latest fashion. Of course, she was in deep mourning but even this suited her. George, Edgar, their father. Gone.

      He hated black.

      Sitting opposite, he stretched his feet towards the hearth, wincing slightly with the movement. ‘So why are you going to the country?’ he asked without preamble. ‘It seems a departure from your usual habits.’

      Elsie had a low tolerance for boredom. In their youth, he’d tended to egg her on while Edgar, always responsible, had bailed her out of numerous scrapes until she married George, who had then assumed the role.

      Until Waterloo.

      ‘I have been feeling unwell.’

      He glanced up sharply. She looked pale, he realised, although her appetite must be fine. She had gained weight. ‘Too many late nights, I suppose.’ While grief and injury had made him a hermit, she had become a social butterfly.

      ‘You are one to talk—well, at least about the late nights. No, it is not that.’ Elsie paused, glancing downwards, her fair ringlets falling across her forehead. She rubbed the black silk of her dress between her fingers. ‘You see, I am having a child.’

      He heard the words. They hung in the space between them, almost visible within the room. He felt nothing. He knew he should feel something: joy, worry, sorrow that George would never see his child...

      ‘Right,’ he said.

      Elsie frowned, scrunching up her face almost as she done when younger. ‘I am announcing that you may soon have a nephew, that George, who was your best friend, might have sired an heir prior to his death and all you can say is “right”?’

      ‘I am happy for you.’

      It was not entirely a lie. It was not that he was unhappy. Rather he was nothing. He felt an odd remoteness as though everything was miles from him—distant and inconsequential.

      And then it happened. One moment he sat within the pleasant decor of the sunny salon opposite his sister and, within the next second, the salon had somehow turned into a mire of muck, churned and muddy from cannon balls.

      He could even smell the war, a mix of blood, smoke, sweat, manure and urine.

      His body felt different. His feet were heavy and his boots sank deep into the mire with a sickly sucking squelch. All around he heard the groans of dying men, their whispered prayers and anguished calls.

      ‘Tony?’

      His sister’s tentative voice came as from a great distance.

      ‘Tony, you’re white as a ghost. Should I get Mason? Are you in pain?’

      ‘No,’ he ground out. His hand tightened over the chair arm, the pain intensifying about his ribs. ‘Do—not—I—do—not—need help.’ He pushed the words out.

      And then that other landscape disappeared, as quickly as it had come, and he was back in the neatly appointed room with its pleasant floral curtaining and sunshine-yellow walls.

      ‘Sit down, Elsie,’ he said as she stood, reaching for the bell pull. ‘No need to raise the alarm. I am fine.’

      ‘You’re certain? You still look pale.’ She glanced at him and then away. People tended to do that as though embarrassed to see the scar snaking down his cheek to his collar.

      ‘I am fine. Happy to hear your news and to know I will be an uncle.’ He pulled out the trite words, relaxing as her worry eased and she sat back in the chair.

      ‘Oh, Tony, I didn’t even realise, at first. It was my maid who suspected. I am six months along and usually a person would know before that, but I didn’t. When I felt ill, I thought it was the grief. And now I am so very happy and sad all at once. It was so—so terrible losing George, but having his child—that will make it easier. It will make life worth living again.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, again feeling inadequate.

      He should feel something. George had been his closest friend. He’d watched the man die. And held him as he did.

      ‘And Father. This would have been his first grandchild. He would have СКАЧАТЬ