A Lady by Midnight (Spindle Cove #3)(61)
Author: Tessa Dare

He hesitated. “Patch.”

“Oh, Samuel.” She pressed a hand to her cheek and shook her head. “I was so thoughtless. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged. “Don’t be. Badger suits him.”

She found the row of numbers inside his left forearm. “And this?”

“Ah. Those mark the next stop in a poacher’s career. Prison.”

“Prison? Oh, no. How old were you then?”

“Fifteen. I think.”

She rubbed the tattoo. “Was this some sort of identification number they gave to all the prisoners?”

He shook his head. “I did it myself, the first month. It’s the date I was due to be released. Didn’t want to risk it being forgotten.”

“Forgotten by the gaolers?”

“Forgotten by me.”

Neither had he been willing to prolong his sentence by accepting any comforts in prison. Bedding, meat rations, the keys to the irons—all of it came at a price, and the gaolers tallied it in ledgers. Sixpence a week for this, a shilling for that. By the time a man’s sentence was served, he might have accrued debt in the tens of pounds—and he wouldn’t be released until he came up with the funds to pay it. Rather than face that madness, he had refused any extra food or blankets.

“How long were you imprisoned?” she asked.

“I was sentenced to seven years. But in the end, I only served four.”

The word “only” contained all sorts of lies. Only four years of sleeping on straw so old it had turned to dust, and so thick with vermin that the dust seemed alive. Only four years of surviving on a penny’s worth of bread a day. Only four years of shivering in irons that never were adjusted, even though he grew bigger and taller every month.

Yes, “only” four years of violence, hunger, ugliness, and animal treatment that haunted him to this day.

“The courts took mercy on you?” she asked.

“Mercy? Hardly. England needed soldiers more than she needed prisoners. They released me on the condition that I enlist.”

“So this . . .” She touched the medallion on the right side of his chest. “Is this the symbol of your regiment?”

“Partly.” His chest lifted in a humorless chuckle. “Don’t go fishing for deep meaning in that one. Just too much rum in a Portuguese tavern one night, soon after we shipped to the Peninsula.”

Her hand slipped down his rib cage and to the left, passing right over his heart. He winced at the ripples of pure pleasure.

“And this . . . ?” she asked. “B.C. Who was she? Did you meet her in the same tavern? Was she exotic and big-breasted and terribly beautiful? Did you . . . care for her?”

He stared at her, struggling like the devil not to laugh.

“I hope she was a good person, for your sake. But however well she treated you, I must admit that I’ve formed an irrational, intense dislike of her already. In my mind, I’ve named her Bathsheba Cabbagewort.”

Now he lost the struggle. He bent his head and laughed, long and low.

“Well, there’s something good come out of it,” she said, eyes misty. “I’ve been growing quite desperate to hear you laugh. And it’s just as I suspected.” She touched his cheek. “You do have a dimple, just here. Tell me Bathsheba never saw that.”

He put his hand over hers and drew it downward. He traced the letters on his side with her fingertip.

“B.C.,” he said. “Not a woman. It stands for ‘Bad Character.’ It’s what they mark on soldiers who are drummed out of their corps for criminal offenses.”

“Criminal offenses? What did you do?”

“What didn’t I do would be the better question. Looting, thieving, fighting, shirking duty, insubordination. Everything short of rape, murder, and desertion—and I was primed to attempt the last. So far as I was concerned, His Majesty’s government had beaten and starved everything human from me already. Then they’d sent me to die on the battlefield. Nothing mattered to me anymore, Katie. I had no loyalty, no honor, no morality. I was truly more beast than man.”

“But you changed, obviously. And you did stay in the army, or you never would have come to Spindle Cove.”

He nodded. “After my drumming out, I was sent to Lord Rycliff. He was Lieutenant Colonel Bramwell then. It was his to say what to do with me—prison, death, worse. But he took one look at me and said he’d be a fool to send away any man with my fitness and strength. So he kept me on, made me his personal batman. His valet, in essence.”

“That was very good of him.”

“You can’t know. It was the first time in years that someone had entrusted me with anything. Rycliff wasn’t much older than me, but he was comfortable with command. And he was nothing like my sergeants. He cared about the men in his regiment. He took pride in our mission. I worked so close to him, I guess some of that rubbed off on me. I started to see that there was honor to be found in doing a task well, no matter how small. Starching collars, mending seams, replacing buttons. But mostly the boots.”

“The boots?”

He nodded. “Worth more than my life’s wages, his boots were. Worth more than my life itself, I’d guess. This was the infantry. Every day, all day—we marched, dug, fought. Come nightfall his boots would be covered in dust, muck, blood, worse. I slaved for hours to make them shine again. So he’d look at them in the morning and know there was something worth saving beneath it all. And when I’d finished with his boots, I still didn’t sleep—not until I’d done the same with mine.

“I wasn’t loyal to the army or England so much as I was loyal to him—or maybe even just to those boots. When he took a bullet to the knee—I couldn’t let him lose that leg, you know. No leg, no boot. Would have been giving up half my purpose in life.” He rubbed his face and stared into the fire. “He’s offered to grant me a commission now.”

“Lord Rycliff has?”

He nodded.

“What an honor, Samuel. Don’t you want it?”

He shook his head. “I’m not made for that. I don’t have Rycliff’s ease with military politics. The open country is where I was best suited, even as a youth. It’s where I belong now. Out in the wilderness, with the creatures that howl and claw and snarl. No social graces necessary.”

There. He’d laid it all out before her. His checkered past, his history of crime and violence. All the reasons he needed to leave England and stay far away from her.