Louise Allen - Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress

‘Yes,’ he said, amiably enough as far as one could tell through half an inch of panelling.

‘Where did you get those trousers?’ She walked past him without a glance to open her medical bag. She would not give him the satisfaction of looking at him. ‘From Johnny, I suppose.’

‘Yes. They are practical,’ Ross said indifferently. ‘But it hardly matters.’

The contents of the medical bag blurred out of focus. Four words, yet they told her so much. His indifference was not about trousers, or her presence or their cramped accommodation. Anyone else might read merely annoyance at her interference or weariness after a bad night in the way he said those few words. But they betrayed something else, something that explained his dark mood and unsmiling face.

She had heard that tone before in the voices of men who were exhausted from battle and pain, men who would not have taken action to end their own lives but who were beyond minding if someone else did. It was the voice of a man who hardly cared whether he lived or died and it was all of a piece with the way he had neglected his leg, the darkness in his gaze. But it was not battle fatigue that had brought him to this, nor the pain of his leg. Something deeper had wounded him.

She spread a towel on the trunk and laid out what she needed, filled a bowl with water and set it by the bed, her hands steady, her thoughts reeling. It was not just his leg that needed saving, it seemed. If helping drag him from the river yesterday was to have any value, then she had to hope he could find something to live for as well.

‘It has not bled.’ She lifted back the sheet above the bandage, laid her hand on the bare skin just at the edge of the linen bindings and felt his flesh contract at the touch. ‘It is not inflamed, or over-hot.’ Ross made no reply as she undid the knots and unwrapped the bandage, finally lifting away the pad directly over the wound.

‘That looks better,’ she said, bending her head to sniff discreetly, hoping he did not realise what she was doing. ‘Look now, it is less swollen. It is important to keep it clean and to exercise very gently. Apparently the blood must continue to flow in the muscles all around in order to help it heal.’

‘No sign of mortification, then?’ Ross asked, as casually as if he was enquiring what was for dinner, not establishing whether she was going to deliver a death sentence or, at the very least, tell him his leg would have to come off.

‘No.’ Meg sprinkled basilicum powder over the wound, laid on a fresh pad and began to bandage it again. ‘I will leave this for a couple of days now and tomorrow you may begin to walk on it again.’ He made no comment so she risked a little more. ‘I suppose we will be at sea three or four days. By the time we dock it should be much more comfortable, although you should not ride even then.’

‘No doubt I would have hired a post chaise in any case,’ Ross observed, as though he had given no thought at all to the practicalities of his arrival in England.

As if he expects there to be no future. The thought made her shiver. For herself, she had everything planned out: a cheap but decent lodging in Falmouth for a night or two while she recovered from the journey and accustomed herself to England. And then she was going straight to Martinsdene and Bella and Lina. But her imagination would not take her beyond that, beyond that first embrace, the tears. They had to be all right, she told herself as she had every time she had thought of them, day in and day out. The silence was because Papa destroyed her letters, that was all.

Ross Brandon, it seemed, had looked no further than getting on to this ship. And a ship was the perfect mode of transport for a man who did not want to make decisions. You got on it and it took you where it was going—no opportunities to change your mind, vary your route or interfere with its direction until you arrived in port.

‘Is it a long journey to your home from Falmouth?’ She tied the final knots and pulled back the sheet.

‘A long way home?’ Ross turned his heavy gaze on her as though she had asked a deeply philosophical question that he must ponder with care. ‘Thirteen years,’ he said at last.

Meg was staring at him as though he had said something strange. ‘Thirteen years,’ she repeated eventually. ‘But how long by road?’

Ross shrugged. He was not going to explain his choice of words. Until they had left his lips he had not realised what he was going to say. ‘Not far, although the roads are narrow.’ It was not miles that separated him from the place where he had been born, it was guilt and loss and the man he had become because of that.

‘And where is your home?’ Meg persisted. She was packing away her bag again, apparently engrossed in the task. But the question had not been casual.

‘I am going to a village some distance outside Falmouth, on the Roseland Peninsula.’ It was easier to answer her than to evade her questions. Social conversation seemed difficult, as though he were speaking in a foreign language that he had not quite mastered the grammar for. And yet he had never been an unsocial man, not until the last few months when the reality of his future had begun to close in around him as a duty as heavy as chains. A bullet in the leg had removed any last lingering illusion of choice that he could stay with his beloved Rifles. His fate was plain: go back to where he had been bitterly unhappy and take over the reins from a father he disliked while surrounded by the ghosts that would never leave him.

‘How lovely that sounds.’ Meg straightened up and scanned the cabin, apparently looking for trifling signs of disorder as she folded his new trousers, put away the towel and twitched the corner curtain into place. ‘I am looking forward to arriving in Falmouth. I have always wanted to see the West Country and the coast, ever since I found a ridiculous novel about pirates and smugglers in the charity box.’ She smiled, apparently amused at the memory of her youthful self. ‘I read it secretly at night, straining my eyes and filling my head with tales of adventure and secret coves.’

‘I was seventeen when I left,’ Ross said. ‘Hardly an age when the beauties of the countryside are of much interest. But I did explore caves and climb cliffs and learn to swim in the sea.

‘But escape and the army were all that had truly interested me then. I knew I could shoot better than anyone for miles around despite my age. I’d haunted the footsteps of my father’s head keeper Tregarne by day, and I sneaked out to spend nights with Billy Gillan, a poacher.’ He closed his eyes, recalling the thrill; it had not all been unhappiness. ‘I could bring down a pheasant or a pigeon and I could stalk game unseen and evade Tregarne’s men as easily as the crafty old rogue who taught me.’

‘It will be good to return to the peace of the countryside, then, to be away from war and noise and killing.’

‘No.’ The thought of the quiet, the lack of the purpose he understood, appalled him. ‘The Rifle Brigade was what I dreamed of, a chance to use and hone my skill. The countryside taught me, that is all.’ The thought of the silence and the memories made him shudder. Strange that he had never anticipated that, far from becoming hardened to death as he had expected, it would come to haunt him. Other young men started out shaken by their first experience of battle or of killing the enemy by sniping from cover. Gradually they became used to it, indifferent. But for him it seemed as though it was the other way around and the horror had grown, slowly, insidiously until he felt as though Death himself walked constantly at his shoulder and sighted along the barrel of his rifle whenever he took aim. But then he had left a legacy of death behind him in England.