Page 64 of The Traitor
Milly could have managed a blink in the time it took the commander of Castle St. Clair to realign his understanding of her intentions.
“I will meet you on the back terrace in twenty minutes, madam.”
Milly made in it fifteen, and the fellow she found pacing before the irises was every bit as handsome as his earlier incarnation, but more relaxed, moreathome.
“Lead on, Sebastian, and tell me about your parents.”
He took her hand, and she hadn’t even had to ask. “You’re to interrogate me?”
“I’m to be your wife and the mother of your children.” How satisfying, to say that in the King’s English. Milly wished she could write it as easily, but someday—married to Sebastian—she might.
“When I think of my mother, I think of her in those last months in France. She was not happy, she was not well.”
Milly closed her grip on his fingers and tugged him back, slowed him down as he marched them off past a bed of roses not yet blooming. “Tell me of a happier time with her, then. A time when you realized your mama was pretty.”
He paused before one lone, precocious rosebud. “She was always pretty.”
“Don’t snatch it away. Leave it to bloom and show the way for the others. When was your mother happy?”
His stride lost its parade-march quality, and he became a man wandering through a garden on a late-spring afternoon.
“She was overjoyed to go back to France, radiant to at last see her parents, her cousins, her old nurse. I was only a boy, but I recall her standing against the rail on the packet we took to Calais, her gaze fixed on the shoreline of France as if she beheld the approach of heaven. My father stood beside me, beholding her with the same expression she wore watching the shoreline of her homeland.”
“They loved each other.”
Milly was careful to survey the garden as she drew this conclusion. Talk of love made Sebastian go quiet. One had to deal with the topic casually, with every appearance of unconcern. She attributed this to a dearth of such expressions of regard in his life, rather than to a lack of receptivity on his part.
“They loved each other passionately. A boy can’t know that, but looking back, I can only imagine what my father suffered, to part from her when she fell ill. Her last thoughts, her last words were of her love for him. I never got to tell him that.”
Milly waited while Sebastian unlatched a gate in the garden wall, the pause giving her a moment to check an anger directed at two people who’d been more absorbed with each other than with their only child.
“I will make you a promise, Sebastian,” she said as she took him firmly by the hand. “If I lie dying at some point, while our young son endures that trial in a strange land without the comfort of your presence, I will use my last breaths to assure him that he’s a wonderful boy. I will tell him how proud I am of him, and how much I have loved being his mama.”
She would write those sentiments down, too, somehow. A boy needed them, and a mother ought to know that.
Sebastian’s arm fell across her shoulders. “My baroness is fierce.”
“Your wife is fierce.” So was his friend, though Milly would not force that sentiment on him. “Did you always grow hops in this field?”
For a man who’d been away from England for more than a decade, he was well-informed regarding his acres. This field was suited to pasture, being good soil, but too rocky to plow easily. That one had always been the tenant’s common potato field, being thin-soiled even after repeated marling.
He vaulted the stiles one-handed, a display of casual athleticism common to any boy raised in the country, then turned and offered Milly his hand with gallantry country boys never learned.
With each field, each stile and stream, Milly became more and more convinced that all the trials and losses visited upon her earlier in life had been wiped away by the great gift of the person of her husband.
Though the loss of him… She snipped that thought off, because today was her wedding day, and anything or anybody seeking to take Sebastian from her would have to overcome her defense of him first.
Sebastian led her down a grassy lane running between parallel avenues of oaks, until they reached an old overshot grist mill, with lavender, lilacs, and honeysuckle growing in a riot around its whitewashed walls.
Along the stream, blankets and a basket sat in the shade of the oaks.
“This is where you came to dream.”
“I called it planning my life. I intended to be the best Baron St. Clair ever seen. I would write famous speeches, I would advise the king himself, and impress the entire world with my swordsmanship.”
He spoke with affection for that boy. Reluctant affection, but affection.
“I would have been happy to write my lessons,” Milly said, leading him toward the blankets. “Now I am happy to share some victuals with my husband.”
