Page 12 of The Traitor
The neighbors had not sent word of Aunt Hyacinth’s death until Milly had no chance of attending the services or the wake, which was likely a mercy, but one Milly bitterly resented.
“Do you have need of my handkerchief, Miss Danforth?”
The baron posed his softly accented question as he clucked the horses into a relaxed trot. His manner suggested that a few blocks past Grosvenor Square, they might turn into the park, their outing no more than a lark.
“I have my own, thank you.” Her reply was ungracious, but that too—like every one of her disgruntlements—was a symptom of the anger that so poorly disguised grief.
They trotted along in silence, until his lordship turned the vehicle south on Park Lane.
“I would be lost if Freddy were to abandon me for the celestial realm.” His tone was contemplative, as if he were only now acknowledging the truth he’d admitted. “I would have nobody to scold me, nobody to hold me accountable for my numerous small lapses, nobody to look upon me as if I were a particularly exquisite arrangement of roses, when I am nothing but a man who scratches and swears and wears his muddy boots into the parlor on occasion.”
For the baron, this was a speech, and also a bit of a eulogy for a woman not yet dead.
“She is formidable, your aunt. My aunt was too, but in a much quieter way.”
They both had been, Hyacinth and Millicent. They’d protected Milly as long as they could, and made the world think Milly was the one looking after them.
“When Aunt Millicent died, Aunt Hyacinth began planning my escape into service. I would have been prey for my cousins without Aunt chiding and encouraging and plotting.”
Mostly chiding.
“You were named for your aunt?”
She was pleased he would remind her of this. “Yes. I have her red hair.”
“Auburn. I am certain your hair is auburn, in proper light. Tell me about your Aunt Hyacinth.” He was being kind, and the magnitude of Milly’s loss was such that all she could do was appreciate his compassion.
“I call her—Icalledher—Aunt Hy. Everybody did, and that was a shame. Hyacinth is a lovely name.”
Traffic was moving along, like it would not at the fashionable hour. The spring breeze brought the pungent scent of Tattersall’s. Life, as both aunts had said often, goes on.
“You do not want to talk about your loved one,” the baron said. “As if that somehow makes them more deceased. Soldiers do not reminisce about fallen comrades easily at first.”
She’d forgotten he’d served. Forgotten he would know a great deal about loss and about life going on.
“Aunt Mil loved laughter, Aunt Hy loved beauty. Ours was a happy household. Aunt Hy could hardly see toward the end—I felt like a traitor for leaving her—but she said she could still feel the beauty with her hands, still smell it with her nose, still taste it in a perfect cup of tea.”
“You did not feel like a traitor for leaving,” the baron said, slowing the team to let an enormous traveling coach lumber past. “You felt like an orphan, an angry orphan with no good choices and nobody whose guidance you could trust, because nobody had trod the path you faced. Your aunts had not been in service; they had not been married. They could suggest, but they could notknow.”
As the phaeton rolled along the park’s pretty green perimeter, the most fashionable addresses in the world on their left, Milly realized the baron was speaking from experience.
She would rather talk of his experiences than her loss—much rather. “You felt that way. You’re English, and you ended up in the French army. You had to have felt that way.”
He wrinkled his grand nose, the gesture Gallic, and Milly’s observation clearly unwelcome. She expected he’d absorb himself in managing his horses, though he drove with the instinctive ease of a born whip.
“I was a boy when the Peace of Amiens came about, and my mother was desperate to visit her relations in France. I spent the summer in Provence, at my grandparents’ château, and I had no concept that the Corsican and old George both were merely regrouping for another decade of war. When the truce ended, my father, of course, had to leave or face internment. Getting him out of the country was a difficult proposition. My mother would not leave me behind, but we could not safely travel with Papa. Very soon, we could not safely travel at all. Mother died that winter, without ever seeing her husband again. She was my first experience with the casualties of war, for I believe she died of a broken heart, not a simple ague.”
So he’d gone from being an English schoolboy, albeit a wellborn schoolboy, to a Frenchman’s grandson with inconvenient paternal antecedents, all in the course of a few bewildering months.
He steered the phaeton past Apsley House, that imposing edifice inhabited by no less personage than the Duke of Wellington.
“Tell me more about these aunts,” St. Clair said. He did not so much as glance at the duke’s handsome residence. “Did they tipple? Did they flirt with the curate? The baroness would lose all heart had she no flirts.”
What to say? That Milly did indeed feel like an orphan—more of an orphan than ever? That she was frightened to be so alone, more frightened than she’d been since her own parents died? He’d listen to those sentiments, and he would not judge her for them.
St. Clair viewed the world with a surprising sense of compassion, and yet, despite her own need for silence, despite the lump in her throat, Milly launched into a spate of chattering about Aunt Hy’s flowers and Aunt Mil’s shortbread.
To spare St. Clair from his own thoughts of an orphaned, angry, bewildered past, she talked.
