For Your Arms Only by Linden, Caroline (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

learned about Papa should surprise her. He had been more absent than home in her life; until he’d left the army three years ago, he hadn’t spent more than a few consecutive weeks at home with them since Cressida was a small child. Most of her perception of him had been born of her grandmother’s stories, and Granny thought Papa the cleverest, noblest, most amiable man on earth. On furlough Papa was jovial and kind, always laughing and full of ideas, with sweets in his pockets for his little girls and a gift for his mother. Cressida had adored her father as a princely figure who whirled through her life from time to time, but she could hardly say she knew him.

The last few years had shaded her adoration somewhat, or else she had seen him with new eyes once she was grown. She still saw Papa’s charm, but also his quick temper and extravagance. He was bluff and brash, and couldn’t seem to understand why Callie was quiet and reserved. Perhaps they were just as strange to him as he was to them, she thought. It was easy to retain the affections of two little girls, especially with Granny singing his praises every night he was gone, but two grown women were apt to be more critical and difficult to please. Callie had survived a bitter marriage and come home quieter than ever, and Cressida had grown into the practical head of the household as Granny’s mind began to slip. Papa came home as charming and energetic as ever, but they were not the same, not waiting with clasped hands and bated breath for him to swagger down the lane to their tiny house with his pack on one shoulder. Just as Papa was not used to being at home, they were not used to having him home.

Somewhere in the city a bell tolled the hour. The shadows in the street below had slanted until everything was tinged with gray, although the sky was still bright. It was near dinnertime. The major had engaged a private parlor, and would be waiting for her.

Cressida washed her face and hands. There was another man she couldn’t make out, although at least in this instance she had the excuse of not knowing him for long. By some accounts he was a traitor and a liar, a man who went missing for five years and then just returned without a word of explanation. Gossip in Marston held that he must have been engaged in illegal activity during that time, with everything from piracy to swindling to murder mentioned, and that he was being quiet to avoid being sent to the gallows for it. There was certainly something dark about him, but Cressida didn’t think that it was dangerous. She couldn’t forget how he had stood his ground at the muzzle of a pistol, nor how he returned the next day and said not a word of confrontation or reproof. The major, she thought, was very sure of himself and had clearly mastered his emotions. It made his actions today all the more surprising—had he simply lost patience with Mr. Prenner’s rude manner, or was it calculated? From the calm way he went about searching the office, even telling her to keep talking to avoid raising the clerk’s suspicion, she suspected it had been entirely calculated. And she could only imagine what he might have done had she not been there.

Cressida felt very conscious of him when she went down to the private parlor. A hearty dinner was laid on the table, and the innkeeper smiled and bowed to her as he herded the serving maid out of the room ahead of him. The door closed, leaving her alone with him. She pressed her palms to her skirt and cleared her throat. Out of nowhere she remembered that he had asked her to call him Alec, but she had never done so yet.

He sat on a bench beside the fireplace, a stack of papers on the floor at his feet. He was frowning at one in his hands. “I believe I’ve found the lithographs,” he said without looking up. “They are signed ‘GT,’ at any rate, and were published not long after the payments.”

“How on earth did you locate them?” She crossed the room to take the print he held out.

“I asked about,” he said vaguely, sliding over to make room for her. The bench was short, and even though she sat primly on the end, his knee still brushed hers. He had washed; she could smell his soap and see his close-cropped hair glistening damply. She bent her head over the print studiously and told herself not to think of it, or him, or how intoxicating this strange intimacy was.

“Good heavens,” was all she could say. “Are they all like this?”

“You needn’t look,” he said, reaching for the print.

“Are they?” She clung to it, feeling slightly nauseous. She had seen outrageous prints before, but surely it was dangerous to draw such things—and she was uneasily certain her father had drawn this image. The King was portrayed as a fat sow, and the piglets suckling at his teats had the faces of Cabinet ministers. A gaunt John Bull figure slopped the pig with a bucket of coins. For the first time since her father had gone missing, Cressida was seriously frightened. Could Papa go to prison for this?

“I doubt it,” he said, and she realized she had blurted out her last question. “It’s no worse than what some are selling, although he’d be wise not to boast of it in certain parts of town.”

“The rest are just as bad, aren’t they?” She let him take the sheet from her lax fingers. “What was Papa thinking?”

“Money.” He leaned down to collect all the prints from the floor. She caught sight of another one with the King, again corpulent and drunken-looking, surrounded by nearly naked, equally fat women, dancing and vomiting on a carpet woven of