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

the garden, across the grass, and on and on they walked. Cressida didn’t know what he intended, but she realized that it didn’t matter; she trusted him. And she would be happy to walk with him like this all day.

“I never missed Penford much while I was away,” he said suddenly. “I strained toward adventure, and did my best to find it at every opportunity. I was the terror of Marston, along with Will Lacey, as anyone will tell you. When I was seventeen my father was only too happy to purchase a commission in the army for me and pack me off to all the adventure one could have fighting Bonaparte, and I was only too happy to go. I packed my trunk and didn’t look back.”

He came to a stop on a slight rise overlooking sloping fields, with the river sparkling in the distance like a fine silver thread. The house was behind them, nestled in the verdant gardens. It was warm and bright and beautiful, and again Cressida felt gripped by the sense that she would rather be here than anywhere. How could he leave without looking back, without growing sick for home at some point, when this was home? But Alec’s eyes seemed to be focused somewhere else entirely as he narrowed his eyes against the sunshine.

“I never thought Penford would be mine, or that I would have such a duty to it. If I had suspected…” He paused, and spoke more slowly, choosing each word with care. “If I had suspected, I might have acted differently. Or perhaps not.

“A battle is unimaginable. No one who hasn’t survived one can truly understand the confusion, the frantic efforts to control men and horses and guns and get them into anything resembling what the commanding officers ordered, the blind panic that drives men to abandon their positions and run when the tide of battle changes. It is terrifying and yet, at the same time, exhilarating. One’s blood runs hot and fast, one’s mind works at a feverish pace. At moments you feel capable of inhuman feats, and perhaps you are. There are long stretches of waiting, or forming up, or trying to maneuver into position, and then all hell breaks loose and you have less than a second to react, or be killed.”

He fell silent again. Cressida gazed out at the gentle swells of peaceful green grass and tried to picture them swarming with men, bloody and wounded and charging forward with murder in their eyes. Papa had never said much about actual battles, and the dispatches printed in the newspapers always painted such a glorious picture of gallant officers leading their men into the fray, of steadfast British infantry standing firm under withering enemy fire. She knew men died in war, or came back mangled and scarred, but she had really only known Tom and Papa, who both returned home whole and healthy. And Alec, whispered a little voice in her head, reminding her again of the scars that crossed his back and chest. You know him…

“What comes after the battle, though, is worse—far worse.” His voice had grown soft and hollow. “Everything is chaos, as regiments are scattered far and wide, or perhaps so decimated they can never be found. Men you loved as brothers are gone, blown to pieces or shot up badly enough the surgeons must cut apart what’s left. The waste of life, both human and animal, is astounding, and yet one’s mind dulls to it. After a while you can look over a battlefield rotting in the sun and simply not feel much of anything. Relief, perhaps, that you are one of the survivors, or regret that you lost good men, or failed to hold your position, or failed to completely crush the enemy. But there is always another battle to come; there will always be war, and death, and treachery.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she whispered. She knew before he said it what he was going to tell her next.

His eyes drifted shut. “I know rumor holds I left Waterloo for piracy in the West Indies, or fled to America in disgrace with a pile of French gold. The truth…The truth…”

After a long moment of silence, she said, “The truth is that you came home five years later to help a complete stranger, even after she pointed a pistol at you and questioned your intentions. You asked uncomfortable questions that needed to be asked, and told uncomfortable truths.” She glanced sideways at him from under her eyelashes. “Those are not the actions of a coward—nor, I think, of a scoundrel.”

“You had—have—no reason to trust me,” he replied. “And indeed you did not, initially.”

Cressida thought about that a moment. “No,” she said slowly. “I had no reason to trust you. But I do, all the same.” She paused. “I suppose it wouldn’t be trust if it had to be proved, would it?”

Alec filled his lungs, the fresh air almost painfully sharp in his chest. There was that. How odd that she alone wouldn’t jump at the chance to know the truth when he knew everyone else in Marston would have. “The truth is that I became a spy,” he said before he could reconsider. “For the Home Office. I posed as servants and tradesmen to spy on rabble who muttered discontent with the government. It was the only chance I could see to restore my good name, eventually. And it failed. I never meant to come home without my honor, but here I am, with a history as clouded and obscure as the day I woke up to discover I was accused of treason. I would rather have remained dead, for all intents and purposes, than come back now, like this, and yet…” He made himself breathe. Carefully he straightened his fingers, which had curled into fists as the familiar helpless fury stole through him again. It had been months, even years, since that feeling had gotten the better of him.

Her