‘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.
Chapter Four
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.
‘I suppose young men are interested in other things,’ Meg agreed. ‘Do you have a large family waiting for you?’
‘No one.’ He said it matter of factly and was unprepared for the sadness that transformed Meg’s face.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘There is no need for you to be. My mother died eighteen months after I joined the army. My younger brother six years later. My father four months ago.’ Said flatly like that it betrayed no embarrassing emotion at all.
‘I have two sisters.’ Meg sat down and began to shake out his shirts, checking each for tears or loose buttons. Ross contemplated telling her that she should not be valeting him, but if she was busy it kept that clear gaze off his face and he could watch her, which was curiously soothing. ‘I am the middle one. Celina, the younger, is sweet and biddable and very good. Arabella, the elder, is practical and kind and sensible.’
‘Like you.’ It was a surprise to see her blush.
‘I had to learn to be practical.’ Meg tugged at a button and then apparently decided it was secure. ‘I used to be the dreamer, the romantic one. I was always in scrapes, always in trouble with Papa.’As he watched she put down the shirt for a moment and spread her right hand, palm up, looking at it as if seeing something that was no longer there. She shivered and picked up the sewing again.
‘But you married your true love in the end? Your childhood sweetheart, no doubt.’ How charming. How very romantic.
‘Yes.’ Meg nodded, her head bent over her sewing roll, apparently not noticing the sneer in his voice. ‘I eloped. Bella helped me, which was brave of her.’ She apparently found the cotton she was seeking and began to thread a needle, squinting at the eye in concentration. ‘But I am sure Papa would never guess she would do anything so dreadful, so I do not think she would have suffered for it. I do hope not.’
‘Suffered for it? Your father was very severe?’
‘Oh, yes, although it was usually me who got the whippings. Bella was too sensible to annoy him and Lina too timid. One thing that convinced me to go was that I was sure life would be much saf…quieter for my sisters with me not there to infuriate Papa.’
Safer, was what she almost said. And the tyrant whipped her? A young girl? It was his right, of course, in law. A father was lord of his household. He could still recall the bite of the switch on the numerous occasions when his own transgressions had been found out. Boys were always being chastised