Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (Transformation of the Shelley Sisters 1)

‘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 and he bore his father no ill will for that. But the thought of someone taking a switch to that slim frame, that tender skin, sickened him. What sort of man beat a woman? A girl?

‘And they are all right now? They have married, left home?’

‘I do not know. I wrote, often, but I never heard from either of them. I expect Papa stopped the letters.’

‘But that is where you will go as soon as we land?’

‘I—ouch!’ Meg dropped the needle and sucked her thumb. ‘Yes. But I will not arrive on the vicarage doorstep, begging to be taken back.’ Her voice held a hard edge he had never heard before, not even when she had been angry with him. But when Ross looked closely at her face all he could see was concentration as she whipped a section of torn hem into place.

‘Why not hire a reliable man, a Bow Street Runner, perhaps, to go and make enquiries?’ Ross asked. ‘That will put your mind at rest without you having to undertake the journey.’

She folded the shirt and added it to the pile, shaking her head. ‘No. I want to go myself, at once.’

‘But your in-laws, surely they will help you?’ Ross found he was becoming positively outraged over the fact that Meg was on her own. Which was ridiculous. She was an independent adult woman and what she did was no affair of his.

‘I had eloped,’ she said simply, although her eyes were dark with emotions that seemed to go far beyond her words. ‘And they blamed me for leading James astray.’ Ross felt a stirring of puzzlement. It was a long time since he had been in England, but surely the fact that she had married would have squashed the little scandal of a vicar’s daughter eloping.

‘They made their position very clear when I wrote to tell them what had happened,’ she continued with a shrug. ‘I couldn’t even bring them a grandchild. Now, of course, I am quite beyond the pale with everyone, although I am not sure whether it was sharing a tent with Dr Ferguson or soiling my hands by tending the wounded that most scandalised the ladies of the regiment. No, I must make myself a new life.’

The day passed slowly. It was hard to accept inactivity, to have the comparative silence of the ship after the bustle of camp and, perhaps most of all, the absence of duties to keep him focused on the here and now, to give some purpose to life. And without something to keep him occupied all he had to think about was the alien English world and its inescapable responsibilities and memories that waited for him.

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Meg seemed to find plenty to keep herself busy, although he suspected their meagre combined wardrobes would not hold enough mending to occupy her for another day. She came and went, leaving him tactfully alone for half an hour at a time. He must get up tomorrow, whatever she said, and give her privacy. It must be hard, managing modestly behind that scrap of curtain. But she never once complained—not at the confined space, the gloom of the cabin, the insidious smell of the bilges. Or his dark mood.