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

‘Will you not you sit down, Meg?’ He was going to have to speak of Giles, to explain. Lay bare the raw guilt that haunted him, haunted this house.

‘No. Thank you.’ She paced away from him, then back. There was anxiety in her eyes; he could almost feel her efforts not to judge, to hear his side of the story. Most people, looking at him, would not have hesitated to believe the worst. ‘What did she mean?’

‘That I am responsible for my brother’s death. I shot him.’

He waited, braced for the revulsion to show in her voice, on her face, but she just stared at him, distressed and questioning.

‘But he died six or so years after you joined the army, you said. Surely you were in the Peninsula then?’

‘I shot him when we were boys. The bullet entered Giles’s chest and could not be removed. It left him weak, prone to every disease and infection that were around. Eventually it killed him.’

‘Oh. Oh, no.’ Meg did sit down then, looking at him with painful earnestness. Her hands were shaking and she clasped them tightly together. ‘Did you mean to shoot him?’

Chapter Eight

‘Did I intend to shoot my brother? No,’ Ross said. ‘It was my own damn carelessness, my lack of responsibility for him, but it was an accident. It was hushed up—two boys hunting, one of those things.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘All I wanted to do was to join the army, to shoot. I was good at one thing only, but in my father’s eye the ability to shoot well was simply one of the attributes of a gentleman, not a way of earning your living. I told you I had two fine tutors: the head keeper and a wicked old poacher. By the age of fourteen I could hit anything, still or moving. Giles was the model son, the obedient, intelligent, hardworking, sweet-tempered son. Unfortunately I was the elder, the heir. Obedience could not be beaten into me, although God knows, my father and tutors tried, but my father could, and did, refuse to let me join the army when I was seventeen as I wanted.

‘All he wanted, of course, was Giles to be the heir.’

‘But you loved your brother,’ Meg said. ‘I can hear it when you say his name. You weren’t jealous or resentful of him, were you?’

‘No. You could only love Giles.’ He made himself look then, look up to where he knew it would be, hanging opposite his father’s desk. He had loved his brother and he hadn’t even been able to take care of him when he was doing the one thing he was good at. ‘See for yourself.’

Meg went to stand in front of the portrait, hands behind her back, like a child in a picture gallery. Ross found himself looking at her, not at his brother’s face, watching the graceful line of neck and shoulder, the weight of hair at her nape, the inquisitive tilt of her head.

‘What an extraordinarily good-looking young man,’ she said at last. ‘He has kind eyes. And, of course, people are inclined to equate beauty with goodness.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ross agreed without resentment, looking up at last. His mother’s pointed chin and high cheek-bones, her green eyes and sensitive mouth allied to his father’s height and jet black hair had resulted in a youth who looked, so the impressionable ladies of the district used to say, like a prince from a fairy tale. And the delicacy of his health left him pale, slender, even more beautiful. ‘He had our mother’s looks. I, as you can see, have my father’s. Just for once, the looks did not lie. He was everything he seems to be.’ And I killed him because I was headstrong and heedless and always had to score a point against authority. Because I would not do my duty. Because I did not love him enough to deny him.

Meg turned and studied Lord Brandon’s image. ‘Black eyes, slanted brows, a stubborn jaw and a mouth that does not know how to say “I Yield”,’ she observed. ‘You must have made a handsome pair, you and your brother.’

‘Raven and dove.’ The comparison had been made often enough. Devil and angel.

‘What happened?’

‘I was almost seventeen, Giles was two years younger. One day when I cut lessons with our tutor to go rook shooting he followed me, wanted to come too, hung on my sleeve, teased me to let him come. For an adventure. I said yes, just that once. I was the elder, I should have been responsible. I should have said no, looked after him.’ But of course, the opportunity to kick over the traces, to be defiant, was far more alluring than any thought of what his duty to his young brother might be.

‘I was used to stalking, used to the woods. He was not. I had my gun raised, my finger on the trigger and he tripped on some brambles, crashed into me. The gun got jammed between us and went off.’

‘You must have been terrified.’ Meg watched him with those wide, candid blue-grey eyes that seemed to see so deep inside him. ‘But you got him back, of course. And he would tell everyone it was an accident.’

‘Of course.’ A good officer gets his men back. But he doesn’t shoot them himself in the first place. All that blood. And Giles, white and terrified and hurting, saying over and over, accident, accident. Blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, the panic. What should I do? Move him? Leave him?

‘Never, since that day, have I felt so helpless, so useless. I got Giles back somehow, carried him for half a mile in my arms, knowing I was hurting him, seeing the bleeding I could not stop, hearing the breath sobbing in his lungs. But Giles never protested, never cried out, because he trusted me.’ And that was perhaps the worst pain of all.

‘So you ran away to join the army.’ He could not tell whether there was condemnation or understanding in Meg’s voice, only that she was struggling to keep it steady.

‘I left as soon as I knew he was not going to die. It was only later, from my godfather’s letters, that I realised how sick it had left him. And then it did kill him. I killed him.’

‘No!’ she protested. ‘No, it was an accident. How could you blame yourself?’ He just looked at her and saw the understanding dawn. ‘You felt the responsibility, that you had failed him. Yes, I can see if I had hurt Lina so badly accidentally I would feel that too, however irrational it was.’ She hesitated. ‘The accident did not put you off shooting?’

‘No.’ Meg’s lack of condemnation, her understanding, shook him. She seemed to think he was not to blame. That was comforting—if he allowed himself to believe it. ‘I think now, looking back, that I wanted to do something useful with the skill. I had shot my brother—I could kill my country’s enemies.’ As many as possible, as coldly and as efficiently as possible. Even if it made him a machine for killing he had to make that mistake right somehow. ‘And I had failed in my duty to him—that made me want to be a better officer.’

‘And now it is time to stop killing and to begin growing things,’ Meg said so softly he was not sure he had heard her correctly. ‘Thank you for telling me.’