It sounded, even to himself, too near a defense.
Her expression altered only slightly, but enough to let him know she had heard the same thing.
“I did not say that you did,” she replied.
“No.” He tightened his hold upon the glass in his hand, then loosened it again. “No, you did not.”
The truth of it made him more uneasy still.
He had not been one of the men who decided anything. He had not drafted reports, nor stood in rooms where reputations were weighed against truth and found more valuable. He had been too young, too ambitious, too ready to believe that those above him had to understand things better than he did.
Everyone involved understood. They had all spoken with the confidence of senior men accustomed to being obeyed, and Owen, fresh enough to command to mistake certainty for honor, had accepted what he was given.
Now, standing before Miss Finch, he began for the first time to feel the full powerlessness of that acceptance, because he saw the consequences it had.
He could remember only snippets of the affair, but he knew why it had required management. It was about an advance, ill-judged or unfortunate depending upon who was telling it, then confusion in the field and a retreat costlier than anyone had expected. Questions followed afterward, the sort of questions that, left alone, might have climbed uncomfortably high.
The official account had been composed with admirable neatness. So neat, in fact, that Owen had admired it at the time, not for its elegance, but for the way it seemed to restore order to chaos. Responsibility had been distributed carefully. Certain mistakes were softened. Certain names were preserved from closer examination.
And his own path, beginning there at the ragged edge of promise, had continued upward untroubled.
If the report had been different, if more blame had fallen where perhaps it ought to have done, would his own advancement have been slower? More contested? He did not know. The possibility had never occurred to him in quite that shape before. He had benefited, along with many other military men.
The knowledge sat badly.
More than that, he had never known that whatever had been done to preserve reputations in the army had spilled outward into private lives. Now, there was a family ruined, a woman ostracized and years of consequence extended far beyond the men who had signed their names and moved on.
That ignorance made him feel, all at once, both uncomfortable and absurdly naive.
Aurelia had not yet looked away. “You knew of the incident,” she said. “But not of my family?”
“No.” The word came quickly, and with more feeling than he intended. “No, I knew nothing of that.”
Some part of him needed her to believe that much.
He saw her take in the answer, weighing it.
“I knew there had been … difficulties afterward,” he said more carefully. “I knew that the military needed to make sense of what happened, and so, an official report was drafted.”
“So, you knew nothing of those who objected?” she asked again.
“No,” he admitted. “To be quite honest, I didn’t even know that there were those who objected. In the end, it all seemed so clean, and the matter settled.” He paused. “If I had known …”
He stopped there, because he did not know with any certainty what he would have done. Objected? To whom? In what way? As a junior officer then, without title, still making his way? The temptation to claim noble retrospective courage was strong and contemptible both.
“If you had known?” she prompted.
Owen met her gaze and chose honesty over comfort. “I do not know what I might have done. But I should at least have known it was wrong.”
There was silence for a moment after that. It seemed to him that Aurelia was trying to determine not only what he meant, but what sort of man he was behind his words.
“You said your father believed there had been a cover-up,” he pointed out. “Did he have reason beyond suspicion?”
Her face settled at once. There it was, the line he had reached too soon.
“My father had his reasons,” she said. “After my mother refused to support the official account, our house was searched. Papers were taken and others were destroyed. You may judge the rest for yourself.”
Owen heard the closure in the words and did not press immediately, though every instinct now urged him toward the matter. If her father had known something, if he had seen something in papers, letters, or accounts, then there might be more to the matter than Owen had ever allowed himself to consider.
