He ate.
“Tell me about your time in the army,” Violet said after a moment. “How long did you serve?”
He set down his fork. “Three years. Most of it in the peninsula, Spain and Portugal. I was a second son with no prospects and no taste for the church. My father purchased a commission.”
“Did you see battle?”
“Enough of it. I was not a distinguished officer. I was competent, which in the army counts for more than distinction. I kept my men alive and did not lose any engagement I could have won, and I came back with all my fingers and a temper that had not improved.”
She smiled, showing her teeth. His heart lurched at the vision of it.
“How did you feel after coming home? I have heard about soldiers returning as different men.”
He considered this. “It made everything here seem very slow, and very loud, and very concerned with things that did not matter. I missed the clarity. A soldier knows what is expected of him. A duke is expected to know without being told, and I have never been good at that.”
She smiled, the quieter kind. “No. You are not.”
“Careful, Wife.” He felt the corners of his lips lift. And he found himself not minding it.
“You invited me to breakfast. You must accept the consequences.” She turned her cup. “Tell me something that has nothing to do with grief.”
Henry sat back in his seat with his teacup. “There was a horse.”
“A horse.”
“In Salamanca. I had been riding the same bad-tempered mare for six months. She threw me into a ditch outside the city, and while I was lying in the mud, a bay gelding walked over and looked down at me with an expression of profound personal disappointment.”
Her eyes crinkled in the corners. “What did you do?”
“I got out of the ditch. Took him back to camp. Fed him until his ribs stopped showing. He carried me the rest of the war. He despised every other officer on sight.”
“What was his name?”
“Abbot. He retired to Iredell Park and lived to eight and twenty. He is buried under an elm near the south lodge with a stone that says his name and nothing else. He would not have wanted a fuss.”
She was laughing. Not the bright, public laugh she had given Edmund. This was quieter, into her cup, belonging to only two of them. He wanted to keep that sound and hear it again tomorrow and the morning after that.
“Your sisters,” he said. “What are they like?”
“Impossible. Poppy talked from the moment she could form words and has not drawn breath since. Primrose was silent until she discovered books, and then she became the loud one about books specifically. The twins were born holding hands, according to my mother, and have not willingly separated since.”
“And you?”
“I was the responsible one. Which is to say I was the one who was not permitted to be anything else.”
Henry looked at her across the table and saw her clearly. Not the duchess or the negotiator or the herbalist, but the eldest daughter who had been carrying a household since she was old enough to lift a kettle. She had been old before she was young.
“You are loud with me,” he said.
“You require it.”
That made him laugh and she laughed with him. After they finished and Mrs Greer knocked on the door to clear the service, Henry watched his duchess leave the room. He sat alone for a while and thought that he enjoyed his wife’s company more than he expected.
Chapter sixteen
Glass and Silk
Henry
