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“Oh, yes?” She didn’t seem particularly interested.
He’d thought she’d be delighted. “I’m sorry I ruined the last one for you.”
She blew out a breath as if exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me, Samuel?”
He stared at her a moment, trying to understand what she meant. Then a horrible chill crept through his belly. Surely she wasn’t talking about...“Tell you what?”
“You know.” Her lips crimped in her frustration. “You never talk to me; you never—”
“We’re talking right now.”
“But you’re not saying anything!” She spoke the words too loudly and then looked chagrined. “You never say anything, even when people make terrible accusations about you. Mr. Thornton came close to calling you a coward to your face when we were in the garden last week, and you never said a word to him. Why can’t you defend yourself at least?”
He felt his lip curl. “What people like Thornton say isn’t worth replying to.”
“So you’d rather remain silent and let yourself be condemned?”
He shook his head. There was no way to explain his actions to her.
“Samuel, I’m not those people. Even if you won’t justify yourself to them, you must talk to me. We are the only family we have left. Uncle Thomas is dead, and Father and Mother died before I could ever know them. Is it so wrong that I want to be closer to you? That I want to know what my brother faced in the war?”
It was his turn to stare out the window now, and he swallowed bile. There seemed to be the smell of men’s sweat in the close carriage, but he knew that it was his brain playing abominable tricks on him. “It isn’t easy to talk of war.”
“Yet I’ve heard other men do so,” she said softly. “Calvary officers bragging of charges and sailors talking of battles at sea.”
He frowned impatiently. “They’re not...”
“Not what?” She leaned forward over her knees as if she would will the words from him. “Tell me, Samuel.”
He held her gaze, although it caused him physical pain to do so. “The soldiers who have seen close action, the soldiers who have felt another man’s breath before taking it from him...” He closed his eyes. “Those soldiers hardly ever speak about it. It’s not something we want to remember. It hurts.”
There was a silence, and then she whispered, “Then what can you talk about? There must be something.”
He stared at her, and a rueful smile curved his lips at a memory. “The rain.”
“What?”
“When it rains on a march, there’s nowhere to hide. The men and their clothes and all the provisions get wet. The trail turns to mud beneath your boots, and the men begin to slip. And once one falls, it’s a rule, it seems, that half a dozen will fall next, their clothes and hair all over mud.”
“But surely you can pitch a tent when you stop for the night?”
“We can, but the tent will be wet as well by then and the ground underneath a sea of mud, and in the end, one wonders if it would be better to simply sleep in the open.”
She was smiling at him, and his heart lightened at the sight. “Poor Samuel! I never dreamed you spent so much time in the mud as a soldier. I always imagined you performing heroic feats.”
“My heroic feats mostly involved a kettle.”
“A kettle?”
He nodded, relaxing against the carriage seat now. “After a day’s march in the rain, our provisions were always wet, including the dry peas and meal.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Wet meal?”
“Wet and sticky. And sometimes we’d have to make it last another week, wet or no.”
“Wouldn’t it mold?”
“Very often. By the end of that week, the meal might be mostly green.”
