She favored the path where he’d first seen her and the flat rock in particular with a sweeping view of the Solway. She named the wildlife for him, teaching him both the Gaelic and Scots words. And as she’d correctly predicted, he was starting to pick up Scots from the men in Auchencairn—it bore similarities to German.
Occasionally Lucy joined them on their jaunts, but she preferred to ramble down below along the water’s edge where he’d first walked with her, often alone. She largely kept her distance from him, but he didn’t get the sense it was personal. As Isobel had said, Lucy carried herself at a remove from everything.
One evening after they’d eaten, Lucy announced her intention to walk. A speaking glance passed between the sisters, and she turned abruptly towards him. “I’m ready to hear it now,” she said tersely.
And so he walked with her down to Balcary Bay where the newly retreating tide had left behind its offering of a thousand little shells. Side by side, gazes on the mudflats, he told her. First of Dubois’s fate, then of Cuvelier’s. And finally of tailing Compton to Boulogne and running him to ground in London. He spared no details about Compton’s death, either the circumstances or his own part in it.
Lucy said nothing throughout nor immediately afterwards either; she just hugged her arms around her midsection. Finally she thanked him and turned down the shore without another word. He let her go, recognizing her need for solitude. As he told Isobel upon his return to the cottage, he couldn’t tell whether Lucy’s thanks were for imparting the news or whether she thanked him for his personal role in Compton’s death. Some of both, maybe.
He lost no sleep over Compton’s death itself, and his superiors as well as a cadre of French operatives were simply happy that particular avenue of treason, bribes, and leaks was gone, although the Foreign Office would undoubtedly have enjoyedpublic prosecution and execution of Compton. Their agent’s hand was forced, however—literally—and the better outcome by far was an end to Compton’s activities. And ultimately the man himself had not escaped some measure of justice, even if it had come at Nate’s hands rather than the end of a rope.
What did give him pause at times was recalling that it wasn’t of Britain or treason or Compton’s dozens of crimes that he’d thought, his knife at Compton’s throat. It wasn’t about the knife wound Compton had just inflicted. Instead, his foremost thought had been for the lives Compton had torn apart, among them Lucy’s and Isobel’s. He’d been angry with his hand on the blade; he’d had no well of cool reserve.
He told Isobel about that part of it one evening as they walked.
“Does it still distress you?” she asked when he finished.
“His death itself, no. He took the easy way out. My blade was the most expedient means of evading the hangman. But I’ve not entirely made peace with my anger. And Compton recognized that anger in me. He taunted me with it at the end.”
“Thereby making you executioner.”
“Aye, so it seems.”Upholding justice? So be it,Compton snarled, venom in his mismatched eyes, just before jerking his throat upwards onto the blade.
Isobel touched his arm, recalling him to the present. “He tried to turn the manner of his death into a living punishment for you. Do not grant him that final triumph. Oh, I know it’s not so simple as that,” she hastened to add. “But it doesn’t put you in the wrong that you did not feel wholly objective. Nor does it make you less honorable.”
“I haven’t dwelt much on honor for a long time.”
She smiled. “I don’t believe that for a second. Your life has been entirely devoted to it, in its many forms, tangled though it may have been.” She paused, her smile dimming. “I cannot saytruthfully that I am unhappy that Compton is dead. In fact, I will say it: I’m glad of it. I do not consider myself a vindictive person in the usual course of things, but there are instances where I am quite prepared to make exceptions.”
She looked up at him. “I would be far more alarmed if you had no emotions at all about having been the instrument of Compton’s death. You are a man of deep feeling, although you keep most of it hidden away.” Her free hand came up to settle along his jaw. “This much I learned of you in France.”
He closed his eyes, accepting the touch.
She slid her arms around his neck, stepping into his body, and he pulled her close. Whatever she used in Scotland to wash her hair had a simpler scent, cleaner and purer than the citrus-floral soap in Paris. It matched the true version of her here. He breathed deeply, a man who’d been unexpectedly on the verge of drowning, once more drawing air. She laid her cheek against his chest.
Some men came away from battle and spy work alike carrying not the slightest regret or burden for their actions, ascribing it as consecrated by God, king, and country, in that order. It had never been so for him, or at least not quite. He’d suppressed any hint of his boyhood sensitivity of necessity, but the work had never sat as easily with him as it did some men.
Isobel had known him neither as boy nor officer in the Rifles. She met him in France squarely on the grounds of what the sum of those years made him. She’d invited him in then. She’d invited him to stay now. And she hadn’t turned away either time.
She tilted her head, searching his face, neither censure nor revulsion in her eyes. Their quiet serenity pulled at him, resonated deep in his chest.
He slid fingers into her hair. Leaned down, found her lips with his own. Found welcome in them, absolution of sorts.
Comfort and, perhaps, peace.
April edged into May. Nathaniel worked tirelessly on the crofter’s cottage and other heavy chores, but he also spent part of every day with her. Little by little, they were learning one another in all the conventional ways their unorthodox introduction had not allowed. It was remarkable how ordinary facts were sweet and so profound, especially set in contrast to those fraught days in France.
“The trick formal de merof finding the horizon,” she said one day. “You told me of it on the packet out of Dover. And told me, when I asked, that you’d learned it from an oysterman.” They were walking a path from which they could see the stake beds out in the bay, one of the local fishing operations.
“Aye.” He’d shaded his eyes from the sun, looking across the bay and past Heston Isle at its mouth to where a three-masted ship traversed the Solway, likely headed out into the Irish Sea. “My grandfather, my mum’s dad.” His voice was resonant, more emotion bare in it than usual. “My uncle was an oysterman too. They took me out with them when I was a lad, sometimes.”
She could picture him, almost: a solemn dark-haired boy, attentive as the older men explained something to him about boats or nets. The image squeezed her heart. “You must have grown up near the sea.”
“Aye. I grew up in sight of it. A small village in north Kent that sits on the Swale, not far from the Thames Estuary. Chestfield.” He drew a deep breath. “I like being near the sea again. It smells like home.”
“For me as well. Rather, we moved to Kirkcudbright when I was eleven. The town. It’s on the River Dee just above the Irish Sea, so it’s tidal. We lived in Glasgow before that, but it’s Kirkcudbright that has always been home in my memory, more sothan other places.” Those had been the happiest years of her childhood, shared with Lucy.
“You never lived here, in this cottage?”
