Page 31 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"May I see?"

He hesitated. Then he handed it over.

Tents in a row. Two soldiers at cards with their coats open. Then a small skull with long front teeth, drawn from three sides.

"Is that a rat?" Kitty asked.

"It was. It lives on my bookshelf now. My sergeant thinks me morbid." Gill took a pair of round spectacles from his pocket and put them on to look. "Bones hold still, Miss Catherine. Recruits do not."

Kitty laughed. She turned the page and stopped at a working horse caught mid-stride. "This one," she said, tilting it to the window light. She traced the shoulder with one finger. "The way you have drawn the muscle here. It looks alive!"

Gill smiled. Every smile of his until this one had carried irony in it somewhere. This one did not. "Thank you. I am fond of that one."

"You should show these to more people," Kitty said.

"I am a militia captain, Miss Catherine. The men I command care more for my ability to order a column than to sketch a finch."

"Then the men you command are missing something!"

Jane folded her hands and kept her face still. Could it truly happen in a quarter hour, over tea and a drawing of a horse? She was glad for Kitty. She was also, to her shame, a little envious.

When Gill rose to leave, he took the sketchbook back, paused, tore out the horse, and held it out. "For you. If you would like it."

Kitty took it. Their gloved fingers brushed, and she drew her hand back a fraction too fast. Gill noticed. He said nothing, put on his hat, and rode away without looking back at the house.

"He is very good," Kitty said from behind her at the window. "At drawing, I mean."

"He is."

"And kind. He did not have to give me the sketch."

"No. He did not."

Kitty turned the drawing in the light. "I think I will frame it. For my room. If that is not too forward."

"It is a drawing of a horse, Kitty. You may frame a horse."

Kitty almost smiled, the first time since Lydia came home. She went off to the ribbon drawer to find something to mount it with.

Jane went out to the stables, to check on Alban and, she admitted, on the foal. Miss Maisie had dropped her two nights ago. Alban had refused his bed. He sat up on an overturned bucket, because she's scared, she needs someone to stay. The foal had opened her eyes on Alban first, and that had settled that.

She was a chestnut filly with a crooked blaze and a look of permanent mild alarm. Two days old, and she had already had a go at Henson's hat and bitten Corporal Pratt on the thumb.

Alban sat cross-legged in the straw with her head in his lap. "She needs a name," he said, not looking up.

"What would you call her?"

He considered it with great gravity. "Nell. Like the song Mrs. Bennet sings. The one about the girl who was brave." He stroked the blaze. "Nell is small and she dinna know anything yet. But Miss Maisie will teach her, and I will teach her, and she will be brave like her mother." A pause. "Miss Maisie bit the bad lord's ear. Did you know?"

"I know."

"Nell will bite people too. When she is bigger. Only the bad ones!"

The foal lifted her head, regarded Jane with large, dark, profoundly unintelligent eyes, and sneezed. A strand of hay stuck to her nose. Jane loved her immediately.

Henson leaned on the stall door. "Boy has not let her out of his sight since she dropped. Sleeps in the stall. I tried to move him to his bed and he told me, and I am quoting, 'She is my responsibility, Mr. Henson, and I do not leave my responsibilities.'"

"Where did he learn that?"