Trusting Miss Trentham

Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One

Letty reacted instinctively, putting her arms around Reid, gathering him close again, holding him tightly. His words echoed inside her head, sharp-edged and terrible. She pressed her face into his damp hair, and rocked him. “Hush,” she whispered mechanically. “It’s all right. Hush.” But she knew it wasn’t all right.

Reid inhaled a huge, shuddering breath, and stopped crying. He tried to pull away from her.

Letty didn’t release him; she tightened her embrace. “Whatever you told them didn’t matter, Icarus,” she said fiercely in his ear. “Wellesley won that battle! The French pulled out of Portugal. Whatever you told them—it didn’t matter.”

She felt him tense, felt him repudiate the words.

Maybe it had mattered. Had men died because of what he’d told the French? Letty hesitated, uncertain what to do, what to say. She needed to know the facts. “What did you tell them, Icarus?”

Reid pulled away again. This time she let him. “Icarus . . . what did you tell them?”

He scrubbed his face with his hands. His cheeks weren’t flushed from crying. He looked bloodless beneath his tan.

Letty reached out and touched his arm. “What did you tell them?”

Reid shook her hand off and looked away, to where her horse stood cropping grass.

“What, Icarus?”

He looked back at her. His lips compressed. “They wanted to know if it was true we had no troops on the northeast ridge.”

“Was it true?”

“Yes.”

“And you told them that?”

His lips thinned even further. He nodded.

“How did that affect the battle?”

Reid looked at the horse again. “They tried to take the ridge, but Wellesley saw the advance. He countered it.”

“So it didn’t matter?”

Reid didn’t answer.

Letty tried to read his profile. Bleak, bitter. “It did matter?”

Reid shook his head, still not looking at her. “No.”

He spoke the truth, but he was also lying, even if there was no clang in her ears. It might not have mattered to the outcome of the battle, but it had mattered to Reid. It had mattered terribly. The expression on his face, the tone of his voice . . .

Reid was somewhere far beyond guilt or shame. He hated himself.

Letty felt helpless. What should she say? What should she do? Reid had been brutalized by the French until he’d betrayed his own side. Did he think himself a coward and a traitor?

Of course he did.

“Icarus . . .” She rose on her knees and caught his chin, brought his head round to look at her, held those silver, despairing eyes in a fierce stare. “You are not a coward. You are not a traitor.”

She saw denial on his face, in his eyes. He tried to jerk his chin free.

“You’re not,” Letty said vehemently, and then—prompted by instinct—she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

She felt Reid stiffen in surprise.

Letty kissed him again, softly, gently, trying to tell him that even if he reviled himself, she didn’t.

For a fleeting second Reid’s lips clung to hers, cool and salty with tears, and then he pulled away, twisting his chin free. He stared at her. His expression was wholly shocked.

“You’re not a coward or a traitor,” Letty told him firmly.

The shock vanished. Reid’s face tightened. He averted his head and climbed to his feet.

The big gray was still on the far side of the stream. Reid looked across at the animal, and then down at the water. A muscle tightened convulsively in his jaw.

Letty realized that he couldn’t bring himself to step into the creek.

“You’re not riding him,” she said brusquely. “Look at him! He wants nothing more than to throw you again. One of the grooms can fetch him.”

Reid glanced at her.

“The folly’s two minutes away. Lucas and Tom are there. You can take one of their horses.”

Reid took Lucas’s mount because Tom stopped painting and rode back with them. “Took a toss, did you?” Tom said cheerfully. “Lord, but you’re wet, the pair of you! You’ll borrow my clothes, of course, Major. We’re almost of a height.”

Letty caught Tom’s elbow in the stableyard. “He needs something hot to drink,” she hissed in his ear. “And some brandy.”

When she next saw Reid, he was in the green and gold salon, eating macaroons and wearing a coat that was half an inch too long in the sleeve. He looked as gaunt and weary as ever, but his hair was dry and the gray tone gone from his skin. Letty sat alongside him on the sofa, and cast Tom a grateful glance.

Reid didn’t stay long. He ate one more macaroon and took his leave, promising to return Tom’s clothes tomorrow.

“How are you getting to Marlborough?” Letty asked. “Not that gray!”

“Lucas’s curricle,” Tom said. “One of the grooms will bring it back.”

He went out to see Reid off, and returned two minutes later.

“How do you think he is?” Letty asked.

“He’s perfectly well. Stop fussing, Tish. It’d take more than a toss to upset a man like Reid!”

Letty stayed awake for a long time that night, thinking about what had happened at the stream, remembering the despair she’d seen in Reid’s eyes. She thought back to her first meeting with him. I need to make things right, he’d said.

She had assumed he was on a personal crusade for revenge, but it seemed to her now that she’d been wrong. Reid’s quest was more than vengeance; he sought expiation as well.

But was expiation possible? Reid couldn’t undo what had happened. He couldn’t take back what he’d told the French.

Letty pondered that question for several hours, and came to an unsettling conclusion. Expiation was possible.

The penalty for cowardice was discharge—and Reid had resigned his commission.

The penalty for treason was death—and Reid had told her he’d be dead by the end of the year.

He’d refused to tell her what he was dying of, but she thought she knew.

Icarus Reid intended to kill himself.