Someone to Honor (Westcott #6) - Mary Balogh Page 0,2

guessed, of course, when these two men turned up unexpectedly in Paris as emissaries of the family. But it had not occurred to him even then that the rest of them would actually journey into the country to see Harry when he arrived home.

After all, no family had ever rallied around him, either on his mother’s side—they had turned her out, never to relent, after she conceived him—or on his father’s. The most his father had ever done for him was purchase his ensign’s commission in a foot regiment after word had reached him of the death of Gil’s mother. Gil had been at that time a sergeant with a British regiment in India. Later he had purchased a lieutenancy for his son too, but Gil had written to him on that occasion, and not to thank him—why should he thank a father who had ignored his very existence for more than twenty years, only to swoop down seemingly from nowhere with a gift his son had neither wanted nor asked for? Gil had written to inform the man that he need supply no further patronage and that it would be refused if it was offered. By that time Gil had been wishing heartily that he were still a sergeant. He had been happier with his own kind.

He and Harry had fought together in the Peninsula and at Toulouse and Waterloo. They had been friends from the start, perhaps because they had one thing in common apart from their regiment and military experiences: They were both bastards—yes, it was always as well to call a spade a spade—in a gentleman’s army. In the officer ranks of the army, that was. Hard work and prowess, talent and dedication to one’s men and mission, counted for far less in the officers’ tents and messes than did birth and fortune. Oh, Gil and Harry had never been ostracized outright, it was true, but they had always been made in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways to feel that they were outsiders. That they did not quite belong. That they were a bit of an embarrassment. Occasionally more than a bit.

He gazed out the window on his side of the carriage at the gloomy countryside, though it was only the heavy clouds and rain that caused the gloom. It was England, and he felt a rush of affection for his native land even if there were not very many happy memories associated with it.

He had a home of his own here, Rose Cottage in Gloucestershire, purchased during the Indian years when he had acquired what had seemed to him—it still seemed—a fabulous fortune in prizes. He had invested what remained of it after the purchase, engaging the services of an agent in London he had been persuaded to trust, happily as it had turned out. He could have lived like a gentleman from that moment on if he had chosen to leave the army. He had not done so, however. Nor had he done so anytime since. The army was all he had known since he left home at the age of fourteen in a recruiting sergeant’s untender care, and on the whole it had been good to him. The life had suited him.

He had gone home after the Battle of Toulouse in 1814, though, taking his pregnant wife with him. He had taken her to Rose Cottage—a great deal larger actually than a cottage despite its name. And all his own. His anchor to this world. The place where he would send down roots. The place where he would raise his family. Home. The dream of happiness had become even more of a reality when Katy was born—Katherine Mary Bennington. Ah, that achingly happy day following hours of pain for Caroline and anxiety for him. That dark-haired baby. That warm little bundle of squawking humanity.

His daughter.

It was a brief interval in his life almost too painful to look back upon. Therefore, he rarely did. But some memories went deeper than conscious thought. They were there always, like a leaden weight, or like an open wound that would not quite kill him but would never heal either.

Happily-ever-after had begun to slip away when Caroline, her confinement over, had become more restless than usual and peevish about the inferior size of the house and the dullness of the village on the edge of which it stood, and the insipid nature of their social life there. It had slipped further a little more than three months after