Page 58 of Baron Bolt

CHAPTER 14

The sky had turned in the night. An old iron lid sat over the downs. Somewhere beyond them the first thunder rolled. So far off it was less a sound than a pressure behind the teeth.

Damian felt it in his injured shoulder.

He did not name it, even to himself. He only knew the long-healed lines across his left shoulder had begun to listen. The bay between his legs felt the weather too. It danced sideways at a pigeon like a skittish, unbroken colt. Damian put it up the lane at a trot before the house was properly awake. He had told Pritchard he meant to look at the lower bridge before the rain found its rotten planking. That much was true. The bridge lay on the road to the village. The village was where he was going.

Men asking after his health. His habits. His scars.

Ophelia had given him the words last night in the voice she kept now for household matters. Level. Correct. No warmer than the footman’s. A foreign gentleman and his servant, my lord. At the inn. She had stood in the study doorway and not come in. The candle was behind her. Light caught the loose golden hair at her temple. She had not lingered. When he produced nothing beyond thank you, she had curtsied and departed.

Curtsied. To her own husband. In her own house. And gone.

Then I shall not ask again, my lord.

She was keeping the vow. He had wanted the silence. Now he was choking on it.

The lane dropped between hedgerows still heavy with dust. Harvest carts pulled aside for him. The men on them touched their hats. Their eyes did what eyes always did. Found the scarred side of his face. Flinched off it, polite as you please. Settled somewhere safe near his cravat. He was used to that. It only cost him a farthing each time, and he had a great store of farthings.

Thunder again. Nearer by a mile or two. His shoulder ached.

The Bell stood at the top of the green, its sign wanting paint, its door standing open to the close morning air. Damian ducked under the lintel. Every lintel in the county had been hung for smaller men. The taproom went quiet as the lord of the manor interrupted the routine.

One old man by the cold hearth, a dog, and Cobb behind the counter polishing a tankard that was already dry. The other man went red to the ears, presumably because the Baron Archer had walked into his taproom like a common farmer.

“My lord.” Cobb came round the counter, stopped, went back behind it, came round it again. “My lord, if you’d—the parlor’s—Martha’s just done the parlor⁠—”

“The taproom will do very well.” Damian set his hat on the counter and his gloves beside it. “Draw two pints, Cobb. You will take one with me.”

Cobb drew them as if the honor might bite. The ale was cool from the cellar and good. Damian said so. The man’s shoulders came down an inch. Then Damian let the silence sit. He had learned that from prisoners, though he saw no profit in saying so. A frightened man filled the silence with whatever sat highest in his mind. What sat highest in Cobb, pushing at his teeth, was the foreigners.

“My lord,” Cobb burst out, on schedule, “I hope there weren’t no—that is, Mr. Stroud sent down, asking after them two gentlemen as stayed, and I hope I done no wrong serving them, for they paid honest, leastways the big one did⁠—”

“You did no wrong at all.” Damian turned his tankard a quarter-circle on the boards. “Tell me about them.”

It came out the way such accounts always came out of landlords. Circling. Doubling back. Garnished with the price of oats. Two foreign gentlemen, three days past, come up in a hired chaise off the Dover road. Stayed two nights. Best chamber, and the one over the kitchen. The big one was broad through the shoulders, dark, quiet, civil enough in his few words of English. Ate like a plow team and paid for both. Paid in gold. Queer gold at that.

“French, my lord.” Cobb produced the coin from under the counter as if it were a confession, laid it down, spun it. A napoleon. The little emperor’s head worn smooth at the brow. “I bit it. It’s good. Only it sat wrong with me, French gold, after … well. After everything.”

“And the other?”

Cobb’s face worked through several answers before it settled on one. “Now he was a queer one, and I’ll say it though he was your lordship’s—though he was a gentleman. Thin as a gallows-tree, if your lordship takes my meaning. Ate nothing. Martha sent up a good pigeon pie and it come down again with the crust broke and naught gone from under it. Up all hours. I heard the boards going over the kitchen half the night, back and forth, back and forth, like a sentry.” He caught himself. “Begging your pardon, my lord.”

“Go on.”

“And he muttered.” Cobb leaned in. Dropped his voice, though the old man by the hearth was deaf as the dog and the dog was asleep. “Constant. At table, on the stair, to the window glass. Talking to nobody. And not English, nor French neither. I’ve heard French. We had the prisoners through here years ago. Some of it might’ve been French. But some was church-talk, like what the curate reads out at a burying, and some was that harsh stuff, like a man coughing up gravel. Three tongues, my lord, I’d swear it, and him sliding between them like a man changes horses.”

The taproom was hushed. The tankard stayed under Damian’s hand. His hand stayed open and easy on the boards. He had been a captain of the army and his hands did as they were told.

The dark came anyway. It came up around him between one breath and the next. Damp stone. The weight on his chest that had been dead men. The drip of something into a basin. And threaded through all of it, going on and on above the meat as if it were reading to itself, that voice. Latin like the curate at a burying. German like gravel. French to the servant on the stair. Three tongues, colliding.

He had last heard that voice through a pile of corpses. He had lain under his own dead countrymen, and some of other countries, and listened to it mutter over its work. Now that voice had crossed the Channel and spent two nights in the best chamber of the Bell. Eating nothing, wearing the floorboards, and asking.

“What did he ask?” Damian said. His voice came out level while inside he was in a panic.

Cobb shifted. “After your lordship. That was the queerness of it, see. Polite questions first, the sort any traveler might. Where was the great house Hartleigh, was the family in residence? Then—” He turned the napoleon over, not looking up. “Then he asks was it true his lordship come back from the dead. His words, my lord. From the dead. I said your lordship had come home from Waterloo, which the papers had wrong, God be thanked, and the whole parish rang the bells for it, which we did. And he … he smiled, my lord. Not a nice smile. And he asks, do the wounds mend. Has anyone seen the scars. Do they fade.” Cobb’s ears had gone red again, this time not from honor. “And then he asks. I’ll say it plain, for it’s been sitting on me. He asks after your lordship’s eyes. What color they was. Whether they—” The landlord’s mouth worked. “Whether they matched.”

The rafter above the counter had a long split in it, dry as bone from the hot summer. Damian stared at that, suddenly and viciously aware that he did not want Cobb to see his eyes in that moment.