Page 82 of Baron Bolt

Ophelia Archer sat with her hand unplayed and watched her husband sleep.

She had spent her whole life playing alone.

She was only waiting, now, for him to wake and pick up his cards.

* * *

Damian woke all at once and did not move. The army had beaten that into him years ago. Lids half down. The cellar in Belgium had only reinforced that training.

Candlelight. The armchair from the window, dragged in close to his bed. In the chair, chin dipping toward her collarbone, his wife sat asleep.

Her hair was coming down. She had washed her hands and missed a thin crescent of rust-brown at one wrist. On the coverlet beside his right hand, squared as she squared everything that mattered, lay a hand of cards face-down.

Dealt to him.

He knew that before he knew the rest. Then the rest arrived whether he wanted it or not. A tight, itching ridge low on his left side. He was bare to the waist under the sheet. Someone had stripped him. Washed him. Seen him. Every seam. Every ladder-mark. The ceiling had not come down. The rain had not stopped.

Since the cellar his life had been one motion: wake, take stock, build the wall between him and the living. Button the coat, account for the eye, choose the day’s lie.

He reached for it now out of habit and closed his hand on air. No wall. Not one brick left she had not already seen. The madman had screamed the whole of it across the study with a pistol in his fist. “Mine. My work. It belongs on the table.” She had heard every word. And she had carried a chair across the room and gone to sleep in it, guarding him as he healed.

The joy of it was indecent. He felt like a fortress whose garrison had marched out and … returned. Every man.

He picked up his cards. Pasteboard whispered. Her head came up at once. Of course it did. Nothing at a card table escaped her. Her eyes found his, wide and blue and awake down to the last thought.

“You should drink something,” she said. “There is barley water, and Luc says⁠—”

“Ophelia.”

She stopped. He had never used her Christian name and then said anything worth hearing. She understood this time might be different. Her hands folded in her lap.

“If I do not say it now,” Damian said, “I shall find a way never to say it. Let me say it.”

“Say it, then.”

He said it to the ceiling first. That was easier. Then he turned to her, because she deserved better than the side of his face.

“I died at Waterloo.” The words came out rough. “The French were bringing a battery to bear on our square. There was a boy. An ensign. Seventeen. All elbows. Standing where the fire was about to arrive. I pushed him out of the way but I was not fast enough to follow. I remember the flash. I remember thinking, quite clearly, so this is the last of it. Ophelia. I want you to understand. It was not a terrible thought. It was almost restful.”

The rain ticked at the glass. She did not move.

“Then it was dark, and cold, and there was weight on me. Faces against mine, and none of them breathing. I was under my own dead. Somewhere above me a man’s voice, not English, crying out to ask if it lived.” His breath left him in a half laugh, the graveyard kind. “He was not talking about me. There was another body on his table and he was rejoicing over that one. Over nothing, as it happened. The only success he ever had was lying under the discards, listening. I have never decided whether that was the worst moment of my life or the finest joke I ever heard.”

“Damian.”

“I know.” He turned his head on the pillow and made himself hold her eyes. “When they went up to their supper I dug myself out. There was a slab. I had been on it. I stood in that cellar and read my own chest with my fingers like a blind man. Every stitch. His handwriting all over me. And the eye.” His hand rose halfway toward the left side of his face and stopped. “The light comes into it wrongly. I think he did something. I have never been sure, and I could hardly write and ask. I found my uniform in a heap of dead men’s clothes. I took coin from the same heap to get home on. I have told myself since that it was foul of me, robbing the dead. But every coin in that pocket was a dead man’s coin, whichever corpse it came off.”

She did not flinch. It simply was not coming. He had to look at the canopy a moment.

“I had one thought. Not England. Not the regiment. Just Hartleigh. Rain on the meadows. This rain. I walked out of that cellar and I walked toward the rain. When I finally came up the drive, half the county was in the hall inside five minutes. My mother was weeping on my chest. Everyone was crying the same three words. He is alive. Over and over. The answer to their prayers, home from the dead.” His jaw set. “And I stood in my father’s hall knowing it was not true. I let them thank God. I let Edward believe⁠—”

His voice caught. He waited a few moments, then continued.

“Edward died holding my hand and telling me what a relief it was to have his brother back. I let my brother die comforted by a walking corpse, and I took his ring, and his title, and his betrothed, because I had given a dying man my word, and my word was the only part of me I was certain had come back from Belgium.”

He stopped. Damian Archer lay in his own bed, emptied out to the last coin of it, and glanced at his wife.

“And now you have all of it,” he said. “Every word. You have had most of it since a lunatic shouted it at you over a pistol barrel. You did not run. You did not faint. You sat the whole night in that chair. I have been trying since I awoke to make that add up, and I cannot. Why are you still here?”