* * *

A room to oneself was a mixed blessing at a gathering like Lady Morrisette’s. On the one hand, Esther had a little privacy in those rare moments when she wasn’t stepping and fetching for her betters, and particularly for Lady Morrisette.

On the other hand, a lady with a room to herself had to guard doubly against the gentlemen who “accidentally” stumbled into her chambers late at night. She also had no one with whom to discuss the day’s small revelations, such as how hard it had been not to watch Lord Percival Windham as he showed one lady after another how to hold her bow and let fly her arrows.

While Esther had lost the archery contest only by deliberately aiming her last shots wide of the bull’s-eye, Charlotte’s accuracy with a barbed comment was not to be underestimated, regardless of how desperately she’d needed Lord Percy’s assistance with her bow.

Esther flipped back the covers and eased from the bed—the cot. She’d had a choice of sleeping with Lady Pott’s maid in a stuffy little dressing room, or taking this glorified closet under the eaves. The closet had appealed, though on a warm night, it was nigh stifling, and on a cool night it would be frigid.

“I need a posset.”

Closets did not sport bellpulls, so Esther slid her feet into slippers, belted a plain dressing gown over her nightgown, and headed down the maid’s stairs to the kitchen.

A tired scullery maid frowned only slightly at Esther’s request before preparing a cup of hot, spiced, spiked milk.

“There ye be, mum. Will there be anything else?”

Esther took a sip of her posset. “My thanks, it’s very good. Does that door lead to the kitchen garden?”

“It do, and from thence to the scent garden and the cutting garden. The formal garden lies beyond that, and then the knot gardens and the folly.” The maid shot a longing glance at the stool by the hearth, as if even giving these directions made a girl’s feet ache.

Ache worse. After eighteen hours on her feet, the maid was no doubt even more tired than Esther.

“I’ll take my posset to the garden.”

“The guests don’t generally use the kitchen garden, mum.”

“All the better.”

This earned Esther a small, understanding smile. The girl sought her stool, and Esther sought the cooler air of the garden by moonlight—the garden where she’d be safe from wandering guests of either gender.

Kitchen gardens bore a particular scent, a fresh, green, culinary fragrance that tickled Esther’s nose as she found a bench along the far wall. Percival Windham’s comment the day before about the moon being full came to mind, because the garden was limned in silvery light, the moon beaming down in all its beneficent glory.

“So you couldn’t sleep either?”

Esther’s first clue regarding the garden’s other occupant was moonlight gleaming on his unpowdered hair.

“My lord.” She started to rise, only to see Percival Windham’s teeth flash in the shadows.

“Oh, must you?” He approached her bench, gaze trained on the cup in her hand. “Might I join you? I fear the farther reaches of the garden are full of predators stalking large game.”

He sounded tired and not the least flirtatious. Esther pulled her skirts aside when what she ought to be doing was returning to the stuffy, mildewed confines of her garret.

She took a sip of her posset and waited.

“How do you do it, Miss Himmelfarb?”

“My lord?”

He sighed and stretched long legs out before him, crossing his feet at the ankles and leaning back against the wall behind them. Moonlight caught the silver of his shoe buckles and the gold of the ring on his left little finger.

“How do you endure these infernal gatherings? They are exhausting of a man’s fortitude if not his energy. If one more young lady presses a feminine part of her anatomy against my person, I am going to start howling like a wolf and wearing my wig backward.”

His lordship sounded so put upon, Esther found it difficult not to smile. “May I ask you a question, your lordship?”

“Lord Percy, if you must stand on ceremony—or sit upon it, as the case may be.”

“Do you take snuff?”

He peered over at her in the moonlight. “I do not. It’s a deucedly filthy habit. Nor do I use smoking tobacco. I’m convinced my father’s frequent agues of the lungs are related to his fondness for the pipe. If you were to ask to borrow my snuffbox, you’d find it holds lemon drops.”

He reached over and plucked Esther’s cup from her grasp, raising it up. “May I?”

What was she to say to that? “You may.”

He helped himself to a sip of her posset, and the idea of it, of this handsome lordling drinking so casually from her cup, was peculiar indeed.

“Are you flirting with me, my lord?”

He set the cup down between them, his lips quirking. “If you have to ask, Miss Himmelfarb, then I’m making a poor job of it, aren’t I?”

He hadn’t said no. “May I ask you another question?”

His lordship closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “I’d rather it be a flirtatious sort of question now that you raise the subject. You’re very pretty, you know, and I’ve lately concluded the entire purpose of this gathering is to develop one’s stamina as a flirt. Like field maneuvers, I suppose.” He cracked open one eye. “I apologize if I’m being rude. That’s a truth potion you’ve slipped me.”

He settled back against the wall, shifting broad shoulders as if to get more comfortable. With his eyes closed, Percival Windham by moonlight was…

Handsome. Still, yet, more… deucedly handsome, to use his word. Lord Percival was the spare, but he had “duke” stamped all over him. The height, the self-possession, the charm…

“So you’re not averse to another question, my lord?”

“If we’re to be drinking companions, Miss Himmelfarb, then the ‘my lording’ has to cease. Mind you, I am not flirting with you.”

He was humoring her, though. Or something. “Do you frequently bathe in company?”

A beat of silence went by, while Esther wondered if perhaps that posset wasn’t truth potion after all.

“Miss Himmelfarb, this version of not-flirting holds a man’s interest. Whyever would you ask?”

He sounded amused and genuinely intrigued.

“I am appeasing my curiosity. Young ladies gossip almost as much as young men do.”

“They couldn’t possibly. To answer your question, it might have escaped your notice, but my dimensions are such that I rather take up the available space in most tubs. I am not in the habit of entertaining callers when I’m at my bath, despite what our hostess appears to have told half the women in the realm. You never did answer my question.”

Esther cast back over their short, odd conversation. “How do I endure house parties?”

“Without committing hanging felonies on your fellow guests, all of whom seem intent on mischief. It’s worse than an entire regiment of Scottish recruits on leave.”

He wasn’t simply tired, he was exasperated and not a little bewildered. Esther picked up the posset and handed it to him.

“Do you miss Canada?” This was what she should have asked him, not those other questions—the ones that Herodia, Charlotte, and Zephora would not believe the answers to.

He drank deeply from her cup and kept it in his hands. “I wish I missed Canada. The land is so beautiful it makes your soul ache, but pitiless, too. In any season, Canada has ways to kill a man—snakes, locals, diseases, itching vines, and lunatic commanding officers.”

Perhaps he was a little drunk, or a little homesick for somewhere neither Canada nor Kent.

“You could transfer elsewhere.”

“And it would be the same, Miss Himmelfarb, because it would still be His Majesty’s military, and I would still be the Moreland spare.” He fell silent, Esther’s cup held in his two hands on his flat belly.

“You were treated differently because your father is a duke?”

“I was. By some I was treated worse, by others better. At my last post, I was bitterly resented by my superior officer.”

This was far, far worse than flirting, or even that whispering-in-her-ear thing Percival Windham could do in a room full of people. Still, she asked the next question.

“What happened?”

He grew still, the darkness seemed to gather closer, and Esther caught a whiff of his cedary scent on soft night air.

“I will tell you, Esther Himmelfarb, because I am a just a wee bit in my cups, or perhaps it’s the moonshine loosening my tongue. In any case, we will both wish—and in the morning pretend—that I had kept my own counsel.” Another pause, another sip of her posset. “My unit was between posts—there are no roads worth the name—and we came upon an encampment of natives. There are all stripes of Indians in the Canadian woods, some friendly, some murderous, and some both, depending on the day of the week. We encountered not even a gesture in the direction of hostility from this group, which upon inspection turned out to be a function of their menfolk being off on a trapping expedition.”

Rape. He would not use the word in her presence, but Esther felt it lurking on the edges of the conversation.

“General Starkweather ordered the women and children rounded up, declared them prisoners, and started marching them through the woods. He did this to goad me, I’m fairly certain. We were not to provoke the locals without cause, and shivering in the woods while praying for spring did not constitute cause in the opinion of any man in that company.”

He set the cup aside, apparently having finished Esther’s posset.

“We got about two hours’ march from the encampment, and were not likely to make our billet by dark. The general ordered the prisoners lined up in a ditch and declared himself unwilling to be slowed down by such a lot of filthy, murdering savages when the weather might turn foul at any point.”

Murder now joined rape in the part of the conversation Lord Percival was not speaking aloud. Murder, rape, and offense to the honor of any officer, any honest man, present on the scene. Esther wanted to touch him, to stop him from speaking more words that would hurt him and forever haunt her.

“General Starkweather assembled a firing squad. He made sure I was directly on hand when the lads were given the command to shoulder arms. If I interfered, I was of course, guilty of insubordination of a magnitude that would earn me a conclusion to my troubles in the same manner our captives were facing.”

Rape, murder, dishonor, execution.

While all around him, gossip wanted to accuse Percival Windham of frivolousness and debauchery.

“You did not give the order to fire. Not on helpless women and children.”

He sat up, set the cup on the ground, and peered over at her for a long moment before he resumed speaking, his words addressed to a patch of rosemary growing across the walk.

“There was an old woman, a stout little thing with a brown face as wrinkled as a prune. She’d been carrying an infant the entire distance, and the child had begun to fuss, likely from hunger. I sat there on my horse, wrapped from head to toe in thick layers of wool, while that old woman shivered, her own blanket given up to keep the child warm. I have never seen such fortitude before or since.

“The men figured out what Starkweather was up to, and the quality of their silence was as chilling as the wind in those woods. Picture this: snow all around us, two hundred of His Majesty’s finest poised to witness murder, and the only sound the wind in the pine boughs and that crying baby.”

Rape, murder, dishonor, hanging, dread, and no options.

“The old woman tickled the baby’s chin.”

Lord Percival reached over and brushed a knuckle twice over the point of Esther’s chin. “She tickled the baby’s chin, jostled him and jollied him, until he was laughing as babies will. Despite the cold, despite his hungry belly, despite the firing squad several yards away, the baby laughed. Starkweather gave the command to take aim then told me to take over.”

“You did not do murder. I know you did not.”

How did she know it, though? From the kindness in his eyes when he flirted? From the weariness he’d let her see by moonlight? From the fact that he’d even noticed an old woman with the courage to tickle a baby while death loomed?

“I did not give the order to fire, Esther Himmelfarb. I will admit to you I was insubordinate, and Tony was there to witness it. As I opened my mouth and gave the command to order arms, the air was filled with a shrieking such as I hope never to hear again. The trapping party had tracked us, circled around front and taken their position in the trees above the trail. I regret to report that though casualties on both sides were minimal, General Starkweather did not survive the affray.”