Alec smoothed the sheets and began to read. As she watched, the thoughtful crease between his eyes vanished. Faster and faster his eyes raced, and his fingers grew clumsy as he turned the page to read to the end. “Are you certain of this translation?” he demanded hoarsely. “Absolutely certain?”
“I—Y-Yes,” she stammered, thrown by his demeanor. She had expected disgust, even anger, but he was as pale as snow. “Why?”
“This was in your father’s journal?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “It is horrible. I cannot bear to think of it—”
Alec lurched to his feet and strode across the room. The door flew back and hit the wall behind it when he threw it open, making Cressida jump again. Shame suffused her. Her father was a traitor, a liar, and worse, he had enticed someone else into doing the same…
Her mouth fell open as the obvious conclusion came to her. Dear Lord. She had been so miserable thinking of her father’s sins, she had completely forgotten about Alec. But her father was in the infantry; Alec was in the cavalry. And he had said he never knew her father at all. She shoved her hands into her hair and gripped her head, trying to physically hold back her thoughts. Alec had never told her exactly how he came to be thought a traitor, and the events Papa wrote of happened almost a decade ago, years before Waterloo. She couldn’t see the connection…but something had sent him storming through the halls.
She jumped up and ran after him. He was striding through the corridors and calling his mother’s name. “What is it?” she cried.
He shook his head, walking past her. “Mother?” He raised his voice and called again. A footman rushed up. “Where is Mrs. Hayes?” he demanded. The flustered servant stammered that he did not know. Alec motioned him away impatiently and continued down the corridor, pulling open every door he passed.
“Why are you shouting?”
Alec swung around to face Julia as she stepped out of the music room. He ignored her question. “After Waterloo, my things were sent home. You told me that.” Julia frowned, but nodded. “Where are they? Did Mother dispose of them?”
“No.” She glanced at Cressida, hovering anxiously behind him. “She refused to look at them, and had it all put away.”
“Where, Julia?”
“In the attic,” she said, her voice rising in surprise at his urgency. “Why?”
He pushed past her into the music room and came out a few moments later with a pair of lit candles. He shoved one at her. “Show me.”
Julia looked at Cressida, who knew she must look as astonished as Julia did at this command. “It will be as black as Hades in there, and filthy, too. What do you need so desperately?”
He closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath. When he opened them he looked right at Cressida. “I need to find my trunk,” he said, a little more calmly. “Now.”
After a moment Julia nodded. Without another word she led the way through the house, up a flight of stairs and through a series of corridors to a narrow door. Alec pulled back the bolt that held it closed, and then heaved the door open with a screech of the hinges.
The other side was indeed as black as Hades, and the air was hot and thick with dust. Cressida stepped carefully, staying close behind Alec as they followed Julia past old furniture, trunks, heaps of discarded clothing, and other detritus accumulated by the Hayes family over the decades. She stumbled into him when he stopped abruptly, and he took her hand in his for a moment and gave it a quick squeeze. Just that touch gave her heart. Whatever her father might have done to him, directly or indirectly, he wasn’t blaming her.
Yet.
“It should be here somewhere,” Julia said, holding her candle high and turning in a circle. “No one will have touched it since then, so we may have to—” She broke off with a gasp as Alec heaved a trunk over onto its end and bent down to examine the one beneath it. The crash shook the floorboards.
“What did they send back? My campaign trunk, the small brown one, or just the larger ones?” Alec fought down the urge to toss over everything in the attic until he found his trunks. There was a good chance what he sought wouldn’t be here. Most of his baggage had been left in quarters in Brussels before the battle; only his smallest trunk had been near the battlefield, carried along with the other officers’ private belongings. That trunk might have been lost, or looted, or simply forgotten in the confusion. But George Turner’s words, leaping off the page in Cressida’s neat writing, had finally shed light on the accusation of treason that had dogged him since Waterloo.
Turner didn’t name his British officer, but he described him. With a mixture of elation and horror, Alec recognized the man in Turner’s account. He didn’t want to, but he did—and the sickening feeling jarred a recollection from the crevices of his memory. The night before the battle, he had seen Will Lacey. They had huddled together in the rain and shared a smoke, trying to keep warm and talking of what the morning would bring, not knowing it was the last time they would ever see each other. At the end, Will had given him a letter, a common practice among soldiers before a battle. No doubt someone had sent his mother the letter Alec had written for her in the event of his death. But Will’s letter…With unnerving clarity, he remembered taking it and promising to see to it. Of course he hadn’t been able to, but that letter…that letter might still be in his things.
