The Courtship Read Online Free Page A

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