Well, that’s because you can’t just go and casually leave the army during a war to drink and carouse with actresses on a whim, her father had said with bitterirony.Unlike university. Except with university, they don’t shoot you, more’s the pity, they send you home to be a burden to your father.
The colonel set to work.
He seemed inclined neither to flirt nor to fill up the silence with words, which is what most men would do when presented with a literally captive female audience.
Perhaps he knew his mere presence was profound enough to transcend the need for speech. A bit like a mountain.
Or maybe he just didn’t know what to say to her.
He was no prettier in very close proximity. The sunlight and shadow filtering down through the leaves made him look like some ageless, majestic beast lying in wait in the underbrush. But drama and mystery, even a certain allure, lurked in the crags and hollows of his face. His hair was streaked in a half dozen subtle colors, from brown to sun-bleached gold, like a lion’s mane, and dashed through here and there with threads of silver. His eyelashes were flaxen at the tips, like a little boy’s. She found this incongruously rather sweet.
“I heard a story about you, Colonel Brightwall.”
“Only one?” He sounded amused. He appeared to be struggling a bit with the knot.
“Something heroic to do with highwaymen. It involves you bashing them with a musket and tying them up.”
He smiled slightly. “Are you suggesting that if I’d been required tountiethem rather than tiethem, I’d likely still be there on the side of that road to this day?”
“I wouldneverimply such a thing,” she vowed, with faux wounded sincerity. “Take all the time you need with my little satin ribbon.”
It felt bold to tease him. She did it because she felt awe encroaching. Awe was a great inhibitor of conversation, and unlike Colonel Brightwall, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with silences.
Thankfully, he did smile again. But he didn’t take his eyes from the knot. “What if I told you that every heroic thing you’ve ever heard about me is both true and untrue?”
“I fear I would then be compelled to ask why you are speaking in riddles. Although I don’t mind riddles, on the whole.”
“What is perceived as heroism, Miss Bellamy, is often just some poor bloke doing their job.”
“Come, Colonel. Surely even you have heroes.”
She worried then that she’d been too bold, but he smiled at this, too, thankfully. “Oh, certainly I admire dozens of people for many reasons. I have the privilege of knowing a number of truly great men. But I’ve learned that the moment we decide someone is a Hero or a Scoundrel or a Boor or what have you—imagine all those words writ with capital letters, like labels—we’ve a tendency to go blind to qualities that might contradict our assumptions, which can often be a grave tactical error. I’m suspicious of pedestals, on the whole. They just beg to be knocked over. And I’m disinclined to judge.”
Briefly she amused herself by imagining him crashing through a museum, swinging a musket at pedestals. But she was, in truth, enthralled at this peek into his mind. She’d heard it said that the few enormous, sometimes controversial, strategic risks he’d taken during the war—promoting talented men from the ranks, demoting other officers ahead of an important battle, for instance—had proved to be the best, and even obvious, choices when viewed after the fact. She knew from playing chess that strategy had its roots in an ability to critically assess every piece’s position on the board.
She thought of her charming, loving father, who found it so exhilarating to take wild chances with finances he’d consigned his family to a life lived on a perilous seesaw of uncertainty, and who was in danger now of needing to sell the ancient, unentailed family home lest they face penury. Her older brother, Theo, who had a quick wit, a quick temper, a tender, easily wounded heart, and a reckless streak of hedonism that got him thrown out of university. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, who was recovering only slowly from a long illness from which she’d nearly died, and not doing it that noble way so beloved of novel writers. She was instead peevish, bored, resentful, and jealous of everyone else’s good health. Alexandra didn’t blame her at all, but keeping the peace often meant coddling her and keeping her own effervescence tamped.
That was her job in the family, ever since hermother died. She restored peace. She was the smoother of feelings, the tonic for bitter arguments, the adroit manager of upheavals, the jollier out of dark moods. She was a confidante, a rescuer, a nurse, and a friend.
“It seems to me, however, that blindness to certain qualities might be beneficial to maintaining harmony among people.” She ventured this gingerly. “Provided harmony is what’s desired, of course.”
Brightwall paused in his ribbon ministrations to regard her. “Oh, certainly,” he said easily enough. “Perhaps. Particularly in families, I should imagine. But is that really blindness? Or is it forbearance?”
This seemed so startlingly close to the bone that she went abruptly silent.
“Well, it’s love, I should think,” she finally replied, somewhat awkwardly. “And loyalty.”
His smile was enigmatic and faint, as if her answer surprised him not at all.
She was unsettled by his astuteness. But perhaps she only felt that way because her family was what she loved best, and was therefore her greatest vulnerability.
“This is all just to say that no mere man is worthy of worship,” he concluded simply.
She wanted to return the conversation to its previous lightness. “Are any mere women worthy of worship?”
She met the dry look he cast her way with one of mischievous, utterly feigned innocence.
His little smile informed her he was far too wise to answer that question.