He reached for his canes.
“I spent a year with my husband in proximity to his regiment,” she told him. “I heard a thing or two that ladies are not supposed to hear. Officers have voices that must carry on a battlefield. Unfortunately, they also carry when they are not on a battlefield. I am not a green girl, Sir Benedict, and I must admit, with some reluctance, that I admire your courage in coming here to speak to me face-to-face. I did not expect it. I take it Lady Gramley did not really feel any burning need to stroll on the terrace with poor Matilda? I believe she ate only one biscuit.”
“I was afraid,” he said, “that if I blurted out my apology in your sister-in-law’s hearing, I might compound my offense by informing her of something she does not know about.”
“Good gracious, you are absolutely right,” she said. “Matilda would have an apoplexy if she discovered I had been beyond the walls of the park without an escort—or even with one.”
“You will forgive me?” he asked her.
“I swore I never would.” Her eyes moved to his canes. “Is it hard for you to ride?”
“Yes,” he said. “But that very fact makes the lure of doing so irresistible. That hedge was the first obstacle I had jumped since … Well, since my great fall more than six years ago. I was inclined to think afterward, in light of what happened and what almost happened, that it would also be my last. But I have decided it will not be. The next time I shall choose a higher obstacle, but I will be sure to approach it with a tallyho! on my lips.”
“You were not born this way, then?” she asked him. “There was an accident?”
“It was called war,” he told her.
Her eyes came back to his, and a frown creased her brow for a moment.
“Well, at least,” she said, “your injuries, though severe, were confined to your legs. Unlike my husband’s.”
He pursed his lips but did not answer.
The dog lumbered to his feet suddenly, crossed the distance to his mistress, set his chin on her lap, and gazed up at her. She patted his head and then smoothed her hand over it while he closed his eyes in ecstasy.
“That was insensitive of me, I suppose,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “Were your injuries confined to your legs?”
A bullet below the shoulder, not so very far from the heart. A broken collarbone. Several broken or cracked ribs. A broken arm. Cuts and bruises in too many places to name. No significant head injuries, the only miracle associated with that particular incident.
“No.”
She looked at him as though she expected him to enumerate all his hurts.
“Those of us who were wounded in the wars are not in competition with each other to discover who suffered most,” he told her. “And there are many ways to suffer. I have a friend who led his men into a number of desperate battles and emerged each time without a scratch. He led a successful Forlorn Hope in Spain and survived unscathed, though most of his men were killed. He was lauded by generals and awarded a title by the Prince of Wales. Then he went out of his mind and was brought back to England in a straitjacket. It took him several years to recuperate to the point where he could resume something resembling a normal life. I have another friend who was both blinded and deafened in his very first battle at the age of seventeen. He was raving mad when he was brought back home. His hearing came back after a while, but his sight did not and never will. It took him a number of years to put himself back together so that he could live his life rather than merely endure what is left of it until death takes him. It is never easy, ma’am, to decide which wounds are more severe than others.”
She had lowered her gaze again while he spoke. She pulled on the dog’s ears and then rested her forehead briefly against the top of his head. But she got abruptly to her feet when Ben had finished speaking and turned away to take a few steps closer to the window.
“I am so tired,” she said in a voice that vibrated with some strong emotion. She stopped abruptly and started again. “I am mortally weary of war and wounds and suffering and death. I want to live. I want to … to dance.” She tipped her head back. He suspected that her eyes were tightly closed. Then she laughed softly. “I want to dance. Only four months after my husband’s death. Could I possibly be more frivolous? Less sensitive? More lost to all decent conduct?”
He looked at her in some surprise. “Has anyone accused you of those things?” he asked her.
She lifted her head and turned to look at him over her shoulder. “Would not everyone?” she asked in her turn. “You are not married, Sir Benedict?”
“No.”
“If you had been and you had died,” she said, “would you have been shocked if your widow had wanted to dance three months later?”
“I suppose,” he said, lifting one finger to rub along the side of his nose, “at that point it would not have mattered much to me, ma’am, what she did. Or at all, in fact.”
She smiled at him unexpectedly and was suddenly transformed into a woman of vivid prettiness. And she must be, he thought, even younger than he had supposed when he walked into the room earlier—and decades younger than he had thought her when they first met.
“But even before my death,” he added, “I would have wanted to know that she would live again after I was gone, smile and laugh again, dance again if she so desired. I suppose that, being human, I would have liked to think that she would grieve for a while too, but not indefinitely. But could she not have remembered me fondly while she smiled and laughed and danced?”