Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (48 page)

“Oh, well…” he said. “I liked you.”

WHATEVER PAPA AND JOHN
Cinnamon were doing, they were taking the devil of a long time about it. After a few minutes, during which Trevor yowled unceasingly, Amaranthus had made her excuses and withdrawn to the house in search of clean clouts.

Without occupation or acquaintance in town or camp, and reluctant to go into the house himself, William found himself at loose ends. The last thing he wanted was to encounter anyone he knew, in any case. He pulled the black slouch hat well down over his brow and forced himself to stroll, rather than stride, through the town toward camp. The place was full of private soldiers, sutlers, and support troops; it would be easy to escape notice.

“William!”

He stiffened at the shout, but smothered the momentary impulse to run. He recognized that voice—just as the owner of it had undoubtedly recognized his height and figure. He turned reluctantly to greet his uncle, the Duke of Pardloe, who had emerged from a house directly behind him.

“Hallo, Uncle Hal,” he said, with what grace he could muster. He supposed it didn’t matter; Lord John would tell his brother about William’s and John Cinnamon’s presence, in any case.

“What are you doing here?” his uncle inquired—mildly, for him. His sharp glance took in everything from William’s mud-caked boots to the stained rucksack on his shoulder and the worn cloak over his arm. “Come to enlist?”

“Haha,” William said coldly, but felt immediately better. “No. I came with a—friend, who had business in camp.”

“Seen your father?”

“Not really.” He didn’t elucidate, and after a thoughtful pause, Hal shook out his own gray military cloak and slung it over his shoulders.

“I’m going down to the river for a bit of air before supper. Come along?”

William shrugged. “Why not?”

They made their way out of the town and down from the bluffs without being accosted, and William felt the tightness between his shoulder blades ease. His uncle didn’t indulge in idle conversation, and didn’t mind silence in the least. They reached the edge of the narrow beach without exchanging a word, and made their way slowly through scrubby pines and yaupon bushes to the clean, solid sand of the tidal zone.

William placed his feet just so, enjoying making prints in the silty gray sand. The summer sky was vast and blue above them, a blazing yellow sun coming slowly down into the waves. They followed the curve of the beach, ending on a tiny spit of sandy gravel inhabited by a gang of orange-billed oystercatchers, who eyed them coldly and gave way with ill grace, turning their heads and glaring as they waddled sideways.

Here they stood for some minutes, looking out into the water.

“Do you miss England?” Hal asked abruptly.

“Sometimes,” William answered honestly. “But I don’t think about it much,” he added, with less honesty.

“I do.” His uncle’s face looked relaxed, almost wistful in the fading light. “But you haven’t a wife there, or children. No establishment of your own, yet.”

“No.”

The sounds of slaves working in the fields behind them were still audible, but muted by the rhythm of the surf at their feet, the passage of the silent clouds above their heads.

The trouble with silence was that it allowed the thoughts in his head to take on a tiresome insistence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room. Cinnamon’s company, disturbing as it occasionally was, had allowed him to escape them when he needed to.

“How does one go about renouncing a title?”

He hadn’t actually been intending to ask that just yet, and was surprised to hear the words emerge from his mouth. Uncle Hal, by contrast, didn’t seem surprised at all.

“You can’t.”

William glared down at his uncle, who was still looking imperturbably downriver toward the sea, the wind pulling strands of his dark hair from his queue.

“What do you mean, I can’t? Whose business is it whether I renounce my title or not?”

Uncle Hal looked at him with an affectionate impatience.

“I’m not speaking rhetorically, blockhead. I mean it literally. You can’t renounce a peerage. There’s no means set down in law or custom for doing it; ergo, it can’t be done.”

“But you—” William stopped, baffled.

“No, I didn’t,” his uncle said dryly. “If I could have at the time, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. The most I
could
do was to stop using the title of ‘Duke,’ and threaten to physically maim anyone who used it in reference or address to me. It took me several years to make it clear that I meant that,” he added offhandedly.

“Really?” William asked cynically. “Who did you maim?”

He actually
had
supposed his uncle to be speaking rhetorically, and was taken aback when the once and present duke furrowed his brow in the effort of recall.

“Oh…several scribblers—they’re like roaches, you know; crush one and the others all rush off into the shadows, but by the time you turn round, there are throngs of them back again, happily feasting on your carcass and spreading filth over your life.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words, Uncle?”

“Yes,” his uncle said briefly. “But beyond punching a few journalists, I called out George Mumford—he’s the Marquess of Clermont now, but he wasn’t then—Herbert Villiers, Viscount Brunton, and a gentleman named Radcliffe. Oh, and a Colonel Phillips, of the Thirty-fourth—cousin to Earl Wallenberg.”

“Duels, do you mean? And did you fight them all?”

“Certainly. Well—not Villiers, because he caught a chill on the liver and died before I could, but otherwise…but that’s beside the point.” Hal caught himself and shook his head to clear it. Evening was coming on, and the onshore breeze was brisk. He wrapped his cloak about his body and nodded toward the town.

“Let’s go. The tide’s coming in and I’m dining with General Prévost in half an hour.”

They made their way slowly through the twilight, the rough marram grass rasping at their boots.

“Besides,” his uncle went on, head down against the wind, “I had another title—one without taint. Refusing to use the Pardloe title meant I also refused to use the income from the title’s estates, but it meant almost nothing in terms of my daily life, bar a bit of eye-rolling from society. My friends largely remained my friends, I was received in most of the places I was accustomed to go, and—the important point—I continued doing what I intended to do: raise and command a regiment. You—” He glanced at William, running an appraising eye over him from slouch hat to clodhopper boots.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, William—it might be easier to ask what it is you want to do, rather than asking how not to do what you don’t.”

William stopped, closed his eyes, and just stood, listening to the water for a few moments of blessed relief from the tick-tock thoughts. Absolutely nothing was happening inside his head.

“Right,” he said at last, taking a deep breath and opening his eyes. “Were you born knowing that’s what you wanted to do?” he asked curiously.

“I suppose so,” his uncle answered slowly, beginning to walk again. “I can’t recall ever thinking of being anything save a soldier. As to
wanting
it, though…I don’t think that question ever occurred to me.”

“Exactly,” said William, with a certain dryness. “You were born into a family where that’s what the oldest son did, and that happened to suit you. I was raised believing that my sacred duty was to care for my lands and tenants, and it never occurred to me for an instant that what I wanted came into it—no more than it did to you.

“The fact remains,” he went on, taking off his hat and tucking it under his arm to keep it from being carried away by the wind, “that I don’t feel entitled—as it were—to
any
of the titles I was supposedly born to….Besides—” A thought struck him, and he gave his uncle a narrow look.

“You said you didn’t accept the dukedom’s income. I don’t suppose you also neglected the care of the estates you weren’t profiting from?”

“Of course n—” Hal broke off and gave William a look in which annoyance was tempered by a certain respect. “Who taught you to think, boy? Your father?”

“I imagine Lord John may have had some small influence,” William said politely. His insides had turned over—as they did with monotonous regularity recently—at mention of his erstwhile father. He couldn’t forget the look of fearful eagerness in John Cinnamon’s eyes…oh, bloody hell, of course he could forget. It was a matter of will, that’s all. He shoved it aside, the next best thing.

“But you didn’t in fact renounce your responsibilities, even though you wouldn’t profit by them. You’re telling me, though, that you couldn’t have done so. There are
no
circumstances in which a peer can stop being a peer?”

“Well, not at his own whim, no. Mind you, a peerage is the gift of a grateful monarch. A monarch who ceases to be grateful can indeed strip a peer of his titles, though I doubt any monarch could do so without support from the House of Lords. Peers don’t like to feel threatened—it so seldom happens to any of them these days, they’re not used to it,” he added sardonically.

“Even so—it isn’t a matter of kingly whim, either. Grounds for revoking a peerage are rather limited, I believe. The only one that comes to mind is engaging in a rebellion against the Crown.”

“You don’t say.”

William had spoken lightly—or meant to—but Hal stopped and turned a piercing look on his nephew.

“If you consider treason and the betrayal of your King, your country, and your family a suitable means of solving your personal difficulties, William, then perhaps John hasn’t taught you as well as I supposed.”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and stumped off through the beds of rotting waterweed, leaving amorphous footprints in the sand.

WILLIAM STAYED BY
the shore for some little while. Not thinking. Not feeling much of anything, either. Just watching the currents move through the river, washing out his tired brain. A squadron of brown pelicans with white heads came floating down the sky, keeping formation as they skimmed two feet above the surface of the water. Evidently seeing nothing interesting, they rose again as one and sailed back over the marshes toward the open sea.

No wonder that people run away to sea,
he thought, with a small sense of longing. To slough off the small cares of daily life and escape the demands of a life unwanted. Nothing but miles of boundless water, boundless sky.

And bad food, seasickness, and the chance of being killed at any moment by pirates, rogue whales, or, much more likely, the weather.

The thought of rogue whales made him laugh and the thought of food, bad or not, reminded him that he was starving. Turning to go, he discovered that while he had stood there vegetating, a large bull alligator had crawled out of the shrubbery behind him and was reposing about four feet away. He shrieked, and the reptile, startled and indignant, opened a horrifying set of jaws and made a noise between a growl and an enormous belch.

He had no idea exactly how he’d done it, but when he stopped, panting and drenched with sweat, he was in the middle of the army camp. Heart still pounding, he made his way through the neat aisles of tents, feeling once more safe amid the normal noises of a camp settling toward supper, the air thick with the smells of wood fire, hot earth from the camp kitchens, grilling meat, and simmering stew.

He was ravenous by the time he reached Papa’s house, though at this time of summer, it would be broad daylight for another hour at least. He assumed that Trevor would be abed, sunlight notwithstanding, and so walked as quietly as he could, using the damp grass beside the brick walk.

As Trevor—and necessarily Trevor’s mother—was in his mind, he glanced round the side of the house and discovered that the bench in the grape arbor was occupied, all right, but not by Amaranthus, with or without baby attached.

“Guillaume!”
John Cinnamon spotted him and erupted from the leafy bower with such force as to scatter leaves and stray grapes across the gravel.

“John! How did it go?” He could see Cinnamon’s broad face, shining with joy, and his inner organs shriveled. Had Papa accepted John Cinnamon as his son?