Love & Folly by Sheila Simonson

"Sarah is a sentimentalist. I assume..."
    Light dawned. Emily sat up straight, her eyes on his reflected face. "You assume Sarah has
badgered your mother into sending for you."
    He rubbed his forehead. "I may be wrong but I've no reason to think otherwise." His eyes were
dark with very old pain.
    She drew a deep breath. "You should go to her, Richard."
    "Very well. Robert's carriage is waiting at the Mitre." He looked up at her and spoke more
naturally. "He sent from London. The duchess is at his town house, it seems. I'll leave at noon. I might as
well take Dyott with me."
    "What of the copying?"
    "Dyott wants to leave us. The election, I daresay."
    "Oh Richard, not the election. He is brooding over the younger ladies at Brecon and
their resident Poet. He has forgot the election." She was relieved when Richard's mouth quirked in a
smile.
    He came to her and touched her nape, rubbing the warm skin. "I'm glad you see these things,
Emily. I don't." He kissed her cheek. "Come to bed. It's very late."
    * * * *
    The carriage jounced over a frozen rut and Johnny's death grip on the strap tightened.
    "Hurt?" Colonel Falk leaned forward and flipped the travelling rug back over Johnny's
outstretched legs.
    "It's bearable." Johnny's breath came in a gasp of steam. The air was icy. He was sitting sidewise
on the well-padded seat with both legs across it. Though the position was more comfortable than facing
forward with bent knees, it rendered every jolt perilous. He felt he might roll off onto the floor at any
moment, his leg hurt abominably, and his arm ached from gripping the strap. The motion of the carriage
was beginning to make him queasy.
    "Shall I direct the coachman to drive slower?"
    "No, thank you, sir." Johnny swiped at his damp brow with his free hand.
    Colonel Falk leaned back against the squabs and resumed his frowning contemplation of the frigid
landscape. He had been silent for the most part since their journey began, and if his mother were ill it was
no wonder.
    Nevertheless Johnny felt impelled to apologise. "I'm sorry to leave you with so much copying
undone, sir."
    Falk shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
    "Shall you include a map of the action before Maastricht?" The carriage heaved. Johnny grabbed
for the strap.
    "I may chuck the whole thing."
    Johnny stared but Colonel Falk was still looking out the window. "After all that work?"
    Falk turned with apparent reluctance. "No amount of labour is going to redeem the book, Dyott.
It's rubbish."
    "You keep saying that. I don't see it. I've read far worse."
    Perversely, the direct contradiction seemed to cheer Falk. "That's hardly a commendation. You're
right, though. I exaggerate. It's a clear enough account with no particular merit other than clarity. I've come
close to publishing work I was ashamed of before, but this is the first time I've hated what I was writing
whilst I was writing it." He pulled the flaps of his greatcoat over his knees and regarded Johnny with
quizzical hazel eyes. "Tom said you were with his company."
    The change of subject startled Johnny. "Er, only for a sixmonth. I kept falling ill." In the
Peninsula, Johnny had succumbed to ague, dysentery, boils, ague, pleurisy, and ague, in that order. He had
passed the Vittoria campaign groaning in the baggage train.
    "You must have joined after Tom exchanged from the Rifles or I'd remember you."
    "It was 1813."
    "If you were in the field half a year you know how to value military glory."
    "I beg your pardon?"
    "It's a load of misery and a pack of lies," Falk said with the air of a dominie who has a slow scholar
on his hands. "History compounds the lies."
    Johnny felt as if he were being tossed in a blanket. Surely Falk understood glory? He was a hero of
Waterloo.
    "Historians are liars?"
    Falk smiled. "All writers are liars. Historians just don't admit it."
    Johnny brooded. The coach swayed. When Colonel Falk continued to regard him quizzically,
Johnny muttered, "I don't agree. The truth exists and a writer