Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress by Louise Allen Page B

Major Ross Brandon when they parted company in Falmouth.

Chapter Six
    R oss leaned on the port rail of the Falmouth Rose and stared at Pendennis Castle in the early morning haze. At the shoreline the gun emplacements and Henry VIII’s old battery were all still manned, all still flying the Union flag. It would be a while before the commander of the castle felt confident enough that the peace would hold and he could pull back his men.
    He was trying to find some sense of his feelings about this homecoming, but the sight of familiar shores from an unfamiliar angle was not much help. They had sailed into the Carrick Roads at dawn on the fifth day after leaving Bordeaux and he had been up to see it, to watch the steep, gorse-covered slopes of St Anthony Head slip past before the captain dropped anchor to wait for a pilot and the harbourmaster’s gig to come out to clear them to enter harbour.
    It had not been any nostalgia that had driven him on deck, but the now-familiar discomfort of waking up next to Meg’s warm, slumbering body. She appeared to have no trouble sleeping in the same bunk, once she hadrecovered from her awkwardness over that embrace. That kiss. He wanted her and yet he wanted her gone. So you can wallow in your own misery again, he sneered at himself.
    ‘Coffee, Major?’ It was Johnny, bright as a button, grinning his gap-toothed smile.
    ‘Aye. Then take coffee and some hot water down to Mrs Brandon. Here,’ he added as the lad turned away, ‘I’ll pay you now.’ He counted out the three pence a day he had promised, then added a shilling on impulse.
    ‘Cor! A whole borde! Thank you, Major!’ Johnny thrust the mug into his hands and was away, not risking Ross changing his mind over the munificent tip.
    Ross was still brooding when the anchor was raised and sail set again.
    ‘Home!’ Meg said beside him. She came to lean her elbows on the rail, her mug clasped between her hands. There was a cool breeze, without the heat of the sun in it yet. ‘Are you glad to see Falmouth?’
    ‘I’ve never seen it from the sea before.’ Ross avoided a direct answer. ‘When I left England I sailed from Portsmouth.’ Without any intention to confide he found the words spilling out of him. ‘I was terrified, but I was damned if I was going to show it. You should have seen me.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conjure up the boy he had been. ‘A lanky seventeen year old with his hair in his eyes, feet I still had to grow into and filled with the terrible triumph of thwarting my father and all his plans for me.’ And guilt. But he was not going to talk about the guilt that rode him still.
    ‘So how did you get a commission? And you must have been so upset at leaving your mother, at least.’
    ‘I had no commission, not then. But I was in the Rifle Brigade, a private, and that was all that mattered to me, even though I was as wet behind the ears as they come. It wasn’t until we were well out to sea and I’d finished casting my accounts up over the side that it occurred to me that my mother would worry.’ God, but he’d been thoughtless—or perhaps, just a typical boy—but he’d salved his conscience with the thought that he’d written to his godfather and told him what he was doing.
    Of course, it did dawn on him after a few weeks that he had landed Sir George Pierce with the unenviable task of dealing with his parents. ‘My godfather got my letter, broke the news.’And, mercifully at the time, kept it from him just how anguished his mother had been. It had not been until she died and her last letter had reached him that he realised what he had done to her peace of mind and her health. It was his first lesson that he could kill at a distance of several hundred miles without needing any weapon, as well as face to face with his finger on the trigger.
    ‘And when I was eighteen, when he discovered that I hadn’t managed to get killed or flogged, my godfather bought me a commission.’