Leonora pulled free. She did not run to Raff. She stood between them, shaking, and looked from the tattoo to her father's emptied face.
"What is it?" she asked. "What have you done?"
Sir Ridley closed his eyes. When he opened them he looked older by a decade.
"I kept a promise," he said. "And then I forgot I had made it. Get up, Harrow. For God's sake—get up."
IV.
Raff stood. Gravel clung to his trousers and to the cut in his palm. He did not brush himself down. He held his torn sleeve shut with his other hand as if modesty, not pride, required it, though Leonora suspected it was neither—only the habit of a man who had learned not to offer his body as a spectacle.
Sir Ridley looked at the house, at the chaise, at his daughter, and seemed to find no safe place for his gaze. At last he said, "Inside. Both of you. The small parlour. Not the library. The library has too many windows on the park."
Leonora almost laughed, and the almost-laugh hurt. "Are we to be a secret already? You have just performed us for the yard."
"The yard will be told the boy was accused of theft and cleared," Sir Ridley said. "Deane will say what he is told to say. Come."
They went in by the side door, past the smell of the kitchens and Mrs. Glynn's startled face, into the small parlour that faced the knot garden. The room was seldom used: faded green silk on the walls, a spinet no one played, chairs that remembered better conversations. Sir Ridley shut the door and put his back against it as if the wood might help him think.
"Show me the mark again," he said.
Raff hesitated, then drew up the torn sleeve. The crown sat quiet on his skin. Up close Leonora saw the work was not fine—needle and soot, or whatever soldiers used when ink was a memory and not a shop. The two strokes beneath the circlet were slightly uneven, as if done by a hand that shook or by a hand that had lost fingers.
Sir Ridley made a sound that was not quite a word. He crossed the room and stopped short of reaching out. His own right hand flexed once, as if it remembered being trapped.
"Corunna," he said. "January. Eighteen hundred and nine. The retreat. Do you know the word, Leonora? Of course you do not. We do not put retreats into girls' geographies. We put victories."
"I know Corunna," Leonora said. "I know men died on the road. I know Sir John Moore was buried on the ramparts. I am not a vase."
Something like respect flickered and died in her father's face. "Your mother would have said the same. God rest her. Listen, then. I was a captain of light dragoons—young, sure, and stupid in the particular way of men who have not yet been broken. My horse went down in a defile above the town. The animal's weight pinned my leg. The French were coming on through the mist. I could hear them. I could smell them. I could not move."
He stopped. The parlour clock ticked as if nothing of consequence were being said in Hampshire.
"A private cut the girths and hauled me free," Sir Ridley went on. "He got me onto another mount. He took a cut across the hand that cost him fingers later. He stayed with me through the embarkation when he might have seen to himself. His name was Mathias Harrow. That night, on the transport, with the surgeon binding what was left of his hand, Mathias made me swear—before the surgeon and Lieutenant Crowle, who is dead now at Waterloo—that if ever I saw the mark he wore, the crown with the blades beneath, I would know it for his claim on my life. He put the same mark on himself years before, he said, after a different scrape. A brotherhood of fools who thought ink could hold honour in place. He said if he had a son, the boy would wear it, and the debt would travel. I swore. I meant it. Then I came home to my acres and my sessions and my daughter, and I let the war become a story I did not tell."