A Christmas Garland Read Online Free PDF Page B

suddenly and radiantly. It took away all the weariness and showed that she was indeed probably no more than thirty at the most, and pretty.
    “Thank you, Lieutenant.” She accepted, making a move to put the child down so she could unhook the bag and pass it to him, but he eased it off her shoulder and took it without her needing to. Its weight startled him. No wonder she had moved so slowly. The strings of the bag must have hurt her.
    They started to walk again, still fairly slowly.
    “You are new here,” she observed, looking straight ahead of her. The child in her arms looked to be less than two, probably well able to walk, but not far or fast. It regarded him solemnly with long-lashed eyes of golden brown. Its hair was curly, and long enough for Narraway to be uncertain if it was a boy or a girl.
    “Does it show so much?” he asked, referring to her observation of his newness. “Or do you know everybody?”
    “I know most everybody,” she replied. “Of course,people come and go a lot, just at the moment.” She made a sad little grimace. “But you look a bit paler, as if you weren’t here during the heat.” Then she blushed at her lack of tact in having made so personal an observation. “I’m sorry.”
    “No reason to apologize,” he replied. “I never thought of that. I suppose I stick out like a row of sore thumbs.”
    She laughed at the image of such a thing. “Next time I see you in the parade ground, I shall think of a row of sore thumbs,” she said cheerfully. “That will be a new insult for the sergeant major to think of. Except I see you’re a lieutenant. I don’t suppose you do a lot of marching around to orders.”
    “Not in the way you mean,” he replied. “Although I feel rather a lot as if I’m marching round and round, to orders, and accomplishing nothing.”
    She looked at him curiously. “A lot of army life is like that. At least my husband always used to say so.”
    He heard the past tense in her speech and saw the moment of pain, the tightening of her arms around the child. There did not seem to be anything he could say that would help, so he walked beside her in silence for twenty or thirty yards. Then a hideous thought occurredto him. Had her husband been among the soldiers of the patrol that Dhuleep Singh’s betrayal had killed? Suddenly, intensely, he realized that he could not afford to know the answer. He could not tell her who he was, and he was ashamed of that. It was a new and much harder bite into the soft flesh of his self-belief. How horribly lonely he was going to be after he had stood up to defend John Tallis, never mind that he had been ordered to do it, and that they could not hang Tallis until justice had been formally satisfied.
    He had been trying to frame a few questions to ask her about Tallis, anything that might allow him to learn a little background. Now the words froze on his tongue. The strings of the bag were cutting into his hands. He wondered what was inside it. No doubt fruit, vegetables, rice, food for herself and the child. Would she marry again one day and have more children, or was this one going to grow up alone?
    He wanted to speak with her. It seemed cold to walk side by side and say nothing, but consciousness of what the next couple of days would bring, and how differently she would see him, kept him silent. How long would it take him to live it down? The man who tried to defendJohn Tallis. Is that who he would remain to the people here?
    She stopped at a gateway outside a house exactly like all the others, at least from the outside.
    “Thank you,” she said with a shy smile. She bent and put the child down. It stood uncertainly on its feet before gaining its balance, then sat down suddenly.
    “I’ll carry the bag as far as the steps for you,” Narraway replied. “Then you can carry him.” He gestured toward the child, who was making an unsuccessful attempt to stand again.
    “Her,” she corrected him. “Thank you.” She bent and