Since the Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page B

Surely someone knows what became of her.”
    Her voice had become increasingly taut with her own fear. Her ears began to ring with his silence. The room was peculiarly still and close, both as a result of the skillfully sealed old building and the fact that Captain Eversea always seemed to use more than his share of air.
    She had the odd sense he was both watching her and listening to her, and he was taking in two very different sets of information with her, and he was taking in two very different sets of information with his eyes and ears.
    What do you see, Captain Eversea? Do I look as different—and as the same—to you as you do to me?
    “Lucy fell in with a crowd that included him,” she continued, as if the conversation actually consisted of two sides. “Or rather, she moved rather on the fringes of a crowd that included him. Wealthy, fast, not all of them…wholesome. This I discovered later.” She faltered on that last word. It had taken courage to say it to that steely face.
    “She…admired…him greatly, I know. She said something to me that led me to believe that he might know—”
    “‘Deuced’?” Chase said so suddenly and sharply she gave a start.
    “Did you say ‘deuced,’ Mrs. March? Next you’ll be smoking cigars and drinking brandy and throwing your legs up onto furniture and spitting.”
    “Surely not spitting.”
    A beat of silence.
    And then, oh so reluctantly, both corners of his mouth turned up and he was smiling. His entire dazzling, difficult self was in that smile. He looked twenty years younger than the thirty and then some he must have been, and her heart, the bloody traitor, did a hard flop in her chest, like a supplicant flinging itself at his feet. She’d once worked so hard to earn his smiles.
    And then she’d needed to learn to withstand them, the way one needed to learn to adjust to giddy altitudes.
    What an idiot she’d been once.
    Her jaw set, her spine straightened. She didn’t need or want his approval now. She needed his help.
    They both knew she didn’t deserve it.
    The light of the smile faded naturally, and he simply looked at her. She endured his not entirely dispassionate scrutiny, her chin up. He could look and look all he liked, but he wouldn’t find her—that girl who’d never dreamed that the unspoken role of the wife of a colonel was to be, in a way, all women to the men—mother, sister, lover—by proxy. The girl who’d been too young and far too busy merely surviving to develop her own very useful code to live by, the way Captain Eversea had. She’d fumbled her way through, utterly in the dark, and had finally lit her way by flinging charm indiscriminately and everywhere, like fairy dust. Astonishingly, the charm had both dazzled and camouflaged, and everyone was too blinded by infatuation—which she’d admittedly rather enjoyed—to notice she was frightened and out of her depth and often bored and resentful when she should have been grateful and gracious and all that was mature.
    No one had noticed, of course, except Captain Eversea. In the end, however, she’d inadvertently spun a trap out of her own charm.
    For herself and for Captain Eversea.
    “You do still consider Kinkade a friend, Captain Eversea?”
    “Of course. I’ll see him tonight at Lord Callender’s do. But why on earth do you think Kinkade had anything to do with it?” He’d come to some conclusion in that moment of studying her. His tone established distance: it was cool and inquisitional. She refused to panic. “Because he works in the Home Office, and he would be able to see and review the petitions for freedom for condemned felons. And though Lucy has not yet been tried, he’s intimately acquainted with the people who work for the prison, with the Charleys, with the magistrates. Surely he can help discover what became of her. She has high social aspirations—Lucy does
    —and I fear they were encouraged because she is pretty and flighty and it amused these people to