Slightly Married Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes. The dog growled halfheartedly as their hands touched. Aidan turned and strode away down the driveway, past the children and their governess. At last he could begin to enjoy his leave.
    But perhaps he would always have the niggling feeling that he had not quite fulfilled his vow. Captain Morris had been so very urgent in his request.
    Promise me you will protect her. Promise me! No matter what!
    He must surely have had
something
in mind.
             
    W ILLIAM A NDREWS, A IDAN ' S BATMAN, HAD BEEN with him for eight years. Through all the hardships and miseries of numerous campaigns, including the tedious advances and retreats that had made up the Peninsular Wars—rain and mud, snow and cold, sun and heat, flea-infested inns, insalubrious open-air bivouacs—through it all he had never been ill a day. Now, back in temperate England, back in the lap of luxury, so to speak, he had caught a head cold.
    When Aidan returned to the Three Feathers and summoned him to pack his bags and make arrangements to have his horse ready for travel within the hour, Andrews appeared with a red beacon of a nose, drooping eyelids, watery eyes, a nasal voice that growled somewhere low in the bass register, dragging footsteps, and a martyr's air.
    “What the devil ails you?” Aidan asked him.
    “I have a slight cold in by dose, sir,” he explained. He sniffed pathetically, then sneezed and apologized. “What bay I do for you, sir?”
    Aidan scowled, swore eloquently, and sent his man off to bed, with strict orders that he was to dose himself with something to sweat the fever out of him and not get out of bed again before morning. Although Andrews looked at him with feeble reproach and opened his mouth to protest, he thought better of arguing and shuffled mournfully off, sneezing and apologizing again before he closed the door behind him.
    And now what the devil was he supposed to do with himself? Aidan wondered. It was scarcely noon and the whole of the rest of the day yawned emptily before him. Sit in the taproom fraternizing with the locals? Explore the spacious metropolis of Heybridge? Take a brisk walk along the village street and back? That might kill ten minutes. Go for a long ride up one country lane and down another? Lie on his bed making pictures out of the stains on the ceiling?
    He was hungry, he realized suddenly. It was five hours since he had had his breakfast, and he had refused the offer of refreshments at Ringwood Manor. The taproom and dining room were all one at the Three Feathers. There was no such thing as a private dining room. He went downstairs, ordered a steak-and-kidney pie with a tankard of ale, and struck up a conversation with the innkeeper and a group of his local patrons. Anything to pass an hour or three without expiring of boredom.
    The main item of news with which the whole village was buzzing, not surprisingly, was the death of Percival Morris. They all knew that Aidan had brought the news and probed for more information without ever being impertinent enough to ask a direct question of such a grand gentleman. They had a curious way of asking the questions of one another or the empty air and then pausing for him to answer.
    “I wonder exactly 'ow young Mr. Percival died,” one of them asked of the pipe smoke above his head.
    “I wonder what them big battles against the Froggies are like,” another mused into the ale in his tankard.
    “You all knew Captain Morris?” Aidan asked after he had satisfied their curiosity by providing a few suitably gory details of the Battle of Toulouse.
    Ah, yes, indeed, they all had, though he had not been home for years.
    “Broke his father's heart, he did, running off like that to take the king's shilling,” one of them said, showing a woeful lack of understanding of how a man became a cavalry officer.
    A spirited discussion followed as to whether old man Morris had had a heart to break.
    “Look what 'e done to 'is own daughter, 'oo nursed 'im like a saint