The Mercenary Major Read Online Free PDF

sergeant to tell her ladyship whatever tales you want her to hear.”
    Jack eyed his friend. If anything could convince Lady Letitia that he had no place in the ton , it would be the stories these two men could tell. “Torres Vedras? Madrid?” he asked, naming the worst episodes.
    Gilling nodded, his face grim. “As you wish, Major.” He patted the chair.
    Jack stepped forward and seated himself. Before he could say another word, his face and neck were swathed in hot cloths. He closed his eyes.
    “You know, sir,” said Gilling. Jack heard the clink of the brush against the bowl as Gilling whipped up the lather. “Torres Vedras, Madrid, not all you did for that black-eyed Spanish witch will change her ladyship’s opinion of you one jot.”
     

**** 4 ****
    V ictoria Carr stepped into her father’s library and shut the door quietly. Late-September sun, low in the sky, slanted its last rays through the west windows across a faded Aubusson carpet, peculiarly worn in a narrow path. The last time , she said to herself as she walked that stretch. She stopped in front of a half-moon table topped with a blue-and-white vase of Michaelmas daisies and sprays of goldenrod, the only color in the room. Taking a deep breath, she looked up.
    Above her on the wall was a portrait of a lovely young woman, just Victoria’s age. The woman in the portrait was dressed in billowing white satin, a blue sash tied below her breasts. A straw bonnet trimmed in the same cornflower-blue dangled by its ribbons from her clasped hands. A basket over her arm held a profusion of cut roses. Her light-golden hair was drawn up in a knot of curls, and soft curls framed her delicately tinted cheeks. Her gentle eyes were as blue as the skies behind her. She seemed everything sweet and soft that a woman could be.
    At thirty-one, after a quarrel with her husband, the woman in the picture had gone to the stables, taken his most mettlesome mount, and ridden to her death.
    Victoria looked down, as dissatisfied as ever with the portrait of her mother that explained nothing. The skirts of her new muslin day dress caught and held her gaze. The color, a deep-red like the bryony and hawthorn berries in the lane, had decided her on the purchase. She would never again wear black or gray or lavender. And never blue.
    She returned her gaze to the portrait and straightened her shoulders. Not for her that languorous curving posture. Not for her the soft curls framing the face or brushing an alabaster shoulder. Victoria touched the loose coil of hair at the back of her head. Her hair was more brown than Anne Carr’s had been, but it was the smooth style she’d adopted that really set her apart from her mother. If there was nothing to be done about the shape of her eyes, or the high wide cheekbones, or the dent in her chin that still proclaimed an overwhelming resemblance to Anne Carr, Victoria had done her best to look different.
    She turned her back on the portrait and stared at the clock on the mantel, which clicked, cutting off each minute with unhurried mechanical precision. Victoria schooled herself to patience. What were a few minutes now? Within the hour she would be gone. London beckoned. She closed her eyes, picturing the gay whirl of dancers in a grand ballroom.
    Then she heard her father’s footsteps on the stair, heard him pause to greet Evans in the entry and collect the day’s post, heard him put his hand to the knob of the library door. He entered, his incongruously white head bent, his eyes scanning the newspaper in his left hand, in his right a single yellow rose. On his sleeve was a mourning band faded nearly the gray of his coat. He reached the table under the painting and stopped. Without looking up, he raised the rose to his lips briefly and laid it on the polished wood. Only then did he lift his gaze from the paper.
    “Tory, I didn’t see you.” His glance strayed to the portrait, completing the salute he’d begun with the rose, and then came