The Captain's Return

Hal found it necessary to set his teeth against unwise utterance. He tried for a calmer note. “Annabel—”

She cut him short again. “Mrs Lett to you, sir.”

“Oh, the devil!” he snapped, exasperated. “I am supposed to be your husband.”

“Not by any will of mine.”

“That I concede.”

Annabel put a hand to her forehead, kneading it painfully. This could not be happening. If only she could think straight! She felt as if she had lost command of both her reason and her tongue. She did not want to bandy words with him. She wanted to fly across the intervening grass and batter at him with her fists! How dared he come here like this? How dared he presume so far? He, whose perfidy had brought her to this pass.

“I cannot talk to you,” she managed, her hand falling to her side. “There is too much confusion—too much pain.”

Hal watched her move unsteadily to the bench and sink down upon it. Compunction seized him. What had he done? Blundering in upon an ill-considered impulse. Devil take it, Ned had been right! He had taken an extreme measure that suited his own conscience, without thought to what distress it might cause at the other end.

Yet one thing spurred him. The short glimpse of that Annabel of his memories. She lay dormant, perhaps, but she was there. She had survived!

He dared to approach within a couple of paces of the figure that sat with bowed head, one hand pressed below her breast where an agitated motion was visible.

“Annabel.”

Her eyes opened, and she looked up at him. Her eyes were dim with incomprehension. Her voice was an anguished whisper.

“How could you serve me so?”

Hal shifted his big shoulders uncomfortably. “I acted without thinking it through. I thought you would refuse even to see me, let alone allow me to make reparation.”

The expression in her eyes became bleaker still. “Reparation. Is that what you came for?”

He dropped back a pace. “I came to take on responsibility for my actions. It is what I would have done a long time ago, as you must very well know.”

Annabel’s confusion deepened. “Must I? I have lived three years and more without knowing it!”

Hal stared at her for a moment, more puzzled than angry. “Oh, this must be to punish me. You cannot accuse me of deserting you, Annabel. It was you who vanished without trace. My regiment was posted away, it’s true, but—”

She thrust a hand up to stop him. “Pray do not make me any pretence of this kind. It is more than I can endure.”

He frowned deeply. But the solution leaped to the eye. “I see your father’s hand in this.”

At that she flared again. “Don’t dare speak hardly of my father! He has done more for me than you would have done.”

“Sending you here? What sort of a life is this?” He waved an impatient hand. “But let that pass. You wrong me, Annabel. I see what it is. Even in this extremity, your father would not unbend from that haughty arrogance that first parted us.”

Annabel got up abruptly. “It was not my father who took me in the summerhouse that night!”

Hal’s hot temper flared. “You need not taunt me! Do you suppose I have not suffered agonies of remorse? Do you think I have not tried by every means in my power to make amends? Devil take it, Annabel! Have I no honour in your eyes?”

“Is it honour then that has brought you here today?”

She strode restlessly away across the grass, moving in a jerky fashion that spoke clearly the agitation of her spirits. In movement and in voice, she resembled more and more the woman of Hal’s remembrance. But her words pricked him.

“It is precisely that! I wronged you, and I have wanted ever since to right you in the eyes of the world.”

Annabel turned on him. “Indeed? And so you have chosen to do so by ensuring that I live with you in sin!”

Hal’s indignation deserted him. This aspect of the matter had not occurred to him. He lifted his fingers and smoothed at his moustache.

It was a characteristic gesture, and a shaft of affectionate memory gave Annabel a sensation as of melting. Just so had he always stood, caressing the short red hairs, whenever he had been disconcerted.

“Well, no one knows that,” he said, recovering. “And once we are truly married—”

“How?” struck in Annabel. “When we are thought to be already married?”

He worked on his moustache for a moment or two in silence. Then he flung up a hand in a hopeless gesture.

“I had not thought of all this. You will think me a fool, I suppose. But the truth is that when I heard of your predicament, I acted instantly upon the knowledge with no thought for the consequences.”

Yes, it had been ever his way, she remembered. Then the substance of his remarks penetrated. “How did you hear of it? Did you go to my father? No, he would not have told you!”

Hal pounced. “Aha, you see! I knew he had thwarted me.”

But Annabel’s gaze was accusing. “How did you know?”

“I set a man to find you. He was here for some days not long since. He discovered not only your whereabouts, but your circumstances too. He thought you were a widow, but I remembered that Lett was your mother’s name, and I knew it wasn’t so. That is why I came.”

But the realisation that Captain Colton had spied upon her was the crowning insult. Her voice shook.

“You took too much upon yourself, sir. You think you have out-jockeyed me, but you are mistaken. A man may be seen to return from the dead, I grant you. But he may equally be seen to be recalled to his regiment! And that, Captain Lett, is precisely what is going to happen.”

With which, she turned on her heel and left him flat, heading for the rear of the little cottage.

Sleep eluded Annabel, despite a deadness of sensation that consumed her body. It had been a fatiguing day. When she had escaped from Hal, she had found herself so plagued by conflicting emotions that she had run past Janet and her daughter in the kitchen, startling them both, and had fled upstairs to indulge in a hearty bout of weeping.

This had proved so efficacious that she had been able at length to descend again, determined to present Captain Colton with a list of distinct rulings by which he might remain for a short time in his usurped status. In this she had been immediately balked on discovering from Janet that Hal had departed with Mr Hartwell, who had apparently waited for him.

“Gone? He has gone—and without a word said?”

“He’ll be back, he said,” the maid had responded, adding in the curt way habitual to her, “It’s him, isn’t it?”

Annabel had sighed out the abrupt sensation of renewed shock that had attacked her, and had plonked down on the sofa. Rebecca had promptly climbed into her lap, and Annabel had received her automatically, her eyes on Janet’s thin-lipped disapproval.

“He’s calling himself Captain Lett.”

Janet had snorted. “And where are we to put him, ma’am, if I may make so bold?”

Annabel had flushed. “You need not set your imagination to work, Janet! You had best make up the truckle bed in the back room.”

The maid had sniffed. “If I can set aside the bits and bobs of your sewing tackle.”