Chapter One

June 1816, Sussex

Home. It had been a word without much meaning, but today, with his village en fete for his friend’s wedding, the contact, the bone-deep belonging, was like a cannonball for Major George Hawkinville—one slamming into earth far too close and knocking the wind out of him.

Following Van and Maria out of the church into the midst of the bouncing, cheering crowd, he felt almost dazed by the familiar—the ancient green ringed by buildings new and old, the row of ramshackle cottages down by the river, the walled and thatched house at the end of the row…

Hawkinville Manor, his personal hell, but now, it would seem, his essential heaven.

“Welcome home, sir!”

He pulled himself together and shook hands with beaming Aaron Hooker. And with the next man, and the next. Soon women were kissing him, not all decorously. Hawk grinned and accepted the kisses.

This was Van’s wedding, but Con was introducing his bride, Susan, here, too. Clearly the villagers were making it into a return festivity for all three of them.

The Georges.

The plaguey imps.

The gallant soldiers.

The heroes.

It wasn’t the time to be wry about that, so he kissed and shook hands and accepted backslaps from men used to slapping oxen. In the end, he caught up to the blushing new bride and the very recent bride, and claimed kisses of his own.

“Hawk,” said Susan Amleigh, Con’s wife, her eyes brilliant, “have I told you how much I love Hawk in the Vale?”

“Once or twice, I think.”

She just laughed at his dry tone. “How lucky you all are to have grown up here. I don’t know how you could bear to leave it.”

Because a tubful of sweet posset could be soured by a spoonful of gall, but Hawk didn’t let his smile twist. He’d been desperate to leave here at sixteen, and didn’t regret it now, but he did regret dragging Van and Con along. Not that he’d have been able to stop them if their families couldn’t. The Georges had always done nearly everything together.

What was done was done—wisdom, of a trite sort— and they’d all survived. Now, in part because of these wonderful women, Con and Van were even happy.

Happy. He rolled that in his mind like a foreign food, uncertain whether it was palatable or not. Whichever it was, it wasn’t on his plate. He was hardly the type for sweethearts and orange blossoms, and he would bring no one he cared for to share Hawkinville Manor with himself and his father. He had only returned there because the squire was crippled by a seizure.

If only he’d died of it.

He put that aside and let a buxom woman drag him into a country dance. Astonishing to realize that it was shy Elsie Dadswell, Elsie Manktelow now, with three children, a boy and two girls, and no trace of shyness that he could see. She was also clearly well on the way to a new baby.

Somewhat alarmed, he asked if she should be dancing so vigorously, but she laughed, linked arms, and nearly swung him off his feet. He laughed too and ricocheted down the line off strong, working-women’s arms.

His people. His to take care of, even if he had to fight his father to do it. Some of the cottages needed repairs and the riverbank needed work, but prizing money out of the squire’s hands these days was like getting a corpse to release a sword.

A blushing girl missing two front teeth asked him to dance next, so he did, glad to escape mundane concerns. He’d dealt with mass army movements over mountainous terrain, through killing storms. Surely the squire and Hawk in the Vale couldn’t defeat him. He flirted with the girl, disconcerted to discover that she was Will Ashbee’s daughter. Will was only a year older than he was.

Will had spent his life here, growing children and working through the cycles of the seasons. Hawk had lived in the death cycle of war. Marching, waiting, squabbling, fighting, then dealing with the broken and burying the dead.

How many men had he known who were now dead? It was not a tally he wanted to make. God had been good, and he, Van, and Con were all home.

Home.

The fiddles and whistles came to the end of their piece, and he passed his partner to a red-faced lad not much older than she was.

Love. For some it seemed as natural as the birds in spring. Perhaps some birds never quite got the hang of it, either.

He saw that a cricket match had started on the quiet side of the green. That was much less likely to stir maudlin thoughts, so he strolled over to watch and applaud.

The batter said, “Want a go, Major?”

Hawk was about to say no, but then he saw the glow in many eyes. Damnable as it was, he was a hero to most of these people. He and Van and Con were all heroes. They were all veterans, but most important, they had all been at the great battle of Waterloo a year ago.

So he shrugged out of his jacket and gave it to Bill Ashbee—Will’s father—to hold, then went to take the home-carved bat. It was part of his role here to take part. As son of the squire and the future squire himself, he was an important part of village life.

He wished he weren’t their hero, however. Two years after taking up a cornetcy in the cavalry, he’d been seconded to the Quartermaster General’s Department, and thus most of his war had been spent out of active fighting. The heroes were the men like Con and Van, who’d breathed the enemy’s breath and waded through blood. Or even Lord Darius Debenham, Con’s friend and an enthusiastic volunteer at Waterloo who’d died there.

But he was the major, while Con and Van had made only captain, and he knew the Duke of Wellington. Rather better than he’d wanted to at times. He took the bat and faced the bowler, who looked to be about fourteen and admirably determined to bowl him out if he could. Hawk hoped he could.

The first bowl went wide, but Hawk leaned forward and stopped it so it bumped across the rough grass into a fielder’s hands. He’d played plenty of cricket during the lazy times in the army. Surely he could manage this so as to please everyone.

He hit another ball a bit harder to make one run, leaving the other batter up. The bowler bowled that man out. Disconcerting not to be able to put a name to him. After a little while, Hawk was facing the determined bowler again, and this time the ball hurtled straight for the wicket. A slight twist of the bat allowed the ball to knock the bails flying, raising a great cheer from the onlookers and a mighty whoop of triumph from the young bowler.

Hawk grinned and went over to slap him on the back, then retrieved his coat.

Ashbee helped him on with it, but then stepped back with him out of the group around the game. “How’s the squire today, sir?”

“Improving. He’s out watching the festivities from a chair near the manor.”

Sitting in state, more likely, but Hawk kept his tone bland. The villagers didn’t need to feel a spill of bile from the Hawkinville family’s affairs.

“Good health to him, sir,” said Ashbee, in the same tone. Folly to think that the villagers didn’t know how things were, with the servants in the manor all village people except the squire’s valet.

And after all, men like Bill Ashbee could remember when handsome Captain John Gaspard arrived in the village to woo Miss Sophronia Hawkinville, the old squire’s only child, and wed her, agreeing to take the family name. They would also remember the lady’s bitter disillusion when her father’s death turned suitor into indifferent husband. After all, Hawk’s mother had not suffered in silence. But she’d suffered. What choice did she have?

And now she was dead, dead more than a year ago of the influenza that had swept through this area. Hawk hoped she had found peace elsewhere, and he regretted that he could not truly grieve. She had been the wronged party, but she had also been so absorbed in her own ill-usage that she’d had no time for her one child except to occasionally fight his father over him.

He realized that Ashbee was hovering because he wanted to say something.

Ashbee cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you’d heard anything about changes down along the river, sir.”

“You mean repairs.” Damn the squire. “I know there’s work needs doing—”

“No, sir, not that. But there was some men poking around the other day. When Granny Muggridge asked their business, they didn’t seem to want to say, but she heard them mention foundations and water levels.”

Hawk managed not to swear. What the devil was the squire up to now? He claimed there was no money to spare, which Hawk couldn’t understand, and now he was planning some improvement to the manor?

“I don’t know, Ashbee. I’ll ask my father.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, but he did not look markedly satisfied. “Thing is, sir, later on Jack Smithers from the Peregrine said he saw them talking to that Slade. The men had stabled horses at the Peregrine, you see, and Slade walked them from his house to the inn.”

Slade. Josiah Slade was a Birmingham iron founder who’d made a fortune casting cannons for the war. For some devil-inspired reason he’d retired here in Hawk in the Vale a year ago and become a crony of the squire’s. How, Hawk couldn’t imagine. The squire came from an aristocratic family and despised trade.

But somehow Slade had persuaded the squire to permit him to build a stuccoed monstrosity of a house on the west side of the green. It would not have been so out of place on the Marine Parade in Brighton, but in Hawk in the Vale it was like a tombstone in a garden. The squire had brushed off questions rather shiftily.

All was not right in Hawk in the Vale. Hawk had come home hoping never to have to dig in the dirt again, but it seemed it wasn’t to be so easy.

“I’ll look into it,” he said, adding, “Thank you.”