Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(43)
It was two years since he had been summoned to return there. But he had ignored the summons at the time and remained with his regiment to lead his men to the bitter end of the fighting.
Two years ago his father had dropped to the floor of the taproom at the village inn. He had been dead before he reached it.
Devlin Ware, seventh Earl of Stratton, peer of the realm, owner of Ravenswood Hall and a number of other properties and a vast fortune besides, had been summoned home by his father’s solicitor, now his own. He had been summoned too by a brief, formal note from the countess, his mother. He neither answered nor responded to either one. Ben had done so, he suspected, but they had not talked about it. They did not talk of what had once been their home or about any of the other people who had lived there and presumably still did. He believed Ben had kept up some sort of correspondence with some of them, but Devlin never asked and Ben almost never volunteered information or comment. Devlin had not corresponded with any of them, even the total innocents. The children. He had always thought it would be best if they considered him dead. Sometimes he almost wished he were.
He had not been killed in six years of relentless, ferocious warfare, however. He had arrived back in England relatively intact. He had all his limbs and both eyes, and surprisingly few scars. The worst of those he did have was unfortunately visible. It slashed across his forehead and through his eyebrow, and across the top half of his cheek, but the saber that had done the damage had missed his eye by some miracle that defied understanding. It had also failed to separate the top half of his head from the rest of his body. If there were other, inner scars, he did not know of them or care about them. He was a battle-hardened warrior with a battle-hardened mind, and that suited him fine.
He had been known in his regiment as a hard and ruthless officer, demanding a great deal of his men, but never more than he demanded of himself. He had held them to a high standard of conduct and achievement, but he had had one quirk of nature that had prevented many of his men from outright hating him and had even inspired a few to devotion and the determination to protect him from hostile fire. A number of enemy skirmishers died from rifle fire as they tried to pick off Captain Ware, conspicuous with his red officer’s sash and sword. Unlike almost every other officer of any rank, he gave second chances except when they were impossible to give, as in a deliberate murder, for example. If one of his men ran in panic from battle, his recapture meant instant execution—except with Captain Ware, who stood the offender up in shirt and breeches and nothing else before a punishment parade of his peers, all standing rigidly to attention, and gave the man the choice between an ignominious death by hanging and a position at the very center of the front line in the next battle. All, without exception, had chosen the front line, and some had died an honorable death there in the next battle. A few had distinguished themselves with extraordinary bravery. Captain Ware gave a second chance but never a third. Most men did not need a third.
His own courage could never be called into question. He volunteered a number of times to lead a forlorn hope, an advance force of elite volunteers who led the charge against a seemingly impregnable position and were almost certain to die so that the regular forces behind them could smash through to victory. On one of those occasions he had been chosen and led his fellow volunteers to what was a successful siege but at the terrible cost of the deaths of nine out of every ten of them. Lieutenant Ware was careless of death himself, but it did not find him on that day or any other. He was awarded his captaincy as a result of that forlorn hope.
His courage, his toughness, his tenacity, his cold adherence to duty made him feared, respected, and revered all at the same time—and by the same men.
During those years he made up for the celibacy of his youth and young manhood. He chose his women exclusively from among the camp followers—washerwomen, cooks, wives, and widows—though he never slept with any of the wives. There were widows enough. Many of them had come to the Peninsula with their husbands as winners of one of the lotteries that decided which women would be allowed to accompany their men and which would not. Those husbands often died in battle, but their widows rarely returned home. How would they have got there? What would they have done when they went back? They stayed and worked and remarried and as like as not were widowed again. It was a constant cycle. There were always men only too willing and eager to take over from dead husbands and have a woman all their own. Most of the women were clean, honest, hardworking, foulmouthed, tough, cheerful, and lusty.
Devlin liked them as a group. He rarely slept with the same woman twice, but few if any of them resented that fact. The women did not expect that an officer would ever marry them, after all, but it was definitely something of a coup to have been seen disappearing inside an officer’s billet during an evening. And if any of them were apprehensive about Captain Ware’s reputation as a cold, hard commanding officer, they were soon able to pass on the reassuring information to other women that he was lovely in bed—always clean and freshly shaved, considerate, respectful, almost gentle. And that he took his time about the main business, Lord love him, and let them have a good time too. Also that he was very generous after bed, though, none of them being whores, there was never any demand or expectation of being paid. He gave gifts of money anyway, yet never made them feel like whores. Many of them would not have minded being invited back for more of the same, though they were far too sensible to expect it or to waste their energy sighing over him when there were plenty of other men to go with or even marry.