“I don’t know,” he said, taking the portmanteau from her. “I truly have no idea what’s to become of me. Who does, in wartime?” He smiled, a little ruefully, and she seemed to feel his sense of uncertainty, for she impulsively laid a hand on his sleeve.
“Well, be assured that you have friends, at least, who care what becomes of you,” she said softly.
“Thank you,” he said, and turned his face toward the cart, lest she see how much that touched him.
In turning, though, his eye caught a purposeful movement, someone threading toward him through the crowd, and Anne Endicott’s soft dark eyes disappeared abruptly from his mind.
“Sir!” It was his groom Colenso Baragwanath, gasping from the effort of running. “Sir, have you—”
“There you are, Baragwanath! What the devil are you doing here, and where have you left Madras? Good news, though: Goth’s come back. Colonel Tarleton has him and—what, for God’s sake?” For Colenso was squirming as though he had a snake in his breeches, his square Cornish face contorted with information.
“Jane and Fanny’re gone, sir!”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“Dunno, sir. But they’ve gone. I came back to get my jacket and the shelter was still up, but their things were gone and I couldn’t find ’em and when I asked the folk who camps near us, they said as the girls had rolled up their bundles and sneaked off!”
William didn’t waste time inquiring how one could possibly sneak out of an open camp of several thousand people, let alone why that should be necessary.
“Which way did they go?”
“That way, sir!” Colenso pointed down the road.
William rubbed a hand over his face and stopped abruptly when he inadvertently touched the bruised swelling on his left temple.
“Ouch. Well, bloody hell—oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Endicott.” For at this point he became aware of Anne Endicott at his elbow, eyes round with curiosity.
“Who are Jane and Fanny?” she asked.
“Ahh . . . two young ladies who are traveling under my protection,” he said, knowing exactly what effect that information was likely to have, but there wasn’t much help for it. “Very young ladies,” he added, in the vain hope of improving things. “Daughters of a . . . um, distant cousin.”
“Oh,” she said, looking distinctly unconvinced. “But they’ve run off? Whyever should they do such a thing?”
“Damned if I—er, beg pardon, ma’am. I don’t know, but I must go and find out. Will you make my excuses to your parents and sisters?”
“I—of course.” She made a small, abortive gesture toward him, putting out her hand and then withdrawing it. She looked both startled and slightly affronted. He regretted it, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it.
“Your servant, ma’am,” he said, and, bowing, left her.
IN THE END, it was half a day, rather than half an hour, before John saw Hal again. He found his brother, quite by chance, standing by the road that led northward, watching the marching columns go past. Most of the camp had already left; only the cook wagons and laundry kettles were trundling past now, the disorderly sprawl of camp followers spreading out behind them like the plague of lice over the land of Egypt.
“William’s gone,” he said to Hal without preamble.
Hal nodded, face somber. “So is Richardson.”
“Bloody hell.”
Hal’s groom was standing by, holding two horses. Hal jerked his head at a dark-bay mare and took the reins of his own horse, a light-bay gelding with a blaze and one white stocking.
“Where do you think we’re going?” John inquired, seeing his brother turn the gelding’s head south.
“Philadelphia,” Hal replied, tight-lipped. “Where else?”
Grey could himself think of any number of alternatives, but recognized a rhetorical question when he heard one and contented himself with asking, “Have you got a clean handkerchief?”
Hal gave him a blank look, then rummaged in his sleeve, pulling out a crumpled but unused linen square.
“Apparently. Why?”
“I expect we’re going to need a flag of truce at some point. The Continental army lying presently between us and Philadelphia, I mean.”
“Oh, that.” Hal stuffed the handkerchief back up his sleeve and said no more until they had negotiated their way past the last trailing remnants of the horde of refugees and found themselves more or less alone on the road leading south.
“No one could be sure, in the confusion,” he said, as though he’d last spoken ten seconds before. “But it looks very much as though Captain Richardson has deserted.”
“What?!”
“Not a bad moment to choose, really,” Hal said reflectively. “No one would have noticed he was gone for days, had I not come looking for him. He was in camp last night, though, and unless he’s disguised himself as a teamster or a laundress, he’s not here any longer.”
“The contingency seems remote,” Grey said. “William was here this morning—both your orderly and his young grooms saw him, and so did a Colonel Tarleton of the British Legion, who breakfasted with him.”
“Who? Oh, him.” Hal waved off Tarleton as a distraction. “Clinton values him, but I never trust a man with lips like a girl’s.”
“Regardless, he seems to have had nothing to do with William’s disappearance. The groom Baragwanath thinks that William went off to see about a couple of . . . young women among the camp followers.”