A Mummers' Play by Jo Beverley Read Free Book Online Page B

they were three very pretty and seemingly very silly young women?”
    “Yes,” she said. “But how did you know about the letter?”
    Humor died. “How could I not know? He wrote it that night, while . . . Later . . . later I saw to it that it was sent to you.”
    He’d sent it, that tragic, blessed letter? She didn’t know whether to curse him or thank him. Had he read it first to check that nothing there incriminated him?
    Oh, surely he had, damn him.
    “Now, where was I?” he asked, returning to the past. “Ah, yes, the three pretty sisters. The war had assuredly been dull for them, when it wasn’t being terrifying. The oldest was twenty-two and a widow, the younger two betrothed but unwed. They would all have been married and mothers in more normal times. They were clearly starved of company, especially male company. Since it was Christmas, they begged us to stay and eat the Christmas Eve feast with them, despite the disapproval of some elderly maids who were acting as duennas. There seemed no reason not to, and we could already smell the roasting pork. . . .”
    He looked across at her, and though he still held his glass in his hand, he hadn’t drunk from it for some time. “It was a misjudgment on my part, as was the amount of wine I drank and permitted the others to drink. As was,” he added after a pause, “agreeing to comfort the eldest daughter through the night. It had been a long and dreary war, but that is no excuse.”
    “Did Simon . . . ?” Then she wished the question unasked.
    “No. I told you, he spent the evening writing a letter to you, then slept the sleep of the virtuous. If the troopers visited the younger sisters, I am unaware of it. It seems unlikely. They were virgins, one assumes.”
    “I wish he had. Gone to bed with one of the ladies, I mean.” Oh, God, why was she saying these things to this man, above all? She stared in horror at her glass, again half-empty. Perhaps she, too, was a foolish drunk.
    “Perhaps you wish
you
had gone to bed with him,” he said, understanding altogether too much. “But it would have distressed him in his final moments, you know, to have used you that way and had to leave you unwed.”
    The last thing she wanted was his awareness of her secret regrets. She firmly put her treacherous wine aside. “Was it true, what the colonel wrote, that Simon’s last words were of me? That was not a polite fiction?”
    “Of course not.” As if discussing the weather, he said, “His precise words, if you want them, were ‘Oh, God, Jack. She’s going to be so unhappy. She takes things so hard. I wish . . .’” But then his composure broke and he looked at her with bitter memories in his eyes. “I honestly don’t know what he wished done or undone, Justina, except that he did not want to die.”
    It was Justina who looked away, looked down, then covered her eyes with her hand. Jack must have a gift for mimicry, for it had been as if Simon were there speaking exactly as he would have said those words. . . .
    And of course Simon would have known how harshly she would take his death. She had always been intense in her emotions, while he’d slid more lightly through life. They’d quarreled about it sometimes, she saying he was a careless wretch, he complaining that she had the makings of a worrywart.
    If she could believe those words, and she did, Simon had not suspected Jack Beaufort of causing his death. Perhaps there was a blessing in that.
    She took a deep breath and straightened to look at him again. “So, how did the ambush occur?”
    He, too, had put aside his glass. Now he tented his hands and rested his chin on them. “We set out in the morning in pretty good order despite the festivities, collecting the rest of the men as we went. I’d decided that the conde had fled to join the retreating French, but I could see nothing at the estancia that would endanger the route to Ciudad Rodrigo. So, despite the pleas of my partner of the