Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long Read Free Book Online

patently ridiculous to think that Kinkade would have anything to do with Lucy’s disappearance, particularly anything nefarious, and even more ridiculous that a bad painting of cows and cherubs would be at all related to it.
    But Rosalind was afraid for her sister.
    He found this, for some reason, unbearable.
    His hand squeezed the top of his walking stick so tightly the horse head bit into his palm.
    head bit into his palm.
    The last time he’d heard anything of Rosalind March was years after the war, from a fellow soldier: he was told she’d searched through the bodies on that blood-soaked battlefield calling for her husband until she found him, grievously wounded. That she’d visited the hospitals wherever they sprang up in Mont St. Jean and Quatre Bras: cottages, barns, the streets, homes of the wealthy
    —that she heard the last words of dying soldiers, held hands, changed dressings. Her husband, like so many extraordinary men, had been wounded badly and died slowly, and he’d heard that she was with him when he breathed his last breath.
    So she had courage.
    It didn’t matter.
    He would never betray yet another friend for her by believing for an instant that Kinkade was somehow dishonorably involved in the matter of Lucy Locke’s disappearance.
    She should have known better than to ask.
    Well, she had known better. Which was, of course, why she’d done it with a cryptic anonymous message sent via the street rat dogging his heels. And this, he told himself, was hardly courageous. Clever, he conceded. But not courageous.
    He fought the corners of his mouth as they began turning up into a smile.
    She certainly knew him.
    “I didna lie about the liedy, did I?” Urchin said triumphantly. “Earned me shilling!”
    me shilling!”
    Chase forbore to agree or disagree.
    “Will yer buy me a strong nasty drink?” urchin tried.
    “No.”
    “Oive ’ad gin before,” it boasted.
    “I don’t doubt it. It’s poison, you know. Don’t drink it again. You’ll
    …grow bubbies like a girl if you do.”
    This horrified the urchin into silence, which Chase had known it would. He hoped he’d flee from horror.
    No such luck. Chase strode on, he and his good leg and his bad leg and his walking stick and his new filthy dogged little shadow. In the distance, beyond the square, a figure was standing on tiptoe to hang a lit lantern on an iron hook in preparation for the evening’s business. Chase assumed this was the Mumford Arms, and this inspired him to walk even faster.
    “Is she yer woman? The liedy?”
    “No!” he snapped. He stopped again abruptly, and the urchin stopped abruptly. Chase breathed, and sighed out roughly, in and closed his eyes again, this time to try to orient himself in his storm of memories.
    Like the night she became a person to him. Not just Colonel March’s late-in-life folly.
    At first Chase had been at best amused by the very fact of Rosalind March, the colonel’s new wife. She laughed too much and danced March, the colonel’s new wife. She laughed too much and danced too long and with kitten-like bravery flung herself in play and flirtation at people who could just as easily squash her as be charmed by her. Like the smoldering, reputedly dangerous Captain Eversea.
    Everyone had loved her.
    Chase had been indifferent. He preferred far more sophisticated flirtations, and in Belgium sophisticated flirtations were routinely directed at the handsome captain and frequently concluded in a bed.
    For in those weeks before the bloodbath outside of Brussels that ended the damn war, there were endless glittering frivolities hosted by Belgian aristocracy, all of which were stuffed to the brim with English aristocrats who had come to watch war as though it was puppet theater, and Chase was compelled to dance with all of the wives, including Mrs. March. The young Mrs. March was in particular captivated and flattered by Lady d’Aligny, a Belgian countess who was young, pretty, excruciatingly