The Soldier's Dark Secret

It came out sounding like a plea to be proved wrong, and for a moment, Jack looked as if he would comply. ‘Most likely,’ he said as he took a step towards her. She could feel his breath on her cheek. He smelled of grass and sunshine. Her heart was beating hard again, making it difficult to breathe. She stared into his eyes, mesmerised. The gap between them imperceptibly, tantalisingly narrowed. Their lips almost touched before they both leapt back as if they had been singed by a naked flame.

Celeste snatched her sketch from the easel and tore it in half. ‘I don’t know what is wrong with me today. I am struggling to find the correct perspective for what should be a simple sketch.’

Jack hesitated, then threw himself down on a wooden bench, his long legs sprawled in front of him. ‘I doubt either Charlie or Eleanor will care which angle you choose, provided you deliver something that closely matches reality. I’m sure the drawing you have just torn up would have proved perfectly satisfactory.’

‘Not to me,’ Celeste said indignantly. ‘I would have known I could have depicted the scene in a more accomplished manner. You may consider what I do to be a trivial endeavour. My paintings don’t save lives or win wars or—or whatever it was you did when you were a soldier, but they are still very important to me.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to patronise you.’

His smile was disarming. Celeste bit her own back, refusing to be so easily won over. ‘But you did none the less.’

‘I did,’ he conceded.

He dug his hands into his pockets. ‘You know, life in the military is not as exciting as you might think. There’s far more time spent marching and drilling than waging war. And in the winter, when the campaign season is over, there’s a deal more playing cards and making bets and drinking than doing drill.’

‘When I am between commissions, I still paint,’ Celeste said. ‘Not landscapes, but people. I am not so good at portraits, but they are mine, and so it is not like work, you know?’

‘Are you often between commissions?’

‘In the beginning, regularly.’ She chuckled. ‘As a result, I was much thinner and not so well dressed as I can now afford to be.’

‘No less pretty, though, I’d wager, if I may be so bold as to offer a compliment to compensate for demeaning your sense of professional pride. Did you always aspire to be an artist?’

‘I am never going to exhibit at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and I have no ambition to do so. I am not the type to try to break all the rules and to starve in the process, spending my last sou on paint rather than a baguette. I have a modest talent. I was fortunate enough to study with some excellent teachers in Paris, and I needed to find a way of supporting myself, so...’ Celeste shrugged.

‘Your parents then, they are dead? You said you needed to support yourself,’ Jack explained when she raised her eyebrows at the question, ‘so I assumed...’

‘Yes. Both dead.’ Celeste stared down at her hands, frowning. Despite spending a good deal of time thinking about it, she had not the foggiest idea how to begin the search for answers which had brought her to England. She needed help, but her ingrained habit of trusting no one save herself inhibited her from seeking it. Not that, as a foreigner, she thought morosely, she had the first idea of where to start seeking.

‘Penny for them?’ Jack was looking at her quizzically. ‘Your thoughts,’ he said. ‘You were a hundred miles away again. I fear I’m boring you rather than distracting you.’

‘No, it’s not that.’ Perhaps she could ask him just one simple question to get her search underway? She really did have to make a start because there, tucked away at the back of her sketchbook, was a letter containing a puzzle she needed to solve in order to draw a line under the past and get on with her life.

‘Jack?’

He looked at her questioningly.

‘Jack, if you—if you needed to find something. Or someone. How would you go about it? I mean if you did not know where this person lived, or—or who they were, precisely. Are there people one can employ to discover such things?’

‘You mean to track down someone who has gone missing?’

She had his attention now. All of it. Though he was still lounging casually on the bench, though his expression was one of polite interest, his eyes were focused entirely on her. Celeste shifted uncomfortably. ‘Not missing precisely. Not anything at all, really. I’m speaking hypothetically.’

She risked looking up, and wished she had not. ‘Hypothetically,’ Jack said, openly sceptical. ‘Well, hypothetically, you could employ a Bow Street Runner.’

‘Is that what you would do?’

He smiled. ‘Good grief, no. Speaking hypothetically of course, I am more than equipped to solve the problem for myself, but we’re not talking hypothetically, are we?’