Read Chapter 7: A Song for a Fallen Soldier

The music began at dusk, drifting down the stairwell like smoke from a dying fire. Élodie paused on the landing, the tray of untouched supper trembling in her hands. She had meant to bring it up, to perform her duty as innkeeper and then retreat. But the melody stopped her cold.

It was a soldier's song. A marching tune, rough and cheerful, the kind men hummed to keep their feet moving through sand and heat and fear. She had heard it a hundred times, whistled through Mathieu's teeth while he shaved, while he mended a strap, while he lay beside her in the dark and stared at the ceiling.

She climbed the remaining steps slowly. The door to Ashworth's room stood ajar, and through the gap she saw him bent over the pianoforte—the old, out-of-tune instrument that had come with the building and that no guest had ever touched. His fingers moved with surprising gentleness across the keys, coaxing the tune from the worn hammers.

He did not look up as she pushed the door open. "The Grenadiers' Lament," he said softly. "Do you know it?"

"No."

"You're lying."

Her jaw tightened. "I have no reason to lie about a song."

He played on, the melody turning melancholy now, lingering on notes that should have been quick. "It was the favorite of the Twenty-Second Light Infantry. The men used to whistle it on the march to Cairo. Even when the heat was killing them, even when half the company was shitting themselves with dysentery, someone would start it up and the rest would follow." He glanced at her. "Mathieu whistled it constantly. Drove the captain mad."

Élodie set the tray down on the sideboard. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. Inside, something cracked and cracked again, hairline fractures spreading through the careful walls she had built.

"He used to hum it," she said. "When he thought I was asleep. He didn't know I could hear."

Ashworth's fingers stilled on the keys. The silence that followed was heavy, full of eleven years of held breath.

"I should have come to you," he said. "After Cairo. After I got word that you didn't know. I should have found you and told you myself, instead of letting the army's letter do it. But I was—" He shook his head. "I was not the man I should have been."

"You were wounded."

"At Marengo. In the leg." He tapped his thigh. "It still pains me when it rains. But that is not why I stayed away."

The words rose in her throat, unbidden and unstoppable. *I am here because I was told to find your secrets. I am here because they want you dead or ruined. I am here because I have already betrayed you twice and I will do it again tomorrow.*

She swallowed them down.

Instead, she asked, "Did you kill him?"

Ashworth went very still. His face, which had been open and soft in the lamplight, hardened into something older, something that had seen too much.

"Did I kill Mathieu?"

"Yes."

"No." The word came out sharp, almost angry. He stood, and she saw him favor his left leg as he turned to face her. "I found him in a hospital in Cairo. He was dying of the fever, not of any wound. The doctors had given up. The orderlies had given up. But he asked me—" Ashworth's voice cracked, and he paused to master it. "He asked me to stay with him. So I stayed. For three days. I held his hand while he shook and sweat and raved. I changed his bedlinen. I fed him water that he could not keep down. And when he finally went, he was not alone."

Élodie's vision blurred. She blinked furiously, refusing to let the tears fall.

"There was an English officer," she said. "In his final letter. Mathieu wrote that he owed a life debt to a man who saved him. The name was scratched out."

Ashworth said nothing.

"You told me he owed you money in Cairo. But Mathieu wrote of a debt of a different kind." She took a step closer. "What happened in Cairo, Julian? What do you know that I don't?"

He held her gaze for a long moment. The lamplight flickered between them, casting strange shadows across his face.

"I knew Mathieu for exactly six weeks before he died," Ashworth said. "We served in different battalions. We met by chance at a well outside Alexandria, when he shared his water with me after my own canteen broke. We became friends. The best kind—the kind forged in heat and danger and the knowledge that either of us might die before the week was out."

He moved toward the window, limping slightly, and looked down at the darkened street.

"He saved my life three times. Once from a sniper. Once from a fever that nearly took me. And once—" He paused. "Once he took a wound meant for me. A saber cut across the ribs. It was not fatal. But it was the kind of wound that festers. That poisons a man slowly from the inside."

Élodie's breath caught.

"He did not die of the fever," she whispered. "You said he died of the fever."

"The fever came after. The infection from the wound weakened him. The fever finished what the blade began." Ashworth turned back to face her. "I owe him a debt that I can never repay. He died so that I might live. And I have carried that weight for eleven years."

The word hung in the air between them. *Debt.*

Not the debt of money. Not the debt of a life saved. Something else—something that twisted the knot in Élodie's stomach tighter.

"Who gave you the wound?" she asked. "The one that still pains you?"

Ashworth's expression shuttered. "That is not a story for tonight."

"Julian—"

"I have told you more than I have told anyone in years." His voice was quiet but firm. "More than I have a right to tell a woman who watches me the way you do."

The words hit her like a slap. She opened her mouth—to confess, to deny, to lie again—but nothing came.

They stood in silence, the space between them stretched thin and taut, a wire that would snap at the slightest pressure.

Finally, Ashworth let out a long breath. "It is late. You should rest."

"I should."

Neither of them moved.

"Élodie." His voice was softer now, almost gentle. "Whatever you are doing here—whatever reason you have for watching me, for asking these questions—I understand. I have been watched before. I have been deceived before. I am not angry."

The tears she had been holding back finally spilled over. She turned away before he could see them.

"I will bring your breakfast in the morning," she said, and fled.

In the hallway, she pressed her back against the wall and pressed her palm to her mouth, holding in the sob that wanted to break free.

She had come so close to telling him everything. So close to laying down the burden of lies and asking him to forgive her, to understand, to help her find a way out of the trap Lefèvre had closed around her.

But she had not. And now she had to decide what she would do tomorrow—and who she would become.