Read Chapter 7: The Night Conversation

The candles had burned down to stubs when Élise finally allowed herself to sit. The ward had grown still—only the soft breathing of sleeping men, the distant creak of the farmhouse timbers settling. She had meant to rest her eyes for a moment at Ashworth’s bedside. Just a moment.

Then his voice came, low and rough.

“You should sleep in a bed, not a chair.”

She started, blinking. His eyes were open—truly open this time, clear and steady in the lamplight. The fever had left him hollow-cheeked but present. All there.

“I was watching your leg,” she said, straightening. “The swelling has gone down.”

“I know.” He shifted slightly, wincing, but his gaze never left her. “I’ve been watching you watch it.”

Élise felt heat creep up her neck. She busied herself with the dressing at his knee, though it needed no attention. “You should not waste your strength talking.”

“I’ve been silent for four days. I have a great deal of unused conversation.”

She almost smiled. She caught herself, pressed her lips flat. “Then save it for the surgeon tomorrow. He will want to know your name for the records.”

“He already asked. I told him my name.” A pause. “He didn’t ask yours.”

Margaret slept three beds over, a curtain drawn between them, but Élise could feel the weight of that unseen presence even now. She kept her voice low. “Hélène.”

“Hélène.” He tried the name like a coin, weighing it. “And before that?”

She stilled. “I don’t understand.”

“The night you treated my leg. Before you lost your senses to the fever.” His jaw tightened, remembering something she did not. “You spoke to me. In French.”

The air between them changed.

Élise kept her hands steady on the bandage. “I am from the border country. We learn both tongues.”

“You spoke like a native of the south. Walloon softening. Liège, perhaps, or Namur.” He watched her with those cautious eyes. “Not the Flemish north you claim.”

The candle guttered. In its flicker, Élise felt the wall she had built around her name crack.

“You were fevered,” she said carefully. “You heard what you wished to hear.”

“Perhaps.” He did not push—that was the strange part. He let the accusation hang, then settled back against his pillow, studying the ceiling beams. “I searched for my sister for three years. She left England after a quarrel with my father. Vowed never to return.”

The shift was so sudden that Élise almost missed it. She obeyed the instinct to follow, grateful for the reprieve. “Your sister?”

“Marie.” The name fell from his lips like a stone into still water. “She was the bright one. The one who defied him. When our mother died, she could not bear the house—the silences, the rules. She fled to Belgium with a man our father had forbidden her to see.”

“Did she find happiness?”

“I don’t know.” His voice frayed at the edges. “The letters stopped two years ago. My father burned the last one before I could read it. I only learned she had married, and that her husband—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I came to Belgium to find her. Instead I found a battlefield.”

Élise’s chest ached with a feeling she recognized—the particular grief of searching and not finding. She knew its shape intimately.

“What was her husband’s name?”

“Laurent.” He said it quietly, like a confession. “Philippe Laurent. A printer, of all things. Our father called him a radical. Perhaps he was. Marie always loved a cause.”

Her hand moved before she could stop it, touching the hidden paper in her bodice—the scrap with *Marie Laurent* written on it, and a date. A date from six months past. She had not yet discovered what it signified. Now, with every word he spoke, it grew heavier against her ribs.

“You think she is still in Belgium?” Élise asked.

“I don’t know where she is.” He turned his head to her, and in the low light she saw the vulnerability he had been holding at bay. “I only know she is somewhere, and I cannot find her.”

Élise felt the shape of her own loss rise to meet his. Théo’s scratched coin, warm from her palm these last days. Théo starving in a Prussian camp. Théo who had taught her to read and to fight and to hope, who had written her letters from every camp Napoleon sent him to.

She understood this man more than she wanted to.

“You should sleep,” she said softly. “Tomorrow will be difficult.”

“You’re avoiding my question.”

“You asked about my French. I answered.”

“You said you were from Bruges.”

“I said I was from the hospital in Brussels.”

Amusement flickered in his weary face. “Carefully danced.”

“I am a nurse, not a dancer.”

“But you are from Belgium. You must know the paths through the Ardennes, the villages where families hide their daughters from recruiting officers.” The fever had left lines of exhaustion around his mouth, but his attention was blade-sharp. “If you were looking for someone, where would you look?”

Élise’s pulse quickened. He was not asking about his sister anymore—not only. He was asking about something deeper. Was he probing what she knew of French prisoners? Did he know about Théo? Or was he testing her, the way a man tests the depth of a river before crossing?

“I would ask the church,” she said carefully. “And the market. Women talk where men keep secrets.”

“And if they hid?”

“Then I would hide something of mine, to draw them out.”

He considered this. A long moment passed. In the darkness, a man across the ward cried out in his sleep—some nightmare of musket fire and horses—and the sound seemed to shake loose something in Ashworth. When he spoke again, his voice was different, quieter.

“You are not Bruges,” he said. “I won’t ask where you are from. You may have your reasons for hiding it, just as I have mine for hiding nothing at all.”

“You hide nothing?”

He met her eyes. “I am Lord Ashworth. That is the only name I carry into this war. Everything before it is a closed ledger.”

But Élise had read the letter, the one addressed to Lady Ashworth, the one she still possessed. A letter asking after a captain—not a lord—who had been expected in Brussels. She had been turning the question over for days: why would a letter addressed to Lady Ashworth ask about a man named Captain Whitmore?

She said nothing now. She was not ready to reveal that card, not yet. But she remembered the way he had said *Laurent*, and the weight in his mouth, as though the name itself cost him something.

“Hélène,” he said, drawing her back. “If I am sent to Brussels tomorrow, I may never learn what happened to Marie. The surgeon is right—my leg needs a careful hand, and the riding will be agony.” His gaze held hers. “But there is one thing I could do before I go. One thing you might need.”

“What is that?”

“I asked about your brother.” He said it without preface, and Élise felt the air leave her lungs. “At Waterloo, there was a list drawn up of the dead and captured. I saw one section—the French regiments. I know some of the names.”

Her hands gripped the edge of the bed. “Why would you take note of French names?”

“Because I have a ledger of my own,” he said. “And I pay my debts.”

He reached beneath his pillow and withdrew a folded paper, creased and worn, and held it out to her. Élise took it with shaking fingers. She opened it in the candlelight.

Inside was a list of names in fine copperplate. French names, dozens of them, annotated with *captured*, *dead*, or *hospitals* in a different hand. At the bottom, a line in pencil:

*Theo Delacroix—Jüterbog.*

She stared at it until the letters blurred.

“Where did you get this?”

“A French prisoner at Hougoumont earned his keep by writing it. He was looking for his own brother. I promised him I would carry it to Brussels.” Ashworth paused. “I have carried it for three days. I believe it is yours now.”

Élise folded the paper and pressed it to her chest. The scrap with Marie Laurent’s name seemed to burn against the fabric of her bodice. She had something of his—something unknowing that she could use. And now he had given her something of infinite value.

“Why?” she asked. “Why do you care about a Belgian nurse’s brother?”

“Because you saved my life.” He said it without sentiment, plain as a report. “And because I know what it is to look for someone and find only silence. I would not wish that on any soul.”

The ward shifted. Above them, a floorboard creaked.

Élise turned sharply. At the far end of the room, a shadow moved—Margaret, standing at the edge of the curtain, half hidden, watching. When Élise caught her gaze, Margaret did not look away. She smiled, faint and poisonous, and slipped back behind the curtain.

Élise turned back to Ashworth and leaned close, her voice barely a whisper. “You must not speak of my brother again. Not to anyone. Do you understand?”

He studied her. “Who are you afraid of?”

“Every person in this room,” she said. Then quieter still, “And myself.”

The candle died. In the dark, she felt his hand close over hers—warm, firm, deliberate.

“Then we will both keep secrets,” he said. “And we will both pay our debts.”

The paper crackled against her palm. Théo’s name, written in a stranger’s hand, was the most precious thing she had ever held. But above the paper, Ashworth’s fingers still pressed against hers, and she understood, with a child’s sickening clarity, that she had just made a bargain with a man whose identity she was beginning to suspect was a lie as constructed as her own.