Atlas stopped walking. Clara stopped walking. “When?” they said together.
Alfie hopped out of Atlas’s arms and brushed twigs and dead leaves off his clothes. “All the time. From trees, from fences, from gates. I almost always land on my feet. I’m like a cat.”
Clara groaned. “No more climbing.”
“Unless you can learn not to fall.”
“Atlas!” She swung toward him.
He shrugged, the roll of his shoulders looking so much like Alfie’s a moment before she almost laughed. “Unless you’re going to lock him in a room, I very much doubt you can keep him on the ground.” He narrowed his eyes at Alfie. “Be more careful. No climbing anything higher than the first-floor window at the dower house.”
Alfie snapped a nod. “Yes, sir.”
Atlas ruffled Alfie’s hair. “Now, retrieve the mistletoe.”
The boy ran for it, gathered it into his arms, and returned to the cart.
“Now for the greenery.” Atlas hooked his thumbs in his pockets and looked about. “Do you see any, Clara?”
They spent the next hour piling the cart high with fragrant branches, and as they crawled back into their spots and Atlas urged the horse into motion, he called out, “Alfie!Berryandplum.”
Alfie laughed then grumbled, “Too hard. I can’t find rhymes for those. Excepthairyforberry.”
“I know a good one forplum.” Atlas winked at Clara, and a word dropped into her mind at the exact same time, as if he’d put it there.
“Bum!”she cried.
Alfie collapsed into giggles that rumbled through the cart the entire way home.
Atlas had planned to tackle some tasks at the dower house after they’d retrieved the mistletoe, but he found it hard to leave Alfie and Clara. Wasn’t even Christmas, and she’d given him a gift he’d not dared ask for—a return to how they’d been before.
He shouldn’t take it. She’d been right the first time—he’d hurt Alfie. And Clara. Let them down eventually. That thought what finally drove him from down the road to the dower house in early afternoon sun to work fears and doubts from his mind.
He found the house quiet and his tools cold, and though he picked them up and chose a task, he found his will… lacking.
Odd. He threw open the window in the finished room. The onetree branches could knock against and little boys could climb through. A sharp breeze filtered inside.
Thank God. It would lift the scent of gunpowder from his skin. Even now, firing a gun…
His stomach turned, and he stuck his head out the window, breathed heavily as he closed his eyes. Clara had let him kiss her today. Without an audience. It made the sour roil in his stomach disappear. He stepped away from the window, the list of his next projects glowing on the mantel across the room. He had much to do.
So he could leave England, find his soul where he left it, somewhere on the Continent.
But he left the dower house instead and returned home to Briarcliff.
To Clara. To Alfie. Perhaps he’d take a bath and wash the gunpowder from his skin.
Sixteen
Early morning, December 24
The battlefield stretched out forever, striated with lines of marching men, dotted with canons, and hazed with smoke. Soldiers fought before the farmhouse. Others hid behind the ridge. The gate—breached. But closing, cutting bodies in two. A wind screamed across it all, every scene just out of sight of the other but somehow fitting all inside Atlas’s head, happening at the same moment instead of across the span of an entire bloody day.
The wind screamed, yes.
Or was that actual screaming? Men in pain and dying. Nature well and pissed off about it. Atlas pissed off, too, truth be told. Because here he stood again seven years later, and the battle still raged.
Fucking Waterloo.
