Jennet would not be unhappy to leave this place, she told herself, if only she knew where she was going. Tomorrow night she might be sleeping on the transport ship, or in a feather bed in Montreal, or someplace else that she could not imagine just now.

She smoothed her skirt, touched her hair, and turned toward the colonel's quarters.

Chapter 40

Though Jennet had been called to the colonel's quarters many times, those few minutes that it took to move from the heat and misery of the stockades to the blockhouse were never enough to prepare her for the transition. The perfumed and glittering plenty should have angered her, but first and foremost, they gave her a headache.

Now and then the colonel had requested that she sup with the officers, but this evening was out of the ordinary, even for Colonel Caudebec. The cook had been hard at work for a whole day at least: there was lamb, roast beef, a haunch of venison, river trout fried in butter, fresh oysters, great bowls of peppered and mashed turnips, carrots baked in brown sugar and wine, new peas and beans glistening with pork fat, and a tureen of ragout big enough to wash in. Jennet's empty stomach churned in appreciation, while her mind was busy with other things.

To her left was a major who had been introduced to her as Jacques-René Boucher de la Bruére, of the Second Battalion of the Lower Canada Select Embodied Militia. In spite of his very long name and title de la Bruére was an unleven loaf of a man, short and squat, radiating a damp warmth. He wore a carefully molded and waxed mustache that curled at the ends, and a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. At first, at least, he showed far more interest in the food than he did in Jennet, which suited her very well.

To her right sat Luke Bonner, of Forbes and Sons, a cousin of the Earl of Carryck. Surely, the colonel prompted, Jennet must know of the Carrycks of Annandale? Jennet did, of course; she told the officers so without flinching, though her heart was hammering so loudly that she could barely hear herself speak.

As far as Mr. Bonner himself was concerned, she had no idea if he had scars on his face or even if he still had two eyes; Jennet steadfastly refused to look him in the face for fear of what her own expression might give away.

For an hour she concentrated on her plate, glad of the conversation that went on without her, listening to Luke's part of it for some hint of what was to come tomorrow and of course finding nothing. Luke barely looked at her, spoke to her only when it was necessary, and then with courtesy that bordered on the cold. He might be a stranger, a man she had never seen before and would never see again.

To amuse herself, Jennet tried to imagine that, to see him as another woman might. Tall and broad in the shoulder, firm of jaw, his blue eyes missing little, giving away nothing. Intriguing, foreboding, mysterious. Looking at him as he was this night, no one would ever imagine the man he could be, the way he could laugh himself into a helpless quivering mass, his fine singing voice, the wild streak in him that showed up when he was on horseback, or held her in his arms. The tenderness he was capable of, his sweet teasing when the need was on him.

“More wine?” asked one of the cadets who served, and Jennet, deep in her thoughts, started.

“Go on, go on,” bellowed the colonel. “Don't deny yourself tonight, Mrs. Huntar. I doubt you'll get any Paxareti equal to that in your convent, or any wine at all, eh?”

“Convent?” asked a young lieutenant, his head inclined politely but the distaste obvious in the set of his mouth. “You are to enter a convent, Mrs. Huntar?”

“The Grey Nuns of the Hôpital Général,” answered Colonel Caudebec for her. “Father O'Neill there has arranged it all. You must know of the charitable works of the sisters, Lieutenant Hughes?”

“That must be why her hair is cropped,” said the long, consumptively thin man called Lieutenant Hughes. He was wearing the scarlet jacket of the Thirty-ninth Foot, which was unfortunate, given his pale red hair and sunburned face. He studied Jennet with an uneasy fascination, as if she were a talking dog or a horse with two heads. Which she supposed she must be, to him. Englishmen had the oddest ideas about Catholics: tails and horns and midnight masses where the blood of infants was spilled.

“My hair is short because of the heat,” Jennet said. “I prefer comfort to fashion.” She wished immediately that she had not let her irritation get the better of her. The men's attention was focused on her now, something she had been trying to avoid.

“She's a Scot,” said Major Wyndham of the King's Rangers, his surprise breaking through what had seemed a permanent expression of boredom. “A Scot and a Catholic. No wonder she's so far from home.”

“I am a Scot, sir,” Jennet said, giving him her most withering look, the one she had learned from her mother. “But I do speak English. There is no need to talk about me in the third person, as if I were a dumb animal.”

That got her a sharp and contemplative look, but no apology.

“It is true what you say,” said another major, this one with heavily French accented English. His tone was friendlier, at least, and he looked at Jennet when he spoke to her. “Life is not easy for us Catholics in Scotland, is it, madame?”

“Mrs. Huntar is a new convert. She never suffered under those unfortunate and unfair restrictions while she was in Scotland,” said the colonel, saving Jennet the trouble of lying. He raised a glass in the priest's direction. “But Mr. Bonner can tell you something of Catholics in Scotland, I think. He lived at Carryck for some years.”