Free Skylark by Jo Beverley

of course. I came up to check on Harry and decided to sit a little. Sleeping children are delightful, aren’t they?”
    “That they are, ma’am.”
    “Is everything ready for departure tomorrow?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Laura felt reluctant to leave, but that was carrying concern too far, so she went back down to her room. She couldn’t resist pausing at the banister overlooking the hall and listening for Jack’s booming voice.
    There it was. He was in the dining room.
    Laura retreated to her room and had her maid prepare her for bed. It was early, but she had the excuse of today’s alarms, and travel the next. Once she was ready, she sent Catherine to bed.
    She would sit up to make sure Jack didn’t come upstairs, but also, when everyone was asleep, she would invade the study. She paced the room, watching the ticking clock, but then made herself sit and read the day’s newspapers.
    Her eyes read lines of print without taking in much of the meaning, but her attention was caught by a story in the paper about army officers whose minds had been turned by the horrors of war. Stephen had mentioned that.
    They were now to be treated in their regiments for a year before being sent to an asylum, which would give a chance of recovery. Asylums for the insane were horrible places, likely to turn someone mad if they weren’t so already.
    As Caldfort House seemed to be deranging her?
    She looked at the clock. Nearly half past nine. Lord Caldfort was often in bed by ten. Why wouldn’t Jack go home! She opened her door a crack, but even from here she could hear his voice.
    She sat again and moved on to a hair-raising account of the captivity of the English consul in Algiers during the confrontation there in August. The consul and his family, along with some naval officers who had tried to rescue them, had been chained, locked in a pit, and marched over long distances with only bread and water.
    Another story of imprisonment, and one that put her own resentments to shame.
    The prisoners’ release was due to the efforts of the American consul, though the dey of Algiers had been humane enough to send the ambassador’s child back to the safety of a British ship.
    Wasn’t it a universal rule to try to avoid harm to children?
    Only if they were irrelevant to the issue. Other children had not fared well. The Princes in the Tower. Prince Arthur, who had stood between King John and the throne of England.
    She forced her mind back to the paper. Two coaches had come to grief while racing to be first into Brighton. She shook her head. One of Hal’s friends had died in a similar accident. Men seemed to need no reason to kill one another. Improve the roads so they were safer, and madmen raced on them.
    She finished the paper and again looked at the clock. Though she felt it was an age since she’d left the dining room, it was only quarter past ten.
    There was no point to sitting here watching the hands of the clock, so Laura settled to writing a letter to her sister, Olivia, who was wife to a naval captain.
    Was that movement below?
    She opened her door and—praise be—heard Jack call his good nights. A little later, footsteps came up the stairs. She closed her door and listened as someone, surely Stephen, passed and another door closed down the corridor.
    At last.
    Lord Caldfort would be settling for the night in his bedchamber. The servants would be clearing the dining room, then washing the last dishes before taking to their beds. Lady Caldfort had been in her rooms for hours. Laura didn’t know when her mother-in-law went to bed or went to sleep, but she’d never been known to emerge after dinner.
    As the house settled into silence, she itched to set off, but she had the whole night. Though she fidgeted and paced, Laura waited until the clock showed eleven thirty before she would let herself leave her room. Then, senses screwed for any sign of life, she carried her candle downstairs and across the hall to her father-in-law’s