Free Emma Barry by Brave in Heart Page B

pile of music and old newspapers on a side table.
    “I’m looking for that piece you were playing the other morning. It was lovely.”
    “Surely I must not bore you all again,” Margaret said.
    Theo slapped the music in front of her. “But we insist,” he responded. “Please?” Gone entirely was the hesitant, differential man she had thrown over. He had blossomed before her eyes.
    “Where were you two years ago?” she whispered as she commenced playing.
    He seemed not to have heard her. His fingers skimmed up her spine, and she felt the tension in her chest that had plagued her since their wedding. She knew to Theo it was exactly this easy. Drop Margaret into this scene, march off to war, and return to a happy, unified home. She knew better, however. She had been left often enough. These people were not her family. This could end as abruptly as it had begun. Even Theo …
    Her hands faltered and struck a discordant chord.
    “Beg pardon,” Margaret called out, she hoped cheerfully, before resuming her playing, newly steeled against confusing emotion.

Chapter VIII
    It had been more than three weeks since Margaret had become his wife. In that time, Theo had known happiness he had hitherto thought unachievable in this life. He had never realized how seamlessly he had moved into the role of his deceased father and uncle. He had taken over his uncle’s practice, taken up his father’s role as head of the household, and allowed the choices and responsibilities of dead men to smother him by the time he was twenty-five.
    It had been unconsciously done. Neither Mother nor Josiah had meant to negate him, but no one had asked what he thought or how he felt or what he wanted. And he had let them. But now, with the army and with Margaret, he had chosen.
    His wife was a passionate woman, and he worshipped her. Whether she graced his arm as they walked to church or argued with him about books at the dinner table or flushed in his arms at night, everything in his life was better with her in it. Even her relationship with Mother was more cordial than he had dared to hope.
    Still, he had yet to tell Margaret that he loved her. She had been firm about her own absence of feelings before they wed, but there was no doubt in his mind that he did. And thus she must reciprocate. He saw it in her face when he made love to her at night. When she prepared his coffee at breakfast. When her face filled with joy when he returned home in the evening. She would be his in every sense of the term very soon.
    He had concluded his work at the firm two weeks prior and was now drilling with his company every day. He, James, and Henry were leading about one hundred enlisted men, mostly from Middletown and the small surrounding villages and farms. Much remained to learn about soldiering, but their progress was marked, and their departure stood only two days away now.
    While he was loath to hurt Margaret and Mother, soldiering was powerful in ways he hadn’t anticipated. He felt true kinship with his men. Steeled by the rightness of their cause, Theo was not anxious about the outcome of the war or the terrors of battle. They would be victorious. He didn’t imagine it would be easy or brief, but they would win. He knew it.
    As he straightened his uniform jacket, Theo remembered the first day he had come home in it. Mother had walked to the window pale and stony. Margaret had stormed from the room and refused to discuss it afterward. Outwardly both Margaret and Mother had immersed themselves in the war effort, but at home, both wanted to hear nothing about company business.
    He glanced in the small looking glass over the dressing table and fussed with his sleeves once again. He wasn’t used to the sight of himself in blue, either. When Margaret entered the room, she knelt and began polishing a spot off his boot with her handkerchief.
    “Leave it, please,” he instructed. She looked up him with tears in her eyes, and he tried to pull her up into his