An Early Engagement by Bárbara Metzger Page A

Rigg could get the door open and his master inside.
    “What’s that, shush? Me shush? Oh, company, you say? Good, good. I told the lads the night was still young. Here, who is it, Rigg? Don’t look like any of the army fellows.” He wrinkled his nose. “Don’t smell like one either.”
    “It’s your brother, sir,” Rigg informed him, grabbing for his master’s hat, sword, and gloves before they ended on the floor. “Your younger brother, Cap’n, Geoffrey. I’ll just go fetch some coffee, shall I, sir?”
    “Capital idea, Rigg, my brother’s here.”
    “Yessir.”
    When the batman left and a grinning Geoffrey was being pounded on the back, Emilyann stayed quiet in her corner, horrified. She hardly knew this man! She had not seen Smoky in, what? three or four years, and then briefly, but how changed he was, how much older he seemed than his twenty-four years. She did not recall him being so large either, surely not so broad-shouldered under his scarlet uniform jacket. His hair showed some silver at the long sideburns, his face was pale and gaunt, with a new red scar following along his jawbone, and worse, Captain Stockton was more than a little disguised. She huddled back into her coat.
    “Devilishly glad to see you, bantling,” he was telling Geoff while tugging at his neckcloth. “If I had more time, I would have sent for you from school, but you wouldn’t have been there anyway, right? Ain’t it lovely how things work out? By the way,” he asked, shrugging out of his jacket, “what was it this time? Wine, women, or song?”
    Now, Geoff had declared himself the spokesman while on the road lest anyone recognize Emilyann for a girl; he desperately wanted not to be the talker now. His frantic glances in Em’s direction brought no salvation.
    “Your abysmal grades, eh? You’ll come about. Give me a hand with these boots, will you?”
    “It ... it was the pig,” Geoff blurted out, giving a pull on one well-polished boot, then the other as his brother leaned back in one of the chairs. “It was a runt, you see, and the farmer was taking it to market anyway, and the little thing couldn’t keep up—oh, Lord.”
    Stokely had unbuttoned his shirt and was starting on his breeches when a squawk from the corner made him turn around. “That had better not be the pig, my boy,” he said awfully, eyeing the pile of rags.
    “It’s Emph, um, hm.”
    “Gads, you’d never make a soldier. Speak up, Geoff, it’s a what?”
    “It’s Emilyann.”
    “Holy Mo—” Pants were hastily fastened, shirt tucked in. “You imbecile, how could you bring her to London like this, to bachelor quarters? Don’t you have anything in your brainbox at all? The pig would have been better!”
    “That’s not fair, Ev. When was the last time you tried to talk her out of anything?”
    Indignant, Emilyann started to get up, but a thundering voice ordered her to “stay. I’ll deal with you next, miss.” Stokely ran his fingers across the scar on his cheek. Lord, what if his friends had come back with him? All he could see of her in the shadows were two huge eyes in a face that was ghost-white where it was not mud-streaked, topped with clumps of colorless hair. Arms and legs poked out from the rags like sticks, and an aura of what?—kennel, kitchen, swamp—hung over the whole corner like a bad dream. At least no one would recognize her for a lady. Hah!
    “You still look like an unfledged nestling,” he told her, finally beginning to see the humor of anyone mistaking this guttersnipe for a gently born female. He headed back toward the chair, apologizing that she improved with the distance, and where the hell was Rigg with that coffee anyway? “For I think I am going to need all my wits about me when I hear what you two cawkers are up to.”
    He was smiling. He was the Smoky she had always known, but oh, dear, where to begin? It wasn’t as if he was going to be happy with the idea, she could see that now. She sent a silent