Solemn Vows by Don Gutteridge

Burns said. “But there’s no need for you to wait. Sir Francis explicitly instructed me to send you home to a warm supper and a feather bed. Dr. Withers gave him and me an account of your abortive expedition following the tragic shooting of Councillor Moncreiff. He will want your first-hand version, of course. But there is an election pending, and tomorrow he will be tied up in meetings until eleven in the morning. He wants to see you in the inner sanctum at that hour precisely.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    “So will I, Lieutenant. I’m never anywhere else.”
    T HE W IDOW S TANDISH LET her parlour curtain drop discreetly and opened the front door of her respectable boarding house. (“My husband, Chalmers, wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said more than once, “as he was a veryparticular gentleman, especially when it concerned the creature comforts of his beloved, God rest his soul.” The dear departed had left her a well-built frame residence eminently suited to respectable boarders.)
    “Oh, Lieutenant Edwards, it is you,” she said, feigning surprise. “I was just putting the cat out for the night.”
    “Good evening, Mrs. Standish.”
    “My heavens, but you do look tuckered out.”
    The cat was nowhere to be seen. “It’s been a very long day.”
    “Your walk from Government House was a pleasant one?” Widow Standish liked to work Government House and any of its doings, however peripheral, into any conversation.
    “It’s a beautiful June evening,” Marc said, following his landlady and self-appointed guardian into the carpeted hallway.
    “I’ve saved you some supper. It’s on the hutch in the dining room. Just some cold beef and bread with a bit of cheese.”
    “I’ll nibble at it later, if you don’t mind.”
    “Oh, I see,” she replied, lowering her voice and whispering, “He’s still on his bed where I left him.”
    “He saw his first dead man today, I’m afraid, and it was not a pretty sight.”
    “Oh, I see,” clucked Widow Standish. She looked relieved. “I thought it might’ve been just the drink.”
    U SING A COTTON CLOTH AND FRESH WATER from the dry sink, Marc managed to clean up Willoughby’s face, and then he got him out of his uniform (which looked beyond rejuvenation, even by Maisie, Mrs. Standish’s very dedicated maid-cook-and-launderer). Willoughby moaned now and again, but his eyes remained resolutely shut. Marc tugged a nightshirt over the young man’s lean, well-muscled body and let him flop back on the bed. The night air was humid and still: he would need no covers.
    As Willoughby’s head hit the pillow, his eyes popped open, then closed again. But in the second or so that they remained open, they took in Marc bending over and the darkening room behind him. And what Marc thought he saw in Willoughby’s face was fear.
    “My God, old chum, but you’ve had one hell of a fright this day,” Marc whispered.
    Willoughby, blind and deaf to the world once more, began to breathe regularly and, from the outside at least, peacefully. His was an aesthetic face, fine-boned with fair skin as smooth as a debutante’s. The brow was high and delicately veined, the hair—now matted and repulsive—was blond and curly, as his beard would be if he could grow one. Like this, with his eyes closed, he might have been mistaken for an adolescent, all promise and possibility. But when those grey eyes were open, Willoughby looked more like he had seen too much too soon, and Marc was never sure whether his suffering would erupt in words or action, or turn in upon itself.
    Marc knew that Colin Willoughby had not begun his manhood years auspiciously. As the second son of a wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner, he was destined for the army or the church, but chose instead a more hedonistic life in the gambling dens and whorehouses of London. Papa Willoughby promptly had him hog-tied and returned to the family castle, and after a good talking-to, he was shipped off to military school at