On Wings of Devotion Read online

  Arabelle lifted her brows. Her shift had been officially over for twenty minutes, but she’d wanted to take care of the unfortunate captain before she left. The cantankerous Nurse Wilcox had no right to badger her, though Susan and Eliza were only halfway through their own shifts. Which was, perhaps, why they scurried out with mumbled apologies. Well, that and the fact they were in the Voluntary Aid Detachment and Arabelle was a trained nurse, which gave her a bit more authority. She planted her hands on her hips. “I’m on my way out, Nurse Wilcox.”

  Wilcox sniffed and turned from the room. “Be on your way, then. I’ll not tolerate you idling about when you’re not working, setting a poor example for the other impressionable young ladies.”

  Arabelle reclaimed the bowl of soiled bandages and pasted a smile into place. “Of course. We wouldn’t want them to pick up any bad habits.” Like scowling at and judging absolutely everyone.

  The matron sent that narrowed gaze over her shoulder. “Are you being disrespectful, Miss Denler?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Aloud, anyway. She didn’t need the position, not in terms of the pittance it paid. But she certainly needed the occupation. Best not to make her superior too angry with her. Though why the hospital matron, Nurse Jameson, tolerated Wilcox’s attitude Arabelle didn’t dare to guess.

  By the time Arabelle reached the doorway, Wilcox had bustled off to terrorize someone else, leaving her free to turn toward the laundry.

  Another friend slid into place beside her—a friend who routinely exasperated the matron, very much on purpose. “Did she catch you staring out the window at a certain grounded pilot again?”

  Arabelle shot a warm smile at their most famous volunteer. “I was not staring, Your Grace. I was praying for him.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Brook Wildon, the Duchess of Stafford, looped her arm with Arabelle’s and leaned close. “You and your father are still coming to dinner tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. It’s been ages since I’ve seen Ella and Rowena and—”

  “He’ll be there.” Brook punctuated her statement—and Arabelle’s stumble—with a grin. “Thought that might silence you.”

  Silence her? It baffled her. She couldn’t imagine that man sitting down to a swanky-as-the-war-allowed dinner party in a duke’s home. “But—”

  “You know my husband served with him at Northolt. Not in the same squadron, of course, but he knows him well.” Brook tucked a bobbed curl behind her ear and steered them toward the back stairs. Which was a good thing, because Arabelle had forgotten where she was supposed to be going. “He’s been wanting Camden to come to dinner for months, and he’s finally accepted.”

  Now? To the same dinner party Arabelle was attending?

  As if reading her thoughts, Brook offered another maddeningly cheeky smile. “Fortuitous indeed, since we needed him for an even number. Otherwise you would have been without a partner.”

  Arabelle gripped her bowl and prayed the look she sent her friend was withering. “Don’t smile at me like that, Brook. You know perfectly well I’m engaged.”

  “What I know is that Edmund Braxton is nothing to you but duty, and you deserve more from life.” She paused at the top of the stairs. “You deserve someone to make you genuinely happy. Someone to love you.”

  The tightness of her throat didn’t lessen any with a swallow. “Such talk has no place in this world. Not anymore.”

  “Oh, don’t be a ninny. Love always has a place,” said the woman who’d had the good fortune of falling in love with her best friend.

  Arabelle lifted her chin a notch. “Let’s not be foolish, Brook. Our generation of men has been reduced to a minimum, and I’m fortunate to have a fiancé at all. I cannot hope for one who came to me for reasons of love.”

  Brook’s green eyes sparked. “Of course you can.”

  “No. There are exactly one million two hundred thousand reasons a man would choose me for his wife, and none of them are love or attraction.”

  Brook folded wool-clad arms over her chest. She was dressed to leave for the day, too, but would go from the front, as that’s where her driver would be waiting. “You are more than your aunt’s fortune.”

  Absolutely. She was also her father’s heir, if he didn’t manage to spend what remained of his half of the Denler fortune after the war was over. Not that she’d put any stock in that. Adventure still waited in the world, after all, and Lawrence Denler wasn’t one to sit back and let other men find it in his stead.

  Arabelle held tightly to her bowl and moved on to the stairs. “Say hello to the boys for me.”

  “Ara.”

  “I’d better hurry. I’m running late again—don’t want Father to worry.” She didn’t pause to await another chastisement from her friend. Though Brook was more than capable of chasing after her, if chastise she truly wanted to do. But she must have decided that the next round of their eternal “to marry for love or convenience” debate could wait for another day.

  Only when Arabelle had reached the bottom of the stairs, and the heat and smells from the laundry wafted out to greet her, did she pause. Drag in a breath. Let her nostrils flare. Maybe she didn’t love Brax, not like Brook did her Justin. But Arabelle had made her choice with eyes wide open. Because she did love his family. His home. And without her—or more correctly, her inheritance—he stood to lose it. His aging mother would be reduced to a pittance to live on. And dear Sarah, who had helped Arabelle through that dark patch of her own life, would be sacked as housekeeper.

  She couldn’t do that to them. Not when it was within her power to help. It was why she’d said an eager “Yes” the moment Brax came to her after her aunt’s death and proposed. He’d been clear, honest, forthright. He respected her, liked her enough to be up front about his reasons. She’d just inherited a sizable fortune. He needed it to keep Middlegrove running. They could have an amiable, friendly marriage, built on a solid foundation. After the war, he’d give her the family she craved. She’d keep his ancestral home from ruin.

  They’d both win.

  Four years ago, it had sounded noble and good. Four years was a lifetime ago.

  Well. Nothing would be accomplished by dillydallying outside the laundry. She bustled in, deposited the stained bandages, and then hurried back up to collect her hat and coat. A few minutes later, she’d said her farewells to Eliza, Susan, and her other friends and stepped into the bite of a London winter wind.

  She joined the other silent pedestrians on the street, bustling along to escape the bluster of February. She’d been fortunate to find a position here, a mere twenty-minute walk from her home in Westminster. Father would be waiting. Probably. Maybe. Unless he’d gone to the Explorers Club again to compare stories with the other adventurers stuck at home while U-boats prowled the seas.

  Paper crackled in her pocket when her satchel brushed against it. She’d had a letter from Brax yesterday but had waited until lunch today to read it. His missives came regularly, once every two weeks. No lines of poetry or waxing on about their postponed dreams. Just facts. But that was all she required, and all she sent in return.

  This one read more like a newspaper article on the advances in the field of naval diving than a letter from a man to his sweetheart. Which, granted, made her smile. He’d always been fascinated with all things maritime. As a child, he’d been obsessed with the revelation that Arabelle’s father owned a yacht and had sailed it across the Atlantic to Central America. He’d not been put off in the slightest by Ara’s snappish answers to his questions. Thoughts of her father, who was at the time missing in the wilds of that distant continent, hadn’t exactly been what she’d wanted to dwell on.

  Arabelle turned right onto the Strand, holding her coat closed a little more tightly. She nearly ran the last stretch of her daily trek, until the familiar views of Buckingham Palace filled her vision. She turned toward the row of townhouses directly across from the palace. Naturally, the one Aunt Hettie had purchased had a floor more than the ones adjoining. Because, she’d said, if she was going to abandon her villa in Italy, she’d do it in the height of English style.

  A waste of money, to be sure. But it was home.

  Ara bustled up the steps to the door, which opened before she even reached it.

  Parks gave her a warm grin as she came inside. “Another cold one, Miss Denler?”

  “Unfortunately.” She returned the young butler’s smile. After dear old Harcourt passed away last year, it had been nearly impossible to find a replacement for him, as so many men were caught up in the war effort. Parks had already been to the front and sent home again with an injury that made him unfit for duty, though it didn’t hinder his abilities in the house. “Is Father at home?”

  Shutting the door behind her, Parks motioned upward. “In his study.”

  Parks’s sister, Ruth, stepped forward with a hand out. “May I take your coat, miss?”

  These siblings were, at present, the sum total of their live-in staff. They had a cook, but she lived elsewhere. “Thank you, Ruth.”

  After handing over her outerwear, she jogged up the eternal flights of stairs.

  Gaslights—blocked from the street by the dark curtains that regulations demanded—shone from Father’s study as she neared its doors. She tapped on the doorframe.

  He didn’t look up. She hadn’t expected him to, not when she saw he had a map tacked to the wall and was, inexplicably, dangling upside down from the edge of his desk, looking at it.

  “Father. What in the world—”

  “My question exactly, sweetling. What in the world was I thinking when I drew this map? I have it wrong, all wrong. The ridge of that mountain didn’t continue northward in this stretch. I can see it in my mind’s eye. I viewed it from the peak of the next mountain over, you
know. Only at a different angle.”

  She leaned her shoulder into the doorpost. “If you slip off your desk again—”

  “You’ll patch me up as you did last time. Handy thing, having a nurse for a daughter. I told the boys at the club as much just last week.” He put down a weathered hand to the floor, though. “You really ought to come with me on my next expedition. You’d be invaluable.”

  “Mm.” She folded her arms over her chest, pressing her lips against a laugh as her father tried to lever himself back up. He wasn’t exactly a young man anymore, but according to him, Lawrence Denler was still fitter and sprier than any explorer the world over. “I’ll be married by the time you set sail again, and Brax may have something to say about his bride heading off into the wild blue yonder.”

  “Bah.” Apparently giving up on pushing himself back upright, he placed both palms on the floor and instead pushed off the desk with his feet, turning half a cartwheel and nailing the landing as Arabelle straightened and gasped her protest of the move.

  His face bobbed back upright with a grin better suited for a boy of five than a man of fifty. “There we are. And I say no one has really lived until they’ve tasted a bit of adventure. Come with me, Ara. We’ll find Atlantis together. Write a few history books.”

  Leave everything—and everyone who mattered—behind, he meant. Chase after what was always elusive instead of holding tight to what was right before one’s nose. She dug her fingers into her palms. Bit back the angry answer that still, after all these years, wanted so desperately to come out.

  She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t speak it. She shook her head. “Don’t forget that we’re dining with the Staffords tomorrow. I don’t want to have to hunt you down at the club again.”

  His smile was impish, bright, crooked, and pierced by the same single dimple in his left cheek that she knew occupied her own. “The duchess would go with her father into the wilds, I daresay.”

  A truth that made her laugh, chasing away that old pain. “I daresay she would. How unfortunate for you that you had me for a daughter instead of her.”

  “Nonsense.” With the same gusto he’d used to vault off his desk, he came to her side and planted a loud kiss on her forehead. Not many men could achieve that feat, but she’d inherited her unusual height from him, after all. “I’ll get you out of England yet. You’ll see, sweetest. You’ll see the allure of it once you’ve had a taste.”

  For some reason she couldn’t decipher, his claim made a pair of stormy eyes and an angry posture fill her mind’s eye. She shook it away. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the wanderlust. It was that she knew its cost.

  He tipped up her chin until her gaze met his. “I’ve always come home, Ara.”

  Eventually. Thus far. Her smile felt small and bare upon her lips. “And I’m sure you always will. Until the time you don’t.”

  She’d never subject her own family to that question. All she wanted was a steady home, a husband who returned to it each night, and children who could trust she would be there. She may not be beautiful or clever or alluring, but she could offer Brax that much.

  And he’d go off diving into the depths of the sea every chance he got, until the time he didn’t come home.

  With a sigh, she turned away from her father. Perhaps she should have promised her fortune to a landlocked gentleman whose estates were on the rocks instead.

  2

  She’d gone too far. Phillip Camden barged into his building, letting the door crash shut behind him. The woman had written to him at work this time. She had some nerve, addressing her latest venom-filled letter so that his own blighted superior handed it to him.

  You’ll pay, she’d written. Again. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll see you pay for his death.

  As if he didn’t pay every blighted day he woke up and realized the nightmare still had a hold of him.

  He took the stairs two at a time. Up the first flight of stairs, the second. His flat was there, right next to the landing, but he was sorely tempted to keep going, to keep his feet hammering in time with the headache. Maybe he would have, had the figure outside his door not halted him by her mere presence.

  Camden came to a halt so suddenly he nearly tipped backward. “Mum?”

  His mother held out a hand, gripped his arm, steadied him before his disrupted balance could topple him back down the stairs. Amusement glinted briefly in her eyes at the name he hadn’t used for her since he was a lad. “Hello, Phillip.”

  Shock always had a way of bringing out the boy in him. He cleared his throat and leaned over to give her cheek its obligatory kiss. “What are you doing here, Mother?” She hated London with the same passion with which he’d hated seeing that all-too-familiar script on the letter in Commander James’s hand.

  If Amelia Camden was here, there was a blamed good reason for it. Or, more likely, a bad one.

  Because that was all that seemed to be left in the world. Though he’d hoped to insulate his mother from such truths.

  She patted his cheek as she’d always done, as if to say, It’s my job to protect you, not the other way round. “I needed to talk to you. And I couldn’t trust it to party lines or a telegram, nor wait for the post to reach you.”

  A rock settled in his abdomen where his stomach should have been. He shoved a hand into his pocket, past the offensive letter, past the ever-present wing pin he kept in there to remind himself of who he’d once been, and came up with the key to his flat. “What have I done this time?”

  His mother chuckled behind him as he fit the key into the lock. “For once, my dear Philly, it has nothing to do with you and your pranks.”

  Pranks. Oh for the day when the consequences of skipping classes or putting pepper in the headmaster’s tea were all he had to worry with. No threats of court-martial. Or firing squads.

  He made the expected show of wincing at the old nickname. “What, then? Don’t tell me Jeremy’s found some trouble. I won’t believe it of him.” With their older brother fallen at Gallipoli, only the youngest of the Camden boys was left to get himself into a pinch. Something completely foreign to Chaplain Camden, aside from when Phillip and Gilbert had dragged him into it as children.

  “It isn’t your brother.” Mother’s voice was tense as she followed him into the dim expanse of his flat.

  He turned the knob to raise the lights, trying to ignore her exaggerated wince as she saw his living arrangements. “Welcome to the Camden Manor of the future.”

  “Not amusing.” She wrinkled her nose at the stack of dishes he hadn’t bothered to clean up yesterday. Or the day before. Or, frankly, the day before that. He’d get around to it when he ran out of clean ones in the cupboard. “Haven’t you a housekeeper in this building? Perhaps you ought to take your lodgings at—”

  “Mum.” He used the familiar name again solely for effect as he latched the door behind them. “If it’s not me or Jer, that only leaves Cass.” His fingers curled into his palm. Cassandra was just a baby—or had been the last time he’d been at home on a daily basis. Granted, he knew she was nineteen now, fully grown, but . . .

  His mother’s lips thinned. “She’s got herself in quite a spot of trouble.”

  “It’s a bloke, isn’t it?” All of a sudden he saw her as she’d looked at Christmas, rather than how he usually imagined her—in short dresses and braids. Her hair had been swept up, her dress fashionable and accentuating her trim figure, and her eyes, now that he thought about it, had been far too sparkling. “Who is it? I’ll hunt him down. I’ll knock him flat. I’ll—”

  “That would do very little good, given that it would change none of the consequences that bring me here.” Mother stepped closer and gripped the hand he’d fisted, covering his eager knuckles with her fingers. “I need you to keep your head, Phillip. And help me find the best course of action. Your sister’s with child, and though the young man responsible claims he loves her, he also claims he’s not at liberty to wed her.”

  Camden bit back the words that wanted to sear his tongue solely because he knew his mother would box his ears for them, despite her having to reach up half a foot to do so. She’d made the stretch before.