Nobody Salutes The Son-in-law

Chapter Six: The Manifest

When the minute was over, Hadrian turned from the window and found his wife sitting up on the sofa with the newspaper in her hands.

She didn't say anything. She stood, laid the paper on the table in front of him with the photograph facing up, and waited.

He could have lied. He had told so many small lies over two years that one more would have been easy. Instead he pulled out the chair across from her, sat down, and told her everything.

He told her about the bridge at the Varn Pass and the thirty-two men who held it in the snow. He told her about Jonas Merrick, eighteen years old and bleeding, and the two days it took to carry him down the mountain on his back. He told her about the title they gave him afterwards and the price the militias put on the Marshal's family, and why his face had been classified ever since. Then he opened the drawer of the little table, took out a bundle of dog tags strung on a length of cord, and laid them beside the newspaper. There were thirty-one of them, the metal worn smooth by his thumb.

She hadn't interrupted him once. Now she looked at the tags for a long time without touching them.

"And my mother?" she said at last. "The side door. The kitchen. Two years of carrying her coat."

"A corporal who eats in the kitchen is nobody," Hadrian said. "Nobody looks at him twice. Nobody follows him home to find out who his mother is." He turned one of the tags over. "Or who his wife is. It was the safest thing I could be, for her and for you."

"You could have told me."

"The people who want the Marshal would have wanted you more."

She took that in. Outside, the yard was turning grey with the first light, and somewhere in the kitchen the cook was already rattling pans.

"The private," she said. "Jonas. What happened to him?"

"He lived." Hadrian set the tag down. "He spent a month in the military hospital, and then one night he got out of bed, dressed, and walked out. Nobody saw him go, and nobody has seen him since." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm still looking."

Elise looked from the dog tags to his face. He could see her putting things in order, the way she did at work, one piece at a time.

"My father knew," she said slowly. "Didn't he? He didn't choose you because you pulled him out of a car. He knew who you were. That's why he insisted."

Hadrian didn't answer, which was answer enough.

They went to see Godfrey together that afternoon.

He lived in the rooms at the top of the house now, the ones with the wide windows, where a nurse came twice a day and Lucinda almost never did. He was sitting in his chair by the window with a blanket over his knees, and when they came in together, his eyes moved from his daughter to Hadrian and stayed there.

Elise knelt beside him. "Papa, I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth."

His right hand was the only part of him that still did what he asked. The nurse had fixed a tablet to the arm of his chair, and he used it to say the few things he still bothered to say. Elise held up the newspaper.

Godfrey looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then he lifted one finger and tapped out two words, one slow letter at a time.

I KNEW.

Elise pressed her hand over her mouth. For two years she had believed her father married her off to a stranger in a fit of gratitude, and she had resented him for it quietly, every time she visited this room. He reached out and caught her wrist with his good hand, and he held it until she nodded.

That evening, in the small room behind the kitchen, Elise spread the manifests across Hadrian's bed and showed him what she had found.

He read the destination port twice. He knew it. Everyone who had served in the mountains knew it, because it was the last town before the passes, and the militias had controlled its docks for years.

"Who is the Quartermaster?" she asked.

"An arms broker," Hadrian said. "The army has been trying to put a face to that name for years. Whoever he is, he keeps the militias supplied." He touched one of the dates with his fingertip. "After I took leave, they sent a new company up to hold the line where my men used to be. The militias ambushed them in the spring. Not one of them came home." He looked down at the long column of crates, and his voice stayed level, though his hand had closed into a fist on the blanket. "They were shot with rifles like these."

For two years, those rifles had been travelling on her family's ships.

Elise turned over the last pages. At the bottom of every dispatch sheet were Hadley Garland's initials, because Hadley ran the shipments. But the authorisations above them, the signatures that released each crate from the warehouse, all carried the same name.

Tarquin Delancey.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her brother's signature for a long time. She was thinking of him at seven years old, crying in the garden over a bird that had flown into the conservatory glass, and of how she had dug its grave for him because he couldn't bear to. Hadrian didn't rush her. He knew what it was to look at a name on a page and see the person behind it.

"I'll testify," Elise said finally. Her voice was quiet, and it didn't shake. "Against my own brother, if I have to."

It was no small thing she was offering. He had watched her look after that boy for two years, covering his debts and smoothing over his messes, long after anyone else would have given up.

Hadrian reached across the papers and took her hand. It was the first time he had done it since their wedding, and she didn't pull away.