Judith gave the quick smile that made her quiet face sparkle. “Actually, it sounded interesting to me, too, but I thought you preferred shopping.”
Antonia made a wry face. “Clear proof we shouldn’t make assumptions about other people’s preferences. Shall we go see Mr. Malcolm’s marvelous machine?”
Abandoning the shops, they set off through the hilly streets for the edge of town. A brisk twenty-minute walk brought them to the top of the last hill.
Below they could see the mine buildings and, a bit beyond, a coaching inn called the George. “I think that’s the sound of the engineering we’re hearing all the way up here,” Judith remarked. “When we set Adam down, I didn’t realize just how noisy it was.”
Antonia nodded. “I see why Adam said that steam carriages on the roads would probably never be feasible because the noise terrifies horses.”
Judith gave a soft chuckle. “I’m not ashamed to admit it would frighten me!”
They started down the hill.
* * * *
Adam studied Malcolm’s drawing. “You really think that you can run an engine at 150 pounds of pressure?”
Malcolm nodded. “Aye. We’ll go even higher when we find a way of sealing the joints of the boiler plates better.” He unrolled another drawing. “You may find this interesting, too.”
Adam cast an experienced eye over the design. “I see you attached the connecting rod directly to the piston. It certainly makes the engine more compact, and it should be cheap to build. Hasn’t Trevithick done something like this?”
“Aye.” The engineer shook his head regretfully. “The man’s a genius, but he never stays with a project long enough to make a success of it. All over Britain, there are men like me building on Trevithick’s ideas.”
Adam smiled inwardly, admiring the dexterity with which Malcolm implied that he himself was competent and reliable. Adam liked associates who were reliable.
As he rolled up the drawing, he realized the background noise had changed. “Your engine is running much harder than when I arrived. It’s really designed to work at such a pace?”
All of Malcolm’s attention had been absorbed by his discussion with this knowledgeable potential investor, but now he stopped to listen. “Bloody hell!” he swore. Without another word, he dived toward the door of the shed.
It was already too late. Even as the engineer’s hand touched the door knob, the pressure of the steam engine, denied the relief of the safety valve, reached explosion point.
* * * *
Antonia and Judith were a couple of hundred yards from the engine house when it exploded with a deafening roar that could be heard on the far side of Macclesfield. The concussion hit the two women with a blast that staggered Antonia and almost knocked the smaller Judith from her feet.
Right in front of their eyes, the engine house disintegrated into clouds of steam and fragments of wood. Huge chunks of iron hurtled through the air in all directions to bury themselves in the earth up to a hundred yards away.
One such chunk just missed a young man who had been approaching the office and who now lay motionless on the ground in the wake of the blast. Other iron missiles tore into the office itself, combining with the shock wave to knock the little building into an untidy jumble of beams and boards.
Deafened by the noise, Antonia stared in horror at the devastation. Then she screamed, “Adam!” and began running full-speed toward the wreckage, Judith hard on her heels.
* * * *
The coach was ten minutes late, which did nothing to improve Ian Kinlock’s mood. Eager to make up for lost time, the coachman was stopping just long enough to change his team and pick up passengers.
The doctor was passing his bag up to the coachman when the engine exploded. Even several hundred yards away, the blast was stunning in its intensity, and the horses began plunging in their traces and trumpeting with fright.
‘“Damnation,’’ Kinlock swore, grabbing at the side of the carriage to steady himself.
As thunderous echoes of the detonation rolled between the bare hills, the coachman gasped, “Gawdamighty, what was that?”
“I don’t know,” Kinlock said grimly, “but throw my bag down again. The odds are that someone is going to need a doctor.”
* * * *
Antonia never recalled the aftermath of the explosion except in a jumble of disconnected images. She remembered men pouring out of the inn down the road, remembered clawing at the steaming wreckage of the shattered engine house, tears pouring down her face.
When a man caught her in his arms and tried to drag her away, she pummeled him with her fists, crying out that her cousin was there and she must save him. The burly workman looked down at her with pity. “If he was in there, miss, he’s past saving.”
Judith was also tugging her away, her white face showing the same terror that Antonia felt. Her voice was almost steady when she said that perhaps Adam had been in the office and would be pulled out unharmed at any moment.
The rescuers drawn by the explosion cleared the wreckage away with slow care. Antonia wanted to shriek at them to hurry, but even in her present state she knew that haste could unbalance the debris, causing further injury to anyone trapped inside.
The young man who’d been heading toward the shed lay unconscious as white-haired man expertly checked him for injuries. At some point Judith passed on the news that apparently no one had been in the engine house, so there was a good chance that Adam was in the office.
The first victim uncovered was a stocky middle-aged man, unconscious but with no obvious injury. Antonia ignored him, her eyes riveted to the ongoing work. Finally, after an endless, aching interval, they brought Adam’s bloody form out of the ruined building.
Antonia fought her way through the ring of men to kneel at his side. He was so still . . . “Get a surgeon!” she begged.
Adam’s light-brown hair was saturated with blood, his face partially obscured, his powerful body completely limp. She clenched his unresponsive hand, refusing to believe that he might be dead.
“I’m a surgeon.’’ The clipped words had a Scottish burr.
Antonia looked up to see the man who had examined the other two victims. Later, she would be surprised at how youthful the face under the white hair was, but now only one thing concerned her. “Is he . . . ?” she stopped, unable to complete the sentence.
The surgeon knelt beside Adam and felt for a pulse in his throat. “He’s alive. For the moment.”
Judith pulled Antonia to her feet and they watched while the doctor made a quick examination. The blood came from a long gash across the right side of Adam’s skull. It was hard to believe a man could lose so much blood and survive.
So much blood...
Antonia gripped Judith’s hand fiercely, fighting her feeling of nausea.
The physician improvised a head bandage, then stood and signaled for the makeshift litter. As two husky fellows carried Adam to the inn, Antonia intercepted the doctor. “Will he be all right?”
“Sorry, lass, but I cannot say,” he said gently. “Even minor head wounds bleed something fierce, so it may not be quite so bad as it looks. There isn’t much a surgeon can do except sew the wound up and hope for the best.’’
He considered telling her that at least the skull hadn’t been broken away to expose the brain, but decided that might be more descriptive than this terrified young beauty could bear. “The gentleman is your husband?”
“No, my cousin.” Antonia shook her head numbly. “More than that, really.”
“Well, he seems a strong fellow. He may be awake in an hour, wanting to know what happened.”
In spite of the reassuring words, Antonia didn’t think that the doctor believed that any more than she did.
* * * *
Judith had known that Antonia and Adam were close, but never had she seen the bond so clearly demonstrated as after the explosion, when Adam hovered near death in a coma. Her employer’s attention was totally focused on her cousin, as if only
her watchful concentration would hold him to life. She didn’t even notice that her hands were bleeding from tearing at the wreckage of the engine house.
It was left to Judith to perform the mundane tasks. The responsibility helped her own precarious equanimity.
She had the doctor attend to Antonia’s hands after the major victims were cared for. She sent to Thornleigh for clothing and for Antonia’s maid. She arranged for rooms and food, welcoming all the distractions.
She also sent a note to Lord Launceston in London, feeling that he should know about his friend’s injury.
It was Judith who dealt with James Malcolm and his anxious questions, wondering cynically if the engineer’s concern was rooted in worry over losing a potential investor. Malcolm had escaped the collapsed office with only a broken arm, while his apprentice, who apparently caused the explosion by accidentally jamming the safety valve, had no injury beyond temporary unconsciousness.
It seemed bitterly unfair that they were hale and hearty while Adam’s life lay in the balance.
Antonia spent all her time at Adam’s side, paying attention to what was happening around her only twice. The first time was when she told Judith to arrange a reward for all the men who had participated in the rescue, leaving the details of how much to her companion.
The second time was when she bent all her formidable powers of persuasion to convincing the surgeon, Ian Kinlock, to stay and attend Adam. It was the sheerest chance that had put Kinlock on the scene, but his obvious competence had quickly won the respect of everyone present as he tended first the blast victims, then the minor injuries of the rescuers.
He spent a long time with Adam, cleaning and sewing his head wound, then checking thoroughly for possible other injuries. The following morning he’d intended to resume his journey to Scotland, but under Antonia’s urging, Kinlock agreed to stay on for at least a couple of days more.
While the physician didn’t strike Judith as being over-susceptible to the female sex, it would have taken a heart of granite to deny Lady Antonia. Most women would have looked haggard under the fear and sleeplessness that her ladyship was undergoing. Antonia had the fine-drawn beauty and burning eyes of a saint in a Renaissance painting.
It was difficult to persuade Antonia to lie down. Only the knowledge that Judith would be with her cousin allowed her to rest.
Most of the time both women sat with Adam as he lay quiet and pale as a marble effigy, his immense vitality diminished to an erratic flicker. The only sign of life was the slow rise and fall of his chest.
Judith considered telling Antonia that she and Adam were betrothed, but dismissed the idea as grotesque when his life might be measured in minutes or hours. Besides, she preferred to keep her grief as private as possible.
Only when she rested, leaving Antonia in the sickroom, would Judith allow herself the luxury of tears. She wept for Adam, whose kindness and intelligence ebbed so close to extinction. She also wept for herself, that the greatest happiness she had ever known seemed likely to end before it had truly begun.
* * * *
It was the third night since the explosion, and Antonia sat alone with Adam in the dark reaches after midnight. In the last twelve hours Adam had started to move restlessly, which Kinlock thought encouraging, but he had not yet regained consciousness.
One terrifying possibility the doctor had mentioned was that Adam might survive, but with his mind so damaged that he would never be himself again. The longer Adam was in a coma, the greater the likelihood of that kind of damage.
Antonia would not think of that. She would not think of it. She guessed that the doctor and Judith expected the worst, but Antonia refused to believe that full recovery wasn’t possible.
She, who had always assiduously avoided sickrooms, spent hours trickling broth into her cousin’s mouth, a few drops at a time. It maddened her to know that the one time in her life when Adam needed help, there was so little she could do for him. It seemed monstrously unfair when he had so often assisted her, usually out of muddles of her own making.
Though she had known Adam since she was four years old, only now did Antonia fully realize what an enormous emptiness his death would leave in her life. Even when he was in Asia, she had known that he was alive and that someday she would see him again. But now he was perilously close to the voyage from which there was no returning.
In the bleak honesty of the last two days Antonia had faced the knowledge that Adam’s proposal to her had been in dead earnest. He had spoken lightly, testing the waters. She had treated his offer as a joke because she hadn’t wanted to accept and a refusal might have created awkwardness between them.
She had been a coward. She’d also felt a lingering anger over the fact that he had left so casually years before. Perhaps she had wanted to punish her cousin by treating him as casually as he had treated her.
Adam, unwilling to show vulnerability, had calmly accepted her teasing refusal. He might not love her in the way that she considered romantic, but she did not doubt the depth of his feelings.
In her selfishness, her desire to avoid unpleasantness, she must have hurt him badly, but he had carefully spared her any hint of reproach. No wonder he had been able to speak of generous love.
Now her prayer was not just that Adam survive, but that she have the opportunity to make up for her past insensitivity. There was ironic significance in the fact that Antonia had scarcely thought of Lord Launceston since her cousin’s injury. Though she had fancied herself in love with Simon, her feelings for Adam ran much deeper.
Lightly Antonia laid one hand on his cheek. His valet had shaved him the day before, but now there were bristles under her palm.
Aching with tenderness and guilt, she made a solemn promise to herself. If Adam survived, and if he still wanted her, she would marry him. Not that she was any great bargain, but if she had the opportunity, she would spend the rest of her life making up for the way she had taken Adam’s love for granted in the past.
His tanned skin was warm under her hand. She studied his face in the dim candlelight, trying to see him through fresh eyes. His square jaw showed a stubbornness that he never used with her, and the faint lines were a product of laughter, not ill-temper.
No one would ever stop and stare as they did with Lord Launceston, but it was an appealing face, more familiar to her than her own. She leaned forward and pressed a light kiss on his well-formed lips.
As she lifted her head away, Adam’s eyes slowly opened and fixed on her. She gasped in shock. She was so close she could see the brown flecks in the gray-green irises, could see the confusion in the depths.
“Adam?” she whispered tensely, scarcely daring to breathe.
“A-dam?” he repeated in a scarcely heard whisper. The word was drawn out experimentally, as if unfamiliar to him.
Hearing his rasping voice, Antonia picked up a glass of water from the bedside table and helped him sip. She considered waking Judith or the doctor, but it was three o’clock and both were asleep. Time enough to tell them in the morning.
When Adam spoke again his voice was stronger, but there was still a quality of tentativeness, as if English was foreign to him. “Where—am—I?”
“In an inn in Macclesfield, near where the explosion was.”
His brow furrowed under the bandage. “Ex-plo-sion?”
Dr. Kinlock had said he might not remember what had happened just prior to the accident. “You were visiting an engineer, Mr. Malcolm, to talk to him about his steam engine. It exploded and you were injured.”
Adam raised an exploratory hand to his head, feeling the bandage, so she explained, “You received quite a crack on the head and a good few bruises, but there are no bones broken.’’
His eyes shifted away from her and she could almost see the slow process of his thoughts as he tried to make sense of her words. Finally he glanced back. “Who are you?”
His question hit Antonia like a blow. It was hard to believe that Adam wouldn’t recognize her unless
his brain was irrevocably damaged. Pray God this was just temporary confusion.
She forced herself to answer calmly. “I’m Antonia.”
Surely there was intelligence in the eyes that regarded her so seriously. Adam slowly raised one hand and touched the thick braid of red-gold hair that fell over her shoulder. “Pretty.”
She smiled at him. “You have always admired my hair.”
“Who am I?” Adam’s next question was even more frightening, but now Antonia was better prepared.
“Your name is Adam Yorke and I am your cousin. You are twenty-nine years old. We grew up together, mostly at a place near here called Thornleigh.”
“Like brother and sister?”
“Not exactly.” In an impulse borne of tenderness and her earlier vow, Antonia found herself saying, “Actually, we have been planning to marry.”
Chapter Seven
Her statement riveted Adam’s attention. His eyes widened as he stared at her. “How did I talk you into that?”
Adam’s voice held his familiar wry humor, and Antonia felt a rush of relief. He could not possibly sound like that if there was anything permanently wrong with him. He was just disoriented now. “You didn’t talk me into a betrothal.” She smiled teasingly. “It was as much my idea as yours.”
An unwelcome thought struck her. When he was back to normal, he would remember that they were not precisely betrothed. True, he’d asked her to marry him, and she had accepted. But those two events had been widely separated in time, and she hadn’t exactly informed him of her acceptance.
How could she, when it had only just occurred? Antonia realized uneasily that a purist might feel she wasn’t telling the truth.
Recalling that Dr. Kinlock said that patients with serious head injuries often didn’t remember events around the time of the accident, she explained, “Though we’ve known each other forever, the decision had only just been made. No one else knows.” Not even Adam.
Her cousin was watching her with unwavering intensity, so she continued rather shyly, “Of course it was just an understanding, not a formal betrothal. You can change your mind if you like.”
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