The Marriage Wager

by Ashford, Jane

  But in Colin’s dreams, it was far otherwise. Through his sleep, he staggered across a blood-soaked battlefield, pain sharp in his head and chest, up to his ankles in foul water and mud. As far as he could see across the ravaged terrain, dead bodies were piled in grotesque poses—arms sticking straight up, legs twisted at impossible angles, teeth bared in grimaces of rage. The soldiers’ gaudy uniforms—all the colors of the rainbow—were stained in varying shades of black and red with gunpowder and blood. Acrid smoke from the guns drifted over the scene, obscuring, then revealing more corpses. A riderless horse with a gash in its side stumbled away in the distance. The only sound was the raucous call of the ravens, summoning their fellows to feast.

  Dreaming, Colin staggered through this scene of carnage looking for something. He did not know what. But as he passed each corpse, he checked it, only to find, in every single case, a friend. There was Teddy Garrett, whom he had known since he was six years old and they were both uneasy newcomers at Eton. There was John Dillon, who had joined the regiment at the same time he did and soon become his closest companion among the officers. There was Jack Morley, whose gaiety and eye for the ladies had been a running joke. There was Colonel Brown, whom he had respected so deeply and made into a sort of substitute father for three entire years. Every face he looked at, he knew. All of them had died during the last few years in one or another of the battles against the French, while time and again Colin himself had gotten off with a few minor wounds, the agonies of grief, and a growing darkness of spirit. There was no escaping that desperation now. It rose like a storm cloud on the horizon and came down over him, choking and foul. Despair engulfed him; hope became a mockery. In his sleep, Colin began to moan.

  The sound was deep and grating. It rose above the whisper of the waves and the hiss of the wind. It drifted through the open door of the dressing room, heavy with hopelessness and pain. It woke Emma at once.

  She blinked in the darkness, gathering her faculties, searching for the emergency that she had sensed even in deep sleep. When the next moan came, she sat up, searching for the source of this frightening sound.

  It did not take her long to find it. It sounded just as it had on their wedding night. Quickly, she slipped out of bed and made her way across to the dressing room. Its wooden floor was cool under her bare feet. The door on the other side was slightly open as well, and she stepped through it, her heart beating a little faster.

  The room was very dim. She had to grope her way over to the bed, guided by Colin’s continued harsh moans. On the small table beside it she found a candlestick and lit it, revealing Colin rigid among the tumbled bedclothes, his body slick with sweat. His head lashed back and forth on the pillow and he was repeating, through clenched teeth, the word “no.”

  The light washed his face, showing an expression that scared her. The muscles stood out, hard as iron. His lips were pulled back in a snarl. His brow was furrowed like a much older man’s. He looked as if he was being tortured, she thought.

  She took hold of his shoulder and began to shake him free of whatever horror had him in its grip. “Colin,” she said. “Colin, wake up.”

  He twisted away from her grasp toward the farther side of the bed.

  Emma scrambled up onto the mattress. Rising to her knees, she began to shake harder. “Colin,” she insisted. “It’s all right. It’s just a nightmare. Wake up!”

  With an anguished shudder and an inarticulate cry, he heaved upright, striking out with one hand as if to fend off an enemy. Emma just managed to duck under the blow. Losing her balance, she threw an arm around his bare ribs to keep from falling. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “It was a dream. Only a dream.”

  Colin went still, but he did not relax. Emma could feel the tension in his muscles and the hard rigidity of his back. “That’s the trouble,” he answered, in a distant, blurred voice that seemed to come from some other place, as if he wasn’t truly awake yet. “It isn’t just a dream. It’s all true.”

  “What?” she said softly.

  “Death. They’re all dead. Shattered by bullets or run through with cold steel. All of them gone. Nothing left but to haunt me.” He shuddered again, and his skin felt clammy and cold suddenly. Emma tightened her grip.

  “You never knew, when you came back to camp, who it would be. Who would have fallen in that battle. You just knew that some of them wouldn’t be there. Some of the friends you’d been riding with, and eating with, and drinking with the night before. After a while, you started wishing for the bullet yourself, because then…”

  Colin stopped short, as if he’d bitten off the words. He sat straighter and looked around as if he were just taking in his surroundings and realizing where he was. He took a deep gasping breath. He turned to look at Emma, his eyes wide and dark, his mouth a grim slash. For a moment, he seemed to concentrate on identifying her. “I… I beg your pardon,” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he added.

  His tone was growing more normal, and more distant, Emma thought. “I’m not frightened,” she insisted, even though she was, a bit.

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed—”

  “No.” She could feel him starting to shiver as the sweat dried on his skin. “Get under the covers,” she said, urging him down.

  He didn’t move, but when he spoke again, his voice sounded completely normal, as if they were chatting in the carriage or attending an evening party in London. “Emma. Return to your own room. I’m sorry I exposed you to this.”

  This was why he locked the door, she realized. “No,” she said again. When she pushed him this time, he yielded slowly and lay down, letting her pull the covers around him. “Tell me about the dream,” she said.

  “No.”

  “It might help,” she argued.

  “Nothing can help the dead,” he replied sharply.

  “Not them,” she agreed. “You.”

  He turned his head away.

  “Were you fighting?” Emma prompted.

  He remained stonily silent.

  “Was it one of the battles you—”

  “All of the battles are over,” he said harshly. “We will not speak of this.”

  “It seems they are not all over,” she pointed out, referring to the dream.

  He said nothing.

  “Did you lose so many friends?” she ventured, remembering what he had said to her once.

  “Yes.” The word was clipped, almost as if he was angry with her.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Another shudder went through him. He pulled further away from her. “You must go to your own bed,” he repeated.

  “No,” said Emma.

  For the first time in months, Colin was afraid. He was afraid the horrors would spill out of him against his will and touch this woman and this place which should never be sullied by such things. “Then I will go,” he said, and started to throw back the covers.

  “Please don’t leave me,” said Emma.

  The plea went through him like the sabers he had been dreaming of. “You don’t understand,” he cried. “I must.”

  “I don’t want to be here alone right now. Please.”

  His fists clenched involuntarily. He wanted desperately to protect her. And he felt that he could only do so by leaving her. Yet she asked him to stay and give comfort he did not possess. “You don’t understand,” he burst out again, against his will. “I have lost every close friend. Men I loved like brothers. Toward the end, I stopped having friends. I couldn’t stand to see them die.”

  “Oh, Colin.” Her voice choked with tears.

  Something about that muffled sound shook him so deeply that the images still burning in his brain tumbled out. Before he could stop himself, he was telling Emma about Teddy and Jack and Colonel Brown, about the officers and men in his com
pany, the bonds that formed in a regiment through the horrors of battle and the lighter intervals in between. He couldn’t stop himself. He described the mud and the laughter, the boredom and the fear, the wearisome years of life in camp that drained away everyday emotions and left a man empty.

  Emma listened and tried to understand both the words and what might lie behind them. This was the source of his melancholy, she thought. This was the thing that set him apart. She was moved to tears more than once, but she blinked them back, not wanting to distract him and stop the flow of confidences. When at last he fell silent, staring at the ceiling, his muscles limp, she put a hand on his bare shoulder in comfort.

  “You’re freezing,” he exclaimed. “You’ve been sitting there in nothing but a nightgown.” Suddenly, he was aware of the thin cotton of this garment, and of the way it revealed rather than concealed the luscious curves and hollows of her body.

  “I’ll get under the covers,” she said, and did so before he could protest. Their bodies touched at hip and shoulder. Desire seared through Colin like violence, pulsing through his body, making his hands shake with its intensity. He wanted to turn and crush her beneath him, drown every jumbled thought and feeling in a fierce torrent of sensation.

  Abruptly, he shifted away from her. He couldn’t touch her now. If he had frightened her somehow before, the way he was feeling now, the strength of his need, would terrify her. Silently, he struggled for control.

  Predawn light was filtering through the closed curtains. The atmosphere seemed gray and almost tangible. A current of cool, brisk salt air wandered in, brushing their faces with dampness. Outside, the rush of the waves was muted by mist.

  “My God,” said Colin quietly. “What have I done? I’ve never spoken to anyone of these things. And now I’ve forced them on you, who have never seen the least violence—”

  “I’ve seen men brawling at the gaming tables,” Emma interrupted. “And drawing knives on one another in the streets.”

  “Not the same.”

  “No. I know that. But it is all to the good.”

  Colin turned to look at her. Her face was very close. “Emma,” he began.

  “Don’t you see? Because I have never witnessed a battle or lived in a camp, I don’t have the memories that haunt you. They don’t have the same power over me.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I had no right to describe such horrors to you.”

  “Hearing about them is nothing to living through them,” she answered evenly. “And it is not a matter of rights.”

  At a loss for words, he stared at a strand of her hair that had strayed across the pillows. She didn’t look frightened or repulsed. He couldn’t understand it. She was a woman, with all of a woman’s soft graces. She had intelligence, imagination, sensitivity—all the traits that had become a curse to him as the war went on and its dreadful progress was engraved in his soul. Where did she get her strength?

  “We made a bargain, remember?” said Emma, as if reading his thoughts. “I am not one of those London chits. I know what it is to endure. You don’t have to shield me from hard truths.”

  As she spoke, a great surge of emotion went through him. He wanted to protect her from any trace of unhappiness, he realized. And yet it was too late. Like his comrades in war, she had already been subjected to far more than she deserved. It was all a muddle, he thought. He didn’t know what he was feeling among all the conflicting currents pulling him this way and that. “It is too much of a burden,” he murmured, wondering if he had done right to marry her. He would not have shared these dark things with one of those London chits. And what right had he to reveal them to anyone? When he had offered her comradeship, he had not imagined anything like this.

  The terrible images he had planted in her consciousness lingered as Emma wondered whether the sadness would ever leave him. How could it after what he had seen and done? She had discovered his inner darkness, she thought; as she’d feared, she had uncovered the hidden depths of his nature. And they had turned out to be so different from Edward’s. Instead of contemptible weakness, Colin had strength. The demons that tormented him were lost friendships and the privations of war, not risk and greed and gratification of his own obsession. She had been of no help whatever to Edward, Emma thought. And after a while, she had stopped trying, or caring. The pain of that failure remained, and she didn’t know if she dared take such a risk again. And yet, she thought—comradeship, fellow feeling, endurance of hardship. These were the words Colin had used, and these were things she understood. Perhaps she still had something to offer after all, she decided, as they lay side by side, each wrestling alone with the shadows of the past.

  ***

  When Emma woke at nine, she was in her own bed, and alone. Colin must have carried her here, she thought as she rose and pulled on her dressing gown. She walked quietly to his room, but it was empty. Returning to her own, she moved about the large square bedchamber, examining her new home in the light that crept in through gaps in the worn curtains. The walls were papered in a floral pattern that had long since faded to an indistinguishable wash of pinks and greens. The furniture was old as well, in the fashion of fifty years ago. The carpet was good, but the draperies had faded in the sun and no longer matched it. Emma went to a window and peered out. Her breath caught in a gasp. The ocean stretched before her, a huge blue expanse all the way to the horizon, glittering in the sun. Directly below was a narrow band of garden, and then a cliff dropping vertically to foaming waves and outcroppings of gray stone in the wild water. It was a dramatic and incredibly beautiful landscape.

  “I’m amazed every time I see it again,” said Colin. She turned to find him standing, already fully dressed, in the outer doorway. When he smiled at her, Emma could see no trace of his nightmare in his face.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  His face showed mild surprise. “Perfectly,” he responded, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the night—or ever. He went and pulled the curtains open, first on the window she had been looking out, then on the others. Light flooded the room. “It is beautiful,” he said, gazing out over the water.

  It was the old Colin back again, Emma saw. And they were to resume their light cordial manner, pretending that the nightmares did not exist, that no difficulties or misunderstandings or troubles of any kind existed. She felt a pang of keen disappointment, an impulse to say something irrevocable and shake him out of his urbane placidity. But when he turned to look at her, she remembered the pain in his voice last night, and she found she couldn’t quite risk the words. “It’s gorgeous,” she replied lightly instead. She opened one of the casements and leaned out, taking in a great gulp of the sea air. “It’s so warm,” she exclaimed.

  “Have a care.” Still smiling, he joined her at the window. “If you fall, everyone is sure to say I pushed you, as one of my ancestors is rumored to have done.”

  “Pushed his wife out the window?” she echoed.

  “And married a neighbor’s daughter only a few weeks after,” added Colin.

  “The blackguard,” exclaimed Emma. “I would have come back as a ghost and driven the new bride shrieking from the house.”

  “Alas.” His eyes twinkling, Colin shook his head. “She was apparently made of very stern stuff. She did not frighten easily.”

  “You mean you do have a ghost?” cried Emma. “Of the poor wife?”

  “So they claim. I have never seen her.”

  “I’ll find her,” Emma declared.

  “Before you go looking, I should tell you that she was said to have locked up her daughter when she reached the age of fifteen, out of jealousy for her youth and beauty. The poor girl had nearly pined away before her father took matters in hand and made use of the window.”

  “Nonsense,” said Emma. “I expect her husband just said that to justify himself. I suppose his second wife was quite young and beautiful
?”

  He cocked a dark eyebrow at her. “Only a year older than his long-suffering daughter.”

  “There, you see?”

  “I see that you are not easily duped,” he replied humorously.

  “Indeed. You will have to think of a far better story than that if you wish to deceive me.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind should I ever wish to change wives.”

  “Do, my lord.” Emma was laughing by this time. “And also be warned that I would choose to haunt you.”

  “How fortunate, then, that I have no such plans,” he said.

  “Are there any other disreputable family members I should know about?” she asked.

  “Oh, any number. Our fortunes rise from a doubtful character they say was an assassin for William, Duke of Normandy, before he came to these shores.”

  “Did he build this house?” she wondered.

  “No, no. That was much later, when the crown needed someone to fight off pirates in the Irish Sea. The king chose the nobleman who most resembled the enemy and granted him an estate just here.”

  “And was he successful?” asked Emma.

  “Thoroughly. The pirates were terrified of him. So were his wife and children, by all accounts.”

  “There appears to be a sinister trend toward tyranny among the Wareham men. I see that I have taken a great risk in marrying you, my lord.”

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “Who knows when the tendencies of my family will surface and goad me to some desperate act?”

  “I’ll keep a sharp eye out,” Emma assured him. “Will you show me the rest of the house? Where was your room when you were young?”

  “At the other end. My mother did not care for our noise.”

  “Come and show me,” she urged again.

  He looked around her bedchamber. “The place is sadly out of repair, Emma. Mother never cared to be here, and since I joined up, I have only made a few flying visits.” He frowned at the threadbare draperies. “I have not spent much thought or money on the house, and I see that it shows. It is hardly fit for a new bride.”