What was he doing, telling this to a child?
But she was listening; he knew she was listening.
“They were very quiet, like you, quiet as mice, for they were mice. They came around looking for crumbs, hiding from the castle cats, and I let them eat what fell from my plate. We became great friends, the mice and I. We endured our privations together.”
But the mice had never become tame, had never quite given up their wariness, no matter how cold or hungry they were. He’d admired those small, soft, helpless creatures, and as miserable as his rations had been, he’d never begrudged the mice their crumbs.
Lucy said nothing, but she relaxed back against her papa.
She no doubt thought he was teasing, but he was damn near tears, and finished the ride as silent as his little princess.
Lucy must have picked up on his mood—she was a bright child, after all—because when he went to swing her down off the high mounting block used by the ladies, she clung to him for a moment, her arms lashed around his neck, her face buried against his shoulder.
A hug, for the man who’d had no friends save the mice, from the daughter who could not tell him she loved him.
Ten
Christian tried not to spend his days looking down the drive, anticipating Gillian’s return from Town. She’d sent a note along telling him she was detained by sartorial matters and would not be back until week’s end.
So he stayed busy, which wasn’t difficult.
The land steward, Hancock, was happy to ride out with him as the weather permitted; the tenants were pleased to have his lordship “drop by” on a schedule Hancock carefully arranged. Vicar came to call again, a fifteen-minute ordeal without Gillian smiling and chattering over the tea service.
Christian had nightmares, of course, worse for Gillian’s absence, or for something, but it helped—some—that he was gradually adding activity to his day.
Having word of Girard’s whereabouts would have helped more.
St. Just had warned Christian about others held prisoner, fellows who’d taken months to regain enough health to rejoin their regiments. Christian’s body wasn’t taking months. He was putting on muscle, his teeth and gums were restored to reliable use, but his mind wasn’t coming along at such a spanking pace.
The nightmares were to be expected, but at least once every day, he’d hear a door slam and his heart would pound for no reason.
Candlelight glinting off a paring knife could make his lungs seize.
He’d attempt some simple task with his left hand—tying a cravat—and fail so miserably he wanted to destroy all in his reach.
This last problem was particularly vexing. His left hand was growing stronger, but its dexterity was limited. The right hand was strong enough, but was still clumsy. Hands were such an obvious, integral part of bodily competence that Christian became determined to address his manual limitations.
But every day that Gillian lingered in Town, the demons rose higher in his mind: What was the point of learning to shave himself right-handed—not that he’d suffer a valet to come near him with a razor, of course. What was the point of coaxing Lucy to speak again? What was the point of continuing to draw breath? The world had thought him dead once before, and gone on turning quite handily without him.
And then he’d hear Girard’s silky voice in his ear.
“Shall I kill you today, mon ange? Would you like that? To leave me here in this miserable pile of rocks all alone, hoping the Corsican can recover not only from the drubbing of your armies, but also from the Russian winter? Shall I give you permanent silence, and victory with it? I would envy you too badly, did I commend you to the angels, so me, I think no death for you today…”
Girard’s regard for him had been disturbingly convincing. Girard had kept Christian alive, in part through those backhanded recitations of France’s losses and tribulations, though Christian would be damned if he’d ever thank the bastard for it. And to complicate matters, Girard was apparently the son of an Englishman. What conflicted loyalties lay behind Girard’s stratagems, and had the colonel truly longed for death himself?
A clock chimed, midnight.
Put in your mind a picture of what you can look forward to and…add details to it, one by one, until the picture is very accurate and the urge to do something untoward has passed.
Christian fell asleep, finally, as he had for the previous six nights, telling himself Gillian was better off putting some distance between herself and the Severn household. He wanted her under his roof—under his protection—but he had little to offer her other than that—at least until he’d dispatched Girard.
But as sleep claimed him, he pictured her, small, golden-haired, bustling about, her voice a lullaby to calm the most tortured soul.
***
Gilly woke knowing the time had come to quit dawdling and get herself back to Mercia.
To Severn. To Severn, the house, the household, the little girl who would not speak, and yes, to the man trying to find his footing with all of it. Mercia was part of what Gilly returned to; he could not be the whole of it.
“Safe journey, your ladyship.”
Meems offered his good wishes, such as they were, from the front steps as the traveling coach came around the corner from the mews.
“My thanks. You may be assured I will report to His Grace that I was graciously received by his staff in his absence.”
Meems looked pained, but offered her a nod, and then stepped back so a footman could hand her up.
She took out her anthology of poetry and tried to read, but the exercise was useless. The day was overcast, the light quite dim, and her mind darted about like a caged finch. The coach rolled on, until Gilly came abruptly awake somewhere among the fields and farms of Surrey.
The coachman’s voice came to her, low and soothing, but with a panicked note under the words. The horses cantered over a rare smooth stretch of road, and still, the coachy urged them to slow.
“Ho up, lads. Easy…easy… There we go, boys. That’s it…”
A sharp crack, and the team tried to bolt, while the coach bobbed crazily behind them.
Gilly fetched up hard against the wall, grabbed the leather strap above her head, and started praying while the coachman resumed his crooning and pleading.
“Now, laddies, ho ye, ho and ho and that’s it… Good boys you are, good boys you be…”
The coach came to a stop, swaying on its springs.
A white-faced groom peered in the door. “Yer ladyship’s right enow, then? That were a rum go there for a bit. ’Is Grace will ’ave our arses—our ’eads if ye’ve suffered ’arm.”
Eight years of marriage came to the aid of her composure. “I’m fine. What happened?”
“Wheel come loose. Lost it a good mile back, but we’ve a good team, and they came right, didn’t they?”
He was as pale as death, suggesting they’d had a very close call. The coach listed heavily, but was held somewhat upright on the three remaining wheels and the web of harness. The wheelers shifted restively at the unaccustomed distribution of weight, while the coachy kept up his spoken lullaby.
“Perhaps I’d best stretch my legs a bit,” she said, and the door was open before she’d collected her reticule.
“Perkins is ’olding the leaders, yer ladyship.” The groom’s voice still held a quaver that suggested danger had been only narrowly averted.
“I’m sure all will soon be in order,” she said, offering him a smile. Smiling was a skill, and Gilly had learned to apply it in all manner of difficult situations. “John Coachman,” she called up to the box, “your passenger is unharmed. Shall we get out the muzzle bags and send a groom for the wheel?”
“Muzzle bags?” The man blinked down at her, his complexion every bit as ashen as the groom’s. “Oh, aye, for the ’orses. Dunston, be about it, then fetch that b
lasted wheel.”
Gilly assessed the sullen sky, saw rain wasn’t an immediate concern, and fetched her book from the coach. She stuffed the poetry in her reticule, and over the slow pounding of her heart, sorted through the situation to find the next necessary task.
There wasn’t one, except to offer a familiar prayer for her continued existence.
She marched to a nearby stile, perched upon it, took out her embroidery, and began to stitch.
By the time she’d finished three tidy inches of hem on a handkerchief for Lucy, Dunston was pushing the wheel up the track like a large, ungainly hoop. The wheel was intact, which was a relief, because there wasn’t a farmhouse or smallholding to be seen.
“The going will be slow,” the coachman said, “but once we bang the wheel back on, we’ll get ye on your way, your ladyship. From His Grace’s grandda’s time, we’ve carried spare pins and such in the boot of the traveling coaches, otherwise you’d have to walk to the next village.”
“How far would that be?”
“A good half league, and it do be threatening rain.”
Another inch of hem and Gilly had the handkerchief done, the wheel was on, and the horses were trotting sedately on to the village.
“I tell you,” Perkins was saying up on the box, “it ain’t natural. A normal woman woulda had the vapors and been a-shriekin’ and a-carrying on.”
“Normal woman?” John Coachman paused to speak soothingly to his leaders. “There’s women been following the drum all over Spain for years, women raising children in Seven Dials. Courage don’t limit itself to men.”
“Not this man.” Perkins heaved a mighty, mighty sigh. “I seen that wheel come loose, I about shit myself.”
“I about pissed myself,” Dunston said from the roof behind them. A pause suggested medicinal spirits produced from the well-stocked boot were making the rounds.
“And if I’d had a free hand,” John said quietly, “I would have crossed myself, like my old Irish granny did.”
“While ’er ladyship does her tatting,” Perkins said. “It ain’t right. I tell ye, it just ain’t right.”
Because the coach was moving slowly, and Gilly had the slot open to the box, she heard their conversation. She’d heard its like before—the help muttering that her ladyship lacked the delicacy her position demanded—particularly early in her marriage.
What her ladyship had lacked was proper discernment about choosing a husband.
When the men fell silent, she took out the book of poetry, embroidery in a moving coach being more than even she undertook with any success.
***
Christian stood naked from the waist up before a small mirror propped on a windowsill in his sitting room. A bowl of steaming water sat at his elbow, his shaving kit laid out in gleaming order beside it. Bright afternoon sunshine was intended to make his task easier, though it didn’t. Nothing could make his task easier.
The staff had orders to leave him in peace until teatime. He was not home to callers.
He’d trimmed the damned beard close to his face without cutting himself, save the once, a nick bleeding sluggishly down his neck into the hair sprinkled over his chest.
He’d been shaving for nearly half his life, and scraping the razor along his throat should be no great matter. The blade was sharpened to a fine edge, a sharp blade being safer than a dull one.
But which hand to use? The damaged left, the awkward right? And what did it matter, for they both shook.
How long he stood, razor in his hand, blood oozing gently down his scarred chest, he did not know. When he thought of bringing the sharp edge to his skin, his guts knotted up, his ears roared, and his vision dimmed at the edges.
His heart pounded so hard, it must surely be trying to escape his chest.
And even as he knew his reactions, while not rational, were to be expected, another part of him was inexorably parting ways with his reason. The longer he stood, shifting the razor from hand to hand, a bearded stranger staring back at him with wild blue eyes, the harder it was to breathe slowly, to think.
Why was he doing this?
Where was Girard?
Would Christian welcome the burning kiss of the razor if his hand slipped? Welcome it like a long-lost friend?
“Your Grace.”
The countess quietly closed the door behind her, but Christian was so far gone in his memories and fears, he merely watched her. He knew who she was; he didn’t want her to see him like this—again—but he could not form the words to chase her away.
“You were lost in thought,” she said, crossing the room sedately. “You did not hear me knock.” Still she didn’t look at the brutality mapped on his chest, arms, and torso, didn’t look anywhere but into his eyes. “I should have knocked louder, I’m sure.”
She stood before him, a little green bottle in one hand, and reached up a finger to his collarbone.
“You’re bleeding, you wretched man. Why…?” But as she dropped her gaze, she took in the accoutrements of his task.
“You were seeing to your toilette,” she said, relief in her eyes. “You’ll let me help you.”
Her voice pushed back the worst of the shadows in his mind. He passed her the razor, relieved when she took it from his hand.
“Shall you sit, Mercia? You are too tall for me to attend you properly when you stand.” She brought a dressing stool over to the window and stood back, arms crossed as if his height were a minor transgression for which sitting was the prescribed penance.
“Lock the door.” He’d managed the words, a growled order, not a polite request.
She set the razor aside, locked the door, then turned him gently by the shoulders to face the afternoon sun. “This won’t take long.”
It took forever, the slow, soft slide of the razor on his throat, over his cheeks and jaw, all around the contours of his mouth and above his lips. Gillian had a deft touch, soaping, scraping, scraping again, and she talked to him as she worked.
“I had to make my obeisance to the shops while I was in Town, though I kept my blacks on all the while. In summer’s heat, going about with a veil on isn’t practical, but people will surely talk if one doesn’t. Chin up, Mercia. Almost done, and I’ve brought you some scent that put me in mind of you.”
And then the ordeal was over too quickly, and Christian missed the feel of her hands, confident, gentle, sure and easy as she turned his jaw, slid the razor over his skin, and brushed his hair back from his face.
He clung to her voice while she patted something that smelled pleasantly of ginger and lemon onto his cheeks.
“You’re quite a handsome man under your plumage, you know. Helene used to lord it over me, which was her right, of course. Though your cheeks are pale, thanks to your beard.”
She brushed her hand over his cheeks, then down his neck, to his shoulders. Her touch was light, but in no wise tentative. She was…petting him, the way he’d pet Chessie, for his pleasure and for the horse’s.
“Look at yourself,” she said, turning him by the shoulders to face the mirror. “A ducal countenance, if ever I beheld one.”
She kept a hand on the middle of his bare back, and he mentally shuddered to think of the skin beneath her fingers. Ridged with a bizarre pattern of scars, Girard’s idea of a joke, to make living embroidery on his prisoner, hemming along bone and muscle in little pink puckered ridges that would fade but never leave Christian’s body or his awareness.
And yet, his countess touched him, casually, easily, proud of her handiwork with his whiskers.
“You’re still lean,” she said, “but coming along nicely. No wonder Helene was such a braggart, having a swain like you for her own.”
The hand on his back radiated warmth, steadied, supported, and reassured, as it brought life and heat to places inside him long lost to light.
To be touched
with such kindness…
“I missed a spot,” she said, taking her hand away and reaching for the damp towel on the windowsill. She went after blood dried on the slope of his chest, a brown streak that came away easily enough and soiled the towel.
As she scrubbed at him, the sunlight caught all manner of highlights in her hair, from red to bronze to flax to…
He put his finger under her chin and turned her face up to the light.
“Gillian, how in the bloody hell did you get such a goddamned ugly bruise?”
***
His Grace was breathtakingly handsome, more so than when he’d been a younger man, more so than when Gilly had first confronted him up in London a few weeks ago. Without his beard she could see he’d lost the worst of his gaunt edge, put on some weight, and some…confidence. Maybe a lot of confidence.
But he was glaring at her ferociously, for all his finger traced her hairline gently.
“I bumped my head when we lost a wheel about two hours from here.” She stood close to him, and his body heat, clean and scented with the ginger and lemon aftershave, threatened to swamp her wits.
“You put ice on this?” His touch moved over her forehead slowly, then he sank all four fingers into her hair and feathered the pad of his thumb over her bruise.
She could not move, did not want to move. “Ice wasn’t on hand. We were in open country, and I would rather have spent the time completing our journey than pestering each coaching inn for some unlikely ice.”
He set his lips to her bruise. Gilly’s insides rose up and sighed when his arms slipped around her, for when, when had anybody ever, kissed a hurt of hers better?
“John Coachman will rue the day,” he said.
The duke brought her against him so Gilly’s cheek was pressed against the scarred flesh of his chest. They’d shared embraces before, but nothing like this. His fingers massaged her nape, his flat male nipple was directly in her line of sight, and she felt empty and hungry and mortified all at once.
But oh, feathers, he was holding her snug and secure against the warm, muscular planes of his body, with his freshly shaved scent teasing her nose, and the rise and fall of his breathing a lullaby to her common sense.
The Captive Page 15