by Mary Balogh
He raised the mirror and looked. His face was pasty pale. It was surely longer and narrower than the one he was accustomed to seeing. His nose seemed correspondingly more prominent. His dark hair was disheveled and oily. The dark stubble on his cheeks and chin would almost qualify as a beard. His eyes were slightly bloodshot. There were dark smudges beneath them. He looked unwell and he looked rough, but he knew the face. It was his own. He could have wept with relief. But as he gazed into his eyes, searching for answers in their depths, he could see nothing but blankness and an impenetrable barrier of anonymity.
It was like looking at himself and a complete stranger at the same time.
“I wonder you do not dash screaming from the room,” he said as she seated herself again—he noticed that she sat like a lady, her spine not quite touching the back of her chair. “I look like a ruffian and a cutthroat—of the unwashed variety.”
“You would need a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other to be really convincing, though,” she said, tipping her head to one side and regarding him with smiling eyes again. “Thank heaven we have no guns in the house and Phyllis guards the kitchen knives with her life. Is it the face you expected to see?”
“More or less,” he said, handing back the looking glass, “though I believe I usually look somewhat less disreputable. It is a face without a name, though, and so I had better take whatever is available. Jonathan Smith at your service, ma’am. That is Mister Jonathan Smith, by the way.”
“Mr. Smith.” She laughed lightly. “I am Rachel York.”
“Miss York.” He inclined his head in her direction and then wished he had not moved it. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”
They stared at each other for a time, and then she got to her feet again and surprised him by seating herself on the side of his bed and reaching up a hand to touch his wound. He was very aware of the bare, creamy flesh above the low, square neckline of her dress and the beginnings of cleavage, most of which was hidden from sight below a lacy frill. He was aware of the faint fragrance of soap, and of her hair like a golden halo against the late afternoon sunshine beyond the window. He held his breath until he realized he could not do so indefinitely.
She was not just impersonally beautiful. She had him thinking of tumbled sheets and tangled limbs and sweat-soaked bodies. Trust his luck to land himself in a brothel without a penny to bless himself with.
“The cut is healing nicely,” she said, her fingers cool against it and causing no unnecessary pain, “even though the surgeon did not stitch you up. The lump is going down, but it is still there.” He could feel her touch it, her fingers feather-light.
And then she was looking, not at his wounds, but directly into his eyes from only a few inches away. The laughter was gone from her own, and he could see in them only warm sympathy.
“Give yourself time to heal,” she said. “Everything will come back to you. I promise.”
It was an absurd promise, since it concerned something quite outside her power to grant. But it comforted him, nevertheless. She gazed down at him and moistened her upper lip, corner to corner, with her tongue. Then she blushed rosily and got to her feet.
For a moment he wondered if his fever had come back.
He no longer wondered if she had set about deliberate enslavement. It was true that her manner of flirtation was more subtle than that employed by her colleagues, who were far more blatant and risqué in their dealings with him. But it was flirtation nevertheless. He was badly wounded and could scarcely move without giving himself excruciating pain. But he was not dead. He could react sexually even if he could not act on his desires. She would have to be a fool not to know it.
He did not believe she was a fool.
“I’ll leave you to rest,” she said without looking at him. “I’ll come back later if there is not too much work to do. Someone will bring you dinner. You must be hungry.”
He closed his eyes after she had left the room. But sleep could no longer be summoned at will. He felt dirty and uncomfortable and restless and hungry and . . .
Deuce take it, he felt half aroused.
He needed a wash and a shave. But it struck him suddenly that he did not possess even as much as a razor or a comb. Somehow the absence of just those two small items brought crashing home to him the ghastly extent of his dilemma. And he had no money with which to buy either one. Not a single farthing.
What the devil was he going to do if his memory did not come back? Wander naked about the streets of Brussels until someone claimed him? Find some military headquarters in the hope that someone would know him there? Or that some officer had been reported missing in action? Ridiculous—there must be dozens at the very least missing in action and unaccounted for. Find an embassy, then, and set them to doing a search for a gently born family that was missing one male son or brother—probably a younger one? Was there an embassy in Brussels? He seemed to recall that there was one at the Hague, but when he paused over the memory, he could draw nothing personal out of it.
What was his regiment? And rank? Was he a cavalryman or an infantryman? Or perhaps he belonged to the artillery? He tried to picture himself riding into a cavalry charge with his men or leading an infantry advance. But it was no use—his imaginings could trigger no real memories.
She would come back, Rachel York had said, if there was not too much work to do. He grimaced. Where did she ply her trade, he wondered, now that he was occupying her room?
It was none of his business. Neither was she.
Except that he was deeply in her debt and had no idea how he was going to be able to repay her. And except that she was plain gorgeous, and he was behaving like a schoolboy dizzy and randy with his first infatuation.
Starting tomorrow, he told himself sternly, he was going to have to make a concerted effort to set his feet—figuratively even if not literally—on the road to recovery. He was already tired of this helplessness.
And tomorrow he was going to remember.
Of course he was.
CHAPTER V
RACHEL DID NOT GO BACK TO THE ROOM THAT day. She had realized anew the uncomfortable power she had over men.
She knew that she was considered beautiful even though she would have been quite happy to be only passably good- looking. Her glass told her that it must be true, though. More than that, men had been looking at her with thinly veiled—or sometimes quite unveiled—admiration for a number of years. She had never chosen to use her power. Quite the contrary, in fact. Although she had had a strange upbringing with a father who had always lived on the edge of danger and poverty, with occasional periods of heady affluence when he had been lucky at the tables, she had been raised as a lady, and ladies did not flaunt their beauty. Besides, the sort of gentlemen she had met before her father’s death, the men with whom he consorted, were certainly not the sort with whom she would wish to make any sort of alliance. And since then, since she had taken a position as Lady Flatley’s companion, she had been very careful to draw as little attention as possible to her looks. One thing she had thought she liked about Nigel Crawley was that he had never made much reference to her beauty. He had seemed to admire her as a person.
She had not intended to arouse the admiration of the wounded man. She had merely wanted to show her concern and sympathy. But she had sensed his physical reaction to her and had felt the tension sizzling between them as she leaned over him.
What a foolish thing to have done. The very thought of being alone with a man in a bedchamber should have shocked her. But to have sat on the side of his bed, leaning over him, touching his head and then looking down into his eyes . . .
Well, it had been remarkably unwise.
And, of course, if she was strictly truthful with herself, she would have to admit that he was not the only one to react as he had. She had felt severely discomposed. He might be wounded and helpless, but he was still a young and good-looking man. And he positively exuded masculinity—a thought that made her cheeks grow warm.
She stayed away from his room until the following morning when it seemed safer to go inside—it was full of people.
The ladies had taken the night off from work, as they claimed they did once each week, and were consequently up early and in high spirits. Phyllis took Mr. Smith his breakfast and stayed for a chat. Bridget and Flossie followed twenty minutes later, armed with a clean nightshirt, clean bandages, hot water, washcloths, and towels. Geraldine took Sergeant Strickland’s breakfast up to the attic. At the same time she intended to ask him if he would lend his shaving gear to Mr. Smith—they had all decided to call the mystery man by that name.
By the time Rachel had washed the dishes and cleaned and tidied the kitchen, they were all in his room, including the sergeant. She stood just outside the doorway watching and listening.
“I must say,” Mr. Smith was saying, “that I feel five pounds lighter—no, six. The grease in my hair alone must have weighed a good pound.”
“I told you I would be as gentle as your own mother, my love,” Bridget told him boldly as she folded up the towel.
“I suppose, Bridget,” he said, “you tell them all that, do you?”
“Only the very young ones,” she said. “I wouldn’t tell you that under normal circumstances.”
“Actually,” he said, and Rachel could see that he was smiling and enjoying himself, “my memory came back to me last night and I remembered that I am a monk. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are my guiding principles.”
“With that body?” Geraldine said in her tragedy-queen voice, setting her hands on her hips. “What a mortal waste.”
“I don’t mind the obedience part,” Phyllis said.
“A gorgeous, penniless monk in a brothel,” Flossie added. “It is enough to make a poor girl weep.”
“He will be more gorgeous without the scrubby beard,” Geraldine said. “I went for Will’s shaving gear but he insisted on coming with it.”
“A rival?” Mr. Smith said, clapping one hand over his chest. “My heart is broken.”
They were all enjoying themselves immensely, Rachel could see. They were all flirting. She wished she could be as blasé. Her friends were all dressed for morning, without cosmetics or elaborate coiffures or flashy clothes. They were all pretty women and looked much younger this way.
“This is Sergeant William Strickland,” Geraldine said. “He was wounded in battle.”
“I lost an eye, sir,” the sergeant said. “I haven’t quite got the hang of seeing out of only the one yet, but it will come in time.”
“Ah,” Mr. Smith said, extending his right hand, “so you are the sergeant who helped Miss York save my life, are you? I am deeply indebted to you.”
The sergeant eyed the hand in obvious embarrassment and took it very briefly while at the same time delivering an awkward, bobbing bow.
“We were asking for the loan of your razor, not for the loan of you, William,” Flossie said. “You ought to be in bed.”
“Don’t scold, lass,” he said. “I can’t lie in bed every minute of the mortal day. I would go back to my men, but the army won’t have me no more on account of my eye is gone.”
“Yes, well,” she said, “your men would go marching off west, you see, William, while you were marching briskly off east because they were on your blind side. You would be no good to them, would you? So you are going to slice Mr. Smith’s throat instead, are you? It would be a dreadful waste of a lovely man, I must say. I could think of much better things to do with him.” She bent a deliberately lascivious glance upon Mr. Smith.
“I believe,” he said, “that I will shave myself if someone would be good enough to help me sit up higher in the bed.”
“Anything to do with beds is my department,” Geraldine said. “Out of my way, Will.”
“If in my usual life I am a duke, of course,” Mr. Smith said, grimacing slightly as Geraldine hauled him upward and stuffed the pillows behind his back, “I have probably never done this before in my life and am about to slash my own throat as surely as Sergeant Strickland would have done.”
“Lord love us,” Phyllis said, elbowing her way past Geraldine, “no more talk of blood if it is all the same to you, Mr. Smith. I’ll do it. I have shaved a thousand men in my time, give or take a hundred or so here and there.”
“Did they all survive?” he asked, grinning at her.
“Give or take a hundred or so here and there,” she told him. “But they all agreed it was a lovely way to go. Look at this jawline, Gerry. Have you seen any more firm and masterful? Lord love us but he’s a beauty!”
It was the moment at which Mr. Smith’s laughing eyes alit upon Rachel just beyond the doorway. They did not stop smiling, but there was an arrested look in them for a moment, and she knew that his awareness of her was different from the way he felt about her friends. She felt suddenly breathless and horribly self-conscious. He was pale, and she knew that the wash and all this fuss were tiring him and probably causing his head to ache, but even so, with his clean nightshirt and damp, clean hair and roguish smile, he looked quite devastatingly handsome.
She had given the wrong impression yesterday, she thought as Phyllis brushed soap over the stubble of his beard and waved the open razor with a flourish in the air. She really ought not to have sat so boldly on his bed.
But when everyone left the room ten minutes or so later, all still in high spirits and talking and laughing, it was Rachel who stayed to pull the curtains closed across the window to cut out some of the bright sunlight. She approached the bed and straightened the bedcovers, though Bridget had just done it before leaving.
He was looking at her, a guarded smile still lurking in his eyes.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.” She felt somewhat tongue-tied. “I can see that you are tired. And that you have a headache.”
“I am exhausted from doing nothing.” The smile had disappeared to be replaced with a somewhat bleaker look. “I awoke in a panic this morning, searching my nonexistent pockets for the letter.”
“What letter?” She leaned over him slightly and frowned.
“I have no idea.” He raised one hand and set the back of it over his eyes. “Was it just a meaningless dream, or was it some fragment trying to detach itself from the pervading fog?”
“Was it a letter to you or from you?” she asked him.
He sighed after a few silent moments and removed his hand. “I have no idea,” he said again, and his smile was back. “But I am not entirely without memory, you know. You are Miss York—Miss Rachel York. And I am Jonathan Smith—mister. You see how perfectly my memory works provided you ask it to perform its tricks only upon events of the past few days?”
He made a joke of it, but she realized suddenly that his loss of memory was a more devastating injury to him than any of the more obvious ones.
She had not intended to stay, but she sat down anyway, pulling the chair closer to the bed as she did so. She guessed that terror probably lurked behind his cheerful manner this morning.
“Let us discover what we do know about you, shall we?” she suggested. “We know that you are English. We know that you are a gentleman. We know that you are an officer. We know that you fought in the Battle of Waterloo.” She was counting the points off on her fingers. She tapped her thumb. “What else?”
“We know that I am a poor rider,” he said. “I fell off my horse. Does that mean I am not a cavalryman? Perhaps I had never ridden before in my life. Perhaps I stole the horse.”
“But you had been shot in the thigh,” she reminded him. “The musket ball was still embedded there. You would have been in great pain, and you were losing blood. And you had already ridden some distance from the battlefield. You are not necessarily a poor rider.”
“Kind of you,” he said with a faint smile. “But when I was wounded why the devil—I beg your pardon—why did my men not carry me off the field to the nearest surgeon? Why was I alone? Why was I on the way to Brussels? I assu
me that is where I was going. Was I deserting?”
“Perhaps,” she said, “you have family members here and were coming to them.”
“Perhaps I have a wife,” he said. “And six children.”
She had not thought of that possibility since discovering that he was alive. But of course there was no reason in the world to feel disappointed at the very real possibility that he was married. Perhaps he was happily married. And perhaps there really were children.
“She would not have brought children to Brussels,” she said. “She would have stayed in England with them. How old are you?”
“Trying to trick me into remembering another detail, are you, Miss York?” he asked her. “How old do I look? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Somewhere in between, I would guess,” she said.
“We will say for the sake of argument that I am twenty-five, then,” he said. “I would have to have been a busy man to produce six children already.” He grinned and looked suddenly boyish and vital despite his pallor.
“Three sets of twins,” she suggested.
“Or two sets of triplets.” He laughed. “But I surely could not have forgotten a wife, could I? Or children? On the other hand, perhaps they are the very reason my memory has decided to take a leave of absence.”
“We also know,” she said, “that you have a sense of humor. All this is very distressing for you, is it not? But you can still joke and laugh about it.”
“Ah, now we are getting somewhere,” he said. “I have a sense of humor. A key piece of evidence. Now we must be able to work out exactly who I am. But, no, perhaps not—there are no such persons as court jesters these days, are there? So much for that apparently promising clue.”
He set an arm over his eyes and sighed.
Rachel gazed at him with sympathy. Her life had not been filled with a great deal of happiness, but even so she would hate to wake up one day and find that everything she had ever been or known was erased from memory. What would be left?