“You should be at a dance.” He scoffed. “And I should be pheasant hunting. I told my brother I would be home for the season. What naïve fools we were.”
“All of England thought this would be over quickly,” she reassured him.
“I daresay it will continue on much longer than any of us thought.”
She did not want to talk of war or the price they paid for it. “I understand you have two brothers.”
He flashed a grin. “The Earl of Westcliffe and the Duke of Ainsley. Not many second sons are bookended by such esteemed fellows.”
“Surely, with their influence you could be returned home.”
“I’ve no doubt. Do I strike you as the sort who would ask for such a favor?”
She slowly shook her head. “No, Captain, you don’t.”
They stood in silence for several long moments before he asked, “Do you miss England?”
“Remarkably so.”
“Well, then, I shall make it my personal mission to recover in haste, return to battle the Russian hordes, and bring an end to this war so you are once again dancing in a ballroom.”
Silly girl that she was, she imagined dancing with him.
A nightly ritual began. Before he was discharged, she would find him waiting outside the hospital each evening, and they’d converse about the most mundane topics, but they all centered around England. They spoke of parks, gardens, and the wonders they’d seen when visiting the Great Exhibition. They might have even walked past each other, two strangers then, who now were brought together by war. Food was scarce in Scutari, and they reminisced about their favorite dishes. He had a fondness for pork. She preferred poultry. He had a weakness for chocolate. She favored strawberries. He enjoyed reading Dickens, while she preferred Austen. Two months after he returned to the campaign, she received from a London bookseller a leather-bound copy of Pride and Prejudice. The note that accompanied it said simply: Sent at the behest of Captain Lyons.
She had given far too much credence to the gift, had assumed he saw her as more than an anonymous nurse. Yet comments made—and more important, words left unsaid—since her arrival at Grantwood Manor indicated that she’d been easily forgotten. Based on his reputation, she shouldn’t have been surprised, she supposed. But still, the yearnings of her heart refused to abate.
Lightly she trailed her finger over the scar that ran the length of his ruggedly handsome face. It still looked fresh enough that she assumed he’d acquired it during the final battle in which he’d fought. She remembered how she’d wept in that small room in the boardinghouse in Paris when she’d seen his name on the list of dead. John had been in her life a mere fortnight by then. She’d held him near and rocked him. With tears streaming down her face, knowing he was too young to understand any of her ramblings, for her sake as well as his, she’d told him about his father.
The strong, the dashing, the courageous Captain Stephen Lyons, who had kept his promise and returned to battle the Cossacks. The soldier who had saved countless lives. The man whose subsequent rise to major came about not through a paid commission but through endeavor. The man who had stormed to her aid one cold and rainy night outside the Barrack Hospital.
Their night together had been brief, important to her, nothing to him. She combed her fingers through his hair. The man she’d known would not have forgotten. How could she have judged him so poorly?
Did she really desire as a husband a man who could forget her so easily? She feared she did.
It seemed she was once again sleeping in his bed, albeit not as comfortably as he was willing to make it for her. She sat in a chair, bent at the waist, her face resting on the mattress near his hip, one hand tucked up beneath her cheek, the other curled around his wrist as though she sought to keep apprised regarding the continual beating of his pulse.
The shadows filtering through the room, the solitary lit lamp, indicated it was still night. And there was a stillness to the residence that only came when the sun bid farewell to day. How long had he been wandering through the maze of healing?
He remembered experiencing bouts of delirium and the suffocating sense of being wrapped tightly in a shroud. Her voice was always near to calm his erratic heart. Her fingers caressed and cooled his heated flesh. And sometimes, when he was very, very fortunate, she would look at him just right, perfectly, and the lamplight would capture the glow of her eyes in such a way that a memory teased—and he latched on to those eyes with the full knowledge that they alone kept him tethered to this world.
Had she nursed him in the Crimea? She’d not said, and he’d not dared to ask for fear of discovering it was one more thing he should never have forgotten. She’d not been there when he’d last awoken in hospital, but judging from his scars, some still pink as though newly formed, others appearing older, he assumed that he’d been wounded on more than one occasion. It was not something he’d thought to ask before leaving for England. All he’d wanted was to escape as quickly as possible the unknown that haunted him and the horrid place that housed him.
The physician had been sure the answers would all return to him in time, with adequate rest, as though the mind healed in the same manner as the body. “It’s just the trauma,” he’d said. But his words had lacked confidence, had seemed more a question than an answer.
Perhaps Stephen should seek out a more knowledgeable physician. Quite suddenly, he was very much interested in knowing exactly how Mercy’s life intertwined with his.
She’d given birth to his son. But how had they met? He was beginning to understand why he might have been drawn to her. She had a caring nature, and an inner strength that wasn’t quite visible at first glance. He wasn’t even sure how he’d known it existed. It wasn’t as though they’d had much involvement since her arrival. A walk. A dinner. A mortifying midnight visit, when he’d been forced to succumb to the pain and weakness in his leg. Yet, he’d instinctively known that she’d not break any promise she made to him.
Ainsley would have. If he thought anything the physician recommended was to the good, he’d feel honor bound to do what was best—regardless of how Stephen might have preferred to handle the matter. Ainsley had never taken a misstep, had never doubted his course. He studied, he examined, he researched. He never went with his gut.
Stephen had trusted his gut instincts. Of the three other people in the room, at that moment when so much was at stake, he trusted Mercy the most. Pity for her. He expected she’d rather be saddled with a man who went with his heart.
Did she dream? Not the ones that accompanied sleep, but those that were of larger things, that hovered nearby when one was awake? She’d come here expecting to find him dead—not breathing and available for marriage. Her father had demanded it, but she’d spoken not a single word of it. What sort of woman didn’t desire marriage? What sort of lady gave all she had to nurse the sick? No, not all. She still managed to make time for someone who was incredibly special to her.
Stephen had awoken once to see her holding her son. He’d only squinted at her, not wanting to alert her to his wakefulness, not wanting to distract her from her purpose. Besides, she’d have poured more laudanum down his throat, and he was sick unto death of it. He knew his leg was still there. It throbbed unmercifully, but the pain was a different sort than he’d had before. Then he’d felt as though demons were slicing through his muscles. Perhaps they had been. Now it was just the weary pain of flesh mending.
Even the pain in his head seemed duller.
It took little movement at all for his fingers to graze her chin. Her eyes fluttered open. “Off with you now,” he ordered in a voice raspy from disuse. “Get some proper sleep.”
Jerking upright, she immediately reached for his brow. “Your fever’s gone.”
He tried to nod, but that motion seemed beyond him. Where had he found the strength to touch her? He was exhausted. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping, but he wanted to roll over and return to slumber. But first—
“Thirsty.”<
br />
“Yes, of course you are. Hungry, too, I suspect. I’ve managed to get some water and soup down your throat, but not nearly enough.”
So it hadn’t all been laudanum as he’d thought. His ability to taste had been playing tricks on him, or perhaps he’d simply been too fevered to know exactly what was going on around him. He thought he remembered his mother. What else had transpired?
Mercy poured water from a pitcher into a glass. Slipping her arm beneath his shoulders, she lifted him slightly and brought the glass to his lips with a measured efficiency. She’d no doubt done this for others. Had she done it for him? He despised the constant ignorance that hounded at him, the questions that plagued him.
The water was cool, and he wondered how something with no flavor could taste so damned good.
He knew she must have bathed recently because she smelled of lavender and carried none of the sickly sweet odor of illness. Her breast rubbed innocently against his arm, but he’d recovered enough that his body reacted with a twitch. He had memories of her wiping a damp cloth over him. The fever had plunged him into hell, and she had lifted him into heaven.
Eventually, she laid him back down and set the glass aside. “Your sheets are damp, from the fever breaking. I’m going to change them, but first I’ll give you a quick wash.”
“I can manage. Just help me sit up.” Words he’d never expected to hear himself utter—to turn down an opportunity to have a woman bathe him? But she was not just a woman. She was the mother of his child. She’d also quite possibly saved his life. After his time at the military hospital, he wasn’t certain he’d ever want to deal with physicians again. He’d heard too many men beg that their arm or leg not be taken. Gritted his teeth against the screams and sobs that followed when their wishes were ignored.
His refusal to seek out a physician to examine his leg had been reckless in retrospect, but in his mind it had been the safer course to remaining whole.
Once he was sitting up with the sheet draped over his waist, she brought him a bowl of warm water. She dipped in a cloth, wrenched the excess water out, and handed it to him. He could have sworn she blushed before she turned away.
“Have you a nightshirt?” she asked.
“No. I don’t like to be confined in bed.” She glanced back at him, and he gave her what he thought might have been his first true smile in months. “Unless it’s within the arms of a beautiful woman, of course.”
Her mouth twitched. “I see you are feeling better.”
“Thanks to you. So what was it?”
“A bit of saber, I think.” She retrieved a handkerchief and unfolded it to reveal glinting steel that was a couple of inches long. “It could have broken off during the battle … or there’s so much flying debris, from what I hear … I’ve never actually been on a battlefield.”
As far as his memory was concerned, neither had he.
“I don’t know how they missed it, but I’ve seen it happen before,” she assured him. “You’re very fortunate that Dr. Roberts was able to save your leg.”
“I don’t remember a good deal about the past … how many days was it?”
“Three.”
After he finished washing up, he moved to the chair. She managed to change the sheets with a quickness and efficiency that had him back in bed before he could break a sweat from his previous efforts.
“Shall I fetch you some soup now?” she asked.
“No. Not hungry.”
“You need to eat.”
“I will in the morning.” He sounded impatient, irascible. She merely nodded and glanced down at her clenched hands, hands that had comforted him. “I’m sorry.”
She lifted her gaze. “No, don’t apologize. You’ve been through an ordeal.”
“No more so than you. I know I’m not the best of patients. Why didn’t you have a servant tend me?”
She tugged on the blanket, bringing it closer to his chin, as though she needed to occupy her hands. “Caring for those who suffer from infirmity is what I was trained to do.”
“But now you have a son who needs your attention.”
“I see him often. Jeanette is very skilled at caring for him. She’s been with us almost since the beginning.” She touched his knee. “And I kept my promise. You have your leg.”
“So I noticed. Thank you for that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think Dr. Roberts had any plans to amputate it. Not like they had planned with your arm.”
Good God! They’d tried to take his arm? How bad had it been? Instinctively, he touched the large thick scar. He’d wondered how it had come to be.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve upset you. You probably don’t like to think about that time. I know I don’t.”
He took a risk—“You tended to me then, when my arm was wounded.”
“Yes. At least this time you didn’t call out the names of at least a dozen other ladies.”
He gave her an ironic grin. “Is that what I did before?”
She nodded, a light twinkle in her eyes. “When your fever was at its worst. You had quite the harem.”
“I suppose a lot of secrets are spilled in delirium.” Perhaps memories as well.
“They are all safe with me.”
He did not doubt her words. “War is harsh. A lady shouldn’t be exposed to it. Why were you there?”
She sank onto the chair, as though her legs could no longer support her, and folded her hands in her lap. “My life seemed without … purpose. There were dances and visiting. But it all seemed so trivial. I wanted to do something to help those who were in need. I had a younger sister. She became very ill. Mother had passed, and it was left to me to take care of Maryanne. She died. I often thought if I’d only known more that I could have prevented her passing somehow.”
His gut clenched with the knowledge that she carried that burden. “It was not your responsibility to cure her. Your father should have sent for a physician—”
“He did. And I know in my head there was nothing I could do, but my heart wonders. I was quite inconsolable after Maryanne’s passing, so Father indulged my whim to learn nursing. I had only just completed my four months of training when I learned of Miss Nightingale’s pleas for nurses to accompany her to the Crimea. The articles in the newspapers were depicting such madness there. Our soldiers didn’t have supplies. There were no adequate hospitals.” She released a self-conscious laugh. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”
Only she was. He’d been so focused on what had happened to him and what he’d lost, that he’d not given any thought to discovering what might have happened to others beyond him. Even his family—he’d assumed they’d gone through nothing of consequence other than the birth of Westcliffe’s son.
“Since you weren’t here,” she continued, “you might not realize there was a public outcry that something be done. It called to me. Not in the way that God called to Joan of Arc, of course, but I knew I had to do something more than gather linens for bandages. So I arranged an interview with Miss Nightingale and I was selected to go with her.”
He heard the passion in her words, and it shamed him that his had not been the same. His brothers had already bought him a commission by the time he had tea with Claire, the last afternoon he remembered. His mother’s influence had kept him safe at home, away from any of Victoria’s little wars. He’d picked a hell of a time to let go of his mother’s skirts. But after listening to Mercy’s story, he couldn’t confess any of that. It made him feel petty and small. It made him feel as though he’d truly been lacking in character, as his family had claimed.
“It gave your life purpose, then?” he asked her instead.
“It gave me John.”
Chapter 6
Now that he was on his way to recovery, he was left to his own company more often than he’d have preferred. Mercy was no longer constantly at his bedside. If not for the occasional squalling of the babe, he would have thought she’d left the residence entirely.
But in the short time he’d come to know her, he knew she’d never leave without the child. Where the child goeth, so went she.
“Your wound is healing nicely,” Dr. Roberts said as he examined the wound. “How does it feel?”
“Not nearly as painful as it was.” He could touch it now without flinching. As a matter of fact, the pain was so diminished that he had hope that he’d eventually walk without the blasted limp.
“I should think it would be good for you to start moving about. Nothing too strenuous. No riding as of yet, but a short walk might do you some good.”
After Dr. Roberts had left, Stephen took his advice, drew on his trousers along with a loosely fitting linen shirt, left his bed, and using his walking stick, hobbled to a chair by the window. The vast sky was gray, the clouds dark, yet he watched as sunshine—Mercy—strolled through the garden, holding her son, his son.
He’d barely given any notice of him after that first viewing. She cradled him now, and in spite of the distance separating them, the love etched in her face as she gazed down on the child backed the breath up painfully in his chest. It was pure adoration, without resentment of any sort. An angel gazing down on wonder.
The child had turned her world upside down, had forced her to leave her mission of mercy, had caused her shame, had ruined her reputation, had led her here. Her future was uncertain, yet still she held on to him as though he were the only thing of any importance.
He wondered if she’d ever feel that way about the child’s father.
Because of the way they were facing, of the boy, he couldn’t see much more than the light blond curls. Like Stephen’s, they’d no doubt darken as the lad grew older. He tried to recall the color of his eyes. Blue, he thought. Like his.
He wanted to join them. If he took it slowly, perhaps he could at least get nearer, close enough to watch her holding the child, to see the joy in her eyes. How much courage it must have taken for her to face her father and then to deal with Stephen’s family. Strangers. She’d had no way of knowing how they might react. She could have taken the secret of being with Stephen to her grave, but she’d ruined her chances of a good match with a decent fellow when she’d chosen to keep the child. What an extraordinary decision for a lady of quality. She could have found someone to take the child in and no one would have been the wiser.
Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman Page 10