Whatever the cost in time and energy, she must now nurse him herself. She couldn’t risk the nurses hearing any unwanted revelations. She wondered where he thought he was, what he thought he was doing…
Cobie was roaming in his dreams through the country of his past. He was being refused by Susanna—and suffering bitter regret. He was in Sophie Massingham’s drawing room, tactlessly refusing her sexual advances—and being jeeringly informed of his illegitimacy. He was with Liz and Paige, playing cards in his early happier days at Bratt’s Crossing. He was being strapped to the corral fence by Greer to be flogged almost to death for daring to try to help the townsfolk there. Next he was high among the rocks, tracking down the men who were trying to kill Hendrick from ambush—and killing them instead. He was with Jennie in the bath in her brothel, and engaged in his first bank robbery.
He relived his brief stay in San Miguel. Again and again he was with Belita, as though by reliving her death he could somehow make it not happen. He knew—how did he know?—that he was holding a woman’s hand, and that she was talking to him, although what she was saying was more unreal to him than what the shadows among whom he moved were saying to him.
Something in Dinah’s voice triggered off another chain of memories, and he was talking to Violet at Moorings, being blackmailed by her, being told to disillusion Dinah, on pain of Dinah’s being sent into exile.
Numbed, Dinah listened to the restless voice. When he spoke of Moorings, she tried to stop him, by putting a gentle hand over his mouth, but he took it away, and she heard him to the bitter end. So that was why he married me, and tricked Rainey—to save me from Violet!
He was rescuing Lizzie Steele from Sir Ratcliffe—and pursuing him and Hoskyns relentlessly. She knew why he and Walker had sparred on the night of the fire. Then she found out why the Prince felt that he owed Cobie Grant something, why he had stolen Sir Ratcliffe’s diamonds and why Walker owed him such a debt of gratitude.
Finally, a little hoarse, he stopped, and still holding Dinah’s hand as though it were a talisman, he fell asleep. The night nurse, looking in later that evening, saw that husband and wife were both sleeping. Dinah still held Cobie’s hand, and her head was beside his, on the pillow.
Cobie woke her up early the next morning by starting to talk again, after drinking milk: she wondered what he thought that he was doing. He spoke more quietly and showed less distress—and she stayed with him, until he slept again. He had still been in dreamland, as Dinah called it, but she had known that he wasn’t dreaming, he was reliving his memories good and bad, and now she had the answer to many of his mysteries. He had also repeatedly told her something which she had long wanted to hear: that he loved her.
When he next awoke, his hand searched the coverlet as though looking for hers. She took it, stroked his forehead, which seemed to soothe him and began to talk gently to him. Never mind that he couldn’t hear her, it made her feel better.
She told him about the baby. ‘Oh, how I wish that I had done so before,’ she said sadly, ‘but I wanted to wait until the action was over and Sir Ratcliffe was defeated, so that we could celebrate without the shadow of that over us. Do you want a boy or a girl, my darling? I don’t really mind which. Of course, we could have twins, I suppose, like your grandmother.’
He stirred as though he had heard her, and for a moment she thought that he was recovering complete consciousness, but he closed his eyes, sighed, took his hand out of hers, and settled down as though he were about to sleep forever.
For the first time Dinah gave up hope. The tears which she had held at bay were about to fall. A knock on the door steadied her. It was the nurse.
‘You have visitors, Lady Dinah. I think that it is important that you see them.’
‘Who are they?’ she asked wearily.
‘Mr and Mrs John Dilhorne,’ said the nurse. ‘They are in the drawing room, Lady Dinah.’
Cobie’s father and mother, from whom he was estranged. She remembered then that Susanna had told her that they were on their way. She went down to greet them.
A woman was sitting on the sofa before the hearth, a man was pacing the room nervously. He stopped to face her. The woman rose. She would have known who the man was if she had met him in the street. He was so like Cobie, except that his face was so much more gentle, and his hair was silver, instead of gold. It was not that his face was soft, but Cobie’s classic good looks concealed a sternness, an inward severity, which this man did not possess. Kindliness shone from him.
Cobie’s mother was a surprise. She was tall, dark and erect. Her face was full of character, but she was not, and never had been, a beauty. No one, Dinah thought, would have taken her for his mother, they were so unalike. Except…except…it was from her that he had inherited his severity. How she knew this was beyond Dinah in her state of exhaustion—a state which Cobie’s mother recognised at once. She moved towards Dinah, and put out her hand—it was shapely, like his.
‘Oh, my dear. We shouldn’t have come. You look all in.’
Dinah shook her head. ‘Oh, no,’ she said earnestly, ‘it is only right that you should come, only…he is talking but he knows no one and nothing at the moment… I…we…don’t even know whether he is going to live…I’m afraid…’
Jack Dilhorne gave a short exclamation and turned away, grief on his face.
Marietta, without hesitation, instinctively took Dinah in her arms. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear. Now I’m glad that we are here. You will let me help you, won’t you? Susanna thought you might be in need of us.’
Dinah lay against Marietta’s loving breast. She could smell her delicate violet scent, and knew again from where Cobie had gained his strength. Marietta gently led her to the sofa and helped her to sit on it. Dinah felt that her legs had turned to water.
‘Now you must forgive me,’ she offered shakily. ‘I haven’t been as stupid as this since it happened. Perhaps…’ and she was hesitant ‘…perhaps if you went in to see him, spoke to him, he might hear and recognise your voices, he doesn’t seem to know mine. You see, he has repeatedly told me in his delirium how much he wishes to be reconciled with you.’
‘Susanna has told us how brave you have been, my dear,’ said Jack, from where he stood by the hearth. ‘We are both so sorry that we should meet you for the first time in such sad circumstances. You know, I’m sure, that the rift between us was no wish of ours, but it is what his mother and I did, unintended though it was, which caused it. You may imagine how we felt when Susanna met us at Southampton and told us what had happened.’
Dinah saw that Jack’s eyes on her were calm and gentle, and thought, Cobie has been kind to me, so often, and he has looked at me with an expression exactly like that on his face. What a strange mixture he is. I’m sure that if I could make him know how much I wanted him to recover, and that we are going to have a baby, he would wake up.
She opened her mouth to begin to tell Jack so, when the door opened, and the head nurse ran in. ‘Oh, Lady Dinah, you must come. Mr Grant has taken a turn for the worse!’
Dinah paled. ‘I’ll be with you immediately,’ and then, to Jack and Marietta, ‘You must come with me, both of you. Who knows what might revive him?’
It was a desperate hope, she knew, and knew it even more when she entered Cobie’s room. They had propped him up on even more pillows, but he was not conscious. His face was grey, and his breathing was shallow.
She ran to his bed, ignoring everyone, and threw herself on her knees beside it. She took his hand and said frantically, ‘Oh, Cobie, Cobie, don’t die, don’t leave me. Your father and mother are here, and—’ she told him again, because she knew that he had not heard her before, but that perhaps he might this time ‘—and we’re going to have a baby, oh, you do want to see the baby, don’t you, my darling? Don’t leave him without a father.’
She heard Marietta’s sharp intake of breath, saw Jack’s face, a rictus of pain, and flung her arms around Cobie, starting to cry for the first time, with abandoned
desperation, for she felt the tide beginning to take him inexorably away.
In the dream of life in which Cobie had lived since he was shot, and to which he had returned when he had fallen asleep again, he was dimly aware that someone had been talking to him and telling him something important. What, he wasn’t quite sure—only that the someone was a woman, and her voice had been loving.
At first his dreams had been unhappy, but gradually as he had lived and relived them, they had become less and less so. It was as though re-experiencing them had purged him. The last time that he had recalled Belita it had been in love, and not in shame and guilt.
He was now back in the New Mexican desert. A moment ago he had been a wild boy again, riding through the dawn with Underwood’s gang, the day after they had robbed and blown up the train, singing the endless verses of ‘The Old Chisholm Trail’. Then the gang had disappeared, and the desert had changed.
No longer was the sky variegated, filled with banners of light.
The mountains were losing their hues which had ranged from scarlet to mauve, to grey to ochre, and the desert itself had lost its colour. Suddenly he was no longer riding, but was walking with giant strides towards the mountains, black now, with jagged edges. A great light was rising in the sky, and he was making for that, and peace.
Nothing, he was determined on that, would stop him this time from reaching and embracing the light, becoming one with it. He remembered that a voice had called him back once before, but not this time! He would not allow it.
All the same the woman’s gentle loving voice was with him, calling his name again, plaintively. This time she was not below him, but behind him. He would tell her to go away.
He turned, away from the light, and looked back. It was Dinah. She was standing there, dressed as she had been at Moorings, with the lost look on her face. She was carrying a baby, which reached out one fat hand towards him.
Her voice said in his head—not that he really had a head, any more than that Dinah and the baby was really there with him—‘Unfinished business, Jacobus Grant.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ said Dinah. The baby merely chuckled, and waved its hand again.
‘No,’ and he turned his head to see that the light was still rising; when he looked back, Dinah and the baby were beginning to fade. They were becoming pale shadows of the reality he was about to lose.
Cobie knew—how did he know?—that if he didn’t soon look towards the light again, it would disappear, but if he did, he would never see his child, or Dinah, again.
‘Unfinished business,’ came whispering to him across the desert.
‘No,’ he said again, but this time his denial was feeble.
‘Unfinished business,’ sang the fading voice.
What I tell you three times is true.
The sentence was written in letters of fire in the sky. No sooner had it appeared, than it disappeared. The light disappeared with it.
This time he said, ‘Yes!’ The desert vanished, and he was travelling down a tunnel towards a light, not the bright sun which had been in the sky, but a small dim one. When he reached this light it was as though he was being pulled through a door which was almost too small to allow for his passage.
Once through it he was in his own room, in bed, with Dinah’s arms around him. She was sobbing, and her tears were wetting his cheek.
All that had happened to him in the limbo in which he had lived since Sir Ratcliffe Heneage had shot him disappeared like clouds blown out of the sky and dispersed by a great wind.
He tried to sit up, but found that he was too weak to do so. He whispered—and his voice shocked him, it was so feeble— ‘Dinah, why are you crying?’
‘Relief,’ she replied. ‘When I came in, Cobie, I thought that you were dead.’
He looked beyond her to see his father and mother standing by the door. What could they be doing here? Why was he in bed? And so feeble? His head was swimming.
‘Jack! Marietta! Is it really you?’ he whispered again. They stared at him—it was as though the lost years which had divided him from them since he had gone to the South West had never been.
‘How did I get here?’
Dinah said, ‘Oh, Cobie, don’t you remember?’
He looked puzzled. He remembered leaving the courtroom. He remembered turning to speak to Dinah—and then, nothing. There had been a light…
Why was Dinah still crying? He wriggled a little, and tried to sit up, but fell back again, asking plaintively, ‘Why am I so weak, so suddenly?’
Dinah said, ‘Oh, Cobie, have you no idea of what happened to you? Sir Ratcliffe shot you on the steps outside the courtroom. You have been here, unconscious, or semi-conscious, ever since. That is why you feel so feeble,’ and she began to cry again.
She seemed to be shedding all the tears which she had held back since that dreadful morning.
‘And Mother and Father?’
It was his mother who answered. She had come over to the bed, had seated herself on a chair by it, and was holding his other hand, the one Dinah wasn’t holding. She kissed him on the cheek, and yes, it was as though he were a boy again.
‘Susanna asked us over some weeks ago. We arrived in England early yesterday. She told us the dreadful news—that you had been shot—and then brought us here to see you straight from the boat. We were with Dinah when the nurse ran in to tell us that she thought that you were…very ill. In danger.’
She gave a great sob. ‘She was wrong, but for a moment, we all thought that she was right—until you responded when Dinah called your name.’
He knew that there was something he ought to be remembering, but the harder he tried, the more elusive the memory was. He gave up. Trying to remember made his head hurt. There was something else he ought to ask, and memory did not elude him this time.
‘Did Walker arrest Sir Ratcliffe?’ he asked Dinah abruptly. He had to know that even before he came to terms with his father and the mother who were treating him as though he were their beloved child again.
Dinah thought very carefully of what she ought to say. She must never let him find out that one by one he had told her all his secrets—that was something for her to know and never to reveal.
She must never say anything that would betray that she knew that Walker had been due to arrest Sir Ratcliffe for murdering the three poor children. After his sudden death the authorities had said nothing about his guilt, preferring to avoid the scandal which the revelation of it would have created.
But she was not supposed to know of Sir Ratcliffe’s guilt.
So she looked confused, and asked, ‘Arrest who? The man who shot Sir Ratcliffe dead? He was killed from ambush after he tried to kill you. No one knows who did it.’
Cobie, his faculties rapidly returning, would have bet good money that he knew who had done it. Instead, after a pause, for it pained and tired him to talk, he said hoarsely, ‘Well, that saves the expense of a trial, I must say. We ought to give a testimonial to whoever did it.’
This was so much like the normal Cobie, and not like the pale wraith who lay on the bed, that all his hearers looked happy.
His father came over, and said mildly. ‘Do you think I could join in the celebrations now that you are back with us? I promise not to cry!’
This, too, was so like Jack that his wife and son began to laugh together, and if Cobie’s laugh was a feeble one, then the fact that he could laugh at all made his family happy.
Their laughter broke the ice completely, and Dinah suddenly remembered poor Mr Van Deusen, who had lived in the library, waiting for his friend to recover. She sent a nurse to tell him the happy news that Jake had come out of his coma, or whatever it was, which had afflicted him, and was now waiting for the doctors to confirm that he was over the worst.
Two days later, after he had slept again, had been fed and been reconciled with the parents from whom he had been so long estranged, Dinah came in to find him awake and restless.
> ‘I thanked Hendrick,’ he said bluntly, ‘even though he pretended to be unaware of what I was thanking him for. Did Walker harass him at all?’
‘No,’ Dinah said. ‘Of course, he questioned him, and everyone else who had been involved in the action, but he could find nothing to suggest that any of them had shot Sir Ratcliffe. I believe they searched Hendrick’s home. Sir Ratcliffe was killed by a bullet from a Colt .44, the inspector said. I think he, and everyone else, was relieved that someone unknown did their job for them, rather than the hangman. Think of the scandal if they had had to try him for attempting to murder you!’
‘Yes, I suppose he did,’ said Cobie drowsily. He was still very weak and tired, but the doctors had prophesied a quick recovery, now that he was over the worst. He had seen his mother and father again, and his mother had told him how devotedly Dinah had nursed him.
‘Why, at the end, the doctors said, when you were so ill, she wouldn’t allow anyone else to nurse you, she was so determined to look after you herself!’
Cobie watched his young wife while she moved around his room, talking to and directing the nurses, thoroughly in charge of him and everyone else. It was difficult to believe that she was not yet nineteen.
He also thought that her determination to be alone with him when he was delirious might have had as much to do with what he might have been saying when he was not fully conscious, as for his bodily welfare! He wondered how many of his secrets he had told her, and decided that he was never going to know, for she was plainly determined not to reveal to him what she had learned.
He was not going to ask her…
He should have trusted her more—she was the true daughter of her strong-minded father, and he would try never to deceive her again. She was brave enough to know the best—and the worst—of him.
More than that, she had saved him twice by using her intelligence and her iron will. First of all at Markendale when she had so cunningly hidden the diamonds after discovering them in the faulty box. If she had not done so, he would have been sitting in a prison cell by now—and Linfield would have killed Walker.
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