The Captive (17 page)

In captivity, Christian had never been touched in friendship, never known tenderness or kindness at the hands of another. If he was forced to accept a bath, the service was rendered with disrespect. If he was tended by a doctor, it was without anesthetic or palliative, the care given hurriedly, even fearfully.

And Girard’s hands on him had been businesslike and fleeting—thank a merciful Deity.

Lady Greendale had renewed a certain appetite in him, one he hadn’t realized he’d possessed—for sweet touches, for care and tenderness and tactile loving kindness. She had it in her very nature to offer such touches, and she’d have him believe she even desired him.

He could not atone for that, but neither would he part with her physical presence in his life. If he had to buy her dogs, give her horses, and keep his own animal nature to himself to do it, he would.

By God, he would.

***

The puppies were effective diplomatic overtures. Gilly understood them clearly for the olive branch they were intended to be. She wasn’t sure what Christian’s motives were with respect to Lucy, but the child adored her pet.

Not Christian.
Mercia.

“We’re to have a guest.”

“You startled me, Your Grace.” Gilly put down her embroidery hoop as he took the seat beside her on a bench amid his mother’s rose gardens. Yards away, Lucy tossed a ball to the pups, who grew larger by the day, like creatures from some fairy tale.

“I don’t know who plays harder,” Mercia said, “the child or the dogs, but it’s too quiet, that scene. She should be shrieking with laughter, calling directions to them. Every night, I go to bed telling myself we’re one day closer to when she speaks to us again, but it grows difficult to keep that faith.”

Oh, and wouldn’t he offer just such a confidence, a glimpse of paternal insecurity more dear to Gilly than all his ducal swaggering about the estate with Hancock.

“I have the sense,” he went on, “this silence of hers has a purpose.”

“What sort of purpose?”

“I don’t know. What are you embroidering now?”

She held up a silk shawl, sized for a child, the hems decorated with dragons tumbling along one side, unicorns leaping across another. She’d made sure the creatures were a bit chubby and that every one of them grinned its way across the fabric.

“For Lucy?”

“I can make one for you, Your Grace.”

“And wouldn’t that be lovely? His Grace dressing in lady’s clothing. See how long I’d stay out of Bedlam when that got out.”

“You are the last person who will find himself in Bedlam.” She hoped her tone put this observation in the realm of fact rather than opinion. “Who is your guest?”

“
Our
guest.”

She let that go by, a harmless dart in their ongoing struggle to…what? In her case, it was a struggle to not fall in love with a man who was determined to be decent to her when what she sought was indulgence of her wanton nature.

Her recently discovered, very frustrated wanton nature, damn him. Greendale was probably laughing at her from the grave.

As she fell asleep at night, try though she might to pray her way to the arms of Morpheus, Gilly found herself calling to mind the lovely heat of Christian’s naked skin, the taste of his mouth on hers, the silky texture of his hair, and the pleasure—the utter, soul-deep relief, and the pleasure—of being held securely in his arms.

While Christian seemed equally determined to entice her into some sort of friendship.

He wasn’t exactly charming, though he was attentive, seeking her out several times a day, always with some question: Was the lavender ready for harvest? Did she fancy goat cheese or only cow cheese? Had Lucy enough books to keep her occupied?

And now,
they
were to have a guest.

“Who is this guest?”

“Colonel Devlin St. Just. The Duke of Moreland’s oldest, though born on the wrong side of the blanket. I traveled with him in France.”

How to ask: Before or after the ordeal of captivity?

He was rubbing his thumb over a hem of Gilly’s shawl, the black silk she wore around the property except on the warmest days.

“Are you looking forward to this company?”

“You called me Christian.”

“I did no such thing.”

“When you saw Dimwit,” he said, his fingers slowing as they moved over the fabric. “You said, ‘Oh, Christian.’”

She’d hoped he had not noticed. “I beg your pardon then, it was an oversight.”

“My name is not an oversight. I used yours, too.”

He’d called her his dearest Gillian, and she’d had to hide her eyes against a silky, panting puppy. And now, the dratted man was going somewhere conversationally. Somewhere Gilly did not want him to go.

“If you used my name, sir, you overstepped.”

“You invited me to use it, my dear.” He was smiling now, faintly, his gaze on the shawl, and that didn’t bode well at all. “Because you’ve shaved me and dressed my hair.”

And she’d kissed him.
Merciful
feathered
saints.

“How are you managing?” she asked reluctantly, though she had wondered—incessantly. “You’ve remained clean shaven.”

“I was uneasy regarding the proximity of a razor to my throat.” The smile was gone as if it had never existed, a seedling unable to sprout roots or leaves. “If I don’t think of the blade, if I concentrate on the scraping away of my whiskers, not on having them scraped, I manage. Does that make sense?”

“You stay outside the business,” she said, knowing all too well what he meant. “You watch yourself being shaved, as if you were the man in the mirror, not the one whom the razor touches.”

“Yes.” A telltale crease appeared between his golden brows. He was puzzling something out, possibly about
her
. She spoke to distract him.

“Tell me about this Colonel St. Just.”

The duke blew out a considering breath. “He is both canny and kind, probably a soldier poet beneath all his Irish charm and ducal bluster. I traveled north with him when I left Toulouse. He’s the oldest of ten, and it informs his style of command.”

“Interesting. Aren’t most officers younger sons?”

“Many are. I think you will like him, and I know he will like you.”

“What are you insinuating?”

“Nothing,” he said, reaching over to pat her hand. “Not one thing.”

And then he fell silent, watching his silent daughter, and Gilly could do nothing but sit silently beside him, wondering what it meant when a man recalled a lady’s every word but refused to kiss her again.

***

“You are charming my countess,” Christian said, passing a brandy to St. Just. In civilian clothes, the colonel was handsomer than ever, and Christian was curiously glad to see him.

“Lady Greendale is charming me,” St. Just said, pausing before a pistol crossbow, the smallest in the Severn family collection. “My thanks for the libation. This little darling has to be quite venerable.”

He held his drink as he studied the weapon, a man who knew to savor the finer things, when another officer on leave might have tossed back his brandy at one go.

“That weapon is two hundred years old, at least.” And it still looked lethal as hell. “Her ladyship charms all in her ambit, including my daughter.” Though what had been amiss with the late earl of Greendale, that Gillian apparently hadn’t charmed him?

Christian poured himself a drink from the tray some thoughtful countess had sent up to the armory, half the amount he’d given St. Just.

St. Just turned his attention to a longbow, a weapon nearly as tall as the men who would have used it.

“If Lady Greendale is the reason your hands don’t shake, you’ve put on two stone of muscle, and your eyes no longer look like you recently took tea in hell’s family parlor, then I must consider her a friend.”

“She’s part of it.” Two stone? Well, perhaps one. One and a half. “A big part. She has the gift of domesticity, of creating a comforting sort of tranquillity.”

“My five sisters do that for me. Her Grace is not my mother, though for reasons known only to her, she loves me as if I were one of her own. The girls, though…they scold and hug and laugh and watch a fellow all the while, catching him at the odd moment and prying confidences from him.”

“And you love them for it?”

He moved on to another longbow, this one Welsh and supposedly a veteran of the Battle of Agincourt. Christian’s father had let him shoot it once, on his fifteenth birthday. His forearm had sported a fierce bruise for weeks.

“How can I not love such sisters?” St. Just asked. “You saw what I saw on the Peninsula. The officers’ wives, the laundresses, the cooks. They put up with the same deprivations the soldiers did, and complained a good deal less.”

Both men fell silent, while St. Just was polite enough to appear to savor his drink and Christian wondered why generations of Severns had kept these weapons in this high-ceilinged, carpeted stronghold, as if they were treasures rather than instruments of death.

“I dread going home, too, though,” St. Just said, apropos of nothing save perhaps his drink, the lateness of the hour, and the battered suit of armor standing guard in a corner.

“You do,” Christian said, “because you think the effort of holding the war inside you, and your family outside you, will defeat your reason. When you were campaigning, it was exactly the opposite. You carried your family in your heart, and the fighting went on around you. It’s…difficult, being a soldier, and also somebody’s son, somebody’s dear older brother.”

Somebody’s papa.

The proceeds from a sale of this old lot of death and destruction would feed a deal of puppies.

Or old soldiers.

“And as carefully as they teach us to shoot,” St. Just said, sighting down the stock of a cavalry crossbow, “as punctiliously as we look after our mounts and our gear and our weapons, they don’t teach us what to do with that difficulty of being two men housed in one body. I suspect it’s half the motivation for the battlefield heroics we saw time after time.”

Christian took the cranequin from him and replaced it on its brass wall hooks. “A wish to die rather than hold those two men in one body?”

“A deadly confusion, in any case, a fatal inability to suffer both peace and war in the same human being.”

St. Just had no visible scars, but watching him balance an ivory-handled dagger on his finger, carefully indifferent to the weapon’s nature, while minutely attentive to its craftsmanship, Christian endured an abrupt need to drag his guest from the armory.

“Be glad, St. Just, you don’t have to add to a soldier’s confusion the burden of a ducal succession.”

St. Just put the knife down beside its mates on a bed of blue velvet. “What can be confusing about that? Surely even the French couldn’t spoil your recall of those activities.”

No fire had been laid in the armory. It was summer, after all, and who in their right mind lingered here?

St. Just held his drink up to a branch of candles, as if light had never done anything more fascinating than shine through an inch of brandy. “What aren’t you saying, Mercia? You’re no damned eunuch.”

Damned, perhaps, nonetheless.

“I am not whole.” The words were out, four little prosaic words, but Christian’s throat promptly closed up, as if to stop any more prosaic words from escaping and mortifying him further. The small crossbow occupied his line of vision; a compulsion to smash it suffused his hands.

Both of his hands.

“You are not…” St. Just’s mouth screwed up in consternation. “I’ve seen your scars, but otherwise…”

In for a penny… St. Just wouldn’t pretend he’d misheard, wouldn’t brush such a disclosure aside, and maybe Christian had known he wouldn’t.

“Girard enjoyed decorating me with scars,” he said, blowing out a breath. “You’ve seen the symmetry of them, front and back, side to side. I bloom with delicate, pink scars, as if I wore a bouquet. At first, it nigh cost me my reason, to know every time his superior officer came around, Girard would cut on me again, slice at my flesh, murmuring sympathy the whole time…”

St. Just swore with soft, Anglo-Saxon intensity.

“But then it became almost a relief, not a pain but a…consolation. His knife was always sharp and clean, and it stung, but it also… I could manage it in silence, without fail, I could manage those messy, interminable sessions in silence. He never cut deeply, never. I soon realized Girard cutting on me was for show, and Girard comprehended my grasp of his agenda.”

Christian’s words were swaddled in the quiet of a big old house late at night, and what was a guest supposed to say to such a disclosure, anyhow?

“I’ve heard the like,” St. Just said, so very calmly. “One of the laundresses had scars.”

Christian had not
heard
the
like
, though it was rumored the Regent was far too willing to open a vein, even when the physicians told him he’d been bled enough.

“A woman with scars?”

“On her arms, well above her wrists,” St. Just said, rearranging the knives so they formed not a fan but a circle on their blue velvet. “She wasn’t trying to end her existence, and the other women said she’d long had the habit.”

Christian had not taken a sip of his drink, and neither had St. Just.

The brandy was, after all, French.

And yet, Christian wanted to finish the topic, though it would probably mean he never saw St. Just again.

“Girard sensed his little torment was no longer doing much mental damage to me, if any, but cutting is bloody, dramatic, and impressive to those who witness it. Anduvoir in particular seemed to enjoy those sessions with the knife.”

“Then may Girard and Anduvoir both die a slow, painful, bloody death.” St. Just lifted his glass, a toast to the eventual demise of two Frenchmen who’d been no credit to their nation.

“And roast honestly in hell,” Christian said. “I understand spies are tortured if they’re taken captive out of uniform, but Anduvoir’s interest in me was beyond the natural perversions of war, if there are such things.”

“One understands your meaning.”

St. Just wouldn’t pry. Christian would have to make this confession on main strength.