The Captive (6 page)

“Other side,” Gilly said, feeling a pressing need to conclude their business. She might have done so without incident, except she’d left the wrist cuffs for last.

“Shall we sit?” she suggested when he was sporting pins up both side and arm seams. “We’re almost done.”

“You’re faster than the tailors.”

“I’m not as exact, and I have no need to impress you with the care I take,” she said, finding a seat on the sofa. “Give me your hand.” He sat and offered the right one first. She put his knuckles against her thigh and gathered the fabric around his wrist. “One doesn’t want to have to move the openings for the sleeve buttons…” She took a pin from her cushion and marked how much to take in. “Other one.”

He hesitated, then extended his left hand. She took that one too, put it in her lap, then drew in a breath.

This single, prosaic appendage was some sort of key to the rest of the man. The palm was broad, the nails clean and blunt. As male hands went, this one should have been elegant, and the first three fingers were. The fourth finger was scarred, however, as if burned, the nail quite short. The smallest finger was missing the very tip. Not enough was gone to disfigure the nail, but enough to suggest a painful mishap. The joints of the last two fingers weren’t quite right either, as if they belonged on the hand of an arthritic coachman.

Gilly tugged at the fabric, intent on completing her task. She’d come across her share of disfigurements, as the lady of any manor might. Stableboys’ toes got mashed, scullery maids suffered the occasional burn, smallpox survivors abounded, and children with less than perfect features were born to the tenants.

But Mercia wasn’t a stableboy, scullery maid, or yeoman’s eleventh child. On him, such an injury was blasphemous. Gilly hadn’t wept since long before her husband’s death, and the ache in her throat and pressure behind her eyes took a moment to decipher.

“It isn’t pretty,” the duke said. “I should have warned you.”

“You’re probably lucky to still have these fingers,” she replied, but inside, inside she was collapsing with outrage on his behalf. He wouldn’t want pity though, no fawning, no tears.

Certainly, no tears. Tears were never a good idea. Gilly’s husband had wasted no time instructing her on the matter of useless tears.

“I can no longer write comfortably with it,” he said, as if his hand were a quill pen in want of attention from a good, sharp knife. “With a glove on, it suffices for appearances’ sake.”

“It pains you, then?” Of course it hurt. Any visible scar hurt, if for no other reason than it reminded one of how the scar arose, and memories could be more painful than simple bodily aches.

“I rarely feel much with it, though I can predict approaching storms. Are you quite through?”

“Almost.” She put in one last, completely unnecessary pin, and let him withdraw his hand before she could weep over it.

She didn’t even know Mercia and might not like him if she did know him, but to have endured such suffering made her hurt for him. Men did stupid things without limit—duels, wagers, horse races, dares, bets—and war had to be the stupidest.

“My thanks.” He stood as soon as she sat back, no doubt glad to be done with the whole business.

“Can you get the shirt off without stabbing yourself? It wants caution. Here.” She didn’t wait for his invitation, but started lifting the hem. She was presuming, but she’d been married for years and years, and his valet was not on hand—if he had a valet—and the shirt was full of pins…

“Really, Lady Greendale, you needn’t.” He reached out as if he would still her hands, but stopped short of touching her. “I can manage, if you’d simply…”

“Close your eyes.” She wasn’t tall enough to lift the shirt over his head unless he bent forward, which he did, allowing her to extricate him from his voluminous, pinned up, inside-out shirt. She stepped back, glad to have the maneuver safely concluded, and carefully folded up the shirt. “There. All done.”

He turned toward his dressing room, and Gilly couldn’t help the sound that came from her. She moaned, an involuntary expression of dread and horror and even grief. He turned to face her, shirtless, and his eyes were colder than ever.

“You insisted, my lady.”

That he’d taken his back from her view helped not at all, for his chest was every bit as disfigured as his back.

***

Over Meems’s sniffy, tenacious protest, Gilly had insisted Mercia be allowed to rest right through dinner the previous night. Meems was in the same excellent rebellious form the next morning, and perhaps of the opinion that a mere interfering countess needed to learn her place in the household.

For Meems was male and must inflict his opinions on all in his ambit.

“His Grace hasn’t stirred, your ladyship, not that we can hear.”

“Not that you can hear?”

“He sleeps with his doors locked, milady.”

Meems’s grave deference notwithstanding, he was happily anticipating how Gilly would see His Grace awakened through a pair of locked doors.

“You’ve tried calling out?”

“If the sitting room door is closed, that would do little good, milady.”

“Then I’ll wake him myself.” She set her teapot down as quietly as she could, when she wanted to bash the thing over the old man’s head. “You’re heating His Grace’s hot water, are you not?”

“But of course.” He had the temerity to fall in step nearly on the heels of her slippers, until Gilly turned and glared at him at the foot of the stairs.

“Surely you’ll see personally to the duke’s breakfast tray, Meems?”

He indulged in a peevish sniff, then took himself back to the kitchen stairs without a word. Meems was piqued because he wanted to show his duke off before Polite Society for what remained of the Season, but Mercia was not an exhibit in a public circus.

Gilly tapped on the door to the sitting room and heard nothing in response. “Your Grace?” She leaned her ear against the door, and still…nothing.

And yes, the door was locked.

She extricated a hairpin from her bun and went to work. The lock was well oiled—give Meems credit—and Gilly was skilled, and soon the mechanism gave with a satisfying click. The bedroom door was even easier, and there he was, the eighth Duke of Mercia, facedown in his great four-poster monstrosity.

Gilly closed the door behind her, mindful of His Grace’s privacy, and approached the bed.

If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought the duke dead. He was that pale, as if he’d wandered beyond even the reach of the sun. In his utter immobility, he looked exhausted, like he’d been on forced march for weeks. A castaway quality to how he sprawled among his crisp, white sheets and blue satin pillows suggested he was resting deeply.

“Your Grace?”

His hand—the right hand, the perfect one—slid under his pillow, and his cheek twitched.

“Mercia? Your Grace?”

She was on the verge of reaching out to shake his shoulder, when he rolled onto his back. Gilly took a blinking moment to comprehend he held a wicked-looking knife in his hand. The blade gleamed in the morning light, brighter than any tea service, bright as jewels.

“Good morning, Your Grace.”

“What the bloody
hell
are you doing here?” Not his near-whispered drawing-room voice, but the rasp of a savage, one who’d use that lethal knife on any and all comers.

He’d snarled a question at her.

“I’m leaving, of course, in a moment. Your tray is on its way, though, and when you’ve broken your fast, I’ll await you in the library.”

***

Though she’d seen many of his scars—by no means all—the countess hadn’t left Christian’s household, and this pleased him more than it should. Of course, she might depart still, probably would, in fact, but she hadn’t run off, a silly note in her wake referencing pressing business or whatever polite fiction women resorted to when terrified out of their wits.

By a scarred, emaciated duke wielding a knife, may God have mercy upon him.

Christian dressed in waistcoat and shirtsleeves—hang the bloody cravat—and stepped into a worn pair of Hessians that had once been nearly painted onto him but fit him loosely now. As he brushed his hair back into its queue—barbering required proximity to scissors too—a footman appeared with a breakfast tray.

The scent of bacon in close quarters, of any cooked meat, nearly drove Christian to retching. “You will please take that down to the library.”

“Of course, Your Grace.”

He didn’t recognize the man, didn’t recognize half his staff, and it had been only two years since his last leave had sent him pelting through London on a lightning spree of self-indulgence.

Helene had disdained to come up to Town for more than a week of it, and he’d applauded her stubbornness, if anybody had cared to ask. What an idiot he’d been, and what a silly twit he’d married.

And yet, he’d give anything to be that idiot again, and for the silly twit to be at his side now, sniffing and judging and trying to tell him what to do.

He paused outside the library and rolled his shoulders as if he were loosening up for a cavalry charge. The countess, being widowed, no doubt had a dower house, but she’d struck him as a woman who’d rather be around family than moldering away on her late husband’s estate.

He opened the door, rehearsed contrition at the ready.

“I do apologize for intruding on your slumber, Your Grace.” The countess was in good looks this morning, dressed in a black gown that showed her figure to great advantage. Three years ago, he would have stolen a kiss to her cheek.

Idiot
did not begin to cover the matter.

“You need not apologize in the slightest, my lady, nor do I sense that you are genuinely sorry.” His breakfast tray waited on the low table before the countess, so he took a place more or less beside her. “Your intent was to rouse me, else you would not have gone through two locked doors to achieve that end.”

“Your orange?” She handed him a plate of fruit, the orange peeled and divided into sections for him. “I’ve told the kitchen they’d best be seeing to the preparation of the foods you enjoy regularly. They’re happy to do it, you know, even to peeling your oranges. I did this one myself. Tea?”

“Without the tea.”

Cautiously, he took a bite of orange. The scent of it was appealing, particularly when blended with the countess’s soap-and-flowers fragrance.

“I’ve basted up your clothes from yesterday’s fitting. If you can spare the time, we’d best see how they do. Scone?”

“Please.”

“Meems is moping,” she went on. “He wants you to sport about Town for a bit so the household might have bragging rights on the lost duke.”

“Lady Greendale—”

She wrinkled her nose, as if a foul scent had wafted in through the open window, which was silly when the window looked out on the gardens where honeysuckle bloomed in riot. “You can’t blame them, really, but I told Meems you were needed at Severn, which you are. Butter?”

“Countess.”

She wound down, as he’d hoped she would, and sat with the scone on the plate in her lap, the butter knife balanced beside it.

“I apologize for what you saw yesterday.”

Before he’d fallen asleep eighteen hours earlier—and before he’d nearly held the lady at knifepoint—he’d come at the problem a dozen different ways in his head. To apologize or express regrets? To apologize deeply, profoundly, sincerely? To be heartily sorry, most sorry, most heartily sorry… Endless words, and none of them sounded quite the note he wanted.

He was not sorry to be alive—only living men could achieve revenge—but he was sorry his misadventures had visited themselves on her in even a minor, indirect, visual way.

“I was married for some years, Your Grace, and to a man who thought a wife’s first responsibility was to valet her husband on all but formal occasions. I would not have taken your shirt from you had I not been prepared to see you
en
déshabille
. Any apologies are due you from me, and you have them.”

He considered forcing the point, but she was passing him his scone, the butter having been liberally applied.

“Might I have a bite of your orange?” She didn’t meet his eyes, and Christian had the sense her question was some kind of test.

Women were the subject of many a campfire discussion among Wellington’s soldiers, and a point of rare agreement among men who drank, fought, swived, and killed daily: there was no understanding women. Not their minds, not their moods, not their passions or lack thereof. Christian was confident the French soldiers, the Dutch, the Russians, the Hessians, they all had the same discussions, and all came to the same conclusion.

“I am happy to share.” He held up a section, and she leaned over and took it between her teeth, as he had previously.

And she chewed tidily, sparing him a small, smug smile.

She was staying. That’s what her little demonstration was about. She wasn’t running off because of an awkward moment, wasn’t succumbing to matronly vapors, wasn’t flinching at the sound of distant cannon.

He offered her another section.

The last night before Christian and Devlin St. Just had arrived in Paris, they’d camped beside yet another farm pond, and St. Just had bluntly asked Christian when he planned to bathe properly.

“My scent offends you?”

“You’re as tidy as a man can be when he bathes regularly in a bucket,” St. Just said. “But you face the generals tomorrow, and you’ll want to look your best for them.”

A great deal went unsaid around Devlin St. Just:
you’ll want to look your sanest for them
, for example.

“I was accosted at my bath,” Christian said, unrolling his blankets. “One moment I was in that frigid, clean water, scrubbing away, thinking dirt was the worst part of soldiering, the next I was surrounded by grinning Frenchmen, a half-dozen rifles aimed at my naked backside.”

St. Just rummaged in his saddlebags. “And that was the start of it. Thereafter you were probably denied the opportunity to be clean, or it was forced upon you. Shall I throw you into yonder pond?”

The offer was as sincere as it was insightful. St. Just was an inch or two taller than Christian’s six feet and two inches; he was as fit as the devil and damned quick.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Fine, then.” St. Just pitched a bar of hard-milled French soap at Christian’s chest, but Christian’s right hand wasn’t up to the challenge of catching it. The soap smelled of roses and mint. “In you go. I’ll just clean my weapons here while you scrub up.”

St. Just offered one of his rare, charming smiles, this one with a bit of devilment in it. And then he extracted a knife case from the same saddlebag and opened it to reveal six gleaming throwing knifes. A brace of elegant pistols that looked to be Manton’s work followed, a short sword, and of course, his cavalry saber as well.

“Point taken.”

Christian would be well and thoroughly guarded while he bathed, and still, he dreaded the necessity to strip down before another human being.

“I can’t guard you if I don’t watch what you’re about,” St. Just said, unsheathing his saber. “Else I’d politely turn my back.”

“You aren’t guarding me. The only threats I see are a lot of bleating sheep and two brindle heifers. You’re playing with your toys.”

“Right. You could also wait until dark, but then the sea monsters might come out and gobble you up.”

“Fuck you, St. Just.”

“So many wish they could.” He heaved a theatrical sigh and went about polishing his sword as if Christian weren’t kneeling on his blankets, feeling like a complete buffoon. The legacy of his tenure among the French would accrue usurious interest—if he allowed it to. Christian pulled his shirt over his head, shucked out of his breeches, and took his damned bath.

And to be clean again, really truly clean, had been worth the humiliation.

Except St. Just hadn’t said a thing about the scars, the eccentricity of a titled officer being afraid to bathe, or the need for a grown man to be reassured of his own safety in the bucolic surrounds of the French countryside.

Christian’s heart had still been thundering against his ribs when he emerged from the pond and toweled off.

“Shall I trim your beard?”

“Are you trying to provoke me?”

“I’m trying to tidy you up. You look like a wild man from darkest Africa in your off moments.”

Of which there was an abundance. “Perhaps I always looked like something escaped from the jungles.”

“Not you.” St. Just tucked his pistols away, and Christian was sorry to lose sight of them. “I was two years ahead of you at university. You were as vain as a peacock ten years ago.”

“We all were.”

“We were boys; it was our turn to be vain.”

Except Christian abruptly recalled St. Just as a much-younger man, a duke’s by-blow who was cursed with a stutter. He hadn’t been vain in the least, and when the situation had called for it, he’d let his fists do the talking.

“So you either give me permission to trim you up now,” St. Just said, “or I’ll have a go at you while you sleep.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Nighty-night then.” He ran his thumb across the blade of yet another knife—this one likely resided in the man’s boot—and his teeth gleamed in the fading light. “Or we could go best out of three falls.” He tucked the knife away. “I’m a decent wrestler, growing up with four brothers. For a while I had a slight advantage, being the oldest, but they’d come at me in twos and threes.”

“Get out your kit, then, and shut up.”

“Wise choice. You wouldn’t want my death or dismemberment on your conscience.”

He pulled a shaving kit from his saddlebag—Aladdin’s cave of wonders for the traveling cavalryman—and produced a pair of grooming scissors.

“Don’t think,” he said. “Just sit there and hate me for doing this, hmm?”

“What hatreds keep you going?” Christian asked the question mostly to keep St. Just talking.

“I am haunted by the abuse I see of good animals,” St. Just said. “They never asked to go to war. They never asked to attempt a goddamned winter march on Moscow. They never asked for the artillery barrages to frighten them out of their feeble little horsey wits. Hold the hell still.”

For all his irascibility, St. Just’s hand was steady and deft. Snip, snip, snip, while Christian wondered if he’d ever allow another to shave him again. To be assigned a valet when he’d come down from university had been a comfortable and pleasant rite of maturation, to start each day with the cheerful, careful ministrations of a man dedicated to the proper care and grooming of the young duke.

“Your cousin took good care of your horse while you were unable to,” St. Just said. “You’re done, and I expect a solid recommendation from you as a barber when I muster out.”

Christian rubbed his hand along his jaw, finding the beard much closer to his skin, much tidier.

“My thanks.” Because by insisting on this concession to proper turnout, St. Just had scrubbed away another layer of captivity.

“You’ll set all the ladies’ hearts to fluttering.” St. Just tossed him a towel, using, of course, too much force.

And Christian couldn’t catch it, not with either hand. “As if I give a hearty goddamn for the ladies’ opinions.”

“You will,” St. Just said, getting comfortable on his blankets. “God willing, we all will again, someday soon.”

Christian wanted to argue with St. Just, wanted to ask what that last comment meant, wanted an excuse to keep the man awake, really, because bathing and letting his beard be trimmed had left Christian’s nerves shorn too. These mundane aspects of hygiene were accomplishments for him, reasons to be a little less worried for his sanity.

But something in the exchange with St. Just had tickled Christian’s jumble of memories, something in the comments about horses. The words rankled, as so many things rankled, and still, Christian could not put a finger on why. Something to do with Chessie, with finding the horse whole and in good weight, even after months of campaigning against the French.

Christian eventually fell asleep, feeling bodily clean for the first time in more than a year, though feeling clean was by no means the same as feeling safe.

***

Christian found Lady Greendale in the family parlor, sitting at the escritoire by the window.

“The clothing fits,” she said, rising as she surveyed him. “A bit loosely, but well enough.”

“And my thanks for your efforts.” She looked so…composed, sitting in the sunlight, the invitations scattered about on the desk. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she had a domestic quality that went well with the tidy parlor and morning sunlight. “I must impose on you a bit further, though.”

“Of course.” She tossed her pen aside and came toward him, then circled around behind him. “You’ll want this tied back.”

“My hair?”

“You’re going to Court, Your Grace. Some still powder their hair for such occasions. Hold still.”

She withdrew a pocket comb and gently started tidying up his hair. He’d done the best he could with his own brush and comb, unwilling to ask anybody’s assistance.

He hadn’t thought to ask hers, though she was a widow and a relation, and a woman who, for all her chatter, possessed prodigious common sense. She’d comprehended he needed his oranges peeled, and he hadn’t had to ask.

Nobody should have to look on the evidence of his captivity—he didn’t want to see it himself—and yet, Christian was gratified that when she did look, Lady Greendale calmly accepted what was before her eyes.

So he suffered her to arrange his hair, tying it back with a simple black ribbon. Her diminutive stature helped him endure her attentions, but so did her tendency to chatter.

His
irritation
at her tendency to chatter, rather.

“You do not appear to be looking forward to this great honor, Your Grace. The day is pleasant, fortunately. Perhaps Prinny will be kept overlong at his tennis matches, and then you’ll be spared the royal interview. Where are your gloves?”

He passed them to her, which merited him a frown.

“These are not riding gloves, sir.”

His dignity suffered more than a pinch, but common sense did not make the woman prescient.

“I can’t easily manage the change of gloves myself—I must use my teeth—and I don’t want to risk…”

She didn’t make him finish. “Dress gloves then. I daresay you’ve a pair or two. You were smart not to tart yourself up with too much gold, lest Prinny get ideas. You won’t glower at the poor Regent like that, though, will you?”

She tugged the glove onto his right hand, and he submitted to her assistance as if he were a boy still in dresses.

“What do you mean, giving Prinny ideas?” He knew the man, had been introduced on a handful of occasions as the scion of any noble house might be in early manhood. The Regent was genial when it suited him, shrewd, and not as spoiled as the press wanted to paint him.

“He solicits donations for his causes, the parks, that pavilion by the sea. Some think it scandalous, while we’ve been waging war over half the globe for his papa’s entire reign. Others consider him a visionary, but everybody knows to keep their coin out of his sight. Where are your sleeve buttons, that I might do up your cuffs?”

“Here.” He extracted them from his pocket, and dropped them into her outstretched hand. He hadn’t figured out quite how he was to don them—a footman usually assisted—and Lady Greendale was still blathering away.

“These are lovely.” She slipped one through his cuff, then brought his hand close to her nose to examine his jewelry. “Are those sapphires?”

By virtue of her having appropriated his hand, his palm was near enough to her cheek he could have stroked her face with his fingers. Had he taken this liberty and dared a small touch of her soft, fragrant person, she would not have rebuked him, but she might have pitied him, and that would have stolen all his pleasure from the moment.

“Those are star sapphires,” Christian said when she let his hand go. “On my personal signet ring, the lion’s eye in the family crest is the same stone.”

“What do you mean your personal signet ring?” She gathered up the right cuff, and slipped the fastener through, then patted his knuckles as if he’d been a good lad, not holding up the coach before the family departed for Sunday services.

“My father was sufficiently practical he kept various versions of the Severn signet ring at our principle houses. He said a groom shouldn’t have to ride halfway across England because His Grace forgot a piece of jewelry and had a letter to seal. I liked the idea of one ring, though,
the
Severn ducal ring, so I had one made on my eighteenth birthday. Papa no doubt rolled his celestial eyes at my vanity. The sleeve buttons and cravat pin were made to go with that ring.”

“And let me guess, the French took your ring from you?” She seized his left hand and attacked the cuff, his disfigurement of no apparent moment to her.

“My ring was the only thing I was wearing when I was captured.”

Her hands momentarily paused, holding his. Her grip around his fingers was warm, firm, and lovely. Sensation in his left hand had become dodgy, but he felt her hold on him and made no move to withdraw.

“Then why did they torture you? Your ring gave away your identity.”

Why, indeed. Christian had been weeks in Girard’s dungeon before that question had occurred to him, emerging into his awareness in the middle of a dream about Chessie being led away by the grinning, laughing French.

“What ring, my lady? The ring disappeared, just as they claimed not to have seen my uniform drying in plain sight over the bushes. I was out of uniform, and therefore due none of the courtesies afforded an officer in captivity.”

“A nation of lawyers, the French…” She retied his cravat and repositioned the pin, the whole effect more fluffy and elegant than what Christian had managed. Had she patted his left knuckles too? Christian was too preoccupied with her casual use of the word torture. Even in his mind, he shied away from the blunt term.

Misadventure, ordeal, difficulties, captivity…not
torture
.

“You’ll start a fashion with this beard.” She brushed her fingers over his cheek, a passing caress startling in its familiarity. Mothers and sisters might touch their menfolk thus, and wives certainly did, though duchesses did not.

Had not.

Her touch sparked none of the bristling and roiling in his gut he might have expected, particularly when she’d been making free with his person for some minutes.

“I’ll soon be late,” he countered. “My thanks for your assistance.”

“You’ll be all right?” She went quiet, didn’t follow the question up with more of her patter or fussing.

He would never be all right, had stopped even wishing for it, for then his Christian duty to forgive his enemies might gain a toehold in his conscience. “I beg your pardon?”

“Today, putting up with the nonsense of it all. George means well, you know. I think he’s really quite a lonely man.”

George…the Regent, the sovereign, the de facto King. And the countess thought the man lonely.

And was very likely right. “I will manage.”

“Yes, you shall.” She linked her arm through his, another casual touch that ought to have startled, but didn’t…quite. “If you find yourself in difficulties, wanting to smash something, say, or scream profanities and take up arms, you put in your mind a picture of what you can look forward to, and you add details to it, one by one, until the picture is very accurate and the urge to do something untoward has passed.”