In his half-conscious state, Matthew was not at all cooperative, at times kicking wildly to free his foot of the barnacle-like appendage in the form of Mrs Parson, shrieking out loud when the wound was opened with a sterilised knife.
“I don’t think I can do that again,” Alex said on the seventh day, using a trembling hand to smooth back his sweat-drenched hair from his face.
“You’ll have to, but it wasn’t that bad today.” Mrs Parson dropped the bloodied rag she’d just used on Matthew’s foot into a bowl.
“You think?” Alex broke open the aloe vera leaf she had brought with her and scooped out the gel to anoint the blistered burn on his buttocks. Instinctively, he tensed, pressing together the cheeks so tightly they whitened around the edges. Mrs Parson’s mouth pursed and she gave Matthew a long, considering look.
“It’s me,” Alex murmured. “It’s Alex, love.”
“Alex,” he repeated in a grating voice. “My bonny, bonny lass.”
Mrs Parson grinned and patted Alex on her shoulder. “He’s getting better, no?”
Not much better, and very slowly at that, sinking into deep black moods that spilled over on all of them. He threw a tantrum when he understood that they’d buried Jacob without him, screaming at Alex that how could she take it upon herself to see his son – his son, you hear? – off into the afterlife without him present? “A father should be there to bury his son!”
“He’d been dead five days! What was I to do? Wait until you were well enough to bury a rotted corpse into the ground?” She backed away from him, breath coming in shallow, uneven gasps. Don’t cry, no crying – later perhaps, but not now. “A mother shouldn’t have to bury her child,” she said, and fled the room.
“I’m sorry,” she heard him say.
On top of all this, there was Sarah, who retreated into brooding silences and escaped them all as much as she could. At mealtimes, she would sit to the side, eat without raising her eyes from the table, and then flee, mumbling something about having to see to Viggo. In fact, she spent most of her time with the convalescing dog, eyes blank as she stroked him repeatedly over his back, his head. Alex was torn in two by the needs of her bright-haired, mute daughter and those of her husband as he struggled with nightmares that kept both of them awake most nights. It was even worse when she tried to touch him.
After that strange asexual coupling the night they’d come home, he was like a coiled spring, and if she placed a hand on him unannounced, he sprang away, shaking his head in an apologetic gesture while murmuring something about hurting all over. She left him alone as much as she could, and when she noticed how stiff he lay in their bed when she crawled in beside him, she stood up and pulled her pillows and quilts over to the floor rug.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She didn’t reply, staring wide-eyed into the night.
*
After a fortnight, Alex decided he had to start moving, bad foot or not, and for the coming week, she hectored and encouraged, always hovering around him to help him should he stumble.
“I can walk on my own,” Matthew snapped, shaking off her supporting hand. They were in the yard, having spent the last hour walking back and forth to the stables.
“Of course you can,” Alex bit back, tired of his irascibility, of his black moods and uncharacteristic self-centredness.
God knows she tried. She comforted and encouraged, she changed bandages and oiled and soothed as best as she could, she made him special treats in the hope that he would eat, she sat beside him when he woke at night, she took the stairs in bounds if she’d been away from him too long. And when he rejected her, when he closed her out, she escaped to work herself to exhaustion in the kitchen garden, staying out until well after dusk to make sure he was asleep before she came up the stairs. Except that he wasn’t, his eyelids fluttering when he kept them closed to avoid having to talk to her.
At times, she wanted to bend down and scream him in the ear, anything to jolt him out of his present behaviour. But she didn’t. She made allowances for him, she assured herself that soon he’d be like he used to be, and then she was brought up short by the terrifying thought that how could he possibly revert to being the man he was before those two days in May?
She twisted and tossed through her nights, lonely and unable to sleep, and not once had he asked how things were with her. All she did was give and give and give. Until now, when something snapped inside her. She glowered at her husband and left him standing halfway across the yard as she stalked away.
“Alex,” Matthew called after her. “I’m sorry.”
In reply, she waved her middle finger in the air. He wanted to apologise, he could bloody well come after her.
She sat on the narrow bench in the graveyard and watched his slow, painful progress up the steep slope. Often he had to stop, raising his foot in the air to take weight off the non-existent toe, and every time he did, Alex sat on her hands to not rush down to help him. He was white to the point of looking green when he finally made it all the way up, stopping to breathe heavily for some minutes before limping his way towards where she was sitting.
“I haven’t been up here since you buried him,” he said in a voice heavy with grief.
Alex didn’t reply, but shifted to allow him room to sit. She came here every morning, often just as the sun cleared the trees on the eastern fringe, to sit and talk for a while with her son. There was as yet no stone to mark the grave as Matthew had insisted he was to do that himself, but Ian had set a wooden cross in place for now. Small offerings of flowers lay scattered around it, disturbingly bright against the dark of the turned soil. Now, three weeks after they’d buried him, a soft sheen of green was sprouting through the earth. Give it one month more and it would all be thick, vibrant grass.
“Do you think it hurt?” That question had been thudding in her head since she’d seen Jacob fall. Matthew sighed, a sound laden with sadness, and tried to take her hand. She pulled it away.
“Aye,” he breathed.
Alex nodded. Of course it hurt to have a musket ball claw its way through your chest at close-range.
“Did he know? That he was dying?” she asked, keeping her eyes on her lap.
“Aye, but he didn’t have time to fear it.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“As deaths go, it wasn’t bad.” Matthew groped for her hand again, and this time she let him take it.
“Too soon,” Alex whispered.
“Too soon,” Matthew echoed, and put an arm around her shoulders.
The dam that had been building for weeks inside her began to crack. Tears slid down her cheeks, an agonising, silent weeping that made her throat and chest ache from the inside out. They didn’t talk. He didn’t do more than hold her, one large hand caressing her hair as she cried for her son, for her hurting daughter and her damaged man – but mostly, she cried for him, for her golden boy that was dead, lying in his far too early grave only feet away from her.
The tears stilled, the racking sobs subsided. Alex snivelled and sat up, averting her face from him as she adjusted her hair and used her sleeve to blot her puffy eyes.
“I’m not sleeping on the floor anymore,” Alex said as she got off the bench. She didn’t attempt to help him, but stood waiting, just in case. With a grunt of concentration, Matthew stood.
“No,” he agreed with an unsteady voice.
“Good.” She moved away from him, leaving him to come down as best he could.
“Alex?” His voice brought her to a halt. “I…I may need help. Will you walk with me?”
Alex smiled to herself, but smoothed both face and voice into calm neutrality before replying that of course she would.
*
Alex disappeared in the direction of the river after supper. She came back an hour or so later, barefoot and with her dark hair still damp against the back of her clean chemise – her best, Matthew noted, and in his stomach something clenched.
She waved at him where he
sat beneath the oak with Ian, Betty and their bairns, and he raised his hand to her, making her face break up into a brilliant smile. He closed his eyes. He was going to have to tell her, and he had no idea how. He was so scared of her touch, that somehow she would know what had been done to him and think less of him.
They hadn’t spoken of that terrible day once since they got back, not because she hadn’t tried to, but because he had refused, saying that it was enough that she saw the damage on him. His back, his maimed foot, the brand that stood a deep and puckered red against the whiteness of his skin… Surely she didn’t expect him to speak of it as well?
“You should,” Alex had said. “Some things have to be talked about to properly heal.” There had been an insinuation in her voice that he hadn’t fully understood.
“I don’t want to,” he’d told her in reply.
Ian smiled at Matthew, leaned over, and lifted a sleeping Timothy out of Matthew’s arms.
“Go.” Ian nodded to where Alex had just walked into the house. Matthew looked at him, fisted his hands a couple of times before he stood up, straightened his back, and limped off across the yard.
Matthew made his way up the stairs and into their bedchamber. The room smelled of lavender and sun. She had changed linens and opened the window wide to let in some of the cooling evening air. In the setting sun, the stained glass panes threw reflections of red and green to dance in her looking glass, and from there they shot like beams across the room. He hesitated by the door, and she turned to face him, dragging her brush through her hair. She held it out to him, and for a long time all there was were the sounds of his strokes and her shallow breathing. He plaited her hair when he was done. It smelled of rosemary and camomile, and something he at first couldn’t identify but then recognised as almond oil.
“My turn.” She took the brush from him and pushed him down to sit before the looking glass. She took her time over his shoulder-length hair – more grey than brown these days, but thick and wavy as it always had been. Once she was done, she used a piece of ribbon to tie it back off his face, rested her hands on his shoulders, and met his eyes in the mirror.
He had to tell her. Her hands were sliding inside his shirt, and he yearned for her touch and yet he feared it. She had undone the fastenings, opening the shirt wide over his hair-covered chest. The shirt slid off to lie like a draped cloth round his hips, and now her hands were running over his healing back.
He trembled under her fingers, swallowed audibly, and cleared his throat. “Alex…I…I haven’t told you all.”
“Shhh,” she whispered in his ear. “You don’t have to tell me anything.” And in her eyes he saw that she knew, and it was like being impaled on a stake and left to die in slow, dragging agony. She had seen it!
She kissed his cheek. “Never in my life have I felt so utterly useless as when I saw what they did to you. I swear, had I been able to, I would have killed them all then and there.” Her hands tightened on his shoulders. “But I couldn’t, and so the least I could do was watch.”
He didn’t know what to say. He just stared at her, uncertain as to how her admission made him feel. “I wanted to die. At that moment, I wished they’d killed me instead.”
Alex nodded. “A total wipeout of your inner self. Like a chrysalis you burst, but unlike a chrysalis there’s no butterfly inside. It’s all an empty black void.”
“Aye,” he said, thinking that he couldn’t have described it better himself. “And afterwards you’re no longer what you were before.”
“No, something is quenched forever.” She met his eyes. “Unless someone helps you find the butterfly that was lost.”
Matthew could barely breathe when she helped him to stand. When she knelt before him, he wasn’t sure if he would survive the bittersweet rush of sensations that rushed through his loins, leaving him so light-headed he had to steady himself against the wall. She rose and walked backwards to the bed before him, and there she sat down.
“Maybe I can help you,” she whispered, and he heard the hope in her voice.
Clumsily, he lowered himself to his knees before her. “I come to you with my need, I come with my desires, and you won’t turn me away. Ever.”
“Ever,” she promised, and guided him home.
Much later, she lay where she belonged: safe in his arms.
“Did Sarah see it as well?” Matthew asked.
“Yes, she came down like a bear trap around me to stop me from charging out of our hiding place then and there, and thank heavens she did.” Alex raised herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. “She’s late, and with every day she’s retreating further and further into herself.”
“Late?” At first he didn’t understand, and when he did, he looked at her in horror. “You mean…”
“I’m still hoping, and Mrs Parson says that sometimes the herbs take time to work – but that sometimes they don’t. She doesn’t dare to increase the dosage because it might lead to haemorrhage.”
“Merciful Father.” Matthew stared unseeing at the ceiling. Well ploughed and planted, Philip Burley had jeered, and now his lass… No, God wouldn’t do something like that, not to a young lass just sixteen.
“That reaction won’t exactly help her, will it?”
“How do you expect me to react?” Matthew snarled, shifting away from her in bed. “Should I toast the health of a Burley bastard?”
“If – and it’s still an if – but if she’s with child, she can’t go around hating it. Part of it is her.”
He gave her a penetrating look. He knew just how much she’d hated Isaac when he grew in her, how she wished that this child, fathered by a man she had come to hate, would somehow shrivel and die.
“We have to help her with this because if we don’t, I fear she might do something really stupid.”
Matthew pinched his nose and nodded weakly. A son’s life, a daughter’s maidenhead, his own humiliation, and now, apparently, a living reminder of it all. He rolled over on his side and collected Alex to lie, as she should, safe in the curve of his body, his arm draped across her waist.
“One day at a time,” he murmured into her hair. Please God, let there be no child, he prayed. Lord, look down on my lass, and spare her this last indignity.
Chapter 40
Sarah was sitting on the bench, staring at absolutely nothing, when Da stopped before her and with a crooked smile asked her if she wished to walk with him to the river and back.
“I can’t walk well enough to take you hunting yet,” he said.
Sarah got to her feet. She hadn’t spoken to Da properly since they got back near on a month ago, watching from afar as he struggled to regain control of his maimed foot. The burn rash around his throat had faded, but she knew from overhearing Mama and Mrs Parson that parts of his back, and in particular the burn on his buttock, were far from healed.
“Are you feeling better then?” he asked her. To her surprise, he took her hand in his, something he hadn’t done since she was a small lass. It was very comforting to have his big, calloused hand folded around hers, and to her consternation her eyes filled with tears.
“I don’t rightly know.” No, she wasn’t alright. Sixteen days and more overdue, and even if she tried to tell herself it was all fancies, she knew that she was with child, and the knowledge thudded like death knells in her head every waking moment of her days.
“Doesn’t it help? To know that they are dead?” Da bent down to scratch a nearly recovered Viggo behind his ear.
“They’re not. Qaachow promised me they wouldn’t die.”
Da came to an abrupt stop. “Not die? Don’t you want revenge on them?” Something dark moved in his eyes. There was the slightest trembling in his set jaw.
“They won’t die,” she told him through compressed lips. “But they’ll wish they had.”
“Ah.” Da tightened his hold on her hand. “How many days?”
She panicked. She attempted to free herself from his grip, but when he wouldn’t l
et go, she collapsed to sit on the ground, hiding her face from him.
“Sarah,” Da said, and very laboriously lowered himself to her. “It’s alright, lass. We will sort it. Whatever happens, we’re with you, your mama and I.”
Sarah clenched her fingers around his, the instinctive clutching of a drowning person round a floating spar. “Oh, Da,” she whispered, and began to cry.
*
The Chisholms rode in a fortnight or so later, bristling with curiosity and news. After a couple of days of rain, the late June day was fresh and crisp, the grass a shade greener, and the air pungent with the scent of heavy, well-turned soil and growing crops. Robert inclined his head in the direction of Alex, clapped Matthew on his back, went a bright red when he realised what he’d just done, and spent the following minutes apologising repeatedly.
“It’s almost healed.” Matthew shifted his shoulders, and shook hands with the other two brothers and Carlos Muñoz, now openly wearing a cassock.
“Are you still here?” Alex asked. “I would’ve thought by now you’d be long gone to safer places.”
Carlos flashed her a triumphant smile. “England has a Catholic king again, the Lord be praised. Long live James, the second of that name.”
“Charles is dead?” Matthew looked from Carlos to the Chisholms.
In response, Robert extracted a worn royal proclamation and handed it to him.
“In February?” Alex peeked over Matthew’s shoulder. “That’s almost five months ago.” She studied the badly executed sketch of a man with very much hair and as prominent a nose as his brother, even if this one was more elegant, and sighed. “Not king for long,” she muttered, and Matthew frowned at her. Alex frowned back. “Common sense. Parliament doesn’t want a Catholic king. And what’s he to do? Take the Test Act oath? Abjure his religion?”
“Reactions were joyful to his ascension,” Robert said rather stiffly. “The people rejoiced at having a peaceful succession.”
Alex raised her brows. “And what about the Duke of Monmouth? Charles’ eldest son? Won’t he make a bid for the throne?”
Revenge and Retribution (The Graham Saga) Page 33
