The silence that fell was heavier than most, and the confession left Alex nearly swaying with fatigue.
“Back to bed with you, Trace?” Stanton asked, gesturing for the bed behind him.
Alex snorted and shook his head. “No, if I have any say in the matter. Four days in there, and I’m likely to be raving mad if there’s a fifth.”
“I always thought you were a little mad as it was, sir,” Stanton offered helpfully. “Not sure it’d be much of a stretch.”
“Thank you, Stanton,” Alex muttered with a snort.
He sighed and looked around the room, sick to death of its pale walls and sparse furniture, everything down to the sprigged quilt and counterpane he’d tried to kick off at least a dozen times in the last few days.
He’d never done well in confined spaces, and his time in the hold of the Amelie Claire proved that. This was an improvement, to be sure, but he still felt trapped in a cage.
“Get me out of this room, Stanton,” Alex told him, leaning against the bedpost wearily. “Out of this bed, out of this room, and away from anything that indicates I’m a weak, pathetic invalid who can’t put on his own trousers.”
“He says to the man who’s just put on his trousers for him,” Stanton grumbled with a smile.
Alex looked at him wryly, then burst out laughing, which hurt a great deal, but he didn’t care.
He hadn’t really laughed in such a long time.
“Help me to move and get stronger,” Alex told Stanton, still smiling. “I need to do something more than lie there and heal. Trust me, I am used to laboring under less than ideal circumstances physically.”
“I can see that, sir,” Stanton chuckled. “We’ve the harvest in a few days, you can help with that, if you have the strength. For now, how would you feel about a walk around the house and some real food?”
Alex groaned in appreciation. “It sounds like the south of France in the spring with a bounteous feast.”
Stanton winced and waved him on, clearly going to follow behind. “It’s nothing of the sort, Trace. Cheshire countryside in a small cottage and some week-old bread and jam. Maybe some cold ham, if I can find some.”
“It will suffice, and I will be exceedingly grateful,” Alex told him as he made his way from the room. His smile faded and his brow furrowed. “I cannot be more of a burden to Poppy than I already am. She deserves better.”
“Aye, Trace,” Stanton murmured with real feeling. “Aye, she does. Come on, now, don’t make me carry you.”
Chapter Six
“He’s doing too much.”
“He is not, and if you tell him so, he is going to be furious.”
“Hardly furious. Cranky, perhaps.”
“Oh, and a cranky man is a better sight, you think?”
“Probably. He won’t hit anything if he’s only cranky.”
Stanton snorted once. “He can’t hit much anyway with one arm still limited.”
Poppy grinned outright and folded her arms, watching Alex lead one of her horses around the paddock by the barn. “It’s not stopping him from doing this.”
“Doesn’t take much at all to do this. He’s just walking.”
She looked up at the larger man beside her, his expression blank as he stared at Alex, too. “And this morning? He was just feeding the animals. And at luncheon? He was just sharpening the scythes for tomorrow. And yesterday…”
“Make your point, madam,” Stanton interrupted, “if you please.”
Poppy sighed and adjusted a lock of her hair that had come loose. “He’s not fully recovered, Stanton. He’s still very weak and shouldn’t aggravate that shoulder, let alone the other injuries.”
“He’s got to recover sometime,” Stanton reminded her. “He can’t get stronger without doing things.”
“I know that,” Poppy murmured, looking back at Alex. “But I’d rather he take things slowly than suffer a setback that could be quite detrimental.”
Stanton turned on the fence to look down at her, his brow furrowing. “This is slow for him. He was champing at the bit to be out of that bed and that room yesterday, and despite looking pale as death, he walked three laps around the cottage before we ate supper. He may be weak by the end of the day, but I’ve always considered such exhaustion to indicate a proper use of one’s time and energy in the gift of the day. Don’t you?”
There was no fair way to answer that question, and he knew it. Of course, she agreed with him, but she couldn’t say so when it would mean that Alex would exert himself more and more just to keep himself out of the bed she’d confined him to.
He was still too frail for her liking, and now that he was on the mend, he would be able to eat more hearty foods, which would help matters a great deal. But while his strength was in doubt, she felt this need to tend him, to protect him, and to ensure that his suffering would be minimal.
As she watched him now, she felt strangely mesmerized. No one watching him would think he had any injuries at all, unless they studied his left arm closely, as it was rarely being used. Even if they did, they might still doubt any injury was involved. Alex moved with a sort of grace and ease that any creature alive would envy. Though she could see where he was frail, she knew what he had once been. Ignorant eyes would only see a lean man of angles and sinews and find nothing about him to fault.
He did look healthier for being out of the bed, and being out on the farm certainly lessened the gravity of his situation, but still, she worried.
“He’s doing fine, Miss Edgewood,” Stanton assured her in a low voice, “and he’s no longer restless. Being active will do more for his healing than our tending him will, I can promise you that.”
“Perhaps,” she replied, still watching Alex.
He smiled at the horses when one of them pushed against his arm with its nose, and Poppy found herself smiling in response. Whatever evils had been in his past, whatever he had suffered, and no matter how changed he appeared, his smile erased any and all evidence of it. There was nothing like his smile, even now, and something fluttered and warmed in her chest at its sight.
It was odd, but now that he was up and moving about, wearing decent clothes, though they did not fit perfectly, made his being here more real. He didn’t appear to be a man in need of care and tending any longer, though he still was. Instead, he looked like a man of strength and fortitude.
Alex, as she had known him, had rarely dressed as simply as he was now, only in a linen shirt and trousers, but she found the simplicity suited him very well. He hadn’t come from money, though he had inherited a great deal with the title passed to him, and he’d never pretended any differently.
Alex had always been nothing more or less than himself at any given time.
And she had loved that about him.
“What do you think happened to him?” Poppy asked softly, smiling as Alex rubbed the nose of the horse that had nudged him and was now murmuring to it.
“Don’t know,” Stanton answered in a very gruff tone. “Don’t want to know.”
Poppy nodded slowly, biting the inside of her lip. “I do. I want to know.”
“No, I suspect you don’t,” came the still gruff reply. “If you knew, I think you’d wish you didn’t.”
“I’m going to ask him,” she told her friend. “Later.”
“Don’t,” Stanton said bluntly. “For his sake, if not yours, don’t ask.”
“Why?”
Stanton’s large hand fell on her arm and squeezed tightly. “There are some things in this world, Miss Edgewood, that only grow darker when brought to light.”
A shiver of apprehension raced across Poppy’s skin, and she craned her neck at the sensation. She nodded again only once, then cleared her throat.
“Come on, Alex, you can’t tell one horse secrets and not the other,” she called over to the paddock.
“No?” Alex looked up at her with a crooked smile. “Perhaps I told different secrets to each of them.”
“An even greater in
dignity!” Poppy protested as she leaned on the fence. “You’ll pit them against each other.”
“I don’t hear them complaining.” He turned back to the horse and cupped its face, looking at it squarely. “Are you offended, Minnie? Jealous of what I may have told Bessie?”
The horse nickered a little, and Alex nodded seriously as though the response was intelligible.
“What did she say, then?” Poppy asked with a tilt of her head.
Alex threw her a superior look. “If you didn’t understand it, you don’t need to know it.”
Stanton chortled beside her and slapped the fence rail.
“I’ll go see to the feed for when the Horse Secret Keeper is done with today’s session.” He shook his head and turned away from them.
“You’re jealous, too!” Alex called after him, which only made Stanton laugh. Alex turned to look at Poppy and smiled gently.
“What is it?” Poppy asked, smiling in return, as helpless in her response as she always had been to him.
He shook his head once. “I’d never have thought it before, but you are perfectly situated here. It is fitting to see you dressed as you are and leaning on the worn fence of a horse paddock.”
Poppy’s smile turned more amused. “Is it? How so? I was raised to be a fine lady.”
“And you never quite managed it,” Alex reminded her, grinning now.
“I did so!” she protested playfully. “I was a perfect lady, and I could give you at least five references to such things.”
Alex scoffed loudly and turned back to the horses, both of whom were waiting for their walk to continue. He scratched both noses and shook his head.
“She wasn’t a perfect lady. Not at all. She pretended well enough, but the reality…”
“I beg your pardon!” Poppy laughed, stepping up on the bottom rail of the fence and clasping her hands together.
“You know you weren’t,” he retorted with a knowing look. “You know it, I know it, and your mother knew it.”
Poppy tossed her head back and laughed harder. “Oh, my mother… She really despaired of me.”
“Well, you weren’t Rosemary, so…”
She hissed, still giggling, and tried to scowl at him.
“That is too true, and a little unkind to be reminded of. Rosemary was the perfect child, though somehow not as well-liked as I was.”
Alex cocked his head. “Unfathomable. She held such promise.”
Poppy dropped her head, snorting softly. “She did, didn’t she?” She looked back up at him, smiling easily as a breeze swept past them both. “Mother never had a reason to criticize my behavior, but she always seemed to know that I was pretending at it.”
“That’s because she knew you were with me,” he said as he shrugged and began to walk the horses again. “Everybody knew that ‘that boy’ was going to bring you down.” He shuddered in revulsion. “Every mother’s worst fear.”
“I don’t know about that,” Poppy answered, keeping her voice coy.
Alex stopped and gave her a very apprehensive look. “Why?”
She grinned mischievously. “Anne Hansen’s mother was particularly keen on you, was she not? And for a while there, it was widely rumored that you fancied Anne.”
As she suspected, Alex groaned and rolled his eyes, tugging the horses into motion again. “Just because I do not neglect a girl whose fortune comes from trade the way every other local man did does not mean that I ever had any interest in her.”
“Oh,” Poppy moaned with a pout, “but Mrs. Hansen was so looking forward to having you in their family.”
“With the quality of people that fall within that description, I can see why,” he muttered.
Poppy snickered into her hands and sighed. “Anne Hansen… I haven’t thought of her in ages.”
“Undoubtedly for the best,” Alex replied, clicking his tongue at the horses. “What happened to her?”
“She married her father’s assistant,” she recalled with a smile. “They opened up a new location of her father’s business in Bristol.”
Alex shook his head, smirking to himself. “Well, Bristol will be better for having them, I have no doubt. Her mother might have been opportunistic and tyrannical…”
“That’s one way to put it,” Poppy interjected wryly.
“…but Anne was a pleasant girl,” Alex continued without marking her. “A fine girl.”
“She was, yes,” Poppy allowed, eyeing Alex curiously. “A bit flighty, though.”
He shook his head slowly. “No more than any other girl of her age. She was innocent and bright, nothing of artifice or designs in her, just genuine and good. Is her husband a good man? Is he fond of her?”
That surprised Poppy and her brow furrowed, though her smile remained. Anne had never been particularly close with her, and certainly not with Alex, though they had mingled in the same circles regularly. Poppy hadn’t given Anne a moment’s thought since she had left with her husband, and she highly doubted Anne had thought of her.
What possible reason could Alex have for wanting to be assured of her presently?
“I believe so, yes,” she told him slowly. “He is well thought of and seemed attached to her. Anne was happy with the match.”
Alex nodded once. “Good. She deserves to be pleased, not just well suited, and to have fair prospects for her future. I wish her well.”
Poppy stared at him while he walked the horses around the paddock again, her smile fading. By his own words, he’d had no interest in her, and yet he had been concerned with her life and security, not to mention her happiness.
“As do I,” she murmured, almost wary now. “Alex, why should you have so much concern for Anne and her marriage? I doubt she’s given a second thought to you in the last five years.”
He raised his eyes to hers, his mouth curving in a hint of a smile. “I’ve developed a concern for everyone I used to know. Every girl I skipped stones with, every boy I once got into mischief with… I’ve thought of my past with more frequency in the last five years than I ever did in the many before them. It was all as bright and shiny in my mind as it was when I lived it, and the names and faces came to memory easier than they had in my life. I can remember all of them. Every single one.”
There was something eerie about his admission, something sad and mournful, and it made her shiver to hear it. She couldn’t let him be lost to the darkness that he seemed so familiar with, not while he was healing and not while she had power and energy to change it.
She swallowed harshly. “Even Peter Taylor?”
Alex stopped and looked over at her, his eyes widening a little. “The blacksmith’s son?”
Poppy laughed with real amusement. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me! How did you remember him?”
“Because he was the first boy to kiss you, and I wanted to thrash him for it,” Alex admitted, laughing himself. “But you wouldn’t have known that.”
No, she wouldn’t, and she didn’t. She had no idea that her first kiss had been something Alex had known about, given that it had occurred when she was five, but the idea that he had resented Peter for it…
It was amusing and touching and confusing all at once.
But she couldn’t afford to discuss it now.
“Who else?” Alex pressed, completely oblivious to her state. “Try me.”
Poppy forced a warm smile on her lips and thought hard. “Umm… Lucy Norris.”
“Red hair and freckles, tried to convince us all she was Irish, but her false accent was Scottish. Also, she was in love with your brother George, which was the strangest idea.”
Poppy covered her face and laughed hysterically. “I’d forgotten she was in love with George!”
Alex hooted a laugh. “How could you forget that? She tried to trap him into a marriage officiated by Thomas Clarke, the curate’s son!”
“And I had to be a bridesmaid!”
“You were miserable…”
“So would you be, if you were fo
rced into one of her overdone pinafores.”
Alex grinned. “Yes, well, the last person who tried to force me into a pinafore earned a pair of black eyes, so…” He waited for her laughter to subside, then nodded in encouragement. “Try again. I know you know more.”
Alex sighed as he and Poppy walked side by side through the tall grass on the outskirts of her farm, Poppy running her hands over the top of the grass. They’d been wandering the land for hours, and his legs were close to shaking with the exertion for so long, but he refused to give the slightest indication of that. Poppy would blame herself if she knew, and then she would treat him like an invalid, and he would be stuck in that blasted bed again. He had known freedom too short a time to give it up now, particularly on account of a weakness he had never been at liberty to indulge before.
It was strange how familiar he could be with a place and yet feel so distant from it. These were lands he had roamed and dashed about in without any care or concern for himself or anyone else. Here he had been free and easy, as innocent as he was capable of being, and the only home he could recall.
But home was an unfamiliar sensation now, and a place he knew not. Walking these grounds now felt foreign, like a dream he could not wake from, and there was no ease about it.
Nothing had changed, as far as he could see, apart from trees growing taller and fuller, and yet it seemed that all had changed.
He knew the truth of the matter; only he had changed.
The grounds were the same, the buildings were the same, the very sky was the same, but he was not.
He would never be the same.
Nor would Poppy, for that matter. The last four and a half years had taken their toll on her, as well, and while his shadows would undoubtedly be darker than anything she could imagine, he could not deny that she bore shadows, as well. He could see the strain of the years when she thought he wasn’t looking, and there was no hiding the lines on her face nor the callouses on her hands.
Yet, he found nothing lacking in her from any angle or respect, shadows or no. Walking about with her like this was the closest to the sentiment of home he was going to get, and the most comfortable he had been in years.
Fall from Trace Page 7
