Torture bore an intimacy, similar to that of a bad marriage. Only the tormenter and his victim knew the exact, awful course of the misery suffered. Those two participated in the dark duet of pain and manipulation to the exclusion of any spectators or seconds.
Though to be fair, Girard had eschewed physical pain as his preferred means of extracting information from Christian. With scientific precision, Girard tried to induce compliance by alternating pain and pleasure, abuse and care, setting himself up as the god of both dungeon and daylight.
More than anything, Christian had feared coming to love his captor. In a calculus known only to the captive, such a thing was possible, even inevitable. The bonds formed outside captivity faded to improbable memories, leaving only the relationship based on deprivation and hurt, balanced with an equally insidious appearance of mercy and generosity.
The prisoner, in an effort to maintain his sanity, lost his connection with a universe created by a just and loving God, where questions had rational answers, and pain was expected to be productive of some end. He existed, cast out of all light, all reason, save what kept breath soughing in and out of a battered body and a despairing spirit.
Girard had offered women at various points, and Christian had been relieved to his bones to feel no reaction. Not to the vacant-eyed slatterns recruited from the French army camp, not to the apple-cheeked dairymaids, and not—thank a merciful Deity—to the rare women taken prisoner and thrust into the dungeon to share Christian’s fate.
Early in his captivity, he’d noted the occasional morning salute resulting from a need to heed nature’s call. Even those responses had been reassuring, initially, but then they’d faded, and indifference to everything—sexual functioning included—had become a necessity.
And then, the circumcision as St. Just so baldly pronounced it, a surgical Latin term for what Christian privately regarded as intimate mutilation.
Anduvoir’s wielding of the knife had felt like the mutilation of Christian’s soul, but in an odd way had given him back his life. Thereafter, he’d truly stopped caring, truly stopped wanting to speak, to scream, to rail against his fate. He’d become stronger for the absence of any emotion save the will to live, and even that…
The countess shifted in his arms, making a sound that suggested she was descending into sleep as she cuddled against him on the sofa.
He let her drift away.
Napping had been one means by which he’d coped with the long, uncomfortable nights, and just at that moment, he needed to hold her. He’d been convinced until recently he could not be an adequate husband to her. If his scars didn’t scare her witless—and apparently they did not—then there had been the continuing lack of animal stirrings from his base urges.
Until recently.
And then he’d discounted what he felt as mere biological habit, not enough to sustain a wedding night, until St. Just, with a soldier’s blunt kindness, had made his little comment about a full complement of Hebrew children throughout history.
The man was right. Disfigured did not necessarily equate with dysfunctional.
And if this last kiss had proven anything to Christian, it had given him incontrovertible evidence that his heart was not the only part of him once again taking an interest in life.
***
Gilly awoke to the novel and lovely sense of being held in a man’s arms, and realized Christian had shifted her as she’d dozed. She was cradled in his lap, supported by his arms, Christian’s chin against her temple.
“Sleeping Beauty awakens.”
His tone was bemused and teasing, and she felt the words in low down, unmentionable places. A prudent woman, even a prudent widow, would have scrambled off that sofa.
She nuzzled his arm, catching scents of soap and linen from the sleeve of his shirt. “I must look a fright.”
The silliest words a female ever uttered, though usually, she uttered them while patting a perfectly intact coiffure. Gilly blew the stray curl off her cheek and tried to find her common sense.
“You look delectable, if a tad pleasantly disheveled. We’re about to talk though, so you’d best get comfortable.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” She closed her eyes and snuggled down, letting her use of his title serve to chide him. That same tone had never failed to make Greendale—
She would not think of Greendale.
“Will you still be Your-Gracing me when I’m inside you, Gilly? Will you call me Mercia when passion overcomes your reason and you cry out in pleasure?”
She opened her eyes, and what she saw in his expression did have her scrambling off his lap. He wasn’t teasing; he was genuinely looking forward to learning the answer to those questions.
Perishing feathers. Now he called her Gilly, her very name a seduction. That was what came of impetuous kisses.
She retrieved her glass of water, relieved he’d let her put even that much distance between them. From the look in his blue eyes, he considered enticing her to dally in the same vein as he did stalking particularly juicy—and doomed—prey. She took a sip and sat on the hard bricks of the hearth, across a low table from the duke lounging on the sofa.
When had he become such a well-muscled specimen, and how was she to look him in the eye now that she’d attacked him not once but twice?
“You must allow, two accidents befalling you in a span of days is at least a dangerous coincidence.” He took a sip from the water glass she’d placed on the table.
The dratted man watched her over the rim of the glass the whole time, drinking from the same spot she had, and Gilly felt panic welling up at the implications of such a simple action.
Such drama, and over a few kisses.
Except—this awareness thumped into her mind, rather like a blow—he hadn’t meant the two incidents of kissing as the accidents he’d referred to. Something had shifted in Christian’s regard for her, and not because the girth on her saddle had broken.
“I will allow those mishaps are unsettling accidents, but only that. Coaches lose wheels, riders take the occasional tumble. Those are everyday occurrences.”
“In the eight years of your marriage to Greendale, did either occur to you even once?”
“No,” she said, trying to focus mentally on the topic of her safety. This was difficult, when her body had developed an acute and inconvenient physical awareness of the duke. When I am inside you…
“Then you will indulge me, my lady, when I ask you not to leave the house without either my escort or that of at least two footmen?”
She mentally reviewed the words independent of his leonine stare.
“You’d make me a virtual prisoner of the house.” Indignation gave her some purchase against the fog in her brain and the lassitude in her limbs. “I spent eight years bowing and scraping to Greendale, denied my liberty. I shall not exchange his domineering possessiveness for another man’s, not ever.”
That sounded convincingly clearheaded, and was even true.
“I seek to keep you alive,” he countered, running his finger around the rim of her glass. He had her drink cradled in his lap, resting against his falls. She looked away as he continued to speak.
“You agreed to join this household, so you should consider yourself bound by my dictates. I’m not suggesting we lock you in a tower for the rest of your days, only that you exercise some reasonable caution for the nonce.”
Reason was not her friend, and never had been. But you’ll be a countess, Gillian. A countess…
“You make it sound so simple, to be again attended everywhere as if I were a child of Lucy’s years.”
“You make it sound so awful, to have the company of brawny fellows—or me—dedicated to your welfare when you’re out-of-doors. Can you detest me so much as all that?”
His lips quirked, as if he’d made a jest, but those eyes of his were watchful and serious, and Gil
ly realized abruptly she’d swum into even deeper waters than she’d feared.
“You are good-looking,” she said, her tone resentful. “Too good-looking and good-smelling and good-sounding, and now you’ve become nigh brawny yourself. I cannot think straight when you’re giving orders and duking about, and when you turn up charming and reasonable, I am even more befuddled.”
“Is to duke a verb now?”
“Don’t distract me, and yes, when you’re underfoot, there’s duking going on.”
“And some countessing too, I suspect.” His finger stopped moving round and round on the glass. “For the next little while, indulge me, Gilly. Let me give you my arm when we’re out of doors, let the footmen carry your basket when you’re in the garden. I’ll assign you the handsomest of the lot, my only aim to keep you safe from harm.”
She nibbled her lip, hating him for being so believable.
“Please, love…I wasn’t here to keep Helene safe. I wasn’t here to look after my own son when he fell ill. Let me protect you.”
And listening to him, listening to the low, utterly serious words, it was easy to forget how closely protection could resemble possession. He believed what he was saying, and he had a point: Gilly was under his roof. Her choices were to leave, or to obey him.
She could leave later, when Lucy was in better spirits; when memories of captivity didn’t have the duke seeing threats in every shadow.
For now—only for now—she’d obey him, and only in this matter of permitting an escort out of doors.
Only for now.
***
The countess was not a sedentary detainee, but Christian had hardly expected she would be. He would come in from his morning ride to find her dragging two bleary-eyed footmen all over the gardens, even as the sun was peeping over the Downs. By late morning, she was on his arm as they made their outing with Lucy. She spent the afternoons on the back terraces or again in the gardens, embroidering, reading, tatting lace, or working at the social correspondence Christian delegated to her in such volume.
He decided to take pity on his footmen and joined her as she once again headed for an afternoon out-of-doors.
She set her basket at her feet and crossed her arms. “I thought George and John were to assist me.”
“Alas for you, you’ll have to make do with a mere duke,” he said, picking up her basket. “What are we about today, Gilly? Gardening, I see.” He winged his arm, and a martial gleam came into her eyes.
“I’m tending the graves.” She took his arm, looking pleased with her strategy.
“More transplanting, then?”
“Yes, though it’s too late for the lily of the valley to bloom.”
“There’s always next year.” Her tactics wouldn’t deter him. Graves were part of a soldier’s life, after all.
She marched along beside him in silence, but it was a beautiful summer day, and Christian was content simply to bear her company. He’d grown accustomed to looking out his window and seeing her in the gardens, to listening for her footsteps coming to fetch him to the nursery, to seeing her across the candlelight at the evening meal.
“Is somebody tending Greendale’s grave?” he asked.
“That is not my concern. He would not allow me to garden while married to him. I’m not about to turn my skill in that regard to his benefit in death.”
She wasn’t an unkind woman—far from it—but her antipathy toward her late spouse was intense to the point of puzzling Christian.
“By rights, you should have hated Helene,” he said, hoping to turn the subject. “She had much that might have been yours.”
“A tiara?” She stopped while Christian opened the gate to the family plots. “I had my title, little good it did me.”
“Helene had a young man for a husband, one who sought to indulge her at least initially, and who left her in peace when the marriage foundered. She had children, a boy and a girl each, she had many friends and gallants, she had tremendous wealth, and staff to wait on her hand and foot… She had every reason to live.”
His countess preceded him through the gate, and he was relieved she didn’t respond to his last observation, or to the puzzlement in his tone.
“I’ll take the blanket,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her from the top of the basket and watched while she spread it out, not near the headstones, but near the wall, where a bed of irises was going dormant after blooming profusely earlier in the year. Their scent had comforted him on more than one long, quiet evening.
“We’re to separate those?”
“It’s early,” she said, “but yes. They’ll do better for setting down some roots before winter comes, and in autumn, the Holland bulbs will demand lifting and separating. You needn’t bother to help.”
“I brought riding gloves.” He dropped to the blanket beside her and passed her one of his gloves, then put up his left hand. She held out the glove, though he’d developed the knack of putting on his own over the past few weeks.
“Your hand looks better,” she said, working the glove over his fingers. “The nails are growing in, the fingers not so bent.”
“The hand wants use. It hurts to use it, it hurts if I don’t use it, but at least then it has some strength and flexibility.” He got his right glove on by himself, because she was regarding him with an entirely too thoughtful frown.
Her ladyship gestured with a hand spade. “You start on that end. I’ll start on this one. They’re likely choked most tightly up against the wall.”
He had a momentary vision of bloody bodies all jumbled together at the base of some Spanish town’s siege walls while a hot wind whipped across an arid plain and flies buzzed in a malevolent cloud.
The Forlorn Hope they’d been called, the volunteers who had led the charge when the guns had breached the walls. For those who survived, it was a good chance at a field promotion, which meant a raise in pay, but it was near-certain death as well.
Still, volunteers had never been in short supply, and they’d broken every siege Wellington had put them to.
“Christian?”
He stared down at the hand spade she held out to him. “Woolgathering.”
“Go gently. The roots are tender.”
He knelt up, the better to get at the tangled roots and leaves, and started working back against the old stone wall surrounding the family plots. The roots erupted from the ground, a twisted, gnarled puzzle that seemed to him in want of a few good swats with the sharp side of a shovel.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “Think of them as ailing, in need of tender care.”
He sat back, rows and rows of stretchers in his mind’s eye, the groaning of the dying in his ears alongside the silence of the dead and nearly dead. And the stench…
Why today? Why the hell did these ghosts have to walk today?
“Was Helene truly prostrate with grief?” The question was out, a means of keeping his morbid imagination from dwelling on battle horrors.
“I was here,” the countess said, setting a dirty white root aside and using her gloved fingers to pry at another. “She’d brought herself nearly to exhaustion fretting over Evan. Easterbrook was very concerned for her.”
“She nursed Evan herself?”
While Christian battled an ache in his fingers, Gilly tugged the root from the choke hold of its neighbors. “She hadn’t the patience, but she fretted nonetheless, looked in on him constantly, spent a great deal of time trying to write to you and ask you to come home.”
“I would have come.” He would have, had he not already been taken captive. Odd, how life could time tragedies for the most exquisite complement of sorrow.
“You would have,” the countess said, setting the second root aside. “Even Greendale didn’t grouse when I told him I was going to her. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to cope.”
“Life hadn’t asked much of Helene to that point,” he said, seeing for the first time that Helene had been closer to childhood than adulthood when he’d married her. Not a woman with a great deal of personal fortitude, certainly not prepared to be a duchess.
And it wasn’t her fault, any more than captivity had been his.
“Helene excelled at being pampered and indulged, a disservice often inflicted on a young woman with abundant beauty.” The countess bent over the flower bed to get a better angle with her hand spade. “But when Evan didn’t rally, Helene blamed herself. In her mind, if she hadn’t sent you away, God would not have punished her by taking her child.”
“Remarkable, isn’t it, how we manufacture guilt to fit most any occasion? Everybody dies.”
She peered up at him over her shoulder. “You blame yourself.” She sat up and took off her gloves. “Oh, Christian…”
He stared straight ahead, seeing the dank, dark walls of the dungeon where he’d been held all those months.
“Girard explained my situation as a choice.” His own voice sounded far away, detached. “I could spare the lives of countless men by keeping my silence, but he promised assassins would see to the death of my wife and my heir did I keep my peace. He could describe the English countryside as if he’d ridden it himself, as if…” Christian frowned down at the tool in his hand. What was he supposed to do with it?
“And if you had told him what he wanted to know?”
“My men would die, and many others with them. Thousands.”
She made a sound of muted horror and wrapped an arm around his waist.
“My family was innocent,” he said. “I did not kill them. Girard’s threats were merely an obscene coincidence, and he stopped making them early in my captivity—they were simply one taunt among his arsenal of torments. I know that, but I should have been here. If I’d been here, Evan would not have taken a chill, or fallen ill, and Helene would not have done what she did.”
He recited his conclusion woodenly. He’d fashioned it in his mind weeks ago, when Easterbrook had first explained that both the duchess and the heir had died, and in Christian’s mind, the mea culpa had sounded smooth, like a catechism. Spoken aloud on a pretty summer day, the words had no sense, but were still somehow compelling.
The Captive Page 20
