Her Enemy At the Altar

by Virginia Heath

  ‘Mr Aaron!’

  They broke apart at the panicked shout, just in time to see a footman skid to halt before them on the gravel, his eyes wide with alarm.

  ‘You need to come quickly, sir. It’s your father...’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Aaron took the stairs two at a time, conscious that Connie was close behind him, then ran to his father’s bedchamber. Inside the room he saw Deaks stood awkwardly next to his father’s valet. The valet was kneeling on the floor, bent over his father’s body. Both men respectfully moved to the side as he rushed in.

  ‘He heard him fall,’ Deaks hurriedly explained, gesturing to the valet. ‘We think he is still alive, sir. I think I felt a pulse. I cannot be sure.’

  Aaron stared in panic at his father’s prone body. He was lying on his side, eyes closed and not moving. He dropped to the floor and pressed his fingers on the base of the old man’s neck. There was a pulse. Barely. ‘Help me to get him on to the bed!’

  The valet and Deaks sprang to his assistance. The valet carefully cradled his master’s head while Aaron and the butler gently lifted him on to the mattress. It was only then he saw the cut on the side of his father’s head. Fresh blood oozed from the wound, trickling on to the pillow and staining the pristine white cotton red.

  Everything suddenly blurred, his head spun and the room evaporated. The roar of battle filled his ears and he wanted to clasp his hands over them to block out the sounds of the screaming. The metallic tang of death and blood was everywhere. It filled his nostrils and his lungs, so thick and acrid it threatened to suffocate him.

  It was so overpowering he could taste it. His stomach lurched in rebellion. He could even feel it on his skin. Warm. Sticky.

  Abhorrent.

  Aaron did not need to see the carnage. He was stood in it. His comrades now formed a swamp of death. They were no longer men, instead needlessly reduced to the gruesome constituent parts that had once made them whole. Unidentifiable.

  Frantically he searched for Fletcher, calling out to him, until he realised that the stickiness on his uniform was Fletcher. It was all Aaron’s fault. It should be his face lying lifeless in the mud.

  ‘Aaron!’

  Someone was calling him and he turned towards the voice desperately, hoping that they could save him. Connie’s face was inches from his. She was staring intently into his eyes. He had no idea how she had got to Spain, or why she was at the fortress, but his relief at seeing her was almost his undoing. He became aware of her gripping his shoulders and turning him around, away from the slaughter. The battlefield floated away, leaving the lifeless eyes of his father’s hunting trophies stared down at him in utter disgust at what he had done.

  ‘Aaron!’

  Then he remembered that his father was dying. His father was dying! But the madness had chosen that exact moment to show itself again and had rendered him useless. Ashamed and shaken, Aaron stared at his feet. Everyone had seen it. They all knew now.

  Connie knew. Her hands cupped his face and angled it up to look at hers again. Her eyes were filled with pity. Connie had found a way to get to him on that battlefield and drag him back. ‘I need you to go and fetch the physician. Can you do that, Aaron?’

  He saw the desperation and fear in her lovely green eyes and nodded gratefully. It did not matter that his father lay dying, he had to get away and she was giving him an excuse to do so.

  ‘I will be back as soon as I can.’ His voice was still trembling, his knees still unsteady, but at least he was back where he was meant to be. Aaron did not turn around to look at his father, fearing the worst if he did, instead he dashed from the room towards the fresh air. He did not stop running until he reached the stable.

  Connie made the viscount as comfortable as possible and tended to the open wound on his head herself. It was just a flesh wound, but judging by the angry swelling that was appearing behind it, he must have hit his head on the nightstand as he fell. The viscount remained unconscious throughout. Now he looked weak and grey against the freshly changed pillowcase, one side of his face pulling awkwardly downwards as if the muscles on that side no longer worked.

  She dismissed all of the servants and sat nervously, waiting for Aaron to return with the doctor, silently praying that she had made the right decision in sending him. She had no doubt that he would come back. Aaron’s sense of responsibility was unquestionable, but to send him away like that, when she had seen first-hand the sheer terror on his face troubled her. At the time, she knew he was on the cusp of losing control.

  It had been the strangest thing to witness. Aaron had rushed in and immediately taken command of the situation—but then he had frozen. Although in actuality all this happened in a split second, Connie had known that something was desperately wrong. He had seen his father’s blood and then his eyes had glazed over as if he was no longer there, his hands fisted at his sides so tightly that she had seen every pronounced vein, his body so rigid it might have been chiselled out of marble. She had rushed to him then, turning him away from the sight of the blood, and had called his name. To begin with it was as if he had not heard her, then she saw him focus and saw the same terror reflected in his eyes that she had witnessed the previous evening when he was in the full grip of his nightmare. Whatever haunted his dreams obviously tormented his waking thoughts, too.

  The bedchamber door burst open and the physician came in, closely followed by her husband. She saw his gaze dart quickly to his father. She watched him take in the clean bandage on the wound and then she saw him almost slump in relief—even though he was obviously still gravely concerned for his father. The sight of blood bothered him. It had triggered the odd episode, Connie was now certain. How she knew this, she could not say, except that she did know it. She also knew that hell would freeze over before he was likely to ever admit to it.

  They both stepped outside to allow the physician to do his job. Aaron purposefully stood a little away from her, his hands gripped tightly behind his back and his posture once again stiff as he paced around the hallway like a caged animal. His usually fluid and graceful movements were jerky and stilted. He did not look at her or speak, giving Connie the distinct impression that he would much rather she wasn’t there at all. Only an hour or so before, she was convinced he had been about to kiss her, yet now a vast chasm of awkwardness had opened between them that neither knew quite how to bridge.

  That was not strictly true, Connie reasoned. The chasm was of his making, not hers. He was in pain, worried sick and embarrassed. To cover that maelstrom of perfectly natural emotions it was Aaron who was creating the distance between them. She needed to be the one to close it.

  ‘Lots of people are frightened the sight of blood, Aaron. I do not think any less of you for it.’

  He stopped pacing instantly and she could practically feel him strapping layer upon layer of imaginary armour over himself before he responded. ‘It is not that I am frightened of it. I have merely seen too much of it.’

  In his hasty defence he had inadvertently given her a window into his past. The war had left an indelible mark on him. He had seen things that he could not forget. ‘I am sure that you have.’

  That was apparently also the wrong thing to say because he became immediately defensive. ‘I know that I reacted badly, but you have to understand that even though I have been expecting this and had prepared for the worst, seeing my father like that was still a shock.’

  Connie wanted to go to him and wrap her arms around him, but everything about his stance and his expression warned her against it. She could see that he was holding his emotions together tightly.

  ‘Of course it was. Please do not think that I am criticising you. Your reaction was completely understandable.’ Connie inched towards him. Whether he wanted her comfort or not she wanted to give it.

  Instantly he backed away. ‘Please don’t, C
onnie,’ he managed stiffly, then stared unseeingly down the brightly lit landing, his back presented to her like the battlements around a castle, a signal for her to keep away. Several painful minutes ticked by until Aaron broke the deafening silence, although resolutely still turned away from her gaze. ‘Did I do anything untoward, Connie?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  He shook his head stiffly, still staring off into the distance. This insight into the man she had married broke Connie’s heart. He had asked a similar question the morning after his nightmare, suggesting that when he was in the grip of whatever it was that tormented him he was not in control of himself. He was not only mortified by his reaction, she now saw, it terrified him.

  ‘It was all over in the blink of an eye,’ she soothed, coming up behind him and laying her hand upon his shoulder. The corded muscle beneath her palm tensed further so she gently ran her hand back and forth over it. ‘You did nothing untoward, Aaron. You just stood there, a little stunned, but perfectly still. That’s all. You did not scream or wince or do anything that would have given the servants cause to gossip.’

  He let out a shuddering breath. ‘But you knew something was wrong, didn’t you, Connie? That’s why you sent me away.’

  ‘I could see that you were not yourself, but that has nothing to do with why I sent you away. I did that because I knew that nobody else could ride faster to the physician than you. And I was right.’

  And Aaron was also right. Sometimes it was kinder to lie to a person when you knew that they would find the truth too painful to bear. Connie had sent him away because she feared that Aaron was in grave danger of losing his tightly held control in front of the servants. She had tried to protect his pride and his dignity for his sake, not hers. She was still doing that.

  The doctor came out then, saving her from having to embellish her lie, and Aaron finally whipped around so that she could see him. His face was drawn and etched in worry.

  ‘Is it very bad?’

  ‘He has had a stroke, I am in no doubt about that, and he has still not regained consciousness. I have no idea if he will. Occasionally, patients make a partial recovery. More often than not they do not. Your father’s health was in a poor state before this happened so I fear that this episode might signal the beginning of the end. Only time will tell. I’m afraid I cannot give you any more hope than that. I have left some laudanum on the nightstand in case he wakes. A few drops of that will ensure that he is not in any pain. I will come back in the morning and check on him again. I am dreadfully sorry, Mr Wincanton, that I cannot do any more than that. You should prepare yourself for the worst.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was no change in Viscount Ardleigh’s condition for several days. Once or twice, they feared that he was hovering on the brink of death and each time he rallied. Then again, they had been equally as convinced that he might regain consciousness, too. The unharmed side of his face would become mobile and his eyelids would tremble as if he was fighting to wake up. They were in a state of perpetual limbo. Aaron could neither fully grieve nor fully hope, which left him feeling more useless and ineffectual than ever.

  They took it in turns to sit with him. That meant that their paths rarely collided. If he was being completely honest with himself, he had orchestrated it to be that way, making himself scarce to avoid having to spend any time with her. Aaron was grateful for the distance. Aside from the fact that he needed time to get his jumbled thoughts together, he could not shake the feeling that she saw through him and that frightened him. Inadvertently, Connie was becoming too close and keeping his guard up around her was becoming increasingly difficult.

  Every time he saw her, he would see the questions in her expression alongside the sympathy and he knew that Connie understood exactly what was going on behind his eyes. To the rest of outside world, he was bearing up stoically, as would be expected of a man who was about to take on the mantle of viscount, but inside he was slowly falling apart. All of the feelings of uselessness and inadequacy that he had fought so hard to bury for so long were boiling up within, demanding release, and sometimes he felt as if they might all burst out at once, leaving him completely broken. Each time he felt like this, he desperately wanted to go to her so that she could make him feel better, as if she could. As if anybody could. Connie would recoil in horror if she knew what he had done and that was a far more daunting prospect than dealing with his own demons alone. Although he deserved it, the thought of losing her to the truth was too painful to bear.

  He barely slept. He did not want to. When he did, Aaron was soon transported back to Ciudad Rodrigo, covered in blood and wishing he was lying dead alongside his comrades so that his nightmare would finally be at an end. He woke up terrified, dripping in sweat and desperately hoping that Connie would come and save him. She didn’t, of course, because he had taken to barricading his door with a heavy chest to prevent her from venturing into his bedchamber and seeing him so unmanned. Again.

  In the last few days she had certainly witnessed him at his lowest. First there had been the nightmare and then there were the awful two instances where he had lost himself at the first sight of blood. Goodness only knew what the woman thought of all that. But then his mind kept thinking about the moment that they had shared after that fateful dinner, where he had desperately wanted to kiss her and had been convinced that she had wanted him to. He almost had. Aaron supposed that he should be relieved that the kiss had never happened because he would have hated to witness the inevitable regret on her lovely face now that she definitely knew that he was not right in the head. Except he wasn’t relieved. Every time he spotted her he wanted to kiss her, then lose himself in her arms and pretend that all was going to be well.

  When he wasn’t with his father or descending into the pit of madness, Aaron holed himself up in his father’s study and tried to make sense of all of the ledgers and papers that he had never been allowed to see before. The baffling array of costs and demands on the estate’s money threatened to bamboozle him—but he was determined to make some sense of that at least. This afternoon, he had demanded a meeting with Mr Thomas to explain them—and with his father so gravely ill, this time the sneaky fellow would have no one to hide behind. He had also summoned the family solicitor. As his father was incapacitated, and was unlikely to be otherwise, it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

  There was a light tap on the study door and, to Aaron’s relief and horror, Connie walked in. Behind her was a maid carrying a laden tray. She quickly deposited it on a table and hurried out, closing the door behind her and leaving him alone with his tempting, intuitive wife.

  ‘You did not eat breakfast,’ she stated in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘so I have brought you some luncheon.’

  He thanked her and bent his head back to the ledger, hoping she would assume he was inordinately busy and leave. Being Connie, she did not. Instead she made herself comfortable in one of his father’s ugly wingback chairs and began to arrange two place settings from the piled crockery on the tray.

  ‘In case you are in any doubt, I will be eating with you. I am tired of worrying about your health as well as your father’s, therefore I have decided that we will take all of our meals together so that I can make sure that you are properly fed.’

  ‘There really is no need.’

  She pinned him with her obstinate glare, the one that brooked no arguments and terrified lesser men. ‘There is every need. You will come and sit down with me right this minute, Aaron Wincanton, or you will feel the full force of my temper.’ To emphasise her words, she stared pointed at the pile of leather-bound ledgers on his desk. ‘I should imagine one of those is much heavier than The Complete Farmer.’

  Aaron felt the muscles in his cheeks pull upwards and, despite everything that was dire and sombre and hopeless about his current situation, he felt himself smile. She did have a point. There was so much to do
. In the next few weeks there was a veritable mountain to climb and, to do it, he had to keep his strength up. He pushed himself up from the desk and drifted over to the matching wingback chair opposite hers. Connie did not ask him what he wanted, she simply piled a plate up with slices of ham, cheese and bread which she handed to him unceremoniously with a single instruction.

  ‘Eat.’

  His lack of enthusiasm for the task soon changed when the first morsel hit his stomach. All at once he was starving. It was a tremendous effort not to shovel the rest of the food into his face like a savage while she poured him tea and plonked that in front of him decisively. ‘I am tired of watching you run yourself into the ground from the wings, Aaron. I am well aware of the fact that you have been avoiding me and, frankly, I am sick of it. This is a dreadful time and I will not be made to sit around and be made useless. I want to help you.’

  But if she helped him he would have to spend time with her. ‘There really is nothing you can do.’

  Her own teacup suddenly clattered into its saucer, sending a waterfall of liquid over the rim. ‘Perhaps I did not make myself clear. When I said that I wanted to help I meant that I am going to help you, whether you like it or not. I am not some ornamental woman and I will not let you treat me like one. You have already admitted to me that you have no idea how to run an estate, therefore I fail to understand your objections to me assisting you. Surely two heads are better than one?’

  Two heads would be better, much as it pained him to admit it, because he was completely out of his depth. Maybe Connie had more of a head for figures than he did. All the numbers started to swim before his eyes after a while.