Chapter Ten
Minutes later.
The mill.
Growing up mostly without a mother and surrounded by men, Charlotte had never quite learned how to weep modestly like a woman, or really to weep at all.
Now sitting on the ground, cradling his head in her lap, she could hardly see for the torrent of tears pouring from her eyes and streaming down her cheeks to dribble onto his brow to mingle with the sweat there. She tugged up a corner of her cloak and used it to clean his beautiful face—his face that for a horrifying interval she had hardly recognized—all the while whispering through shallow breaths, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Please wake up.”
His cheek turned against her palm. She gasped and choked back tears.
“Horace,” she whispered, smoothing her hand along the side of his face and willing his eyes to open.
They did, hooded. They were blue, bright blue as they should be, not the filmy white they had been for a million terrible seconds.
His breaths were shallow, his features still slack. But his eyes remained partially open and his chest was beginning to move in a regular rhythm.
His lips moved.
“D—” His eyes clamped shut.
She stroked her fingertips over his temple and brow. “Yes?” she whispered, swallowing back tears of relief. “I am here. I am listening.”
“Disgrace,” he said thickly and she saw blood between his lips. “Disgrace myself?”
Dabbing at his lips again with the soft velvet of her cloak, she shook her head.
“You are my hero, Horace Church,” she said.
His brow creased. “Ch—Char—” His eyes tightened shut.
“No,” she forced out. “You did not disgrace yourself. You are still in one very handsome piece, albeit lying on the floor of a mill, so I suspect your overcoat might suffer for it. I have some experience tending wounds, but I haven’t ever—that is, I don’t know what to do for you now. Give me instruction, please.”
“Claytons,” he said. “Go.”
“I will not leave you. Give me a different instruction.”
“No—time to—waste.” His hand came heavily around hers that was curved about his cheek. “Charlotte.”
“All right.” She grasped his hand, choking back the fear clogging her throat. “I will go. Only promise me you will not die while I am gone.”
He barely moved his head, but his features seemed to relax, and his lips to curve ever so slightly.
“Worst is over,” he said still thickly, as though he were very, very weary. But it was more clearly actual speech. “Dreadful headache, though.”
Unclasping her cloak she folded it into a pillow and tucked it beneath his head.
“I would kiss you now,” she said, “but I think you’ve bitten your tongue and I do not want to hurt you.”
“You could never hurt me.” He did not open his eyes. “Now, run.”
“I don’t—”
“Run.”
Her skirts were awkward, but she hitched them up between her legs and without the cloak she was light. She ran faster than she ever had before.
Lord Fortier returned to the inn just as she was pouring her story into the innkeeper’s ears. They had been wrong about Sheridan. Along the road the tradesman had stopped at a farmhouse and, upon entry, introduced Lord Fortier to his sweet elderly mother and three orphaned nieces and nephews, whom he was visiting for the holiday. Despite his low appearance, it seemed he was not a cozener of unprotected women, after all, rather simply a friendly gentleman. Lord Fortier had turned back immediately.
Now he asked her pointed questions about the duke’s state. Then, after speaking with George, he departed in pursuit of the Claytons.
With her guidance, Fields and the innkeeper retrieved the duke from the mill and discreetly assisted him to his bedchamber.
“T’ain’t right, my lady: His Grace lying to everybody like that,” her coachman said afterward with a shake of his hoary head.
“It was for a noble purpose, Fields.”
This was proven when Lord Fortier returned again as the sun fell, with the announcement that Mr. and Mrs. Clayton were now languishing in the magistrate’s jail two counties away. They had confessed to their crimes, which Mr. Clayton typically perpetrated alone, but, as it was the holiday season, he preferred to be with his family.
Justice had been done.
But Charlotte could not be still. Miss Mapplethorpe and the inn mistress plied her with delicacies all evening, but her stomach was too tight to admit food. She was pacing the corridor when Lord Fortier emerged from the duke’s room.
She ran to him. “How is he?”
“He sleeps,” he said. “The headache is fierce for many hours afterward. Sleep relieves it.”
“You have seen this before, been through this with him, at other times?”
“I have known him since we were boys,” he said with a gentle smile.
“That was not an answer.”
“Oui. It has happened enough times so I know that by morning he will again be his arrogant self.”
“Is he ill?”
“Not any more so than he was fifteen years ago. Better, in fact. It has been some time since the last.”
“How much time?”
“Years.”
“What is it?”
“That is an unsettled mystery. The priests in my country will tell you he has been possessed.”
“By the devil?”
He shook his head. “Nothing so unkind. In my people’s religion, the gods are many. Occasionally they enjoy speaking through the living.”
“Please,” she said. “Give me an explanation that I can understand—that I can reconcile with the man I know.”
“It is a trouble of the brain. A discomfort and an inconvenience, particularly when snow or water makes sunlight bright and inconstant.”
“That is why he wore that cloak and held onto the horse as we walked! He was trying to avoid seeing the sunlight reflecting off the snow. Wasn’t he?”
“He has learned methods of avoiding the dangers. But sometimes the danger comes when he cannot anticipate it. Mostly it is a frustration. This time, I suspect, his pride will be the greatest casualty.”
Because she had witnessed it.
She nodded.
“If you would like to see him . . .” he said, eyes glimmering with playfulness now. He gestured toward the duke’s bedchamber door. “I will tell no one, not even him if you wish it.”
Gulping a big breath, she went into the bedchamber. The draperies were closed and the man on the bed was very still, his breaths shallow. As the door clicked shut, he did not wake.
Standing beside the bed, she studied the noble line of his brow, the delectable cut of his jaw now shadowed with whiskers that obscured the fading bruise, his strong hands that had held her with such passion, and his lips. Her throat was so thick she could hardly breathe.
“I do not entirely understand what happened to you,” she whispered. “But it is clear to me that you bear a burden, two burdens, both this—this thing and the burden of keeping it a secret from everybody. How you have done so for so many years, I cannot fathom.”
There had been blood too, that day she had found him on that path in the wood at Cheriot Manor. She had thought he must have fallen from his horse and been knocked unconscious. That would have been sufficient cause for a boy of seventeen to feel shame enough to ignore her afterward. Perhaps he had fallen from his horse on that occasion.
So many years of hiding his secret.
Everything inside her was tight and hot and anguished. Her heartbeats would not slow. Yet he slept so deeply; he showed no sign of waking.
Sliding her feet out of her slippers, she crawled onto the bed and turned onto her side to face him. Tracing the familiar, beloved silhouette of his features with her gaze, she swallowed back yet more tears.
“Today I thought you were dying,” she whispered. “Until you opened your beautiful eyes, I thought . . .” Her throat clenched. “So, here is the situation, Horace Church: you mustn’t die. You see I have learned how to live quite happily without you, that is, with the certainty that you will never be mine. But I do not think I could learn how to be happy if you were no longer in the world. I think then that I would want to die too. So, there you have it. You are forbidden to die.”
A fresh tear leaked out of her eye and dripped onto her hands folded beneath her face. She wiped it away.
His chest rose on an abrupt breath, and his lips parted. Before Charlotte could leap off the bed, he turned his head.
“Charlotte Ascot,” he said slowly, enunciating each syllable. His eyes shone brilliantly blue. “You are in my bed.”
“I . . . That is . . . I . . .” She pushed herself up.
In one fluid movement he turned and rose above her, entrapping her on the bed between his hands to either side and the magnificent wall of his chest that hovered just above hers. Where his hip and thigh leaned against hers, explosions were happening inside her, and glorious heat. A lock of his hair tumbled over his brow and his gaze was all over her face. She couldn’t breathe.
“Best Christmas gift ever,” he murmured huskily, then bent his head and captured her lips beneath his.