CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The heat is an animal, a wet, smothering weight crouched on Liam’s chest, crushing the life from his body. He holds very still, surrounded by raw pulsing earth. Far overhead, weak light filters through the wooden slats, but the light does not reach this depth. The darkness smells like soil and rot, copper and drying blood. It is hot.
If they have forgotten him down here . . .
Stop.
He takes a breath, a careful and shallow sip of air, for the hole is as deep as some mine shafts, and the oxygen won’t last. An hour more, or perhaps two—he would know it by the sudden constriction in his chest, the dizziness—is he feeling it even now?
Stop.
Sweat stings his eyes. Sweat is a constant presence, sometimes useful; the sting of it can call one’s attention to hidden injuries that should not be ignored. Two days ago he’d found a gash in his leg. It throbs now, insistent as a drum.
Smith, the former army medic, found fresh mud, scraped from beneath the fence at great risk to himself, to pack onto the wound. Don’t scratch at it, he said.
God, but he wants to scratch. The mud has dried into a makeshift plaster. It, too, is a kind of torture, like the heat, the sting of sweat, the hunger in his belly.
He turns his mind from one small torture to the next, breathing shallowly, letting the ordinary discomforts focus him, while his eyes fix on the light far overhead. The heat is rising with the light and the sun. Sadler was left in this hole to bake to death last week. His body, when they pulled it out—
Stop.
Think of coolness.
Think of England.
He rarely lets himself think of home anymore. Memories pierce the numbness, leave him weak. What happened before is now myth and romance, useless to survival, distracting.
But on rare occasions, those memories might be portioned out, like mouthfuls of water or bread.
He should have kept his mouth closed last night. He should not have spoken up for the boy. But the mistake was made. Now he will bake to death, or suffocate, or be dragged half dead from the hole when the guards remember him. But his mind will be elsewhere, already free.
England. Cool green rolling misty clean soft gentle hills.
Anna, in ivory lace. Bridal, resplendent. Her wry grimace as she scratches her wrist: nobody mentions how it itches!
It itches. His calf is on fire. He could knock away the mud, hook his fingers into the wound, rip himself open to the bone, just to end it—
Stop.
Anna on the island, hair whipping around her face. Her clever fingers tracing his mouth. I think you will miss me when you go.
“Do you miss me?”
She is here with him. She cannot be here, but she is standing in front of him, her skirts like ice brushing his knees, blissfully cold, and the scent of her, sea salt and soap and female skin, all around him.
His amazement, his joy, is swift and muscular and gutting. “Anna,” he gasps—and then recoils, lashed with horror.
She cannot be here. Huddled into the dirt, bridal gown ragged, she lifts her face, and her eyes are huge and terrified.
“What did you imagine?” Her voice is thin, cold like fog drifting through a graveyard. “Did you think they only took you?”
Christ God, no. “You were—” She’d been on the ship when they’d come for him. She’d been safe. “You’re not here.”
Her smile is a corpselike grin.
Men envision awful things in the hole. He rubs his eyes, but they do not clear. He will scratch them out before he believes them. He looks up for the light, and soil hits his face. Again—and again. Clumps are raining down from above.
They are burying him alive.
His fingers hook into the gnarled root-choked wall. They are burying him alive.
He hears taunts from above, snarled curses and mockery. They are predicting how long it will take for him to die.
With a great cry, he throws himself against the wall and tries to climb. But the wall crumbles beneath his grip. He collapses, breath knocked out of him, and dirt mounds on his back, filling his nostrils, crushing out his breath.
A great boulder of dirt smacks into his back. He is suffocating.
“Last chance!” comes the cry from above. “Beg for your life!”
He will die silent. Pride is all that remains. He will die with his pride intact.
“Help.”
This broken whisper cannot be real. It is Anna’s voice, choked and struggling. She cannot be here.
“Help,” she gasps again.
She is here. She is dying with him.
• • •
“I should have told you.”
Anna opened her eyes, jarred, confused. Liam was staring at her, his face lost in shadow. She was lying next to him in bed—good heavens, she had fallen asleep beside him.
But he was awake again, praise God! It had been a full day since he’d last spoken. Smiling, she reached out to touch his face.
His skin burned like a brand.
Swallowing her disappointment, she stroked his cheek.
“Long before Paris,” he whispered.
More rambling. But something in his presence, in the clarity of his words, felt different now. He was watching her as though he knew who she was. She studied him, feeling a quick pulse of hope.
“What about Paris?” she asked.
“I should have told you before. The first time I knew.”
She smoothed his hair from his eyes. “All right,” she said soothingly.
The room was cold. In his fever, he had kicked off the sweat-soaked covers, leaving them both exposed. The chill made her shiver now suddenly.
He felt it. His hand covered hers. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “It would not have made a difference. But I should have told you.”
As he shifted toward her, the moonlight slanting through the crack in the curtains cut a pale bar across his face, illuminating the bead of sweat on his brow, the shining fixed quality of his gaze. He was staring at her so fiercely, widening his eyes every few moments, almost as though he were trying not to blink.
“It’s all right,” she said. How long had she slept? It had been dusk when she’d lain down beside him—it would not surprise her to learn she had slept straight through until the next evening.
His grip tightened suddenly over her hand. “But you knew,” he said urgently. “Didn’t you?”
“I knew,” she told him. “Close your eyes, Liam.”
“You knew I loved you.”
Her breath caught.
“You felt it. I know you did.”
She swallowed, willing herself to remember how ill he was. Perhaps he thought himself looking at someone else.
“I knew that day on Rawsey,” he said hoarsely. “It was too soon—it was impossible. But I could not take my eyes from you. I saw worlds in you. I saw my future.”
Her heart turned over. The tenderness in his voice, in his expression, took her four years into the past. Did he speak these words in memory of that time? Or had the fever generated some new narrative, unfamiliar to the waking man, untrue to his experience?
The possibility was too painful to contemplate. She had fallen in love with him. But they had never spoken of love. It had not been a part of their contract.
The hardest words she had perhaps ever spoken—but they must be said, for his sake: “Liam, close your eyes.” Keep speaking. “Go to sleep.” Tell me more. “You need rest.”
He pulled her hand to his mouth, kissing her knuckles with cracked lips, his breath hot. “He said, you will know, all at once. And I did.”
She blinked back tears. “Who said that?”
“My father. It was so, with my mother. He told me.”
These were the ramblings of a sick man. They could not be trusted. But her heart was so parched. His words, like water, caused it to swell. She would take that nourishment, even from his delirium. “I knew then, too,” she said softly. He would remember none of this. “I realized later—I came to believe it later—but that was when I knew.”
A faint smile touched his mouth, edged with melancholy. “So why are you here?”
“To care for you. You are ill, Liam.”
“But you curse me,” he rasped. “Let me die in peace, Anna. Be safe, away from here.”
She sat up, looking down at him. “You’re not going to die.”
He squinted up, frowning a little, as though there was some blazing light behind her, instead of the darkness of the room. “Let them bury me alone.”
“No one is going to bury you. You are safe—”
“Shh.” He sat up, his hand over her mouth, a hard look overtaking his face. “Don’t let them hear you. They are listening.”
She laid her hand over his. Where his chest pressed against her shoulder, she could feel the laboring gallop of his heart. He was elsewhere. He looked haunted as he stared upward. He did not see the bed canopy. She could not guess what he saw. Her stomach twisted as she imagined the possibilities.
“You are safe,” she insisted again.
“You must go.”
He had worked so hard to hide the truth from her. But the man gripping her now was living that truth as he stared up into nothing. He was back in the horror of his past—and she wanted to know, despite her gut-deep, sinking instinct that his answer would be fearsome: “Who are they?”
“They want me to beg,” he rasped. “They are listening for it. But I won’t do it. I will die first. I will gladly die.”
She pulled his hand away, kissed his palm, then urged him to lie back down. “You won’t die,” she told him. “And you won’t beg.”
• • •
“Will he recover?”
The soft question startled Anna from her reverie. She rose and went to the bedroom door. Anxiety was stamped so plainly on Wilkins’s face that she could not scold him for countermanding her orders not to disturb them.
She led him into the hall, where their conversation would not risk waking Liam. “The fever is weakening. He is calmer now when he wakes.”
Wilkins slumped a little. “Well, that’s good,” he muttered. “I’ll let the others know.”
Only then did she see the small group huddled down the hallway: the footmen, Danvers and Riley and Dunning and Gibbs; the roustabout coachman, Henneage; Hanks, the valet; and even Cook, whose station meant he never should have set foot abovestairs.
For the first time, she wondered what scars their uniforms might conceal. She had already seen Wilkins’s ravaged throat, which he hid tonight beneath a woven scarf that looked far too fine to belong to a porter.
He noticed her gaze lingering upon it. “Lock gave it to me,” he said, groping at the fringe. “It’s a fine thing, ain’t it?”
“Very fine,” she murmured.
“He said he’d stick by us.” Wilkins stared intently at the closed door, his jaw tightening. “Once we saw this house, though, what life he was meant to lead . . . well, some said we shouldn’t believe him.”
She hesitated. “Why would you not believe him?”
Wilkins flashed her a disbelieving look. “He’s a nob. But I never doubted him. He saved me from the hole—took my place, he did. If he could do that, I said, he’d keep his word on anything.”
She felt a stir of dread. The way Liam had looked up at the canopy . . . the words he had spoken: Let them bury me alone. “What do you mean, the hole? What is the hole?”
“I . . .” He shook his head as though to clear it. “He’s kept his word, is what I mean.”
“Tell me,” she said urgently. “Did they—did your captors put you underground?”
“They did anything they could.” His blue eyes were bloodshot, ringed by shadows. He had not slept in some time—perhaps not since Liam had fallen ill, she thought. “But he was never afraid. Not for himself—only for the rest of us. I reckon he’s a rare nob,” he said heatedly. “To look out for others, and to keep his word afterward, to anyone.”
Belatedly she registered the accusation in his voice. He did not think her a ‘rare nob.’ And why should he? Every man here saved each other, more than once. So Liam had told her. And yet, the day after her arrival, she’d tried to sack them all.
“He is an honorable man,” she said softly. No matter that she had spent almost four years believing otherwise. Having seen the proof of his story, realizing that he had not abandoned her, and then to have witnessed these men’s loyalty to him—could she doubt it?
He was honorable. And she had wasted four years embroidering hateful fictions of him, when instead . . .
She should have been searching for him. Raising the alarm and crying for justice.
Staggered, she leaned against the wall. She had failed him.
Wilkins, misinterpreting her collapse, snapped back into the form she had taught him.
“Forgive me, m’lady. Can I fetch you something? Tea, a meal, a—”
“I’ve seen to it.” This from Cook, who came lumbering toward them, bringing along the reek of his cheap cigars. “Maids are bringing a tray to Lock’s rooms for you, ma’am.”
“And here’s your post,” said Henneage, approaching with a handful of notes and cards. “Your cousin called, ma’am, but we told her you was seeing to his lordship. I reckon you’ll want to let her know how you fare.”
Dazed, she looked between them, these rogues she had disdained so violently. “Thank you.” Hearing the break in her own voice, and mindful of the expectant quality of their regard, she swallowed hard and straightened. “Thank you,” she repeated more firmly. “As I told Wilkins, his lordship will recover. He is resting more peacefully now.”
“Has Doc Smith seen him recently?” asked Riley with a frown. “Because he said—” At Henneage’s sharp elbowing, he clamped shut his mouth.
“You’ll know best, my lady,” Henneage said.
But she could see the unease that rippled over the group. She cleared her throat. “Did Dr. Smith leave?”
Riley spoke instantly. “He’s below, having a cup of tea. Came to check on Katie.”
She was the maid who’d taken ill. “Katie is recovered now?”
“Already on her feet,” Riley said pointedly—and then shrugged and added, “Doc says she got less of the poison, most like, what with the water she washed the clothes in.”
She nodded slowly. “And Dr. Smith was . . . with you all? In Elland?”
That nobody looked surprised, or hesitated before nodding, broke her heart a little. They all assumed that Liam had told her of Elland from the first—that he had trusted her with the truth as a matter of course.
Perhaps that should encourage her. These men knew her husband better than she did: she could not believe otherwise now. And if they imagined her worthy of Liam’s trust, then he clearly had not suggested otherwise to them.
She took a deep breath. Liam trusted them. If Francis Smith was one of their number, then Liam would want him nearby. “Tell the doctor he is welcome to rejoin me, once he has finished his tea.”
Relieved smiles traveled the group.
Never had she imagined a day might come when she would feel complimented by the approval of convicts.