by Mary Balogh
“And Mr. Jewell passed away how long ago?” the countess asked, her manner suddenly stiff and formal.
Ah. All hope of a gradual introduction to Sydnam’s family was dashed.
“I have not been married before yesterday, ma’am,” Anne said.
“David Jewell!” the viscountess exclaimed suddenly. “But of course! Miss Jewell. You were at the Duke of Bewcastle’s Welsh estate this summer, Anne. Christine has spoken of you. She said that you were a friend of Sydnam’s.”
There was a short, awkward silence, during which they must all have realized that the two of them had been more than just friends during the summer.
“Well,” the viscount said with false heartiness, “if we stand out here on the terrace much longer, darkness will be falling. I am for my tea, and I am sure Anne and Syd must be after the long journey from Bath. Shall we go inside? David, my boy, would you like to come with Andrew and me and we will find you a room close to his? How old are you?”
“Nine, sir,” David said. “Going on ten.”
“Nine going on ten! An elder cousin indeed,” Kit said. “And I had better be Uncle Kit to you since that is what I am. What are you clever at? Mathematics? Cricket? Standing on your head?”
He set Andrew down and took Sophia from his wife’s arms. David laughed and detached himself from Anne, leaving disaster behind him, and went off with them, a new spring in his step. Andrew was gazing worshipfully up at him.
The viscountess linked an arm through Anne’s and led her up the steps into the house. Sydnam followed, between his mother and father.
There was a horrible, heavy silence to succeed the loud delight with which they had all greeted Sydnam’s return home just a few minutes ago and his announcement that he was married.
“Children!” the viscountess said softly and with apparent sympathy. “They would hang one every time, would they not? Even when they are nine years old. Or perhaps especially when they are nine years old.”
The rest of the day did not get any easier for Anne.
It continued with her second quarrel with Sydnam-one day into her marriage.
“If only I could have been swallowed up in a black hole out there on the terrace and never been heard from again,” she said after they had been taken up to his old suite of rooms and left alone there to freshen up before going to the drawing room for tea, “I would have been happy.”
“Don’t be angry with David,” he said. “He merely wished to assert himself as a member of our group. Anyway, Anne, do you not think that on the whole it was for the best that the truth came out right at the start as it did?”
“What must they think of me?” she asked him, pulling off her bonnet and dropping it onto the bed. “First they were introduced to me and my son, then they were told that we married in haste without even informing them, then they were told that I am with child, and then they learned that I have never been married before.” She slapped the points off on her fingers. “But perhaps what they think is no more than the truth. I had no business marrying the son-”
“Anne!” he said sharply. “Please don’t. Whatever they think of you over this pregnancy they must think of me too. It took both of us to make the child.”
“Oh, no,” she said, “you really do not understand, do you? It is always the woman who is to blame-even when she has been raped.”
“Are you trying to say that I took you by force at Ty Gwyn?” he asked her, his hand clutching the bedpost, color flooding into the left side of his face.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Your family will see it quite otherwise, in fact. I will be the one who seduced you.”
“Nonsense!” he said. “They are going to love you as soon as they get to know you and as soon as they see how much you mean to me.”
He did not understand at all. He was at home with his family, secure in their love and the familiarity of his surroundings and their presence. He could not see her through their eyes-or the situation through hers.
“Show me where I can straighten my hair and wash my hands,” she said. “They will be expecting us.”
“The trouble with you, Anne,” he said when they were ready to leave the room, “is that you do not trust anyone else but yourself and your own small circle of friends.”
“The trouble with me,” she said tartly, “is that I did not believe disaster could strike me twice. I am a slow learner, it would seem.”
“Is our child a disaster, then?” he asked softly, though she could hear anger trembling in his voice. “Is David a disaster?”
“And the trouble with you,” she said, almost suffocated with anger herself, “is that you do not fight fair, Sydnam Butler. That is not what I meant. You know it is not what I meant.”
“You do not need to yell,” he said. “You do not need to signal to the whole house that we are having a disagreement. What did you mean?”
She was normally an even-tempered woman. As a teacher she had been renowned for it. She was usually sensible and reasonable too. She really did not know quite what had got into her. She did not even recognize the note of bitterness in her voice. The unaccustomed anger drained from her now, as it had the night before.
“I do not know what I meant,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
Except that she did not know where home was. It had not been the house in Gloucestershire for a long, long time. She no longer belonged at the school in Bath. She had been to Ty Gwyn on just one memorable occasion. There was no home-no safe home-to go to.
Sydnam was right, perhaps. She did not trust, she did not belong. But this time her predicament was entirely her own fault.
“I’ll take you there soon,” he said, his manner softening too. “But since we have come here, we might as well stay for a few days, would you not agree?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
She opened the door and preceded him from the room. He offered his arm as they descended the stairs and she took it. But the shadow of an unresolved quarrel and a marriage shakily begun lay dark between them. It was not helped by her awareness that she had been petulant and self-pitying. She did not know what his family thought of her, did she?
Everyone was remarkably polite during tea and again later at dinner. Conversation did not flag. But the warm delight with which Sydnam and she too had been greeted on their arrival was definitely gone. No one ignored Anne. Indeed, she was drawn firmly into the conversation.
The earl questioned her and discovered that her father was a gentleman, that she had a younger sister and an elder brother, that the expense of sending her brother first to Eton and then to Oxford had put such a severe strain on her father’s purse that she had offered to seek a governess’s position for a few years before marrying.
The countess questioned her and discovered that she had indeed been a governess before David was born and teacher to a few pupils in a Cornish village for a few years afterward until she had been fortunate enough to be recommended to the position of mathematics and geography teacher at Miss Martin’s School for Girls in Bath.
“Miss Martin?” Kit said, grinning-he had asked Anne to call him by his given name, as had his wife. “The famous Miss Martin who left her position at Lindsey Hall after trying to teach Freyja and refusing a letter of recommendation from Bewcastle?”
“Yes,” Anne said. “That Miss Martin.”
Kit asked more questions and discovered that she had been invited to Glandwr because the Marquess of Hallmere had befriended her in Cornwall and Lady Hallmere was the one who had recommended her to the school.
“It is to be hoped,” he said, chuckling, “that Miss Martin does not know that particular juicy fact.”
“She does,” Anne said. “But she did not when she hired me.”
The earl with a single question discovered that she had been estranged from her family for ten years. No one asked why. The reason, Anne supposed, was self-evident.
At dinner Lauren learned that Anne’s ivory lace-over-s
ilk gown, which she had admired, was a wedding gift from Sydnam and that it was part of a whole wardrobe of ready-made clothes he had bought for her in Bath yesterday. And when the countess remarked upon her gold and diamond chain and earrings, she learned that they were a wedding gift too.
“Would you not agree that I have excellent taste, Mama?” Sydnam asked, smiling at Anne. “Not that my wife’s beauty needs embellishment.”
Anne wished that she had worn her old green silk and no jewelry at all.
For of course as the evening progressed she could see herself with stark clarity as she must appear through their eyes-as a fortune hunter. It was clear that she was no longer a very young woman-she had a son who was almost ten years old. She had never been wealthy. She had been forced to work for a living because her father was short of funds. Her son was illegitimate. Her future prospects were not bright-she could expect to live out her days as a spinster schoolteacher. Her only asset was her beauty. And so she had used that beauty this past summer when opportunity had presented itself to snare for herself a husband of rank and fortune whose own future prospects were equally bleak, though for a different reason-a man who was so badly maimed that he could expect only solitude and loneliness for the rest of his life. Her plan had succeeded extremely well. By the end of the summer she had been with child-by a gentleman to whom honor obviously meant more than life. His maimed body proved that.
That was how they must see her.
How could they not? The facts appeared to speak for themselves.
It was a very damning portrait.
They were polite to her because she was a guest in their home and she was Sydnam’s wife-and it was perfectly obvious to her that all of them adored him.
But how they must despise her!
By the time she retired for the night she was exhausted. She was thankful that Sydnam remained in the drawing room for a while to finish a conversation with his brother-they were talking about land and crops and livestock.
Although the suite of rooms included a sitting room and a large dressing room, there was only the one bedroom-and the one bed.
Anne undressed and washed, pulled on a nightgown, and brushed out her hair as quickly as she could, climbed into the big bed, moved over as far to the edge of it as she was able, pulled the covers up over her ears, and closed her eyes.
And then it struck her that this was probably the very bed where Sydnam had lain for long months recuperating from his experiences at the hands of torturers. She could have wept then but did not because she no longer had the privacy of a room of her own.
Last night-her wedding night-had been a terrible mistake. She had hoped that perhaps they could make amends tonight. But tonight she was too weary to want anything except to weep for the man Sydnam must have been before the torture.
The man she would never have met.
When he let himself quietly into the room perhaps fifteen minutes after she had lain down, she pretended to be asleep.
The nightmares almost always followed the same pattern.
They were never of the physical torture itself.
They were of the intervals between-the waiting for the next session, the never knowing exactly when it would be, the always knowing what it would be. They had always told him that in graphic detail in advance. And the temptation-the terrible, almost overwhelming temptation to give them what they wanted, to sell Kit out, to betray his country and her allies so that he would be granted the blessed release of death.
“No.” He was not speaking to them. He was speaking to it-the temptation. “No. No! No!” He did not want to scream. He tried desperately not to. He never screamed during the sessions. He would not give them the satisfaction. But even in the times between they would hear, and so he tried not to scream. But sometimes…
“No-o-o-o-o-o!”
As always he woke himself up with the screaming. He sat bolt upright on the bed, bathed in sweat, threw off the covers, stumbled over them anyway as he got out because he had thrown them with his right hand, and gasped for air like a drowning man.
He was almost instantly aware of Anne, sitting up on her side of the bed, reaching for him though he was too far away from her. He was still more than half in the nightmare and would be for some time, he knew from long experience. His body and his mind were too heavily drugged with the past to deal with the present for a while or even to display the common courtesies.
“Get out!” he told her. “Get out of here.”
“Sydnam-”
“Get out!”
“Sydnam-”
She was out of bed too and rounding the foot of it to come to him. He would have lashed out at her then if he had had a right arm to do it with.
Someone knocked on the door-hammered on it actually.
“Syd?” It was Kit’s voice. “Syd? Anne? May I come in?”
Anne changed direction and headed for the door, which opened just before she reached it.
“Syd?” Kit said again. “You are still having the nightmares? Let me help you. Anne-”
“Go away! Get out of here!”
He was still almost screaming. Soon the shaking would begin. He hated that weakness more than anything else. He hated for anyone to see it.
“Anne,” Kit said again, sounding like the military officer Sydnam had briefly known him as. “Go with Lauren. Mother is here too. Go with them. I’ll see to this.”
“Get out! All of you.”
“He has had a nightmare,” Anne said, her voice soft but quite firm. “I will see to him, Kit, thank you.”
“But-”
“He is my husband,” she said. “He wishes to be alone. Go back to bed. Everything will be all right. I will see to him.”
And when she closed the door, she remained on Sydnam’s side of it.
He began to shake-every cell in his body shook, or so it seemed. All he could do was grasp a bedpost, cling tightly, and clamp his teeth together while the breath rasped in and out of his lungs.
“Sit down,” she said softly an indeterminate length of time later, one hand touching his arm, the other curling about his waist from behind.
When he sat, he found a chair behind him. A cover from the bed came over him then and was tucked warmly about him and beneath his chin and about his neck and shoulders so that he felt cocooned by its soft warmth. She must have gone down onto her knees before him. She set her head on his lap, turned it to one side, and wrapped her arms about his waist.
She did not move again or say another word while he shook and sweated and finally felt the comfort of the warm cover and the weight of her head on his knees and her arms clasped about him.
His mother, his father, Jerome, his various nurses, his valet before they went to Wales-they had all in their turn tried to talk him out of the aftermath of nightmare, but had only succeeded in pushing it deeper.
He appreciated her silence more than he could say. And he appreciated her presence more than he could possibly have expected.
“I am so sorry,” he said at last.
His hand was under the covers. He would have laid it on her head if it had been free. But she lifted her head and looked up at him, and in the faint moonlight that beamed through the window it seemed to him that she had never looked more beautiful.
“I am too,” she said. “Oh, Sydnam, my dear, I am so sorry. Do you need to talk about it?”
“Good God, no!” he exclaimed. “I beg your pardon, Anne, but no, thank you. It is my personal demon that will be with me forever, I daresay. One cannot go through something like that and expect only the body to be scarred. Just as my body will never be whole again, neither will my mind. I have accepted that. The nightmares are no longer as frequent as they used to be, and when I do have them, I seem to be able to break free of them more quickly most of the time. But I am sorry for the distress this one has caused you and that other ones will in future.”
“Sydnam,” she said, and he realized that her arms were stretched along his outer thighs, “I ma
rried you. All of you. I know I cannot share this pain with you, but you must not feel obliged to shield me from it or try to minimize it. I will be saddened if you do. We have been friends almost since we met, have we not? But we are more than friends now despite a rather shaky start to our marriage. We are husband and wife. We are…lovers.”
Once they had been lovers. But that once had produced life in her womb and had bound them forever. He could not feel sorry it had happened even though he had seen her distress last evening and today and had felt a certain guilt yesterday about taking her from the people and the environment she had grown to love. He should have been offering her nothing but comfort for the past two days, not quarreling with her and now burdening her with this.
He lowered the blanket and stroked his fingers over her arm.
“I suppose I am vain and conceited,” he said. “I hate having you witness my weakness.”
“I think,” she said, “you are probably the least weak person I know, Sydnam Butler.”
He smiled at her.
“Did Andrew have the story right?” she asked him. “Was it an army surgeon who amputated your arm?”
“A British surgeon, yes,” he said, “after Kit and a group of Spanish partisans had rescued me. It was impossible to save it.”
“Sydnam,” she said, “I want to see you.”
It was impossible to misunderstand her meaning.
He had worn his shirt and breeches to bed even though she had been asleep by the time he came upstairs.
He shook his head.
“I need to,” she said.
It was, he supposed, inevitable unless they were to live a separate, celibate existence for the rest of their lives, something he would find immeasurably less tolerable than remaining single. Sooner or later she would have to see him.
He just wished it could be later rather than sooner. He was so very tired…
But she was not waiting for his permission. She had got to her feet and lit a single candle on the small table on the near side of the bed. And then she came to kneel in front of him again and drew his shirt free of the waistband of his breeches after taking the blanket away. It would have been churlish of him not to raise his arm when she drew the shirt upward so that she could lift it off over his head.