“England has the land all parceled up into tidy rectangles and squares. In Africa, the sky above and the land below are open and sprawling, which of course is why Europe thinks it free for the taking.”
“Free for the taking?” Her brow crinkled. “But doesn’t all land belong to someone?”
A humorless laugh sounded through his nose. “First, we came to sort out the Dutch and Portuguese. But then …” He gave his head a shake as if to clear it of a foul odor. “There was a battle—Grahamstown.”
Artemis understood now was the time to listen.
“Grahamstown wasn’t about the Dutch or the Portuguese. We fought the Xhosa that day.”
“Oh, no.”
“It wasn’t until afterward that I realized the true meaning of the battle. We, the English, were settling in to claim the land as ours. In a self-serving stretch of logic, to keep the Dutch and Portuguese from laying claim to Xhosaland, we also had to keep it from the indigenous populace.”
Now that he’d begun, he looked to have no intention of stopping the flow of his words. She sensed in them a sort of relief.
“Waterloo had been about stopping a tyrant, protecting England and the innocent. But Grahamstown …” He stared unseeing at his hands. “It was a slaughter of the innocent.” Guilt and self-loathing shone in his eyes. “They ran toward the bullets, Artemis.”
A knot formed in her throat.
“They were told the bullets would turn into water,” he said. “It wasn’t only the men, but women and children, too. There was no stopping them from rushing toward the garrison.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. The horror of that day took little imagination, but even so, she hadn’t lived it.
This man had.
“Was that the day you were injured?”
He shook his head. “I was injured a year later during a routine patrol.”
Artemis’s head began shaking and couldn’t seem to stop. The horror was too great.
A march of unnamable emotions passed behind his eyes. “They wanted to take my leg.”
“Was the injury not severe enough to warrant an amputa?—”
“Bones were broken in several places, and my right hip …” He blinked the memory away. “They weren’t taking my leg.”
“Couldn’t that have killed you?” She’d heard any number of ways a leg injury could cause death.
His golden gaze held hers. “Yes.”
She felt suddenly out of breath. “You would rather have died than?—”
“Lose my leg,” he finished for her. A grim laugh scraped across his throat. “Of course, I couldn’t have known that I would still want to die after I didn’t lose my leg.”
“You wanted to die?” She knew the answer, of course. He’d already said as much. But the words spoken aloud imbued them with a certain wretched power.
“I did.” How terrible was his pragmatic tone.
“And now?” she somehow found the courage to ask, her voice a near-whisper.
“Now is …” He searched his mind. “Some days are better, but none are worse.”
Before her sat a man who had made his peace with that sort of half a life.
Yet could half a life lived ever be enough?
His eyes lifted and fixed on her. “I thought of you that day.”
