What words could ever describe the horror, the unspeakable that had happened?
Liam looked over to Rebecca, as if her eyes might hold the answer. They did not, though their steadfastness gave him the courage to continue.
‘I left to explore another route, and when I returned to camp... It was gone, but for frozen, mangled corpses... That is, those that hadn’t been picked clean by scavengers...’ Liam took a steadying breath, and finished his drink, disgust and pain contorting his face into a grotesque mask. ‘There had been territorial disputes, with the British... Angus had said we shouldn’t push so far north, but I never thought...’ A bitter laugh tore from his throat and he shook his head.
‘Your friend, his son, they were killed?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘His son, Peter, had just turned eighteen... There had always been disputes over borders, and routes, and furs, but I never thought it would go so far. What was done to them... I should’ve... I watched that boy grow up...’
Liam turned away from Rebecca’s now all too penetrating gaze. He leaned back in the chair, stretching his legs out before him, and shifted his own gaze to the sickeningly bucolic pastoral scene above the mantelpiece. He’d never spoken of Angus and Peter to anyone. And now, telling her, it felt as if yet another burden he carried had been passed to her.
He wished he could tell her how it had felt, to find them, what had been left of them.
To find nothing but bones, and pieces of a carved necklace to identify the man who had offered him friendship, and a respite from the pain of his past. To know the boy he’d watched become a man—helped, he liked to think—only by the smaller bones. To be unable to bury them, for the ground was immovable in the harsh depths of winter, no matter how hard he’d scratched and torn at it. To see first-hand what devastation the greed and lust of man could wreak. To know he would have been no better, what he might have done had he found those responsible for Angus’s and Peter’s deaths.
He wished he could tell her how he hated himself for having failed to protect them.
Just as he had Hal.
He wished he could tell her that whatever small piece of him had still been capable of hope had died that day. That all that was left in him now was a frozen cold so much more bitter than that of the Arctic, and a dark soul, unredeemable. He wished he could tell her what else he saw in his nightmares—who else. His other torment, the other scene that haunted him endlessly. But he did not. Could not. Already too many boundaries had been crossed.
Enough, fool.
‘It is no wonder that such things should haunt you, my lord,’ Rebecca said finally. ‘I am very sorry for your loss and your suffering. But their death was not your fault.’
Liam turned and glared at her, and she shrank back under his gaze.
‘I only meant... You should carry their memory with you, but not...not the memory of them as you found them. Just as the monster is not that which it seems, so the ghosts that haunt us are more our own guilt and regret than true apparitions.’
Liam remained there, gaping at her, speechless, unable to voice any of his rising anger or bitterness. He had bared a part of his soul to her, a part of his grief, and she...she dared to...
To speak the truth.
Her stark and acutely perceptive evaluation was hurtful, and disconcerting. Altogether more unpleasant than pity or heartless sympathy might have been.
‘Yet again, I have gone too far. Forgive me, my lord,’ she said, rising again before he could stop her. ‘It has grown late.’
‘Mrs Hardwicke,’ he called after her as she neared the door.
‘Yes, my lord?’
‘Why did you stay that night?’
‘Because you asked.’
A curtsey, a rustle of skirts, and yet again she disappeared, his ghost of flesh and blood, leaving a thousand questions swirling in her wake.
Chapter Eight
Nearly three weeks since he had returned. It might have been a year—it wouldn’t have changed anything. Liam knew he would have to face it. Faceher. Sooner rather than later had been his plan, but that plan had been so much easier to make in the warm, safe confines of a London pub.
Countless times since his return he had tried, every time coming closer than the last. He had used the excuse of following Mrs Hardwicke’s progress as incentive, somewhat successfully. Up the stairs. Down the corridor. Now, he stood before the door. It was there—shewas there. Just out of reach, beyond the safe, solid barrier of centuries-old oak. He could feel her there. Feel her everywhere in this forsaken house.
Hal...
The door he had seen so many times in his dreams seemed unreal now. Different. In his nightmares it had been a great impassable barrier, full of ancient magic and dread. It had stood between him and his sister, taunted him as it kept him from her. Yet now, standing before it, Liam saw it in all its acute simplicity.
Only a door.
