“Nay.” He paused again, and she steeled herself for something else—something worse. “As I stood on the field where they were laying down their weapons, a shot rang out from the trees on the hill behind me.” He put a hand on his thigh, so near the wound she winced. “I was struck by musket fire and fell. The shooter was Eben Gibbs.”
She drew in her breath so sharply it became a cry.
“He meant to kill me, he said. Muskets make miserable arms, or he might have done so. As soon as he misfired, he ran but was soon rounded up by the New York militia. After his court-martial, he hung.”
Stung, she looked to the cradle as if it could anchor her. Her thoughts were dashing in every direction, trying to come to terms with James’s death, Coralie’s capture, and Gibbs’s execution. And how Rhys had suffered the consequences.
The tears she thought checked began to fall again. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.” He looked to the cradle again absently. “I’m sorry in ways I can’t fully grasp or express.”
Sorrow washed through her, along with a burning ire and suffocating regret. She wanted to run out the back door again and escape her unruly emotions. As it was, she could only get up and grab her smallclothes and go downstairs to make breakfast. But that made her feel she was abandoning him when he needed her. Only he might not need her but push her away if she tried to comfort him or seek comfort.
In the kitchen, her hands fairly shook as she ground the coffee beans she’d roasted the day before, her mind grappling with all he’d told her. She’d never see James again, her beloved brother who had served so faithfully without complaint. Who had loved to tease and never bore a grudge. Who had introduced her to the man she loved best.
Once again she felt she held part of the blame for Eben Gibbs’s final, dishonorable act, no doubt nurtured through Coralie and her loathing of Rhys and the American cause. Though it hadn’t killed him, Rhys would carry the effects of it to his grave. As would she.
Woodenly, she went through the routine of frying bacon and toasting bread and brewing coffee, her hands busy but her head elsewhere. The tap of crutches brought her round. Though everything in her wanted to, she resisted the urge to hurry into the hall and help Rhys down the stairs.
When he finally came into the kitchen he took a seat at the head of the table. His bowed head and closed eyes brought another knot to her throat. She served him wordlessly, her own appetite gone. Would she ever be able to get past their confrontation at the fort? Did she misconstrue his intensity, his dark looks of late, for something else entirely? Might it have been the burden of keeping secret all that he’d just told her?
She wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around him and return to the way they’d been at first, when even the roughness of a fort in the middle of the wilderness hadn’t mattered with him beside her. But there was no going back. Only forward.
When he thanked her for breakfast it rent her already brokenheart. As he ate, she stood by a window, staring out at the snowy landscape the wind had sculpted with deep drifts and pockets, the glare making her squint.
Only the pop of the fire sounded. And then she heard the scrape of his chair as he got up from the table. She hoped he might hobble toward her, perhaps put his arms around her as he used to do. The ache in her chest and throat grew unbearable as she held back her tears.
When she looked again he wasn’t there.
fifty-five
The greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.
Thomas Paine
Days passed, the brilliant snow now old and muddied. Though he was getting around on crutches with more ease, his pain more manageable, Rhys was not the man he’d been, neither in body nor soul. Because of it, he forced himself to tend to chores his father or Bronwyn could easily have done. He fell down more than once, even sliding on ice and getting bloodied all over again when he collided with the side of the barn.
Christmas loomed but none of the festive feeling with it, though Harlow House, as neighbors called it, overflowed with the aroma of gingerbread and beeswax candles and pine boughs. Mae seemed determined to decorate their home top to bottom as if staying busy could keep her grief over James at bay.
When he wasn’t in the house he went downhill to his father’s workshop, forbidding Mae to follow. Bronwyn was often uphill, keeping her company, so he didn’t feel guilty absenting himself. By the workshop’s fire, he and his father crafted a rocking chair from maple. Though his thigh was mangled, his hands were not. Usinga drawknife, he shaped the spindles and backrest and legs while his father assembled the frame. It required both of them working if they were to finish by Christmas.
Anticipating Mae’s pleasure spurred him on. Losing himself in something to benefit someone else seemed a tonic, a means to heal. The deadness he’d felt since New York began to lighten somewhat.
“So, are you ready to be a father?”
Rhys continued carving, shavings at his feet, surprised by his father’s candor. He had always been a taciturn man, and Rhys seemed to mirror him since his harrowing return from the war.
“I misdoubt anyone is ready for the most important task of one’s life aside from being a husband. And I’m a poor one at present.”
“You’re still healing.”
Only physically, he thought. In other ways he seemed as far as the east from the west from the one that most mattered. Mae seemed untried territory, a wilderness with no compass, and he didn’t sense a way through. “I can’t seem to find my way back to her.”
“To Mae.”
Rhys swallowed, suddenly at sea. That was how he felt. Adrift. Unable to return to what they’d once had. “Much has changed.”
“But not your love for her.”
