She bent her head. “Of course you would try, despite nearly being killed.”
“We are who we are, yes,” he said with a wry smile. “The surgeon insisted that I could not rise, and for a month I didn’t.”
“It must have been so frustrating for you,” she said softly. This man, this vibrant, exasperating, active man would not have handled being confined to a bed. She could only picture how terribly he must have behaved.
“I thought I might run mad,” he admitted. “They kept trying to give me things to entertain me, but I was half wild with laudanum and God knows what else. And all I could think about was that day. Your father. The sound of shots cutting through the air.”
He stopped, and she reached out to cover his hand with hers. “And the knot?” she encouraged, steering him back on course with as much gentleness as she could muster.
He shook his head. “Of course, I’m sorry. That first day, when they changed my bloody bandage, they left it there next to my bed. All I could do was stare at that knot. It was…intricate. So I began to practice tying it, over and over. Until I could master it.”
She pressed her lips together and tried not to let her thoughts run away from her. It was almost impossible when this information led to more questions than answers.
“Your surgeon, was he trained by my father?” she asked.
Lucas sat up slightly. The lazy sensuality that had flowed through them before was now gone. He was focused again, looking at her with sharp, hawkish interest.
“No,” he said slowly. “Not that first one. He was your father’s contemporary, but not his student. Yates, I think his name was.”
Diana made a face, for she knew the man. “You are lucky he didn’t kill you. My father thought very little of him. But how would he know?”
“Know what?” He leaned in. “What has brought this interrogation on?”
“The knot,” she explained. “It’s likely nothing, but I’ve only ever seen my father tie it. It was a bit of a…signature for him, if that makes sense. Even I had a hard time learning it, for it is, as you say, intricate. But you tied it with ease. I just wondered how you came to know it. Still, I suppose Yates might have picked up the practice from my father.”
Lucas continued to stare at her. His eyes were a little wide, his jaw set. There was the spy again. Her lover was gone.
“Yates didn’t tie the knot I learned from,” he said softly. “The injury to my leg, it was deep.”
“Yes,” she said with a shiver. “It’s evident from the scarring and your remaining limp. It healed beautifully, though, unlike the shoulder that the doctors could not leave alone.”
He nodded. “That’s because when they found me, my leg had already been bandaged. It’s been a bone of contention on how that happened. Perhaps the first men to arrive did the bandaging, perhaps it was someone else. But the knot I learned from was on my leg before a surgeon ever examined my injuries, Diana.”
Her lips parted and she drew back. “But if that’s true…”
“Then whoever did it knew the special and advanced techniques used by your father to treat the injured.” He climbed out of the bed and paced across the room before he turned back and speared her with a stare. “Whoever did it once trained under him.”
Chapter Fifteen
The color had gone out of Diana’s cheeks as she stared at him from his bed. The hand that held a sheet over her body shook as she processed what Lucas had just told her.
In truth, he was having trouble processing it, himself. The bandaged leg had been an unanswered question from that day, of course. But it had been chalked up to something that had happened in the chaos of that horrible afternoon. Something a kind servant might have done, or a fellow spy when they came upon him after the guard had been called in.
Now, though, this new information slid into the puzzle of his mind and fit in to a blank space. Only it created more questions than answers.
Answers Diana had begun to provide in unexpected moments.
“How or why would someone know my father’s methods?” she pressed. Her voice was shaking.
“A very good question,” Lucas said. “He did have acolytes. Trainees. But if one of them was there, then it would mean…”
Her lips parted. “That they were the traitor?” she burst out.
He shrugged. “It’s a possibility. One I hadn’t considered. Only, if they were the one who attacked your father and me, why would that person then bandage my leg? It saved my life, I’ve been told that multiple times in the past six months. Why would the man who attacked me want tosaveme?”
He asked the question and the moment he did, an answer came to mind. A terrible, horrible answer that he’d never even considered until that moment.
An answer that had nothing to do with anyone else in the world but Diana’s father. Only he couldn’t believe that George Oakford would be involved in the attacks on the War Department.
