Fitz let it lie until they’d greeted the stableboy, Tom, and thanked him for readying the horses.Once they’d swung into the saddles and trotted away from the stables, out toward the rolling green hills, Fitz said, “So if it isn’t your head…?”
Gabriel grimaced.“That’s the thing.It is in my head, in a way—but it’s not the injury.At least, I don’t think so.”
He struggled for a moment, feeling like a mewling pup to be conversing on this topic, but hadn’t he just resolved to find some way to conquer these horrible dreams?And Fitz’s face was nothing but open and receptive.Gabriel knew his friend was not the sort to judge.
“The truth is, I’ve been having these…nightmares, I suppose you’d call them.Every night.Only they’re strange, not the usual sort of ‘forgot to do my lines and the headmaster is feeling twitchy’ or ‘naked in the Great Hall’ type of dreams.”
“I have that one, too!”Fitz cried.“The headmaster one.Dear old Dr.Keate and his whippy little birch rod.What a rotter, and yet one feels strangely sentimental about it now, lo these many years later.But you were saying you’re not having that one?”
Shaking his head, Gabriel had to concentrate on keeping his grip on the reins loose and supple.His mount was a sweetheart of a chestnut mare who was much feistier than her name—Poppet—suggested.She didn’t deserve to have her sensitive mouth sawed at because Gabriel was throwing a strop over a few unpleasant dreams.
He gritted his teeth.“I’m in the dark.I don’t know where I am, exactly, but I know every feature of the space, every corner, every empty inch of it.I’ve been there a long time.I’ve lost all hope that I’ll ever get out.In the dream, I know that I used to believe I would be rescued but now I’m certain…no one is coming.”
Fitz pulled up short.His gelding, Arrow, snorted at the sudden stop.When Gabriel turned to give his friend a questioning frown, Fitz’s face was nearly as white as the cravat at his neck.
“Thorne,” he began, then swallowed hard and continued, in a gentler tone that instantly set Gabriel’s teeth on edge, “Gabriel.You haven’t asked me again, about what happened to you.When we were at Cambridge, before your falling out with your family.”
“You said you didn’t know what happened between Uncle Roman and me.”Gabriel didn’t recognize his own voice.He sounded like he’d eaten rocks for breakfast.
“I don’t,” Fitz was quick to say.“I wasn’t on hand for the fireworks, as it were, but I think I know what lit the fuse.”
“When I was taken.”Gabriel had stopped his mount too, though he had no awareness of having done so.
Those words had plagued him.The mystery behind them gnawed at Gabriel, incessant and sharp—so why hadn’t he pursued the question?
He’d been aware that Fitz knew more than he let on.Once Gabriel’s health had improved enough to travel, once he’d been beyond Dr.Perry’s exhortations that he must remain calm at all times, surely Gabriel could have prevailed upon his friend for further details.
You were taken, Fitz had said.Gabriel had thought of it a hundred times in the days since, and every time, his heart had frozen in his chest while sweat broke out along his brow line.
This was going to be bad.
Feeling as though he might leap out of his skin, Gabriel forced himself to be still and wait for Fitz to speak.
“You didn’t press me to know more about that,” Fitz said, at length.“I expected you would.Dreaded it, really.”
That same dread, or something like it, coiled around Gabriel’s lower ribs and stifled him.His head began to pound, but there was no turning back now.
“Tell me,” he rasped.
Fitz pressed his lips together for an agonized moment before he visibly screwed his courage to the sticking point and said, “I don’t think those are nightmares.I mean, I’m sure they’re dreams and they’re bad, but what I mean to say is, I think those are memories.Trying to surface.”
“Memories of what?”Gabriel managed to ask, through clenched teeth and a choked throat.
So, Fitz told him.
* * *
Lucy loved Gabriel’s childhood home.
It was a shock to her, somehow, because she’d never spent a lot of time in a big country manor house.Growing up, her father had balked at any suggestion of leaving London, which he felt to be the center of all life, regardless of time of year.
So even when most of Lucy’s friends decamped with their families to their country houses as the Season wound down in July, not to be seen again until the spring, the Lively family stayed on in Town.Lucy had never even been to the Ashbourn ducal seat, which was somewhere in Sussex.
If it was anything like as nice as Thornecliff, she retroactively resented every sooty, congested Christmas they’d sniffled through in London.
The house itself was quirky, and entirely lovely in all its quirks.The housekeeper, Mrs.Brimley, was a jowly, dour-faced woman who appeared to view the running of the household as something akin to putting on a daily funeral, but Lucy had begun work on drawing her out the moment she met her.She thought she’d detected the slightest crinkling of approval at the corners of Mrs.Brimley’s eyes that morning, when she’d praised the menus flower arrangements in the drawing room.
When Lucy had begged for a tour of the house, Mrs.Brimley unbent enough to offer some fascinating tidbits about its history.For instance, most of the main house was Elizabethan in origin, but one tower in the west wing seemed to have survived from an even earlier period and was made out of something delightfully called clunch.
