“A woman can be educated, Montgomery.”
“Yes,” he said. “Tobacco, as well as a variety of other crops.”
Now, what did she say? She didn’t want to ask this question, but she did so anyway. “Do you miss it?”
“With my whole heart,” he said.
The emotions swamping her weren’t difficult to understand. Fear, because she faced the unknown. Would Montgomery remain in Scotland or return home? Regret, because she didn’t want to be transported to a strange country, and sadness,because a man should evince that kind of longing for a person, not a place.
Yet what would she have done if he’d mentioned someone?
She wanted, almost desperately, to ask about his grief. For whom did he mourn?
Rather than looking at him, she concentrated on the passing scenery. The rain had lightened a little, enough to see the river. She’d visited Inverness often, and the series of bridges in the city had always fascinated her.
Inverness reminded her of her parents.
“I didn’t want to marry you either,” she said, a few minutes later. “If I’d had my say, I would’ve chosen almost anyone else. A stranger on the street, a lamplighter in the square. If he talked to me periodically and didn’t look through me as if I were a pane of glass, he’d be a very acceptable husband.”
He glanced at her, the corner of his mouth turning up.
“Do I amuse you, Montgomery?”
“Yes,” he said, startling her. “You do.”
She looked away, uncertain whether to be offended or hurt.
“I had no intention of being rude,” he said.
Something in his voice made her turn and look at him again.
“I understand,” she said, her irritation banished beneath her compassion. “Truly I do.”
He sat back against the seat and closed his eyes.
“Your clairvoyance again?”
“I know Scotland is strange to you. I know what it’s like to have everything you’d thought familiar and normal suddenly vanish,” she said. “I know what it’s like to look around and see that your entire life has changed.”
His eyes opened, his gaze intent.
“Is it permissible to ask you about the war?” she asked.
Anything she’d learned about the American Civil War had come from newspapers, and she wasn’t certain her informationwas accurate. She was willing, however, to talk about anything rather than be ignored.
“How did the war affect you?”
He smiled, but the expression didn’t have any humor in it.
“How it affected me?” He shook his head a little as if to negate the question.
She lowered her gaze.
“Very well, I’m not to ask about the war. Will you please tell me what I am to talk about?”
“People who don’t know anything about war always want to know everything about it. Do you want to know if I got sick the first time I killed a man? Or how I lay on my pallet at night staring up at the stars, wishing I could somehow transport myself home? How, at the end, I didn’t care much about anything, even my own survival? I lived because of luck, Veronica, not because I wished it or even wanted it. I lived because I didn’t die, and that’s how war affected me.”
Perhaps it would be safer to distance herself from Montgomery just as he distanced himself from the world. In her case, it would be for protection, to prevent him from hurting her, or fascinating her, or even seducing her.
