Suddenly he found it all but impossible to speak. He’d known where telling this story would lead him, and still the lancing pain surprised him. “I found her in a ravine. She had slipped on the ice, fallen, broken her neck. She was dead. I touched my hand to her belly, but it was still. The night before, the women of her clan had been feeling the baby move, and then...”
He squeezed his eyes shut against the memory, felt Bethie walk up behind him.
Her small hand rested on his back. “You didna mean for either of them to die.”
He turned to face her, overwhelmed with hatred for himself. “Didn’t I? I took delight in humiliating her, in hurting her! If I had shown her the smallest kindness that day, if I had forsworn my lust for vengeance, she would not be dead, and the baby...”
Bethie pressed herself against him, wrapped her slender arms around him. “You didna kill her, Nicholas. ’Twas an accident. How were you to know she would slip and fall?”
He cupped Bethie’s face in his hands, forced her to meet his gaze, spoke between gritted teeth. “You don’t understand. I was an animal! I didn’t care about her! I didn’t care about any of the women I used! I gave no thought to the other children I might have sired! I didn’t care about anything!”
“Except for the baby. And your friends, Eben and Josiah. You cared about them.”
Her words were a fist to his gut. He sat on the bed. “Aye, I cared about them.”
Bethie sat beside him, took his hand. “You did the best you could, Nicholas. You cannae punish yourself forever for wrongs you did not intend.”
Her words hung in the air for a moment, and Nicholas wondered what he had done to deserve her, this loving, giving woman. “I left the Wyandot village the next morning. It took me two months to reach Virginia again. My parents had thought me dead, so my arrival quite surprised them. Amid the celebration, I learnt that Penelope, my fiancée, had married another. And then the nightmares began.”
He told her how Eben’s and Josiah’s screams and curses had followed him into his sleep, how his sister Elizabeth had come to comfort him in the night, and how in his rage and confusion he’d almost killed her.
“I took only what I needed and rode west.” His voice betrayed him, caught in his throat as he struggled to choke out the rest of it. “I left my mother weeping... in her nightgown. She begged me not to leave, and still I rode away. I wanted to protect them from the man I had become.”
“You’ve a family that loves you, Nicholas. That’s somethin’ to be cherished, for certain, somethin’ I’ve never known. Why did you no’ go home?”
“Sweet Bethie, always so forgiving.” He sought for the right words. “I didn’t go home because I believed the man they loved no longer existed.”
She knelt before him, her eyes filled with tears. “’Tis no’ your fault that you survived and the others didna. You cannae give them back their lives by refusin’ to live your own, Nicholas.”
He pulled her against him, buried his face in the sweet-smelling silk of her hair. “Is it really that simple, Bethie? And what of the animal I became? That creature is still inside me.”
“I know no animal, Nicholas. I know only the man who held my hand when I gave birth, the man who risked his life time and again to protect mine, the man who forgave my shame, the man who holds me in his arms and makes the world disappear. I know only the man I love, Nicholas. Only you.”
He started to tell her she bore no shame and never had, when her last words struck him. His heart seemed to stop.
Only the man I love.
“Do you mean that, Bethie?”
She stood before him, silent tears streaming down her face, took off her shift. Then she slowly removed his shirt and breeches, kissed his scars one by one, bathed him with her tears. And when at last he joined his body with hers, the fissure inside him cracked wide open, but rather than darkness spilling forth, there was white light, only light.
***
Bethie lay with her head on Nicholas’s chest, listened to his heartbeat as he slept. Between the brandy he’d drunk, the torrent of emotions that had poured through him, and the passionate release of their lovemaking, he was surely exhausted.
She knew it had taken all his strength to tell her what he’d told her, and she tried to grasp it all. She’d known that he’d been tortured. She’d been able to see that for herself. But the horror of it...
She ran a finger over one puckered scar. Now that she knew what they’d done to him, she was able to read the strange pattern on his skin as she might the words in a book. The lines were what remained of knife cuts, the puckered burns the scars left by glowing embers. There were so many of them.
So many.
Her eyes, already sore from crying, pricked with fresh tears. She could not imagine how much he had suffered, nor how horrible it must have been to watch, helpless, as his two young friends were burned slowly to death. How desperate must he have felt to witness their torment! How it must have crushed him when, after he’d offered his life for theirs, they died cursing him! How alone he must have felt, tied up, in pain and sick with fever—as if even God had abandoned him.
And that woman—Lyda—what she had done to him! Lyda had forced herself on him, as surely as Richard had forced himself on Bethie. But hadn’t Nicholas’s humiliation been much worse? Aye, it had. The entire clan had watched as Lyda had forced his body to oblige her, had taken her pleasure of him, had stolen his seed.
’Twas clear now why he’d understood her need to be clean after Richard had tried to rape her. He must have felt the same urge when they’d at last cut away his bonds and—
Then Bethie remembered, and regret sliced through her.Shehad tied him to her bed. She had drugged him, then bound him by wrist and ankle. He had fought like a wild animal to free himself—and had failed. She’d thought at the time he was simply angry at being bested by a woman, but it had been so much more than that. What terrible memories it must have stirred in him!
