He left Cam to finish his whiskey alone, mounted the stairs to his old bedchamber, and fell across the bed, too exhausted to remove his clothes.
God, I’m tired. So tired.
As his eyes began to close an image crept into his mind of long, dark strands of hair against the white skin of a woman’s back, but then the picture dissolved and he fell deeper into the darkness that lured him with lies, with promises of a peace that never came. He struggled against it before he let it take him, but then he stopped fighting and collapsed into it, because there was nothing else he could do….
Bodies, the twist and tangle and heave of them. Missing hands, fingers. Pieces of men half buried in gluts of blood and mud. He tries to make sense of the pieces, but no one can make sense of them because there are too many hands, an impossible number of them, and so many arms without hands, and hands without fingers, but if he can only put them together again, the fingers with the hands and the hands with the arms and the arms with the torsos… If he can fit all the pieces back together like a puzzle, the bodies will be whole again, but there are too many and there’s too much mud and too much blood and he can’t find all the hands or all the fingers dear God, there aren’t enough fingers—
Julian jerked awake with a gasp and shot straight up in the bed, icy sweat pouring down his back.Jesus. He ran a trembling hand down his face. Had he screamed? He must have. He always did. The scream was what tore him from the dream. For all the good it did, he screamed at the end.
Colin’s watch. Julian clawed at the bedclothes around him in a sudden panic. Where—?
His fingers closed over the hard metal, still in his waistcoat pocket; then he fell back against the pillow until numbness stole over him. He lay there with his eyes open for what was left of the night, the watch clutched in his palm.
Chapter Five
“I’m going to ask you once again, Sarah, and I’ll have the truth this time, if you please. Are you a spy?”
Charlotte kicked her legs out in front of her, slumped back against the plush carriage seat, and waited for her vulgar pose to hurl Sarah from her icy silence headlong into the blistering scold that hovered on the tip of her tongue.
The scold was inevitable, so they may as well get it over with.
She didn’t need to wait long. Disapproval rose from Sarah like thick clouds of smoke from a conflagration. “If I’m a spy, I’m not going to tell you so, am I? What kind of spy admits she’s a spy, my lady?”
“That sounds like a confession.”
“It’s nothing of the sort.” Sarah gave a haughty sniff. “I haven’t anything to confess.”
“Ah, now I know you’re lying. Everyone, dear old thing, has something to confess. We all have at least one secret sin.”
Sarah pressed her lips so tightly together they became indistinguishable from the rest of her face. “Sins now, is it? There’s some as has a great deal more than one, and not so secret as they should be, neither.”
Ah. There it was—the scold Charlotte knew was coming since Sarah dragged her from her bed an hour ago. Despite her rigid sense of propriety, Sarah had a tongue like a striking adder, and she never could hold it for long.
“How dull it would be if everyone kept their sins to themselves.” Charlotte hid a yawn behind her gloved hand. “Thank heavens thetondoesn’t think as you do, Sarah, or we’d never have any amusement. Public sins are far more diverting.”
Sarah drew herself up, her spine rigid against her seat. “Surely you didn’t just thankheavenfor shameless sins, my lady?”
Charlotte laughed at the maid’s scandalized look. “Why yes, I believe I did. But really, Sarah, I begin to think all this talk of sin is your attempt to divert me from the question at hand. If you’re not a spy, then how does my sister, Eleanor, always know when I set a toe over the line of propriety?”
Sarah snorted. “A toe, indeed. It’s a whole foot for you every time, or nothing at all, and Lady Eleanor knows it as well as I do.”
“That’s precisely the issue at hand, Sarah.Howdoes she know it?”
It was no great mystery, of course. Charlotte knew very well Sarah had been whispering in Ellie’s ear almost from the moment they’d arrived in London. She should dismiss Sarah at once for such blatant disloyalty, of course, but she was perversely fond of the impertinent creature.
“One of your widow friends told her, most like.” Not a blush stained that guilty cheek, and Sarah’s gaze never wavered. “Probably that little French one.”
She was blaming Aurelie? Shameless.
Until now Charlotte hadn’t been terribly concerned about Sarah’s tattling. She didn’t like to upset her sister, but she was a widow, not a debutante, and a widow of independent means, at that. She could do as she wished.
But now—nowshe was concerned, and had been since Julian West dragged her out of that brothel last night. Well, perhaps dragged wasn’t quite the right word. He’d taken advantage of her foolishness tomaneuverher out. She’d been so shocked to see him it hadn’t occurred to her his presence at that particular brothel couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. Cam and Ellie knew she’d be there last night, because Sarah had told them. They’d sent Julian to retrieve her, and she’d helped him finish the job by being fool enough to bargain for his silence.
It wouldn’t happen again. Sarah couldn’t tattle if she had no tales to tell, and Charlotte would take care in future to see she didn’t.
She yawned again. “Honestly, I don’t know why we indulge Ellie’s whims in this ridiculous way, rushing over to Bedford Square at the crack of dawn as if we’d been summoned by the queen herself.”
“Dawn? It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, my lady. It’ll do you good to be up and about before the sun sets. The fresh air will put color in your cheeks.”
