‘You never got to say goodbye.’
‘I was probably being given the last rites when the decision was made.’ More stones flew as he aimed the blade again. ‘I think I received them so many times in the first month I could probably recite them.’
Something which didn’t bear thinking about. ‘Is that how you were wounded? The fire?’
He nodded curtly, then, jaw clenched, directed all his focus to the task in hand. Obviously hurting. She wanted to comfort him, but didn’t know how to. In the end, she decided the best course of action was not to ask a single one of the many questions she desperately wanted to ask. Instead, she did her damnedest to load the wheelbarrow as quickly as he was dismantling the wall, wishing she knew what to say to make him feel better.
After ten tense, silent minutes, he threw the pickaxe to the ground and kicked the loose stones in the bottom of the trench. ‘For pity’s sake! I can hear the blasted questions whirring in your mind like a cog, Miss None-of-your-blasted-business!’
‘I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business—and I have no intention of prying.’
‘Good.’
‘And actually, in my case, if I am being pedantic, questions spin in wildly like a top more than whir like a cog.’ And so many unanswered questions gave her a headache. ‘I cannot stop them.’
‘Then ask the damn things, woman, and let’s be done with the inevitable inquisition before that big brain of yours explodes!’ He started to pace within the narrow confines of the trench, both hands fisted, his expression furious. But for some reason she knew it was at circumstance rather than at her specifically. When she remained quiet, he stopped pacing and glared hands on hips, daring her to speak.
‘As you say, it is none of my business.’
‘I’d rather you heard it from me rather than Eleanor. Or, heaven help me, idle and misinformed gossip from people with nothing better to do than speculate and fabricate their own answers when none is forthcoming. That used to drive me mad on board ship. Rumours... Panics... Fairy tales... If you are going to dig on my land and make friends with my interfering sister, Miss No-peace-for-the-wicked, then you might as well know the sorry truth.’
‘All right... How did it happen?’
‘We were part of the blockade anchored outside New York tasked with preventing cargo entering or leaving the harbour. A stupid waste of time, if you ask me, and a foolhardy gamble with the lives of sailors when all the aggrieved parties would have been better off sitting around a table and hashing it out like adults instead of playing silly games to maintain the stalemate for two years. But what would I know about such things?’ The sarcasm was accompanied by a frustrated shake of the head. ‘I was only there—in the thick of it—at the mercy of the whims of the government and the Admiralty three thousand miles away!’
‘It must have been hard fighting a war you didn’t agree with.’
‘It wasn’t a war. Wars have rules, tactics, battles... Obvious enemies and a clearly defined cause to be fighting for. There wasn’t much evidence of any of that from where I was anchored. We were fifteen ships in total and it had been a quiet week. Too quiet. It lulled us all into a false sense of security. That annoys me the most because I was lulled, too. Privateers attacked in the dead of night when I was asleep. The first I knew, we were already dodging cannon fire. By the time I got on deck, the ship was on fire. We tried to fight it as best we could, alongside fighting them as well, but the wind sent it spreading to the sails on the mizzenmast. I knew if the mainsail went up then we were done for—a sitting duck—so I climbed the mast to cut it down and managed to set myself on fire in the process.’
‘Did it...hurt?’ A stupid question, but one which had plagued her since her first glimpse of the scars on his cheek.
‘Enough that I wished for death to take me immediately. And perhaps it would have if I hadn’t stupidly thrown myself into the sea in order to stop it.’ Thank goodness. Effie couldn’t imagine how awful it must have been. The pain and fear. ‘And very near drowned wrapped in the sail to boot. I think they pumped a good gallon of brine out of my lungs when they fished me out. Although thankfully I have no memory of that.’
But as he recalled it, she saw the horror in his eyes and realised he clearly remembered both the burning and the drowning, and despite the warm sun on her skin she shivered at the thought.
‘Does it still hurt?’
He shook his head. ‘But I do not feel like my skin fits any more, if that makes sense. Too tight. Numb in places. Oversensitive in others. It isn’t mine.’ Anger again—but tinged with something else. Frustration? Sadness? ‘It isn’t me.’
It isn’t me.A strange and upsetting statement which threw up new questions. Questions she knew he wouldn’t answer despite giving her permission to ask them. His sister had said something similar when she had assured Effie he wasn’t himself. He was clearly lost. Languishing in some strange limbo he was struggling to find his way out of. She understood. After Rupert’s death, when she had been forced to resign herself to the fact she would never have any of the things the female part of her craved—like children, or real intimacy with another human being who accepted her exactly as she was—she had had to do a great deal of soul searching to claw her way out of that pit of despair.
Purpose had been her salvation then and was still the only thing which blurred the constant sense of loneliness and otherness she had felt from her earliest memories. Feelings which had intensified as her age had increased and all hope of living any sort of normal life beside someone who wanted her there gradually eroded away with each rejection or daily reminder of exactly how peculiar she was.
Dark days and hopelessness sucked all the joy out of your soul and she suspected Lord Rivenhall’s weren’t over yet.
‘How much of you was burned?’ An intensely personal question, but she needed to know. Needed to understand the full ordeal he had been through and perhaps through that him, too. The real him beneath all the bluster and anger. The man whose outer wounds had healed, but who still had a long way to go to be mended.
‘In fractions, inches or just body parts? Because if it’s fractions, then one physician put it at an eighth. How he came to that figure I do not know. You would have to ask him. The scars run from here...’ He pointed angrily at his left ear. ‘To here.’ He jabbed himself in the ribs. ‘Largely thanks to the supremely combustible properties of the fine wool in mydashingblue and white captain’s coat. At its longest point it is eighteen and a quarter inches. Another helpful physician gave me that hideous number because he felt the urge to measure it. He thought it remarkable. My case remarkable. Because I wasn’t expected to survive the night, let alone the six-week sailing home. But survive I did, more’s the pity, as I wouldn’t wish that first year of recovery on anyone.’
‘Why?’
‘It was agonising. I spent most of it in a delirious stupor thanks to all the laudanum they forced into me. It was as if I was trapped in a never-ending nightmare involving the fire and the water...’ His eyes were bleak now. The anger gone from his voice and replaced by something else. ‘Hell on Earth. Then I had to suffer another three months of a different kind of hell as Eleanor weaned me off the stuff after the worst of the wounds had healed over.’
‘By then your ship was gone.’
‘It was. And my crew and my illustrious naval career with it.’ He couldn’t disguise the sadness in his dark eyes. ‘Alongside my father, who died of pneumonia that winter—not that I wascompos mentisenough to understand that, let alone grieve for him when he passed. We were never close and even less so after I defied him to go to sea, but still...’ He had lost so much. Been through so much. None of it his fault yet he would carry the scars of it for ever. Was it any wonder he was angry at the world?
‘Then, of course, I was bullied into six long months of exercise because my muscles had wasted away.’
