“They had started on his right side,” he said, “and worked their way gradually downward with exquisitely wrought tortures of burning, crushing, and gouging. They had reached his right knee before we found him. Our surgeons saved his leg, but his arm had to be amputated after we had got him back to base. That journey!” He sucked in air slowly and audibly. “He had given away nothing under torture—not my name or my destination or the purpose of my mission. Only his own name, rank, and regiment, repeated over and over again, night and day, even after we had him back. They had not broken him, except in body. Had he broken, of course, and told them what they wanted to know, they would have granted him a swift and merciful death.”
He heard a soft expulsion of breath behind him, but she said nothing.
“I sacrificed my brother,” he said, “for honor. And then I had all the glory of success. I was trained, you see, to have a heart of flint, to be ruthlessly opportunistic and selfish in the accomplishment of my duties. I sacrificed my brother, and then I brought him home and created mayhem here with the lives and sensibilities of the rest of my family. I behaved badly that summer, Lauren. Shamefully. It is a good thing you have insisted upon a temporary betrothal. I would not be a good lifelong bargain. I amputated myself, you see, in exchange for becoming a glorious hero. There is nothing of me left.” He laughed softly. “Nothing but honor.”
“He is alive,” she said. His sensible, matter-of-fact Lauren. “Kit, he is alive.”
“He breathes.” He spoke harshly. “He is not alive, Lauren. He will never be that again. He is my father’s steward here, for God’s sake. He plans to accept the salaried position of steward on one of Bewcastle’s properties. You do not understand, of course, the dreadful nature of such a fate. How could you? Sydnam was an artist. No, is—he is an artist. His landscape paintings were the most extraordinary canvases I have ever seen. There was craftsmanship there and an eye for color and atmosphere and detail and . . . Ah, how can an ordinary mortal like me describe the—the soul that was there? His painting breathed with what even a layman like me could sense was the very meaning of the scene he depicted. He was a gentle man and a dreamer and a visionary and . . . And now he is serving a life sentence inside the prison of a ruined body, capable of nothing loftier than being someone’s steward.”
“Kit,” she said, “you must not do this to yourself, dear. It was war. And you did what was right. You made the right decision. You did your duty. It was what you had to do.”
“How could it be right?” he cried. “When I see him so maimed and scarred, when I see my sweet-natured Syd shut up deep inside himself, rejecting my every overture of sympathy, hating me, how can I believe that what I did was right?”
“It just was,” she said. “Some things have no neat explanation, Kit. Life is not like that, unfortunately. One can spend all of one’s life doing the right things and going unrewarded in the end. One can find oneself forced into making a choice between two courses that seem equally right but only one can be chosen. You made the right choice.”
A part of him knew with the utmost certainty that if he had the choice to make over again he would take the same course—and suffer the same hell of remorse and guilt afterward.
“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much/Loved I not honor more,’ ” he said quietly. “Who wrote those lines? Do you know?”
“Richard Lovelace, I believe,” she said. “One of the Cavalier poets.”
“Never believe it,” he said. “It is a lie. Nothing should come before love.”
“If you had made the other choice,” she said after a short silence filled with the howling of the wind and the lashing of the rain, “and if hundreds, perhaps thousands, had suffered as a result, Kit, you would never have forgiven yourself.”
He laughed softly. “I would not have needed to. I would be dead.”
“You did your duty,” she said softly. “It is all any of us can do, Kit.”
He kept his eyes closed and his forehead pressed to his fist. He allowed her words to envelop him, to soothe him, to comfort him, very much—for the moment at least—like absolution.
For the past several minutes Lauren had been feeling very much as if she were going to faint. She had always tried to avoid any sight or mention of violence, believing that ladies should have no dealings with such sordid realities. It had never been particularly difficult to do. Most gentlemen seemed to hold the same belief. She could remember an occasion when Lily, newly come to Newbury, had launched eagerly into a conversation about the wars—she had grown up in the train of the armies, first in India, then in the Peninsula, as the supposed daughter of an infantry sergeant. Lauren, consumed by secret hatred at the time, had tried to appease her conscience by instructing Lily in what would be expected of her as the Countess of Kilbourne. She could recall advising Lily that a lady did not speak of the wars or listen to any conversation about them.
She had been so very righteous in those days, so convinced that she was right. So much the perfect lady. So unbearably prim.
But now she could not shake from her mind the horrifying images of torture that Kit had conjured up, though he had given no details. Or the image of the regimental surgeon plying his trade, saw in hand, amputating a man’s arm. She could almost smell the blood.
At one point she had considered trying to change the subject, as she had done so successfully last night. But the two occasions, so similar on the surface, were in fact entirely different. Tonight the unfortunate incident in the drawing room with Sydnam Butler had ripped away everything he had put there to cover the gaping wound of his deepest agony. Tonight it would have been cruel, unthinkable, unpardonable, to have tried to stop him. Tonight he had needed to unburden his conscience more, perhaps, than he had needed anything else in his life before.
And so she had sat straight and still on the wide velvet bench, her feet neatly side by side on the floor, her hands clasping the ends of her shawl, determinedly clinging to consciousness, fighting the ringing in her ears, the coldness in her head. The fact that she was a delicately, correctly nurtured lady was of no significance. She had resisted the urge to shift the focus of her hearing to the wind and the rain outside. She had listened carefully to every single word.
She had not cringed or allowed herself to faint. She knew what it felt like to lock up everything that was most painful inside oneself, not sharing one’s hurt even with one’s dearest friend. She knew all about pain and loneliness and even despair. Perhaps that was why he had chosen her as his audience, even if it had not been a conscious choice. Perhaps he simply recognized in her a fellow sufferer.
There was no doubt that he had done what was right. She had told him that, and of course he must know it for himself. But she realized too that knowing it would not really ease his pain. She knew he would never forgive himself for not doing the wrong thing. It was pointless to add words to words. She sat quietly and waited, giving him all the time he needed. She was glad he had locked the gallery door behind them. There was no danger of anyone rushing in before he was ready to face the world again.
After a while, when she sensed somehow that the time was right, she got to her feet without speaking and closed the distance between them. She set her arms about his waist from behind and rested her cheek against his shoulder, intent upon giving him all the comfort of her physical presence, for what it was worth. She felt him inhale slowly and deeply. She both felt and heard the breath shudder out of him. And then he turned and caught her to him, crushing her against him with arms that felt like iron bands. She felt all the breath rush out of her, but it did not occur to her to feel alarm or to struggle to be free. He needed her.