The Marriage Wager (15 page)

This was why he locked the door, she realized. “No,” she said again. When she pushed him this time, he yielded slowly and lay down, letting her pull the covers around him. “Tell me about the dream,” she said.

“No.”

“It might help,” she argued.

“Nothing can help the dead,” he replied sharply.

“Not them,” she agreed. “You.”

He turned his head away.

“Were you fighting?” Emma prompted.

He remained stonily silent.

“Was it one of the battles you—”

“All of the battles are over,” he said harshly. “We will not speak of this.”

“It seems they are not all over,” she pointed out, referring to the dream.

He said nothing.

“Did you lose so many friends?” she ventured, remembering what he had said to her once.

“Yes.” The word was clipped, almost as if he was angry with her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Another shudder went through him. He pulled further away from her. “You must go to your own bed,” he repeated.

“No,” said Emma.

For the first time in months, Colin was afraid. He was afraid the horrors would spill out of him against his will and touch this woman and this place which should never be sullied by such things. “Then I will go,” he said, and started to throw back the covers.

“Please don’t leave me,” said Emma.

The plea went through him like the sabers he had been dreaming of. “You don’t understand,” he cried. “I must.”

“I don’t want to be here alone right now. Please.”

His fists clenched involuntarily. He wanted desperately to protect her. And he felt that he could only do so by leaving her. Yet she asked him to stay and give comfort he did not possess. “You don’t understand,” he burst out again, against his will. “I have lost every close friend. Men I loved like brothers. Toward the end, I stopped having friends. I couldn’t stand to see them die.”

“Oh, Colin.” Her voice choked with tears.

Something about that muffled sound shook him so deeply that the images still burning in his brain tumbled out. Before he could stop himself, he was telling Emma about Teddy and Jack and Colonel Brown, about the officers and men in his company, the bonds that formed in a regiment through the horrors of battle and the lighter intervals in between. He couldn’t stop himself. He described the mud and the laughter, the boredom and the fear, the wearisome years of life in camp that drained away everyday emotions and left a man empty.

Emma listened and tried to understand both the words and what might lie behind them. This was the source of his melancholy, she thought. This was the thing that set him apart. She was moved to tears more than once, but she blinked them back, not wanting to distract him and stop the flow of confidences. When at last he fell silent, staring at the ceiling, his muscles limp, she put a hand on his bare shoulder in comfort.

“You’re freezing,” he exclaimed. “You’ve been sitting there in nothing but a nightgown.” Suddenly, he was aware of the thin cotton of this garment, and of the way it revealed rather than concealed the luscious curves and hollows of her body.

“I’ll get under the covers,” she said, and did so before he could protest. Their bodies touched at hip and shoulder. Desire seared through Colin like violence, pulsing through his body, making his hands shake with its intensity. He wanted to turn and crush her beneath him, drown every jumbled thought and feeling in a fierce torrent of sensation.

Abruptly, he shifted away from her. He couldn’t touch her now. If he had frightened her somehow before, the way he was feeling now, the strength of his need, would terrify her. Silently, he struggled for control.

Predawn light was filtering through the closed curtains. The atmosphere seemed gray and almost tangible. A current of cool, brisk salt air wandered in, brushing their faces with dampness. Outside, the rush of the waves was muted by mist.

“My God,” said Colin quietly. “What have I done? I’ve never spoken to anyone of these things. And now I’ve forced them on you, who have never seen the least violence—”

“I’ve seen men brawling at the gaming tables,” Emma interrupted. “And drawing knives on one another in the streets.”

“Not the same.”

“No. I know that. But it is all to the good.”

Colin turned to look at her. Her face was very close. “Emma,” he began.

“Don’t you see? Because I have never witnessed a battle or lived in a camp, I don’t have the memories that haunt you. They don’t have the same power over me.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I had no right to describe such horrors to you.”

“Hearing about them is nothing to living through them,” she answered evenly. “And it is not a matter of rights.”

At a loss for words, he stared at a strand of her hair that had strayed across the pillows. She didn’t look frightened or repulsed. He couldn’t understand it. She was a woman, with all of a woman’s soft graces. She had intelligence, imagination, sensitivity—all the traits that had become a curse to him as the war went on and its dreadful progress was engraved in his soul. Where did she get her strength?

“We made a bargain, remember?” said Emma, as if reading his thoughts. “I am not one of those London chits. I know what it is to endure. You don’t have to shield me from hard truths.”

As she spoke, a great surge of emotion went through him. He wanted to protect her from any trace of unhappiness, he realized. And yet it was too late. Like his comrades in war, she had already been subjected to far more than she deserved. It was all a muddle, he thought. He didn’t know what he was feeling among all the conflicting currents pulling him this way and that. “It is too much of a burden,” he murmured, wondering if he had done right to marry her. He would not have shared these dark things with one of those London chits. And what right had he to reveal them to anyone? When he had offered her comradeship, he had not imagined anything like this.

The terrible images he had planted in her consciousness lingered as Emma wondered whether the sadness would ever leave him. How could it after what he had seen and done? She had discovered his inner darkness, she thought; as she’d feared, she had uncovered the hidden depths of his nature. And they had turned out to be so different from Edward’s. Instead of contemptible weakness, Colin had strength. The demons that tormented him were lost friendships and the privations of war, not risk and greed and gratification of his own obsession. She had been of no help whatever to Edward, Emma thought. And after a while, she had stopped trying, or caring. The pain of that failure remained, and she didn’t know if she dared take such a risk again. And yet, she thought—comradeship, fellow feeling, endurance of hardship. These were the words Colin had used, and these were things she understood. Perhaps she still had something to offer after all, she decided, as they lay side by side, each wrestling alone with the shadows of the past.

***

When Emma woke at nine, she was in her own bed, and alone. Colin must have carried her here, she thought as she rose and pulled on her dressing gown. She walked quietly to his room, but it was empty. Returning to her own, she moved about the large square bedchamber, examining her new home in the light that crept in through gaps in the worn curtains. The walls were papered in a floral pattern that had long since faded to an indistinguishable wash of pinks and greens. The furniture was old as well, in the fashion of fifty years ago. The carpet was good, but the draperies had faded in the sun and no longer matched it. Emma went to a window and peered out. Her breath caught in a gasp. The ocean stretched before her, a huge blue expanse all the way to the horizon, glittering in the sun. Directly below was a narrow band of garden, and then a cliff dropping vertically to foaming waves and outcroppings of gray stone in the wild water. It was a dramatic and incredibly beautiful landscape.

“I’m amazed every time I see it again,” said Colin. She turned to find him standing, already fully dressed, in the outer doorway. When he smiled at her, Emma could see no trace of his nightmare in his face.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

His face showed mild surprise. “Perfectly,” he responded, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the night—or ever. He went and pulled the curtains open, first on the window she had been looking out, then on the others. Light flooded the room. “It is beautiful,” he said, gazing out over the water.

It was the old Colin back again, Emma saw. And they were to resume their light cordial manner, pretending that the nightmares did not exist, that no difficulties or misunderstandings or troubles of any kind existed. She felt a pang of keen disappointment, an impulse to say something irrevocable and shake him out of his urbane placidity. But when he turned to look at her, she remembered the pain in his voice last night, and she found she couldn’t quite risk the words. “It’s gorgeous,” she replied lightly instead. She opened one of the casements and leaned out, taking in a great gulp of the sea air. “It’s so warm,” she exclaimed.

“Have a care.” Still smiling, he joined her at the window. “If you fall, everyone is sure to say I pushed you, as one of my ancestors is rumored to have done.”

“Pushed his wife out the window?” she echoed.

“And married a neighbor’s daughter only a few weeks after,” added Colin.

“The blackguard,” exclaimed Emma. “
I
would have come back as a ghost and driven the new bride shrieking from the house.”

“Alas.” His eyes twinkling, Colin shook his head. “She was apparently made of very stern stuff. She did not frighten easily.”

“You mean you do have a ghost?” cried Emma. “Of the poor wife?”

“So they claim. I have never seen her.”

“I’ll find her,” Emma declared.

“Before you go looking, I should tell you that she was said to have locked up her daughter when she reached the age of fifteen, out of jealousy for her youth and beauty. The poor girl had nearly pined away before her father took matters in hand and made use of the window.”

“Nonsense,” said Emma. “I expect her husband just said that to justify himself. I suppose his second wife was quite young and beautiful?”

He cocked a dark eyebrow at her. “Only a year older than his long-suffering daughter.”

“There, you see?”

“I see that you are not easily duped,” he replied humorously.

“Indeed. You will have to think of a far better story than that if you wish to deceive me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind should I ever wish to change wives.”

“Do, my lord.” Emma was laughing by this time. “And also be warned that
I
would choose to haunt
you
.”

“How fortunate, then, that I have no such plans,” he said.

“Are there any other disreputable family members I should know about?” she asked.

“Oh, any number. Our fortunes rise from a doubtful character they say was an assassin for William, Duke of Normandy, before he came to these shores.”

“Did he build this house?” she wondered.

“No, no. That was much later, when the crown needed someone to fight off pirates in the Irish Sea. The king chose the nobleman who most resembled the enemy and granted him an estate just here.”

“And was he successful?” asked Emma.

“Thoroughly. The pirates were terrified of him. So were his wife and children, by all accounts.”

“There appears to be a sinister trend toward tyranny among the Wareham men. I see that I have taken a great risk in marrying you, my lord.”

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Who knows when the tendencies of my family will surface and goad me to some desperate act?”

“I’ll keep a sharp eye out,” Emma assured him. “Will you show me the rest of the house? Where was your room when you were young?”

“At the other end. My mother did not care for our noise.”

“Come and show me,” she urged again.

He looked around her bedchamber. “The place is sadly out of repair, Emma. Mother never cared to be here, and since I joined up, I have only made a few flying visits.” He frowned at the threadbare draperies. “I have not spent much thought or money on the house, and I see that it shows. It is hardly fit for a new bride.”

“Well, then, it’s time you looked over it and made plans for repairs,” declared Emma. “And you may as well know that I have already set my heart on new wallpaper for this room. I hope you are not too attached to this pink.”

He examined it more closely. “Mother always said it was the color of a diseased tongue,” he told her.

“Why didn’t she replace it, then?” said Emma, torn between laughter and indignation.

“She only cared about getting away to London,” he replied absently. “We might do some refurbishing, I think.”

“Oh, it is decided. And after the new wallpaper, I shall install some sturdy bars on these windows.”

He turned to look at her, startled. Then he threw back his head and began to laugh.

The valet Reddings, who was tidying the adjoining dressing room, cocked his head like a hound on a strong scent. It had been so long since he had heard that sound that for a moment, he wasn’t sure. Then he relaxed. It really was his master’s laughter, which he had feared was gone forever. Deeply gratified, Reddings allowed himself a small smile.

***

Emma dressed, and then she and Colin made a rapid progress through the closed and muffled rooms of Trevallan. Everywhere, she threw back decaying draperies and let the sun in, suggesting new paint and cloth to brighten the dark corners. “Were you often here as a boy?” she asked when they stood in the third floor bedchamber that had been his.

“Most summers,” he replied. “And whenever I could manage it on holidays. It was always a sore spot for my parents. My father would have spent a good deal of the year here, perhaps going to London only for the height of the Season. But my mother found the place deadly dull.”

“She would,” muttered Emma to herself.

“What?”

“Nothing. It is lovely here in summer.”

“It was paradise for a boy.” He looked out at the ocean, his eyes faraway.

“I think
we
should come here for summers,” said Emma. “And other times as well.”