Trial by Desire (34 page)

Ned knew all her weaknesses, her biggest fears. He’d stood straight when her legs buckled. He’d whispered strength when she most needed to hear it. But the one thing he hadn’t done was let her give strength to him in return.

He had told Louisa once to think of what she wanted. Kate knew what she would say if he asked her that same question now. She wanted
him.
She wanted him to believe that she was as strong as he’d once told her she was. She wanted his trust. She wanted his love. She wanted to nurture her hopes for her marriage without fear that he might hurt her again.

The world had forced her into practicality enough. She didn’t want to be practical about her husband.

Kate squared her shoulders and went to find him. As she’d suspected, the physician had set and splinted his leg. The door to his room was open a crack, and from the sound of silence within, he was alone once more. She pushed it wide and stepped through.

He’d woken at some point. He must not have heard her enter, though, because he did not turn to her.

He sat on the bed, his leg stretched out in front of him. He looked as if he chose to sit there not because he was an invalid, but as a matter of prerogative. He might have been presiding over a meeting, the way he sat, ramrod straight. Even now, with nobody watching, he did not let a hint of weakness show. Kate felt suddenly weary on his behalf.

But instead of letting the emotion show, she simply tapped on the wall beside her. He looked up, and now that she was peering into his eyes, she could see the hints of emotion. There was that slight widening of his eyes when he saw her. His lips compressed, not in anger, but in pain, as he shifted his legs as if he were going to—

“Ned,” Kate said in as oppressive a tone of voice as she could manage, “you are not going to stand up to greet me. That would be
extremely
foolish.”

He paused, on the verge of swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “Um,” he replied.

She sighed. “And let me guess. You refused all laudanum.”

As he was gritting his teeth in pain, instead of smiling
in the dreamy wonder the drug would provide, she didn’t need him to answer.

“It’s cold in here,” she said. “Do you want me to—”

“No.”

Oh, yes. That. She always managed to forget it.

“On the physician’s orders, you’ll be confined to crutches for months. You might as well be comfortable. Can I bring you…some tea? A book?”

He glanced at her once more. “No.”

“Can I sit with you, then, and keep you company? Isn’t there something I can do for you?”

He smiled. “Nothing, Kate. No need to bother yourself.”

Kate stepped toward him. He was smiling, but his words were as much a betrayal as ever. When he’d been half dead on his feet, he’d insisted he didn’t need any help. Some of that, no doubt, had been a masculine, irrational response to overwhelming pain. But now that he was himself again, he was doing the same. He was just doing it more politely.

“Ned, you’re going to be limited for weeks. Months, perhaps. You might as well let me care for you, just a little.”

He didn’t say anything. His shoulders stiffened, though, and he leaned forward just an inch. “You
were
planning on staying in bed today, weren’t you?”

Still no response. No
verbal
response, that was, and the lack of meek assent on his part was as a denial. She waited until he finally looked up at her.

“But there’s Harcroft,” he said.

Just those words, and she understood what he meant. If she let herself think of what Harcroft could do, her own skin crawled.

“If I can stop him,” he said quietly, “I can do
any thing.
”

“But you can’t,” Kate said quietly. She sat in the chair by his bedside and reached for his hand. “You
can’t
do anything you wish. You certainly can’t do everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can respect you, even if your bones knit at a human pace. I can trust you even if you can’t get out of bed to catch me.”

He turned his palm down before she could take his hand. “That’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not that I believe I must heal unnaturally quickly. It’s that… It’s that…”

“It’s that you don’t want me to help you.”

His head shot up at that, and a flare entered his eyes. “I don’t
need
help.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t ever intend to be a burden on you, Kate.”

“You’re not a burden, Ned.” She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder.

He looked away for a second. “Do you want to know why I don’t accept help? Why I can’t accept your charity, however kindly you mean it? It’s the same reason I sleep in the cold. Why I pitch hay, instead of having servants do it for me. It’s because I don’t dare allow myself common weaknesses.”

“I don’t want you to be weak. I just want—”

“You want to wrap me up in cotton batting, so I can’t
get hurt. Do you want to know what happened in China, Kate?”

“I thought—”

“Do you want to know what
really
happened in China, after they pulled me out of the privy? I nearly killed myself.”

“An accident—”

“No. When I confronted Captain Adams in China, I wasn’t just desperate. I was fighting for every last scrap of determination that I could find, but weighted down by a black despair.”

She stared at him.

He spoke quietly. “You don’t know what I mean, when I speak of black despair. You think that is just hyperbole. After Captain Adams tossed me into the swamp, the feeling only intensified. I washed three times. It didn’t help. I couldn’t get the stink from my mind, no matter how raw I rubbed my skin.”

Ned was staring at a spot on the wall, his hands gripped on his knees. “He’d won. And there was no escaping the fact that he was right—that I was a useless excuse for a man, sent off because nobody at home needed me any longer.”

“You know that’s not true.”

He glanced at her once, and then looked away. “At first, I thought only to get myself to water. As if I could become clean again by proximity. And so I found a dinghy and rowed out into the ocean.” He sighed. “Funny how I felt so trapped, with nothing about me.”

“Accidents happen at sea.” Kate took another step toward him, reached out her hand. But he sent her another
quelling look, and her fingers curled up. “You were upset. You can’t blame yourself.”

“Don’t run from it, Kate.” His voice was dark, quiet. It echoed in the room. “You want me to trust you? You want to understand what I mean when I talk of darkness? Then listen to this. I had a pistol with me. And I held it to my temple.”

She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t even swallow the gasp of horror that escaped her.

“I was this close to pulling the trigger—and it wasn’t hope or comfort or help from anyone else that drew me back. It was simply that when faced with the stark choice between life and death, I discovered that I wanted to live.
Truly
live, not just stumble through life from point to point, waiting to be plunged into darkness again. So don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I survived.”

She grappled for words. “I don’t think you’re weak because you had a lapse—”

His eyes blazed. “No. I’m not. I’m here because I made myself
strong.
Because I knew if I intended to go on, I had to stop feeling as if I was a burden to everyone around me. If you want to know who I am, if you want to understand why I do what I do, then you need to comprehend that some part of me has never left that boat. And for me, the choice of whether to live the life I want is as simple as believing that I
can
do this all, without ever being a burden on anyone again.”

“It’s not
pity
when I offer to make you comfortable. It’s not an apology if I hurt for you when you tell me you’ve suffered. You aren’t weak if you let me care for you.”

“No,” he said in a clipped tone. “You’re quite right. It’s
none of those things. But it is also not something I allow myself.”

And on those words he turned away. It wounded her, that dismissal. Strength, her husband could discuss. But for all that he’d promised to be worthy of
her
trust, he’d never once made a covenant to trust Kate in return.

She’d run up against the rock wall of this need of his—this need to be strong, no matter how much it hurt her—often enough that she knew how immovable it was. All she could do was bruise herself slamming against it, and her spirit ached enough as it was. And now she’d managed to uncover the
why
of it. The cold, hard truth that made him who he was. She knew enough to know that he
wouldn’t
change.

It would have been too simple to say she was hurt by the knowledge. “Hurt” sounded like a mere pain in her mind, a onetime twinge that flared up and would ebb away. What she felt was not so sharp as pain, but much more pervasive. Every inch of her skin ached to lean close to him, to pull his head toward her and smooth his brow. Every fiber of her being wanted to give him comfort, to tell him that he was strong, that he didn’t need to
do
this to himself. It wasn’t hurt she felt. It was worse. It was all the hopes that she’d nourished without evidence all these years turning to disappointment inside her.

She stepped forward until she stood over him. Ever since he returned, he’d been towering over her. Now, trapped on the bed as he was, she loomed over him. The darkness of her shadow, cast in the afternoon light, crossed his face as she stepped forward.

She wanted to yell at him. She wanted to grab him by
the shoulders. If he hadn’t broken his leg, she might even have done it.

It wouldn’t have done any good.

“I don’t mean to hurt you,” he said.

No. He never had. “Of course not,” she replied as calmly as she could manage. “You just need to…to protect yourself first. I do understand, Ned.”

She just wished she didn’t. She shut her eyes to stave off the salt prickle of tears. She wished she were impractical enough to threaten to run away. But this was what marriage meant: that even though she’d entered into another pretense with him, she would stay. She would learn to stop asking to become a part of his life. She would pretend that his refusal to trust her didn’t hurt. It was another disguise, one as cloying as the one he’d penetrated. And one a thousand times more painful. Because in
this
masquerade, she had to pretend that his distance didn’t hurt her. Even though it would, every single day.

He reached out and touched her, even now giving her strength that he would not accept in return.

She closed her eyes and let the feeling of loss run through her. His fingers were still on her elbow, strong and warm and steady. That steadiness ached now, and that gentle circling of his fingers against her seemed to sting some deep place inside of her.

Before the hurt could build up, she took her arm gently from his grasp and left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

F
AT FLAKES OF EARLY SNOW
were falling around the stores on Bond Street, but once they hit the ground, they melted into the slushy pavement. Kate remembered the little shop all too well; she’d visited it once, in that hectic flurry that followed her wedding. The night rail she’d purchased there, filmy and gauzy and full of hope, now sat in a chest of drawers in her room. She had used it only the once, a mere handful of days ago. It hadn’t worked as she’d intended it. And now it seemed a token of the dreams she’d once possessed: translucent and insubstantial. It wouldn’t have survived even a good hard rain.

The shop had placed bolts of fabric in the narrow window to advertise its wares. Behind the spread of silks and satins, some cheaper goods were laid out for the less privileged customers—thick, serviceable cottons and warm wools in sober colors. But the front of the display was taken up with colorful bolts of watered silk, satin, creamy muslin and fine striped cambric. Ribbons and lace and a welter of buttons were laid out in an eye-catching formation.

Kate’s eye was not caught by any of them. She brushed off the snow that had collected on her shoulders. In this weather, looking at all that filmy fabric just made her feel cold.

Before Ned had come back to England, she’d believed the feelings she’d harbored about him would simply dissipate over time. Now she wished they could. It was the marriages that
could
blow away that she envied. As if the people mired in them might simply close their eyes and puff and, like a dandelion, their wishes would be carried on the wind.

This thinking was rather too maudlin for Kate. She’d intended to go shopping; she was a duke’s daughter, and a wealthy gentleman’s wife. Everyone who was anyone—who’d read the gossip columns that were even now being distributed by dirty-faced postboys—would be watching her now. She was
shopping,
after all. She and Louisa would be famous for that for years.

And while she might wish things were different with Ned… Well. There was no use sobbing over what could not be. And so shopping she would go. Anywhere, that is, but here. She had no need for any more night rails.

Kate had just tipped up her nose and was on the verge of stalking past, in search of a really, truly incredible bonnet, when she felt something pull at her. She looked in the window of the shop more closely, at one of the bolts that her eyes had passed over before.

The fabric was not silky. It was not sheer. It was not the sort of fabric that a lady would use for a night rail. It was the sort of thing that a servant might order. Serviceable. Practical.
Warm.

It had been a mistake to overlook that one. Hope tugged at her still, faint but unmistakable.

It wasn’t time for boots or bonnets.

No, she needed to purchase a night rail, after all.

T
HAT EVENING
N
ED LAY IN BED
, the cold of the room swirling around him. The predicament before him was impossible. For the moment Louisa was safe, but her husband still had a legal right to her. There would come a time when Harcroft might stand in court and simply demand that his wife be returned to him. They might be able to refuse, on grounds of cruelty, but no court in England would let Louisa keep her child.