"You"re unwell," she said in a raw voice, wrapping her arms around herself in an attempt to generate some warmth.
"No, just drunk and heartsick." He made a sudden savage gesture with one gloved hand. "For the love of Christ, Charis, go back to bed."
"No," she said stubbornly, tightening her arms to hide her shaking.
"Not twelve hours ago, you promised to obey me."
"And you promised to love me," she snapped, then immediately regretted the words.
His face tautened with pain that made her flinch. He looked terrible. His clothes were torn and streaked with dirt. A graze marked his cheekbone, and blood stained the open collar of his shirt.
The elegant man she"d married was only a memory. He"d lost his neckcloth, his gloves were filthy, and his jaw was dark with bristle. Now she was closer, the reek of alcohol was unmistakable.
Worst by far was the expression in his eyes as he stared at her. He looked haggard and ill and as if he wished he were dead.
Still, his voice deepened into kindness. "Go back to bed, Charis. Everything will look better in the morning."
It was the facile, meaningless promise one offered a child. There are no monsters under the bed. Let me kiss it better. There will be a happily ever after.
Even though she quaked with nerves, her tone was firm. "No, everything won"t. You need to tell me the truth, Gideon. I"m your wife. I deserve to know what"s wrong." She paused, then made herself push on. She was tired of fighting imaginary horrors. The truth couldn"t be worse than the phantoms in her mind. "Are you sick because...because of what you did with those women in India?"
He recoiled. For a horrible moment, she wondered if her guess was accurate.
"Venereal disease, you mean?" He shook his head. "No, I"m clean. In fact, my body is in perfect working order. In every way."
The emphasis struck her as odd. "What do you...?" Then she realized what he meant. "Oh."
"What"s the point of lying? Close confines will soon make my condition plain." The words slurred slightly with drink as his control wavered. She doubted she"d get this much frankness out of him if he wasn"t half-seas over. His deep voice vibrated with feeling. "I ache with desire for you."
The candle flame burned unflickering. Silence fell. Lengthened.
A coal exploded in the grate, snapping the tension. Charis"s paralyzed brain began to work again. And harsh reality shone a stark light on his lie. How could she think him kind? He was crueler by far than her stepbrothers. They couldn"t hurt her heart. Gideon could.
"Don"t mock me," she said sharply, rubbing her arms.
"If there"s a joke, it"s on me." Despair dripped from every word. His eyes sharpened on her. Abruptly he stood and ripped his coat off. "You"re cold. At least put this on."
"Thank you." Her frozen hands took the garment. When she pulled it on, warmth and the subtle lemon scent of Gideon filled her senses. It was almost like he touched her. "You don"t want me. You jump ten feet if I come near you."
He gave a short, unamused laugh as he dropped into his chair. He leaned his head back and studied the shadowy ceiling. "That"s the vilest element of my affliction, dear wife. I can want to the point of insanity, but I can never have. A punishment worthy of a d.a.m.ned Greek myth."
She shook her head, ignoring the lingering twinges of headache. Perhaps the champagne had damaged her mind in some fundamental way. "You said you weren"t sick."
"I said my body worked fine. The trouble, my love, is in my head. I should have warned you before you tied yourself to me for life. Your husband is possessed by devils."
My love? For a moment, the world faded to nothing. Had she imagined that endearment? Surely she had. She wasn"t his love. He could hardly bear sharing the same room as her.
She drew the scrambled remnants of her concentration together and addressed the immediate issue. "You"re not mad," she said shakily. She believed that to her bones.
He clutched at the wooden arms of his chair as if they offered his only link to reality. "If I"m not mad already, our marriage will be the end of me."
What was he telling her? Her dazed mind struggled to sift fact from fantasy. She didn"t understand what troubled him or what she could do to help. But it was astonishingly clear that what she"d always believed una.s.sailable truth was categorically false.
"You want me?" she asked in dawning wonder.
His lips twisted in another of those grim smiles, and at last he looked at her. "Indubitably."
Letting her arms fall to her sides, she stepped nearer. "Surely that means..."
He surged to his feet and lurched toward the wall behind him. "d.a.m.n it, Charis, don"t touch me."
He pressed against the wall. She heard the uneven rattle of his breath. She stopped and frowned. "I can"t touch you, yet you say you...want me."
"I told you it was insane."
All of a sudden, a whole range of memories came into focus and made sense in a way they never had. If anything about this bizarre situation made sense. She spoke slowly. "You can"t touch anyone. That"s why you got sick after Portsmouth. All those people."
He was as tense as if she attacked him with a rapier instead of words. She expected him to lie or refuse to answer. But he gave an abrupt nod. "Yes."
She retreated carefully as if she tried to calm a wild animal. With one unsteady hand, she felt behind her until she gripped the back of a chair. "I won"t come near you."
"Thank you," he said quietly, a world of relief in the words.
She kept her voice even, as if indeed he were an animal caught in a gamekeeper"s trap. "Won"t you sit down?"
He hesitated, then returned to his chair with jerky movements. In the feeble light, he looked tired but composed. Slowly she sank into the chair she held, curling her cold toes under her.
"Were you always like this?" She thought and answered her own question. "No, you can"t have been. You"ve had lovers."
"Charis..."
Twining her hands together in her lap, she raised her chin. Her courage faltered, but she steeled herself. She was guiltily aware she took unfair advantage of his weariness, his inebriation, his wretchedness. But she had to seize her chance.
She forced out the question she"d always been afraid to ask. "What happened in Rangapindhi?"
Thirteen.
Even in the dimness, Charis saw the blood drain from Gideon"s face. His eyes became opaque, as if he stared at gruesome specters visible only to him. He gripped the chair arms like a drowning sailor s.n.a.t.c.hed at driftwood to keep himself afloat.
Anyone with a sc.r.a.p of sympathy would relent. Tell him he was welcome to his secrets.
She remained silent and waited.
When she"d given up hope of an answer, he sucked in a rasping breath and focused on her. "My tutor at Cambridge recommended me to the East India Company."
"Your knack with languages." She kept her voice carefully neutral.
"Yes. And I was a rider and a cricketer and a marksman and a swordsman. The Company always wanted men with my peculiar skills."
As if the Company found many recruits with such talents, Charis thought, noting again his lack of conceit in speaking of his abilities. She wasn"t surprised he"d been both out-standing scholar and outstanding sportsman. From the first, she"d recognized how remarkable he was. The tragedy was he could do so much out of the ordinary, yet something as simple and essential as sharing the touch of a human hand was denied him. Her belly cramped with a feeling more profound than pity.
"I was ripe for adventure, in need of a career, eager to find an outlet for my energies." His voice was husky but steady. Only his face, drawn and white, indicated the ordeal he found this recounting. "I set out to spread the light of European civilization to a benighted people."
"But it wasn"t like that?" She hardly needed to ask. His tone reeked of shattered illusions.
"No. I encountered a sophisticated, exotic world beyond my wildest imaginings."
He"d told her he worked in native liaison, but that meant nothing to her. "So were you an administrator?"
Bleakness etched his expression. "Nothing so admirable, Charis. I was a spy."
Shock pinned her in her chair. So many elements that perplexed her about him came together at last. His cleverness and confidence against Hubert and Felix. His handiness in a street brawl. His secretiveness. His shame.
When she didn"t speak, he went on, still in that calm voice so at odds with the torment in his black eyes. "I"m naturally swarthy, and my skin tans in the sun. I became Ahmal, a Muslim scribe. A scribe learns a kingdom"s secrets, and few question his movements."
She clutched her hands together so tightly they hurt. It became near impossible to maintain her mask of composure. "It must have been difficult living a lie."
"Dirty, lonely, difficult." Still, he gazed at some far-off landscape she couldn"t see. "But I thought I worked for the greater good against forces of barbarism. At least at first. In the end, I believed my masters" greed the greatest barbarism, far worse than anything I encountered among the natives." He paused, and his hands flexed convulsively on the chair arms. "Then, along with two of my colleagues, I was betrayed."
Finally, his unearthly self-command fragmented. The roughening of his voice told her he approached the worst part of his story. She tensed, and dread coalesced into a cold ma.s.s in her stomach. She already knew she"d loathe hearing what he told her.
"It was my last a.s.signment." With every word, his tone became more austere. "The Nawab of Rangapindhi plotted to invade a neighboring kingdom, whose ruler favored the British. My superiors were desperate to learn what happened in Rangapindhi. But the Nawab was cunning and on his guard-worse, he had spies in the Company."
"This is a world I can hardly imagine," Charis said softly, forcing the words past her apprehension.
"For most of my adult life, it was my world, familiar as my own face in the mirror."
"But always dangerous."
"If you forgot that, you were as good as dead." Suddenly restless, he swung to his feet and crossed to stoke the fire with suppressed violence. The flames cast unforgiving light on the taut lines bracketing his mouth.
"I wasn"t supposed to go to Rangapindhi." He set the poker down with exaggerated care, and his voice was flat with control. "I"d handed in my resignation and booked pa.s.sage to England. But my masters wanted their best men, and I let myself be persuaded. Three of us-Charles Parsons, Robert Gerard, and I-went into Rangapindhi." The silence was longer this time and charged with Gideon"s grief and anger. "Only I came out alive."
"What happened?" His expression told her it had been terrible beyond description.
"Gerard was careless. He"d been in the field ten years. Too long. He was a good, courageous man. But even the best make mistakes when pressure goes on too long."
She noted but didn"t comment that he was ready to forgive a failing in another that he refused to forgive in himself. He ran an unsteady hand through his hair, and his body sagged with what she read as defeat. He was tired and hurt, and she had no right to harangue him. But if she didn"t catch him now, when he was vulnerable, he"d retreat behind his formidable defenses.
He sighed heavily. "d.a.m.n it, I"ve had too much to drink."
She rose on trembling legs, battling a dizzying mixture of fear and overwhelming love. "Gideon, for pity"s sake, tell me."
Standing in the center of the shadowy room, his wife was as beautiful as a carved alabaster angel in a cathedral. And just as unrelenting.
Charis"s unwavering gaze held such trust, such love. Both pierced him with sorrow. Gideon couldn"t rely on the love, and he didn"t deserve the trust.
He shut his eyes and fought for strength to deny her. Everything between them would change once she knew what had happened in India. He couldn"t burden her with the horrors of his past. He couldn"t enmesh her in the chaos of his life.
But simmering guilt and too much liquor played h.e.l.l with his principles.
Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and took a step closer. "The Nawab had us chained and dragged into his audience hall. I"d only seen him from a distance before. They called him the Elephant of Rajasthan. Fat rolled off him in monstrous folds. He wore ropes of pearls as big as pigeon eggs. They must have weighed a ton."
"He knew you were British in spite of your disguise?"
The memory made the skin on the back of his neck crawl, and his hands fist at his sides. "He had us stripped in front of his court."
He saw she didn"t understand. Sometimes he forgot how little his countrymen knew of the Subcontinent. "We posed as Muslims, but none of us were circ.u.mcised."
Sweet pink flooded her cheeks, visible even in the flickering candlelight. "Oh."
"I"m surprised you know what I mean."
"I had the run of my father"s library. He had some unusual books." She paused. "And anyway, it"s in the Bible."
Again, he realized this woman was considerably more mysterious than anything he"d encountered in India.
"We provided an evening"s diversion for the court." Gideon spoke quickly, hoping that would ease the telling. It didn"t. "We were whipped."
He bit down hard, trying not to remember the cutting agony of the lash, the strangled groans and screams from Gerard and Parsons.
"He meant to humiliate you." Charis"s composure was surprising, impressive, but he noticed the tremor in the hand she curled around the back of her chair.
"Us and the overweening British nation. He wanted information too, but that could wait until specialists got their hands on us. This was purely for His Highness"s entertainment."
"You didn"t beg for mercy." Her voice rang with certainty. The knuckles on her fine-boned hand shone white as she clutched the chair.
"I had too much stupid pride. It meant my beating went on considerably longer than the others"." Until he"d collapsed unconscious on the cold marble floor. He"d thought then he had tested the dregs of humiliation. How naive he"d been. "Then they took us away and tortured us."
Dear Lord, don"t let her ask about his torture in the Nawab"s dungeons. The memories were so vivid, it was as though he still hung in chains from the seeping, fetid walls. Nothing this side of heaven could force him to tell her about that foul Gehenna. A place of neither night nor day, just darkness, lit by the flare of torches and reeking with blood and filth and terror.
The fiendish instruments. The endless torment. The inevitable knowledge that nothing could save them.
There would be pain. Then there would be death. No escape.
"Gideon..." She looked down and sucked in a shuddering breath. Not before he caught the shimmer of tears.
Her shaking distress wrenched him back from nightmare. "I should stop. I"m upsetting you."
As she looked up, her eyes glittered. He was astonished to recognize fury beneath her wretchedness. "Of course I"m upset. You describe your systematic degradation and torture." Her slender throat moved as she swallowed. "How long were you held?"