Swept Away (10 page)

One was old, swathed neck to toe in black bombazine with skin like wrinkled parchment and a knot of white curls supporting a lace caplet. The other was younger. Much younger. And as he blinked the sweat and panic out of his eyes, he realized she looked familiar, with her dark chestnut hair and deep blue eyes.

It was the angel he had seen before. He remembered she had cool hands and a soothing voice, and she had sat with him and smiled and he had wanted to drown in her eyes.

“Well.” The old lady visibly relaxed the defensive grip she had taken on her cane. “I must remember not to touch you again while you are sleeping. I meant no harm, I assure you. I only wished to see if you had developed a fever.”

Emory’s heartbeat began to slow, his rate of breathing began to return to normal, and the images of his nightmare--or whatever the hell it had been--began to fade into the background, taking the rush of incredibly blinding pain with it.

“For what?” The old woman chuckled. “You have grown into a fine specimen of a man, Emory Althorpe. The last time I saw you, why you were no wider than a sapling and still ignorant of the use of a razor.”

“You must be--” he glanced briefly at his angel, but she had not yet composed herself enough to look at the bed-- “Florence?”

“You used to call me Auntie Lal, but I suppose ‘Florence’ will have to do for now. Unless, of course, Rory dear, you are feeling better? My niece informed me yesterday that you were having difficulty remembering what happened.”

“Yesterday?” Emory frowned. “Was it not just this morning--”

“It seems she was a trifle enthusiastic administering the laudanum,” Florence said dryly. “We sat about all afternoon waiting for you to waken again, but alas, apart from a few stirrings and mumblings, you remained asleep through the night. A grave disappointment to your brother, I might add, who was exceedingly hopeful last evening of finding you fully awake and recovered.”

“My brother--” Emory glanced briefly at his dark haired angel of mercy, who had not once looked up since averting her eyes from his naked body-- “Stanley?”

“Yes,” Florence beamed. “Do you recollect him now?”

“No. Nothing more than the name.”

“Oh dear. I was so hoping with an extra night’s rest and all, you would have gained back some of your faculties. I was so hopeful, in fact, that I did not tell your brother there were some, ah, complications in your recovery.”

“It is as if someone has taken a cloth and wiped all the writing off the slate,” he said honestly. “I see blurry images, an occasional picture of something. I get impressions of things flashing through my mind, but I do not know what they mean.”

“Do you get an impression of hunger?” Florence inquired solicitously. “You have been here more than three full days without eating a morsel of food and only drinking what little sustenance Annaleah could pour through your lips.”

Annaleah, he thought. Had she told him her name yesterday? No. No, she had been prim and formal...and frightened of something. Of him.

“I think I am a little hungry,” he admitted, attempting a faint smile.

Florence waved her cane to indicate the small banquet that had been laid out on a table behind them. “Do you feel strong enough to get out of bed, or shall we bring a tray to you?”

“I feel strong enough to try,” he said. “If I had some clothes...?”

She rapped the end of the cane on a nearby chair. “Shirt, breeches, stockings. You came with your own drawers so we did not have to scrounge about for them, but the rest came from whoever could spare it. My niece and I shall remove ourselves to the hallway while you dress, and then, if it is agreeable to you, we shall return and take tea while you replenish your strength.”

The cane gave off a muted thump with every footstep as Florence took Annaleah’s arm and retreated toward the door. Emory caught a quick glance from the celestial blue eyes, but he had no time to respond to it before the door closed behind them. She had not said a word, had barely raised her gaze above the level of the bed skirt, and it made him adjust the covers again, wondering just how long he had kicked and thrashed before he had wakened himself.

Long enough to set the devils hammering in his skull again, that much was a certainty, and he raised his hand, probing gingerly at the lump at the back of his head. The pain was still bad, but it was something he could control. The images and flashes of things, people, places that came and went through his mind had no rhyme or reason, nor could he hold one long enough to identify it. The nightmare had been all the more alarming for not knowing if it was a real event from his past that he was reliving, or something his mind had conjured to torment him. If it was real, what did it mean? His wrists had been tied to a beam in the ceiling and someone had been deliberately cutting him...but why? He had wakened the day before with nothing more than an impression of water, vast expanses of water. Now there were distinct memories of pain, but no reason behind it. Unless of course, it hadn’t really happened.

Emory ran his fingers over the tops of his shoulders and at first, felt nothing. But when he reached further back, they were there: thin raised lines in his flesh where stripes had been cut in the skin.

Searching farther afield, he peeled the covers aside and stared down at his naked body. All of his parts appeared to be there, in ample enough quantities to explain why a modest young lady would blush herself almost crimson. There were, however, other scars on his arms, legs, his hip, his belly and ribs, some more obvious than others, and most able to be attributed to other kinds of violence. There was a deep, puckered welt he surmised to be an old saber wound on his thigh, another on his arm. A mark on the back of his left buttock drew a frown when he fit the pad of his forefinger into the center of the ragged pock and realized it was a healed bullet wound. At some point in his life, he had been shot in the arse--surely a painful and embarrassing situation--yet he could not remember it. He had been shot, slashed by swords and God knew what else, but he could remember none of it! His skin was weathered and tanned from the waist up, suggesting he was no stranger to sunlight and ocean breezes. His arms and legs were like oak, tempered with strong bands of sinew and muscle. There was strength in his hands as well; enough for him to know he was not a man who squandered his days in idle dicing and dancing.

Feeling the pressure beginning to build behind his eyes again, he forced the panic aside and, after swinging his legs over the side of the mattress, used the wooden bedpost to lever himself gingerly to his feet. The room spun sickeningly for a few moments but he persevered until he was upright, swaying like a drunkard, but standing on his own with only the fingertips of his left hand resting against the post for support.

His success sent another flush of heat surging through his body and he savored the sensation of knowing that not only were all his parts intact, they were functioning normally. He searched around the floor of the bed for a moment and found what he sought, and after relieving himself in the chamberpot, he inspected the assortment of clothes that had been left neatly folded on the chair.

With modesty his first priority, he dragged a long white shirt made of rough homespun over his arms and shoulders. It was several sizes too big and fell well below his hips--he guessed it was a donation from his giant watchdog, Harold Broom--in contrast to the knee length breeches which were a stretchable, but exceedingly tight fit. There were stockings but no garters, and leather shoes with thin wooden soles. On the washstand, he found a brush and used it to tame the unkempt black waves of his hair. Noticing one glaring omission in the toiletries, he rubbed a hand over his jaw and discovered it was smooth. Someone had already shaved him, either not trusting him to do it without cutting himself, or simply not trusting him with a razor.

He shrugged the question aside and bound his hair with a length of black ribbon. He had been staring at another object on the table for a few moments, and when his hair was tamed and his hands ran out of things to do, he lowered them and ran his fingertips over the raised pattern of silver swans that graced the back of the oval mirror.

He must have stared at it for two full minutes before he finally persuaded himself to simply pick it up and turn it over. It was a strange sensation, slowly angling the polished surface upward, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what he would see or feel when he saw the face that was reflected back at him.

He did not recognize it. Not the wide brow or the smooth, dark eyebrows. Not the bold jut of the chin or the straight ridge of his nose; not the brown eyes that were nearly as dark as the lashes that surrounded them. He had ears, a mouth, most of his teeth, but he could have been looking at a stranger on the street for all the comfort and familiarity he felt. The pressure, the panic, the sense of sheer frustration made him tighten his fist around the metal handle, and with a cry that welled up from deep in his soul, he turned and hurled the mirror across the room, shattering the offending image into a hundred bright shards of glass.

Out on the tiny landing, Annaleah was in the midst of trying to eradicate an image of her own--that of Emory Althorpe’s body with the blanket twisted down around his waist. An inch or two more and he would have revealed everything she had been trying so diligently to forget since finding him on the beach. Unfortunately, her mind was fertile enough to put the two images together with the result that she had been afraid to meet his eye, certain he would sense her discomfort and know that she was not particularly thinking of her own shattered modesty. Rather, he would know she was thinking he was the simply the most spectacularly beautiful man she had ever seen in her young life. Beautiful, dangerous, and as her sister Beatrice would have said with succinct and justifiable emphasis: the kind of man who represented Instant Ruination to any woman with the modicum of sensibility to see it.

The cry of anguish, followed by the sound of the mirror crashing on the wall beside her, made Anna literally leap to one side and mash her shoulder sharply against the opposite wall. Her aunt, who was used to gongs being struck with little or no advance warning, merely turned from the tiny garret window and arched an eyebrow.

Anna bit her lip and watched as her aunt opened the door. She could not very well let Florence go back inside unattended, and so she followed, but each step was cautiously placed, with every sense on prickling alert. She saw the mirror lying in a spray of broken glass beside the door, and a few feet away, Emory Althorpe was standing in front of the washstand, his broad back to the door, his hands braced against the wall, his head bent forward between his shoulders.

“Yes. To see if I was telling the truth, or if, for some reason unknown to me, you believed I was faking this loss of everything I am, everything I was.”

When he straightened and turned around, both Anna and Florence had cause to hold their breaths, for the composition of his face had altered completely. Not the physical look of it, but rather the impression as a whole, changing from a countenance full of confusion and uncertainty to one of blackness, mistrust, and anger.

“It was not a test, Rory,” Florence said carefully. “It was merely an old woman’s thoughtless attempt to help you jar your memory.”

The accusation remained cold and brittle in his eyes for a long, silent moment, then gradually began to melt, like candle wax collapsing toward a flame. His shoulders sagged and his arms fell limp by his sides, the muscles no longer straining with tension.

“I...I’m...sorry,” he said haltingly. “I just don’t... I can’t...”

“Come,” Florence said, interrupting his attempt to explain something neither she nor Annaleah could have understood anyway. “You must be exceptionally frustrated, as would anyone who could not recognize their own nose in their own face. Sit and have something to eat. I always find it difficult to concentrate when my belly is rumbling and my tongue is dry. Eat and we can pick our way through the maze together.”

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture of apology. “I suspect I have a temper,” he said lamely.

“You did not tolerate fools or foolishness lightly,” Florence agreed. “Not even as a boy. Now come. Sit.”

The command was emphasised with two forceful raps of her cane. There were only two chairs, which Althorpe held for Anna and her aunt, but the table had been set up in front of the window, providing for a third on the recessed ledge of the casement. He sat with his back to the sun, the light turning his hair into gleaming ebony and silhouetting the shape of his torso beneath the loose folds of the shirt.

Anna nearly shook her head as she imagined all the Fates conspiring against her for she sat opposite him, her hands folded primly in her lap, her back straight, her gaze deliberately averted. She was determined not to look directly at him. At the same time she could scarcely fail to be aware each time he looked at her--which he seemed to do so with alarming frequency. Her cheeks remained continuously warm and her mouth stayed dry regardless how many times she moistened her lips. There were subtle reactions elsewhere in her body as well. A slow, rhythmic tightening chilled the skin across her breasts, while a strange shimmering sensation low in her belly made her wary of moving, even breathing too deeply at times.