The Marriage Wager (14 page)

What had come over her? She was
not
the sort of person who indulged in groundless fears or made great fusses over small matters. She did not enact dramatic scenes. She was reasonable, practical, clearheaded. She
never
overindulged in wine or spirits.

Emma groaned softly again.

Unable to sit still, she threw back the covers and went to look for her dressing gown. When she had put it on, she quietly opened the door into the sitting room and stepped through.

A few coals still glowed in the fireplace. With moonlight streaming through the windows, she could see that the remains of their supper had been cleared away, though the table and chairs had been left in front of the hearth. The sofa and armchairs on the other side of the room looked gray and ghostly. The ticking of the mantel clock was barely audible, and simply emphasized the silent emptiness.

Emma went over to the door that led into the other bedchamber. It was securely closed, the bland white panels offering her no information. She could open it and walk in, she thought. She was married; she had the right. But the idea was intimidating. Did she propose to wake her new husband from a sound sleep in the middle of the night to… what, apologize? To explain that she had been thinking of the disappointments of her first marriage, and that had made her act so irrationally?

Emma shook her head and turned away from the door, only to be stopped by a sound from within Colin’s bedchamber.

As she turned back, it came again, sharp and exigent—a cry or a protest. It was his voice, yet so harsh and agitated that she just barely recognized it. Even as she wondered, she heard it once more. It sounded like, “No!”

“Colin?” said Emma tentatively.

There was no response. Probably, she hadn’t spoken loudly enough to be heard through the door, Emma thought. After a brief hesitation, she grasped the doorknob. Taking a breath, she readied herself to step inside. She twisted the knob, and found that it wouldn’t turn. She tried turning it in the other direction; it rattled a little, but didn’t move. The door was locked.

Emma took a step backward. He’d locked the door against her. He had quite consciously shut her out of his bedchamber.

Standing alone in the silent parlor, she wrapped her arms around her waist. Was he so angry over her behavior tonight that he didn’t want her in his room? she wondered. But he hadn’t seemed so when they parted earlier; she could remember that much. She remembered his kiss as well—vividly. What could have led him, after that, to go into his room and turn the key in the lock?

She heard another sound from within—an agitated muttering that rose and fell for nearly a minute before silence surrounded her again. She drew her arms tighter around her body. What was it that he did not wish her to know or see?

Emma waited for a long time outside that locked door. Though she strained her ears, she heard nothing further as the moon shadows wheeled across the carpet and the crickets continued to rasp outside. When at last she returned to her own room and to bed, she did not sleep. She lay staring at the pale canopy over her bed and wondering what unexpected darkness lay at the heart of this marriage on which she had gambled everything.

***

After six days of hard traveling south and west, they arrived at Trevallan on the coast of Cornwall just at twilight on a still, warm August day. Leaning out of the carriage as they drove up, Emma could see the outlines of a long stone building with many windows—only two of them lit. The air smelled of sea salt and evergreens; spines of gray stone pushed through the earth here and there on the property. There was a good feel to the place, she thought, a kind of energy in the atmosphere that penetrated even her deep fatigue.

Though Emma had not noticed anyone along the road, somehow the staff had been made aware of their approach. When they climbed stiffly down from the carriage and walked through the wide front door, they found a long line of servants waiting to greet them in the cavernous great hall. Candlelight illuminated the white aprons of the housemaids and starched collars of the men against a backdrop of dark wood and tapestries and swaths of thick shadow. Emma was tired from the long jolting journey, but she summoned up reserves of strength to smile and respond to the introductions of the housekeeper and other senior servants. The housemaids and footmen merely curtsied or bowed as she was led past them.

Everyone was very kind, but fatigue made the offers of assistance, the well-cooked dinner, and the covert appraisals by the older servants something of a blur. Emma was very glad to go to bed early. “Her ladyship always sleeps in this room,” the housekeeper told her complacently as she showed her into a large square bedchamber. “The master’s through there, with a dressing room between.”

Emma looked at the indicated doorway. It was slightly ajar. She did not go near it, however. She felt as effectively barred as if a great metal padlock secured it.

That was the way the subject of their wedding night was being treated. She had tried to say something the following morning, perhaps make amends for her childish behavior, as well as discover some reason for his locked door. But Colin had brushed her attempt aside as if it were a matter of no importance, and indeed not much interest to him. And yet he had shown no resentment. He had chatted with her and maintained a calm concern about the strains of the long journey. And at each inn they patronized along the way, he had engaged a separate bedchamber for her, making no move to join her there. It was as if the night had never happened. It was almost as if their marriage had never happened, and they were simply cordial acquaintances journeying together.

He was so skilled at keeping things on the surface, thought Emma as she got wearily into bed. Perhaps that was what he wanted, what he had meant by comradeship and a comfortable bargain. She, however, was finding it something of a strain. Maybe things would change now that they were settled in his old family home? As Emma fell asleep, she found herself fervently wishing that it might be so.

Though he was also tired from the journey, Colin found that sleep eluded him. He lay quiet in the thick darkness, listening to the distant rhythms of the sea and to the familiar creaking of the old house. He had many memories of this place, going back as far as memory went, but this particular arrival had brought back one of the few painful recollections he associated with Cornwall.

Just before his father died, when he was seventeen, the former baron had called Colin to him in this bedchamber and committed his mother and sister to his care. “The name is yours now, Colin,” he had said, “to uphold and to carry on. I know you’ll bring honor to it, lad.”

The pain of that early death returned to him now. It had been so hard to lose his father. And along with the personal loss and grief, he had felt such a heavy weight of responsibility. Honor and duty—those had been his watchwords ever since, and they had almost never let him rest.

This was why he had brought Emma here first of all, he realized. As if he could present her to his dead father and show that he had done well—that the name would be carried on, that he had not forgotten his obligations despite going off to war. Though he loved Trevallan, he had hardly come here since his father’s death. The atmosphere had become oppressive to him, heavy with expectation. But now, that feeling was gone; he felt as if a weight had been lifted off his chest. The place was his in a way it had never been before.

And Emma? inquired a sardonic inner voice. She was not his, Colin acknowledged. Not yet. But now that they were no longer spending their days in a jolting carriage, and their evenings in a public inn, there would no doubt be time to remedy that. He would find the cause of the apprehension and reluctance he had seen in her eyes that first night, and banish it. And then she would give way to the eager response he had felt in her more than once, he thought, and she would find he had much to show her. Much, he repeated silently as he at last fell asleep.

The rambling old stone house settled into silence. Outside, the sea wind fingered its walls, as it had done for hundreds of years. The waves murmured on the rocks below. The kitchen cat prowled through long grass, alert for the scent of field mice on the salt-laden, piney air. It was a soft, warm night, with a thin haze, like a gauzy shawl, over the stars and no moon as yet. Colin moved restlessly under the bedclothes and muttered softly in his sleep. Emma turned over without waking. Everything about the scene suggested peace and tranquility.

But in Colin’s dreams, it was far otherwise. Through his sleep, he staggered across a blood-soaked battlefield, pain sharp in his head and chest, up to his ankles in foul water and mud. As far as he could see across the ravaged terrain, dead bodies were piled in grotesque poses—arms sticking straight up, legs twisted at impossible angles, teeth bared in grimaces of rage. The soldiers’ gaudy uniforms—all the colors of the rainbow—were stained in varying shades of black and red with gunpowder and blood. Acrid smoke from the guns drifted over the scene, obscuring, then revealing more corpses. A riderless horse with a gash in its side stumbled away in the distance. The only sound was the raucous call of the ravens, summoning their fellows to feast.

Dreaming, Colin staggered through this scene of carnage looking for something. He did not know what. But as he passed each corpse, he checked it, only to find, in every single case, a friend. There was Teddy Garrett, whom he had known since he was six years old and they were both uneasy newcomers at Eton. There was John Dillon, who had joined the regiment at the same time he did and soon become his closest companion among the officers. There was Jack Morley, whose gaiety and eye for the ladies had been a running joke. There was Colonel Brown, whom he had respected so deeply and made into a sort of substitute father for three entire years. Every face he looked at, he knew. All of them had died during the last few years in one or another of the battles against the French, while time and again Colin himself had gotten off with a few minor wounds, the agonies of grief, and a growing darkness of spirit. There was no escaping that desperation now. It rose like a storm cloud on the horizon and came down over him, choking and foul. Despair engulfed him; hope became a mockery. In his sleep, Colin began to moan.

The sound was deep and grating. It rose above the whisper of the waves and the hiss of the wind. It drifted through the open door of the dressing room, heavy with hopelessness and pain. It woke Emma at once.

She blinked in the darkness, gathering her faculties, searching for the emergency that she had sensed even in deep sleep. When the next moan came, she sat up, searching for the source of this frightening sound.

It did not take her long to find it. It sounded just as it had on their wedding night. Quickly, she slipped out of bed and made her way across to the dressing room. Its wooden floor was cool under her bare feet. The door on the other side was slightly open as well, and she stepped through it, her heart beating a little faster.

The room was very dim. She had to grope her way over to the bed, guided by Colin’s continued harsh moans. On the small table beside it she found a candlestick and lit it, revealing Colin rigid among the tumbled bedclothes, his body slick with sweat. His head lashed back and forth on the pillow and he was repeating, through clenched teeth, the word “no.”

The light washed his face, showing an expression that scared her. The muscles stood out, hard as iron. His lips were pulled back in a snarl. His brow was furrowed like a much older man’s. He looked as if he was being tortured, she thought.

She took hold of his shoulder and began to shake him free of whatever horror had him in its grip. “Colin,” she said. “Colin, wake up.”

He twisted away from her grasp toward the farther side of the bed.

Emma scrambled up onto the mattress. Rising to her knees, she began to shake harder. “Colin,” she insisted. “It’s all right. It’s just a nightmare. Wake up!”

With an anguished shudder and an inarticulate cry, he heaved upright, striking out with one hand as if to fend off an enemy. Emma just managed to duck under the blow. Losing her balance, she threw an arm around his bare ribs to keep from falling. “It’s all right,” she repeated. “It was a dream. Only a dream.”

Colin went still, but he did not relax. Emma could feel the tension in his muscles and the hard rigidity of his back. “That’s the trouble,” he answered, in a distant, blurred voice that seemed to come from some other place, as if he wasn’t truly awake yet. “It isn’t just a dream. It’s all true.”

“What?” she said softly.

“Death. They’re all dead. Shattered by bullets or run through with cold steel. All of them gone. Nothing left but to haunt me.” He shuddered again, and his skin felt clammy and cold suddenly. Emma tightened her grip.

“You never knew, when you came back to camp, who it would be. Who would have fallen in that battle. You just knew that some of them wouldn’t be there. Some of the friends you’d been riding with, and eating with, and drinking with the night before. After a while, you started wishing for the bullet yourself, because then…”

Colin stopped short, as if he’d bitten off the words. He sat straighter and looked around as if he were just taking in his surroundings and realizing where he was. He took a deep gasping breath. He turned to look at Emma, his eyes wide and dark, his mouth a grim slash. For a moment, he seemed to concentrate on identifying her. “I… I beg your pardon,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he added.

His tone was growing more normal, and more distant, Emma thought. “I’m not frightened,” she insisted, even though she was, a bit.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed—”

“No.” She could feel him starting to shiver as the sweat dried on his skin. “Get under the covers,” she said, urging him down.

He didn’t move, but when he spoke again, his voice sounded completely normal, as if they were chatting in the carriage or attending an evening party in London. “Emma. Return to your own room. I’m sorry I exposed you to this.”