He thought about explaining that he hadn’t sprained his ankle, but somehow he did not think she would find the truth more palatable.
“If I can do this,” he told her seriously, “I can do anything. And if I can do anything—”
Then he never, ever had to worry about finding himself on a little rowboat in the ocean again.
But she didn’t know the whole of that story. “Well, you can’t do everything,” she said, as if reason and logic mattered. “You can’t walk on a sprained ankle. Thick skull.” She was smoothing his hair against his brow. Before he could protest that he obviously could, she patted his head. “I won’t let you.”
She was smiling. He was supposed to smile back. He couldn’t quite make his lips do more than curl in a wretched little half grimace.
“What is it?” she asked. “Here. We need to get you home, to a physician. Blakely, you’ll have to help.”
“No,” Ned protested. “No—I don’t need any help. Not from Gareth.”
“Ned,” Jenny was saying, “do you want me to—”
“Not you, especially not from you, Jenny. I can do it myself.”
“He’s been this recalcitrant the entire morning,” Louisa said. “I don’t even understand how he managed to walk inside.”
“Riding boot is long and stiff enough that it makes a decent splint.” Ned shut his eyes. It didn’t make the pain any better. “And this isn’t about me and my stupid little broken leg. That will heal. We need to see to Lady Harcroft first.”
“Broken leg?” Kate’s voice was dangerous in his ears. “What do you mean, broken leg? I thought you had a sprain.”
“Oh,” Ned said uncomfortably. “Did I say that?”
He had.
He wasn’t sure how he got to the carriage. On the ride home, Kate fussed over him, her breath hissing in with every turn of the carriage as if she were the one feeling the pain. As if he were some damned weakling, to cry out at every little hurt that came his way.
He was already floating on a fog of pain so pervasive, a little gentle rocking had no meaning. As they alighted, Kate went to his side. He didn’t need support. If he could do this, he could do anything. He was clinging to that thought, he knew, because the alternative was to faint like a girl.
If he could finish this—see Lady Harcroft safe, get Kate home, placate his cousin’s worries and solve the universal problems of poverty and war, while he was at it—well, then he would know he was good enough.
“Kate,” he growled as she tried to get her shoulder under his arm to offer support, “let me do it.”
“Blakely.” Kate’s voice seemed very far away. “Help.”
“I don’t need help,” Ned insisted. It seemed like a very reasonable statement as he made it. “I can do it on my own. I can stand on my own two feet.”
But there were hands on his back, arms around him, grabbing him, lifting him from his feet and threatening his last hold on consciousness.
“No,” he protested weakly, “put me down.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Ned.”
They were the last words he heard, and he wasn’t even sure who uttered them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I FEEL LIKE AN IDIOT.”
Kate stopped in the hallway. She stood just outside her own parlor, and yet she suddenly felt like an intruder in her own home. It wasn’t the words that arrested her; it was the fact that they’d been spoken by Lord Blakely, who had always struck her as the opposite of an idiot. Intimidatingly intelligent, in fact.
Stopping was not a good idea. In the past few hours, her duties as a hostess had carried her forward. After the relief she’d felt at the end of her trial, she could have collapsed. Instead, she’d settled Louisa in a suite of rooms with her baby and left Lord and Lady Blakely in the parlor. Ned had not been conscious when the physician had come, cut away his boot, and pronounced his diagnosis. So Kate had been there as well.
She hadn’t had time to stop. Kate had come to convey the news to Lord and Lady Blakely, who were waiting patiently for word of him. She hadn’t come to overhear their conversation. She surely hadn’t come to lean against the wall, fatigue threatening to overwhelm her. But now that she’d halted, she couldn’t quite make herself move again.
“Well. You aren’t the only one.” That wry, tired voice belonged to Lady Blakely.
Lord and Lady Blakely had always struck Kate as rather a conundrum. Lord Blakely seemed cold; he always looked to be watching everyone and finding fault. She’d had the impression that he had at first considered whether Kate was a potential human being—and once he’d answered the question in the negative, had ignored her thereafter.
Lady Blakely, on the other hand, had tried to encourage Kate into friendship at first. And perhaps at second and third. It was Kate who had turned away from her.
“She didn’t like you,” Lord Blakely said shortly. “I assumed she had to be ten kinds of a useless fool.”
Kate felt a flush go through her. They were talking about her. No doubt they thought they were having a private conversation, even if it was being held in her parlor. She needed to clear her throat, or trip over the door as she came into the room. At the very least, she could do them the courtesy of coughing very, very loudly.
But she didn’t. Instead, she held her breath.
“People don’t have to like me,” Lady Blakely said with amusement. “You didn’t, at first.”
“That’s calumny.” A longer pause. “If we’d known, if she had felt she could come to us, none of this would have happened. Ned’s leg. Being charged with a crime—in a police court, of all places, and God above, will the gossip rags go on about that. Jenny, she’s a Carhart. I’m responsible for her. And I let this happen. All because I let myself be fooled into thinking she was precisely as she seemed on the surface.”
Kate had spent most of her life having people dismiss her because of the way she looked. Even put in these stark terms, the hidden approval in those words shook her. She’d sent Blakely the letter, telling him everything she’d done. And now it was too late to take it back.
“She’s not quite as useless as she seems, is she? I do recall someone might have said something along those lines….”
“Don’t gloat,” Blakely huffed. “It doesn’t help.”
“Does this help?”
No answer. Kate hardly wanted to be the source of marital strife. She peered into the room. Lord and Lady Blakely sat next to each other on the divan; the marquess had turned to his wife, and his head rested against her shoulder. Her hands ruffled his hair gently. The couple looked upset, tired and altogether miserable. Nobody would have looked at them and imagined them happy.
And yet still it hurt to watch that easy intimacy, to see that comfortable sharing of burdens. It was almost a physical pain she felt, stabbing into her. So this was what a happy marriage looked like, even under circumstances that were far from happy. This was what it really meant—not that they never suffered, but that when they did, they shared their burdens.
Does this help? Three words she could never imagine saying to Ned—not without him freezing and walking out of the room. With a broken leg, no less. This was what she wanted—this trust from her husband. And while she could rely on him, he’d told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want her close enough to offer assistance.
Kate crept from the room, not quite understanding what she’d just witnessed, or why it had shaken her so. She knew only that if she entered, the tired mass of burdens she carried might overwhelm her.
If you fall, Ned had once told her, I will catch you.
She now knew precisely how true this was. He was strong, powerful and reliable—so much that she might lean on him for support, not even realizing as she did so that he was walking on a broken leg.
This feeling that she might throw herself backward and he would catch her, no matter the consequences—this blind and unhesitating trust—this was what love really looked like. Love was courage. It was shyne
ss made gregarious, softness rendered strong. It was all her secret vulnerabilities trusted to him, and transmuted into hidden strength.
But there was pain in that realization. That moment of intimacy she’d witnessed between the marquess and his wife burned in her mind. Lord Blakely had had no compunction about leaning on his lady.
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 an
yone 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.