She knew she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone. Even if Hears Good had appeared, she couldn’t have told him either. “I can’t tell you,” she raged at him, but to her horror there was a catch in her voice. “I can’t tell even my father.”
He moved his head to look at her. “You can tell me,” he whispered.
It was those words that made the tears start. She tried to choke them back, but she couldn’t. She tried to find her anger again, but she couldn’t renew it. Truthfully, she was glad to see another human being. She was tired of being alone. “I can’t tell anyone. Not anyone.” The tears won out then, a great steady flood of them.
’Ring moved off her and pulled her into his arms. While holding her, he leaned back against a tree and held her to him, cradling her as one would a child. “Go ahead and cry, sweetheart. You deserve to cry.”
Since Laurel had been taken, Maddie had not allowed herself to cry much. She had been very brave and strong as she told herself that she was doing what must be done. But then, perhaps the reason she had been able to be brave was because she had had hope, hope that Laurel was going to be returned to her and that everything would turn out all right. But after tonight her hope was almost gone.
’Ring stroked her hair and held her tightly and securely as she cried. He’d said that she was safe now, and she did indeed feel much safer. And when her head cleared somewhat, she was grateful that he wasn’t raging at her for having once again used opium on him. She tried to pull away from him, if for no other reason than that she was very embarrassed. She sat up in his lap. “I am so sorry, Captain. I don’t usually do this.”
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and handed her his clean handkerchief. Maddie was glad for the darkness that hid her red face. The entire front of his shirt and a great deal of his jacket was soaked.
She blew her nose and the unladylike noise further embarrassed her. “I usually have better control of myself than this. I…” She trailed off, not knowing what to say. She started to get off his lap, but he pulled her back into his arms and snuggled her head against his chest.
She did try to move away from him, but it wasn’t a serious attempt to move and he didn’t have to make much effort to hold her to him. His heart against her cheek felt good, and as she lay against him, she prayed that he wouldn’t again start asking her to tell him where she had been.
“I don’t guess you’ve had many women cry on you before, have you, Captain? I would imagine most women do their best to present their best side to you. Mustn’t let handsome Captain Montgomery see a lady in any way except at her best.”
She had meant her comment to be a little snide—anything to save her further embarrassment, but he was silent for so long that she felt guilty about her nastiness. She lay still against him, listening to his heart and trying to think of anything except Laurel.
“Actually,” he said slowly. “I held my sister, Ardis, after Davy died. She cried then.”
Maddie was quiet, allowing him time to tell her the story if he wished. She didn’t want to leave his arms, didn’t want to move away from him, and thinking of someone else took her mind off Laurel. “Who was Davy?”
“Davy was the son of a woman who worked for us. Her husband had been killed before Davy was born so we became her family, and with there being so many kids in our family, there was always a lot to do. My sister Ardis was born two days before Davy, and it seemed natural to put the two of them together. They played together, slept together, took their first steps by holding on to each other.”
He looked off into the darkness and smiled. “I guess it was a little odd how much they were left on their own, but my mother produced a new child every year for a while, and I guess everyone was grateful that there were at least two kids who didn’t need constant attention. As the oldest, with a whole passel of brats following me, I was glad to have one fewer to pester me.”
He took a breath and put his hand in Maddie’s hair and began stroking it. “Three years ago, when Ardis was seventeen, I received a letter from her asking if I could come home for her wedding to Davy. With those two, a wedding seemed anticlimactic. I’m not sure that I’d ever even seen one without the other.” He smiled again. “You should have seen them! They were like a world unto themselves. They talked together constantly, but when anyone else tried to talk to them, they had nothing to say. I was very pleased when Ardis asked me to her wedding because, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure she knew anyone except Davy was alive.”
“You returned?”
“Yes, of course. I arrived in Warbrooke three days before the wedding. My mother was in a dither because Ardis was the first of her children to get married. Ardis was the calmest of the bunch. The only time she showed any agitation was when my mother told her she couldn’t see Davy for twenty-four hours before the wedding. I don’t think Ardis had gone so much as an hour of her life without Davy beside her, and she didn’t very much like the idea of being without him. I think that if it had been up to her, she would have called off the wedding rather than do without Davy for a whole day.”
He paused. “Nor did Davy like the idea of separation. He didn’t say much—he never did—but we think that’s why he rowed out to Ghost Island by himself.”
“Ghost Island?”
“Warbrooke is on the tip of a peninsula and there are islands not far away. Ghost Island is said to be haunted by a couple of men, one of them wearing a black mask. Boys often take girls there to frighten them.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
He was silent, not saying anything, just holding her and stroking her hair.
“What happened to Davy?”
“We don’t know. He never came back. When he didn’t show up for the wedding we knew that something was wrong. Davy wasn’t going to jilt Ardis. Everyone started searching. My brother Jamie found Davy’s little rowboat. It had caught on a snag on the far side of Ghost Island. But there was no sign of Davy.”
“How did Ardis take the news?”
“She was very, very calm. Everyone else was tearing around, no sleep, only enough food to keep us alive as we searched for him, but Ardis was still and quiet, not saying anything. On the third day after when the wedding was supposed to have taken place, Davy’s body washed up on shore.”
“What had happened to him?”
“We never knew. After three days in the water, the body was misshapen and the fishes…”
“I understand. What about Ardis? Did she cry then?”
“No, she didn’t cry then. My mother went to tell her the news and Ardis took it very well. Everyone was so relieved—that is, until the next day at breakfast, when Ardis kept looking out the window. Someone asked her what she was looking for and she said she couldn’t imagine what was keeping Davy.”
“How awful.”
“Yes, it was. No one knew what to do. For two days we all tiptoed around the house, fearful that Ardis was losing her mind. I know they all meant well when they were so careful of her, but I had spent some time with the army and I had seen some things.”
“Such as?”
“Things I don’t want to remember, much less talk about. But I had seen women, and men as well, who had seen terrible things done to the people they’d loved. They, too, had done the best they could to pretend nothing had happened.”
“What did you do?” she asked, sensing that he had been the one to help Ardis.
“I took her to see Davy’s body.”
She moved to look at him. “His body that the fishes had…”
“Yes. I thought it might shock her into facing reality.”
“Did it?”
“No. She looked at the body but she didn’t see it. She said that she had to get back to the house to be there when Davy returned from Ghost Island.”
He took a breath. “My family was quite angry with me when I returned home. They thought Ardis should be in bed. There was an awful scene and everyone was on her side and against me. You would
have thought I was a monster and wanted to hurt my own sister.”
She could hear the hurt that was still in his voice.
“In the end it was my mother who asked me what I wanted to do with Ardis, and I said that I wanted to take her with me to Ghost Island, just the two of us. My mother packed food and blankets for us and, while everyone else protested, I rowed Ardis out to the island.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t know what to say at first, but every time she mentioned Davy I told her he was dead. She ignored me. She acted just as she always did, but there was a certain wildness in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before. By the third day I couldn’t stand it anymore. She mentioned Davy and I grabbed her and shook her and screamed at her that Davy was dead and that he was never coming back again.”
He clutched Maddie closer to him. “Ardis began to fight me, fight me as hard as anyone’s ever fought before. She wanted to get away from me. I didn’t know what she wanted to do if she did get away, but I wasn’t releasing her to find out. I tried to keep her nails away from my face, and when she kept kicking me, I sat on her legs and removed her shoes.”
Maddie looked up at him, but he put her head back down.
“I don’t know how long she fought, but it was a while. An hour or more probably. I thought she was getting tired, so I relaxed my hold of her and she slipped away from me as quick as an eel. I ran after her but couldn’t find her. I guess my senses were dulled or something, because she sneaked up behind me and hit me with something. It dazed me, knocked me out for a few minutes.”
“What did she do?” Maddie felt her heart pounding in sympathy for the girl.
“I think she meant to drown herself, for she was swimming toward the mainland. It took me a while to find her, and by then she was so far out that I wasn’t sure if that was her head I saw or a lobster trap. I went after her. She’s a strong, fast swimmer and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to catch her.”
“But you did.”
“I did. And when she began to fight me in the water, I hauled her up and clipped her one on the jaw, knocked her cold, then swam back to the island with her. We were both freezing, and I knew there was no time to build a fire, so I stripped off her clothes and mine, down to our skin, pulled her onto my lap, wrapped four blankets around us and tried to get us warm.”
“And that’s when she cried,” Maddie said softly.
He didn’t say a word for a moment. “When she woke she spoke so softly I could hardly hear her. She said that she and Davy had decided to wait until they were married before making love to each other. They had decided that they knew so much about each other that they would save this one thing for later. She said that she had always known that when she sat, nude, in a naked man’s arms, they would be in Davy’s, not in her brother’s arms and certainly not in the arms of her ugliest brother.”
Maddie didn’t look at him, for she knew that there were tears in his eyes as well as in his voice.
“Ardis cried then. She cried the rest of the day and most of the night. I built a fire and got our clothes dry and we dressed and still she cried. I got her to eat a little lobster but nothing else. She—”
He broke off, and Maddie knew that he couldn’t speak of it anymore. She lifted her arm to put it around his neck and pulled his face down so that it was buried in her neck. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”
Chapter 11
She held his face against her neck for some time. So, this was the cool, perfect Captain Montgomery. This was the man who seemed to know how to do everything. This was the man who told people what to do and how to do it.
She stroked his hair and held him, and it occurred to her that she’d never been as close to a man as she’d become to him. In all the years she’d been traveling around the world with John’s help, she’d been able to keep her distance from other people. It had been easy to keep up the façade of being a duchess, but with this man she wasn’t able to keep up any façade.
“What’s this?” he asked, moving his head and taking her hand in his.
It was Laurel’s ring that she’d slipped on her little finger. “Nothing,” she said, and snatched her hand away.
“I can tell you anything about myself, but you can tell me nothing about you, is that it?”
She wanted to protest that what he was saying was unfair, that there were reasons that she couldn’t tell him about herself, but she didn’t. Maddie remembered the man saying that those who held Laurel were angry that an army man was following her.
She moved off his lap. “I have told you at least a thousand times, Captain, I neither want you nor need you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going down to the camp.”
He stood and caught her arm. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s night and you’re tired and you need rest. We’ll spend the night here.”
Spend the night with him? It was one thing to sleep in the tent with him nearby but quite another to sleep in the open with nothing between them but a little mountain air. “I’m going down the mountain.”
He caught her arm again. “No, you’re not.”
She jerked away from him. “I most certainly am going back to the camp. If you’re tired, you may remain here, that is your choice. I do not try to impose my will on other people. Now, would you please get out of my way?”
He didn’t move. “You’re still not going to tell me anything, are you?” he said softly.
“There is nothing to tell.” She glared up at him, barely able to see him in the darkness.
“When do you meet him again?”
“Three days,” she said before she thought.
He seemed to be thinking about something else. “I don’t want you to go back to the camp tonight. There’s something wrong in that camp. Something wrong with one of your people, and I don’t know which one it is.”
“Edith,” Maddie said quickly. “I mean, if there is something wrong, I have no doubt that Edith is the cause.”
“Toby is trying to find out what he can, but in the meantime I don’t want you near the place for a while.”
“So, you want me to spend the night here in the woods with you. Alone. Just the two of us. Tell me, Captain, do you plan for us to share blankets?”
“Why, Miss Worth, that thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Tell me, do you always have such carnal thoughts, or is it me alone who incites them?”
“Drop dead,” she said, and started down the mountain. She heard ’Ring move toward his horse, and he didn’t try to detain her again, so she was able to make some progress before he stopped her. Damnation, but he could move silently! She wondered where Hears Good was and if he was impressed with this young man’s abilities. Probably not, she thought. Hears Good wasn’t impressed with much of anything a white man could do.
“Ah, Captain Montgomery, what a surprise to see you here. Although I should have guessed that you’d reappear. It’s not as though I’ve been allowed any privacy since you came into my life.”
“I want to show you something.” He picked up her right arm and she felt something heavy being slipped around her wrist. A bracelet? He was giving her a bracelet now, in the middle of the night?
When he dropped her arm, she found it was heavier than she’d at first thought—and it rattled. “What in the world—” she muttered, then she knew what he’d done.
Handcuffs! He had handcuffed her to him. She jerked her arm and saw that there was about two and a half feet of chain linking the two of them together. “Release me,” she said through her teeth.
“I will in the morning, but for now I need some sleep, and with the way you have of sneaking around, I just might sleep through your leaving.”
She was so angry that she couldn’t speak.
“Come on,” he said as though nothing were wrong, and when he moved, her arm rose.
She stood where she was.
“Ah, now, come on. You aren’t going to be sulky, are you? You must be able to see that this is the only way. I
can’t protect you if I’m asleep, and I can’t let you go down the mountain by yourself. Surely even you can see that.”
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Release me,” was all that she could say.
“Oh, hell,” he said in the voice of a man pushed to his limits, then he lifted her into his arms and carried her back up the mountain to where his horse was.
She didn’t fight him. She knew from experience that fighting did no good, but she lay rigid, rather like a board stretched across his arms.
When he was at his horse, he set her down and began unsaddling the animal. Every time he moved, the chain rattled and her arm came up.
“I find this situation intolerable,” she said in the calmest voice she could manage. “I cannot accept this.”
He removed the saddle and went to set it on a stump, and as he walked, he pulled Maddie with him. “You’ll get used to it.” He turned back to her. “Look, I don’t want to have to do this. I thought long and hard before I did it. If you were a woman of reason, maybe I could talk to you, but talking to you is like talking to my horse. You smile and lie and sing so very beautifully and, just as I let Butter get away with things I should discipline him for, I let you get away with things I shouldn’t allow either.”
Reason? This man spoke of reason? This man, who thought that a horse he owned and a woman who he definitely did not own were one and the same, talked to her about reason?
“I am not your horse,” she said quietly. “You cannot tie me up as you do your horse.”
He ran a handful of grass over Buttercup’s sweaty back. “Believe me, I don’t want to, but I see no alternative. Are you ready to get some sleep? I’m bushed. I don’t know how you keep such hours. Maybe it’s all the years you spent in Europe. You want to sleep on the right or the left?”
“I sleep alone,” she said pointedly.
“I’ll do the best I can to allow you to do that. There’s some slack between us with this chain.” He pulled her to her horse and began unsaddling it.
“I…I have to have some privacy. You’ll have to release me to allow me a few moments alone.” She made her voice sound as sincere as possible.