He groaned. Moonlight sifted through the foliage, and I saw that his face was deathly gray, his eyes and mouth wide open as he gasped for air. The front of his shirt was drenched with blood.
“Stay calm,” I urged. “We’re going to help you.”
Slade ripped open Mr. Heald’s shirt. His chest was awash in blood that flowed from a hole at his right breast. The hole made a sucking, gurgling sound every time he breathed.
“The bullet went in his lung,” Slade said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Then we must take him to a physician!”
Mr. Heald’s gasps weakened. I seized his hand. It gripped mine in a convulsive spasm. He stared pleadingly up at me. His lips formed my name. Then his breaths ceased; his hand went limp, his gaze vacant.
“He’s dead,” Slade said.
“No!” I cried. Sorrow magnified all the gratitude and guilt I felt toward Mr. Heald. He’d saved my life, and I’d never even signed his beloved copy of Jane Eyre.
In the distance, the fire still roared; crashes came from the house as it collapsed. Footsteps crunched through the woods toward us. Slade dragged me away from Mr. Heald. “Stieber and his men are coming. We have to go.”
31
We made our way into town along a circuitous route. When we reached the high street, it must have been near nine o’clock; no other people were about. The buildings were dark, although the sky glowed orange from the burning workhouse. Slade stopped short of the Rose and Crown. “We’ll say goodbye here.”
I felt a panic as strong as when we’d been trapped in the fire. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the laboratory,” Slade said, “to find Stieber. He wants me more than he wants you. I’ll lure him and his men away from Tonbridge and deliver him to justice. You’ll be safe.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Stay here,” Slade said. “I’ll deal with Stieber. I’ll exonerate us. You needn’t worry about anything.”
It was so like him to try to take on the world single-handedly. I loved him for his valor. But he’d placed me on a pedestal because he thought I was too good for him, and I was finding it most uncomfortable. I chafed at sitting idle while he fought on my behalf, and the past had shown that we could accomplish more together than separately.
I sought an excuse to prevent Slade from leaving. “There’s blood on your shirt. “You’re injured.”
Slade glanced down at his shoulder. “It’s only a scratch.”
I walked around him, inspected him, and gasped. “Your back is covered with blood!”
Indeed, his shirt looked as if it had been dyed crimson and ripped to shreds. He twisted around to see. “I must have been hit by debris from the explosion. I didn’t even notice.”
“You had better see a physician,” I said.
“There’s no time. I’ll be all right.”
“At least let me examine the cuts.”
“Never mind.” Slade’s expression repelled the very idea of my seeing him undressed, hurt, vulnerable, and weak.
“You can’t go around bleeding like this,” I said. “The wounds may fester. Besides, you’ll attract attention.”
Slade couldn’t argue with that. He let me take him into the Rose and Crown. I was glad I’d registered under a false name, as a married woman. Anyone who saw us would assume Slade was my husband. They wouldn’t suspect that the famous spinster author Currer Bell was up to no good. I sneaked Slade into my room, which was luxuriously furnished with a four-poster canopied bed. The impropriety of the situation embarrassed me; the intimacy excited me as well as disturbed me. But I could not have done otherwise; Slade needed help.
While he removed his shirt, I went in search of the house-keeper, from whom I obtained washcloths, bandages, and a bottle of alcohol. I told her my husband had been injured in a minor accident and his shirt ruined. She gave me a clean shirt left behind by another guest. When I returned, Slade was sitting in a chair, stripped to the waist. Even as I felt a shameful thrill at the sight of his nakedness, I winced because his back was a gory mess of cuts, blood, and embedded glass fragments. As I poured water from the jug on the washstand into the basin, neither of us spoke. We didn’t look at each other. I carefully picked the glass out of his flesh. Luckily, I’d had some experience with nursing while caring for my sisters and brother, and the cuts weren’t deep. As I cleaned them, I tried not to notice his lean, strong muscles or the heat from his skin, or to glance over his shoulders at his bare chest, but I couldn’t help wanting to caress him; I couldn’t stop the molten, heavy sensation that spread through my body. Dabbing the cuts with alcohol, I tried to think of myself as a nurse and Slade as my patient.
I failed miserably.
“The bleeding’s stopped,” I said, bandaging the wounds. “You should heal just fine.”
He put on the clean shirt. His expression was cold, hard; he’d sealed himself off from me. He stood, ready to leave, and I knew it was unfair to keep him with me. I knew the agony of being in the presence of someone who had rejected me; I should let Slade go. But suddenly I was overpowered by emotion. His confession, Lord Eastbourne, the fire, Wilhelm Stieber, the death of Oliver Heald, and our own narrow escape-it was all too much, after Katerina’s murder, my arrest, and my ordeal in Bedlam. I began to cry.
Slade acted as remote as if he were a million miles away. “You’ll feel better when you’re home with your family.”
“My family is gone,” I said between sobs. “While you were in Russia, Emily, Anne, and Branwell died of consumption.”
“My God.” Slade was shocked, mortified. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He put his arms around me, but I cried harder because, even though Slade was still with me, I had lost him, too.
Slade spoke hesitantly: “You must be upset about Oliver Heald. Was he a close friend?”
I perceived that Slade wanted to know if I had been romantically involved with Mr. Heald. I wondered if Slade was jealous; but if so, what did it matter? I had enough other proof of his love, and I had rejected it. Once I might have been tempted to say I’d been in love with Mr. Heald to pay Slade back for his charade with Katerina, but that would have been disrespectful to Mr. Heald as well as untrue, and I hadn’t the heart for petty games.
“No,” I said. “He was just an admirer of my work. I’d only met him a few times.” I gave an incoherent explanation of how Mr. Heald had followed me around. “But he was a good man. I was mean to him. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. He saved my life, and he died because of me.”
I wept, my face buried against Slade’s chest. Slade was as rigid as if I were a bereaved stranger who’d thrown herself at him. My requited love for him was as hopeless as every unrequited love I’d ever experienced. But sometimes the body does not accept what the mind knows. My face involuntarily lifted to Slade’s. Our eyes met. Mine streamed with tears. His were alarmed. I sensed him wishing to recoil-but he didn’t. I felt a rush of the euphoria that one feels when one has survived a disaster. With it came an instinctive hunger to celebrate life. And I knew Slade felt the same. The rigidness of his body yielded. He bent his head. His mouth met mine with a force as cataclysmic as the explosion at the workhouse. He kissed me with a need and passion that equaled mine.
I have always scorned novels in which the heroine sees stars or hears music when she and the hero kiss, but now I understood the truth in the cliche. Stars and music there were none, but flashes like lightning seared my closed eyes. Thundering sensation rocked us both. Longing vanquished my modesty and sense of propriety. I drank Slade like a woman dying of thirst gulps water; I tasted blood and smoke and fire. My body melted against him. The hardness at his loins pressed urgently against me. I then learned that when a man and a woman who are former lovers become lovers anew, they cannot start at the beginning, with chaste kisses on the hand or cheek. They plunge straight into the depth of engagement they once shared. I wanted more than what I’d done with Slade in the forest in Scotland three years ago. Shame and sin be damned-I wanted us to join in the ultimate fulfillment that I’d never experienced but always craved.
We moved toward the bed, until Slade suddenly wrenched away from me. Breathing hard, his face suffused with desire and horror, he said, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Either he didn’t realize that I’d instigated the kiss or
