her eyes.
And then it struck her that this was probably the very bed where Sydnam had lain for long months recuperating from his experiences at the hands of torturers. She could have wept then but did not because she no longer had the privacy of a room of her own.
Last night-her wedding night-had been a terrible mistake. She had hoped that perhaps they could make amends tonight. But tonight she was too weary to want anything except to weep for the man Sydnam must have been before the torture.
The man she would never have met.
When he let himself quietly into the room perhaps fifteen minutes after she had lain down, she pretended to be asleep.
They were never of the physical torture itself.
They were of the intervals between-the waiting for the next session, the never knowing exactly when it would be, the always knowing
“No.” He was not speaking to them. He was speaking to
As always he woke himself up with the screaming. He sat bolt upright on the bed, bathed in sweat, threw off the covers, stumbled over them anyway as he got out because he had thrown them with his
He was almost instantly aware of Anne, sitting up on her side of the bed, reaching for him though he was too far away from her. He was still more than half in the nightmare and would be for some time, he knew from long experience. His body and his mind were too heavily drugged with the past to deal with the present for a while or even to display the common courtesies.
“Get out!” he told her. “Get out of here.”
“Sydnam-”
“Sydnam-”
She was out of bed too and rounding the foot of it to come to him. He would have lashed out at her then if he had had a right arm to do it with.
Someone knocked on the door-hammered on it actually.
“Syd?” It was Kit’s voice. “Syd? Anne? May I come in?”
Anne changed direction and headed for the door, which opened just before she reached it.
“Syd?” Kit said again. “You are still having the nightmares? Let me help you. Anne-”
“Go away! Get out of here!”
He was still almost screaming. Soon the shaking would begin. He hated that weakness more than anything else. He hated for anyone to see it.
“Anne,” Kit said again, sounding like the military officer Sydnam had briefly known him as. “Go with Lauren. Mother is here too. Go with them. I’ll see to this.”
“He has had a nightmare,” Anne said, her voice soft but quite firm. “I will see to him, Kit, thank you.”
“But-”
“He is my husband,” she said. “He wishes to be alone. Go back to bed. Everything will be all right. I will see to him.”
And when she closed the door, she remained on Sydnam’s side of it.
He began to shake-every cell in his body shook, or so it seemed. All he could do was grasp a bedpost, cling tightly, and clamp his teeth together while the breath rasped in and out of his lungs.
“Sit down,” she said softly an indeterminate length of time later, one hand touching his arm, the other curling about his waist from behind.
When he sat, he found a chair behind him. A cover from the bed came over him then and was tucked warmly about him and beneath his chin and about his neck and shoulders so that he felt cocooned by its soft warmth. She must have gone down onto her knees before him. She set her head on his lap, turned it to one side, and wrapped her arms about his waist.
She did not move again or say another word while he shook and sweated and finally felt the comfort of the warm cover and the weight of her head on his knees and her arms clasped about him.
His mother, his father, Jerome, his various nurses, his valet before they went to Wales-they had all in their turn tried to talk him out of the aftermath of nightmare, but had only succeeded in pushing it deeper.
He appreciated her silence more than he could say. And he appreciated her presence more than he could possibly have expected.
“I am so sorry,” he said at last.
His hand was under the covers. He would have laid it on her head if it had been free. But she lifted her head and looked up at him, and in the faint moonlight that beamed through the window it seemed to him that she had never looked more beautiful.
“I am too,” she said. “Oh, Sydnam, my dear, I am so sorry. Do you need to talk about it?”
“Good God, no!” he exclaimed. “I beg your pardon, Anne, but no, thank you. It is my personal demon that will be with me forever, I daresay. One cannot go through something like that and expect only the body to be scarred. Just as my body will never be whole again, neither will my mind. I have accepted that. The nightmares are no longer as frequent as they used to be, and when I do have them, I seem to be able to break free of them more quickly most of the time. But I am sorry for the distress this one has caused you and that other ones will in future.”
“Sydnam,” she said, and he realized that her arms were stretched along his outer thighs, “I married
He lowered the blanket and stroked his fingers over her arm.
“I suppose I am vain and conceited,” he said. “I hate having you witness my weakness.”
“I think,” she said, “you are probably the least weak person I know, Sydnam Butler.”
He smiled at her.
“Did Andrew have the story right?” she asked him. “Was it an army surgeon who amputated your arm?”
“A British surgeon, yes,” he said, “after Kit and a group of Spanish partisans had rescued me. It was impossible to save it.”
“Sydnam,” she said, “I want to see you.”
It was impossible to misunderstand her meaning.
He had worn his shirt and breeches to bed even though she had been asleep by the time he came upstairs.
He shook his head.
“I