Chapter 17

Someone was ruining Belle’s life by pouring something horrible into her mouth. She spluttered and tried to turn her head away, to no avail.

“This will be easier”—Rufus loomed over her, looking frankly ghastly—“if you’re drunk.”

“I don’t want to be—”

Drunk? Here? It felt very like the sort of situation where nothing was easy. And, in fact, everything was difficult. Difficult accelerating towards miserable.

“Tough. Drink. Damn you.”

She half drank, half failed to drink, her throat and lips burning. “Where am I? What’s ...” A comical hiccough briefly interrupted both her words and her train of thought. “What’s happening?”

“You’re at an inn. And I’m about to sew up your arm.”

Only one of those seemed good. “Why? Is it falling off?”

“No. Obviously not. Must you be so fucking dramatic?”

“I’m not being dramatic,” she protested, offended and lightheaded at the same time. She was, at least, in less pain than she remembered. But that might have been because she was now mostly made of whisky. “Bunny had a bonn—no, wait. Bonny had a bunny ...” She giggled suddenly. “That sounds funny. Anyway, he had a bunny that he cuddled so much the arm fell off. So I tried to sew it back on because I was a girl, and that’s the sort of thing girls are supposed to be able to do, except it turns out sewing is hard, so I ended up re-attaching it the wrong way round.”

Rufus was threading a needle, his fingers less steady than might have been preferable under the circumstances. “Bonny did what to a rabbit?”

“Not a real rabbit. A toy rabbit.” A further thought occurred. “Wait a moment. I am a girl and I can’t sew. You’re not a girl. Can you sew?”

“I don’t think skill with a needle is directly linked to gender, dear heart.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I was in the army,” said Rufus, still not answering. “I had a uniform to maintain.”

Belle didn’t quite shriek. “A uniform is clothes. I’m not clothes.”

“Someone hold her down, please.”

It was Gil in the end who caught her weakly flailing hands in a surprisingly steady grip.

“Oh.” Belle blinked up at him. “Hello, Gil. I wasn’t sure if I dreamed you.”

“Sadly not. This is all a true thing taking place in my life.”

“And mine,” she pointed out. She tried to catch Rufus’s eye. “Is there not a doctor who could do this?”

“We sent for one, but we’re running out of time.”

“Out of time for what?”

“Out of time for you to have blood inside your body.”

She watched him heating the needle in a nearby candle flame. “Do I really need blood, though?”

“Unfortunately, it’s generally accounted a necessity for continued existence. I really am sorry about this, Belle.” And then, to someone just beyond her blurry range of vision, “And I’m sorry about your kitchen table.”

“I mean,” said a woman’s voice, low and laconic, “emergency surgery is what I keep it for.”

Belle considered this, thoughts loose from alcohol and swimming disconnectedly around her brain. “It’s not, is it? She’s lying.”

“She’s being very accommodating. Now, er, be so good as to hold on to this wooden spoon.”

“Wffmffteeef?”

“Mmm. Just bite down when you need to.”

Belle made an incoherently concerned noise that turned into a guttural squawk as Rufus doused her exposed arm in what felt like several gallons of alcohol. This, it turned out, was even worse than having to drink it. She violently spat out the spoon. “Ow.”

“Belle.” Rufus heaved a sigh of abject despair.

“What?”

“Just do what someone else tells you. For once in your life. Please. ”

This seemed unjust. “I do what people tell me.”

“When?”

“There have been times.”

“Name three.”

There was a long silence.

“Why don’t you think about it with this wooden spoon in your mouth?” suggested Rufus. “And then we can discuss how terribly wrong I am about everything afterwards?”

“I ...” Something in Belle quailed, various fears, barely admitted to herself, coalescing onto the nearest available object. “I don’t like the spoon. The spoon is scary.”

Rufus sighed again. Fine tremors racked his whole body. “I know, dear heart, I know. But I need you to handle it for—”

“Mouthle it.”

“Pardon?”

“Technically, you need me to mouthle it.”

“Right.” He curled his lips wanly. “Can you manage that for me?”

She pouted. “If I have to.”

“You have to. I can’t do ... what I have to do if you’re screaming and ...” Again, that tragic sketch of a smile. “You don’t want me to sew your arm on backwards, do you?”

It was then—far later than she would have done had she been sober and fully supplied with the recommended quantity of internal fluids—that she realised he was more upset by her pain than she was. With the closest a Tarleton could manage to meekness, she let him set the spoon between her lips, and was, in the end, glad of it, for she had sworn to herself, in that moment, she would not make a sound, and being able to grind her teeth into the soft wood meant that she did not.

Not a single cry. Nor a single whimper.

And Rufus worked quietly, and swiftly, his head bowed over her, the sweat caught in the furrows of his brow, pausing every now and again to steady his hands, dab away blood, or reheat the needle. Once to wipe his eyes.

She didn’t, for all her oft-avowed pleasure in I told you so s, ponder specific occasions on which she had taken instruction. Mostly, she tried to think of things that made her happy. Her twin reading and being infuriating about it, covering the book in notes and inserting little pieces of paper to remember his favourite pages. The smug way Bonny gazed at Valentine and the wonder-struck way Valentine gazed back. The sound of rain drumming like fingertips on the leaves of her favourite oak tree. Orfeo’s voice, soaring through impossible notes as effortless as a falcon in flight. And Peggy, of course. Her lost lover, her dear friend, who was never meant to stay, whose laughing she still missed, from times when it had been solely hers.

When next she surfaced, the pain was a steady—if unwelcome—companion, instead of a wild thing trying to claw its way through her skin. Her arm was tightly bandaged, and Rufus was washing his shaking, bloody hands in a basin. She meant to thank him and wanted to reassure him, but the world was wriggling away from her again. It didn’t feel like last time. There was no swirling ascent to infinity. Just a ground-in fatigue that was familiar and wholly of the body, and she sank into it with unexpected gladness.

At some point, Rufus was carrying her. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately.

And then she was in a bed, with fresh-smelling sheets and soft pillows, and hopefully very few to no bugs of any kind. She wasn’t sure if she was still drunk or utterly exhausted, but she had a vague memory of being encouraged—made—to drink water, which technically counted towards Rufus’s list of Belle Doing What She’d Been Told. Mostly, she was content to drift and doze and dreamily watch the soft-footed to-and-fro of figures in her room, catching pieces of conversation like reflections from the corner of her eye. She thought a doctor came and went. And, sometime later, which might not have been much later at all, she opened her eyes to find Rufus standing by the fire, still shirtless and haggard, with Gil’s highwayman cloak cast over his shoulders and Belle’s blood matted in his hair.

“You should rest too,” Gil was saying, which Belle agreed with.

“I don’t know how I could.”

“I think if you lie down, you’ll find it comes easily to you.”

“And what if she—”

“I can watch her.”

Rufus pressed his brow against the mantel. “That’s not your responsibility.”

“I did shoot her? That surely makes me a little bit responsible.” Gil gave a pointed cough. “Also, it’s no hardship. She’s been a lot nicer to me than you have.”

“I didn’t shoot you back. That makes me a lot nicer than you deserve.”

There was a long silence. Or Belle fell asleep.

Gil had his hand on Rufus’s arm. “You really care about her, don’t you?”

“Arabella Tarleton?”

“No, some other woman whose bullet wound you just sewed up.”

“She’s a pain in my fucking arse.”

With a huff of exasperation and an impatient motion, Rufus shook himself free, striding out of the room without another word.

And this, Belle supposed, was what you got for eavesdropping, even if it was unintentionally. It was one of the laws of the universe, alongside a single man in possession of a good fortune always being in want of a wife or there only ever being one bed. Listening to conversations not meant for you inevitably subjected you to things you didn’t want to hear. But she was too tired to be able to spend a lot of time delving into the recesses of her feelings. She was hurt, of course, yet it hardly seemed to matter. What she mainly was, was unsurprised. Being a pain in the arse seemed to be rather her inescapable destiny. To be fair, it was Bonny’s, too, except he made it cute.

Not for the first time, she wondered how different life would be had her parents not died so suddenly. Her days of blaming them for that (and feeling guilty for blaming them) were behind her. Had passed with the night-long weeping fits and the months of numbness, where nothing in the world felt real, and she kept waiting to wake up and find everything put back to rights. Herself in her bed at home, Bonny beside her (for he always crept in), her father at his dressing table—for he had, she saw with an adult’s eyes, always been vain—her mother in her sitting room, reading or sewing, both of them beloved in their ordinariness, safe to take for granted.

Bonny had learned to take other things for granted. She never had. She knew her aunt and uncle cared for them, but she also knew becoming the guardians of two grief-stricken children was something neither of them would have chosen. She knew Peggy had loved her once, and that this love, too, which she could not reciprocate, had become a burden. She knew Valentine wanted to do right by her, in recompense for past wrongs, but she also knew his ideal would have been to think of nothing but Bonny until the end of his days. For that matter, Bonny would probably have preferred to be living happily ever after with the duke of his dreams, and not worrying about his strange, unloveable, unloving sister. Orfeo, at least, had never concerned themself with her, or what others tended to perceive as her problems, but that was largely because they barely noticed she existed.

All of which meant it made sense that—in spite of his promise never to reproach her for their connection—she would be primarily an inconvenience to Rufus as well. She had tried not to be, and some of that inconvenience had been for his own good. Admittedly, that time she’d nearly let him get killed and eaten was not working in her favour. But when he hadn’t been lamenting the travails of long-distance travel, he’d truly seemed happier the past few days. He wasn’t trying to drink himself to death, at any rate. Did that not count for something?

Or maybe she was making excuses.

Maybe she’d been selfish again. Fucked everything up again. Dragged someone, yet again, into the Charybdis of her nonsense.

All because she was frightened of what could be taken from her next.

Of being inevitably and inescapably alone.