Chapter Twenty Six

I don't know what ‘appened," Dannyboy sobbed, and the sound pierced through the strange haze that shrouded Emma's mind as if it had come from miles and miles away. "She just fell on me in the carriage. And now she won't wake up."

Had that happened? Emma could scarcely credit it. It didn't sound like the sort of thing she would ordinarily do. At least, it had never happened before. She ought to say something, perhaps protest what surely must have been a dire exaggeration.

In a moment, she would. When she could convince her lips to move and her mouth to produce any sound beyond the deep, even breaths it wanted to take.

"There, now, she's only asleep." Diana's voice, pitched to a soothing tone, as one would use with a frightened child. "She's been awake for days now. I imagine she simply couldn't manage it anymore. She'll be right as rain again with a little rest, Dannyboy. Nothing to worry yourself over, I'm certain."

"Here, I've got her." A masculine rumble, raspy and hoarse and barely audible past the fog within Emma's ears.

"Rafe, your fingers!" Diana cried.

Rafe?

"I've had worse, Diana. Don't fuss."

There was the strange sense of motion that Emma had not initiated. A shaft of bright sunlight blazed against her closed lids as she found herself turned from the odd, uncomfortable position into which she must have crumpled. The fabric of her skirts and petticoats rubbed against her legs as an arm wedged itself beneath her knees, and another braced her back.

Her head tipped against a hard shoulder, her mussed hair falling into her face, the strands tickling her cheeks and chin. If she had had even the tiniest bit of energy left, she might have wrinkled her nose at acrid scent of sweat and fear that had permeated the once-fine linen of the shirt against her cheek. Probably he had not been allowed a bath in too many days. Had he come straight here instead of to his home to bathe and recover from his ordeal, then?

She could not summon the will even to crack her eyes open. Already she was slipping away again as the sunlight streamed over her face, the chatter about her fading to a distant murmur. It seemed only a moment before she was jerked toward the surface of sleep once more by the sensation of falling. No, not falling—her head touched the feathery fluff of a pillow. The warmth of Rafe's arms deserted her, leaving her cradled by the plush mattress and the soft velvet counterpane beneath her.

"Just a bit longer." There was the pressure of a hand upon her shoulder, turning her toward her stomach. "Diana, fetch a nightgown, won't you?" A soothing stroke along her back, and then the gentle manipulation of buttons followed. Somewhere across the room, there was the scrape of drawers in their moorings within her dresser, the rustle of soft fabrics as Diana rooted through her things in search of a nightgown.

"I can do it." Emma managed to dredge the words up and force them out in a slurry mumble from where her face was mashed into the pillow. "I'm awake."

A soft laugh, half-amused, half-annoyed. "You really are not." Her gown slipped off her shoulders, her arms slid through the casing of smooth silk, and the whole thing was pulled out from beneath her and over her head. A pull at the tapes of her petticoat and then the laces of her stays. "It's all right. Sleep."

"Rafe." Her voice crackled away into nothingness, smothered against the cool surface of the pillow. Somehow she managed to lift her head enough to try again. "I—"

Gentle fingers slid through her hair in a soothing stroke. "Emma, for God's sake. Go to sleep."

Well, she had tried. But she hadn't managed even to open her eyes, really. With a long sigh, she surrendered that last bit of consciousness to which she had clung so desperately, and for a while she knew nothing further.

She had no sense of the passage of time, nothing more than the occasional vague awareness of something happening nearby. The muted scrape of a chair's legs across the carpet. A hand upon her back, warm against her skin even through the familiar softness of her nightgown, into which she had been changed at some indeterminable point. The weight of the counterpane being tucked around her shoulders to ward away the chill. The crackle of the fire being stoked, and an ambient heat curling around her.

Brief conversations held in hushed voices, as if the speakers were loath to disturb her rest. Diana's voice, in gentle whispers. Dannyboy's, and Hannah's, and Kit's, too, once, or so she thought. Sometimes they tugged her from the depths of that curious lethargy, pulling her close—but not quite near enough—to the surface once more. They wove a strange tapestry of sounds about her, but it was…comforting. Pleasant. Reassuring.

She slept. And she slept. Impossible to tell, really, what was waking and what was dreaming. Impossible to know when at last that veil would lift, whether what little she had been aware of happening in her vicinity had been real or just an invention of her exhausted mind. When she might at last stir herself enough toward wakefulness to ease the notes of worry she heard lingering between softly-spoken words.

"She's not woken yet." Rafe's voice, rife with concern.

She wanted to. It was just that her every muscle refused to cooperate. Even her thoughts were vague and distant, swimming away from her before she could grasp at them, until she felt like an outside observer even to herself.

"She will, Rafe," Diana said. "She only needs rest. She's stretched herself to her very limits these last few days."

"On our account." It was a dark grumble, full of guilt.

"Would you have preferred to hang?" A heavy silence drew out, too long for comfort, and Diana snapped in strident tones of reproach, "Rafe."

"I would have preferred not to involve her, and certainly never to such an extent," he said at last, but Emma felt his fingers once more twine through her hair, as if it presented an irresistible lure. "She's been through enough already."

"As have you, I think," Diana said. She gave a delicate cough, the sort meant to indicate a modicum of disapproval. "If you will not take rest yourself, at least you ought to bathe. I could smell you from the hall."

"I will." But still his fingers slid through her hair on a smooth, even glide. "Eventually."

Diana heaved an exasperated sigh. "Have it your way," she said. "But I am going to fetch someone to see to your hand. It looks just dreadful."

His battered fingers. They had to pain him terribly.

There was the soft pad of footsteps retreating, and then the whisk of the door closing. The distant crackle of the fire prickled at the silence, scorching it at the edges.

"I'm so sorry, Emma." He whispered the words as if he had not the right to speak them, as if it were a grave offense only to let them pass his lips. "I'm so damned sorry. There are so many things I would have done differently, had I known better at the time."

She knew this already. She had learned for herself the travails of making difficult choices with only the information one possessed. Sometimes there was no right choice. That even the choices one felt entirely justified in making could burn one in the end. That it was possible to make the objectively correct choice and still live to regret it. There were never any certainties in life.

"It was selfish of me even to come," he said, still in that same hushed tone. "Once again I have placed my wishes above your own, and I have no defense for it. Perhaps it would be best to leave before you wake. To do you the small courtesy of absenting myself and save you the trouble of ejecting me."

Her lids were too heavy still to lift, but her lips formed a word. Her fingers flexed, summoning the strength to slide across the vast emptiness of the bed that separated them. She heard the catch of his breath as her fingers brushed his.

"Stay," she whispered. It was the most that she could manage, but it had been enough. He made a choked sound, ragged and aching, and his hand collected hers within it.

"As you wish," he said.

And there; there was certainty now, in this. That he would still be here at her bedside when at last she could stir herself enough to open her eyes. And it was that thought that carried her once more down into a deep sleep once more.

∞∞∞

It was dark when she awoke again, the fire banked to a low, flickering glow of shifting orange and red. This time, when she thought about moving, her muscles obeyed. Slowly, and with trembling, jerky movements—but they obeyed. Her arm slid out from beneath the covers, stretching for the nightstand beside her bed in a queer, shaky gesture, fingers reaching blindly in the darkness.

There was a faint rustle beside her. "What do you need?"

"Water." Her voice was the hoarse croak of a toad, through a throat that felt hot and dry and scratchy. In the darkness there was a strange blur of movement, and then the cold surface of a glass pressed against her fingers. She grabbed it greedily, swallowing down half the cool contents in a single desperate gulp.

The blurred edges of her vision cleared enough to bring Rafe's dim outline into focus, to see him brace one hand upon the edge of the bed. "Would you like me to ring for dinner?" he asked.

"Dinner?" She surrendered the empty glass back to him. "Is it so late already?"

"Late," he said. "Then early. Now late again. Emma, you've slept for nearly a day and a half."

"What?" She couldn't have done. "You're joking."

"I am not. Diana tells me you did not sleep these last days. That you hardly ate." There was just the faintest hint of recrimination in his voice, as if displeased with her recklessness—even though she had judged it a necessary evil, even despite the outcome.

Her fingers curled into the soft velvet counterpane. "I cannot imagine you have fared much better yourself," she said quietly. She had hardly let herself think of it, after all. He had been battered already when first she had seen him at Whitehall all those days ago, and it turned her stomach to consider what he and Kit might have suffered since. "Have you slept?"

"No. But I am accustomed to such things—"

"That's enough." The clear, crisp intonation was the same one she had long learned to use on recalcitrant children, and it brooked no argument, offered no avenue of dissent. With one hand she patted the space beside her. "Here," she said. "Now."

He hesitated. She could almost hear the clench of his teeth in the darkness, the cogs inside his mind wrenching to a grinding halt. She did hear the sweet tinge of longing in his voice when he spoke again. "Emma, I—"

"It wasn't a request. I will prevail upon your guilty conscience if I must." Though she suspected she weighed upon it a bit too heavily already. But it had worked, and she felt the tremble of his arms as he braced them upon the bed, and she eased to the side to permit him a bit more room only seconds before he collapsed upon the mattress beside her. An odd sound—not quite a sigh of relief, but more a grand releasing of tension—tore itself from his lungs. Perhaps he, too, had reached his limit, though he had borne it all somewhat more steadfastly than she had managed.

"Have you been in that chair all this time?" she asked as she settled herself beside him, tucking her head against his shoulder.

"Not all of it. I did have a bath. Diana found my odor offensive."

So had she, but less due to the sour stench of sweat that had clung to his skin and his clothes and more because it had been an olfactory reminder of what he had suffered, where he had been, how close he had come to the very brink of death. Now he smelled clean and fresh. Probably someone had fetched him a new set of clothing at some point.

"You were never left alone," he said. "Diana sat with you for a time. And Phoebe. Lydia and Marcus, as well. And Chris, though he swiftly lost patience with Dannyboy and Hannah, whom he judged too rambunctious for his liking—"

"Kit was here? I thought I might've dreamt it."

"He is still," Rafe said. "Your butler has had him housed in a room somewhere down the hall. He meant to recover in his own home, but I didn't give him much of a choice in the matter. It would be unwise to move him, for a while."

Because of the state of his knee, she guessed he meant to imply. Probably she had seen less than the half of it. "He will recover?"

"He'll heal," he said, in a dull voice. "In time. But the damage is extensive. He'll walk again, but not comfortably. It's likely he'll always have a limp."

That would rankle, she knew. And it would necessitate certain changes to his life that would ill-suit the devil-may-care one he had led prior. But what was a limp when weighed against the value of the life he had regained? "I suppose I shall have to purchase him a cane," she said. "They're really quite fashionable at the moment." And no one would dare utter a scathing word against him in her hearing.

Beneath her head, she could feel the slow loosening of muscles, hear the evening of his breath. "He won't like it," Rafe said. Already there was the blurry mumble of encroaching sleep within his voice.

No, Kit wouldn't. He would attribute the use of it—fashionable or not—to a sort of weakness he was loath to let anyone see. But he would use it nonetheless, because he was her brother and he loved her. And that was worth all the complaints she would no doubt suffer.

Rafe's shoulder jerked, as if he had sensed himself falling into sleep and pulled himself back from it. "I have to tell you," he said, in a strange note of urgency.

"Later," she soothed. Much later, when they had both rested. When the weight of the stress they both had endured had passed.

"I need you to know how very sorry—"

"Later," she said again. Because now there would be a later. Time, which she had only too recently measured in mere hours, had unfurled itself once more, stretching into a distant future. "We'll do a great deal of talking, the two of us. Later."

With a regretful sigh, he gave up the ghost at last, everything he had meant to say lost for the moment, smothered beneath the shroud of much-needed sleep. The desperation held within those final few words he had spoken had pulled upon the strings of her heart, and she had the sense that he had been holding them back a good long while.

Probably for ten years, she supposed, more or less. Every action, every conversation, every night he had spent with her—that apology had always been hiding there within them. An apology he had never been able to give to her in truth, because he had been bound by duty and honor toward his country to secrecy. But it had been there just the same. She had simply been unable to see past her hurt to the truth of it, to the man who had always loved her, even when she had scarcely been aware of his existence.

The soft, even cadence of his breath edged slowly toward a snore, the low drone of it coaxing a smile from her, and she thought it the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard. Only because it was one more breath he drew, one more moment of a life no longer destined to be cut tragically short.

And she would never again take a single one of those precious breaths, nor even one tiny, inconsequential moment for granted.