Trial by Desire (Carhart 2)

But instead of letting the emotion show, she simply tapped on the wall beside her. He looked up, and now that she was peering into his eyes, she could see the hints of emotion. There was that slight widening of his eyes when he saw her. His lips compressed, not in anger, but in pain, as he shifted his legs as if he were going to—

“Ned,” Kate said in as oppressive a tone of voice as she could manage, “you are not going to stand up to greet me. That would be extremely foolish.”

He paused, on the verge of swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “Um,” he replied.

She sighed. “And let me guess. You refused all laudanum.”

As he was gritting his teeth in pain, instead of smiling in the dreamy wonder the drug would provide, she didn’t need him to answer.

“It’s cold in here,” she said. “Do you want me to—”

“No.”

Oh, yes. That. She always managed to forget it.

“On the physician’s orders, you’ll be confined to crutches for months. You might as well be comfortable. Can I bring you…some tea? A book?”

He glanced at her once more. “No.”

“Can I sit with you, then, and keep you company? Isn’t there something I can do for you?”

He smiled. “Nothing, Kate. No need to bother yourself.”

Kate stepped toward him. He was smiling, but his words were as much a betrayal as ever. When he’d been half dead on his feet, he’d insisted he didn’t need any help. Some of that, no doubt, had been a masculine, irrational response to overwhelming pain. But now that he was himself again, he was doing the same. He was just doing it more politely.

“Ned, you’re going to be limited for weeks. Months, perhaps. You might as well let me care for you, just a little.”

He didn’t say anything. His shoulders stiffened, though, and he leaned forward just an inch. “You were planning on staying in bed today, weren’t you?”

Still no response. No verbal response, that was, and the lack of meek assent on his part was as a denial. She waited until he finally looked up at her.

“But there’s Harcroft,” he said.

Just those words, and she understood what he meant. If she let herself think of what Harcroft could do, her own skin crawled.

“If I can stop him,” he said quietly, “I can do any thing.”

“But you can’t,” Kate said quietly. She sat in the chair by his bedside and reached for his hand. “You can’t do anything you wish. You certainly can’t do everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can respect you, even if your bones knit at a human pace. I can trust you even if you can’t get out of bed to catch me.”

He turned his palm down before she could take his hand. “That’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not that I believe I must heal unnaturally quickly. It’s that… It’s that…”

“It’s that you don’t want me to help you.”

His head shot up at that, and a flare entered his eyes. “I don’t need help.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t ever intend to be a burden on you, Kate.”

“You’re not a burden, Ned.” She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder.

He looked away for a second. “Do you want to know why I don’t accept help? Why I can’t accept your charity, however kindly you mean it? It’s the same reason I sleep in the cold. Why I pitch hay, instead of having servants do it for me. It’s because I don’t dare allow myself common weaknesses.”

“I don’t want you to be weak. I just want—”

“You want to wrap me up in cotton batting, so I can’t get hurt. Do you want to know what happened in China, Kate?”

“I thought—”

“Do you want to know what really happened in China, after they pulled me out of the privy? I nearly killed myself.”

“An accident—”

“No. When I confronted Captain Adams in China, I wasn’t just desperate. I was fighting for every last scrap of determination that I could find, but weighted down by a black despair.”

She stared at him.

He spoke quietly. “You don’t know what I mean, when I speak of black despair. You think that is just hyperbole. After Captain Adams tossed me into the swamp, the feeling only intensified. I washed three times. It didn’t help. I couldn’t get the stink from my mind, no matter how raw I rubbed my skin.”

Ned was staring at a spot on the wall, his hands gripped on his knees. “He’d won. And there was no escaping the fact that he was right—that I was a useless excuse for a man, sent off because nobody at home needed me any longer.”

“You know that’s not true.”

He glanced at her once, and then looked away. “At first, I thought only to get myself to water. As if I could become clean again by proximity. And so I found a dinghy and rowed out into the ocean.” He sighed. “Funny how I felt so trapped, with nothing about me.”

“Accidents happen at sea.” Kate took another step toward him, reached out her hand. But he sent her another quelling look, and her fingers curled up. “You were upset. You can’t blame yourself.”

“Don’t run from it, Kate.” His voice was dark, quiet. It echoed in the room. “You want me to trust you? You want to understand what I mean when I talk of darkness? Then listen to this. I had a pistol with me. And I held it to my temple.”

She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t even swallow the gasp of horror that escaped her.

“I was this close to pulling the trigger—and it wasn’t hope or comfort or help from anyone else that drew me back. It was simply that when faced with the stark choice between life and death, I discovered that I wanted to live. Truly live, not just stumble through life from point to point, waiting to be plunged into darkness again. So don’t you dare feel sorry for me. I survived.”

She grappled for words. “I don’t think you’re weak because you had a lapse—”

His eyes blazed. “No. I’m not. I’m here because I made myself strong. Because I knew if I intended to go on, I had to stop feeling as if I was a burden to everyone around me. If you want to know who I am, if you want to understand why I do what I do, then you need to comprehend that some part of me has never left that boat. And for me, the choice of whether to live the life I want is as simple as believing that I can do this all, without ever being a burden on an

yone again.”

“It’s not pity when I offer to make you comfortable. It’s not an apology if I hurt for you when you tell me you’ve suffered. You aren’t weak if you let me care for you.”

“No,” he said in a clipped tone. “You’re quite right. It’s none of those things. But it is also not something I allow myself.”

And on those words he turned away. It wounded her, that dismissal. Strength, her husband could discuss. But for all that he’d promised to be worthy of her trust, he’d never once made a covenant to trust Kate in return.

She’d run up against the rock wall of this need of his—this need to be strong, no matter how much it hurt her—often enough that she knew how immovable it was. All she could do was bruise herself slamming against it, and her spirit ached enough as it was. And now she’d managed to uncover the why of it. The cold, hard truth that made him who he was. She knew enough to know that he wouldn’t change.

It would have been too simple to say she was hurt by the knowledge. “Hurt” sounded like a mere pain in her mind, a onetime twinge that flared up and would ebb away. What she felt was not so sharp as pain, but much more pervasive. Every inch of her skin ached to lean close to him, to pull his head toward her and smooth his brow. Every fiber of her being wanted to give him comfort, to tell him that he was strong, that he didn’t need to do this to himself. It wasn’t hurt she felt. It was worse. It was all the hopes that she’d nourished without evidence all these years turning to disappointment inside her.

She stepped forward until she stood over him. Ever since he returned, he’d been towering over her. Now, trapped on the bed as he was, she loomed over him. The darkness of her shadow, cast in the afternoon light, crossed his face as she stepped forward.

She wanted to yell at him. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders. If he hadn’t broken his leg, she might even have done it.

It wouldn’t have done any good.

“I don’t mean to hurt you,” he said.