“I’m surprised you know what I mean.”
“I had the run of my father’s library. He had some unusual books.” She paused. “And anyway, it’s in the Bible.”
Again, he realized this woman was considerably more mysterious than anything he’d encountered in India.
“We provided an evening’s diversion for the court.” Gideon spoke quickly, hoping that would ease the telling. It didn’t. “We were whipped.”
He bit down hard, trying not to remember the cutting agony of the lash, the strangled groans and screams from Gerard and Parsons.
“He meant to humiliate you.” Charis’s composure was surprising, impressive, but he noticed the tremor in the hand she curled around the back of her chair.
“Us and the overweening British nation. He wanted information too, but that could wait until specialists got their hands on us. This was purely for His Highness’s entertainment.”
“You didn’t beg for mercy.” Her voice rang with certainty. The knuckles on her fine-boned hand shone white as she clutched the chair.
“I had too much stupid pride. It meant my beating went on considerably longer than the others’.” Until he’d collapsed unconscious on the cold marble floor. He’d thought then he had tested the dregs of humiliation. How naïve he’d been. “Then they took us away and tortured us.”
Dear Lord, don’t let her ask about his torture in the Nawab’s dungeons. The memories were so vivid, it was as though he still hung in chains from the seeping, fetid walls. Nothing this side of heaven could force him to tell her about that foul Gehenna. A place of neither night nor day, just darkness, lit by the flare of torches and reeking with blood and filth and terror.
The fiendish instruments. The endless torment. The inevitable knowledge that nothing could save them.
There would be pain. Then there would be death. No escape.
“Gideon…” She looked down and sucked in a shuddering breath. Not before he caught the shimmer of tears.
Her shaking distress wrenched him back from nightmare. “I should stop. I’m upsetting you.”
As she looked up, her eyes glittered. He was astonished to recognize fury beneath her wretchedness. “Of course I’m upset. You describe your systematic degradation and torture.” Her slender throat moved as she swallowed. “How long were you held?”
“A year. Mostly in a dark pit the size of a grave.” His voice was still flat although his heart beat like a drum as he revisited the agonies of Rangapindhi. Not that they were ever far from his thoughts. But somehow putting what he’d endured into words revived all the vile reality.
Now he’d released the floodgates that dammed the memories, he couldn’t stop. “Parsons died within the first week. Gerard, poor devil, hung on for over a month. God knows why I didn’t die too. I should have. The jailers gave me just enough food to keep me alive. I’ve never been sure why. Just as I’ve never been sure why of the three of us, I survived.”
She released the chair and wrapped her arms around herself. Standing there in her cheap, borrowed dress and a coat far too large for her, she should have looked absurd. But her beauty shone like a beacon, stole his breath.
“You wanted to die,” she said bleakly.
His lips flattened. “Believe me, death would have been welcome. But I was too blasted stubborn to kill myself and give those bastards the satisfaction of besting me. And for all the pain they put me through, they never quite finished me off.”
Raising her chin, she cast him a defiant look. Her voice emerged with unexpected ruthlessness. “So you were a hero.”
He stiffened and stepped back. No hero he. A hero never begged for mercy from his torturers. A hero never longed for death to spare him another day’s pain. A hero never succumbed to devils in his mind.
“No, I wasn’t a bloody hero.”
Her voice deepened into irony. “Because you told the Nawab what he wanted to know.”
“Believe me, keeping my mouth shut was the extent of my courage. When the Company’s men finally dragged me out of that pit, I was a babbling lunatic.”
She made a sound in her throat that indicated disagreement, but mercifully she didn’t argue. Strain marked her features. “And it’s the torture that makes it impossible for you to…touch anyone?”
He met her perceptive gaze and decided he’d gone too far to prevaricate. He folded his arms in a futile attempt to hide his shaking. “We were chained together in the pit and left.”
He thought at first she hadn’t understood. Thank God.
Then he realized what scant color she retained leached from her face. “The three of you?”
He stiffened. Damnation, he should never have started this. Why didn’t he make up some easy story about comfortable incarceration and eventual rescue?