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  “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “It looks worse than it is.”

  But Catherine didn’t agree. If anything, it was worse than it looked. She was infused with panic as she wondered if he were going into shock, a condition in which the heart did not pump enough blood to maintain the body. It had been described as a “momentary pause in the act of death.”

  Stripping off her riding coat, she tried to lay it over his chest.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Trying to keep you warm.”

  Leo plucked the garment off his chest and made a scoffing sound. “Don’t be ridiculous. First, the injury isn’t that bad. Second, this tiny thing is not capable of keeping any part of me warm. Now, about my plan—”

  “It is obviously a significant injury,” she said, “and I do not agree to your plan. I have a better one.”

  “Of course you do,” he replied sardonically. “Marks, for once would you do as I ask?”

  “No, I’m not going to leave you here. I’m going to pile up enough debris for both of us to climb out.”

  “You can’t even see, damn it. And you can’t move these timbers and stones. You’re too small.”

  “There is no need to make derogatory remarks about my stature,” she said, lurching upward and squinting at her surroundings. Identifying the highest pile of debris, she made her way to it and hunted for nearby rocks.

  “I’m not being derogatory.” He sounded exasperated. “Your stature is absolutely perfect for my favorite activity. But you’re not built for hauling rocks. Blast it, Marks, you’re going to hurt yourself—”

  “Stay there,” Catherine said sharply, hearing him push some heavy object aside. “You’ll worsen your injury, and then it will be even more difficult to get you out. Let me do the work.” Finding a heap of ashlar blocks, she picked one up and lugged it up the pile, trying not to trip over her own skirts.

  “You’re not strong enough,” Leo said, sounding aggravated and out of breath.

  “What I lack in physical strength,” she replied, going for another block, “I make up for in determination.”

  “How inspiring. Could we set aside the heroic fortitude for one bloody moment and dredge up some common sense?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, my lord. I need to save my breath for”—she paused to heft another block—“stacking rocks.”

  Somewhere amid the ordeal, Leo decided hazily that he would never underestimate Catherine Marks again. Ounce for ounce, she was the most insanely obstinate person he had ever known, dragging rocks and debris while half blind and hampered by long skirts, diligently crossing back and forth across his vision like an industrious mole. She had decided to build a mound upon which they could climb out, and nothing would stop her.

  Occasionally she stopped and put her hand on his forehead or throat, checking his temperature and pulse. And then she would be off again.

  It was maddening not to be able to help her—humiliating to let a woman do such work without him—but every time he tried to stand, he became dizzy and disoriented. His shoulder was on fire, and he couldn’t use his left arm properly. Cold sweat dripped from his face and stung his eyes.

  He must have drifted off for a few minutes, because the next thing he was aware of was Catherine’s urgent hands shaking him awake.

  “Marks,” he said groggily. “What are you doing here?” He had the confused impression that it was morning, and she wanted him to awaken before his usual hour.

  “Don’t sleep,” she said with an anxious frown. “I’ve built the pile high enough that we can climb out now. Come with me.”

  His body felt as if it had been encased in lead. He was overwhelmed with weariness. “In few minutes. Let me doze a bit longer.”

  “Now, my lord.” Clearly she would bully and badger him until he obeyed. “Come with me. Up with you. Move.”

  Leo complied with a groan, lurching until he had staggered to his feet. A cold burst of pain radiated from his shoulder and arm, and a few helpless curses slipped out before he could stop himself. Oddly, Catherine didn’t rebuke him.

  “Over there,” she said. “And don’t trip—you’re too heavy for me to catch.”

  Profoundly irritated but aware that she was trying to help him, he concentrated on placing his feet and maintaining his balance.

  “Is Leo short for Leonard?” she asked, confusing him.

  “Confound it, Marks, I don’t want to talk now.”

  “Answer me,” she persisted.

  He realized she was trying to keep him alert. “No,” he said, breathing heavily. “It’s just Leo. My father loved the constellations. Leo is the … constellation of high summer. The brightest star marks his heart. Regulus.” He paused to stare blearily at the pile she had made. “Well. How efficient you are. The next time I take an architectural commission—” He paused to catch his breath. “I’ll recommend you as the contractor.”

  “Just think if I’d had my spectacles,” she said. “I could have made proper stairs.”

  He let out a huff of laughter. “You go first, and I’ll follow.”

  “Hold on to my skirts,” she said.

  “Why, Marks, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  They climbed out together laboriously, while Leo’s blood turned to ice and his wound ached and his brains went to mush. By the time he’d flopped to the ground in an awkward sideways sprawl, he was infuriated with Catherine for making him go to such effort when he’d wanted to stay in the pit and rest. The sun was blinding, and he felt hot and strange. A ferocious ache had settled behind his eyes.

  “I’ll fetch my horse,” Catherine said. “We’ll ride back together.”

  The prospect of mounting a horse and riding to Ramsay House was exhausting. But faced with her ruthless insistence, he had no choice but to comply. Very well. He would ride. He would bloody well ride until he expired, and Catherine would appear at the house with his corpse seated behind her.

  Leo sat there fuming and boiling until Catherine brought the horse. The anger gave him the strength for one last massive effort. He swung up behind her, sat the horse, and put his good arm around her slim body. He held on to her, shivering with discomfort. She was small but strong, her spine a steady axis that centered them both. Now all he had to do was endure. His resentment evaporated, dispersed by thrills of pain.

  He heard Catherine’s voice. “Why have you decided never to marry?”

  His head bobbed closer to her ear. “It isn’t fair to ask personal questions when I’m nearly delirious. I might tell you the truth.”

  “Why?” she persisted.

  Did she realize she was asking for a piece of him, of his past, that he never gave to anyone? Had he been feeling even a little less wretched, he would have cut her off at once. But his usual defenses were no more effective than the broken stone wall surrounding the manor-house remains.

  “It’s because of the girl who died, isn’t it?” Catherine stunned him by asking. “You were betrothed. And she perished from the same scarlet fever that afflicted you and Win. What was her name…?”

  “Laura Dillard.” It seemed impossible that he could share this with Catherine Marks, but she seemed to expect that he would. And somehow he was obliging her. “Beautiful girl. She loved to watercolor. Few people are good at that, they’re too afraid of making mistakes. You can’t lift the color or hide it, once it’s put down. And water is unpredictable—an active partner in the painting—you have to let it behave as it will. Sometimes the color diffuses in ways you don’t expect, or one shade backruns into another. That was fine with Laura. She liked the surprises of it. We had known each other all during childhood. I went away for two years to study architecture, and when I came back, we fell in love. So easily. We never argued—there was nothing to argue over. Nothing in our way. My parents had both died the previous year. My father had a heart ailment. He went to sleep one night and never woke up. And my mother followed him just a few months later. She could
n’t stop mourning him. I hadn’t known until then that some people could die of grief.”

  He was quiet then, following the memories as if they were leaves and twigs floating on a stream. “When Laura caught the fever, I never thought it would be fatal. I thought I loved her so much that the power of it would be greater than any illness. But I held her for three days and felt her dying a little more each hour. Like water trickling through my fingers. I held her until her heart stopped beating, and her skin finally turned cool. The fever had done its work and left her.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly, when he fell silent. She covered his good hand with her own. “Truly sorry. I … oh, what an inadequate thing to say.”

  “It’s all right,” Leo said. “There are some experiences in life they haven’t invented the right words for.”

  “Yes.” Her hand remained over his. “After Laura died,” she said in a moment, “you fell ill with the same fever.”

  “It was a relief.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to die. Except that Merripen, with his bloody Gypsy potions, wouldn’t let me. It took a long time for me to forgive him for that. I hated him for keeping me alive. Hated the world for spinning without her. Hated myself for not having the bollocks to end it all. Every night I fell asleep begging Laura to haunt me. I think she did for a while.”

  “You mean … in your mind? Or literally, as a ghost?”

  “Both, I suppose. I put myself and everyone around me through hell until I finally accepted that she was gone.”

  “And you still love her.” Catherine’s voice was bleak. “That’s why you’ll never marry.”

  “No. I have an extraordinary fondness for her memory. But it was a lifetime ago. And I can’t ever go through that again. I love like a madman.”

  “It might not be like that again.”

  “No, it would be worse. Because I was only a boy then. And now who I am, what I need … it’s too damned much for anyone to manage.” A sardonic laugh rustled in his throat. “I overwhelm even myself, Marks.”

  Chapter Eight

  By the time they reached the timber yard, set a short distance from Ramsay House, Catherine was desperately worried. Leo had become monosyllabic, and he was leaning on her heavily. He was shivering and sweating, his arm a cold weight across her front as he held on to her. A portion of her dress stuck to her shoulder where his blood had soaked it. She saw a blurry group of men preparing to unload a timber wagon. Please, dear God, let Merripen be among them.

  “Is Mr. Merripen with you?” she called out.

  To her vast relief, Merripen’s dark, lean form emerged. “Yes, Miss Marks?”

  “Lord Ramsay has been injured,” she said desperately. “We took a fall—his shoulder was pierced—”

  “Take him to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

  Before she could reply, he had already begun to run to the house with smooth, ground-eating speed.

  By the time Catherine had guided the horse to the front entrance, Merripen was there.

  “There was an accident at the ruins,” Catherine said. “A shard of timber has been lodged in his shoulder for at least an hour. He’s very cold, and his speech is disoriented.”

  “That’s my usual way of talking,” Leo said behind her. “I’m perfectly lucid.” He tried to descend from the horse in a kind of slow topple. Reaching up for him, Merripen caught him deftly. He wedged his shoulder beneath Leo’s and guided his good arm around his neck. The pain jolted Leo and caused him to grunt. “Oh, you sodding filthy whoreson.”

  “You are lucid,” Merripen said dryly, and he looked at Catherine. “Where is Lord Ramsay’s horse?”

  “Still at the ruins.”

  Merripen gave her an assessing glance. “Are you injured, Miss Marks?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Run into the house and find Cam.”

  Accustomed as the Hathaways were to emergencies, they managed the situation with brisk efficiency. Cam and Merripen helped Leo into the manor and up the stairs, one on either side of him. Although a bachelor’s house had been built beside the estate for Leo’s use, he had insisted that Merripen and Win live there instead, pointing out that as a fairly recently married couple, they needed the privacy far more than he. When he came to Hampshire, he stayed in one of the guest rooms in the main house.

  They formed a fairly harmonious triad, Cam and Merripen and Leo, each with his own area of responsibility. Although Leo was the holder of the estate, he had no objection to sharing authority. Upon returning from France after a two-year absence, Leo had been grateful to see how Cam and Merripen had rebuilt the Ramsay estate in his absence. They had turned the ramshackle property into a thriving and prosperous enterprise, and neither of them had asked for anything in return. And Leo had recognized that he had much to learn from both of them.

  Running an estate required far more than lounging in the library with a glass of port, as the aristocrats in novels did. It took extensive knowledge of agriculture, business, animal husbandry, construction, timber production, and land improvement. All that added to the responsibilities of politics and Parliament was more than one man could undertake. Therefore, Merripen and Leo had agreed to share the timber and agricultural concerns, while Cam handled the estate business and investments.

  In medical emergencies, although Merripen was competent in such matters, Cam usually took charge. Having learned the healing arts from his Romany grandmother, Cam was relatively experienced at treating illness and injury. It was better, safer even, to let him do what he could for Leo rather than send for a doctor.

  The established practice in modern medicine was for doctors to bleed their patients for every imaginable ailment, despite controversies within the medical community. Statisticians had begun to track case history to prove that bloodletting did no good whatsoever, but the procedure persisted. Sometimes bloodletting was even used to treat hemorrhaging, in accordance with the belief that it was better to do something than nothing at all.

  “Amelia,” Cam said as he and Merripen settled Leo into his bed, “we’ll need cans of hot water sent up from the kitchen, and all the toweling you can spare. And Win, perhaps you and Beatrix might take Miss Marks to her room and help her?”

  “Oh, no,” Catherine protested, “thank you, but I don’t need assistance. I can wash by myself and—”

  Her objections were overridden, however. Win and Beatrix would not relent until they had overseen her bath and helped to wash her hair and change her into a fresh gown. The extra pair of spectacles was found, and Catherine was relieved to have her vision restored. Win insisted on tending Catherine’s hands and applying salve and bandages to her fingers.

  Finally Catherine was allowed to go to Leo’s room, while Win and Beatrix went to wait downstairs. She found Amelia, Cam, and Merripen all crowded around the bedside. Leo was shirtless, and heaped with blankets. It shouldn’t have surprised her that he was arguing simultaneously with the three of them.

  “We don’t need his permission,” Merripen said to Cam. “I’ll pour it down his throat if necessary.”

  “The hell you will,” Leo growled. “I’ll kill you if you try—”

  “No one is going to force you to take it,” Cam interrupted, sounding exasperated. “But you have to explain your reasons, phral, because you’re not making sense.”

  “I don’t have to explain. You and Merripen can take that filthy stuff and shove it up your—”

  “What is it?” Catherine asked from the doorway. “Is there a problem?”

  Amelia came out into the hallway, her face taut with worry and vexation. “Yes, the problem is that my brother is a pigheaded idiot,” she said, loudly enough for Leo to hear. She turned to Catherine and lowered her voice. “Cam and Merripen say the wound isn’t serious, but it could become very bad indeed if they don’t clean it properly. The piece of timber slipped in between the clavicle and the shoulder joint, and there’s no way of knowing how deep it went. They have to ir
rigate the wound to remove splinters or clothing fibers, or it will fester. In other words, it’s going to be a bloody mess. And Leo refuses to take any laudanum.”

  Catherine regarded her with bafflement. “But … he must have something to dull his senses.”

  “Yes. But he won’t. He keeps telling Cam to go ahead and treat the wound. As if anyone could do such painstaking work when a man is screaming in agony.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t scream,” Leo retorted from the bedroom. “I only do that when Marks starts reciting her poetry.”

  Despite her consternation, Catherine almost smiled.

  Peering around the doorjamb, she saw that Leo’s coloring was terrible, his sun-browned complexion lightened to an ashy pallor. He was trembling like a wet dog. As his gaze met hers, he looked so defiant and exhausted and miserable that Catherine couldn’t stop herself from asking, “A word with you, my lord, if I may?”

  “By all means,” came his sullen reply. “I would so love to have someone else to argue with.”

  She entered the room, while Cam and Merripen moved aside. With an apologetic expression, she asked, “If I might have a moment of privacy with Lord Ramsay…?”

  Cam gave her a quizzical glance, clearly wondering what influence she thought she could have with Leo. “Do what you can to persuade him to drink that medicine on the bedside table.”

  “And if that doesn’t work,” Merripen added, “try a hard knock on the skull with that fireplace poker.”

  The pair went out into the hallway.

  Left alone with Leo, Catherine approached the bedside. She winced at the sight of the stake embedded in his shoulder, the lacerated flesh oozing blood. Since there was no bedside chair to sit on, she perched carefully on the edge of the mattress. She stared at him steadily, her voice soft with concern. “Why won’t you take the laudanum?”

  “Damn it, Marks…” He let out a harsh sigh. “I can’t. Believe me, I know what it’s going to be like without it, but I have no choice. It’s…” He stopped and looked away from her, setting his jaw against a new spate of shivering.