Chapter 14
Daniel had been walking for miles, through a swamp wreathed in mist. He could see the tree he sought but it never seemed to grow any closer.
The mud sucked at his boots and hands reached out through the swirling miasma, clutching at his clothes, holding him back.
His breath churned in his chest in his efforts to reach the tree, and now as the haze cleared he could see that it was not a tree but a gallows raised high on a hillock, and a figure danced and twisted at the end of a badly tied rope.
‘Kit!’ He screamed his brother’s name as the figure stilled, turning a mask of rotting flesh to look at him, the mouldering lips pulled back in a macabre death’s head grin.
‘Hush.’ A woman’s voice pierced the fog and he jerked himself awake the nightmare receding.
It took a moment for his breathing to still.
A cool cloth brushed his forehead and he forced his eyes open, blinking to allow the face above him to come into focus.
A woman … a young woman with a heart-shaped face and hazel eyes that gleamed gold in the light of the single candle she held in her hand.
She had taken off that awful linen cap and soft, brown hair curled around her face.
‘Agnes?”
She smiled and set the candle down. ‘I’m here.’
‘Where am I … are we?’
He tried to sit up but she firmly pushed him back onto the bolsters.
‘Seven Ways, the home of Sir Jonathan Thornton. You brought us here — remember?’
He had a brief, shaming memory of collapsing on the doorstep. Not quite the impression he would have wished to make on his brother’s old friend.
He reached up and touched her cheek, soft as his mother’s satin dress.
‘Did I tell you that I like your freckles?’ he said.
She frowned. ‘My freckles?’
He traced the scatter across her nose. ‘I’ll count them. One … two … ’
She should have batted his hand away and told him to stop being foolish; instead, she caught it and held it against her cheek for a long moment.
‘I thought you were going to die,’ she said, her voice uneven.
He extricated his hand from her grasp and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘After all the times in my life I could have died, it would be very annoying to die in a comfortable bed in England,’ he said, adding, ‘But unfortunately for me, the worst is yet to come.’
‘But your fever is down,’ she said.
‘In an hour or so the ague will be back.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath as he lay back on the bolsters.
‘In the West Indies, at a certain time of the year, they have terrible storms that rage and destroy all in their wake, and suddenly it is calm and the sun comes out. That is the worst time of all because you know the storm will return, worse than before. The fever is like that.’
She swallowed. ‘Ellen said to give you the infusion of Jesuit Bark when you woke.’
He nodded and she turned away. Liquid sloshed from a jug and she returned to the bed with a horn beaker. Sliding her arm beneath his shoulders, she lifted his head and he grimaced at the familiar taste of Jesuit Bark. Without it, he would have died years ago.
He swallowed the last of the bitter brew and asked for water. She refilled the beaker and he insisted on taking it from her, controlling his shaking hand with a supreme effort. It galled him to be physically weakened and reliant on this woman, of all women.
‘I have some broth. It will take but a moment to warm it.’
He nodded and she turned away from him, busying herself beside the fireplace, where a cheerful glow lit the old, darkened timbers of the ceiling.
‘So you’ve had this fever before?’ She had her back to him as she stirred a pot on the fire.
‘Several times. It is the legacy of my time in the West Indies.’
‘But you’ve come through it?’
He shrugged. ‘The attacks are further apart and not so severe,’ he said. ‘They get it in the Low Countries from where I have just come. That and the soaking of the last few days…’
She returned to stand by the bed, holding a wooden bowl in her hand. All trace of humour had gone from her face.
‘It’s not your only legacy of Barbados,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen your back, Daniel.’
The breath caught in his throat. No choice but to bluster his way out of it.
‘Not pretty, is it?’
‘Lady Thornton says you should have died.’
‘I nearly did.’
‘Why? What did you do?’
He pulled himself up in the bed. The distress in her voice betrayed the shock she must have felt — as any woman must feel. There had been a girl in Fort Royal who had recoiled from him and refused to touch him. That memory still stung like a raw nerve.
The spoon rattled in the bowl she held as she trembled — with cold, or emotion?
‘Who did it?’ she asked in a tight voice.
He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. How could he explain a man like Outhwaite, who delighted not only in the subjugation of his fellow man but the infliction of pain?
‘It was a long time ago. I survived. I escaped. Are you going to give me that broth or let it go cold?’
She looked down at the bowl in her hand as if she had forgotten she held it. ‘Do you need help?’
He glared at her. ‘I can feed myself, thank you,’ he said, and she handed him the bowl.
‘Is Kit your brother?’ she asked.
His hand jerked, spilling some of the soup on the bedclothes.
Agnes had cloths to hand and as she sponged the sheets, she said, ‘You called his name in your sleep.’
He handed her the bowl and lay back, the memory of the dream still harsh and clear. ‘Yes, Kit is … was … my brother. I dreamed I saw him on the gallows — a rotting corpse.’
She regarded him, her head slightly on one side, a gesture he had come to recognize in their short acquaintance.
‘Were you close to your brother?’ she asked.
Close? Had he been close to Kit? There had been a ten-year age difference and he had worshipped the ground Kit walked on, driving him mad when Kit graced Eveleigh with his presence.
But Kit had always shown great patience with his young brother.
Daniel smiled at the memory of his brother teaching him how to use a sword.
He lacked Kit’s natural grace and ability, but he had tried so hard.
‘Yes, as close as we could be given he was ten years my senior,’ he said.
‘When the war broke out he and my father raised a regiment in support of the King. They fought side by side through the years of the war, returning home with stories of adventure and great victories. I yearned to join them and ride into battle under the banner of the Midhursts, side by side with my father and brother — all in the King’s cause.
Guardians of the Crown.’ He could not hide the bitterness in his voice at the last words.
Agnes frowned. ‘The Midhursts?’
He glanced at her. What harm in her knowing?
‘My grandfather is — was, I can only assume he is dead now — Lord Midhurst.’
‘So if your father and brother are now dead, does that make you Lord Midhurst?’
Daniel’s tired mind grappled with that concept — grandfather, father, older brother, all dead.
‘I suppose I am — whatever that means,’ he said.
A smile caught at the corners of Agnes’s mouth and she laid her hand over his, her mouth curving in amusement. ‘Don’t expect me to start calling you my Lord … my Lord.’
He smiled in response, and his fingers closed around hers. Such a little hand, he thought.
‘Go on with the story,’ she said.
His eyes felt heavy. He needed to sleep and gather his strength for the next bout of the fever, but the dark and the candlelight and a desire to talk after all the years of silence had loosened his tongue.
‘It all ended for us when the country rose again in ’48.
Kit and my father fought at the Battle of Preston and lost. They returned to Eveleigh with half the Parliamentary army on their tail.
The house had never been built for a siege and my father surrendered, only to be shot in cold blood on the steps of his own home by … ’
Agnes’s fingers tightened on his and she finished the sentence for him. ‘Tobias Ashby?’
Daniel closed his eyes. ‘Tobias Ashby. Before my father was even buried, he ordered the house destroyed. He took Kit prisoner, but somewhere along the way Kit escaped and fled to France, leaving us all but destitute with only a few habitable rooms to live in.’
It was the next part that made the hard telling; Kit’s return in 1651, full of braggartly tales of how the King would march into England and claim his throne.
The angry confrontation with Daniel’s mother, when Daniel had announced he would go with his brother.
Anger … so much anger. It seemed to be all he could remember now.
He swallowed. ‘I followed Kit to Worcester with dreams of honour and glory … and revenge for my father’s death.
The battle itself was anything except that.
’ The pressure on his fingers encouraged him to go on and his voice cracked as he said, ‘I saw Kit fall just before the butt of musket took me down. When I came around I was a prisoner in Worcester Cathedral, and the nightmare had only just begun.’ He turned his face away so she wouldn’t see the pain that the illness would not let him disguise.
‘You’re tired. You should sleep while you can,’ Agnes said. She pushed back a strand of hair from his damp forehead. Her touch sent a wave of fire through him and he shivered.
He nodded, his eyes heavy, sleep already beginning to steal up on him. ‘I thought Kit had died but he didn’t. He lived to die at the end of a hangman’s rope.’
Agnes sighed and her hand softly brushed his face, probably as she would gentle the boy … what was his name … Henry?
Some recollection from his fever drifted into his consciousness. Something about the child. My son — she had said that, hadn’t she?
The malaise washed through him and he could no longer retain his hold on the world; it dipped and slid, breaking into a multitude of colours and shapes.