Chapter 29
The first thing William saw was peach.
Not precisely peach, perhaps. Pink with a little gold bleeding through it, strange and hazy and far too bright against his half-open eyes.
For several confused seconds, he simply stared.
Then a deeply unpleasant thought occurred to him.
Perhaps he was dead.
William considered this possibility with what felt like admirable calm. He had never given much thought to what awaited him after death, but he was reasonably certain no clergyman had ever mentioned peach-colored skies.
Something shifted beside him.
William tried to turn his head and immediately discovered two things. The first was that he was lying in a bed.
The second was that being dead apparently hurt like hell.
Pain tore through his side, sharp enough to drag a breath from him, and the peach-colored haze above gradually sharpened into a perfectly ordinary ceiling.
So he was not dead.
Probably.
He lay still for another moment, waiting for the room to settle around him.
The strange light came from the windows, where someone had hung a length of pink fabric across the glass.
Morning sunlight filtered through it, bathing everything in a warm rosy glow that explained the peculiar sky he had awakened beneath.
Then he noticed the woman asleep in the chair beside his bed.
Rosalind.
Or at least, she had been asleep.
Her head lifted abruptly, and for one disorienting moment she merely stared at him.
William stared back.
She looked terrible.
Her hair had escaped whatever arrangement she had attempted and now hung in loose strands around her face. Shadows darkened the skin beneath her eyes, and her gown looked as though she had slept in it.
William opened his mouth. “You look exhausted.”
Rosalind made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
Of all the reactions he might have expected, that was not one of them. She covered her mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway, and tears appeared almost immediately in her eyes.
William frowned. “Was that offensive?”
“Extremely.”
“I apologize.”
“No, you do not.”
“No,” he admitted. “Probably not.”
Rosalind laughed again and wiped impatiently at her eyes. “Perhaps we should put that in the manual.”
His thoughts were still moving rather slowly. “What manual?”
Her expression softened. “Our courtship manual.”
Something shifted in his memory.
A garden beneath the summer sun. Rosalind arguing with him in a gallery. Horses carrying them across Wales.
Then Bryn Hir. Algernon. The pistol.
William’s amusement disappeared as he tried to push himself upright.
Pain exploded beneath his ribs. “Bloody hell.”
“Do not move!”
Rosalind was on her feet immediately, one hand against his shoulder as she pressed him carefully back into the pillows. William breathed through the pain until the room stopped threatening to disappear around him.
“I have been shot.”
“Yes.”
He looked down at himself. His shirt had been replaced by one he did not recognize, and thick bandaging circled his ribs beneath it.
“That seems unnecessarily dramatic.”
“You threw yourself at a man holding a pistol.”
“My brother.”
“That does not improve the decision.”
William looked at her. Rosalind looked furious, which under the circumstances seemed entirely unreasonable.
It was also one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days.”
His humor disappeared. “Two days?”
“You have woken briefly several times, although I am not certain you knew it.” Rosalind settled into the chair again but kept hold of his hand.
“The physician says you were extraordinarily fortunate. The ball struck one of your ribs and glanced along your side rather than passing deeply into your body. He removed it, and there has been no sign of fever. He says you are no longer in immediate danger.”
William was quiet for a moment, trying to absorb the fact that two entire days had passed without his knowledge.
Then another thought pushed everything else aside.
“Your father?”
“Alive, free, and currently behaving as though several weeks of imprisonment have given him the right to order everyone else about.”
Relief loosened something inside him. “And Isabella?”
“Also alive. Less obedient.”
“That sounds more serious.”
“It is.”
William smiled, only to regret it when even that small movement pulled painfully at his side.
Rosalind noticed immediately. “Do not laugh.”
“You have become remarkably authoritarian.”
“I have had two days to practice.”
He was about to answer when the last clear memories of Bryn Hir began returning. Algernon in the cellar. The pistol appearing in his hand. William throwing himself toward him before the weapon fired.
After that, everything became confused.
He remembered falling and Rosalind’s face above him. There might have been other voices, perhaps someone he did not recognize, but every attempt to reach for more made the memories seem to retreat farther away.
“What happened after I was shot?”
Rosalind’s teasing disappeared. Still holding his hand, she told him what he had missed. Pembry had heard Algernon’s confession from upstairs and witnessed the shooting.
Isabella had finally opened Edmund’s cell with the keys she had taken from Algernon, and once her father was free, they had locked Algernon inside while the magistrate went about arranging for sufficient men to take him into custody.
“And Gabriel?”
Something suspiciously amused entered Rosalind’s expression. “He went for the physician.”
“I remember that.”
“No, you do not. You were unconscious.”
William frowned, certain there was some memory of Gabriel leaving, though he could not decide whether it belonged to that night or had been supplied later. “Then someone must have told me.”
“I did. Yesterday.”
“There. You see? I remember perfectly.”
Rosalind gave him a look. “You were mostly unconscious then too.”
That made arguing his case considerably more difficult, so William wisely abandoned it.
“Gabriel sent the physician back with a message,” she continued. “Instead of returning here, he rode directly on to the Duke of Merriton’s estate near the border to arrange a carriage for us.”
William stared at her. “He kept riding after spending most of the night fetching the physician?”
“Apparently.”
He considered Gabriel’s longstanding belief that unnecessary physical exertion was one of society’s great failings. “Is he alive?”
“I assume so. I was quite certain he would escape mortal danger. I was less certain he would survive that much riding. He is not nearly as tough as he believes himself to be.”
William laughed before remembering that laughing was currently a terrible idea. Pain pulled sharply at his injured side, and he sucked in a breath as his hand moved instinctively toward the bandages.
Rosalind leaned forward at once. “I told you not to laugh.”
“Yes, I am beginning to understand why.”
“You might consider listening to me occasionally.”
“That seems an unreasonable condition for courtship.”
The words escaped before he could think better of them, and the easy amusement between them disappeared.
Rosalind’s hand remained wrapped around his, but she went very still.
William did too.
Courtship.
For one foolish moment, he had forgotten that there was no longer any such thing between them.
The memory of the pond returned with painful clarity. Rosalind standing before him beneath the summer sun, hurt and angry because he had trusted his brother when she had asked him to trust her.
The courtship is over.
William looked down at their joined hands.
She had believed him about Bryn Hir. She had trusted him enough to travel across Wales with him and leave her father in his care while she went for Gabriel. She was here now, exhausted from apparently spending two days beside his bed.
But none of that meant she had changed her mind about them.
The realization hurt in a place the bullet had missed entirely.
“What have you all been doing here for two days?” he asked.
For a moment, William wondered whether she would let him escape the subject so easily.
Then Rosalind’s expression softened. “Isabella and I have been working our solstice magic.”
Relief came with the change of subject, though William suspected it was only a temporary reprieve.
“Have you?”
“Very important work. Papa has been supervising us, although he is terrible at it. He keeps attempting to leave his bed.”
“And you keep ordering him back into it, I assume.”
“Naturally.”
William regarded her solemnly. “Your solstice magic has always been quite tyrannical.”
“You have benefited greatly from it.”
Before he could ask what precisely that meant, the bedchamber door opened and Isabella entered carrying a small parcel beneath one arm. She had taken only a few steps into the room before noticing that William was awake.
“Oh, good.”
William waited for some further expression of relief.
None came.
“Your concern overwhelms me, Miss Hartwell.”
“You have had quite enough concern directed at you already.”
She crossed the room and set her parcel on the table, allowing William to notice that she was still wearing the same sort of masculine clothing she had worn throughout their journey.
Rosalind noticed something else. “Where have you been?”
“The village. We were running low on food, and I wanted ink and a fresh quill.”
William glanced again at her trousers. “You rode there alone?”
Isabella gave him the sort of look that suggested being shot had not made his questions any more intelligent. “I managed to cross Wales without dying, Lord William. I assure you I can survive several miles to a village.”
“I meant no insult.”
“You seem unbearably pleased with herself.” Rosalind said to her friend.
“I had every reason to be.” Isabella began removing her gloves, though the force with which she tugged at each finger suggested her satisfaction was mixed with irritation.