Chapter 10
That evening was their first night in their house, so Elspeth wanted to look her best at dinner, though her wardrobe was not inspiring.
It was also not extensive. Everything she’d brought with her in the two trunks fit into the small room adjacent to her bedchamber.
Elspeth liked the idea of a room just for clothing and sundries.
The maid, Agnes, told her that the master bedchamber which adjoined hers had a similar room, plus a dedicated bathing and washroom beyond.
This was the newest part of the house, and whoever designed it was obviously forward-thinking.
Elspeth chose the most formal-looking of her purple dresses, the one with the cap sleeves made of jet taffeta, and the trim in black lace.
Agnes helped her put up her hair into a simple chignon, and Ellie wore a small silver cross on a silver chain around her neck.
She’d put her mother’s pearls carefully away in a small case, having received them back from Struan on the ship.
The cross had belonged to her grandmother, and her aunt Rosalind had offered it to Elspeth on her sixteenth birthday. It was the only present she received that year (barring a copy of Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. That was, obviously, from Mairi).
“But don’t you want to save this for Genevieve?” Elspeth had asked, thinking of her vivacious young cousin.
Her aunt had replied, “Your grandmother had several lovely pieces, so Genny will receive her legacy in time. But this one made me think of you, darling. And I want you to wear it and know that you always have family.”
Elspeth had been touched by the gift, even if she’d not fully grasped the significance at the time.
Their late dinner was served in a long room that featured tall windows set between buttressed stone walls on one side.
The other side featured portraits of much the same size as the windows, all of them depicting stern men and women, presumably distinguished ancestors of this branch of the MacInnes clan.
In the daytime, perhaps the sunshine would brighten the countenance of the portrait subjects.
At night, however, the meager light from the candles only made the painted eyes gleam balefully from the dark.
Elspeth regarded these new family members, and decided she’d have to learn how to clean oil paintings.
The meal was plain but hearty, and Elspeth ate more than usual, which made it difficult to talk. And since Struan was not exactly loquacious, the room was nearly silent except for the clink of silver on the dishes.
“I’m excited to see the house and the grounds in daylight,” she said at last. “It’s dark in here, isn’t it? Should I call for more candles to be lit? Or have the fire put on?” She just realized that the fire that was laid in the fireplace had not been lit, which seemed like an oversight.
But Struan gave one firm shake of his head. “No. I would prefer to not have the fire at all. Until it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Do you dislike fire so much?”
“I don’t dislike fire. I hate it,” he growled.
* * * *
Struan watched Elspeth’s eyes widen.
“You hate it? But fire is just the same as air or water or earth or stone. It can be good or bad and thus there’s no reason to hate the thing itself. It’s how it’s used.”
“Well, I remember how it was used to burn off my skin.”
Elspeth winced, and he chastised himself for speaking so harshly, but then decided that she’d had asked, so she had better be prepared to hear the answer.
Apparently she was prepared, because she pushed aside her plate and leaned closer to him. “Can you tell me?”
Could he? She ought to know. She was his wife. She’d eventually have to see the body that the fire had destroyed. He took a breath. “It’s not a nice story.”
“I didn’t expect it to be.”
“All right. It happened while we were moving through a village in France. To this day, I don’t know the name of the village, or even whether it deserved a name.
It wasn’t much more than half a dozen cottages along a slightly wider part of the road.
We were on our way to rejoin the larger part of the battalion, when someone yelled out ambush.
There was a hill, and the enemy had concealed artillery among the trees growing on it.
They didn’t attack us in the morning when we’d gone through on our reconnaissance mission; they waited the whole day until we came back and we were tired, and we believed the way was safe.
It was afternoon, and the sun was already low in the sky, so we couldn’t see them as more than silhouettes among the trees. We didn’t have a chance.”
Elspeth already looked stricken, but he’d barely begun the story.
“The whole company scattered, taking cover against the cottage walls to keep something between us and the shells that were starting to come down, but we didn’t have enough warning.
Plus there were soldiers concealed in the cottages, and they would shoot any man who took cover in a spot.
I had been minding one of the pack horses that had gone lame, so I was further away from the rest of the men, and I saw it all start to happen.
Time seemed to slow down. I called out a warning when I saw the first man fall from the snipers’ bullets, and I tried to direct the others to a different place, where they might have a better chance to shield themselves. ”
“Did anyone hear you?”
“Yes. The men you met at the wedding heard me. Thane heard me and grabbed Kai and Calan and started to run across the road while Duncan shot toward the place the first sniper was using as a blind. I was so focused on them getting to safety that I didn’t hear the shell descending.
It was just on the other side of the horse, and then there was no more horse, and that may have been the thing that kept me alive, at least in that moment.
But the shell exploded, and there were sparks and they flew into the back of the wagon the pack horse had been hauling.
It had been packed with weapons—that was what we’d gone to fetch that morning.
And those crates were packed with straw with more straw in between them, to keep them from sliding and rattling, and also to conceal what they were from a casual glance. ”
“It caught fire,” Elspeth guessed, horror in her eyes.
“Instantly. The straw was all in flames, and then a breeze sprang up and the sparks were just in the air floating like fireflies, but it was too early for fireflies, and then they landed on me and my clothes caught fire, and then all I remember was heat and pain and not knowing where to turn next. I don’t know how long it took for the other men to reach me.
The sniper, you see, thought I was a grand distraction, because everyone kept yelling and trying to help me from a distance, not that they could do anything.
But any time a man moved out of cover, the sniper would take another shot. ”
“What did you do?” Elspeth whispered.
“I dropped to the ground. I rolled, thinking that that would help put the fire out, but there was something in that shell—oil or some other substance—and the fire just kept relighting and spreading, and everything was hotter and hotter. And I just remember clawing into the dirt itself, like I was trying to break into my own grave. The earth wouldn’t let me in, but I did lose consciousness. ”
Elspeth had wrapped her arms around herself. He had to take a few deep breaths before he could go on.
“A few days later I woke up in a tent somewhere in our camp. I was in pain from top to bottom, and I couldn’t move at all.
I had been wrapped in a shroud. It took two nurses and a doctor to explain to me that it wasn’t really a shroud, but just gauze that they had wrapped around my whole body because I was one gigantic wound.
The fire had split my skin, burned it halfway.
My right side especially felt like meat instead of my own body.
I kept asking them when I would die. The doctor wouldn’t ever answer.
One of the nurses finally told me that when I first was brought in, they took me for a corpse, and tried to send me out to be buried with the others.
But Calan and Duncan wouldn’t leave until I was given a bed, and my wounds were washed and wrapped. ”
“Good!”
“The doctors said there wasn’t enough gauze.
But Kai brought some within an hour. To this day I have no idea where he got it.
I was in that tent for two weeks, barely able to move.
Waiting to die. Calan came every day to talk to me, even when I wouldn’t answer.
Even when I couldn’t answer. Kai brought wine and whisky.
Whisky was worth more than gold to anyone in our regiment.
He got it for me to help with the pain.”
“Oh, Struan.”
“Eventually, we—the other wounded men—were put on a ship home, if by home one meant London. Plenty of doctors looked at me there, but damn few had anything to say, other than that it was a miracle I wasn’t dead yet.
So, Thane and Kai, having got back to England, managed to put me on another ship for Edinburgh.
The doctors are better here in Scotland.
They found one who was willing to look at me.
He came to my house every day in town. And he actually tried every method he could think of to bring about any improvement in my muscles and my skin.
He said more than once that he wished he’d been there in France, because there were things that the doctors could’ve done immediately which would have probably allowed my skin to grow back in a more normal way.
“I tell myself that maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.
I would’ve always ended up looking like this.
But the doctor did his best, which is more than I can say for the rest of them.
And my friends listened to every piece of advice he gave, and made sure that I followed all of his instructions.
It’s likely that without returning to Edinburgh, and having that doctor’s care, I would’ve succumbed to my wounds or infection, or any of the plagues that a bedridden patient faces.
“I did recover, though it took months. And I started to pick up the pieces I’d left behind when I went overseas to serve. One of those things was trying to regain some semblance of an ordinary life. Meeting friends for a drink around the corner. Visiting my club. Going to dinner.”
“Finding a wife,” she suggested.
“I didn’t even try.” Struan almost, almost mentioned the other reason for his second thoughts about marriage, beyond his physical appearance. But he couldn’t tell her. Not yet.
Ellie looked concerned, but then chirped, “Until me!”
That’s right, she believed he’d selected her long before the proposal. He wished it were true. To say something that wasn’t a lie, he told her, “Yes, until you. I half expected you to run out of the church.”
“Everyone expected that,” she informed him, looking annoyed. “As if you were some monster.”
He was. Did Elspeth just have poor vision? No, on the voyage north, she’d seen (and had questions about) literally everything.
She went on, “I’m so glad you told me what happened to you. And I hope that you don’t think I was uncaring because I didn’t ask before. I was afraid to bring it up if you didn’t wish to relive it.”
“I should have told you immediately,” he admitted. “I suppose I kept putting it off because I do hate thinking about it. Not that it stops me from thinking about it. I wake up half my nights because I’ve dreamed I was back there.”
“Oh.” She stretched across the table and reached for his hands. “I want to help.”
“What could you do about it?”
“Well, you could talk to me about it. Whenever I had nightmares, I could talk to Mairi and the awfulness of the dream would fade and then I could go back to sleep.”
“I’m not coming to your room and waking you in the middle of the night to talk about bad dreams.”
“But you could.” She offered him a hopeful smile. “You can tell me anything you like. And you can ask anything you like. That’s what it means that we’re married.”
He knew that. Of course he knew that.
He also knew he was not coming to her room late at night.
He was not going to scoop her up in his arms and take her somewhere and expose himself, emotionally or physically.
Because even in his most fantastical imaginings about Elspeth—and considering how short a time he’d known her, he’d had more than his share—he’d never had the imagination to picture himself as something she’d actually want to look at, let alone touch.
It wasn’t that he thought her shallow or cruel.
She clearly was neither. But she was naive.
And even if she truly believed that his appearance wouldn’t be an impediment to intimacy, the moment she saw all of him, the truth would set in.
To say nothing of the…other issue, the possibility that he never could have a family, that he was broken beyond repair.
And he couldn’t stand to think about that. It was bad enough that he’d essentially purchased her. It would be far worse to finally prove how pointless the idea of marriage was for him.
Because seeing regret in her eyes would be the worst of all.