Chapter 17
The nightmares almost always followed the same pattern.
They were never of the physical torture itself.
They were of the intervals between—the waiting for the next session, the never knowing exactly when it would be, the always knowing what it would be.
They had always told him that in graphic detail in advance.
And the temptation—the terrible, almost overwhelming temptation to give them what they wanted, to sell Kit out, to betray his country and her allies so that he would be granted the blessed release of death.
“No.” He was not speaking to them. He was speaking to it—the temptation.
“No. No! No!” He did not want to scream.
He tried desperately not to. He never screamed during the sessions.
He would not give them the satisfaction.
But even in the times between they would hear, and so he tried not to scream. But sometimes…
“No-o-o-o-o-o!”
As always he woke himself up with the screaming. He sat bolt upright on the bed, bathed in sweat, threw off the covers, stumbled over them anyway as he got out because he had thrown them with his right hand, and gasped for air like a drowning man.
He was almost instantly aware of Anne, sitting up on her side of the bed, reaching for him though he was too far away from her.
He was still more than half in the nightmare and would be for some time, he knew from long experience.
His body and his mind were too heavily drugged with the past to deal with the present for a while or even to display the common courtesies.
“Get out!” he told her. “Get out of here.”
“Sydnam—”
“Get out!”
“Sydnam—”
She was out of bed too and rounding the foot of it to come to him. He would have lashed out at her then if he had had a right arm to do it with.
Someone knocked on the door—hammered on it actually.
“Syd?” It was Kit’s voice. “Syd? Anne? May I come in?”
Anne changed direction and headed for the door, which opened just before she reached it.
“Syd?” Kit said again. “You are still having the nightmares? Let me help you. Anne—”
“Go away! Get out of here!”
He was still almost screaming. Soon the shaking would begin. He hated that weakness more than anything else. He hated for anyone to see it.
“Anne,” Kit said again, sounding like the military officer Sydnam had briefly known him as. “Go with Lauren. Mother is here too. Go with them. I’ll see to this.”
“Get out! All of you.”
“He has had a nightmare,” Anne said, her voice soft but quite firm. “I will see to him, Kit, thank you.”
“But—”
“He is my husband,” she said. “He wishes to be alone. Go back to bed. Everything will be all right. I will see to him.”
And when she closed the door, she remained on Sydnam’s side of it.
He began to shake—every cell in his body shook, or so it seemed. All he could do was grasp a bedpost, cling tightly, and clamp his teeth together while the breath rasped in and out of his lungs.
“Sit down,” she said softly an indeterminate length of time later, one hand touching his arm, the other curling about his waist from behind.
When he sat, he found a chair behind him.
A cover from the bed came over him then and was tucked warmly about him and beneath his chin and about his neck and shoulders so that he felt cocooned by its soft warmth.
She must have gone down onto her knees before him.
She set her head on his lap, turned it to one side, and wrapped her arms about his waist.
She did not move again or say another word while he shook and sweated and finally felt the comfort of the warm cover and the weight of her head on his knees and her arms clasped about him.
His mother, his father, Jerome, his various nurses, his valet before they went to Wales—they had all in their turn tried to talk him out of the aftermath of nightmare, but had only succeeded in pushing it deeper.
He appreciated her silence more than he could say. And he appreciated her presence more than he could possibly have expected.
“I am so sorry,” he said at last.
His hand was under the covers. He would have laid it on her head if it had been free. But she lifted her head and looked up at him, and in the faint moonlight that beamed through the window it seemed to him that she had never looked more beautiful.
“I am too,” she said. “Oh, Sydnam, my dear, I am so sorry. Do you need to talk about it?”
“Good God, no!” he exclaimed. “I beg your pardon, Anne, but no, thank you. It is my personal demon that will be with me forever, I daresay. One cannot go through something like that and expect only the body to be scarred. Just as my body will never be whole again, neither will my mind. I have accepted that. The nightmares are no longer as frequent as they used to be, and when I do have them, I seem to be able to break free of them more quickly most of the time. But I am sorry for the distress this one has caused you and that other ones will in future.”
“Sydnam,” she said, and he realized that her arms were stretched along his outer thighs, “I married you. All of you. I know I cannot share this pain with you, but you must not feel obliged to shield me from it or try to minimize it. I will be saddened if you do. We have been friends almost since we met, have we not? But we are more than friends now despite a rather shaky start to our marriage. We are husband and wife. We are…lovers.”
Once they had been lovers. But that once had produced life in her womb and had bound them forever.
He could not feel sorry it had happened even though he had seen her distress last evening and today and had felt a certain guilt yesterday about taking her from the people and the environment she had grown to love.
He should have been offering her nothing but comfort for the past two days, not quarreling with her and now burdening her with this.
He lowered the blanket and stroked his fingers over her arm.
“I suppose I am vain and conceited,” he said. “I hate having you witness my weakness.”
“I think,” she said, “you are probably the least weak person I know, Sydnam Butler.”
He smiled at her.
“Did Andrew have the story right?” she asked him. “Was it an army surgeon who amputated your arm?”
“A British surgeon, yes,” he said, “after Kit and a group of Spanish partisans had rescued me. It was impossible to save it.”
“Sydnam,” she said, “I want to see you.”
It was impossible to misunderstand her meaning.
He had worn his shirt and breeches to bed even though she had been asleep by the time he came upstairs.
He shook his head.
“I need to,” she said.
It was, he supposed, inevitable unless they were to live a separate, celibate existence for the rest of their lives, something he would find immeasurably less tolerable than remaining single. Sooner or later she would have to see him.
He just wished it could be later rather than sooner. He was so very tired…
But she was not waiting for his permission.
She had got to her feet and lit a single candle on the small table on the near side of the bed.
And then she came to kneel in front of him again and drew his shirt free of the waistband of his breeches after taking the blanket away.
It would have been churlish of him not to raise his arm when she drew the shirt upward so that she could lift it off over his head.
He did not close his eye. He watched her.
The surgeon had amputated his arm a few inches below the shoulder.
Because there had been no recent battle and consequently the surgeon had not been pressed for time while other wounded soldiers awaited their turn to go under his knife, he had done a good, neat job.
The stump of the arm was not unsightly—as amputations went.
“I still have my arm, you know,” he said with a somewhat twisted smile, “and my hand. In my mind they are still there and very real. I can feel them. Sometimes they itch. I can almost use my hand. But they are both gone, as you can see.”
It was not just the stump of his arm she could see, though. The whole right side of his body was purple from the burns, the crisscrossing scars of the old cuts livid in contrast. They extended all the way down his side and leg to the knee.
She set her hand against the naked flesh of his side, just above the band of his breeches.
“Is there still pain?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he admitted. “Particularly about my eye, about the stump of my arm, and in my knee, which was not actually destroyed. But not always and not unbearable. It is worst in damp weather. It is something I am accustomed to, something that is quite within my control. One can learn to live with a great deal of discomfort and even pain, Anne. For about six months of my life, I wished fervently to die, but I am glad I did not. Life is very sweet despite all the losses I have sustained. I am not generally, I think, a complainer.”
“You are not,” she agreed.
She reached up her hand then and cupped it about the right side of his face.
He closed his eye and leaned into her hand.
So few people except physicians had touched his right side since he came home from the Peninsula.
It was as if his torturers had laid everlasting claim to it.
He had not even realized just how much he had craved someone’s touch—a gentle touch after all the violence.
It felt almost as if healing flowed through her hand, as if after she had lifted it away his flesh would be whole again.
He swallowed against a gurgle in his throat.
And then he felt her thumb move beneath the black ribbon of his eye patch and realized her intent. He grabbed for her wrist and opened his left eye, but it was too late. She set the eye patch down on the floor beside his chair.
He gazed at her in horror and misery.
“It is all right,” she told him softly. “Sydnam, you are my husband. It is all right.”