Chapter Eight
“Did Your Lordship ever think that perhaps you were mistaken, and it wasn’t me you saw at all?” With that borderline teasing
response—he hated it when she called him Your Lordship, had urged her to call him Thomas which, given his position and hers,
she didn’t feel able to do—Rynn moved to pick up his nightclothes from where they lay discarded on the floor. “It could have
been anyone. Or no one at all. It could have been a dream.”
“It could have been, but it wasn’t.” He sounded so sure. He watched her broodingly as she folded his nightshirt and placed
it under his pillow. In an attempt to hide her too-expressive face, she went back to the bedside table and began to pour out
his medicine. “Trust me, Rynn Carmichael, no one, but no one, looks like you. Even in the dark, even when you’re running like
you’re dodging bombs on a battlefield.”
His words were no surprise. He had a crush on her and owned up to it freely. Actually, he’d had it for years, or so he claimed,
ever since he used to visit Ballyshannon Court as a little boy with his family for a month every summer and watched her running
wild with the other local children along the cliff edge and below on the Strand, and paddling in the sea. As a Brit, and shy,
he’d never got up the courage to try to join in, although, he assured her, he’d wanted to. For her part, if she’d ever seen
him, she couldn’t remember it.
“Ugh. What a terrible image.” Without looking at him, she mixed powder with liquid and stirred.
“It’s what I see when I close my eyes. Only it’s me running, not you. Which is why I missed my sleeping draught that you failed
to bring up last night.”
“I’m sorry.” She was genuinely contrite. His screaming nightmares when he’d first arrived at Ballyshannon Court were the stuff
of legend. “I won’t forget again.” She had the first potion ready and turned to hand it to him.
“From what I saw, you seemed to be upset. Last night.” He was watching her keenly. “Was it Donal?”
Of course she’d told him about Donal. Of their love, that he was off fighting and most recently of his return home and their
engagement. Nothing dangerous, nothing of what Molly Kincaid had told her, but snippets of her life just as he had shared
snippets of his. Because over the months she’d been caring for him, they’d become not just nurse and patient, but friends.
“Take your medicine,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended.
He made a face at her, swallowed the medicine, then accepted the second dose she handed him and drank that down, too. A handful
of pills, and they were done.
Before he could return to the subject of last night, she said, “Since you’re already up and dressed, why don’t we get our
walk in before breakfast? Before the festivities start?” A walk meant trading the chair for crutches. Since it was raining,
they would use the long gallery at the rear of the house. Traversing the gallery on crutches even once required a huge effort
on his part, but now that he saw walking again as a real possibility, he was determination personified. It was all she could
do to dissuade him from trying it for more than the doctor prescribed: half an hour twice a day.
“Yes, all right” was all he said, but she knew him well enough by this time not to think that he was going to let the topic of what he’d seen go forever.
She was, however, glad enough to put it aside for the time being.
Fetching his crutches, she gave them to him to hold and proceeded to wheel him along the hall to the Red Staircase, so called because of the vibrant color of its walls.
It led directly down from the back bedrooms to the hall connected to the gallery.
A ramp had been installed to accommodate those patients in wheelchairs, and they reached the ground floor and then the gallery without incident.
“I’ll be leaving here in a little less than three weeks,” he said abruptly as she set the brakes on his chair then took the
crutches from him and leaned them against the wall preparatory to getting him up. “I’m going home. My father’s sent for me,
and Dr. Lowry cleared me to go. I was going to tell you last night, but you didn’t come.”
Frowning, Rynn turned back to him. Positioned as he was in his chair, he had to look up at her, and as she stopped in front
of him, he tilted his head back to regard her intently. With a heavy lock of his honey-colored hair falling over his forehead
and the gray light of a rainy morning filtering in through the windows to turn his skin ashen, he looked very young and alarmingly
frail. Too frail to leave hospital? But they all would be leaving soon, because the war was over and this particular hospital
would revert to the privately owned home it had been before.
“That’s wonderful news,” she said, and meant it. She was happy for him but she would miss his friendship, just as she would
miss the hospital and its people and the security it represented. One more loss following the seismic ones of the previous
night.
“Is it?” he said.
His hands rested on the wheels of his chair, and she watched them tighten. The look in his eyes—what was that look?
“Certainly it is.”
“Not for me.” He hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind about something before continuing with, “I’m hoping you’ll come
with me, actually. As my nurse, of course. You’ve been doing such a splendid job, and I—I feel I’m not quite ready to manage
without you.”
Rynn looked at him in surprise. Such a possibility had never entered her mind.
“Are you offering me a job?”
“Yes.”
“I . . .” She hesitated, at a loss.
“Don’t say you can’t,” he said. “As I know you’re meaning to do. I know you’ll say that there’s O’Reilly, and you’re to be
married, and this is your home and all you want in life is here. But a whole world exists beyond this place, you know, and
you’ve seen nothing of it! Don’t you want to at least have a look? I can show you London, and Paris, too, and all the great
cities of Europe when I’m better and we go traveling as I would like to do. The war is over, and all the world is open again,
and you can see it all if you come with me—” Something in her face must have given him pause, because he faltered slightly
then added, “As my nurse.”
Before she could even begin to make sense of her thoughts, much less frame a reply, a series of hasty footsteps behind her
caused her to glance around.
“There you are! I’ve been looking everywhere!
Miss Carmichael, you’re wanted in the music room right away.
” Cyril, the gray-haired, slightly stooped first footman who’d grown old in the service of the family regarded her with what looked very much like distress.
A glance past him told her why: two British soldiers in their khaki uniforms had followed him into the gallery.
There was nothing to read in their faces, but they were there, standing shoulder to shoulder a pace or so behind him, armed to the teeth, looking at her. Waiting for her.
Rynn’s stomach dropped clear to her toes.
“Who wants her?” Lord Thomas asked.
“Colonel Pelly, sir,” Cyril answered.
Then one of the soldiers spoke directly to her. “We’ve been sent to escort you. If you’ll come along, miss.”
The walls seemed to tilt and the floor seemed to shift beneath Rynn’s feet.
Someone must have seen me. The thought struck up a panicked drumbeat in her mind.
“You don’t have to—” Lord Thomas began, frowning up at her.
“No, it’s fine.” Remembering her telltale face, she forced a smile even as she shook her head at him. She had to behave as
if she had no idea that anything could possibly be amiss.
“You’ll stay here with Lord Thomas, won’t you?” she asked Cyril. At the footman’s nod, she said to Lord Thomas, “I’ll just
go see what Colonel Pelly wants, and be right back.”
Before anything more could be said, she swept past Cyril and the soldiers. The soldiers followed her like a unit from the
Praetorian Guard through the maze of connecting hallways until they reached the music room.
The door was open, allowing her to see the fire that blazed in the marble fireplace opposite, as well as the Christmas decorations
adorning the mantel, as she approached. With the soldiers behind her she didn’t so much as hesitate on the threshold even
though inwardly she quaked with fear. She walked into the wood-paneled room as if she owned the place. Head high, shoulders
back, taking care to reveal nothing of her inner turmoil in her face or demeanor.
Would it be enough?
The warm glow of the fire was augmented by pale morning light pouring through the tall windows. The familiar combined aromas of woodsmoke, pine and the sea masked another, elusively familiar, far less pleasant smell.
Even as one of the soldiers escorting her said, “Miss Carmichael, sir,” she saw Colonel Pelly with Chief Inspector Fallon
and another man she didn’t immediately recognize. They stood together with their backs turned to her near one of the long
sofas on which guests were wont to sit as they enjoyed musical performances. Having the trio turn as one to look at her would
have sent her pulse galloping if her gaze, at that moment, hadn’t fallen on the dead woman lying on the sofa.
Rynn stopped in her tracks. Yes, there was no doubt about it: the woman was dead.
“Ah, Miss Carmichael. Come join us, please.”
Colonel Pelly’s greeting seemed to reach her from a thousand miles away. Gathering her composure, Rynn resumed her approach
while trying not to focus on the woman, whose long, matted dark hair trailed toward the floor. The sickly-sweet scent of death,
with which she’d become familiar over the last few years, was the odd smell she’d noticed mixing with the more Christmassy
ones. Someone had placed an oilcloth and layers of canvas beneath the corpse because she was wet, soaked through in fact,
so that her white blouse and gray skirt clung to her slender form and her shoes left muddy markings on the canvas. It was