Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Octavia had not meant to cause any trouble, but as Malcolm ate his way through the next two courses of white fish with lemon slices and succulent roast chicken with buttered vegetables in complete silence, she knew she had struck a nerve.
For a moment after she had mentioned him fighting in the war, he had almost transformed back into the man she remembered. The man who had been brusque before their wedding, indifferent during, and surprisingly gentle but still distant afterwards. A hard, cold man.
Worried about her son meeting that version of her husband instead of the warm, playful one from the greenhouse, she cleared her throat and steeled herself.
“I should speak to the doctor about what you do and do not remember, so I do not make a mistake again,” she said.
Malcolm glanced at her. “Ye didn’t make a mistake. I can’t remember much of the war, but I ken I don’t like speaking of it.” He sighed. “It’s a feeling in my body, rather than a memory. Still, ye weren’t to ken that.”
She swallowed, a faint prickle of warmth running up the back of her neck.
If he could remember the war by feeling, then what else could he remember?
Did his body remember their brief honeymoon?
Is that why he had embraced her so warmly when he came into the drawing room, his body telling him that there was a connection between them that a memory would refute?
“Do you have any ‘feelings’ about this manor?” she asked, reaching for her glass of wine and taking a rather large sip.
He shook his head. “Nae really.”
“Highcastle?”
“Misery,” he replied simply.
She gulped down another mouthful. “And me?”
“I’m still figuring them out,” he said with a smile. “But I ken ye’re beautiful, and ye’re warm, and ye’re the kind of lass I wouldn’t be able to walk away from.”
She nearly choked on her wine, her face radiating sudden heat. Was her husband… flirting with her?
“Well, you did,” she blurted out, her throat tight. “Actually… no, that is not entirely true. You did not walk away from us. You have taken very good care of us from afar, which you had promised to do.”
“I prefer being beside ye,” he said, turning in his chair, bringing himself a little bit closer to her.
Oh goodness… How am I supposed to get through a single conversation with this man when he keeps looking at me like that?
She took a breath, steeling herself. “We had a honeymoon. It was just for a week, then you left. I do not know where you went, but I stayed at Highcastle for three months, so I could be sure that I was with-child.”
Why was it so terribly embarrassing to tell the truth to a man who, somewhere in his addled mind, knew all of this already? He had been right there, even if he could not recall it.
“I left our honeymoon?” He sounded incredulous. “Well, now I am starting to wonder if ye’re telling me everything. There’s nay way I would have abandoned ye during our honeymoon, of all times.”
“It was… our agreement,” she urged, her cheeks flaming. “Agreed upon before we got married. I needed a very specific kind of husband, and you were him.”
He put his elbow on the table and rested his cheek against his palm, watching her with that disarming smile. “Specific in what way?”
“I needed a husband who wanted children but did not care about the rest,” she explained, her voice catching. “You… obliged. It was, I promise you, what you wanted too. A marriage of convenience, living separate lives. And when Simon arrived, there was no reason for us to… um… try again.”
She did not mention that she would have liked to have siblings for her son, in case he got the wrong idea. She had wanted many children, a whole host of them, but she had learned to be content with just one.
Malcolm shook his head. “I’d like to have a stern word with the fool who made that agreement with ye. Who could ever let a lass like ye go once he had ye at his side?”
Flustered and blushing furiously, Octavia sought to take another sip of her wine, struggling to swallow.
“The way ye are with me,” he said, his eyebrow raised, “anyone would think I’d never spoken like this to ye before.”
She cleared her throat. “Well, that is because you have not.” Her heart had begun to race, and she did not know how to slow it. “I confess, the Duke of Highcastle that I knew, that I married, is very different to…”
She wafted a hand in his general direction.
“I notice ye never use my name,” he said, with that devastating smile of his. “Ye should try it; ye might like it. Aye, ye could think of me as Malcolm and the man ye kenned as the Duke of Highcastle.”
She considered it, but it was not as helpful as he clearly thought it was. After all, this was not the kind of marriage she wanted, regardless of what she called him.
And imagine if, one moment, I am speaking to ‘Malcolm’ and the next minute he remembers everything, and I am speaking to the Duke. She could not even begin to imagine what the man she had actually married would make of such informality.
“I would prefer not to,” she said stiffly. “Indeed, I would prefer it if you behaved more like the man I remember.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Then, ye should prepare yerself, lass, because I’m nae planning to hide my attraction for my wife.
I married the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
I cannae be held responsible for admiring ye and telling ye how lovely ye are, every opportunity I get.
” He paused, smirking. “Indeed, I mean to do the wooing that the old me clearly neglected to do, so that we might be the family we should be.”
She stared at him, unable to speak.
Evidently, he had struck his head much harder than the doctor had said, for this man was not even the slightest bit like her husband.
He was a changeling. An impostor who wore Malcolm’s face and form.
A threat to the peace and contentment that she had carefully crafted for herself, and not without reason.
She did not want to be wooed. She did not want to be courted.
If she had wanted that, she would have sought a husband the usual way while she was still young and appealing to the gentlemen of the ton.
At nine-and-twenty and married for five years, she had never thought that she would have to fend off a suitor again.
“I would not waste your efforts if I were you,” she said coolly.
“I cannot prevent you from spending time with your son and building a relationship with him, but I will never be your wife. Not in the way you are suggesting. I liked our arrangement, and that is how it will remain. I promise you that.”
But Malcolm merely smirked, as if he knew something she did not, and sank back into his chair as the next course was served.
“So, ye don’t ken my wife at all?” Malcolm asked Doctor Stanforth, who had agreed to remain at Huntfield for a week or two. To ‘keep an eye on things.’
Stanforth sat across from him in the secondary parlor that no one else seemed to use. As such, it served as an excellent spot for Malcolm to gather his thoughts, quieting his mind in the hopes that it might be enough to coax his memories back.
The doctor shook his head. “Barely, Your Grace.”
“Were ye the doctor when she found out she was with-child?”
“Nay, Your Grace. That was my father.” The doctor stared down into the glass of brandy that Malcolm had poured for him, for there did not seem to be any whisky at all in the household.
“And ye can’t get yer father to come here?” Malcolm said. “Or write to him, to ask more about those months she spent at Highcastle?”
Stanforth sighed and took a sip, grimacing. “My father is gone, Your Grace. He has been gone for some three years now. I do have his records, but they are in Scotland.” He paused. “If you had been less rash, maybe we could have looked over some of them before you came here.”
It was a bold man who would scold Malcolm so openly, though he did not mind it. It was probably deserved, considering he had departed Highcastle without warning while under the doctor’s care.
Malcolm took a sip of his own drink and pulled a similar face. He did not much like brandy. “Is it… normal for someone in my condition to have a… uh… change of character?”
The thought had been bothering him since dinner, when Octavia had informed him that he was completely different to the Malcolm she had known.
How on earth could a knock to the head have altered him so much?
Or, perhaps, the better question was what had happened in the missing ten years that had altered him so much?
“In truth, Your Grace, I don’t know,” the doctor replied, frowning.
“I had been reading some accounts of amnesia while I was tending to you at Highcastle, but they are so rare, and there doesn’t seem to be any uniformity in the symptoms, the outcomes, the healing process, the way in which it presents. ”
Malcolm swirled the amber liquid, mesmerized. “Is there a chance I’ll never recover those memories?”
“There is,” the doctor replied, “but there’s just as much chance that you will. As I said, there’s no exactness to this. I have a theory that it pertains to swelling and inflammation of the brain, alongside lasting damage from the injury itself.”
“What do ye mean?”
Stanforth sat forward slightly in his chair.
“When you hurt your ankle, for example, it can look rather nasty, but bruising and swelling doesn’t always mean that the bone beneath is broken.
It might just be a sprain, and the joint or limb will return to normal once the swelling has gone away.
However, sometimes, the bone is broken. For some, that can be remedied in a way that the bone returns to normal eventually.
For others, it will never be the same again, and they may limp permanently. ”
It was a useful analogy, though not entirely helpful.
“So, I may remember nothing or everything or only some of what I once kenned?” Malcolm said.
The doctor nodded, offering an apologetic look. “Time and rest will tell us.” He frowned at the glass in Malcolm’s hand. “You mightn’t want to drink so much of that, either. Nothing that can addle the mind.”
“But if I wished to remain forgetful?” Malcolm asked, watching the liquid coat the glass. “I should drink more?”
Stanforth narrowed his eyes. “Why on earth would you want that?”
“Just a thought,” Malcolm said, and set the glass down.
Why on earth wouldn’t I?
As far as he could tell, the man he used to be was not someone worth remembering at all.