Icarus tried to conceal his ill temper, but he knew Green and Houghton had noticed. He smiled tightly, and offered the excuse of a headache. To Miss Trentham, he offered no excuse. She knew exactly why he was angry.
He ate his dinner grimly, ignoring Miss Trentham’s promptings that he have a second helping of pie and another serving of suet pudding.
Houghton ate seconds.
After the meal, Icarus was strongly tempted to go up to his bedchamber and have a slug of brandy. He didn’t. He played two games of backgammon with Houghton and then excused himself—saying a coldly courteous good night to Miss Trentham—and climbed the stairs to his bedchamber. That infernal woman. Talking about things she had no knowledge of. How dared she talk of poor, damned Pereira?
Icarus paused at the top of the stairs and squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to remember. But he couldn’t hold the memories back: Pereira begging them to stop. Pereira sobbing and gasping and choking and vomiting. Pereira telling them in desperate, thickly accented French, Oui, oui, c’est vrai. C’est vrai!
And the bastards had still killed him.
Icarus blinked several times and inhaled deeply through his nose and opened the door to his bedchamber. He pasted a stiff smile on his face and let Green help him out of his boots and his tailcoat and then sent the boy away.
When he went to lock the door, he discovered this was impossible: there was no keyhole. Worse, there wasn’t even a latch. His stool was too short to jam beneath the door handle, and the washstand too tall.
“Fuck,” he said, under his breath.
The brandy bottle sat on the bedside table, beckoning him.
Icarus poured himself a glass, drained it in one swallow, coughed, caught his breath, and put the glass back on the tray. He saw Pereira in his mind’s eye: lanky in his uniform, with a boyish face and dark, eager eyes.
Miss Trentham had been correct: he wouldn’t have wanted Pereira to hang.
He sat on the edge of the bed and bowed his head into his hands. I wish this was over. I wish I was in my grave.
The floorboards outside his door creaked.
Icarus stood swiftly—ducking his head—and flung the door open. Miss Trentham stood in the corridor, her hand on her own door handle, her face dimly visible. He saw her eyebrows lift. “Icarus?”
“I don’t want you in my room tonight,” he told her coldly.
Miss Trentham’s expression became perfectly blank.
“Do you hear me? I won’t have you in my room tonight!”
Miss Trentham lifted her chin and met his gaze straightly. “I have no intention of lying awake half the night listening to you scream. If your nightmares wake me, you may be certain that I shall wake you.”
Icarus hissed a sharp, angry breath at her. “You are the most dreadful woman it has ever been my misfortune to meet!”
Her face tightened as if he’d struck her; she’d heard that truth.
Icarus turned on his stockinged heel and stalked into his bedchamber, closing the door with a muted slam. Once in his room, his rage drained away. He sat on the edge of his bed and bowed his head into his hands again. I wish I was in my grave.
He lay on stony ground, bound hand and foot, retching helplessly, more dead than alive, water streaming from his mouth, from his nose, from his hair, from his clothes—and already they were heaving him up again, carrying him back to the creek. Icarus wheezed desperately for breath. The rage that had sustained him was gone; he’d vomited it up long ago. Please, oh, God, please.
But God didn’t hear him, and here was the creek again, black water glinting in the moonlight.
Icarus thrashed weakly, frantically. “No! No! Please!”
He was dumped facedown alongside Pereira’s sodden corpse. Someone crouched and gripped his hair, forcing his head up. “The northeast ridge, it is not defended, yes? C’est vrai?”
Icarus struggled to breathe, water rattling in his throat.
His hair was released. A curt order was barked. Rough hands gripped him, lifted him. Icarus saw the gleam of moonlit water. Panic took over. “It’s true!” he screamed hoarsely. “It’s true!”
His captors dumped him on the ground again. The fingers dug into his hair, lifting his head. “Dis-moi. Tell me.”
Hot, despairing tears leaked from his eyes. “C’est vrai,” he choked out.
His hair was released. His head fell forward.
He heard the hasty crunch of footsteps, heard hurried voices. The footsteps and voices receded. Silence came. Echoing, empty silence.
Icarus pressed his face into the stony soil, and wept.
“Icarus!” Someone shook his shoulder. “Icarus, wake up!”
Icarus wrestled his way to wakefulness. His eyes slitted open. He saw shadowy bedhangings and a pale, anxious face. “Icarus?”
With consciousness came no ease. I told them. Oh, God, I told them.
Icarus turned his face into the pillow and cried as despairingly as he had at Vimeiro.
“Icarus?” Someone stroked his hair. “Icarus?”
He couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop the huge, wrenching sobs, couldn’t catch his breath.
“Icarus . . .” The person gathered him in her arms, rocked him gently. “Hush, hush . . .”
He wept endless tears, while someone held him, and rocked him, and stroked his hair. An eternity passed. He finally ran out of tears, but not of despair. He was submerged in despair, drowning in despair.
Gentle fingers wiped his face. “Go to sleep, Icarus.”
He recognized the voice: Letty Trentham.
It was her arms around him, her warmth in his bed. Dimly, at the back of his brain, beneath the fog of despair, beneath the exhaustion, he knew he should turn her out of his bedchamber, but he didn’t want her to stop holding him. Don’t leave me.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered again, and Icarus obeyed.
She was gone when he woke, but he could tell she’d spent the night with him; it wasn’t just the dent in the pillow and the rumpled hollow under the bedcovers, it was the empty feeling in his bed, as if someone had been holding him until only a few minutes ago.
Icarus touched where she’d lain. The sheets were still faintly warm.
Green tiptoed in half an hour later, and drew open the curtains when he found Icarus awake. “Sergeant Houghton walked down to the post road, sir, and he says it’s no longer flooded.”
Icarus sat up slowly. His head felt thick and his limbs lethargic. He wanted to curl up in a dark, quiet place and close his eyes and never open them again.
“We should be able to reach Taunton today,” Green said cheerfully, laying out the razor and strop.
Icarus washed and shaved and dressed and ate and climbed into the post-chaise, and climbed out of it again in Taunton, but none of it seemed real. He spent the day in a fog of despair that he couldn’t fight his way out of. He was aware of Houghton and Miss Trentham and Green watching him anxiously, but the fog was so dense, and wrapped so thickly around him, that he couldn’t free himself. He lay awake that night, staring blindly up at the ceiling. Tonight was going to be one of those nights that was as long as a year, where every second was endless—
“Icarus!”
Icarus fell off his horse and scrambled to his feet, flailing with his fists. They wouldn’t take him this time. He’d fight to the death rather than be captured.
His fist connected with something. He heard someone fall.
“Icarus, stop!”
He halted, panting, blinking.
His surroundings came into focus: four-poster bed, washstand, fireplace, candle burning in a chamberstick. And on the floor at his feet, Miss Trentham.
Icarus stared down at her stupidly.
“Icarus?”
Awareness washed over him. Icarus staggered under the weight of it and heard himself groan. He dragged air into his lungs, but couldn’t find speech.
“Icarus?” Miss Trentham said again, cautiously.
With the awareness came belated horror. He’d struck her again. He held out his hand to her and helped her to her feet. His arm was trembling. His whole body was trembling. “You all right?”
“Yes. Are you?”
He nodded dumbly, and lurched down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Miss Trentham briskly rearranged his pillows and straightened the bedclothes. “In you get.”
Icarus climbed into bed.
“Here.”
He swallowed a quarter of a glass of brandy. And then a teaspoon of valerian. Miss Trentham sat beside him and opened Herodotus. “On the side of the barbarians, the number of vessels was six hundred . . .”
After she’d turned the first page, Icarus reached out and took her hand. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
She glanced at him and smiled. “I know.”
Some of his guilt subsided. He lay listening to her cool, quiet voice and holding on to her warm hand. Stay with me tonight, please. His eyelids grew heavy. He could no longer keep them open. Miss Trentham’s voice slowed, then stopped.
Icarus blinked open his eyes with effort and turned his face towards her. Please stay.
Miss Trentham hesitated, and then bent to lightly kiss him. Icarus sighed with pleasure.
They kissed, and kissed some more, and his arms were around her, and he heard himself say sleepily against her mouth, “Don’ go.”
Miss Trentham stopped kissing him. She grew very still. “I’m the most dreadful woman you’ve ever met.”
Icarus tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were too heavy. “’S true,” he said. “An’ you’re also the best. The worst, an’ the best.”
Miss Trentham huffed a faint laugh. She seemed to relax. She kissed him again, lingering on his lower lip, and then pressed her mouth to his throat.
A low, purring hum kindled in his blood. Icarus uttered a wordless sound of pleasure. Don’t stop.
She didn’t. She kissed his throat again and his blood hummed and it was a marvelous feeling, absolutely the most marvelous feeling in the world. This must be how embers in a banked fire felt—warm and safe and alive and snug and slumberous.
Icarus gave himself up to it, let himself float on it, let himself drift to sleep, warm and safe and happy.
He half-woke at dawn. Someone bent over him, pressed a light kiss to his cheek, whispered in his ear. Icarus sank back to sleep before catching the words. He didn’t wake again until several hours later, and even then not fully. He lay for some time, warm and drowsy. Reality began to intrude. He heard voices in the street outside, heard the distant rattle of carriage wheels, heard the muffled thump of footsteps descending the staircase.
Icarus yawned, and stretched, and rolled over—and was confronted by a pillow that someone else had clearly slept on. He blinked. Memory washed over him. Letty Trentham. He’d asked her to sleep in his bed. It had been Letty Trentham who’d bent over him at dawn, Letty Trentham who’d whispered in his ear.
You’re not dead, Icarus Reid. Do you hear me? You’re not dead.
His warm, drowsy contentment congealed.
Icarus sat up and flung back the bedclothes.
He’d asked Letty Trentham to spend the night in his bed? What in God’s name had induced him to do that? It was unforgivable! Inexcusable!
Icarus climbed out of bed, mortification cold in his belly. No brandy tonight, he told himself, jerking open the curtains. Not one mouthful. Not even one drop.