A Stranger at Castonbury(33)

‘I think she is in shock,’ Jamie said. He sounded so calm, just as he had whenever a crisis threatened in the military camps, but there was tremor running just beneath the words. ‘Everyone move aside, please. Phaedra is right, she does need some air. It is much too warm in here.’

Jamie scooped her up in his arms and Catalina felt him carry her across the drawing room and nudge open a door with his shoulder. The noise of everyone arguing over the best way to treat a faint faded behind them.

He lowered her carefully until she felt satin cushions at her back and she finally opened her eyes. He had carried her into a small sitting room crowded with furniture, and the only light was the silvery glow of the moon from beyond the window. He leaned over her, watching her in silence, and she stared up at him in the moonlight. He was a stranger, yet once he had been her husband.

He was certainly as handsome as ever, tall and elegantly lean, dark and bright all at the same time. Yet there was something there that had not been in the man she married. Deep lines bracketed his sensual mouth. His grey eyes were so wary, as flat and still as a millpond, hiding his emotions. It was almost as if another soul had come to inhabit the body of the man she loved.

Was her Jamie still behind those dead eyes? What had happened to him? Had he finished his work in Spain? Above all—how was he here, alive, when he had been gone for so long?

‘I—I thought you dead,’ she managed to say. ‘They told me you were drowned that day.’

‘Catalina. What an impasse,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you were dead.’

She stared up at him, aghast at his words. ‘You thought I was dead? Why?’

‘After the river, and many days in a makeshift field hospital nearby, I managed to make my way back to the camp, but it had been destroyed. I found a farmer who told me the French had attacked the contingent who had been left behind after we departed, that almost everyone had been killed—including the surgeon you worked with and the chaplain who married us. He showed me the place where they buried everyone. He showed be your grave. And he gave me...this.’

Jamie untied his cravat and reached inside his shirt to draw out a thin gold chain. The moonlight caught on the object that dangled from it, a sapphire ring. ‘He was an honest man indeed to give it up,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew you would not have parted from it willingly.’

Catalina rubbed at her bare finger and closed her eyes as the terror of that long-ago day washed over her again. She remembered so well running, fleeing blindly to she knew not where until she found that hidey-hole in the woods. By then it was too late to go back and search for her precious ring. All that she had left of Jamie.

But Jamie was here. And he wore her ring. Surely that meant something. Anything.

She opened her eyes again, only to find that he still looked down at her with that steady stillness, that lack of expression that made him resemble one of the marble statues that dotted Castonbury’s lush gardens. Jamie was so different here, like an entirely separate person from the man she had married. What had happened to him? Where was he?

What was he capable of, this man she had once thought she knew so well and then turned out not to know at all?

Perhaps the ring was not a memento of her, then. Perhaps it was merely to remind him not to make the mistake of marrying in haste again.

Slowly, cautiously, she reached up and brushed the scar on his face with her fingertips. It felt rough under her touch, but his skin was so warm. So real. He tensed, that muscle in his jaw flexing, but he didn’t pull away.

‘Where did you go after that?’ she whispered. ‘What have you been doing?’ Had he done his task of restoring the king to the Spanish throne? What lengths had he gone to in order to do that?

‘That is not important,’ he answered, his voice low and rough. ‘I can hardly think of anything tonight. It has all been turned upside down.’

Catalina nodded. She knew how that felt—it seemed like a hundred years since she had walked downstairs with Lydia. The moment before and the moment after she saw him again marked a vast chasm of time. Right now she felt as if she floated free in the night sky, untethered to any kind of reality at all.

Jamie took her hand in his with a terrible gentleness and held her fingers on his palm as he studied them. ‘Why did you come to England? Did you journey here alone, or on some mission?’

Catalina stared at him. Just like him, she couldn’t remember why she had come to England, or anything else. Just him, just this moment. ‘I came to England because I couldn’t bear Spain any longer. With the Bourbons returned—it was not my home, you know. I wanted to make a new start here.’