Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(20)
Not a chance. His lip curled in awkward distaste.
Even though Ned hadn’t said a word, Harcroft must have caught his meaning. The man swiveled in his chair to look Ned in the eyes. The look they exchanged was rooted in a years-old memory, dredged from their respective youths. They’d both been at Cambridge. One evening they’d shared one too many bottles of claret. It had been during one of Ned’s bad periods—just before he was sent down for sheer listlessness. The spirits he’d imbibed that night hadn’t cured whatever it was that ailed him. Instead, on that evening, he and Harcroft had ended up getting bloody drunk.
After what Ned was sure was only the fourth bottle of wine, and Harcroft insisted was the sixth, they’d engaged in an activity that no self-respecting men would ever admit to—they had talked about their feelings. At length.
Ned still got the shivers just thinking about that night.
“A very tiny glass,” he said, holding up his fingers. “Just to hold.”
“Just so.” Harcroft’s lip quirked in understanding—and possibly in memory. He stood and walked to the decanter on the sideboard and poured Ned the barest slug of tawny liquid.
Ned took the glass and seated himself in the chair opposite Harcroft. They stared into the fire.
It was easier than looking Harcroft in the eye. Even drunk, they’d instinctively avoided direct discussion of any topics so squishy and laden with emotion as the ones that had most bothered Ned. But aside from the Marchioness of Blakely, Harcroft was the only person who knew even a hint about what ailed Ned.
That night, he’d made his veiled, maudlin confession. He had told Harcroft that he feared there was something wrong with him, something irretrievably different. Harcroft, who had been similarly drunk, had admitted the same was true for him. They’d talked around the issue, of course; even soused, Ned was not so stupid as to complain about a bewildering and inexplicable sadness that sometimes came over him. Harcroft, too, hadn’t described what happened. Instead, they’d called it a thing, an accident. That night, it had seemed a separate beast. They had drunk to its demise.
Drinking hadn’t killed it.
Instead, Ned remembered the conversation as a dim, drunken mistake. Mutual confession hadn’t brought them closer; instead, Ned had wanted to scrub all memory of that conversation from his mind. Harcroft had been a good friend, before; after, Ned had wanted to stay very, very far from the man, as if he had been the source of contagion. As if speaking about the thing that afflicted him had somehow made it more real.
The fire crackled in front of them, and Ned shook his head.
“What was it like?” Harcroft fingered his glass of port. If he’d done more than wet his lips tonight, the level of liquid in the glass didn’t show it. Since the evening of the mawkish confessions, Harcroft, too, had scarcely touched spirits. He’d barely sipped his wedding toast.
“What was what like?” Ned asked uneasily.
“China.”
A safe enough topic. So it might have seemed, were Ned’s journey not so inextricably bound with the subject of their conversation on that night. He set his own glass aside and shut his eyes. Images flashed through his head—high green hills rising steeply out of the clear blue glass of the ocean, vegetation choking every inch of land; humid heat and the overpowering stench of human waste; the glint of water off polished steel, the sun hot overhead; and then, once he’d left Hong Kong, the delta of the Pearl River, obscured by the acrid smoke of cannon fire.
This evening, Ned had no desire to delve into those feelings. Not at any length at all.
Hot was finally the word Ned settled upon. “So hot you sweat buckets, and so damned humid those buckets never evaporate. I was wringing sweat from my coat half the time.”
“Ha. Sounds uncivilized.” Harcroft stretched out and hooked his feet on another chair, pulling it closer to use as a footrest. The fire snapped again, and a small draft brought the smell of woodsmoke to Ned. The faint scent seemed an echo of those sulfurous clouds of gunpowder in Ned’s memory.
“If civilization is waltzes and twelve-piece orchestras playing in gilt-edged drawing rooms, then, yes. It was uncivilized.” With his eyes still closed, Ned could feel the soft swell of water rising underneath his feet. A small smile played across his lips.
“What else might civilization be?” Harcroft’s voice was amused.
In Ned’s mind, a ragged breath of low mist obscured the mouth of the river—no mere cloud of water vapor, but smoke, acrid and sulfurous. Shredded remnants of cannon fire.
“I think we carry our civilization inside us,” Ned said carefully. “And our savagery. I suspect it takes very little for anyone to switch from one to the other. Whether you happen to be British or Chinese.”
“Blasphemy,” Harcroft said with very little heat. “Treason, at least.”
“Truth.” Ned opened his eyes and glanced at Harcroft.
The man had folded his hands around his glass. He stared into the liquid, as if he could discern all civilization in its golden depths. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “Is your savagery so close to the surface, then?”
This was coming rather too close to that drunken conversation.
As for savagery… Before he’d trekked halfway round the world, the word savage had connoted all kinds of strange and different things: cannibalism and half-clothed women. After, he thought more of Captain Adams. Or that acrid bank of mist, rising over rubble. Or the dens where the opium-eaters retreated, to escape a world they did not dare remember.