“Yes, please,” Vale said, while at the same time Reynaud shook his head. “No.”
Vale looked at him, his smile gone.
Miss Corning cleared her throat again. “Well, I think, ah, yes, I think I’ll leave you two to yourselves. There must be many things you’d like to catch up on.”
She walked to the door where Vale still stood and whispered to him, “Just don’t stay too long. He’s been very ill.”
Vale nodded, holding the door for her and then shutting it gently after she’d left. He turned to look at Reynaud.
Who snapped, “I’m not an invalid.”
“You’ve been ill?”
“I took a fever on the ship over. It’s nothing.”
Vale raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment on that. Instead he asked, “What happened?”
Reynaud smiled sardonically. “I think I should be asking that of you.”
Vale looked away, his face paling. “I thought—we all thought—that you were dead.”
“I wasn’t.” Reynaud bit off the words, his incisors closing with sharp finality.
He remembered the stink of burning flesh. The binds cutting into his arms. Of marching naked through new snowfall. Her brown eyes stared up through a mask of blood…. He shook his head once, sharply, chasing the ghosts from his mind, focusing on the living man before him. His hand moved to the hilt of his knife.
Vale watched his movement warily. “I would never have left you had I known you lived.”
“Yet the fact remains that I was alive and you did leave me.”
“I’m sorry. I . . .” Vale’s mouth flattened. He stared at the carpet between his feet. “I saw you die, Reynaud.”
For a moment, demons chattered in Reynaud’s brain, whispering of treachery. He saw clearly the grimace a dying man made while being burned alive. Then, with an effort, he pushed back the image and the mad voices.
“What happened at the Wyandot camp?” he asked.
“After they took you away, you mean?” Vale didn’t wait for the reply but sighed heavily. “They tied us to stakes and tortured the other men—Munroe, Horn, Growe, and Coleman. They killed Coleman.”
Reynaud nodded. He’d seen how the enemies—both white and native—were treated by the Indians who captured them.
Vale inhaled, as if bracing himself. “Then, after Coleman’s death on the second day, the Indians took us to where they were burning a man at the stake. They told us it was you. He wore your coat, had black hair. I thought he was you. We all thought he was you.” Vale looked up, meeting Reynaud’s gaze with haunted turquoise eyes. “His face was already gone. Blackened and burned by the flames.”
Reynaud looked away. The reasonable part of his mind knew that Vale and the others had had no choice. They’d believed him dead because of overwhelming evidence. Any sane man would believe the same when faced with what they’d seen and been told.
And yet…
And yet the beast at his core refused the explanation. He’d been abandoned, left by those he’d risked life and limb for. Left by those he’d called his friends.
“It was almost another fortnight before Sam Hartley brought back a rescue party to ransom us,” Vale said quietly. “Were you in the Indian camp that entire time?”
Reynaud shook his head, watching his left hand flatten against the counterpane, noting absently the contrast of his brown skin against the white fabric. His hand was thin, the tendons standing out clearly on the back. “How is my sister, Emeline?”
He heard Vale sigh as if frustrated. “Emeline. Emeline is just fine. She’s remarried now, you know. To Samuel Hartley.”
Reynaud’s head jerked up, his eyes narrowing. “Corporal Hartley? The ranger?”
Vale smirked. “The same, although he’s no longer a lowly corporal. He’s made his fortune importing and exporting goods from the Colonies.”
“Miss Corning told me that she married a colonial, but I hadn’t realized it was Hartley.” Even if Hartley was wealthy now, Emeline had married beneath her station. She was the daughter of an earl. What had possessed her?