His eyes met hers, and for a moment all amusement left his face. His extraordinary blue eyes were stern, almost cold, and she wondered in a flash of insight if this was what he’d looked like on the battlefield when he’d led his men.
Then his expression softened a little. “You know why.”
She grimaced because she did know why. “You’re too sensitive to your injury. Many men come home without an arm or a leg or even an eye, and one continues to see them at balls and events. No one singles them out except to say how brave they were.”
“That’s not what Frances said.” Jeremy’s eyes were old and sad.
She bit her lip. “Frances was a complete and utter ninny, and frankly I think you were saved years of insipid conversation over your morning tea when she called off your engagement.”
He laughed, thankfully, but it turned to a cough, and she had to hurry over and pour him a cup of water.
o;I was.” He hesitated. The subject wasn’t one he ever wanted to visit again in this lifetime, but the expression on Miss Corning’s face was rapt. Had not Othello wooed his Desdemona thus? If telling her his bloody war tales would win her, he’d do it, no matter the pain to himself. Brown eyes stared up through a mask of blood.
Even if it tore his soul in two.
“I had no choice. I was enslaved.”
BEATRICE DREW IN her breath at the word enslaved. The carriage bumped around a corner, jostling her against the side, but she paid little mind, caught up as she was with the thought of proud Lord Hope in slavery. The very thought was an abomination.
“Is that where you got those?” She nodded at the bird tattoos.
He raised a hand to trace them. “Aye.”
“Tell me,” she said simply.
His hand dropped. “You’ve heard about the massacre at Spinner’s Falls.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “There was an ambush. Most of the regiment were killed.”
He nodded, his face turned toward the window, though she somehow knew he saw nothing of what passed outside. “We were marching through the woods from Quebec to Fort Edward. The trail was narrow, and the men were forced to walk in single file. The regiment became strung out. Too damned strung out.”
She watched as a muscle ticked in his jaw. He didn’t like telling her this story, but he was doing it anyway.
He inhaled. “I was riding to tell our colonel that I thought we should stop and let the tail catch up to the head of the line when the Indians attacked.”
His lips set firmly, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t go on, but then he looked at her, his black eyes desperate.
“We couldn’t form a line of defense. My men were being picked off before they could rally. The Indians shot from both sides of the trail, hidden in the trees. My men were screaming and falling, and then my colonel was pulled from his horse.”
He looked blindly at his hands. “They scalped him. My men were dying all about me, screaming and being scalped.” His fingers flexed into fists. “My horse caught a bullet and went down. I managed to jump free, but I was surrounded. I don’t remember what happened then—I think I was struck on the head—but when I became aware of my surroundings again, we were being marched to the Indian camp. The French had given us to their allies as war booty.”
“Dear God,” Beatrice breathed, feeling sick to her stomach. How terrible for Lord Hope to lose his men thusly. How impotent he must’ve felt.
He was gazing out the window again and made no indication that he’d heard her. “After we made the camp, I was separated from the others by the Indian who had captured me. His name was Sastaretsi. He stripped me naked, took my clothes away, and gave me only a thin, flea-infested blanket to cover myself with. Then Sastaretsi marched me through the woods for six weeks. By the time we’d made his village, I was walking in bare feet through grass crusted with frost.”
He paused, remembering that awful time, and Beatrice was silent, waiting.
“All that time,” he whispered. “All that time, I schemed on how to kill Sastaretsi. But my hands were bound so tightly in front of me that the flesh had swollen into the leather thongs. He’d pulled my fingernails from my hands so I could not use even their feeble strength to scratch my bonds loose. And at night he tied my bound hands to a stake driven deep in the ground. I was weakened from the cold and lack of nourishment. I think I might’ve died in that endless wood if we hadn’t happened upon a French trapper and his son. The man spoke some Wyandot and seemed to take pity on me, for he gave me an old shirt and a pair of leggings. Those leggings and shirt saved me.”
He was silent again, and this time Beatrice knew he didn’t mean to go on.
“But why?” she finally blurted. “Why did Sastaretsi do all this to you?”
He looked at her then, and his eyes were blank—flat as if he were dead. “Because he meant to burn me at the stake when we reached his village.”
Chapter Six
Now, a giant hourglass sits in the throne room of the Goblin King, its sands endlessly flowing until time itself shall stop. By this means, the goblins mark time in their sunless land deep beneath the earth. It happened that one year when Longsword went to plea for his freedom, the Goblin King was in a particularly good mood, having just that day defeated a great prince in battle.