“Are they?” he asked absently.
“Lord Hope—”
But he was lowering her to the ground as if nothing had happened. Really! He hadn’t given her any warning at all. Did he want to be thought mad?
She peeked up at him and cleared her throat. “What’s the gauntlet?”
“A nasty way to welcome captives to an Indian camp.” He held out his arm for her, and she placed her gloved fingers primly on his sleeve. “All the inhabitants in the village form two lines, and the captive must run between them.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
He looked down at her, the bird tattoos decorating his swarthy skin, the iron cross swinging from his ear. He looked like a pirate. “They hit and kick the captive as he runs.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “And when he reaches the end of the line, what happens then?”
“It depends,” he said, guiding her around a clump of ladies eagerly peering in a shop window. “If the captive is a child or young boy, sometimes he is adopted into the Indian tribe.”
“And if he is older?” she whispered, dreading the answer.
“Then most often he is tortured and killed.”
She inhaled sharply. He said it so matter-of-factly.
“Were you . . .” She swallowed. How could she ask? But she had to know. The experience no matter how terrible was part of who he was. “Were you—”
“I wasn’t tortured.” His lips tightened as he looked straight ahead. “Not then anyway.”
Sudden tears rushed to her eyes. No, part of her wailed inside. Not him. Not this man. She’d known it had to have happened, but to hear it from his lips was devastating. For them to have hurt—shamed—this man ripped apart a portion of her soul. She felt suddenly older. Weary with the knowledge.
“What happened instead?” she asked quietly.
“Gaho saved me,” he said.
“Who is Gaho? And how did he save you?”
“She.”
She stopped and looked up at him, ignoring the mutters of the other pedestrians who were forced to go around them. “A lady Indian saved you?”
He smiled down into her face, making the birds crinkle as if they’d taken flight. “Yes. A powerful lady Indian saved me. She owned more furs, more pots, and more slaves than any other in that village. You might even call her a princess.”
“Humph.” She faced forward and began to walk, but she was unable to keep the question from leaving her lips. “Was she pretty?”
“Very.” She felt the whisper of his breath against her ear as he leaned down to tease her. “For a woman in her sixth decade.”
“Oh.” She tilted her nose in the air, feeling irrationally relieved. “Well, how did Gaho save you?”
“Sastaretsi had a rather bad reputation it seems. A year before, he’d killed one of Gaho’s favorite slaves in an argument. Gaho was a wise woman. She knew that Sastaretsi had very little to his name, so she’d bided her time until he acquired something that she might demand in repayment for the loss of her slave—me.”
“And what did she do with you?”
“What do you think, Miss Corning?” His wide, sensuous mouth twisted, curving down sardonically. “I was the son of an earl, a captain in His Majesty’s army, and I became the slave of an old Indian woman. Is that what you wanted to hear? That I was reduced to the lowest of the low in that Indian camp?”
He’d stopped in the street, but no one muttered as the crowd gave them a wide berth. Lord Hope might be attired like an aristocrat, but his expression was savage at the moment.
Beatrice had a cowardly urge to flee, but she stood her ground, tilting her chin up at him, holding his wild black eyes as she said, “No. No, I never wanted to hear that you were humiliated.”
He leaned over her, large and intimidating. “Then why persist in asking?”