“The last we heard, you’d been attacked by pirates off Patagonia. You were shot and fell into the sea.” The grim edge to Silas’s voice reflected the pall that had fallen over the family when the news finally reached them. “Everyone we spoke to agreed that after that, there was no sighting of you. The lieutenant ordered a boat out to find you, once the pirates had been repelled, but nobody held out any hope. How the devil did you manage to come back alive from that?”
Robert shook his head, and his hooded gaze focused on his brother. “I remember the cannonball striking me in the shoulder and taking me over the side with some rigging. I must have hit my head. I came to, tangled in some ropes and colder than I’d ever been in my life. The ship was a mere speck on the horizon. I don’t think they looked too hard or too long, by God. I was bleeding, but the worst was the freezing water. I managed to get myself up onto a plank, but I must say I thought my goose was cooked.”
Morwenna had feared he might have trouble getting the whole story out. Last night, he’d had difficulty stringing together more than a few words. But as he went on, the account started to emerge more smoothly. In silent encouragement, she firmed her grip on his fingers. While the little she’d managed to choke down for breakfast congealed into a hard, cold mass in her stomach.
Sometimes a vivid imagination was a curse. She had no trouble recreating Robert’s desperate straits at that moment. Wounded, alone, lost in an icy sea. She loathed hearing about his suffering.
“How did you get out of that?” Pascal asked.
“I drifted for a couple of days. Luckily they were rainy days, or else I’d have died of thirst. I washed up closer to dead than alive on a beach. Unfortunately it was the beach the pirates used as their lair.”
“Oh, no,” Amy said, watching him avidly.
He shrugged, but Morwenna could see that his attempt at nonchalance convinced nobody. “I think they had some vague idea of ransom. They threw me into a pit and left me there, but at least they gave me food enough to keep me alive.”
“So you’ve been trapped in a pit for five years?” Morwenna asked, horrified. She pressed her free hand to her stomach to quell the urge to bring up what little she’d eaten.
Robert gave a grunt of unamused laughter. She realized she still hadn’t seen him smile. “No, after about six months, I managed to escape. I doubt I’d have made it otherwise. You’ve never seen such a fever-ridden spot in your life. Another winter, and it would have been all up for me, believe me.”
“So it’s taken you the rest of the time to get back to us?” Silas asked. “Couldn’t you have sent word that you were alive?”
“Unfortunately when I stumbled into the nearest town, opinion was divided whether I was a pirate or a spy. They flung me into the local prison while they made up their minds.”
“How long were you there?” Morwenna asked, nausea tasting sour on her tongue. How had he borne all of this?
His voice was flat, and she could see that he deliberately avoided the grimmer det
ails of his incarceration. But she knew his travails had been horrific and unrelenting. She’d seen the scars on his beautiful body, and his emaciation, and the haunted look in his eyes. A haunted look absent when he awoke, but now back full force.
By heaven, if using her body gave him the briefest moment’s peace, she’d happily lie down for him anywhere and anytime he asked.
He stared down at the untouched rolls on his plate. “I managed to escape two months ago. I made it to the coast and wondered what the devil I could do. Luckily, the whaler that brought me back to London stopped for fresh water and took me on as extra crew for the voyage north. Even luckier, they were on their way home and not starting their hunt, or I wouldn’t have been back for another year.”
Morwenna sent him an appalled glance and met steady black eyes. He knew as well as she did how close they’d veered to disaster and a scandal that would taint the family name. Another year, and she’d have been married to Garson, perhaps the mother of his child. After all, it hadn’t taken her long to conceive Robert’s baby. Any children she and Garson had would be declared bastards, because with her first husband alive, her second marriage was invalid.
Morwenna realized with a shock that she hadn’t yet told Robert about Kerenza. She braced to tell him, but Silas had started speaking. “It was one of the happiest days in my life when you walked in.” His deep voice, so similar in timbre to Robert’s, was thick with emotion. “None of us took losing you easily. Morwenna, most of all.”
She released Robert’s hand and prepared to hear him condemn her for accepting another man’s proposal. But to her surprise, he reached across and clasped his brother’s shoulder. It was the first unforced gesture of affection she’d seen him make since he’d returned.
Well, unless she counted last night’s passion. But that had resulted more from desperate need than anything as simple as mere fondness.
“And you can’t know how the thought of my family waiting for me kept me fighting to survive.”
Silas made an attempt to move beyond the appalling details of Robert’s imprisonment. “You won’t know the children when you see them. Although of course they’ve heard all about their heroic Uncle Robert. And, my God, how Kerenza will preen now that her father’s home at last.”
Chapter Six
* * *
Kerenza?
As he lurched to his feet, Robert’s face must have shown his profound shock, because everyone around the table fell silent. Morwenna stood away from the table and retreated a couple of paces, regarding him with a distraught expression.
“I tried to tell you last night,” she said, wringing her hands.
“Kerenza,” he said slowly. A child? His child?
Silas, Caro, Amy, and Pascal glanced at each other and by unspoken consent also stood. “I’m afraid I’ve put my foot in it,” Silas said.