“Tulliver had his hands full.” Her voice softened into compassion. “Are you feeling better?”
“He’ll have the devil’s own headache. He always does after one of his takings,” Tulliver said calmly.
Gideon hadn’t seen anything beyond the girl. Now he looked past her to where Tulliver waited, holding the bowl.
“He has these attacks often?” The girl’s clear gaze rested on him with curiosity and concern.
Even in this state, his pride revolted at her pity. “I’m not an ailing puppy, Miss Watson. I can speak for myself.”
Her lips turned down at his childish response. Which he regretted as soon as it emerged. Helping him couldn’t have been pleasant. She deserved gratitude, not pique.
The pounding in his head made rational, connected thought increasingly difficult. He closed his eyes and stifled renewed nausea.
“I’ll get the laudanum, lad.” Tulliver’s voice came from a long way off, masked by the painful throb of Gideon’s blood.
“The sickness has passed,” he forced out.
“The laudanum makes you sleep. You know sleep is all that brings you through. Do you want to stop at an inn? A bed might be better than rattling around in this rig.”
A bed. Cool sheets. Quiet. A cessation of movement. All beckoned like the promise of heaven.
He hesitated. He had to reach Penrhyn. Something urgent.
He opened his eyes and saw the girl’s worried face above him in the gloomy carriage interior. Of course. If they stopped, she might run.
They had to keep going. He’d have to accept the despised laudanum. And endure the harrowing visions.
“No…inn.” He shook his head. Even so much movement made his stomach revolt. “Get the laudanum, Tulliver.”
“Aye, guvnor.”
As the coach rattled on through the day and into the night, Sir Gideon slept like the dead.
At first his unconsciousness perturbed Charis. His illness had been so violent, she’d feared for his life.
He stretched awkwardly over a bench that was too short for his height. She studied his face, pale, drawn, handsome still. The muscles around his eyes were tight, and his mouth was white with strain. The certainty built that while he might lie motionless as a stone effigy, his dreams brought no peace.
She turned away and stared unseeingly out into the darkness. Who were these men she’d cast her lot with? Tulliver, who faced trouble with such stoic competence. Akash, clever, enigmatic like a strange foreign idol.
Sir Gideon…
She commanded her wayward heart not to flutter at the thought of her rescuer. It was like telling the sun not to rise. Every moment she spent with him only drew the net of fascination tighter.
He was famous, a celebrity. The crowd in Portsmouth had pressed about him, bristling with excitement. They’d hailed him as the Hero of somewhere called Rangapindhi. Was he home after some daring patriotic action overseas?
Her stepbrothers had kept her isolated for months. She hadn’t seen a newspaper or received any letters. Recent events in the wider world were a complete mystery.
If Sir Gideon was newly returned from India, it suggested a few explanations to things that puzzled her. His tan. Akash. Even his illness. Perhaps some tropical disease attacked him.
His horrific sufferings had cut her to the quick. Gideon Trevithick, her only bulwark against her stepbrothers, was unquestionably ill. But the nature of his sickness was an enigma. What ailment turned a man so quickly from invincible avenging angel to shivering wreck?
At dawn, Sir Gideon stirred from his deathlike sleep. The movement was slight but enough to disturb Charis’s restless doze. She opened bleary eyes, excruciatingly aware of her own aches and exhaustion. The carriage’s endless jolting had punctuated her erratic dreams. She’d checked him periodically through the night, but his sickness hadn’t returned.
Without looking at her, he groaned and swung his feet to the floor as he sat up. He rubbed his hands across his face in a weary gesture. Granting him a moment’s privacy, she opened the blinds and looked out the window onto a wild and unpopulated world. There was a charged intimacy in sharing this tiny space after she’d seen him at his extremity. It made her nervy, shy, unsure.
The view didn’t help to restore her courage. They’d abandoned civilization miles past. The lonely, windswept scene was depressing, frightening to a woman with only strangers to rely upon. Staunchly, she reminded herself that her stepbrothers would have difficulty tracking her through this wasteland.
She wondered how much farther Sir Gideon meant to go. Since they’d left Portsmouth, the only punctuation to eternal travel was stopping to change horses. Hurried, efficient movement, a flare of torches, Tulliver rebinding her arm if the bandage had loosened, a hot drink shoved into her hands. Then away they went again. The beef broth from the last stop, a poor place in the middle of desolate moorland, had left a nasty taste in her mouth. Luckily, she had a cast-iron stomach.