“Yes, yes, if you care for paintings of soldiers toppling down hills and blood trails and shells exploding—”
“Richard!”
“Very sorry, dear. I am only thinking of your own good, for I do not wish you to romanticize our son’s position. This is war, you know. Bloody affairs and all that. No pleasant thing.”
“I did not say it was pleasant.” Mamma folded the letter and set it aside, as if the warming pride of seconds ago had turned bitter. “I am the only one in this family who discouraged him from joining Wellington’s troops, if you remember.”
“I remember, dear.”
“I have never understood why he should wish to enlist in the first place.”
Didn’t she? Didn’t they all?
Papa rose from his chair, settled next to his wife, and took both of her now-trembling hands into his. “Let us talk of it no more, my dear. I can see you are growing upset. We shall keep Hugh in our prayers and think on happier things, hmm?”
Felton left the parlor before he had to witness another ordeal of tears from his mother. They were right for each other, the two of them. His mother should like to pretend her youngest son was off playing tin soldier, and Papa would rather dismiss the danger than speak of it.
They were always like that.
Pretending all the time.
As if they didn’t know Hugh Northwood would rather take his chances in the heat of the Peninsular War than stay here in Lodnouth fighting an invisible battle.
One they’d already lost fourteen years ago.
One Felton was left fighting alone.
Blackness and then red. How coolly, how silently, the curtains fluttered. Back and forth, here and there, brushing against her face and blinding her. Why could she not escape?
But the harder she fought, the more there was red. She was tangled. She was trapped.
And then came the beast.
First there were claws, ripping through skin and red, shredding her flesh with each painful grab. Then she saw the eyes, yellow, luminous, lost in a face half-human and half-fur. “You don’t understand,” it roared. “You don’t understand what happened.”
Her throat cried with an answer, a plea, but it went unheard.
Because the beast attacked again. Glass shattering. Red flying. Falling, falling, falling …
Eliza jerked upward and cupped her mouth with her hands. “Captain.” She groped around the bed, waited for the sound of his footsteps hurrying toward her or the feel of his cool hands brushing back her hair.
But the room was still. No one came running to assure her the nightmare was gone, to scare the beast of her dreams back into the dark cells of her mind.
One, two, three.She forced air in and out in rhythm to the numbers, just as Captain had always told her to do.Four, five, six.
But for all her counting, there was no regulating her breaths. She untangled from the bed linens, staggered to the window, and hurried it open.
Fresh night air blasted her sweating face.God, help it go away.
Because without Captain, the nightmare’s presence still lingered in the confines of this bedchamber. The beast was yet here.
What am I going to do?She could not stay. She would not stay. Somehow, she must discover a way to return to the safety of the forest, where all danger was set at bay and Captain could pacify her nightmares. Back where she wasn’t friendless because she had the trees, and she wasn’t alone because she had her stories. Back where she could imagine anything on the mossy rock by the stream.
But what if Felton Northwood was right? What if she had been a little girl who had witnessed a murder all those long years ago?
After all, she’d remembered her father. Was it possible she would remember a murderer too?
Or perhaps she knew him already.
