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“I was sent to Ceylon, not India. And you were right, you know. I didn’t want to go. I fought them at every turn. But when I stepped onto that ship, part of me thought, ‘Well, this will show him. He’ll feel sorry when he hears I’m gone.’”
Aidan winced, hating her in that moment.
“But,” Kate said quietly, “I got over that soon enough, long before I arrived in Ceylon. . . .”
Determined not to offer comfort, he clenched his jaw to bar any soft words from escaping.
“I thought I’d be able to talk my way out of it somehow. But when the ship docked, a cart was waiting to take me into the jungle. Two servants and me and a pastor . . . He did not even introduce himself, my husband. I didn’t have time to change out of my dusty clothes or wash up. I was led into the house and the pastor married us. And then, I think . . . I disappeared.”
Aidan turned to her to find her staring down at her hands as if she’d never seen them before. “What do you mean?”
“I still thought it wasn’t too late. I was shown to a bedroom, and when he came in . . .”
Aidan tensed and held up a hand, thinking he would stop her, but it was too late.
“I told him it was all a mistake. That I’d been promised to you. That I’d already made love with you. I thought he would send me back, but he didn’t.”
“Kate—”
“He only said, ‘This will be easier then,’ and he laid me on the bed and h-h-he—”
“Kate, please—”
“—he had me. Just like that. As if it meant nothing to him.”
Pain spiraled through Aidan as if a knife was twisting straight through him. He’d said those words to her. That those women had meant nothing to him. But he couldn’t imagine . . . He didn’t want to imagine what those words had meant to Kate.
“So yes, I was telling the truth about that, but I was married in Ceylon, and his name was David Gallow.”
She went quiet then, but Aidan could hear his own breathing, too loud and fast. “And he’s dead,” he growled.
“Yes.”
“So I will not have to kill him?”
She looked up, surprise in her eyes. “He didn’t deserve to be killed.”
“He did!” Aidan shouted. When she shook her head, he pounded his fist onto the table as hard as he could. “He did, Kate. How can you say that? He raped you.” He thought of her, young and bright, laughing over her shoulder as he’d teased her. Looking up at him as he’d eased inside her body while his heart shook like a bird in his chest. Smiling across the table the first time they met.
He didn’t know how she’d lived with what had happened to her. Aidan wasn’t sure that he could.
“I thought he was a monster,” she said quietly, “but he was just a man. He was in love with a woman named Iniya. He’d bought her from her father when she was sixteen and made her his mistress, and that was why he needed me. The good Englishmen of Ceylon all had women they kept, but he was too open about it. He took his children into town to buy them treats. He lived in her cabin instead of the big house. He scandalized the other wives with his indiscretion. None of them wanted the truth flaunted in their faces. He needed me as a shield against scandal, and that was all. David was as miserable as I.”
Aidan eased down to sit next to her. “How can you say that? No one forced him to anything. No one put their hands on him.”
Kate shrugged one shoulder and stared down into her glass.
“How did you live like that?”
She flashed a quick smile with no humor in it. “I didn’t. I ate and breathed and slept. I existed. Nothing more. Sometimes I took laudanum to help me sleep longer because there were so many endless hours in the day. Have you ever noticed that? How many hours there are?”
He shook his head.
“One night I woke up and I simply walked out. It was the middle of the night. I had nowhere to go, but I just couldn’t stay another moment in that house. I walked for miles. Miles. Into the jungle. Into the rain. I just kept walking. After the sun rose, I heard hoofbeats behind me; it was David. He didn’t say a word, he just put his hand out to pull me up. I tried to run up a hill, and he followed. The hillside wasn’t stable, and the horse slipped. . . . The whole world seemed to fall away.” She touched her cheek and the scar that lay there. “In the end, his spine was broken. He was never the same, but I came to know him as a person after that. I helped care for him. Iniya moved into the house. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I was alive.”
“Did he kill himself?” Aidan asked.
“Yes. He never fully recovered. When he didn’t want to live that way anymore, he took poison. Gerard thought I’d done it. He accused me and so I ran. And I came here. I changed my name to hide from him. And I thought that would be the end of it, I swear. I had no idea that others suspected the same thing.”
