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I must not be hurt by his words, she told herself. He’s in pain, he doesn’t know what he is saying.
‘Julia.’ His eyes were fixed on her face now, clear and forceful. Hal knew exactly what he was saying, she realized. ‘Who knows you are here?’
‘Captain Grey, Rick Bredon, my landlady,’ she said, puzzled. ‘The baron helped me stay in Brussels.’
‘Rick and Will can keep their mouths shut. You can bribe the landlady. Go back to Brussels now, Julia. Go to the baron.’
‘We cannot move you yet,’ she said with more calm than she was feeling. ‘George is going to sew up your wounds and then you must rest. All I have is the gig, you see, and I don’t think we can move you in that yet, there isn’t enough room for you to lie down.’
‘Leave me,’ he said urgently. His right hand moved as though to take her wrist and he gasped at the sudden pain. ‘It is bad enough as it is, but you’ll be ruined if you spend the night here.’
‘It doesn’t matter!’
‘Yes it does! If you stay, I will have to marry you. If I live. And you cannot marry me.’
She sat back on her heels, staring at him. ‘You will live,’ she said as though she could make it so by force of will. ‘You cannot give up. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, I hear you. You should not be here. It was…foolish. Wrong. I have no desire to marry. Not you.’ The vehemence of his words exhausted him.
Julia sat dumbly looking at the gaunt bruised face, the thin white lips, the closed eyes, and she struggled not to give way to tears. Foolish? No desire to marry… Not you. Was he trying to drive her away with words as weapons? Perhaps he was. Hal Carlow did not know her very well, if that was so. ‘Unfortunately, Major Carlow, you are going to have to put up with me,’ she said flatly. ‘I cannot leave you here or you will die and I do not want that on my conscience. When George is finished with Max, he will start on you. Do you want some more brandy?’
The bruised eyelids dragged open. ‘Max?’
‘He is all ri
ght, just some cuts,’ Julia reassured him, trying not to feel jealous of a horse. ‘Drink this,’ she added, putting the flask to his lips. He was going to need it. She only wished she could drain it dry herself.
Somehow she got through the stitching without having to rush outside to be ill again, chiefly by telling herself that if Hal had to put up with it, then she certainly could. She suspected that her presence—snipping each knot for George, then bandaging behind his seemingly endless row of stitches—was preventing Hal from venting his feelings in bad language: she just wished he would let go and faint.
When it was finished and she got shakily to her feet, Hal opened his eyes and looked at George. ‘Thank you.’
The groom grunted, then grinned. ‘You’re easier than a horse, guv’nor: never tried to kick or bite once.’ He began to tidy up his things, leaving Julia alone at Hal’s side.
‘Who took my clothes off?’
‘We did, George and I. And don’t look like that: your naked buttocks are not the worst thing I have seen today, believe me.’ She had actually made him blush, she realized. ‘Oh for goodness sake!’
‘You aren’t going, are you?’ he said wearily. ‘You’ve been missing from home all day, you’ve been seen on the battlefield and now, unless you leave now, you’ll be found here, nursing me. What were you thinking about? There is no hope for it: we are going to have to get married, Julia.’
‘I refuse.’ Her hands were shaking. A bandage she was trying to roll up escaped from her trembling fingers and fell into the scattered hay. ‘I do not want to marry a man who doesn’t want me.’ She realized she had held onto the memory of that ballroom kiss believing, deep down, that he wanted to marry her. And now it seemed, she had been wrong.
The look he gave her was long, hard and unwavering. ‘I never said I did not want you. I said it was wrong to marry you, but marry me you will. The lesser of two evils, perhaps. You have saved my life, Julia. Now you will take my name, whether you like it or not.’
Chapter Fifteen
Julia saw the first glimmerings of light and gave a little sob of exhausted relief. Somehow they had got through the night. Hal’s pronouncement about marriage was almost the last coherent thing he said before slipping into a fever that had him tossing and muttering through the hours of darkness.
She and George had taken turns to sit by Hal’s side, one bathing him with cool water while the other fetched fresh from the well behind the building. The water, by a miracle, seemed un tainted although the hot night air was foul.
Now, at last, it was light; the phantoms that had hung over her shoulder all night gibbering their messages of despair had fled with the dawn. Hal was going to live, she was beginning to hope, not just to tell herself she must believe it. Now the restlessness of the night had calmed, he felt cooler when she touched his brow, laid her hand on his chest.
And she must marry him, she had decided after wrestling all night with her conscience, her desires and plain common sense. She was compromised. If she had only herself to think about, then she would refuse him, should refuse him. But there were Mama and Phillip to think about. Must they suffer because she had so hopelessly misunderstood Hal’s true feelings? If she was ruined, then it would make their situation so much harder.
And Hal’s strong sense of honour would be salved, she recognized that. Which had to be the real—the only—reason he was so in sis tent now. Whatever he said, he did not want her, she knew that. At least, he might want her at the most basic level that a man wanted a woman. But he did not love her. The kiss at the ball haunted her, like a book in a language she could not read. If only she was not so in experienced, if only she could under stand what that had meant to him.
George had pulled the gig into the hovel and now sat with his back against the upright supporting the wide opening, legs out stretched, one hand on the stock of the musket while he snored.
Julia dragged some hay into a heap by the side of Hal’s bed, spread a blanket on top of it and curled up, trying to resign herself to this mess. She was going to marry a man whom she loved, but all that would bring him to the altar was his sense of honour. She had trapped him by compromising herself, but she found it hard to believe he would rather be dead than married. She could try and run away from him, she supposed. But she knew him too well now to believe he would let her go. This was where her heart and her desires warred with her revulsion against trapping him, how ever un wit tingly.
