He felt every muscle in his body come alert, his shoulders going rigid. No. Foolish. There was no chance. He stopped breathing. God, Free. We could have waited until morning to destroy everything.
“Yes?” he managed. The word came out roughly.
“You don’t have to answer—not if you’re not ready. But why do you always wear a glove on your right hand? You didn’t even take it off tonight.”
Not the question he’d feared. Thank God, not that one. He was so relieved, he was even willing to answer her. He didn’t say anything at all; he simply removed his right glove and held out his hand to her. In the moonlight, it was all too obvious that his two smallest fingers had been cut off at the knuckle.
She inhaled sharply. And then she took his right hand in hers.
“What happened?”
“It was after Strasbourg had surrendered. I’d been sent back to occupied Colmar—that was the village where the blacksmith who had taken me in lived. At that pointed, I only wanted to return home, but now the path back to England led through a foreign army. With no funds and no access to official channels, my choices were limited. So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time.” So long as he said the words, and didn’t think of what they meant, it would all turn out right. “I forged myself safe-conduct papers and a letter of credit.”
Her fingers were warm against his.
“I tried to use the letter of credit first. But the banker—a man named Soames—realized it was a forgery.”
She inhaled.
“But he didn’t turn me in. You see, he was ambitious. He realized that it would be more useful to have his own personal forger than a worthless Englishman subject to martial law in the midst of an occupation. So instead, he used me.”
“He blackmailed you?” But Free’s voice was uncertain, and her fingers, gentle against his, suggested that she knew that wasn’t the case.
Edward let out a long breath. “The first man he wanted me to betray? Blackmail wouldn’t have worked. I didn’t lose my fingers in an accident, sweetheart. I lost them slowly, over the course of two weeks. The fingers weren’t even the worst part. He only started on those after he’d near-drowned me a half-dozen times.”
Her hand twitched against his.
“Pain rewrites everything. You don’t just do things to make pain stop. You believe them. Even as you’re sitting, forging a false letter purporting to establish that a man is part of an armed resistance in occupied territory. Even while you’re perpetrating the fraud, you can convince yourself that it is the truth. I can still remember some of the events I invented for Soames as if they really happened. As if I had been standing there. I forged mortgages and letters of credit on the one hand, and faked resistance on the other. The county was occupied, and Soames intended to profit from it as long as he could. I was just his tool.”
The sun had set. He couldn’t see the expression on her face, didn’t know what she was thinking.
“There was only that one small part of me that understood something was wrong.” He gulped in a breath. “And so when I could—when peace came in March, and Soames lost the threat of martial law and summary execution to expand his empire—I escaped. It took me months to regain my reason, such as it was.”
There were still some memories he had of those months that he doubted, and he’d never know if they were real or not.
“I had thought I was so brave before the war started, refusing to bow under my father’s persuasion. But I no longer had the strength of any convictions. It had all been lies, a fantasy I told myself so I’d believe myself superior. I wasn’t. I begged like any man when threatened with a dire fate. A little pain, and I lied, no matter who was hurt. That was the point when I vowed that I’d not flinch from the worst that I was. I have to know who I am, what I am—or I’ll let the next fellow who comes along make me into far worse.”
She laid a soothing hand against his shoulder. “Now you’re not alone in that any longer. I know who you are, too—all of it, the good and the bad. And I won’t let you be anyone but yourself.”
But she didn’t know. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know that it was his own brother who was making idle plans to hold her—and far, far worse.
No matter what, that would never happen to her—not while he had breath in his body. He’d seen to that today, no matter what else he had done.
“No,” he said gravely. “I’m not a good man. But you had it right: I’m your scoundrel.”
“Shh,” she said.
“You don’t know what I’ve done.”
She turned to him, coming up on her elbow. “You’re not to blame,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve gone through. You aren’t awful. The world has been awful to you.”
“Those things are not mutually exclusive, love.”