I wanted to stop up my ears, to deny what I was hearing. Did he not understand how that sounded? I could feel Gage’s eyes watching him, watching me, weighing the truth of his words. What was Will thinking? What did he know?
“Why would you say such a thing?” I demanded, my voice cracking in distress.
“Kiera.” Will leaned toward me. His voice was gentle, as it had been ten years before when he was soothing a distraught fifteen-year-old who had been told her paintings were no good. “I want to believe that I would never harm you. That I would never harm any woman. And, in my right mind, I know I never would. But . . .” He sank back into his chair with a dejected sigh. “I’m not always myself,” he admitted guardedly.
There was such despair in his gaze that it wrenched something inside of me.
“I don’t know what happens to me. And I can’t seem to control it.” He shook his head in obvious frustration. “I thought I was getting better, that I had finally put those moments behind me.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I guess I was wrong.”
I glanced at Gage, who was studying Will with a mixture of wariness and compassion.
“Do you have any recollection of what happens to you during those times?” I ventured to ask him. “Michael suggested it’s like you go someplace else. Somewhere he can’t reach you.”
His brow furrowed. “All I know is that one moment I’m fine and the next I’m not. I’m . . . there.”
My stomach clenched. “The asylum?”
He nodded. His eyes were unfocused, staring off into the distance.
“Do you ever . . . return . . . to the war?” I asked, remembering all he had told me a decade before about his time on the continent during the war with France.
His gaze lifted to meet mine before drifting away again. “Sometimes. But usually it’s that hellhole.” He spat out the word angrily.
I couldn’t fault the man for his rage, and, in fact, I welcomed it. It was comforting somehow to see him express his fury at what had happened to him. I found it far more disturbing when he faced me with such resigned acceptance.
“And the drawings?”
He looked up at me as I worked out how to ask my question.
“Is that . . .” I tried again. “Are they representations of what happened there?”
Will had never hid the darkness inside of him from me before, even if he had hidden his paintings, and he didn’t do so now either. “Yes. Exaggerated. But . . .” He heaved a sigh. “Yes.”
I glanced at Gage, who was watching me, his brow furrowed in concern. I turned away to look up at the wall on my left, covered in Will’s crude sketches, for the first time since our arrival. The light of day had softened the charcoal’s harsh lines, but the drawings’ contents were still disturbing, particularly if they depicted fact and not just the fevered imaginings of a troubled man. My gaze snagged on the image of the man having his head held underwater by two burly figures standing behind him.
I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat before asking cautiously, “Did these things happen to you?”
Will seemed hesitant to respond, and that, in and of itself, was answer enough. “Some of them,” he reluctantly admitted as I rose to my feet.
I wrapped my arms around myself and paced before the wall of drawings, no longer able to sit still. My stomach churned and my nerves prickled. My legs were ready to take flight, to carry me far from here so that I wouldn’t have to face what had happened to Will. So that I wouldn’t have to accept that human beings could be so cruel.
But, of course, I already knew they could. I had paced my bedchamber in Sir Anthony’s town house in much the same manner on the night he had told me I would be assisting with his dissection the next day or be forced to live without my art forever. And on the evening not long after his death when his colleagues had accused me of unnatural tendencies and promised to send the Bow Street Runners for me. My mind had rebelled just as assiduously then as it did now, wanting to block out the truth of Will’s words, the painful reality etched in his eyes.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so frank,” Will said. “But . . . Michael told me a little bit about what happened to you. About what your husband made you do.”
I stopped pacing to look at him.
“And I thought, maybe, you, of all people, would understand, even just a little bit.” His gray eyes flickered with a hope that I could tell he was afraid, and possibly ashamed, to feel. “You always saw more than most people did.”
I had no words for him. The knot inside my chest was too tight. So I simply nodded.
His head dropped back onto his chair cushion with relief and he closed his eyes. I could see the tight lines around his mouth and the ashy cast to his complexion, and I worried we had exhausted him.
“We should let you rest now,” I told him.
Will didn’t even try to object, or rise from his chair, which told me just how tired he truly was. “But you will come again?”
“Of course,” I assured him.
He nodded listlessly. “Then you can tell me how you ended up married to that cantankerous sod in the first place.”