“Rousseau tried to make her talk, except . . . the poor woman knew nothing.” He swallowed. “You can imagine what they did to her.”
Hero suspected she probably could not imagine—did not want to imagine. The editor at the Times had been blessedly vague about the details. She said, “Your dreams . . . That’s what you see?”
“Not always. But often. Sometimes I see them not as I found them but as they would have been . . . before.”
She said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was. I’m the one who carried those false dispatches into French hands. My ignorance in no way excuses either my gullibility or my culpability. I knew what sort of man Oliphant was.”
“But—how could anyone have known what he intended? He deliberately sent the French against that convent, hoping that their brutality would drive álvares Cabral into the arms of the British.” She hesitated. “Did it work?”
Devlin shook his head. “No. When the old man saw what the French had done—to his daughter, to the children, to the other nuns—he collapsed and died.”
Hero felt a deep and powerful rage building within her. “And Oliphant? What happened to him?”
“I rode straight from the blood-soaked ruins of the convent to our camp. I was going to kill him. I knew I’d hang for it, but I didn’t care.” Devlin huffed a soft sound devoid of any trace of humor. “He’d been recalled to headquarters. His older brother had died, and he’s now Lord Oliphant. Last I heard, he’s been appointed Governor of Jamaica. I’ve never seen him again.”
“And then you sold out?”
“Yes. Although it wasn’t only because of Oliphant and Santa Iria. That was simply the culmination of so much that had gone before. We like to think we’re more civilized, more honorable, more righteous than our enemies, but we’re not. Just ask the dead women and children of Copenhagen, of Badajoz, of Dublin, of a thousand forgotten hamlets and farms. And once you realize that, it does rather beg the question: Why am I fighting? Why am I killing?”
She rested her hand on his arm, felt the fine tremors going through him. She thought of the memories he carried with him always, the sights and smells and sounds, and the suffocating weight of guilt. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again. “The deaths of those women and children are on Oliphant’s head. On Oliphant, and the French major, Rousseau, and the English and French officials who put two such men in positions of power.”
But he only pressed his lips into a tight, strange smile and gave a faint shake of his head.
She said, “What happened to Rousseau?”
“He’s dead,” said Devlin. And she knew without being told that, somehow, before Devlin left the Peninsula, he’d tracked down the French major and killed him.
“Good.”
She touched her hand to his cheek, and he turned toward her, his arms coming around her to draw her close, his cheek pressed to the side of her hair. She felt his chest lift against hers as he drew in a ragged breath and held her tight. And then he said the words she’d long thought she’d never hear.
“God, how I love you, Hero. So much. So much . . .”
Chapter 42
Paul Gibson spent the afternoon explaining the functions and structure of the human kidney to a full theater at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Normally, he would good-naturedly rap the knuckles of any dozing audience member with a boiled fibula and patiently field questions that showed a decided lack of attention on the part of confused students. But not today. Today, every sleepy student, every ridiculous question, filled him with an unholy rage. It took a while, but he finally admitted to himself the origins of his uncharacteristic irritation.
He wanted to get back to Tower Hill. To Alexi.
Sure, then, but you’re six kinds of a bloody fool, he told himself in disgust. What are you thinking? That a fine young woman such as her might be interested in you? That she might see you as a man—a real man, with all of a man’s needs and desires and dreams?
Laughing at himself, he determinedly refocused his attention on the task at hand and resolved to think no more about her.
Then he let his audience go half an hour early.
He hurried back across London Bridge to the city, the crutch he used when he had to cover great distances swinging with a rhythmic tap, tap. The fog was so thick it could strangle a man if he made the mistake of breathing too deeply, and Gibson could feel the beads of moisture-encrusted grit reddening his eyes, until between the fog and his own watering vision he was nearly blind.
And still he hurried on.
He’d just passed the Monument when he knew, again, that he was being followed.