“Oh yes. You’ve mentioned her.”
“Have I?” he asked absently. He and Billie were the best of friends—truly, they’d grown up together. A bigger tomboy had never walked this earth, though, and he wasn’t sure he’d even realized she was a girl until he was eight.
He chuckled at the memory.
Cecilia looked away.
“I can’t imagine why I would have written to you about her,” Edward said.
“You didn’t,” she explained. “Thomas did.”
“Thomas?” That seemed odd.
She gave an unconcerned shrug. “You must have talked to him about her.”
“I suppose.” He reached back into the trunk to pull out a clean shirt. It was why he’d opened the bloody thing in the first place. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said before whipping his shirt over his head and pulling on the fresh one.
“Oh!” Cecilia exclaimed. “You have a scar.”
He glanced back at her over his shoulder. “What?”
“There is a scar on your back. I never noticed it before.” She frowned. “I suppose I wouldn’t have done. While I was caring for you I never . . . Well, never mind.” A moment passed and then she asked, “How did you get it?”
He reached around and pointed toward his left scapula. “This one?”
“Yes.”
“I fell out of a tree.”
“Recently?”
He gave her a look. Honestly. “I was nine.”
This seemed to interest her, and she shifted position, sitting cross-legged under the covers. “What happened?”
“I fell out of a tree.”
She groaned. “Surely there is more to the story than that.”
“Not really,” he said with a shrug. “For about two years I lied and said my brother pushed me, but in truth I just lost my balance. I hit a branch on the way down. Tore right through my shirt.”
She chuckled at that. “You must have been the bane of your mother’s existence.”
“My mother and whoever was doing the mending. Although I imagine that shirt was irredeemable.”
“Better a shirt than an arm or a leg.”
“Oh, we ruined those as well.”
“Good heavens!”
He grinned at her. “Billie broke both of her arms.”
Cecilia’s eyes bugged out. “At the same time?”
“Thankfully not, but Andrew and I had great fun imagining what it would have been like if she had. When she broke the second one, we tied the good one up in a sling, just to see how she managed.”
“And she let you?”
“Let us? She was the one who suggested it.”
“She sounds most singular,” Cecilia said politely.
“Billie?” He shook his head. “There’s no one else like her, that is for certain.”
Cecilia looked down at the bed, picking idly at the covers. She seemed to be making some sort of pattern in her mind. “What is she doing now?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said regretfully. It pained him that he was so cut off from his family. He’d had no news of them in over four months. And they likely thought he was dead.
“I’m sorry,” Cecilia said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t think.”
“It’s all right,” he replied. It certainly wasn’t her fault. “Although I do wonder—might I have received correspondence during my absence? It seems likely that my family would have written to me before receiving notice that I’d gone missing.”
“I don’t know. We can certainly inquire.”
Edward saw to his cuffs, fastening first the left and then right.
“Did they write to you often?” She smiled, but it looked forced. Or maybe she was just tired.
“My family?”
She nodded. “And your friends.”
“None so often as you wrote to Thomas,” he said ruefully. “I was forever jealous of that. We all were.”
“Really?” Her smile lit her eyes this time.
“Really,” he confirmed. “Thomas received more mail than I did, and you were his only correspondent.”
“That can’t be true.”
“I assure you it is. Well, perhaps not if I count my mother,” he admitted. “But that hardly seems fair.”
She laughed at that. “What do you mean?”
“Mothers have to write to their sons, don’t you think? But siblings and friends . . . well, they hardly need be so diligent.”
“Our father never wrote to Thomas,” Cecilia said. “Sometimes he asked me to pass along his greetings, but that is all.” She didn’t sound upset by this, or even resigned. Edward had a sudden recollection of his friend, idly whittling a stick at one of their shared camps. Thomas often spouted aphorisms, and one of his favorites had been: “Change what you can and accept what you can’t.”
That seemed to sum up Thomas’s sister quite well.
He looked over at her, studying her for a moment. She was a woman of remarkable strength and grace. He wondered if she realized that.
He went back to fussing with his cuffs, even though they were fully fastened and straight. The urge to keep looking at her was too strong. He would embarrass her, or more likely, himself. But he wanted to watch her. He wanted to learn her. He wanted all of her secrets and desires, and he wanted her mundane stories, the little bits of her past that had fit into her like pieces of a puzzle.
How odd it was to want to know another person, inside and out. He could not recall ever wanting to do so before.
“I told you about my childhood,” he said. He reached into his trunk for a fresh cravat and got to work tying it. “Tell me about yours.”
“What do you wish to know?” she asked. She sounded vaguely surprised, perhaps a little amused.
“Did you play outside a great deal?”
“I did not break any arms, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It wasn’t, but I’m relieved to hear it.”
“We can’t all be Billies,” she quipped.
He felt his chin draw back and he turned to her, certain he’d misheard. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” she said, giving her head a little shake that said it wasn’t worth talking about. “I was being silly. And no, I did not play outside a great deal. Not like you, at least. I much preferred to sit inside and read.”
“Poetry? Prose?”
“Anything I could get my hands on. Thomas liked to call me a bookworm.”
“More of a book dragon, I should think.”
She laughed. “Why would you say that?”
“You are far too fierce to be a lowly worm.”
Her eyes flicked up to the ceiling and she looked vaguely embarrassed. And perhaps a little proud as well. “I am quite sure you are the only person who has ever judged me to be fierce.”
“You crossed an ocean to save your brother. That seems the very definition of fierceness to me.”
“Perhaps.” But the spark had left her voice.
He regarded her curiously. “Why so somber all of a sudden?”
“Just that . . .” She thought for a moment and sighed. “When I made for Liverpool—that was where I sailed from—I don’t know that it was my love for Thomas that spurred me into action.”