My love? For a moment, the world faded to nothing. Had she imagined that endearment? Surely she had. She wasn’t his love. He could hardly bear sharing the same room as her.
She drew the scrambled remnants of her concentration together and addressed the immediate issue. “You’re not mad,” she said shakily. She believed that to her bones.
He clutched at the wooden arms of his chair as if they offered his only link to reality. “If I’m not mad already, our marriage will be the end of me.”
What was he telling her? Her dazed mind struggled to sift fact from fantasy. She didn’t understand what troubled him or what she could do to help. But it was astonishingly clear that what she’d always believed unassailable truth was categorically false.
“You want me?” she asked in dawning wonder.
His lips twisted in another of those grim smiles, and at last he looked at her. “Indubitably.”
Letting her arms fall to her sides, she stepped nearer. “Surely that means…”
He surged t
o his feet and lurched toward the wall behind him. “Damn it, Charis, don’t touch me.”
He pressed against the wall. She heard the uneven rattle of his breath. She stopped and frowned. “I can’t touch you, yet you say you…want me.”
“I told you it was insane.”
All of a sudden, a whole range of memories came into focus and made sense in a way they never had. If anything about this bizarre situation made sense. She spoke slowly. “You can’t touch anyone. That’s why you got sick after Portsmouth. All those people.”
He was as tense as if she attacked him with a rapier instead of words. She expected him to lie or refuse to answer. But he gave an abrupt nod. “Yes.”
She retreated carefully as if she tried to calm a wild animal. With one unsteady hand, she felt behind her until she gripped the back of a chair. “I won’t come near you.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly, a world of relief in the words.
She kept her voice even, as if indeed he were an animal caught in a gamekeeper’s trap. “Won’t you sit down?”
He hesitated, then returned to his chair with jerky movements. In the feeble light, he looked tired but composed. Slowly she sank into the chair she held, curling her cold toes under her.
“Were you always like this?” She thought and answered her own question. “No, you can’t have been. You’ve had lovers.”
“Charis…”
Twining her hands together in her lap, she raised her chin. Her courage faltered, but she steeled herself. She was guiltily aware she took unfair advantage of his weariness, his inebriation, his wretchedness. But she had to seize her chance.
She forced out the question she’d always been afraid to ask. “What happened in Rangapindhi?”
Thirteen
Even in the dimness, Charis saw the blood drain from Gideon’s face. His eyes became opaque, as if he stared at gruesome specters visible only to him. He gripped the chair arms like a drowning sailor snatched at driftwood to keep himself afloat.
Anyone with a scrap of sympathy would relent. Tell him he was welcome to his secrets.
She remained silent and waited.
When she’d given up hope of an answer, he sucked in a rasping breath and focused on her. “My tutor at Cambridge recommended me to the East India Company.”
“Your knack with languages.” She kept her voice carefully neutral.
“Yes. And I was a rider and a cricketer and a marksman and a swordsman. The Company always wanted men with my peculiar skills.”
As if the Company found many recruits with such talents, Charis thought, noting again his lack of conceit in speaking of his abilities. She wasn’t surprised he’d been both out-standing scholar and outstanding sportsman. From the first, she’d recognized how remarkable he was. The tragedy was he could do so much out of the ordinary, yet something as simple and essential as sharing the touch of a human hand was denied him. Her belly cramped with a feeling more profound than pity.
“I was ripe for adventure, in need of a career, eager to find an outlet for my energies.” His voice was husky but steady. Only his face, drawn and white, indicated the ordeal he found this recounting. “I set out to spread the light of European civilization to a benighted people.”