Trusting Miss Trentham

Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

His arms were bound tightly behind him. Someone knelt on his back. His face touched the surface of the creek. With each wheezing, desperate breath, he sucked a little water into his mouth. Iron-hard fingers gripped his hair, digging into his scalp. “C’est vrai?” a voice asked in his ear. “Dis-moi! Tell me!”

Icarus squeezed his eyes shut, and wheezed for air. His throat was raw from vomiting. His lungs ached.

“Dis-moi!” the voice said again, and the fingers clenched even tighter in his hair, pressing his head lower. Each inhalation was now half water, half air. His panic grew until he could barely breathe. Hot tears squeezed from beneath his eyelids.

His captor ruthlessly thrust his head under water. Icarus bucked and thrashed and tried to dislodge the man on his back, tried to tear his head free, tried not to breathe—but eventually came the moment when he had to breathe, sooner this time than the last time, and the water rushed into his mouth, down his throat, into his lungs—

“Icarus!”

Icarus lunged up into wakefulness, flailing out with arms that were suddenly free. He was half out of the bed, his heart beating a thousand times a second, when he recognized the figure standing before him. Miss Trentham in her nightgown. Full awareness flooded him with the suddenness of a blow to the head: he wasn’t at Vimeiro. For a moment, he stood stunned, and then half-collapsed back on the bed. Every muscle in his body trembled violently. His lungs were laboring, not quite believing they could get enough air. The urge to vomit was strong.

He scrubbed his face with shaking hands while Miss Trentham busied herself with the brandy. The bottle clinked faintly against the rim of the glass. Icarus closed his eyes and tried to calm his breathing—there was enough air, even if it didn’t feel like it.

“Here,” Miss Trentham said.

Icarus opened his eyes. She was holding a very full glass of brandy.

He sipped while she rearranged his pillows. Small, cautious sips, partly because he could barely hold the glass steady, partly because his breathing was still jerky.

“Sit back,” Miss Trentham said.

Obediently, Icarus did.

Miss Trentham smiled crookedly at him, and smoothed his hair back from his brow, and turned away.

The brandy was warm in his mouth, warm in his throat, warm in his belly, and he wanted to keep sipping until the glass was empty—but memory of what had happened last night between himself and Miss Trentham was vivid.

Icarus lowered the glass and tried to think, before he drank too much.

His first thought was that he should send her from his room, now. His second was that he wanted to kiss her again. His third was that she wanted to kiss him.

Icarus stared down at the brandy, trying to decide what to do.

It would be selfish of him to kiss her. Selfish and dishonorable. But everything he’d done in the past three weeks had been selfish and dishonorable. He was using Miss Trentham, allowing her to risk her reputation in pursuit of his traitor, and he was giving her nothing in return, absolutely nothing, because he had nothing to give her, not a husband’s protection, not his heart, nothing. Except perhaps this. A kiss.

Did it make it right that he didn’t only want to kiss her for himself? That he wanted to kiss her because she deserved to be kissed? Because it was the one thing he could give her?

Of course it didn’t.

Icarus looked at his reflection in the brandy and felt ashamed of himself, and then he looked at Miss Trentham and the shame was superseded by an emotion almost like longing. He wanted her to stay with him. Wanted her to sit on his bed and read to him. Kiss him. Come to Exeter with him. Be with him during the last few weeks he had on this earth.

He took another sip of brandy, felt it slide down his throat, warm and potent and relaxing, and it was tempting to keep sipping until the very last drop was gone—but he resolutely handed the glass back to Miss Trentham.

“Don’t you want it?”

Yes, he did; and no, he didn’t. Icarus selected his answer with care. “I don’t wish to drink too much tonight.”

Miss Trentham nodded. She’d heard the truth in his words. She poured him a teaspoonful of valerian.

Icarus swallowed it.

She rearranged his pillows, fetched Herodotus, and perched herself on the end of his bed.

Icarus relaxed back against the pillows.

Miss Trentham opened the book and found her place. “At length, when the time came for parting, Procles . . .”

It was her voice he liked. Low and musical. She made Herodotus sound like poetry. Icarus listened without paying any attention to the words. His eyelids grew heavy. After some time, he became aware that Miss Trentham had stopped reading. He blinked his eyes open. She was still sitting on the end of his bed, but her gaze was on him, not the book.

“You’re almost asleep, aren’t you?” Miss Trentham put Herodotus aside, and climbed down from the bed and came quietly to stand alongside him. She reached out and smoothed his hair, and then bent and kissed him lightly, pressing her mouth to his.

Icarus remembered her lips from last night. Warm and soft and wonderfully responsive. He made a low murmur of pleasure in his throat and reached for her, drawing her closer.

They kissed. And kissed some more. And then some more. And somehow she ended up lying on the bed with him, and his arms were around her, and his tongue was in her mouth, and he was kissing her. Deep, slow, sleepy kisses. Comforting kisses. Kisses that made him feel warm and safe and happy in a way he hadn’t felt for a very long time.

Icarus didn’t remember falling asleep, but it must have happened, because he woke in a vaguely familiar room with the sense of having slept for a long time. Daylight leaked through the chintz curtains. His bladder told him it was late morning.

He stretched and yawned and rubbed his face, and climbed out of bed and attended to his bladder. Then he opened the curtains and leaned his hands on the windowsill and gazed out at Bristol, gray and hazy with coalsmoke. He felt rested, and hungry, and oddly content.

He ate a late breakfast of eggs and sirloin, and set out with Miss Trentham to visit the final four parishes. There was no self-consciousness between them today, just a feeling of comfortable familiarity and something that was almost friendship.

The search went more quickly than yesterday, but none of the churchwardens knew of Houghton. They were, however, able to supply him with the names of the three Bristol parishes the landlord had forgotten. It was almost dusk by the time the hackney coach drew up outside the third and final church. The churchwarden was in the vestry, preparing for evening prayer. “Sergeant Houghton? No, can’t say as I’ve ever heard of him, sir.”

“He’s a Chelsea Hospital out-pensioner,” Icarus explained, for the seventh time that day. “Lost an arm in Portugal three months ago.”

“Only a few pensions from Chelsea come through here, and none of them are your sergeant. Have you tried the other parishes?” The churchwarden was a colorless man, with mild, earnest blue eyes.

“All of them. You’re the last.” Icarus raked a hand through his hair in frustration. “He’s from Bristol.”

“Which parishes have you tried?” the warden asked helpfully. “Perhaps you missed one.”

Icarus handed him the sketched map and explained where they’d been. The churchwarden pursed his lips. “There are a few outlying parishes you could try, sir. And then there’s Bedminster and Horfield and Westbury, which aren’t Bristol of course, but most people think of them as such.” He c****d his head. “Shall I write the names down for you?”

“Please.”

They followed the churchwarden into his small, cluttered office. Icarus examined the furnishings while the man found a quill and sheet of paper. The carpet was worn almost through and the curtains had faded to an indeterminate gray. Not a wealthy parish, this.

The churchwarden blotted his list, folded it, and held it out. “Failing these, I suggest you write to Chelsea Hospital, sir, to find out where they’re sending the sergeant’s out-pension.”

“I’ll do that,” Icarus said, tucking the list into his waistcoat pocket. “Thank you. We’re much obliged to you.” He pulled out his pocketbook and extracted a five-pound note.

“Oh,” the man said, his cheeks flushing faintly at the sight of such largess. “Thank you! That will go to good use, sir. Very good use!”

Outside, Icarus stood for a moment. Frustration fermented in his chest. He’d been in London; why the devil hadn’t he thought to visit Chelsea Hospital and furnish himself with Houghton’s direction?

He expelled a sharp breath, and looked round for a hackney. Dusk was falling rapidly. The evening worshippers would soon be arriving.

“Spare a penny for a wounded soldier?”

Icarus glanced to his right. There, leaning on a crutch, was a grimy young man. “Soldier?”

“Twenty-eighth Foot.” The man shuffled forward, hobbling awkwardly. “Hamstrung at Alexandria.”

“Hamstrung?” Icarus grimaced. He’d seen men hamstrung in battle, and horses. He felt for his pocketbook—and was arrested by a light touch on his arm. Miss Trentham.

He glanced at her, and saw her shake her head.

Icarus slid the pocketbook back into place. “Not hamstrung?”

“And not a soldier.”

Icarus turned back to the beggar. His pity metamorphosed into disgust. He wanted to pick the man up by his collar and shake him like a terrier shaking a rat. “The fellows of the Twenty-eighth would give you a good thrashing if they knew your game. Since they’re not here, seems I should do it for them.” He took a step towards the beggar.

The man turned and ran, pelting down the darkening street, legs pumping frantically, crutch tucked under one arm.

Icarus halted. Definitely not hamstrung.

His disgust died as abruptly as a candle being snuffed. Not hamstrung, and not an ex-soldier, but undoubtedly poor, undoubtedly hungry, and undoubtedly in need of a few pennies. He sighed, and turned back to Miss Trentham.

She was watching him, her expression neutral, neither condemning nor approving.

Shame heated Icarus’s face. “I beg your pardon.” To offer violence to a beggar—in front of her. “I wouldn’t have hit him.”

“I know.” Her smile was small and wry and sympathetic, and made him feel even worse.

He hailed a hackney, handed Miss Trentham into it, and sat on the lumpy squab seat beside her, sunk in unwelcome thought. He was turning into someone he didn’t recognize. Someone he didn’t like.

Behind them, he heard church bells begin to ring, calling parishioners to evening prayer.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right, Icarus.” Miss Trentham slipped her hand into his.

Icarus held on to it and allowed himself to feel slightly comforted, even though he knew he didn’t deserve it.