He scooped up a cluster of items from her dressing table, hairbrushes and whatnot, and dumped them into the nearly empty trunk. They clattered against the sides.
“What happened in America?” Thea asked.
He shook his head and roamed around, grabbing up items and hurling them haphazardly toward the trunk. “At first, we enjoyed the adventure, though we hadn’t a clue how to make a home, aristocratic offspring that we were. And then, Katharine… She changed. She turned melancholy. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Just started fading away before my eyes. I promised to take her home to England when I earned enough money.”
“And then?”
“And then…”
Rafe paused to stare out a window and shivered, as if he were back in that cold, dreary cabin they had tried so hard to make cozy. The sunlight hurt his eyes so he turned his back on it; it forgave the slight and generously warmed his skin through his drying shirt. Thea had found a stripe of sunshine to stand in, the dust motes dancing over her white toes and damp blue skirts.
“Her melancholy passed, and I got as much work as I could. Then she changed again. One day, she spent our entire savings and more besides, buying up pots and plates and baskets of produce from the market. Hell, we had live goats and chickens running through our cabin. She said she planned to open a tavern; it would be the most popular place in the land and we’d become rich. I couldn’t reason with her. I mean, she could barely cook the most basic of meals and there she was, trying to cook ten things at once, nearly burning down the house. She didn’t sleep for days, just… And those blasted chickens…” She had alarmed him, with her eyes unnaturally bright and her speech impossibly fast. “Then that passed too, and she was frightened by her own behavior. There were other episodes too. When she had a shock, she lost grip on reality and feared the world meant her harm. And I…”
And he could do nothing. Nothing but hold her, and tell her everything would be all right, and secretly worry how to get her home to England. Time and again, Katharine’s mind turned on her during those years, and Rafe could do nothing but watch.
He wiped his hand over his face as if he could wipe away the memory, but when he looked up, the past was still with him, and Thea’s eyes were wide with concern. She looked almost comical, standing there bedraggled and barefoot, half her hair still pinned up, the rest tumbling over her shoulders. He smiled, despite everything. Oh, to forget the past and be with her now; to run his fingers through her hair and hold her against him, so that she might warm his heart the way the sun warmed his skin.
“You were so young,” she said softly. She took two steps toward him, but the trunk blocked her way. “In a foreign land, with no friends, no family, no solutions. It must have been terrifying for you.”
“I don’t need your pity. It was Katharine who suffered. I promised to look after her but…”
He tore his eyes off her, away from that gentle sympathy that he didn’t deserve.
“Lord Ventnor came,” Thea prompted.
“Right. Katharine had written to her mother, and he traveled all that way to take her home. I let her go. It seemed best. Then Nicholas—the bishop, you remember—he wrote me that Ventnor had put Katharine in a lunatic asylum, so I sailed back to England to get her out. As her husband, I had rights her father did not. If you had seen her when she came out of that place…”
The memory still made him shudder: spirited Katharine turned wan and silent, shuffling along, her eyes vacant.
Rafe shoved aside the image and picked up a heavy bestiary from the table. It was open at the entry on jaguars. That, too, made his heart ache: the thought of Thea, sitting alone, reading about giant cats because she wanted to know more and he would not tell her.
“And you lived in the Dower House here,” Thea said.
“Right. My father had died, my mother moved to the Continent, and my brother John was the earl. He let us live there.”
He slammed the book shut and threw it into her trunk.
“That’s not mine.” She bent to remove it and hugged it to her middle. “And why never mention that Sally lived with you?”
He shrugged. “It’s not worth the bother of mentioning. Sally was good for Katharine. The whole arrangement seemed to be good for her. She went weeks without an episode of any kind. I was reading about new treatments for disorders of the mind, out of France. A Quaker is trying something similar in York. I was corresponding with a French aliéniste, and I thought—”
“I beg your pardon? An alienist?”
“A doctor of mental illnesses. I was considering taking Katharine to the Continent. She was happy; we all were. But then—suddenly; I don’t know why—her mind turned on her again. We maintained complete calm around her, and she had had no frights or shocks. Except she read that blasted Gothic novel. She believed it held messages for her. And then the crows… She kept talking about crows, saying they were coming to take her away, and accusing me of being a crow or in league with the crows, or… I don’t know.”
“Why did she believe you meant her harm?”
Curse you, Katharine had hissed, wild-eyed, in the grip of whatever nightmare consumed her mind, while the heavy gray storm clouds crackled and rumbled overhead. Dark and silent as the crow, and with just as evil intent.
“She saw a crow kill a sparrow.”
“That was all?”
He sighed. “A storm was building. She was outside and I was trying to coax her back into the house. She refused, insisting I meant to murder her. I knew we had to be calm with her, but I was tired, impatient.”
“Worried,” Thea suggested.
He waved off her excuses. “I lost my temper and tried to grab her. She escaped and ran to the stables, didn’t even saddle the horse…”
And he, the fool, he had wasted minutes fetching a vial of laudanum before going after her. Precious minutes during which she had mounted a horse and ridden away.
Thea unwrapped her arms from the bestiary and lowered the huge book to a table, frowning thoughtfully as she traced the ornate letters on its front. Just as she had traced the scars on his shoulder, a lifetime ago, back in the lake. Rafe tried to take all of her in, every angle and curve of her face and her body; he might never see her again.
She looked up and caught him studying her. Something flashed across the space between them, swift as lightning.
“Why was Ventnor so shocked to see Sally?” she asked.
“I left England the same day we buried Katharine. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“Did you never ask?”
“What’s the blasted point? It doesn’t change what happened.”
He could never change the past. He could never change Katharine’s death. He could never change himself.
Rafe forced himself to meet Thea’s eyes, forced himself to say, “You have to go.”
She lifted her chin. “Actually, I think I shall stay.”
Chapter 18
Thea met Rafe’s baffled gaze steadily. He was silhouetted against the window, his hair drying into a dark mane, the sun outlining his body under his shirt. How she wished he would accept her comfort, this strong, vital man, so caring, so hurt by life.