“Yes,” he said darkly.
“You can tell me, Cole,” she whispered, fearing that, even as she said the words, he’d deny her.
“There are no words to convey my time in that place,” he said after a contemplative moment. “It made Newgate seem like a palace. Filth is too clean a word. Despair is too happy a word. Cruelty is too kind a word. Perhaps if you imagine endless days in a room hot as a furnace, bearing witness to things so unimaginably horrific that you close your eyes hoping to escape into a nightmare … that might begin to convey my time there.”
Imogen couldn’t think of a thing to say, couldn’t trust her voice past the tight emotions crowding her throat, so she remained quiet and moved on to another stitch. Her silence seemed to encourage him, and he continued in a flat, toneless voice, as though he addressed someone far away, or dictated a letter.
“I thought I knew grief before then. I thought I knew pain. I was a soldier and a spy, after all. I’d lost my entire family. But I came to understand that before that year, I never knew a man could be broken in so many ways. My captors, they wanted me to beg for the barest scraps of dignity, but I refused and so I was denied even those scraps.”
Why? she wondered, and didn’t realize she’d breathed the word out loud until he answered her in a hard, mordant tone.
“I am the Duke of Trenwyth. I beg for nothing. I bend my knee to no one but the queen.”
“You told them this?” she marveled.
“Of course I did.”
“And they didn’t kill you?”
He lifted his shoulders in a devil-may-care motion, which reminded him of what she was doing to his shoulder, and he stilled. “I’m convinced it is my rank that kept me alive. They were trying to coerce Her Majesty and Prime Minister Disraeli into a secret treaty, and I think they succeeded.”
Imogen had never paid much mind to politics until her acquaintance and subsequent marriage to Lord Anstruther. His fondness for her reading the paper to him not only amused her, but kept her informed as well. Britain had not been a great friend to the Ottomans, though they had been allies against the Russians in the Crimean War. However, that bond was beginning to fray, and both empires had broken faith. The April Uprising had been the proverbial nail in the coffin, forcing the crown and Parliament to withdraw all military and financial support from the Ottomans. The British Navy had sat idly by as the Russians exacted costly revenge on the Ottoman Empire. It seemed that the Duke of Trenwyth had been just the leverage the Ottomans had needed to force Disraeli’s hand. That and the island of Cyprus, granted to England by the Cyprus Convention in secret in 1878.
“It must have made you very angry,” she supposed aloud.
He made another sound devoid of any mirth. “You can’t imagine the rage.” His fist tightened, sending a resounding ripple up the muscles in his arm and bunching the shoulder upon which she worked. “It is my only companion these days.”
She tied off the knot she was working on, and began the final stitch. “Is that why you so value your silence and solitude?” she ventured. “Because you share it with your rage?”
His chin dipped, though she couldn’t say it was a definitive nod in the affirmative. “Men like me spend our time containing within ourselves the worst of man and nature. All the lusts, the avarice, the fury and the pain; if I revealed them, if I indulged them, I would be weak. I would become the animal they tried to make of me. After dedicating my day to such a struggle, there isn’t much left of me for anything else.”
Heart aching, Imogen fought the urge to lean in to him, to console him with a press of her forehead against his. Instead she worked on keeping her hand steady as she finished stitching him and reached into the basin of warm water for a cloth to clean the blood from his arm and back.
“Perhaps you might consider that your pain isn’t weakness,” she posited. Covered by the cloth, her fingers traced the swell of his bicep, the curious indents created by so many muscles working in tandem. “In your particular struggle lies a very unique form of strength.” She dipped the cloth back into the water, which came away pink as she wrung it out. “Sometimes, the widest shoulders carry the heaviest burdens,” she murmured, trailing the cloth along the nape of his neck. His great body shuddered in response, and a different tension seemed to bunch the muscles there. “You’re not an animal, Cole, you’re a hero.”
His back expanded as he filled his lungs with what seemed to be a painful breath. “You. Don’t. Know. You can’t imagine.”
“I don’t know,” she agreed. “I do not profess to comprehend your suffering. I simply cannot.” She cast about for an idea and caught one immediately. “Maybe there are those who can. Other wounded soldiers like you. Men who feel broken, who had pieces of their minds and bodies taken from them by their enemies.”
“They didn’t take my hand.”
“What?” She couldn’t have heard him right. Perhaps the blood heating her ears prevented her from understanding him correctly.
“They didn’t take my hand,” he repeated between his teeth.
Stunned, her cloth stilled upon his back. “Then … who…?”
“I did.”
Imogen couldn’t remember another moment in her entire life she’d been more absolutely stupefied.
“That … you … why?” She wished she could see his face, that she could read his expression, but her body refused to obey any of her commands.
“At night they’d chain us to the wall so they didn’t have to post guards. These cuffs were no hinged iron, but some Asian steelwork that, to me, seemed like magic at the time. When Ravencroft broke into the prison to extract me, we both worked on unhinging it, but someone saw us and raised the alarm.” He lifted his left arm, holding the cold steel in front of his face as though inspecting a memory. “It was our only chance. Escape or both die in that prison … or worse. We winched my arm, I took the Scotsman’s dirk, and he helped me saw through my wrist.”
“Oh dear God,” she gasped.
His head snapped to the side. “I told you not to pity me,” he snarled over his shoulder.
Imogen snatched her hand from his shoulder, quick as one would from a growling hound. “You can’t command things like that,” she reproached in a quavering voice. “How can I help but feel sympathy for someone who’s undergone such suffering?” She bent to pick up the white cloth, forever stained with his blood, and shook it at him like a scolding nanny. “Pity is not disgrace, it is compassion. And compassion is something that everyone deserves.”
He stood then, rising to his intimidating height, and took a step toward the door without so much as a by-your-leave. “Not one such as I.”
“Especially you,” she insisted.
He whirled on her then, a wolf of wrath and rage. An animal too fierce to be caged. Lord, how did men erect walls thick enough to contain such a man?
They hadn’t.
He’d escaped them.
“Do you know how many people I’ve murdered?” he spat. “How many have suffered because of me?”
Imogen shook her head, placing her hand to contain a fugitive heart. He thrust his mismatched hands toward her. “When your hands are stained with enough blood, it becomes a part of you. Past your own veins and meat. Past your bones and marrow. It doesn’t stop until it stains your soul.”