His back stiffened. The humor, the pleasure, drained from his face so quickly it took his color along too. “My horse. Duke. I had forgotten—”
“He is well.” In this, at least, she could comfort him. “A servant found him two days after you had been brought in, hungry and lathered in sweat, but otherwise unscathed. We have been caring for him in our stables.”
Relief sank him back into the pillows. “Thank you.” A pause. “For both his care … and mine.”
“I do not suppose you remember much.”
“I fear the memories are rather distorted. I remember waking up in the rain and climbing until my hands bled. Everything else is lost to me.” He stared down at his bandaged hands, spreading them open as if in them he might find answers.
“Who would want you dead?”
He blinked hard.
“Mr. Kensley?”
“That is what I came here to find out.” A hesitant smile creased his face. “I never quite made it.”
“But how should Father know? What does all this have to do with the … with the business you discussed in London?”
“Let us not talk of it, hmm?” He nodded to the door. “Now leave me alone so I can torture myself with the sorrows of Mr. Werther, whoever he is.”
“But—”
“Remember? If you make me angry, I shall stand on my head.”
“In your condition, I should like to see you try.” Sighing, she walked around the bed, then looped an arm around the bed poster and cocked her head at him. “Mr. Kensley?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you any other sisters?”
His eyes widened with the realization she believed him. Then he shook his head with a small laugh. “None so merciless in chess as you.”
Days passed into more days with very little to distinguish them. Moving hurt. Not moving hurt. Over and over, William imagined ripping away the bed linens, hobbling from the room, finding Duke, and getting away from here whether he perished on the way or not.
Miss Gresham’s visits kept him from madness. She brought him books, or a chessboard, or even a drizzling box so he could assist her in removing gold and silver threads from a tapestry. Such tedium. None of the pastimes amused—but then again, he doubted they amused Miss Gresham either.
She likely came for his sake alone.
Because she believed him.
How strange that she did not curse his being here. That she did not look at him with a wrinkled nose of disdain, as if his illegitimacy were a pollution. Instead, she seemed almost as if she … well, as if she cared a bit whether he lived or died. Or whether he went mad in this bed. Or whether his pillow was situated wrong and giving him pain.
If he had imagined a sister, he could have thought of no one greater. She was light and happy and innocent and true. She had feelings that were not buried behind a stoic exterior but were displayed without restraint at every change of thought or temperament.
The door pushed open, drawing William from his thoughts. Dusk had already turned the windows a dark blue, and as no one had yet come to light a candle and the visitor did not hold one himself, only a shadow entered the room.
Blood coursed hot and fast through William’s veins. The figure was too large, too broad, to be Miss Gresham or Helena or the lanky footman who was sometimes sent up to assist William. If he had to fight for his life again, he didn’t know if he’d have enough strength—
“You should never have come here.” Lord Gresham’s voice. He stepped to the end of the bed, where streams of pale moonlight illuminated his rage-filled face.
William glanced at his father’s hands. No gun. William’s body relaxed. “There is not much I can do about it now.”
“Who endeavors to see you dead?”
“You?”
“If I had wanted you killed, you would not have survived the first day in my house.”
