Redeeming the Reclusive Earl - Virginia Heath Page 0,38
was only there—in the thick of it—at the mercy of the whims of the government and the Admiralty three thousand miles away!’
‘It must have been hard fighting a war you didn’t agree with.’
‘It wasn’t a war. Wars have rules, tactics, battles... Obvious enemies and a clearly defined cause to be fighting for. There wasn’t much evidence of any of that from where I was anchored. We were fifteen ships in total and it had been a quiet week. Too quiet. It lulled us all into a false sense of security. That annoys me the most because I was lulled, too. Privateers attacked in the dead of night when I was asleep. The first I knew, we were already dodging cannon fire. By the time I got on deck, the ship was on fire. We tried to fight it as best we could, alongside fighting them as well, but the wind sent it spreading to the sails on the mizzenmast. I knew if the mainsail went up then we were done for—a sitting duck—so I climbed the mast to cut it down and managed to set myself on fire in the process.’
‘Did it...hurt?’ A stupid question, but one which had plagued her since her first glimpse of the scars on his cheek.
‘Enough that I wished for death to take me immediately. And perhaps it would have if I hadn’t stupidly thrown myself into the sea in order to stop it.’ Thank goodness. Effie couldn’t imagine how awful it must have been. The pain and fear. ‘And very near drowned wrapped in the sail to boot. I think they pumped a good gallon of brine out of my lungs when they fished me out. Although thankfully I have no memory of that.’
But as he recalled it, she saw the horror in his eyes and realised he clearly remembered both the burning and the drowning, and despite the warm sun on her skin she shivered at the thought.
‘Does it still hurt?’
He shook his head. ‘But I do not feel like my skin fits any more, if that makes sense. Too tight. Numb in places. Oversensitive in others. It isn’t mine.’ Anger again—but tinged with something else. Frustration? Sadness? ‘It isn’t me.’
It isn’t me. A strange and upsetting statement which threw up new questions. Questions she knew he wouldn’t answer despite giving her permission to ask them. His sister had said something similar when she had assured Effie he wasn’t himself. He was clearly lost. Languishing in some strange limbo he was struggling to find his way out of. She understood. After Rupert’s death, when she had been forced to resign herself to the fact she would never have any of the things the female part of her craved—like children, or real intimacy with another human being who accepted her exactly as she was—she had had to do a great deal of soul searching to claw her way out of that pit of despair.
Purpose had been her salvation then and was still the only thing which blurred the constant sense of loneliness and otherness she had felt from her earliest memories. Feelings which had intensified as her age had increased and all hope of living any sort of normal life beside someone who wanted her there gradually eroded away with each rejection or daily reminder of exactly how peculiar she was.
Dark days and hopelessness sucked all the joy out of your soul and she suspected Lord Rivenhall’s weren’t over yet.
‘How much of you was burned?’ An intensely personal question, but she needed to know. Needed to understand the full ordeal he had been through and perhaps through that him, too. The real him beneath all the bluster and anger. The man whose outer wounds had healed, but who still had a long way to go to be mended.
‘In fractions, inches or just body parts? Because if it’s fractions, then one physician put it at an eighth. How he came to that figure I do not know. You would have to ask him. The scars run from here...’ He pointed angrily at his left ear. ‘To here.’ He jabbed himself in the ribs. ‘Largely thanks to the supremely combustible properties of the fine wool in my dashing blue and white captain’s coat. At its longest point it is eighteen