Page 79 of Baron Bolt

“No. I think it is costing him.”

“Costing him what?”

Luc’s eyes went again to Damian’s face.

“Everything he has.”

Luc tied off the last stitch, cut the thread with a pocketknife, and did not reach for the linen to bind it. He sat back on his heels and looked at what he had sewn for a long moment. His heavy face altered. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. As if he had found his own hand in a place it should not have been.

“Whatever the master has made,” he said, half to himself, in that slow English, “it holds to life harder than men do.”

Made.

The word went through her without resistance. There was nothing left in her to resist it. For hours the doctor had been howling it in one language or another. Mine. My work. It is mine. I made it. And for hours she had refused to let the words mean anything. She had stacked them in a corner of her mind face-down, unplayed.

Now the wound itself forced her to deal with it.

She looked at her husband in the lamplight.

He was bare to the waist. The new seam sat low on his left side, small and neat and already impossible. Luc’s waxed thread. Her own hands had held the edges of him together while that needle went in. She made herself look slowly above it, the way her father had taught her to read a table, missing nothing, not hurrying the bad cards, not pretending the good ones would save her if she blinked.

Above that wound lay the rest.

Old work marched across the broad chest and up over the left shoulder. Ridged silver-white lines. The ladder-marks of stitching still legible in the skin, like a sampler someone had refused to unpick. Closed by a terrible needle. Not Luc’s. Not tonight’s. Weeks old, and still declaring themselves. The scarring climbed faintly out of that work up the left side of his throat, up along the jaw, fading as it went, until it became only that slight roughness by his left eye that she had noticed a hundred times across a hundred hands of whist and been too polite to wonder at. The eye that never quite caught the light the way its fellow did.

She could have put her palm on any of it. The chest. The wreck of the shoulder. The faint climb at the throat she had never been allowed to see below a collar and stock. Her fingers knew the heat of him already: she had knelt in it on the carpet, pressed linen to him, felt the pulse that had no business continuing.

Looking was different.

Looking asked nothing of him and everything of her.

She did not look away.

Every locked door resolved itself against that silver. The dressing-room door bolted between their chambers every night of their marriage, the click she had learned to count as the last sound of the house. I cannot, he had said, jaw set as if the next charge were already in the smoke, and she had thought it was distaste. That he could not bear the sight of her. That Edward’s child, Edward’s widowing, Edward’s last kindness, had been a duty a living man performed with his face turned aside.

But it was not the facts. Not the cards she held in her hand.

A man who had died at Waterloo was lying on the floor, sewn back into the world, healing faster than the living.

And looking, for the moment, almost as helpless as the dead.

Her gaze returned to the new seam.

Still closed.

Still changing.

His body was not surrendering him. It was spending him to keep him.

He was going to live.

The breath she had been rationing since midnight went out of her all at once. The next one came in deep and ragged and made a sound she did not permit it to repeat.

He was going to live.

He might sleep for an hour or a day. He might wake unable to lift his head. She did not know what this impossible body demanded in payment for repairing itself.

But it was repairing itself.