The countess questioned her and discovered that she had indeed been a governess before David was born and teacher to a few pupils in a Cornish village for a few years afterward until she had been fortunate enough to be recommended to the position of mathematics and geography teacher at Miss Martin’s School for Girls in Bath.

“Miss Martin?” Kit said, grinning-he had asked Anne to call him by his given name, as had his wife. “The famous Miss Martin who left her position at Lindsey Hall after trying to teach Freyja and refusing a letter of recommendation from Bewcastle?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “That Miss Martin.”

Kit asked more questions and discovered that she had been invited to Glandwr because the Marquess of Hallmere had befriended her in Cornwall and Lady Hallmere was the one who had recommended her to the school.

“It is to be hoped,” he said, chuckling, “that Miss Martin does not know that particular juicy fact.”

“She does,” Anne said. “But she did not when she hired me.”

The earl with a single question discovered that she had been estranged from her family for ten years. No one asked why. The reason, Anne supposed, was self-evident.

At dinner Lauren learned that Anne’s ivory lace-over-silk gown, which she had admired, was a wedding gift from Sydnam and that it was part of a whole wardrobe of ready-made clothes he had bought for her in Bath yesterday. And when the countess remarked upon her gold and diamond chain and earrings, she learned that they were a wedding gift too.

“Would you not agree that I have excellent taste, Mama?” Sydnam asked, smiling at Anne. “Not that my wife’s beauty needs embellishment.”

Anne wished that she had worn her old green silk and no jewelry at all.

For of course as the evening progressed she could see herself with stark clarity as she must appear through their eyes-as a fortune hunter. It was clear that she was no longer a very young woman-she had a son who was almost ten years old. She had never been wealthy. She had been forced to work for a living because her father was short of funds. Her son was illegitimate. Her future prospects were not bright-she could expect to live out her days as a spinster schoolteacher. Her only asset was her beauty. And so she had used that beauty this past summer when opportunity had presented itself to snare for herself a husband of rank and fortune whose own future prospects were equally bleak, though for a different reason-a man who was so badly maimed that he could expect only solitude and loneliness for the rest of his life. Her plan had succeeded extremely well. By the end of the summer she had been with child-by a gentleman to whom honor obviously meant more than life. His maimed body proved that.

That was how they must see her.

How could they not? The facts appeared to speak for themselves.

It was a very damning portrait.

They were polite to her because she was a guest in their home and she was Sydnam’s wife-and it was perfectly obvious to her that all of them adored him.

But how they must despise her!

By the time she retired for the night she was exhausted. She was thankful that Sydnam remained in the drawing room for a while to finish a conversation with his brother-they were talking about land and crops and livestock.

Although the suite of rooms included a sitting room and a large dressing room, there was only the one bedroom-and the one bed.

Anne undressed and washed, pulled on a nightgown, and brushed out her hair as quickly as she could, climbed into the big bed, moved over as far to the edge of it as she was able, pulled the covers up over her ears, and closed her eyes.

And then it struck her that this was probably the very bed where Sydnam had lain for long months recuperating from his experiences at the hands of torturers. She could have wept then but did not because she no longer had the privacy of a room of her own.

Last night-her wedding night-had been a terrible mistake. She had hoped that perhaps they could make amends tonight. But tonight she was too weary to want anything except to weep for the man Sydnam must have been before the torture.

The man she would never have met.

When he let himself quietly into the room perhaps fifteen minutes after she had lain down, she pretended to be asleep.

The nightmares almost always followed the same pattern.

They were never of the physical torture itself.

They were of the intervals between-the waiting for the next session, the never knowing exactly when it would be, the always knowing what it would be. They had always told him that in graphic detail in advance. And the temptation-the terrible, almost overwhelming temptation to give them what they wanted, to sell Kit out, to betray his country and her allies so that he would be granted the blessed release of death.

“No.” He was not speaking to them. He was speaking to it-the temptation. “No. No! No!” He did not want to scream. He tried desperately not to. He never screamed during the sessions. He would not give them the satisfaction. But even in the times between they would hear, and so he tried not to scream. But sometimes…

“No-o-o-o-o-o!”

As always he woke himself up with the screaming. He sat bolt upright on the bed, bathed in sweat, threw off the covers, stumbled over them anyway as he got out because he had thrown them with his right hand, and gasped for air like a drowning man.

He was almost instantly aware of Anne, sitting up on her side of the bed, reaching for him though he was too far away from her. He was still more than half in the nightmare and would be for some time, he knew from long experience. His body and his mind were too heavily drugged with the past to deal with the present for a while or even to display the common courtesies.

“Get out!” he told her. “Get out of here.”

“Sydnam-”

“Get out!”

“Sydnam-”

She was out of bed too and rounding the foot of it to come to him. He would have lashed out at her then if he had had a right arm to do it with.

Someone knocked on the door-hammered on it actually.

“Syd?” It was Kit’s voice. “Syd? Anne? May I come in?”

Anne changed direction and headed for the door, which opened just before she reached it.

“Syd?” Kit said again. “You are still having the nightmares? Let me help you. Anne-”

“Go away! Get out of here!”

He was still almost screaming. Soon the shaking would begin. He hated that weakness more than anything else. He hated for anyone to see it.

“Anne,” Kit said again, sounding like the military officer Sydnam had briefly known him as. “Go with Lauren. Mother is here too. Go with them. I’ll see to this.”

“Get out! All of you.”

“He has had a nightmare,” Anne said, her voice soft but quite firm. “I will see to him, Kit, thank you.”

“But-”

“He is my husband,” she said. “He wishes to be alone. Go back to bed. Everything will be all right. I will see to him.”

And when she closed the door, she remained on Sydnam’s side of it.

He began to shake-every cell in his body shook, or so it seemed. All he could do was grasp a bedpost, cling tightly, and clamp his teeth together while the breath rasped in and out of his lungs.

“Sit down,” she said softly an indeterminate length of time later, one hand touching his arm, the other curling about his waist from behind.

When he sat, he found a chair behind him. A cover from the bed came over him then and was tucked warmly about him and beneath his chin and about his neck and shoulders so that he felt cocooned by its soft warmth. She must have gone down onto her knees before him. She set her head on his lap, turned it to one side, and wrapped her arms about his waist.