By the time they reached the timber yard, set a short distance from Ramsay House, Catherine was desperately worried. Leo had become monosyllabic, and he was leaning on her heavily. He was shivering and sweating, his arm a cold weight across her front as he held on to her. A portion of her dress stuck to her shoulder where his blood had soaked it. She saw a blurry group of men preparing to unload a timber wagon. Please, dear God, let Merripen be among them.

“Is Mr. Merripen with you?” she called out.

To her vast relief, Merripen’s dark, lean form emerged. “Yes, Miss Marks?”

“Lord Ramsay has been injured,” she said desperately. “We took a fall—his shoulder was pierced—”

“Take him to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

Before she could reply, he had already begun to run to the house with smooth, ground-eating speed.

By the time Catherine had guided the horse to the front entrance, Merripen was there.

“There was an accident at the ruins,” Catherine said. “A shard of timber has been lodged in his shoulder for at least an hour. He’s very cold, and his speech is disoriented.”

“That’s my usual way of talking,” Leo said behind her. “I’m perfectly lucid.” He tried to descend from the horse in a kind of slow topple. Reaching up for him, Merripen caught him deftly. He wedged his shoulder beneath Leo’s and guided his good arm around his neck. The pain jolted Leo and caused him to grunt. “Oh, you sodding filthy whoreson.”

“You are lucid,” Merripen said dryly, and he looked at Catherine. “Where is Lord Ramsay’s horse?”

“Still at the ruins.”

Merripen gave her an assessing glance. “Are you injured, Miss Marks?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Run into the house and find Cam.”

Accustomed as the Hathaways were to emergencies, they managed the situation with brisk efficiency. Cam and Merripen helped Leo into the manor and up the stairs, one on either side of him. Although a bachelor’s house had been built beside the estate for Leo’s use, he had insisted that Merripen and Win live there instead, pointing out that as a fairly recently married couple, they needed the privacy far more than he. When he came to Hampshire, he stayed in one of the guest rooms in the main house.

They formed a fairly harmonious triad, Cam and Merripen and Leo, each with his own area of responsibility. Although Leo was the holder of the estate, he had no objection to sharing authority. Upon returning from France after a two-year absence, Leo had been grateful to see how Cam and Merripen had rebuilt the Ramsay estate in his absence. They had turned the ramshackle property into a thriving and prosperous enterprise, and neither of them had asked for anything in return. And Leo had recognized that he had much to learn from both of them.

Running an estate required far more than lounging in the library with a glass of port, as the aristocrats in novels did. It took extensive knowledge of agriculture, business, animal husbandry, construction, timber production, and land improvement. All that added to the responsibilities of politics and Parliament was more than one man could undertake. Therefore, Merripen and Leo had agreed to share the timber and agricultural concerns, while Cam handled the estate business and investments.

In medical emergencies, although Merripen was competent in such matters, Cam usually took charge. Having learned the healing arts from his Romany grandmother, Cam was relatively experienced at treating illness and injury. It was better, safer even, to let him do what he could for Leo rather than send for a doctor.

The established practice in modern medicine was for doctors to bleed their patients for every imaginable ailment, despite controversies within the medical community. Statisticians had begun to track case history to prove that bloodletting did no good whatsoever, but the procedure persisted. Sometimes bloodletting was even used to treat hemorrhaging, in accordance with the belief that it was better to do something than nothing at all.

“Amelia,” Cam said as he and Merripen settled Leo into his bed, “we’ll need cans of hot water sent up from the kitchen, and all the toweling you can spare. And Win, perhaps you and Beatrix might take Miss Marks to her room and help her?”

“Oh, no,” Catherine protested, “thank you, but I don’t need assistance. I can wash by myself and—”

Her objections were overridden, however. Win and Beatrix would not relent until they had overseen her bath and helped to wash her hair and change her into a fresh gown. The extra pair of spectacles was found, and Catherine was relieved to have her vision restored. Win insisted on tending Catherine’s hands and applying salve and bandages to her fingers.

Finally Catherine was allowed to go to Leo’s room, while Win and Beatrix went to wait downstairs. She found Amelia, Cam, and Merripen all crowded around the bedside. Leo was shirtless, and heaped with blankets. It shouldn’t have surprised her that he was arguing simultaneously with the three of them.

“We don’t need his permission,” Merripen said to Cam. “I’ll pour it down his throat if necessary.”

“The hell you will,” Leo growled. “I’ll kill you if you try—”

“No one is going to force you to take it,” Cam interrupted, sounding exasperated. “But you have to explain your reasons, phral, because you’re not making sense.”

“I don’t have to explain. You and Merripen can take that filthy stuff and shove it up your—”

“What is it?” Catherine asked from the doorway. “Is there a problem?”

Amelia came out into the hallway, her face taut with worry and vexation. “Yes, the problem is that my brother is a pigheaded idiot,” she said, loudly enough for Leo to hear. She turned to Catherine and lowered her voice. “Cam and Merripen say the wound isn’t serious, but it could become very bad indeed if they don’t clean it properly. The piece of timber slipped in between the clavicle and the shoulder joint, and there’s no way of knowing how deep it went. They have to irrigate the wound to remove splinters or clothing fibers, or it will fester. In other words, it’s going to be a bloody mess. And Leo refuses to take any laudanum.”

Catherine regarded her with bafflement. “But … he must have something to dull his senses.”

“Yes. But he won’t. He keeps telling Cam to go ahead and treat the wound. As if anyone could do such painstaking work when a man is screaming in agony.”

“I told you I wouldn’t scream,” Leo retorted from the bedroom. “I only do that when Marks starts reciting her poetry.”

Despite her consternation, Catherine almost smiled.

Peering around the doorjamb, she saw that Leo’s coloring was terrible, his sun-browned complexion lightened to an ashy pallor. He was trembling like a wet dog. As his gaze met hers, he looked so defiant and exhausted and miserable that Catherine couldn’t stop herself from asking, “A word with you, my lord, if I may?”

“By all means,” came his sullen reply. “I would so love to have someone else to argue with.”

She entered the room, while Cam and Merripen moved aside. With an apologetic expression, she asked, “If I might have a moment of privacy with Lord Ramsay…?”

Cam gave her a quizzical glance, clearly wondering what influence she thought she could have with Leo. “Do what you can to persuade him to drink that medicine on the bedside table.”

“And if that doesn’t work,” Merripen added, “try a hard knock on the skull with that fireplace poker.”

The pair went out into the hallway.

Left alone with Leo, Catherine approached the bedside. She winced at the sight of the stake embedded in his shoulder, the lacerated flesh oozing blood. Since there was no bedside chair to sit on, she perched carefully on the edge of the mattress. She stared at him steadily, her voice soft with concern. “Why won’t you take the laudanum?”

“Damn it, Marks…” He let out a harsh sigh. “I can’t. Believe me, I know what it’s going to be like without it, but I have no choice. It’s…” He stopped and looked away from her, setting his jaw against a new spate of shivering.

“Why?” Catherine wanted so badly to reach him, to understand, that she found herself touching his hand. When no resistance was offered, she became emboldened and slid her bandaged fingers beneath his cold palm. “Tell me,” she urged. “Please.”

Leo’s hand turned and enclosed hers in a careful grip that sent a response through her entire body. The sensation was one of relief, a feeling of something fitting exactly into place. They both stared at their joined hands, warmth collecting in the sphere of palms and fingers.

“After Laura died,” she heard him say thickly, “I behaved very badly. Worse than I do now, if you can conceive it. But no matter what I did, nothing gave me the oblivion I needed. One night I went to the East End with a few of my more depraved companions, to an opium den.” He paused as he felt Catherine’s hand tighten in reaction. “You could smell the smoke all down the alley. The air was brown with it. They took me to a room filled with men and women all lying pell-mell on pallets and pillows, mumbling and dreaming. The way the opium pipes glowed … it was like dozens of little red eyes winking in the dark.”

“It sounds like a vision of hell,” Catherine whispered.

“Yes. And hell was exactly where I wanted to be. Someone brought me a pipe. With the first draw, I felt so much better, I almost wept.”

“What does it feel like?” she asked, her hand clutched fast in his.

“In an instant, all is right with the world, and nothing, no matter how dark or painful, can change that. Imagine all the guilt and fear and fury you’ve ever felt, lifting away like a feather on a breeze.”

Perhaps once Catherine would have judged him severely for indulging in such wickedness. But now she felt compassion. She understood the pain that had driven him to such depths.

“But the feeling doesn’t last,” she murmured.

He shook his head. “No. And when it goes, you’re worse off than before. You can’t take pleasure in anything. The people you love don’t matter. All you can think of is the opium smoke and when you can have it again.”

Catherine stared at his partially averted profile. It hardly seemed possible that this was the same man she had scorned and disdained for the past year. Nothing had ever seemed to matter to him—he had seemed utterly shallow and self-indulgent. When in truth, things had mattered far too much. “What made you stop?” she asked gently.

“I reached the point at which the thought of going on was too damned exhausting. I had a pistol in my hand. It was Cam who stopped me. He told me the Rom believe that if you grieve too much, you turn the spirit of the deceased into a ghost. I had to let Laura go, he said. For her sake.” Leo looked at her then, his eyes a riveting blue. “And I did. I have. I swore to leave off the opium, and since then I’ve never touched the filthy stuff. Sweet Christ, Cat, you don’t know how hard it was. It took everything I had to turn away. If I went back to it even once … I might find myself in the bottom of a pit I could never climb out of. I can’t take that chance. I won’t.”

“Leo…” She saw him blink in surprise. It was the first time she had ever used his name. “Take the laudanum,” she said. “I won’t let you fall. I won’t let you turn into a degenerate.”

His mouth twisted. “You’re offering to take me on as your responsibility.”

“Yes.”

“I’m too much for you to manage.”

“No,” Catherine said decisively, “you’re not.”

He let out a mirthless laugh, followed by a long, curious stare. As if she were someone he ought to know but couldn’t quite place.

Catherine could hardly believe that she was perched on the edge of his bed, holding the hand of a man she had battled so fiercely and for so long. She had never imagined that he would willingly make himself vulnerable to her.

“Trust me,” she urged.

“Give me one good reason.”

“Because you can.”

Leo shook his head slightly, holding her gaze. At first she thought he was refusing her. But it turned out that he was shaking his head in rueful wonder at his own actions. He gestured for the small glass of liquid on the bedside table. “Give it to me,” he muttered, “before I have a chance to think better of it.” She handed the glass to him, and he downed it in a few efficient gulps. A shudder of revulsion swept through him as he gave the empty glass back to her.

They both waited for the medicine to take effect.

“Your hands…” Leo said, reaching for her bandaged fingers. The tip of his thumb brushed gently over the surface of her nails.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered. “Just a few scrapes.”

The blue eyes turned hazy and unfocused, and he closed them. The pained grooves of his face began to relax. “Have I thanked you yet,” he asked, “for hauling me out of the ruins?”

“No thanks are necessary.”

“All the same … thank you.” Lifting one of her hands, he cradled her palm against his cheek while his eyes remained closed. “My guardian angel,” he said, the words beginning to slur. “I don’t think I ever had one until now.”

“If you did,” she said, “you probably ran too fast for her to keep up with you.”

He made a quiet sound of amusement.

The feel of his shaven cheek beneath her hand filled her with astonishing tenderness. She had to remind herself that the opium was exerting its influence on him. This feeling between them wasn’t real. But it seemed as if something new were emerging from the wreckage of their former conflict. A thrill of intimacy went through her as she felt the ripple of his swallow in the space beneath his jaw.

They stayed like that until a noise from the doorway caused Catherine to start.

Cam entered the room, glanced at the empty glass, and gave Catherine an approving nod. “Well done,” he said. “This will make it easer on Ramsay. And more importantly, on me.”

“Bugger you,” Leo replied mildly, slitting his eyes open as Cam and Merripen went to the bedside. Amelia followed with an armload of clean rags and toweling. Reluctantly, Catherine pulled away from Leo and retreated to the doorway.

Cam looked down at his brother-in-law with a mixture of concern and affection. The abundant sunlight from the window slid over the shiny black layers of his hair. “I can take care of this, phral. But we could send for a gadjo doctor if you prefer.”

“God, no. Anything he did would be far worse than your blundering. And he’d start with his damned jar of leeches.”

“No leeches here,” Cam replied as he eased the pillows from behind Leo’s back. “I’m terrified of them.”

“Are you?” Amelia asked. “I didn’t know that.”

Cam helped Leo to lower to the mattress. “When I was a boy still living with the tribe, I went wading in a spring-fed pond with a few of the other children. We all came out with leeches attached to our legs. I would say I screamed like a girl, except the girls were much quieter.”

“Poor Cam,” Amelia said, smiling.

“Poor Cam?” Leo echoed, sounding indignant. “What about me?”

“I’m reluctant to give you too much sympathy,” Amelia replied, “in light of my suspicion that you’ve only done this to get out of the turnip planting.”

Leo replied with two choice words that made her grin.

Pulling the bed linens to her brother’s waist, Amelia carefully tucked towels beneath his injured shoulder and side. The sight of his lean, smoothly muscled torso—and that intriguing dusting of hair on his chest—caused Catherine’s stomach to dive in an odd little swoop. She retreated farther behind the door, not wanting to leave and yet knowing it was improper for her to stay.

Cam dropped a kiss atop his wife’s head and nudged her away from the bed. “Wait over there, monisha—we need room to work.” He turned to the nearby tray of supplies.

Catherine blanched as she heard the rattle of knives and metal implements.

“Aren’t you going to sacrifice a goat or perform a tribal dance?” Leo asked woozily. “Or at least chant something?”

“We did all that downstairs,” Cam said. He handed a piece of leather strap to Leo. “Put this between your teeth. And try not to make too much noise while we’re working on you. My son is napping.”

“Before I put this in my mouth,” Leo said, “you might tell me the last place it’s been.” He paused. “On second thought … never mind. I don’t want to know.” He put the strap between his teeth, then removed it temporarily to add, “I’d rather you didn’t amputate anything.”

“If we do,” Merripen said, swabbing carefully around the injured shoulder, “it won’t be intentional.”

“Ready, phral?” she heard Cam ask gently. “Hold him still, Merripen. All right. On the count of three.”

Amelia joined Catherine in the hallway, her face tense. She wrapped her arms around her middle.

They heard Leo’s low groan, followed by a voluble flow of Romany between Cam and Merripen. The foreign language was brisk but soothing.

It was clear that despite the effects of the opium, the procedure was difficult to endure. Every time Catherine heard a grunt or pained sound coming from Leo, she tensed all over and knotted her torn fingers together.

After two or three minutes had passed, Amelia looked around the doorway. “Did it splinter?” she asked.

“Only a little, monisha, ” came Cam’s reply. “It could have been much worse, but—” He paused at a muffled sound from Leo. “Sorry, phral. Merripen, take the tweezers and—yes, that part right there.”

Amelia’s face was pale as she turned back to Catherine. And she astonished her by reaching out and drawing her close in the same way she might have hugged Win, Poppy, or Beatrix. Catherine stiffened a little, not in aversion but awkwardness. “I’m so glad you weren’t harmed, Catherine,” Amelia said. “Thank you for taking care of Lord Ramsay.”

Catherine nodded slightly.

Drawing back, Amelia smiled at her. “He’ll be fine, you know. He has more lives than a cat.”

“I hope so,” Catherine said soberly. “I hope this isn’t a result of the Ramsay curse.”

“I don’t believe in curses, or spells, or anything of the sort. The only curse my brother faces is self-imposed.”

“You … you mean because of his grief over Laura Dillard?”

Amelia’s blue eyes turned round. “He talked to you about her?”

Catherine nodded.

Amelia seemed caught off guard. Taking Catherine’s arm, she drew her further along the hallway, where there was less risk of being overheard. “What did he say?”

“That she liked to watercolor,” Catherine replied hesitantly. “That they were betrothed, and then she caught the scarlet fever, and died in his arms. And that … she haunted him for a time. Literally. But that couldn’t be true … could it?”

Amelia was silent for a good half minute. “I think it might be,” she said with remarkable calmness. “I wouldn’t admit that to many people—it makes me sound like a lunatic.” A wry smile crossed her lips. “However, you’ve lived with the Hathaways long enough to know of a certainty that we are indeed a pack of lunatics.” She paused. “Catherine.”

“Yes?”

“My brother never discusses Laura Dillard with anyone. Ever.”

Catherine blinked. “He was in pain. He’d lost blood.”

“I don’t think that is why he confided in you.”

“What other reason could there have been?” Catherine asked with difficulty.

It must have shown in her face, how much she dreaded the answer.

Amelia stared at her closely, and then shrugged with a rueful smile. “I’ve already said too much. Forgive me. It’s only that I desire my brother’s happiness so greatly.” She paused before adding sincerely, “And yours.”

“I assure you, ma’am, one has nothing to do with the other.”

“Of course,” Amelia murmured, and went back to the doorway to wait.