Cynthia Bailey Pratt Read Online Free

removing them. She thought, I’ve done all I think I need to. I’d better go. The boys will be wondering where I am. In truth, Arnold was probably so angry at being tricked out of a journey to Australia that Granville had not yet had time from defending himself to think of her.
    Jocelyn looked at the man on the bed. His thin, brown face looked younger, relaxed, and unaware. She noticed the deep, bruise-colored circles beneath his eyes and the way his nose seemed sharp as a peak above the hollows of his cheeks. It came to her suddenly that this man had not eaten very well of late. Without knowing why she did it, Jocelyn reached out to brush the lank black hair off his damp forehead.
    Blood. Blood on her hand. She stared at it for what seemed a long time while her mind raced with panic. She had often comforted the small wounds of her cousins’ childhood. However, when she saw the rich red smear on her palm, she felt shaken, sick, and stupid. The blood seemed to burn like a cinder on her skin. It was all she could think about.
    Careful to avoid getting the blood on the lining of her coat, she stripped it off and laid it across the end of the bed. Lifting the water jug, she mechanically noted that it was empty and went out to fill it, not caring if anyone saw her clad in shirt and waistcoat. She wanted to wash the blood away, from her hand and coat sleeve, and she wanted to do it now.
    * * * *
    Used though he was to sleeping in strange places, it had been a long time since he lay on a bed with a sheet that smelled of ... The man had a sudden vision of his father’s house. Not as he last saw it, with the storm clouds overhead echoing the storms within, but shining, the cream-colored towers rising at the foot of hills, his family’s as long as time itself.
    To him, his father’s house stood for the England he fought for, even when barred from the company of Englishmen. He supposed the chateaux he’d seen during the last ten years stood for France to the sons of the families that held them, yet those ancestral seats had been destroyed, trampled under the galloping feet of the steeds of war. He thought of Gray-croft with shattered walls and smoking fields, the people he still considered his lying dead among the ruins.
    The thought stabbed hint, and he sat up, ignoring the sickening swirling of the room around him. He opened the strings of his shirt under his cravat and reached inside. His fingers closed around a piece of heavy paper while his dark eyes searched the room for a safe hiding place.
    The boy’s coat lay near at hand. Nothing closer suggested itself, and he felt somehow that he did not have sufficient strength to get out of the bed. His heart pounded painfully just from the effort of sitting up. He reached for the coat, and a loose thread on its shalloon lining caught his eye. Slowly he pulled the thread. It came free, unstitching itself. Hearing the boy’s footsteps on the stairs, he thrust the paper between the lining and the blue wool.
    When Jocelyn came back with the jug, he lay in the same position as when she left, but his eyes were open. “What’s your name?” he asked dully.
    She began to say her own name, bit it off, and said, “Joss.”
    “I’m Hammond. It must have frightened you, my going off like that. I’m sorry.” His breath still came in long sighs, but his voice seemed steadier if not strong. She did not like his color. Jocelyn saw his hand move beneath the blanket and a grimace contort his tired face.
    “Well, Joss,” he said with a sigh that seemed less involuntary and more like that of a man prepared to face a painful ordeal. “This looks pretty rum, eh?”
    “Oh, no, sir,” Jocelyn said brightly and then felt like a fool. “I mean, I suppose so.”
    “Do you turn sick at the sight of blood?”
    She looked at her coat lying on the edge of the bed and shook her head with her eyes shut. “Not very.”
    “I only ask because I need your help. You can see I’ve been hurt. I don’t