“Ralph,” she said, and he could hear the raw pain in her voice, “what happened?”
* * *
For a long while he said nothing, and she could feel all the tautness of his muscles through the blanket. She could feel the cold too now that she was out of bed. Her nightgown was too thin to warm her. She shivered.
He was not going to answer, and she had risked his renewed irritation by asking the same question yet again. She ought to have turned over in bed and gone back to sleep. Why had she not?
He must have felt her shiver. He opened the blanket and drew her inside it with him. He wrapped it about her, and she warmed her body against his, her head turned against his shoulder, her hands on his upper arms. She was more aware of his nakedness standing like this than she ever was in bed. She loved his body, so beautifully proportioned, so firmly muscled, so masculine. She even loved his scars because they were a part of him, because they had been dearly earned. Her left hand moved in to rest against the hard ridge of the one that circled his right shoulder.
He did not speak for another long while, though some of the rigidity had gone from his muscles. She realized something then—something she would really rather not have known, though it explained why she had left the warmth of the bed to bring him a blanket and to ask again the question he would not answer. She loved him. She scarcely knew him, of course. There were whole facets of his being that he carefully shielded from her knowing. But there were some things she knew. There was the intensely passionate, energetic, idealistic, charismatic boy he had been when he was at school with Graham. There was the young man with his broken body and shattered dreams who had been brought back to England from the Peninsula closer to death than to life, wanting death more than he wanted life. And there was the closed, disciplined, sometimes morose, very private man he was now with his empty eyes. Though they were not empty to her. The emptiness was like a curtain he had drawn across his soul to hide his pain from anyone who tried to look in.
It was not a romantic love she felt for him, for there were no illusions. She did not expect moonlight and music and roses. She did not even expect a return of her feelings. There was no euphoria and never would be. She was not in love. There were no stars in her eyes.
There was merely an acceptance of who he was, even the vast depths of him she did not know and perhaps never would. She loved the complexity of him, the pain of him, his sense of duty, his innate decency, even his difficult moods. She loved his body, the look and feel of him, the warmth and smell of him. She loved the weight of his body when it was on hers in bed, the hard thrust of his lovemaking, the sudden liquid heat of his seed.
She loved him, though she would rather she did not. For she would rather not be burdened with the one-sided failure of the bargain she had suggested and he had accepted. Keeping to the terms of it was going to be harder to do now that she had allowed an emotional bond after all.
On the other hand, she would rather the father of her children be a man she loved than one she did not. Her courses were due in a couple of days. They sometimes came early. Not this time, though. And perhaps—oh, please, please—they would not come on time either but would be late, nine months late. She desperately, desperately wanted to be with child. It was the one thing that would please him and please her and bind them into a closer tie.
Not that she would ever want to try to bind him.
He spoke at last.
“We very rarely spent school holidays alone,” he said. “We spent them together at one another’s homes. Their parents became like my parents, or at least like favored uncles and aunts, and mine became like theirs.”
He was talking about his three friends. She did not need to ask.
“I did not fully realize at the time,” he said, “how idyllic my boyhood was. Though I did know I was privileged, and I thought privilege brought obligation—to think, to form responsible opinions, to act upon my convictions even if doing so meant disappointing or even hurting those who loved me. As with many boys, my ideals were not tempered with realism or open to compromise. Youth can be a dangerous time of life.”
Chloe said nothing. He was not seeking either approval or consolation.
“I was a leader,” he said. “I do not really understand why, but it was so. Other boys listened to me and followed me, and because I was a boy and had not even entertained the idea that perhaps I might sometimes be wrong, I allowed them to do so, even encouraged it. And sometimes, to my shame, I felt impatience, even scorn, with those few who stood against me.”
As with Graham?
“And so they came to war with me, those three boys,” he said, “and they died. Ah, you might say that they came of their own free will, that they died for a righteous cause, one in which they believed. You might go on to say that countless thousands died in the course of those wars, including helpless civilians, even innocent women and children who happened to find themselves in the path of war. I cannot burden my conscience with the deaths of all those poor souls, though. And perhaps I would be able to let my friends go too if it were only they who had suffered, for, yes, each had a mind of his own and had made his decision to go with me. But each one had a family, people who loved them and lost them and have lived on, people for whom I have been the cause of endless suffering. People who took me into their homes and loved me. People I supposedly loved.”
“They have surely forgiven you—if they ever blamed you in the first place,” Chloe said. She could understand why he blamed himself. The whole experience had, after all, been unbearably distressing for him. But surely the families of his friends would not blame him. Those three boys had been leaders in their own right, according to Graham. They had not been helpless pawns in a reckless or ruthless game Ralph had been playing. “Have you seen or spoken with any of them since?”