C allum did not know if it was night or day. He felt as if he had been trampled by horses, which was a slight improvement from having felt like he’d been beaten up by London toughs.
It took him a moment to realize that light was peering in through the curtains.
He blinked slowly. He wanted water. His mouth was dry. He lifted his hand, hoping that someone might see, someone gentle, someone like the love of his life. Someone being Cymbeline.
“She’s not here,” a voice drawled.
He blinked slowly. “Calchas?” he croaked.
Calchas Briarwood, dressed in his naval uniform, sat in a chair beside the bed. He snapped his book closed, sat up straighter, and said, “Well, at least we know your mind’s not gone. The fever hasn’t taken that.”
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice not nearly as commanding as he was accustomed to.
“She needed rest, and I came to sit beside you because I’ve been thinking.”
“Thinking?” he echoed, feeling slightly dazed.
“I should get Cymbeline at once. But you and I must speak first.”
A wave of unease slipped through Callum. He wanted Cymbeline, to tell her he loved her, to thank the heavens that he was still here. With her.
But the intensity in Calchas’s voice couldn’t be ignored.
Quietly, Calchas poured Callum out a glass of water, and then, much to his shock, helped him sit. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, Calchas brought the cool drink to his lips.
Calchas was patient. He actually held him with kindness. And he thought that anyone who was Calchas’s friend was remarkably lucky.
Calchas then guided him back onto the pillows and adjusted them. Then he put the glass of water down. “You look like hell.”
“I feel like hell,” Callum said, the drink having done him a world of help.
“Good.”
“What?” he asked.
“Good,” Calchas repeated. “I’m glad you feel like hell. You deserve it.”
“I deserve it?” Callum demanded.
“Indeed you do. You wanted this, didn’t you? You were willing to have a dance with Death, all in the name of being the Duke of Baxter. And now you’ve had it, what do you think?”
He shuddered. “This is not at all what I wanted.”
Calchas’s mouth tightened for a moment, then he sighed.
“No, you were arrogant enough to think you would go exactly like your father, weren’t you?
One quick apoplexy or heart failure and then off you’d go, leaving everybody behind.
But no, it never occurred to you that it could be something like this.
“Good God, man. What if you’d been paralyzed?
Or struck blind from illness. We all would have taken care of you, of course, and Cymbeline would have stayed lovingly by your side.
But your illness happened out of a sheer willfulness to never let up.
That’s not strength, old boy. That’s severely misguided stubbornness.
And you’ve been married, what, a few weeks?
If you’d died, you’d be gone from her life, a failure on every front because you don’t have any children.
What would that mean for the great Duke of Baxter? ”
He ground his teeth and yet…he couldn’t argue. Not really. “Calchas, you are being a devil.”
“No, I’m not being a devil,” Calchas countered.
“I’m being a realist. I think someone needs to show you reality.
You’ve been living in some bizarre story where you made yourself a martyr.
And I don’t have time for martyrs because real death, real pain, real killing is happening every moment.
Not here, not in this house, but on the battlefields of Europe, on the oceans of the world, and quite frankly, Callum, all around you in England. And you know it better than most.”
Calchas leaned forward and leveled him with a merciless stare.
“People are genuinely struggling every day. You fight for them! And yet you torture yourself on purpose. People would give anything to be able to rest, and you have the means to take care of yourself. Most people in this country don’t.
They get up and they must labor from the moment they wake to the moment they can drink gin, pass out, and start it all again.
But you! You can see the best doctors. You could go to Bath, or you could go down to the country.
You can sleep in a bed that is fit for kings.
You have the best food. And yet you refuse to take care of yourself because you see it as some sort of noble endeavor to push yourself into an early grave with work.
Are you trying to punish yourself for the good life that you have? ”
The words crashed down on him over and over again. “No, I don’t think I am.”
“Then what is it,” Calchas demanded, “that makes you act this way? Don’t you understand why my sister wants you in her life? Why we all do?”
Callum blinked. “You want me in your life, Calchas?”
“Bloody hell,” Calchas drawled. “How obvious must I be? Of course I do. You’re family. And my friend. It may not seem so, but I like you. I’m a prickly sort of fellow.”
Callum didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t find words. All of this was so much. He’d faced death, and now he was alive and faced with a choice, and he knew Calchas was trying to help him make it.
But he felt lost and like a disappointment. He’d nearly lost his wife.
“Listen,” Calchas began, his voice rich with sincerity.
“We don’t want you in our lives because you’re the great Duke of Baxter.
As a matter of fact, Callum, you quite remind me of my father, another duke.
The two of you have much in common, actually, and I adore him.
But I don’t adore him because he’s the Duke of Westleigh.
And Cymbeline doesn’t love you because you are the Duke of Baxter. ”
Calchas drew in a long breath, leaned forward, and locked gazes with him.
“Callum, the world needs you, not the Duke of Baxter. And I’d wager this.
Even if you weren’t the great Duke of Baxter, you would do great things because of the sort of man you are.
Cymbeline doesn’t love a duke or coronet.
She loves you. And if you martyr yourself to that coronet, well, the world will be left behind wanting.
Didn’t you miss your father when he died? ”
Callum swallowed. “Yes, but I couldn’t let myself. I had to convince myself that he’d died for all the right reasons. Perhaps he had. But I haven’t let myself think or feel how it could have been different.”
“No, you haven’t,” a voice said from the door.
He blinked and spotted the Dowager Duchess of Westleigh.
“Come to gloat, have you?” he asked sheepishly.
“Gloating is the last thing that I wish to do, dear boy,” she returned, arching a silvery brow.
“I feared something like this would be coming for you, and it did. Believe it or not, it doesn’t make me happy to be right.
Now I want to know what you’re going to do.
But you just said something that gives me hope. ”
“Hope?” he croaked.
The dowager nodded. “When last you and I talked privately, I realized that all these things that you’ve been doing are wonderful, of course.
But you’ve had to run your whole life so that you did not feel the aching loss of your father: a father who was, well, lionized in your mind.
I don’t even know if you knew the real man well. ”
He winced. “Perhaps I did not,” he whispered, though the confession pained him greatly.
“And is that what you want for your children, to not know you well?”
“You’ll be lucky if you have children,” Calchas drawled. “If you keep going as you have been, you are going to be dead. And you know what that will do to my cousin? It will destroy her.”
His throat tightened. “I don’t want to destroy her…”
Calchas was silent for a long moment and then he said, “Do not make me wish that she’d never married you. You cannot keep going as you have always done. Can you change? Do you even want to?”
The words lacerated him. This felt like all too much after his illness, and yet he understood why this was happening. It had to. He couldn’t ignore this. Not now.
“Because that is the only thing that matters, dear boy,” the dowager duchess said as she crossed to the bed, “if you want to. Because, quite frankly, up until now, up until this very moment, it’s been clear that you don’t want to.
But now that you’ve gone through this door, will you be willing to actually live? ”
He ground his teeth. It was quite an accusation to suggest that he hadn’t truly been living all this time, that he had been running away from the death of his father, trying to avoid the thoughts and the feelings that came with it.
But when he really made himself pause, he realized they were both right.
And the pain of it, dear God, the pain ripped through him so intensely that he wished they were gone and that he was still battling the illness that had gone through him. He sucked in a shuddering breath.
“I have been holding tight for so long,” he ground out.
“We know,” the dowager duchess said gently.
“You don’t need to hold tight anymore. We will take up the rope,” Calchas said.
“And now I think it’s time I drag you down to the country and force you to get better: for your sake, for my cousin’s sake, for the family’s sake.
Do you understand? You’re not alone anymore.
You are not ever going to have to face the world alone. ”
Callum shook his head, struggling. Struggling to respond as they wished. “That’s what I don’t think you two understand. I’ve always liked not needing anyone. I’ve always liked being the one who was needed. I’m not afraid of being alone,” he ground out.
Calchas let out a slow, pained breath. “Oh, I see,” he said.
The dowager duchess sat on the bed, and instead of castigating him, she nodded.
“That takes a special kind of person. And I’ve always known that you were special.
To be someone who’s not afraid of being alone takes a great strength.
But here’s the thing, and perhaps this is where it truly lies, Callum.
Other people need you, and you need to allow them to need you.
Do you see? We need you. Cymbeline needs you.
And so you must take care of yourself so that you can stay with us, so that you can stay with her. ”
“Stay with her,” he whispered. “How could I not?”
But what were they asking? They were asking him to give up who he had always been? Could he do it? Could he give it all up, the way he’d always worked, the way he’d always driven himself. For love?
For Cymbeline?
For himself?