Page 25 of The Sisters of Sea View
The major scowled. “I thought you swore to protect me. Why did you allow this woman back in?”
“Taggart did, but I would not have prevented her. I agree with your father—the lady is a godsend.”
A godsend? Her? Viola could not credit it.
Mr. Sagar gestured with graceful hands. “Please, do not allow me to intrude. Go on with your reading.”
The major groaned. “I am numb from listening to her drone on about the markets.”
Viola rose. “Our time is up, anyway.”
Armaan glanced from her to the major and back again. “Then I shall escort you out.”
As they walked to the front door, an awkward silence loomed between them.
To fill it, she said, “Major Hutton told me he has you to thank for saving his life.”
“To thank, or to blame?”
She stumbled midstride. “Excuse me?”
“Never mind.” He waved a dismissive hand and opened the door for her.
“You pulled him from a burning building, I understand.”
He chuckled dryly. “How like him to tell only that part of the story.”
“There is more?”
“Oh yes. He was only in that place to rescue me.” Pausing under the porte cochère, he looked at her, perhaps to make sure she was truly interested.
“Please go on,” she urged.
“It was not a ... how do you say, official battle. Some men I had known in my youth resented that I served with the British. They ambushed me and dragged me into a munitions shed. They tied my hands and began to beat me. Intended to kill me.”
He slowly shook his head, eyes distant in memory. “There were four of them. Too many to fight. The major, he started a fire just outside the door as a diversion, contained in a metal drum. The smoke filled the shed and scared most of them off. But one man—Raj—pulled out a piece of burning rubbish and tossed it into a barrel of gunpowder.
“Before Raj fled, he saw the major cut me loose and shot through the smoke, aiming for me and striking the major instead. Then came a great explosion. Fire everywhere. So yes, I dragged him out of there. Shot and burned but alive. Yet he only entered that building to save me. He does not tell that part.”
Armaan stared off toward the horizon, where the afternoon sun shone over Peak Hill, gilding it in a golden gleam. “Sometimes I think he wishes I had left him to die.”
She said nothing. Simply watched the man’s profile, and the emotions crossing his dark, handsome face. In the outdoor light, she realized he was older than the major, perhaps by a few years.
He glanced at her, smiled thinly, then finished his tale. “I received permission to accompany him back to England. To see he gets the care he needs from the English doctors he is used to. We came here because they say the sea air is good for the lungs. I hope so. I feel to blame for his wounds. He says no. He would be dead if not for me. I don’t know.”
“I am sure he is grateful, even if he does not show it.”
Armaan nodded. “He keeps his heart hidden, that one. Yet he is a friend to me, in the place of those who turned against me. I am grateful and don’t hesitate to, as you say, show it.”
Viola considered pressing for more details about the major’s prognosis and decided against it. She was also tempted to ask him who Miss Truman was but held her tongue.
On Monday, Emily hired a sedan chair, a single seat enclosed in a small box carried on two poles. Two strapping young men served as porters. They carried Mamma east along the esplanade, past Fort Field and the library to Mr. Hodges’s Medical Baths, near the middle of the beach.
Emily and Georgiana walked alongside. They had agreed to accompany Mamma since Viola and Sarah were busy. Although afraid of the sea, Emily thought she could manage the indoor baths, where the water, she had been assured, did not go over one’s head.
Several sedan chairs and donkeys fitted with invalid saddles were there before them, because many people frequented the brine baths—the infirm and the hale alike.
One advantage over a saddled donkey or carriage was that the sedan chair and its bearers could continue right into the establishment, limiting how far the invalid had to walk or be carried.
