Chapter Text
It was the threshing machine, in the end, that nearly did what a whole lifetime of Anthony's dread had promised.
Kate would never afterward be entirely clear on how it happened, because the accounts came to her in fragments, from frightened men who could not meet her eye, something about the new machine and a jammed belt and Anthony climbing up to see the trouble himself, because of course he had, because he was the sort of viscount who did things himself, who could not stand at a distance and direct when he might climb up and see, and something had given way, or he had slipped, or the machine had caught, and he had fallen. Fallen hard, from a height, onto the iron and the ground, and struck his head, and been carried up to the house by six white-faced laborers on a hurdle, unconscious, bleeding, terribly still.
Kate did not fall apart. That was the first thing, and she would be proud of it later and ashamed of it too, in equal measure, that when they carried her husband in broken and grey she did not scream or faint or dissolve, she took hold. She had learned, long ago, in another country, how to be the calm center of a catastrophe, how to freeze the useless fear and let the useful part of the mind take over, and it took over now. She cleared the hall. She sent the fastest rider for the physician and the second-fastest for the surgeon in the next town in case the first was out. She had them carry Anthony to their bed and she stripped back the covers herself and directed the men where to lay him and got the frightened maids fetching hot water and clean linen and she knelt beside him and pressed a cloth to the wound on his head and spoke to him, low and steady, the whole time, I'm here, Anthony, I'm here, you're home, you're safe, the physician's coming, stay with me, and her hands did not shake, and her voice did not break, and she was magnificent, everyone said so afterward, the young viscountess, so calm, so strong, a rock in the middle of the terror.
She was strong for hours. She was strong while the physician came and examined him and made a grave face and used words like concussion and we must wait and the next day will tell. She was strong while they cleaned and bound the wound and while the household crept about in horror and while the light went down and the candles were lit. She was strong because being strong was the only useful thing there was to do, and Kate Bridgerton did the useful thing, always, it was the whole of how she'd survived her life, and so she knelt by her husband's bed through the long evening and held his hand and was a rock.
And Anthony did not wake.
That was the thing that broke her, in the end. Not the blood, not the fall, not the physician's grave face. It was the hours passing, and the candles burning down, and Anthony not waking. Because she had been strong on the understanding, the unspoken bargain she'd made with herself, that her strength was for something, that if she stayed calm and did everything right and held on, then he would wake, and it would be all right, and the strength would have been the thing that got them through. That was the deal. She held the line and he came back.
And he did not come back. The night wore on and he lay there grey and still and breathing too shallow, and he did not wake, and did not wake, and did not wake, and slowly, terribly, Kate understood that her strength was not a bargain, that it bought her nothing, that she could be the calmest strongest most competent woman in England and it would not make one particle of difference to whether her husband opened his eyes, because that was not hers to control, that was not anyone's to control, and all her formidable will was, against this, against the simple fact of a man who would not wake, utterly and completely useless.
And the strength went.
It did not go slowly. It went all at once, somewhere in the small hours, when the last of the household had been sent to bed and she was alone with him and the guttering candles, and she looked at his still grey face and understood that he might not wake at all, that this might be it, that the thing he had promised her since the very beginning, I'll die young, I'll leave you, might be happening right now, tonight, in this bed, and the rock cracked straight down the middle and what was underneath it was not strength at all. It was terror. Vast and total and childish, the terror of a woman about to lose the only thing that had ever mattered.
"Anthony." Her voice came out wrong now, cracked and small. "Anthony, please. Please wake up."
He did not.
"Please." She had his hand in both of hers and she was gripping it too hard and she did not care. "Please, Anthony, I'm asking you, I'm begging you, do you hear me, I don't beg, I have never once in my life begged anyone for anything and I'm begging you now, please, please wake up. Please don't do this to me. Please don't leave me. Please." The tears were coming now, all the tears she'd held back through the strong competent hours, and they came in a flood, and she pressed his hand to her face and wept and begged, all her pride gone, all her fierce dry composure gone, nothing left but a wife on her knees in the candlelight begging an unconscious man not to die. "You promised me, you said, you said you'd give me the whole life, you can't, Anthony, you can't go now, we've only had two years, two years isn't, it's not enough, it's not nearly enough, you don't get to leave me after only two years, I won't let you, do you hear me, I forbid it, I forbid you to die, wake up, wake up, please, my love, please, I can't, I can't do this without you, I don't know how, please don't make me learn how, please—"
There was a small sound behind her.
Edmund. In the nursery down the hall, waking, hungry, the way six-month-olds woke in the night with no knowledge of anything wrong in the world, and his small ordinary cry carried down the corridor and into the room, and Kate turned toward it, and something in her tore clean in half.
Because there it was. There was the whole of it. There was the future Anthony had always been so afraid of, made suddenly, unbearably real, in the space of one night. If he died, if he died tonight, then that sound down the hall was a fatherless baby. A boy who would never remember him. Six months old, who would grow up with a portrait and her stories and nothing else, who would never be lifted in his father's arms or know the sound of his laugh, exactly, exactly the thing Anthony had dreaded his whole life, exactly the thing he'd nearly not married her to prevent, and Kate knelt between her dying husband and her crying son and understood, fully, for the first time, in her own body, the fear she had spent two years gently telling him was morbid and irrational and would never come to pass.
It was not irrational. It had nearly just happened. She had been wrong to dismiss it. She would never dismiss it again.
"Please," she said again, to Anthony, brokenly, the baby crying down the hall. "Please. He needs you. He needs his father. I need you. We can't, please, we've only just started, please don't leave us at the very beginning, please—"
And Anthony's hand moved in hers.
It was the smallest thing, a twitch, a tightening, and Kate's whole body went rigid, and she looked at his face, and his eyes were open, barely, unfocused, glazed with pain, but open, looking at her, and a sound came out of her that was half a sob and half a laugh and entirely undone.
"Anthony. Oh God. Oh thank God. You're, you're awake, you're here, don't move, don't try to, just, you're here, you came back—"
"Kate." His voice was a wreck, thick and slow. His eyes found her face and held onto it. "You're crying. You never cry. Something must be very wrong. Am I dying?"
"No. No, you're not dying, you're not allowed to die, I've just spent an hour forbidding it—"
"The machine." Memory moved across his face, and then, terribly, something else, something she knew, the old fatalism settling over his features like a shadow, and her heart sank even in the middle of her relief, because she knew what was coming. "I fell. I remember. I fell and I hit, and I thought, Kate, as I was falling I actually thought, there it is. This is it. This is the thing. I've been waiting my whole life for the thing that kills me young and I thought it had found me, on a threshing machine, of all the stupid, I thought, this is how, this is how I leave her." His voice was flat and certain and awful. "It's coming, Kate. Do you understand now? You always told me I was morbid, imagining it, and I fell off a machine today and nearly, and it's coming, it's real, it's going to happen, maybe not today but it's, I've always known, I'm going to die young and leave you and there's nothing—"
"Stop it." She was still holding his hand, still weeping, but a fierceness came into it now. "Stop it, Anthony, not tonight, I can't hear it tonight, I have just spent hours watching you not wake up and begging you not to die, I cannot, I cannot also sit here and listen to you tell me it's coming for you, please, I haven't the strength left, I used all of it, I've none spare for your prophecies—"
And something changed in his face.
The fatalism went. She watched it go, watched him take in, properly, for the first time, the state of her, the tears, the wreck of her, the fact that Kate Bridgerton, who did not cry, who did not beg, who was the calmest strongest woman he had ever known, was kneeling by his bed shattered, and she saw him understand what the last hours had been for her, saw him realize what his falling had done to her, what his dying would do to her, and the fatalism gave way to something else entirely, which was not hope, and was not resolve, and was not any of the things she might have wanted, but was, simply, sorrow.
"Oh, Kate," he said. Softly. Wrecked. "You begged. Didn't you. You've been kneeling here begging me. Oh, my love. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Anthony—"
"I'm sorry." His hand tightened weakly on hers, and his own eyes were wet now. "I'm sorry I fell. I'm sorry I frightened you like this. I'm sorry you had to feel it, even for one night, the thing I've felt my whole life, I never wanted you to feel it, that's the whole, that's the entire reason I nearly didn't marry you, so you'd never have to feel exactly what you've felt tonight, and now I've gone and made you feel it anyway, on a threshing machine, because I couldn't stand at a distance like a sensible man." A tear slid down into the bandage. "I'm sorry. I don't have anything better than that. I can't promise you it won't happen, I've never been able to promise you that, I don't believe it and I won't lie to you. But I can be sorry. I am. I'm so sorry, Kate. For all of it. For the fear I carry that I can't put down, and for tonight, and for whatever's coming that I can't stop. I'm sorry I'm the kind of man you have to be afraid for. I'm sorry I can't be someone you get to keep without dread. I'm sorry."
And Kate, who had been strong for hours and broken for one and had nothing left of either, laid her head down on her husband's chest, gently, careful of his hurts, and felt it rise and fall, alive, alive, and did not tell him it was all right, because it was not all right, and she was too wrung out to pretend, and she did not tell him his fear was foolish, because she could not, not anymore, not after tonight. She just lay against him and listened to his heart go, the heart he was so sure would stop, going, for now, tonight, and let him be sorry, and was too tired to fight the fear or forbid it or forge anything brave out of it. Down the hall, a maid had gone to Edmund; the crying had stopped. The candles guttered. And the two of them lay in the wreckage of the night, the man who was sorry and the woman who had begged, and did not fix anything, because some nights there was nothing to fix, there was only the getting through, and they had gotten through, this once, this time.
"Don't fall off any more machines," Kate said, finally, into his chest. It was not much. It was all she had.
"I'll try." A pause. "I can't promise."
"I know." She closed her eyes. "You never can. That's the whole trouble with you."
And she stayed there, her head on his chest, listening to him breathe, and did not sleep, and did not let go, and the fear he'd carried his whole life lay down in the bed with both of them now, hers as much as his from this night on, and no one made it better, and no one made it go away, and the night went on, and Anthony breathed, and that, for tonight, was the only thing either of them had, and it was, barely, enough.