The Escape (Survivor's Club) Read Free

to have noticed. We
all
have, but it has never come up during our nightly sessions.”
    They had sat up late most nights during the past three weeks, as they did each year, sharing some of their deeper concerns and insecurities—and triumphs. Theykept few secrets from one another. There were always some, of course. One’s soul could never be laid quite bare to another person, no matter how close a friend. Ben had held his own soul close this year. He
had
been depressed. He still was. He felt chagrined, though, that he had not hidden his mood better.
    “Perhaps we are intruding where no help or sympathy is wanted,” the duke said. “Are we, Benedict? Or shall we sit back down and discuss it?”
    “After I have just made the herculean effort to get up? And when everyone is about to totter off to bed in order to look fresh and beautiful in the morning?” Ben laughed, but no one else shared his amusement.
    “You
are
depressed, Ben,” Vincent said. “Even I have noticed.”
    The others all sat again, and Ben, with a sigh, resumed his own seat. He had so nearly got away with it.
    “No one likes to be a whiner,” he told them. “Whiners are dead bores.”
    “Agreed.” George smiled. “But you have never been a whiner, Benedict. None of us has. The rest of us would not have put up with it. Admitting problems, asking for help or even just for a friendly ear, is not whining. It is merely drawing upon the collective sympathies of people who know almost exactly what you are going through. Your legs are paining you, are they?”
    “I never resent a bit of pain,” Ben said without denying it. “At least it reminds me that I still have my legs.”
    “But—?”
    George had not himself fought in the wars, though he had once been a military officer. His only son had fought, though, and had died in Portugal. His wife, the boy’s mother, perhaps overcome with grief, flung herself to her death from the cliffs at the edge of the estate not long after. When he had opened his home to thesix of them, as well as to others, George had been as wounded as any of them. He probably still was.
    “I will walk. I
do
walk after a fashion. And I will dance one day.” Ben smiled ruefully. That had always been his boast, and the others often teased him about it.
    No one teased now.
    “But—?” It was Hugo this time.
    “But I will never do either as I once did,” Ben said. “I suppose I have known it for a long time. I would be a fool not to have done so. But it has taken me six years to face up to the fact that I will never walk more than a few steps without my canes—plural—and that I will never move more than haltingly with them. I will never get my life back as it was. I will always be a cripple.”
    “A harsh word, that,” Ralph said with a frown. “And a bit defeatist?”
    “It is the simple truth,” Ben said firmly. “It is time to accept reality.”
    The duke rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. “And accepting reality involves giving up and calling yourself a cripple?” he said. “You would never have got up off your bed, Benedict, if you had done that from the start. Indeed, you would have agreed to allow the army sawbones to relieve you of your legs altogether.”
    “Admitting the truth does not mean giving up,” Ben told him. “But it does mean assessing reality and adjusting my life accordingly. I was a career military officer and never envisaged any other life for myself. I did not
want
any other life. I was going to end up a general. I have lived and toiled for the day when I could have that old life back. It is not going to happen, though. It never was. It is time I admitted it openly and dealt with it.”
    “You cannot be happy with a life outside the army?” Imogen asked.
    “Oh, I can be,” Ben assured her. “Of course I can. Andwill. It is just that I have spent six years denying reality, with the result that at this late date I still have no idea what the