Angel's Flight (16 page)

Chapter Twelve

A patter of rain came in the night. This, and the long hunger now so well satisfied, made it easy to sleep.

Downstairs, no one stirred. The first sound they heard was the mooing of disconsolate cows in a nearby shed, calling to be milked.

Angelica lay awake, watching Jack light their candle. Naked, her long golden hair loosened, she gazed at him, languidly admiring. He wasn’t bulging like Nancy’s brawny Johnnie, but deep muscles rippled on his back, thighs and arms. Here and there were the white lines of scars, testimony to twenty years of war.

There was none of Armistead’s spare elegance. Jack had no waist to speak of, but years of rough riding and long marches had stripped any excess. To Angelica, it seemed perfectly appropriate that she should have such a husband. Out of his clothes, Jack was revealed as a muscular and well-exercised male who shared the blood of her sturdy Dutch tribe.

Sandy locks trailed over his broad shoulders, shoulders she’d kissed, buried her face against, shoulders she’d bitten, shoulders she’d clung to while he’d rocked her. He’d filled her many times during the night, each time not satisfying himself until he’d heard her cry, wrung from her the panting, reflexive struggle which signals ecstasy.

She lifted the covers for him. As he joined her, he took a kiss. She responded by putting her face against his chest, feeling the crinkly light brown hair. In spite of his see-through eyes, he wasn’t as fair as she. Angelica was honey blonde even to the sensitive triangle.

“What do you suppose will happen today?” she murmured.

“Well, the rain will keep everyone and everything quiet, for there are going to be some monumental hangovers.”

“Won’t they expect me in the kitchen?”

“No, as a matter of fact, they won’t. The day after the bridal is one of the few times in her life when a Border woman doesn’t have to work like a slave for her man. If these folks go true to course, they’ll bring us water and then breakfast. You’ll be expected to stay in bed, ready to submit to the insatiable desires of your husband.”

This pronouncement was followed by a kiss on the nose. She didn’t reply, just nestled closer, thinking she had already done a good deal of that! Jack dropped another kiss on her forehead.

“Don’t fret, little Dutchwoman,” he said. “I shall stick to the promise I made before the good reverend, even if our only witnesses are a band of cutthroats.”

Angelica reached to touch his face, the strong line of his jaw. “Is this real?” she asked.

There was a recurring sense that everything, beginning with her abduction on the river, was some long, savage dream, one from which she must eventually awaken.

“It’s a surprising turn for me, too.” Jack soothed her, stroking her back. “Six months ago, I was swearing to myself that I’d never love another woman.”

He tilted her chin, the better to gaze into her blue eyes. “But I do believe what I said about seizing the moment. From the first dance at Governor Tryon’s, I knew I must be your knight.” Another kiss brushed her mouth as she lay languidly back in his arms.

“Still—” He shook his head. “—I’ve strayed from the original chaste errand I set out upon. And I warn you, things are going to be most unpleasant—above and beyond this damned war—after I get you home.”

“Do you suppose you ever will?” she asked, fingers tracing the hardness of his chest. At this instant, the present was all that mattered.

“I intend to.” The gray eyes levelly regarded her. “But if a bullet parts us, at least we shall have had a taste of heaven here on earth.”

Angelica closed her eyes against the pain the idea of losing him brought. Tears squeezed from beneath her golden lashes.

“I was selfish to make love to you here but, damn it, I’m glad I did. Courage, dear heart,” he said. “We shall escape and live to be happy together.” He gathered her close.

Angelica was buoyed upon an inexorable tide. All she knew at this moment was that she loved him, that she knew she wanted him, and wanted more of the frank joy he had given
her
.

On one side, danger threatened. On the other, disapproval frowned and fretted, twin mountains of impossibility hemming her in. Set against her passion for Jack, against last night’s absolute surrender, was the stark fact that in so doing, she had stepped over the boundary of her Hudson Valley world, and had made a choice her family would hate.

Worse, life with this adoring and adored man would join her with those who wanted to enslave her country. Nevertheless, this morning, she, Angelica TenBroeck, the woman who had defied Major

Armistead, who had lectured all and sundry upon the rights of man and America, had woken wedded, bedded, and close in the arms of an avowed Tory.

***

Leaving Angelica in bed, Jack pulled on trousers and went down the ladder. He returned not only with water, but a chunk of cold beef from last night’s feast and a steaming square of fried mush piled on a wooden trencher.

“Molly was in the cook shed. When I came in, she handed me this,” he said, smiling.

Then, without ceremony, he stripped and washed, using the treasured castile soap. Although she was suddenly shy, it was soon her turn to wash in front of him.

Hoping not to blush, Angelica arose and began what was necessary. Jack kept stealing admiring glances at her as he tied on his crumpled stock.

“I’ve always thought one of the most beautiful sights on this earth is a woman at her bath.”

“And how many women have you seen in this defenseless state?” Angelica replied.

“I choose not to incriminate myself,” her new husband answered. The cheerful grin wasn’t denying anything, but nothing could bother her this morning.

She went on washing, beginning with face, ears and neck and then going to breasts and underarms. At last, she crouched beside the basin on a length of clean toweling to which she’d laid claim yesterday. The most necessary part of the bath, the time of sitting in the basin, was fast approaching.

“Please, Mr. Church,” she said, pausing to look up at him.

“As you wish, Mrs. Church,” he replied, as he turned. “But someday, when we are settled, we shall share our bath, and have it in a big, wooden laundry tub in front of the fire.”

After, while she was balancing, drying a foot, he returned to her. Embracing her, he exclaimed, “Where are your wings, my angel?”

“I believe you’ve removed them,” she replied, nestling against him. She loved his loving—loved his eyes, his face, his warm, tender hands. Trusting, she’d let those hands guide her along passion’s highroad.

Reaching down, he drew the shift out of the pile of clothes on the floor. “Here, love, put this on before you take a chill.”

Then he sat cross-legged behind her on the bed and began to work
at the tangles in her waist length gold.

“Would I have had this pleasure if we’d been married properly?” he asked after awhile. “Some nosy and giggling female relative would’ve chased me out of your chamber this morning.”

Angelica smiled, imagining it. “Do you like to play hairdresser, sir?”

“Yes, I believe I do,” he said, starting the braid. “Especially when it is with such a glory as this.” He lifted a long golden tendril and formally kissed it. “Blonde hair is often fine, but this is thick as Hal’s tail.”

“Your Mama must have good hair for yours is also thick.”

“Yes. When the family was not groaning that I must have been sired by the devil—it was generally acknowledged that I favored her.”

After she’d got her cap on over the coiled braids, they began their breakfast. The steady drip of rain sounded. It was too chilly and wet to leave the canvas pulled back from the broken window, so they remained in candlelight.

“You sit that way easily,” she observed, gazing at her cross-legged husband. “Like an Indian, or a man just back from trapping.”

“It’s all my time in
the
Canada
s
, in various log-and-dirt groundhog holes. The largest fort I was at was Fort Brewerton. I have seen Fort Johnson, too, and met the famous Sir John and his Mohawk family.”

“You know western New York?”

“Pretty well.” Jack, apparently not inclined to pursue this topic, did not elaborate. A knife flashed as he lifted it to cut another piece from the slab of beef.

“Not a bad breakfast,” he said. “But a little different, I believe, from what you would serve me.”

“Yes.” Angelica smiled. She had been ignoring the oozing beef and, instead, eating fried mush. While grateful it was hot, buttered, and not too full of grit, she found herself very much wishing for something luxurious to spread upon it.

“At home, we have an entire shelf of conserves. We keep bees, too, and have a fine dairy. We have a wonderful little fawn colored English butter cow. She gives the richest milk anywhere.”

“Do you bake?” Jack asked, smiling into her blue eyes. “My Mama is always in her kitchen. Papa fussed about it. He thought it was undignified for a gentlewoman to do such work, but he clearly preferred her baking to the cook’s.
”

“My Mama made us cakes, pies, bread and oleykoeks. This
morning I confess to entertaining visions of future breakfasts complete with oleykoeks.” He paused and gave her a hopeful look she found endearingly boyish. “Can you make them?”

“I can indeed, Mr. Church,” she happily declared. “And very good ones, too. But what Dutch wife raised in this valley cannot?”

As they shared a lingering kiss, Angelica had a wonderful vision of a well-ordered, clean kitchen, the room fragrant with hot fat, a bubbling kettle filled with rising cakes.

Jack will sit nearby, his elegant legs in riding boots, leaning back in his chair and smiling his beautiful smile. There will be a steaming pot of tea and four small dishes, each with its own silver serving spoon. One dish will contain whipped cream, one, plum conserve, one, blackberry. The last will hold a dripping chunk of fragrant honeycomb...

“Oh, Jack,” she whispered as their lips parted, “how do we get from here to quiet breakfasts with preserves and oleykoecks?”

His mouth brushed her forehead. “Yesterday,” he said in a low voice, “when I was roaming the woods alone, I came upon a Mohawk brave. Or rather, he came upon me,” he amended with a soft chuckle.

“Good God! Why haven’t you said?” she added, as a sweaty host of childhood terrors came crowding in. “Where there’s one savage, there’s sure to be more.”

“Yes.” Jack went on stroking, composed as ever. “In this case, however, he was a scout for the king. It seems there’s a band of loyalist militia scouring the area, working in concert with the troops who almost caught us at Anthony’s Nose. They’ve been searching for the gunpowder M’Bain captured because they’d like to use it to attack Putnam at West Point.”

“How on earth do you know all that?”

“Because he and I talked.”

Angelica stared at him incredulously. Apparently, he had done far more yesterday than take a bath, elude a guard and save her from Nancy, Bet and Jen.

“M’Bain is shortly to have a rude awakening,” Jack said. “In my very best Mohawk, I told the scout where his sentries sit.”

“Jack!” she gasped. “How do you know the loyalist militia won’t take me prisoner? That Armistead won’t be down on the river waiting for me?”

“You’re Mrs. Church now. If he wants you, he’s going to have to kill a certain very possessive husband first.”

Angelica, remembering the backward step at the assembly, the mortal way the eyes of the two men had locked, shivered. Leaning against his chest, she breathed in the comforting scent of him. Her thoughts tumbled wildly.

“Today we need to lie low, to rest,” her husband continued. “They might come as soon as tonight, but I think, if I understood the scout
a
right, it won’t be until dawn tomorrow. We don’t want to be taken hostage, so we’ll have to leave. If it doesn’t stop raining, it’ll be a miserable night in the woods, but I don’t want M’Bain’s men shooting us or taking you with them if they get a chance to run.”

***

Angelica inched backwards
along the slippery roof in the damp darkness on her belly. The pocket riding in her shirt was a fat package with all that she had added to the quilt in the nervous make-work of that rainy day. Her shoes she’d tossed down earlier. She was breathing hard, nearly blind with fear, toes and fingers testing each slick shingle. It was a long way down if she slipped.

When someone stopped below, she lay still, listened as they made water against the side of the house. To her great relief, after a drunken hiccup, whoever it was had gone inside. His progress was marked by a slam of the door.

Jack had already gone down, about a half an hour earlier. She’d heard him quieting an inquisitive dog.

Slowly, she continued backing, extended her feet over the edge. It was like being an inchworm, moving with belly waves, in the smallest increments. She was wet and cold from hugging the aging roof, but heartily glad for the noisy conversation indoors.