Beloved Enemy (47 page)

A
shadow passed across her face, and she turned away, busying herself with the
clothes she had discarded. "You need not be afraid of that. I am
barren."

"How
can you possibly know that?" Alex caught her by the shoulders, swinging
her round to face him.

She
shrugged. "You forget I was married for some considerable time. My
inability to conceive was not through want of trying on my husband's
part." She presented the brutal truth flatly, and Alex winced. He had
found it easy to forget the fact that Giles Courtney had once possessed the
body that he felt so passionately was his and his alone. It had been easy
because he knew she had not been touched by the other man, not in the ways of
love. She had been as innocent of loving as any virgin. Now the candid
statement was like an open-handed slap, and he flinched from the images thus
produced.

"I
have a staff meting," he said abruptly, going to the door. "Do not
wear those britches around the camp, if you please. They are for riding
only."

Ginny
looked at the closed door and shook her head with sad  resignation.   Alex's 
thoughts  had  not been hard  to divine, but why should the reminder of a
long-dead man concern him? Men were most definitely a puzzle. She lay down on
the lumpy pallet that was all the bed this humble accommodation could provide,
linking her arms behind her head, wondering how Alex would have reacted to the
information that she was barren if they were contemplating marriage. It was one
thing, and a very convenient one, for a mistress to be unable to conceive, but
for a wife it was disastrous. Alex would want sons; cut off from his roots,
disowned and disinherited, he would need to found his own branch of the family,
his own dynasty in the land that he had fought for and would continue fighting
for, if not with the sword, then with words in Parliament during the process of
reconstruction. But she had told herself never to think of the future, never to
speculate, never to permit even the slightest hint of future planning. To do so
brought only desolation as she had just discovered.

During
the ensuing days, there was little time for thought and even less for planning
beyond the moment. The march took them through the Cotswold hills where signs
of the battles of the first war that had been fought around Oxford, brought
home to them all the futility of victory if it was to be so short-lived. Ginny
could sense the anger rising among the men as well as the officers, angry and
embittered that they had to endure this discomfort, face death and privation
again in a renewed struggle that Parliament's previous victories should have
taught the Royalist rebels would be without gain. With this bitterness came a
desire for vengeance, a resolve to exact an eye for an eye. And it was a
resolve that General Marshall appeared to support. While he would permit no
plundering, he turned a blind eye when his troopers uncovered a nest of wounded
Royalists with whom they had much sport before putting the wretched men to the
sword. When the division was harassed by groups of rebels who came nibbling at
the edges of his army like caterpillars at a leaf, he showed no quarter in
revenge, pursuing them  across the  countryside,   refusing to  take prisoners,
abandoning the wounded to the tender mercies of his men.

Ginny
watched, sickened by the ruthless cruelty, the blind indifference to suffering.
On one level, she understood the reasons for it, understood that Alex, by
allowing his men to express their bitter rage in this way, was preventing the
inevitable dispiritedness, weakening of morale, loss of discipline, grumbles
that could lead to mutinous action that he would have to punish with relentless
severity—all the ills :hat were inevitable concomitants of a forced march
undertaken in conditions of hardship. But understanding could not excuse, and,
while her love for the man remained undiminished, her despair at the soldier's
barbarity drove a wedge between them until she could remain silent no longer.

One
afternoon, they rode into a small village just outside Melton Mowbray, to be
greeted with much enthusiasm and excitement by the villagers who came eagerly
to the commander of this magnificent division, full of tales of the excesses
committed in the countryside by rebel troops; who presented for inspection six
captured Cavaliers who. had been discovered red-handed stealing horses to take
them north to join the duke of Hamilton's forces and the Scots, whom no
right-minded Englishman would accept as master.

General
Marshall listened to the charges, his expression almost indifferent as he sat
upon his horse in the village square, his officers around him, the division
drawn up upon the green. "Hang them," he said simply, when the
peroration was done.

"No!"
Ginny forgot her place, forgot that she must never in public challenge the
general's authority on serious matters, and there was no more public arena than
this. "Alex, you cannot do that; you cannot allow such a barbarism."

"Be
silent!" he thundered, his eyes blazing like green fire in the deeply
tanned face. "You dare to tell me my business!"

Ginny
flinched beneath a fury, the extent of which she had not experienced before,
but she stuck to her guns. "You remember what you said of General Colney,
in Winchester? That he was a butcher who did not understand how to make
punishment an effective deterrent. How excesses achieved nothing. Has there not
been enough excess? What possible good can hanging these men do? Whom do you
hope to deter by their deaths? There is no one here but Parliament's loyal
supporters." Without waiting to see the effect of her words, she turned
her horse and galloped out of the village, heedless of the stares of the men
who, while they could not have heard the exchange, knew that some confrontation
had taken place between the general and the division's physician.

A
frozen silence held the group in the square, a silence broken only by the
chomping on a bit, the pawing of a hoof on the cobbles. Alex allowed the
stillness to seep into his bones as he absorbed Ginny’s words. He knew why the
estrangement had come between them in the last weeks, but he had accepted it as
a consequence of duty. It was his duty to subjugate a rebellious land and
maintain the morale of his troops who were entitled to their revenge. If it was
harsh and cruel, then it was because war was harsh and cruel. Virginia did not
seem to see this reality, and perhaps it was hardly surprising. One did not
expect the weaker sex to be intimately acquainted with such realities as a
matter of course, and somehow, in his need to have her beside him, he had
neglected to anticipate this. However, maybe, on this occasion she had a point.
What would be gained by executing the prisoners out of hand? They would reach
Nottingham tomorrow, and he could afford to take prisoners that far. The
authorities there could deal with them.

"Captain
Baldwin, hold the prisoners under guard. They march with us to Nottingham in
the morning. Colonel, dismiss the troops to their quarters; we will make an
early halt this day, a few hours' rest will not come amiss. Lieutenant
Maulfrey, will you go in search of that firebrand, please? I do not want her
roaming the countryside alone."

Diccon
saluted, unable to hide his grin, and went about a task that he infinitely
preferred to ordinary duty. It took him an hour to find her, though, and when
he did so, it was only because he saw a riderless Jen grazing tranquily in
front of a small, tumbledown cottage set in a neglected garden behind a broken
fieldstone wall.

Dismounting,
he tethered his own horse to a wavy sapling and rapped smartly on an
ill-fitting door. There was no response at first, and he knocked again, calling
her name. The door opened then, and Ginny stood blinking at him in the daylight
that provided a sharp contrast to the gloom of the cottage at her back.
"Is it you, Diccon?"

"I
have been sent to bring you back to the village" he said, peering over her
shoulder to where a toothless crone sat by the fire, stirring something in an
iron cauldron. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as a wall-eyed cat
brushed against his leg, and he took an involuntary step backward, away from
whatever witchcraft was contained in the dilapidated hovel.

"I
am not coming back," Ginny stated flatly. "I have supped full of
horrors these last days, and I will not lay my head in a place where the
gibbets swing beneath my casement. You may come for me in the morning, when you
are ready to leave. I will stay here with Dame Barton, who has much wisdom to
impart.''

"There
are no gibbets," Diccon said uneasily, wishing he were miles away from the
ancient dame and her cat and the aromatic contents of that cauldron in the
spider-hung cottage. "The prisoners are to be taken to Nottingham, and the
general doesn't wish you to roam the countryside alone."

The
old woman cackled scornfully at this. "She’ll be coming to no harm,"
she said, "too much sense and too much knowledge, that one, for all that
she's got a babe's head on her shoulders."

"You
flatter me, dame," Ginny laughed, before saying seriously to Diccon,
"There are to be no hangings?"

Diccon
shook his head. "We're to stop early for the day, give the men a chance to
cook a decent supper and look to their clothes and armor. We'll all be glad of
the respite."

"And
the general?" she inquired, eyebrows raised. "What is his mood?
Perhaps I would still be better advised to pass the night here with Dame
Barton?"

"I
could not say." Diccon shuffled his feet, embarrassed. "He did not
appear greatly annoyed after you had left."

"Then
I will return, but not yet. You may go back and tell the general that I am
quite safe, and that I am learning from Dame Barton, who has knowledge of some
most effective simples."

Diccon
had little doubt of that, although for preference would have substituted the
word spells for simples. But he had no authority over Ginny and could see no
alternative to his returning to the village empty-handed. "May I, at
least, say what time you will come back?"

"Before
supper," Ginny reassured him. "Dame Barton has little enough for
herself, without sharing it."

"True
enough," the old dame said with another cackle. "But there's nettles
aplenty out back. They'll make a fine soup, if someone's prepared to pick
'em."

"Off
you go, Diccon." Ginny gave him a little push. "You are not at all
comfortable here, and I am wasting precious time. There is much I would ask
Dame Barton." She closed the door on him firmly, and the lieutenant
remounted and rode disconsolately back to the village.

"Could
you not find her?" Alex demanded, anxiety rasping harsh in his voice.

"I
found her, sir, with an old dame some two miles away. She said she would return
for supper, but wished to talk with the crone." Diccon grimaced.
"Unsavory place it was, sir— smelled of witchcraft."

"Oh,
do not be absurd," Alex reproved briskly. "This fear of witches grows
to epidemic proportions. I'll have no further talk of it."

"Sir."
Diccon saluted stiffly, hurt apparent in every line of his rigid body.

Alex
controlled his quivering lip. "You are dismissed, Lieutenant." When
Diccon had gone, he turned back to the others, gathered in the kitchen of a
substantial farmhouse that was to provide their quarters for the night.
"I'll not encourage this rabid talk of witches. It grows worse the further
north we march. It is getting to the point where every old woman with a cat and
a little skill at physicking is suspect." Knowing that did little to ease
his mind at Ginny's prolonged absence. If she was in suspect company,
exchanging recipes and cures, picking herbs in the fields, she could easily
fall foul of superstitious countryfolk. He sighed in weary exasperation. He was
no longer concerned about her rebel activities; the Royalists hereabouts were
on the run, the uprisings quelled, and there was little harm she could do to
Parliament's cause. Neither was he afraid that she would attempt to leave him.
But now, it seemed, he had something else to fear from her lone wanderings, and
attempting to forbid those wanderings would inevitably lead to a major
confrontation.

When
she eventually appeared, however, she brought him something much more pressing
to worry about. She burst into the farm kitchen, drawing off her gloves,
tossing her hat onto the table. "There is dysentery in the camp,
Alex."