Chase the Dawn (14 page)

Before
she
got in any deeper? A mirthless smile quirked his lips. Before
he
found himself in waters too hot and too deep. If he were truly honest with himself, Miss Bryony was well and truly under his skin, and he could not afford such an encumbrance—for either of their sakes.

He poured himself a beaker of coffee and sat back on his heels, still watching her covertly since it was clear she was not asleep. He knew very little about amnesia, but surely her memory was taking an unconscionably long time to return? It was not as if the loss was complete, and for a while she had been remembering little things on a daily basis, but that seemed to have stopped in the last few days. Benedict sighed. He would have to go in search of her identity himself. It would mean going into town, where news of a missing girl in the neighborhood would surely have been circulated by now. Maybe some of the men who worked in town had picked up some gossip. It was something he should have done days ago, but he had been curiously reluctant, telling himself that someone would bring the information to him when they had it. In truth, of course, he had been afraid to find out, knowing that it would signal the end of the idyll, one way or another.

Her head turned on her knees, and she opened her eyes, looking directly at him, without saying anything. Her expression was grave, with a resignation that he knew was mirrored in his own.

“Come and have some breakfast,” he said quietly, pouring a second beaker of coffee.

She came over to the fire, taking the offering with a tiny smile of thanks.

“I’m going to leave you for a little while this morning,” Ben told her casually. “I should be back by mid-afternoon.”

“May I come with you?”

“No.”

Bryony shrugged. In another mood, she would have
demanded a reason for his refusal, but she could not summon up the energy, somehow.

Benedict considered softening his denial with the explanation for his absence. But then she might be frightened at the very idea of his going in search of her identity. It would be a terrifying notion, he thought—if one had lived in the trackless wastes for such a time, creating a self out of the present, suddenly to contemplate the imposition of a past over which one had no control. No, better to leave her in ignorance for the moment.

“I hope you do not expect me to skin that rabbit whilst you are gone.” Bryony attempted to lighten an atmosphere that seemed heavier than the maize porridge on her trencher.

“I do not expect you to do anything but lie in the sun until your ache is better,” he replied in similar accents.

“Then I shall take the brandy bottle to the creek and lose myself in a sodden, swinish, sun-soaked stupor.”

Ben regarded her through narrowed eyes. “If that was an attempt at provocation, lass, permit me to tell you that it was successful. It is only your present delicate condition that restrains me.”

“From doing what?” she bantered with a mischievous gleam.

“Don’t ask, you might not like the answer,” he returned smartly.

When he left thirty minutes later, the despondent gravity had dissipated completely, more by conscious effort on both their parts than by chance. Bryony pottered around the cabin, performing her customary tasks, although Ben had told her to leave them for today. She actually found the business of tidying, sweeping the earthen floor, and straightening the coarse holland
sheets on the bedstead relaxing. It freed her mind while her body moved along accustomed paths, and there was considerable satisfaction in the efficient performance of even these small tasks for one who hitherto had been unaccustomed to tying her own shoelaces.

Benedict’s destination was a forge in Williamsburg. But he went first to Joshua’s farm, where he borrowed a sturdy cob that would carry him the seven miles rather faster than his legs. For all that the town was strongly supportive of the Patriot cause, habitual caution led him to avoid the place as a rule, on the principle that the fewer people who saw his face, the better. He was not remarkable in clothing or bearing so long as he remembered to walk like a backwoodsman and not with the challenging stride of a Clare. But he had learned to disguise the aristocratic bearing—to lower his head and gaze, to round his shoulders and scuff his feet a little as he walked—during the years of his servitude, when the natural arrogance of his birth and breeding had so exacerbated his master. Now no one would look twice at the bearded man in jerkin and britches, wearing his own hair unpowdered, like any workman, hands callused from hard work, long legs astride an unremarkable if stolid mount.

William barely acknowledged him when he appeared in the doorway of the forge and watched the young lad who assisted the blacksmith vigorously pump the bellows. Sparks flew with the clang of steel upon steel as William hammered a sickle out of the glowing, pliant iron upon the anvil. The heat from the roaring fire was oppressive, and both the smith and the lad, in their heavy leather aprons, were pouring sweat. Ben wiped
his brow with his checkered neckcloth and sauntered out into the street again.

Now that William knew Ben was in town, he would round up the others and they would congregate in the loft above the baker’s, ready for whatever emergency had provoked his coming. It had been agreed that they would have no contact for two weeks after the raid on the armory, except in the case of emergency. The weapons were still hidden beneath the straw in Joshua’s barn, waiting for the hue and cry over the raid to die down before they would be transported to the Patriot armory up-river, on the plantation of Paul Tyler—the man who provided the overt rallying point for Virginia Patriots. For those whose work for the cause was as yet covert, Benedict Clare provided leadership.

Benedict strolled around the town, an inconspicuous figure whose ever-open ears and eyes would not be remarked upon. He had no need of the commodities offered in the shops, and little coin with which to purchase them even had he the need. Escaped bondsmen tended to be impecunious. What he could not hunt, catch, or fashion for himself, he acquired by barter with the Indians and with those farmers and tradesmen who could use the skills of an educated man. Beneath the earthen floor of the log cabin lay a pouch of gold sovereigns and those possessions of Benedict Clare that could be turned into hard currency when the right moment came; it was an inheritance that his mother had pressed upon him in those minutes of farewell, as agonizing as they were brief, before he had been dragged back to the stinking jail to be held, shackled among the rats, until the vessel that would bear him into slavery set sail for Charleston, South Carolina.

A rich yeasty fragrance rose on the air outside the baker’s shop, steaming in enticing, aromatic invitation through the door that stood open to the street.

“I give you good day, Bart,” Benedict greeted the broad back bent over the enormous brick oven set in the wall beside the stone chimney.

The baker turned, his usually ruddy face scarlet, hands coated with flour. “Good day to ye, Ben.” He wiped his hands on his apron. “I’ll join ye abovestairs just as soon as I’ve taken this batch out.”

Ben nodded easily and went up the rickety stairs set in the corner of the shop. The small loft contained six men, all of them showing signs of varying degrees of agitation.

Ben greeted them casually and perched on a corner of an upturned barrel. “Let us wait for Bart,” he suggested, seeing William about to launch into speech. “There is nothing amiss.”

“Oh, but there is!” exclaimed William. “Summat dreadfully amiss. I was coming to ye tonight if ye hadn’t come to town.”

“True enough, Ben,” one of the younger members of the group put in. “Jack here only found out yesterday eventide and we’ve not known which way to turn, waiting for dark to bring ye the news.”

“Well, now I am here, so you need wait no longer.” Ben smiled, the smile that generally soothed and reassured as it reminded them that he was in control, that he had never yet met a situation he could not handle, never yet let them down in a moment of crisis.

“It’s that girl,” William pronounced. “I told ye no good would come of it.” The rather bovine features settled in an expression of morbid satisfaction as he looked
around the room. “Should have left her to take her chance at Trueman’s. I always said so.”

“Yes, William, so you did.” Ben sighed with ill-concealed irritation. “However, I chose to do otherwise.”

“And we’ll all have cause to regret it—”

“That is enough, William!” The crisp, incisive tones reduced the blustering blacksmith to silence. They were tones Ben rarely used with this group, accepting that his position as leader was by democratic decision and depended entirely on his continued success at preserving their safety and accomplishing their goals. He had no authority but that which they gave him. However, there
were
times when he was forced to exert the natural authority of his breeding and education.

“Jack?” He turned to the man with the information. “Enlighten me, pray.”

The vintner scratched his head with both hands, clearly in vigorous search of an active louse. “I was making a delivery up at Carter’s plantation last even. A butt of fine canary,” he added, as if the matter were of some relevance. “Anyways, there was talk in the kitchen about a Miss Paget gone missing from Trueman’s. Seems her father—Sir Edward, he be—has come to town in a great taking. They couldn’t turn up nothing at Trueman’s plantation, so there’s to be a proclamation by the criers in the town square—a reward for any information.” Tale told, Jack subsided against the wall and returned to his head-scratching.

Bryony Paget. Benedict felt the cold bitterness seep into his veins. Almost any other identity would have been easier for him to accept—even if she had been the Crown governor’s daughter. No wonder she had that
Irish coloring, although he’d lay considerable odds that she had almost no knowledge of his homeland. The Pagets were one of the wealthiest absentee landlords in that beleaguered country, denying their own heritage, even as they milked the land and their tenants of their life blood in order to maintain themselves in luxury in England—and here in the Colonies, too, presumably. He felt sickened as he always did when he thought of the abuses visited upon the peasant farmers whose cause he had fought for, turning against his own kind and ultimately against his king—a traitor who had not paid the traitor’s penalty but had still paid dearly at the hands of Sir Edward Paget and his like. Bryony Paget—the daughter of a man who embodied everything Benedict Clare had sworn to fight, everything against which he had sworn vengeance; the daughter who had presumably imbibed contempt for the Irish peasantry together with the Loyalist cant of a true blue Englishman from her first waking moments!

“She’s got to be got rid of.” William spoke again, with even greater truculence than before. “If ye’re too squeamish to do it, then I’ve no such qualms.”

“Do not be ridiculous!” Ben snapped. “I’ll not have gratuitous killing. I’ve told you before.”

“William’s right, Ben.” Bart appeared at the head of the stairs. “She was at the armory, saw us all….”

“And saved our bacon, as I recall,” Ben said sardonically.

“But she didn’t know who she was then,” Jack pointed out. “What happens when she remembers? She’ll run to her pa with a fine story. There’s Joshua’s farm and the cabin, Trueman’s barn, the armory, and every one of us.”

Benedict shook his head. “You’ll have to trust me. She’ll not betray us, I promise you that.”

“The only way to be sure of that is if we still her tongue for good,” William muttered. “Ye can’t keep her with ye for always, stands to reason. And she can’t go back home to her folks, knowing what she does.”

“She’ll not betray us,” Ben repeated with absolute conviction. Sickened though he was at the knowledge that she came from a family who embraced everything he most detested, he knew instinctively that she would be loyal to him and to the memory of their time together, regardless of any opposing loyalties and principles she might hold.

“It’ll be more than
your
head that’ll roll if she does,” Bart said. “We can’t risk it, Ben.”

“What are you suggesting? That I cut her throat while she’s asleep and throw her body in the river?” He raised his eyebrows as if the idea were laughable.

“Easy enough,” said William with a shrug. “We know she’s been keeping yer bed warm, so I’ll do it for ye, if she’s made ye softhearted.”

“I said no.” He spoke very softly now, his eyes narrowed with anger and purpose. His hand drifted casually to the pistol in his belt, and a slight ripple ran through the men in the loft. “I take responsibility for Miss Bryony Paget, now and at all times. And she is not to be harmed.” The hawk’s eyes roamed slowly around the circle, stabbing each face until the owner dropped his gaze under the glittering black challenge.

“What’s to be done, then?” Bart asked with a resigned shrug. He, for one, was not prepared to pick up Ben’s gauntlet. The younger man was all too handy with knife and pistol, and he’d never given them the least
cause to mistrust either his loyalty or his ability to fulfill his promises.

Ben stood up. “It is time Miss Paget was returned to her own,” he said with a briskness that hid his pain. “It was in the hopes of discovering her identity that I came here today.” He went toward the stairs, then paused. “I say again, none of you have anything to fear. I have never yet given you cause to mistrust my word, have I?”

Again, he scanned the circle of faces, and slowly the heads nodded in agreement, William’s head last, but none the less definite.

“Then, I bid you farewell. I’ll send word when we’re to move the arms from Joshua’s to Tyler’s.” His hand lifted in a parting gesture, and he sprang lightly down the unstable staircase, through the bakeshop, and out into the street. The afternoon air was heavy and humid, adding to his feeling of oppression as he made his way to the forge, where Joshua’s cob waited. Dust rose, dry and thick from the streets, under the wheels and hooves of carriages and horses traversing the town that a short time ago had been the seat of government of King George’s colony of Virginia; but the business of government was for the moment in abeyance as the king’s men battled throughout the thirteen colonies for the continued right to govern the king’s colonies.