Chase the Dawn (16 page)

T
ry as she might during the next few days, Bryony could no longer deny that rift. Ben was preoccupied and took to going off into the woods for hours at a time. True, he always came back with game of some kind, but Bryony could not deceive herself that hunting for the dinner table was his sole motive for these expeditions. If it were, he would have allowed her to accompany him, as she frequently had done in the past. But the first time since his return from Williamsburg that she tentatively suggested bearing him company, he produced a list of tasks around the cabin that were apparently imperative and would keep her busy for the better part of the day; the second time, he responded with a blunt, unadorned refusal. She hid her hurt as best she could, and greeted him cheerfully and without recrimination on his return, but she did not again risk the pain of rejection. Instead she waited in forlorn patience for the invitation that was not issued.

On the fifth day, Bryony decided that something had to be done. She had racked her brain for some way in
which she was responsible for his withdrawal, but she came up with nothing that could have caused this degree of resentment. Her Loyalist background was problematic, but surely no more than that. She would not betray Ben and his men, and she was no fervent proponent of the king, so there should be no cause for quarreling between them on that score. Perhaps, therefore, it was nothing to do with her. Perhaps something had occurred that Ben would not—or could not—share with her. Perhaps she should offer him comfort and reassurance, attempt to take his mind off whatever was distressing him in the only way she knew, offering the healing love of her body with a generous spirit that would make no demands of its own.

Benedict, although he slept beside her every night, had made no attempt to touch her beyond a brief goodnight kiss. She had assumed he was exhibiting a natural delicacy about her monthly indisposition, but such consideration was no longer relevant and maybe he was waiting for her to signal that fact.

With a plan of action came relief. She had spent too long agonizing in indecision and incomprehension. It was time to take matters into her own hands. Humming cheerfully, Bryony found soap and towel and set off for the creek. No longer bothered by sharing her bathwater with fish and water beetles, she washed her hair and every inch of skin, then lay on the bank, allowing the sun to dry her before she returned to the cabin.

Instead of the doeskin tunic, which by now had most definitely seen better days, she donned Benedict’s nightshirt, freshly washed and sun-dried, taking as much care as if she were dressing for a dance as she rolled the sleeves artistically. She gathered the material at her slender
waist, wrapping a cravat around as her sash, tying it in a neat bow at her back. Ben had a comb—missing several teeth, certainly, but a comb, nevertheless—and she put it to good use, drawing it through the shining blue-black silken waterfall until not a tangle remained. There was no mirror, but somehow she knew that her eyes were bright, her skin clear; Ben, in the time before this estrangement, had told her so often how he loved the way the sun had colored her complexion that she could picture her features without difficulty.

Then, as eager and as carefully prepared as any bride anxious to please her groom, Bryony went outside to sit in the evening sun and await the returning hunter.

Benedict, in the company of three Indians, a deer slung on a pole between two of them, emerged laughing into the clearing and then stopped, the smile fading from his face as Bryony stood up, turning to greet him. The fine weave of the lawn nightshirt did little to conceal the shape of her breasts, the dark shadow of her nipples, the soft lines of her body. Her eyes, in the instant before she registered his companions, shone with the luminous glow of anticipation—the glow they always bore when she contemplated lovemaking—and her arms lifted toward him. Then they fell to her sides so rapidly that he could almost have imagined the invitation.

He felt a sick sinking in his belly, remorse mingling with compassion, as he understood what she had been intending as she waited, so fresh and eager, for his return. He knew he had behaved abominably to her in the last few days. Somehow, whenever he saw her, heard her voice, watched her move with the unconscious certainty of privilege, all the memories so firmly controlled, the bitterness carefully reined so that it provided only
constructive force rather than destructive inefficiency, were triggered into life again, obscuring clarity and rational purpose. Bryony Paget bore no personal responsibility for the horrors that he and others had endured, but she belonged to the perpetrators, had learned their values and ideals, had absorbed a self-image that placed her without personal effort on the pedestal of the master race, both in Ireland and here in the Colonies—the English. And that image, as well as her unquestioning acceptance of the privileges that accompanied it, was manifest in every move she made, every word she spoke, so that constantly and quite unconsciously she exacerbated the deep-rooted sores on his soul and he reacted with blind unkindness.

Ben pulled himself together as one of his companions cleared his throat. Bryony should not be standing there in that semitransparent shift, her loving purpose nakedly revealed as much to his friends as to himself. He strode rapidly across to her, leaving the Indians, who, standing utterly motionless, seemed to fade into the background of trees as if understanding that their presence was for the moment awkward.

“Sweet heaven, lass! We are in the middle of the forest, not in the boudoir of a bawdy house!” The low-voiced exclamation sounded harsh when he had wanted it to sound gently teasing. He kissed her quickly, before the deepening hurt and embarrassment in her blue eyes could overwhelm him. “You are a sight to enflame even the most jaded spirit,” he whispered, his lips brushing the sensitive corner of her mouth. “But it is not a sight I am prepared to share. Where is your tunic?”

Bryony shrugged with a fair assumption of carelessness, fighting back the wave of mortification. “I felt like
wearing something clean after my bath, that’s all.” Her eyes went over his shoulder to the three men and the dead buck, and the joyful glow, the energy of decision, ran away from her like drops of oil on stretched hide.

“Go and put it on,” he insisted. “It is hardly fair to torment those who may not accept the invitation.”

“I did not know …” she began, then turned with a helpless little shrug to the cabin. “I will stay inside until they’ve gone.”

“They will stay to sup with us,” Benedict told her. “We must divide the buck, since we caught it together, but we intend to roast a haunch and share it tonight.”

“My company will be unwelcome, in that case,” she said in a dull monotone. “Your friends will not choose to break bread with a woman.”

Benedict caught her arm as she moved toward the cabin. “You will eat with us, and you will help me prepare the meal,” he stated. “I have told them so already, and they expect it.”

“And if I do not wish to?”

“Why would you not wish to?”

“Perhaps for the same reason that you do not wish for
my
company.” Her voice was dull, flat, and she stood passively, still turned toward the cabin, waiting for him to release her arm.

Benedict’s hold tightened. “I am not going to embark on an unseemly squabble in front of my guests. We can discuss this later, but for now you will please change your dress and come back out here. If you refuse to join us, you will insult them and humiliate me.”

“When last they were here, my
presence
would have done both, as I recall,” she snapped. “What has changed so radically?”

Benedict sighed, hanging on to his temper by a thread as he recognized that she did have a point. “I invited them to share our meal,” he said quietly, “making it clear that if they accepted the invitation, they must also accept the rules of my fireside. They are most courteous men, Bryony, and having accepted graciously both the invitation and the condition, any alteration in either would cause them grievous insult. Do you understand that?”

She did, of course, although definitions of courtesy were obviously open to interpretation. “Yes. I’ll go and change.”

“Thank you.” Releasing her arm, he offered her a small bow that in different circumstances would have entertained her. But now, with her healing plan in ruins, her grievances relegated to the status of an unseemly squabble, there seemed little reason for amusement.

When she came outside again, once more respectably clad in her tunic and moccasins, her hair tied back with the cravat that had served as a sash for the nightshirt, she found the fire already blazing and the four men occupied in butchering the deer. Bryony picked up the kettle and headed for the creek, averting her eyes from the butchery. Mint and cress grew in lavish profusion around the creek, and she gathered a bunch for a salad, reflecting that since meeting Ben she saw her surroundings with new eyes—recognizing in perfectly ordinary plants, grasses, and bushes the makings of a quite tasty dish or accompaniment to the abundance of fish, fowl, or game. He had taught her with painstaking care on those occasions when they had roamed the woodland together—on those occasions when he had seemed to welcome her companionship.

Absently, she sat back on her heels, gazing across the creek to the reed-thatched marsh beyond. She had to return home. There was nothing to keep her here anymore—no hope for a permanent future—and she could not evade the responsibilities of her identity for much longer. But she did not want to part from Benedict like this, unable to understand and therefore unable to change his abrupt, bewildering indifference to her that had come out of the blue and at times seemed close to dislike.

“Bryony? What the devil are you doing? This is no time for daydreaming!” Ben’s voice, raised in exasperation, brought her to her feet automatically. “I need this water, and I need your help,” he declared testily, taking the kettle from her. “In case you have forgotten, you are not lounging around on a terrace, sipping orange-flower water and waiting for your dinner to appear as if by magic, prepared and presented by unseen hands! If you wish to eat, you do your share.”

Tears pricked behind her eyelids at this blatant injustice. “I do do my share!” She yelped as he pushed her in front of him with a light but definitely scolding smack on her bottom. “Don’t do that! I am not a donkey!”

As rapidly as it had arisen, his irritation seemed to vanish under the indignant glare she threw at him over her shoulder. “I beg your pardon,” Ben said in perfunctory apology. “I cannot imagine how I could have made such an error.” His lips twitched and he put the kettle down, grabbing Bryony around the waist, bringing her hard against his body. “Cry truce, sweeting.”

“But it is you who are quarreling, not I,” she said. “I don’t understand what has happened. I cannot seem to do anything right.” The temptation to sink against him,
to drop her defenses and melt into his strength sang a siren song, but she resisted it, afraid of another rebuff, which painful experience had taught her could follow this moment of warmth, without a word of warning.

His expression softened and a long finger traced the straight line of her mouth. “I am an unmitigated bastard,” he said remorsefully. “I must wrestle with my own demons, sweet Bryony. I cannot help it if I must do so alone.”

“I should leave you, then,” she said. “Return home, become again Miss Bryony Paget with an insoluble problem.” There was no note of question in her voice, no request for reprieve from the inevitable.

“You must decide that for yourself,” he replied, wondering why he was not endorsing a resolve that he had made for himself and was the only avenue open to either of them. “Come now, we cannot talk of this further with venison to cook and guests to entertain.”

It was a strange evening that Bryony passed. Their visitors barely acknowledged her presence, but neither did they show her the least discourtesy on the occasions when they were obliged to notice her. The stone cider jar emptied over the course of the evening, and Bryony, interpreting correctly a glance from Ben, fetched the brandy bottle from the cabin. Benedict, she noticed, showed little sign of being the worse for drink; his three visitors, on the other hand, began to have difficulty putting their words together coherently and coordinating their movements.

A heavy yellow moon hung in the purple sky, and the air was redolent of wood smoke and roasting venison. Mosquitoes whined in the close, humid night, and
Bryony gave up slapping at them since they only renewed the attack when her hands were elsewhere.

“Go to bed,” Ben said into her ear. “They will bother you less inside if you hang the blanket over the window.”

She had been intending to wait up with him until the visitors left, had been hoping that the moment of warmth beside the creek could be kindled anew, and, as they took pleasure in and of each other, that they could touch truth, reach some point of understanding. But she rose, bade them all a soft good night, and retired into the cabin. The blanket over the window kept out the mosquitoes, but it made the atmosphere in the cabin insufferably hot. She lay naked, sprawled on the bedstead, the sheet cast aside, feeling the sweat dew her skin simply with the effort of breathing. The rise and fall of voices murmured beyond the door, broken by an occasional crack of laughter and the sound of liquid slurping into a beaker.

What were Ben’s demons? In what hellish depths of his soul did they dwell? She knew every inch of his body, every millimeter of skin; the feel and the scent of him were almost as familiar to her as her own. And yet she knew nothing of the man beyond those aspects of his character and personality that he permitted her to see. He bore the scars of the whip upon his back, the dark secrets of his past upon his soul. And without a single clue, she could not begin to speculate about either. But until she discovered that history, she would never understand what had wrought this bewildering change in him, of that she was quite convinced.

She fell asleep eventually, despite the suffocating heat. When, toward dawn, Ben gently rearranged her
outflung limbs to allow room for himself on the bedstead, she barely stirred, rolling against him as his weight pulled the mattress down. He slipped an arm beneath her, stroked the thick mass of her hair away from her damp brow as he lay down beside her in the darkness. The three Indians lay beside the now dead fire, their snores resounding in the clearing.