Chase the Dawn (43 page)

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed solemnly. “Well, see to your protégé. The pig has to be butchered, and we must bury these bodies before we go.”

It was two hours later before the band was ready to move on, their booty packed in haversacks, the dead buried in a deep communal pit that would deter the scavengers for a while. Ned still had not spoken a word, but he had consumed the bread and milk with a single-minded concentration, and had endured Bryony’s ministrations as she stripped off his rags and cleansed the worst of the dirt from him with water drawn from the village well. She had used a paste of wormwood on the open sores, which would kill the maggots and keep away further flies, then regarded her handiwork, frowning.

“Stay here, Ned. I will be but a minute.” Leaving the child by the well, she had gone in search of Ben, who was busy with the grisly business of burying the dead. “I don’t know what to put on him, Ben. His clothes are torn beyond repair.”

Ben had sighed. “Since we won’t be taking him farther than the next hamlet, Bryony, surely they will do?”

“If the next hamlet looks like this one, we’ll be taking him a lot farther.”

So little Ned, wrapped in a shirt of Ben’s, as if in swaddling clothes, was clutched tightly in Bryony’s arms when they left the hamlet and continued on their way in pursuit of Major Patrick Ferguson.

“You had better let me have him,” Ben said, after they had been walking for an hour and Bryony’s step was beginning to flag. He made to take the child, but Ned
wailed in sudden terror and clung to Bryony, burying his face in her neck.

“It’s all right. I can manage.” Bryony smoothed the dirty thatch of hair in soothing fashion.

“I beg to differ,” Benedict said dryly. “Come along, Ned. Either you let me carry you, or you walk.” He pried the scrawny arms from Bryony’s neck and hitched the trembling boy onto his hip. “The sooner we find a home for this stray, the better.”

“We have seen nothing but wasteland,” Bryony said. “I do not understand it, Ben. Francis is with Ferguson. He would not be a party to such inhumane savagery. You know he would not. I broke bread with the major. My father called him friend. I cannot make my mind go around it….” She sighed. “I don’t know how to explain.”

“I understand,” he said, brushing a speck of dirt from her nose. “But in war, people behave in inconceivable ways.”

“Francis would not have been a party to this,” she repeated sturdily. “What are you doing to my nose?”

“I thought it was dirt.” He chuckled, attempting to deflect her train of thought. “But it’s only a freckle, it seems. You are so thoroughly bespeckled that there is barely a free centimeter.”

But Bryony was not to be deflected. “I suppose he may be dead.”

“Yes, he may well be.” Ben was never one to ease matters with prevarication.

Bryony said nothing further, just tramped at his side until the falling of dusk signaled the moment to make camp. These backwoodsmen and frontiersmen were expert at creating a degree of comfort out of the most unyielding
surroundings. Fires sprang to life in a circle that allowed for privacy even as it offered companionship. Groups had formed long ago, and foraging, hunting, and cooking took place within them. But no one team would refuse to share with another less fortunate.

The minuscule addition to the Clares’ cluster of themselves, Charlie, and two burly, monosyllabic Carolinians remained mute, although his mouth opened to roast pig before he tumbled, still swaddled in the voluminous shirt, onto a pile of leaves and instantly fell asleep.

“Poor little bugger,” one of the Carolinians muttered. “What d’ye intend doing with him, Ben?”

“The same as the others,” Ben said. “There’ll be someone in the next village who’ll take him in.”

“How old do you think he is?” Bryony yawned deeply. “He seems such a baby, but that’s probably because he will not speak.”

“Four or five,” hazarded Charlie. “Young enough to forget, it’s to be hoped.”

“In which case, he is more fortunate than I.” Bryony wiped their knives clean on the grass, concentrating on the chore with a little frown.

Ben threw more sticks on the fire. He knew that frown from experience, and it had nothing to do with the task at hand. “Bedtime, I think.”

The others rose instantly, bidding them good night and seeking their own beds at a discreet distance. Bryony sat looking into the fire, her expression bleak.

“Sleep on it, lass,” Ben advised quietly. “Things always look less grim in the morning.”

“I do not believe that Francis is dead,” she said, poking at the fire with a twig. “That night, when he left me
on the path to the clearing, he said it was not our last farewell. And something tells me that it was not.”

Ben sighed. “Basing hopes on feelings and premonitions, sweeting, is not sound practice. You merely set yourself up for more grief.”

“That is easy for you to say. You have not left behind all those whom you love, who informed your childhood and your growing—” She stopped, shivering at the look on his face.

“Have I not?” he asked, a mocking note in his voice. “You know more about me than I do myself, it would seem. Or are you simply assuming that I sprang without family assistance into the world?”

“If I were to assume such a thing, it would hardly be surprising,” Bryony said, meeting the challenge head-on. “I dare not ask questions. As far as I am concerned, I am married to a man who has no family and no history. I have said that I am content to have it so, if that is what you wish. I do not know whether you are a murderer or a thief, or whether you were wrongly accused and sentenced. I know that Roger Martin put those scars on your back, and that you are a runaway bondsman. Which means that you are an outlaw, but I do not suppose that will matter once this war is over. I don’t suppose anything will matter anymore.” They were brave words, but the tremor in her voice could not be hidden.

“You are not content to have it so,” Ben heard himself say. “And I fear that I was not wrongfully accused and unjustly sentenced. I have committed both murder and theft in the name of justice—but they call it treason.” Why he started on this road after all his resolutions, he would never know, but his feet were firmly on the path now, and he did not think they would stop until the tale
was told. Perhaps it was better. She had given up so much for him that maybe he no longer had the right to withhold what he knew she needed so desperately. And there would be a relief for him in the telling.

“You are talking in riddles.” The firelight caught the bright spark in her eyes as she leaned closer to him. All around them was the silence of sleeping men, broken only by the crackle of a fire, the occasional, desolate hoot of an owl, the rustle of the night breeze in the trees.

Benedict looked into the fire and saw tumble-down hovels and starving children; women, aged beyond their years by incessant childbearing; men, bowed and broken by the struggle to wrest a livelihood from land that was loaned on sufferance and taken away at whim. He saw families standing by the wayside, their pots and pans and the few sticks of furniture around them, evicted from their homes because their landlord, who had probably never set foot on his land, had another use for it, condemning them to the slow death of starvation.

“What do you know of Ireland?” he asked quietly.

Bryony frowned. “Very little. We have considerable land there, I believe. Papa says the people are lazy and ignorant, drunk most of the time—”

“And on what does Papa base this judgment?” Ben interrupted harshly. “When did he last visit his land and his tenants?”

Bryony touched her lips with her tongue, feeling the edge of the precipice with a dreadful fascination, wondering if she dared step closer, knowing now that this was what it was all about. This was the stain with which she was tainted. But it was too late to draw back even if she wished. “I don’t think he has ever been there,” she
said hesitantly. “He has a steward who sends him monies and reports.”

“And where do you think that money comes from?” he demanded. “Perhaps it grows in the fields, in the hedgerows, there for the picking?”

“I think you had better tell me where it comes from,” Bryony said, keeping her voice steady with effort as the fearful foreboding cast its slimy tendrils around her. “I appear to be very ignorant.”

“It comes from the labor of those lazy, ignorant drunkards,” he said with low-voiced bitterness. “They pay your father rack rent for a plot of land too small to feed their families. They work your father’s land for no wage to help pay their rents. And if they fail …” He shrugged with seeming nonchalance, and the tendrils took hold of her, became tentacles of dread. “Or should your father’s steward decide that he needs their little plot of land, then he will tell them to leave. If they protest, the roof will be burned over their heads, the crops they have planted will be destroyed.”

“Please …” Bryony broke in, her eyes clouded with distress as she looked into the picture being painted for her. “You cannot be telling the truth. My father would not knowingly permit such things.”

“Of course he permits them! How else is he to get his rents? Rents that have kept
you
in silk and satin; your belly filled with delicacies; a blood horse to ride.” Benedict laughed derisively. “And your father will defend to the death his right to do as he pleases with his land and with his tenants, who have no legal redress and mostly cannot read or write because Catholics are denied the right to education.”

“But what of
your
family?” she demanded, unable to
contemplate the image of her father created by Benedict’s descriptions without making some attempt to defend or to explain—at least to lay his sins at the door of a community rather than an individual. “Are they any better?”

His face was in shadow, and she could not make out his expression as he said, “I have no family.”

“They are dead?”

“I am dead to them.” And then he told her, sparing neither of them a single nuance of detail.

“So, you are wedded to a traitor who should have paid the traitor’s penalty,” he finished with a bitter laugh. “Hanged, drawn, and quartered … because I questioned the right of men like your father to starve families to death—a right that your father would consider inalienable and the traitor’s penalty well visited on those who would deny him.”

“It could have been my father who sentenced you. That is what you are saying, is it not?” The puzzle was now in place, and Bryony felt as if she were sitting on some cold, gray beach, contemplating the wreckage of a ship of illusions.

“Do you deny it?”

“No, I cannot. And I am guilty by extension. As you said, I have enjoyed the fruits of those labors. No wonder you didn’t wish to marry me.” She shook her head and the black hair swirled, hiding her face from him. “Why did you?”

“I am not married to your father,” he said quietly. “And I love you.”

“Not always. Sometimes you hate me. But at least now I understand why.” She looked up and offered him a travesty of a smile, which held so much weariness and hurt that he wanted to weep.

“I should not have told you.” He reached for her, pulling her into his arms. “I never intended that you should know. I do not really blame you. It is only when the bitterness rises as it does.”

“Yes, yes, I understand that now,” she said, almost impatiently. “Your friends have died a dreadful death, you lived in slavery … endured such degradation that I cannot bear to think of it….” A tremor ran through her. “And still it continues. How can you help but be bitter? How can you help but find loathsome those who perpetrate by omission or commission—”

“Enough!” he said fiercely, crushing her to him, alarmed by her extreme pallor, the haunted distress in her eyes, the sudden fragility of the body he held, as if all the stuffing had gone from her. “You are to say nothing more, do you hear me? It will never be mentioned between us again.” His hand stroked her hair away from her brow, but she began to shake, her teeth chattering as if she were in the grip of an ague, and he cursed himself for the self-indulgent insensitivity that had led him to tell her what he had known all along would cut her to the quick.

“It may never be mentioned, but it can never go away,” she said with low intensity, resisting the comfort of his hold, turning her jaw against the fingers that would bring her face to his. He could feel the retreat of her self, a shrinking deep down into the core that he could only reach when her body and spirit met and matched his on the ephemeral plane of pure sensation.

With grim deliberation, he forced her to meet his eyes, his fingers bruising against her jaw as he refused to yield to her mute wish to crawl into her own place, to lick alone the wounds that she should not have to bear.
The words of denial were on her lips as he brought his mouth to hers, stifling the negation. Even then she held her mouth closed against him, as if to permit him entrance would expose her to yet more pain. But he explored the tender curves with the tip of his tongue, tasting the sweetness of her lips, the fingers on her jaw holding her immobile. His other hand was behind her, unfastening the hooks of her gown. The soft September night air, tipped with mountain freshness, brushed her bare back, and she struggled against him, in confusion and distress, knowing that he offered sweet annihilation and the loss of hurt, yet resisting the gift in strange, irrational anger.

The gentle exploration of her mouth changed, became a searing, thorough invasion that forced her lips apart. Her breasts were flattened against his chest as he held her against him as if his heart would beat for them both. His free hand roamed down her bared back, reaching farther to caress her buttocks, lifting her so that she lay sideways across his lap and could feel the hard maleness of him pulsing against her hip. She tried to push against his chest, but the hand on her buttocks gripped tight, clamping her to him as his tongue continued to ravish and plunder her mouth. And within this captivity, this forcing of her self, lay the peace of final surrender, the healing that he would compel her to receive.

When he felt the fight go out of her, Ben released his hold on her jaw, although his mouth still held hers and his other hand remained firm and warm on her bottom. He pushed the loosened gown from her shoulders, baring the proud mounds of her breasts, moving his mouth to the hollow of her throat, then burning a teasing, tantalizing path to her bosom. The straight black
eyelashes swept upward, and Bryony gazed into his face, where the fire’s glow created planes of light and hollows of shadow. He let her fall backward on his lap so that she lay, still now, in offering.