Chase the Dawn (44 page)

“I love you,” he whispered. “You must never forget that. It is all that matters, do you understand?” He drew the wadded material of her gown from under her so that she lay naked, the tender symmetry of her body, the pearl softness of her skin brushed by the night air, opalescent in the fire’s glow. “Do you understand?” he repeated with gentle insistence, spanning the slender indentation of her waist with the callused hands of the woodsman fighter.

Bryony nodded, reaching a hand to touch his face, laying her fingers lightly across his cheek, tracing the strong angle of his jaw, down to his neck, where the tendons stood out, in taut evidence of his urgency and the muscular restraint of that urgency. “I love you.”

A tiny sigh escaped him, and he began to move over her body with sweeping caresses, his words, expressing his sensuous delight in the glories that he found, filling her with liquid enchantment. He drew from her the murmured responses that he required, obliging her to reveal for him the sites and touches that gave her greatest pleasure. And she was no longer isolated, alone with the pain of a self-imposed responsibility and its guilt. She was fired with the brand of his love, that was taking her, ever ascending, to the moment of obliteration.

She was still lost when he laid her upon the grass, his black eyes charcoal embers as they devoured her where she lay, awash in languor. He stripped off his clothes, then knelt between her widespread thighs, his body a bronzed and powerful shadow in the deeper shadows of
the night. He drew her legs onto his shoulders, slipping his hands beneath her buttocks to lift her to meet the slow thrust of his entry, which seemed to penetrate her core, to fill her with a sweet anguish that she could barely contain, yet could not bear to relinquish. The fire had burned low and the woodland sounds had yielded to the silence of profound night before they came back to themselves, the sweat cooling on their entwined bodies. Bryony cuddled closer into Ben’s embrace, and he reached for her cloak, wrapping her soundly before rebuilding the fire, so that they lay in a circle of warmth and light within the deep dark of the wood. Their companions’ fires had died long since and, before sleep finally claimed them, the lovers could believe that they still existed on their own plane in their own universe, where words were not necessary; their eyes locked in love and the touch of their skins expressed all that ever needed to be said.

I
t’s to be hoped we’ll find a likely family here.” Benedict hitched Ned higher on his back, where he was riding piggyback, and frowned at the farmhouse and the cluster of outbuildings that appeared beside the bridle path.

“Ye take one step on my land and ye’ll be feeding the vultures!” The threat bellowed from the top of the barn and a shot punched into the trunk of a tree behind them. Ben had dropped Ned to the ground and swept Bryony behind him almost before the echo had died.

“We come in peace,” he called, raising his hands, showing them weaponless.

Bryony stepped forward. “We would ask for your help for a child—”

Another shot whined overhead, and Benedict, a violent expletive rending the air, grabbed her roughly, shoving her behind him again. “Stay where you are put!”

“But I only thought that if they could see Ned and me, then they wouldn’t be afeard,” she explained
reasonably. “If Ferguson’s men have come this way, then it is hardly surprising that they don’t welcome strangers.”

“When folks are scared, they are inclined to shoot first and ask questions later,” Ben pointed out.

“Then they are as likely to shoot you as me.”

Ben’s laugh quivered in his voice. “You are a damnably argumentative lass.” He looked around again, then shook his head. “I think we are on a fool’s errand here. We had best rejoin the others.”

They had broken away from the group earlier that morning, since the pursuit of Ferguson’s band was now taking them off the beaten track, away from the possibility of hamlets or even the lone farmhouse, like this one. Ben was anxious to be rid of the boy, who still had not said a word, although he came trustingly enough into Ben’s arms when his little legs grew weary. But campaigning of any kind was no activity for a child, and this stealthy creeping up on the plundering Tories was fraught with more than ordinary dangers and privations. Bryony seemed to thrive on this hand-to-mouth existence, her body grown lean and taut where it had been slender and fragile, her skin bronzed and freckled instead of cream and rose. Her hair was always tangled and frequently dirty, but Benedict did not think he had ever known her more beautiful—or more achingly desirable.

“Wait!” Bryony said suddenly as Ben turned to go back the way they had come. “Someone is coming.” A woman, a rifle beneath her arm, appeared in the doorway of the house. Bryony, dodging Ben’s grasping hand and ignoring his imperative shout to come back, ran over to the house. Ben swore again, waiting with jarring
heart for another shot from the watcher in the barn. None was forthcoming, however, and Bryony reached the house unmolested. Hoisting the child into his arms, Ben followed her.

Bryony was deep in explanation when he reached the house. Her audience was a gaunt woman with sharp eyes and gnarled hands, iron-gray hair scraped back from an angular countenance. She held the rifle with the ease of one well versed in its use, and she stood, legs apart, with all the stolidity of one who had broken the sod of the frontier and knew its hardness and intractability. She listened to Bryony and eyed Ned, who gazed with his habitual, wide-eyed mistrust from the shelter of Ben’s arms.

“Scrawny!” the woman pronounced when Bryony had fallen silent. “But he’ll learn to work soon enough.”

“But he is only a baby,” Bryony said, shocked into protest. “He can’t work.”

The woman snorted. “There’s no food for idle hands! He’ll chop wood and fetch water, clean out the stables and do most anything for a bed in the barn and his keep.”

Bryony turned to Benedict, who said quietly, “It is the life he would have had, lass, if he had not lost his family.”

“But he would have had it with people who loved him,” she said in a low voice, looking around the bleak property, then into the expressionless eyes of the woman. There was no love here. Maybe no cruelty, either, but such a little mite, already battered by the world’s ferocity, would shrivel in this thin, ungiving soil where there was no nurturing warmth.

Ben set the child on his feet and said, “I will pay for
his keep, ma’am, until he is older and stronger … and for a bed in the house.” Drawing one of his few remaining sovereigns from his pocket, he held it out to the woman and said to Bryony, “It has to be, lass.” Taking her arm, he turned her back to the path. She went without protest, knowing that he had done what he could, but she had not taken three steps when a sobbing wail came from behind. Spinning on her heel, she saw the child hurtling toward her.

“Bryny … stay with me!” Ned flung himself at her knees, clinging and sobbing. It was the first time he had spoken since she had found him.

“Sweet Jesus!” muttered Benedict, in no doubt as to what was going to happen now. “Bryony, I cannot be saddled with a child.”

“You will not be. I will,” she said firmly.

Benedict sighed. “Listen, lass. It is hard enough for me to do what I must when I have a woman in tow.”

“I am not in tow!” Indignation sparked in her eyes.

“You are,” he stated, “and I would not have it any other way. But
not
a child!”

“Then I shall stay with him, and you may come back for us both when you have done what you must and what you cannot do with women and children in tow.” She faced him on the narrow path with all the resolution that he knew so well, but a resolution now hardened with the wisdom and experience of maturity.

Benedict looked down at the child, who still clung to her skirts, peeping up at him with an anxious yet unusually trusting stare. He accepted defeat. “Then retrieve my sovereign. We don’t have so many that I can scatter them at random around the countryside, for all that you seem to think I can.”

“Mayhap, she will have some clothes that would do for him,” Bryony said thoughtfully. “For a small payment—”

“There will be no more payments,” Ben interrupted, “for anything that is not essential. You will have to turn seamstress, I fear. You were taught to sew, were you not?”

“Well, yes,” Bryony said doubtfully. “But I’ll lay odds I am not as good as you are.”

“As it happens, I am not at all handy with a needle,” he stated, dashing her hopes.

“Oh.” Bryony shrugged. “Then, I daresay I will manage.” She ran back to the house, where the woman still stood, as if carved in granite. “I must thank you, ma’am, but the child, it seems, wishes to come with us.” She smiled, hopefully placating. “If I could have the sovereign.”

“Givin’ in to children never did any good,” the woman said, but she handed over the gold coin with a tiny shrug, then turned back into the house without a word of farewell, the door banging shut with a desolate finality.

Bryony left the bleak, unfriendly spot with a sigh of relief, and the three of them set off down the path, Ned, his articulate moment apparently just that, trotting silently between them. Bryony looked up at Benedict. “We could not have left him there.”

“We could have,” Ben replied.
“You
would not. Warfare and children make ill companions. And warriors who have to concern themselves with the day-today conditions of women and children make less than single-minded soldiers.”

“You would be rid of me, then?”

Ben glanced down at the brown, set face and shook his head ruefully. “Only when there is danger and I worry about your safety. But I could do without the child, I’ll admit.”

“I will care for him,” she declared with determination. “I am quite capable.” A mischievous chuckle suddenly escaped her. “After all, in any other circumstance, I would have had half a dozen of my own by now.”

Benedict, for some reason, did not seem to find the idea as amusing as she did. Indeed, the thought of fathering a child filled him with trepidation, and he could not imagine a time when it would not. He was hardly in a position to found his dynasty, and it seemed highly unlikely that that position would change, even if he survived the war. He had no land, no fortune, no family to fall back on—nothing to give a wife, let alone children. But such contemplation produced gloom, and time was too precious these days to waste in despondent reflection upon a future that might never materialize.

“It is to be hoped you don’t regret your charge,” he declared with an assumption of briskness. “For he is most certainly your charge. I shall hold you responsible for any mischief he may get himself into and for ensuring that he does not trouble anyone else. Is it agreed?”

Bryony peered down at the trailing mite. “He doesn’t look as if he could possibly get into mischief.”

“It is the nature of the beast called child,” Ben told her. “Once he has recovered himself somewhat, you will have your hands full, I guarantee it.”

Charlie greeted their return with raised eyebrows. “Still got him, then?”

“He didn’t want to be left,” Bryony explained. “He actually said so.”

Charlie whistled in surprise. “So, what are you going to do with him now?”

“First I must find him some clothes.” Bryony tapped her teeth with an impatient fingernail as she pondered the problem. “I can cut down Ben’s shirts easily enough, but what are we to do about britches?”

“I don’t recall giving you permission to make free with my shirts,” Ben stated.

“Well, you would not allow me to buy him clothes, so what else are we to do?” She caught the raised eyebrow. “What else am
I
to do?” she amended.

“That’s better. You may have one of my shirts in addition to the one he is already wearing, but that is as far as I am prepared to countenance the depletion of my already scant wardrobe.” Shouldering his musket, Ben veered off into the woods in search of game for their supper.

A week later, they crossed the border into North Carolina and knew they were close now to their prey. The houses were still smoldering, the bodies barely cold, and those they spoke with told bitter tales of systematic looting and murder. The band of backwoodsmen and frontier riflemen was almost nine hundred strong, each and every one filled with a savage fury, vengeance their only goal. Bryony felt the grim purpose rise to exclude all else as the men grew silent, the lines of their faces set as they turned inward, drawing from their own wells for strength and courage.

“We have him, Ben.” It was said with satisfaction, just after they made camp early one evening, and Benedict looked up from the rifle he was cleaning.

“The scouts have found him?”

“Aye. Atop a hill at Kings Mountain. About a thousand
of ’em.” The young rifleman squatted down by the fire. “They’ll have the advantage, being atop of us.”

Bryony’s fingers became suddenly clumsy, and the needle she was using slipped, pricking her thumb and leaving a bright spot of blood on the shirt she was hemming. She swore a backwoods oath that did not even draw a glance from her companions, and sucked the injured thumb.