Chase the Dawn (52 page)

It was time to pull herself together. All this weary glumping was achieving nothing! And if she could not rid herself of the depression, then Benedict would become very difficult. He was not in the habit of making idle threats. Bryony stood up, straightened her shoulders in a gesture of resolution, and went outside. It was dusk and Ned’s squeals of laughter, interspersed with Charlie’s more moderate tones, rang in the late-summer air. The ball came flying toward her and she leaped, catching it deftly.

“Bravo!” Charlie applauded and she laughed, tossing the ball to Ned, who missed it and went scampering along the riverbank in pursuit, shrieking gleefully.

“Do you think he ought to be in bed?” Bryony asked Charlie, curling her bare toes into the grass, feeling it dry and scratchy, still warm after the day’s sun.

“He’ll go when he’s tired.” Charlie wiped his brow with his handkerchief. “He always does.”

“Yes,” Bryony agreed. “Campaigning doesn’t exactly lend itself to a nursery routine, does it?” She walked to the edge of the little stream. “I cannot imagine what is to become of him when all this is over.”

“He’ll stay with you and Ben, will he not?” Frowning,
Charlie joined her on the bank, where she sat, idly dabbling her toes in the cool water.

“But where will we be, Charlie? Doing what?”

“Is that what has been troubling you these last days?”

She sighed. “A little, but don’t tell Ben. He has enough to concern him.”

“I think he would be less concerned if he understood.” Charlie stood up. “Baron von Steuben has demanded my presence at a drill to be conducted at nightfall. I do not quite understand the significance of such an exercise, but one does not argue with the inspector general.”

“No, indeed not.” Bryony laughed, getting to her feet. “The Prussian has proved himself too good a soldier for his tactics to be questioned.”

“He’s an irascible bastard, though,” Charlie stated with absolute truth. “Therefore, I do not care to be late.” Calling good-bye to Ned, he strolled off into the town.

Bryony was asleep in their loft bedchamber when Ben came back in the early hours of the morning. The raven’s hair lay tumbled across the pillow, one bare arm curled above her head. Her face, even in repose, showed the determination and the humor that had carried her through the hardships of the last sixteen months. He had once said that her father had a lot to answer for, Ben remembered with a tiny smile as he shrugged out of his shirt. Sir Edward Paget had certainly fashioned a most extraordinary daughter—undeniably unique. He came down onto the bedstead beside her, and she rolled instantly into his arms in her warm soft nakedness. He was content to lie in the moonlit loft, holding her, feeling the suppleness of her frame, her breath rustling across his chest, her hair tickling his chin. Ben smiled to himself,
inhaling the fresh, clean fragrance of her skin and hair. Cleanliness was a luxury they had gone without for the better part of the last sixteen months….

He woke slowly, wonderfully, to the awareness of his body coming alive beneath whispering caresses. He heard her soft murmur of satisfaction as he rose beneath her ministering hands, and he reached down dreamily to stroke her head, resting on his belly as she concentrated on her task. She made love to him with languid pleasure, taking the time to taste every inch of him, to revisit the planes and hollows of his body before moving above him, drawing him within her, moving at her own pace as he yielded to her orchestration, allowing her to play upon them both in the soft, lyrical morning. Afterward, they lay, still unspeaking, savoring this moment when they were alone in their own universe, until the peace was abruptly shattered.

Running feet sounded on the lane outside and then there was a hammering on the door. Ben was on his feet, pulling on his britches almost before the echo had died. They heard Charlie’s voice, struggling with sleep, and then Ben, barefoot, had plunged down the stairs, which were really no more than a ladder. Bryony, too anxious to take the time to get dressed, bundled herself into her cloak, it being the nearest to a wrapper that she possessed, and followed.

“What has happened?” She pushed her hair out of her eyes and blinked at the young trooper standing in the doorway. The sound of drums and the shrill call of the bugle came from the town.

“A big fleet has been sighted in the Chesapeake,” the messenger told them. “The marquis has issued a general alert.”

“French or English ships?” Benedict snapped, turning back to the ladder.

“We don’t know yet, sir. They are too far away.”

Bryony went over to the hearth, filling the kettle with water from the stone jar that stood beside it. She set the kettle over the fire and poked at the embers, performing the domestic actions automatically as she absorbed the implications of the news. If it was a British fleet, then Cornwallis was out of the trap. If it was the French, then he was cut off by sea and entrapped on land. She did not know which she hoped for. “Do you wish for coffee before you go?”

“No time, lass.” Ben, now dressed and booted, clattered back down the ladder. “God knows when I’ll be back.” He lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck. “If it’s the French, sweeting, this business will be over in no time.” He did not wait for a response and left with Charlie, hastening toward headquarters, where they would receive their orders.

It was an anxious day as they waited to discover the identity of the fleet. Late that night Benedict returned to the cottage, weary but triumphant. The French Admiral de Grasse was in the bay with twenty-eight line-of-battle ships, several frigates, and three regiments of French soldiers.

Within weeks, General Washington and his army had arrived in Williamsburg.

As September continued in days of blazing heat and suddenly chilly nights, the embattled Cornwallis worked incessantly on fortifying his position, clearly prepared to defend himself to the last extremity, and General Washington planned that last extremity with great care. Williamsburg filled with troops as the
Americans gathered from across the country for the last campaign of the war, and Bryony Clare retreated within herself.

To all outward appearances, she was calm, cheerful, uncomplaining at Benedict’s constant absences on patrols. When he returned, exhausted, hungry, dirty, but always exuberant, she listened to the descriptions of the skirmishes, the stories of spies, the attacks on the small British fleet on the beaches of Yorktown. And her heart grew cold as she pictured her father, cornered, preparing himself for the humiliating surrender that he must know was inevitable—if he was still alive.

There was smallpox in Yorktown, Ben told her, supplies were down to a minimum. Starving horses had been driven out to die on the beaches because they could no longer be fed. Women camp followers and their children had been sent away to fend for themselves. The damn arrogant British would swallow their pride this time! It was said with that fierce intensity, with the disfiguring smile that she had seen so often before; the first time was when he had contemplated the capture of the group of redcoats on the lane by the armory, and she had wondered then what demons possessed a man of such tenderness and humor, who had so much love to give and who gave it so freely. She knew the demons now, and she knew her own. And she knew how they must be exorcized.

On the evening of September 27, Benedict and Charlie, the gravity of their expressions belied by the excitement in their eyes, came back to the cottage with the news that Washington had drawn up his order of battle. They were to march at dawn to strike the final blow that would win America.

“There will be a garrison of two hundred remaining here with the sick, the wounded, and the stores,” Ben said, drinking deeply of his tankard of ale. “You and Ned will be quite safe until we return.”

“Yes, I am sure we shall,” Bryony said calmly, without the flicker of an eyelid. “Do you have time for supper, or must you go back to headquarters?”

Benedict glanced at her. There was something amiss, something not quite right about her voice, her manner. But it was probably the prospect of the upcoming battle, he told himself. He crooked a finger at her, and she came over to him, unsmiling, though her body as he held her was quite relaxed. “It will be the last time, sweeting,” he promised gently, touching her lips with his finger. “I know it is hard for you to bear, but you have borne so much, you can manage this last.”

“Have I said that I cannot?” There was a tinge of indignation in her voice that quite reassured him.

At five o’clock the following morning, the troops moved out of Williamsburg and took the sandy woodland roads to Yorktown, seven miles away. It was already warm and, as the morning wore on, the heat grew intense and clouds of gray powdery dust filled the air under the steady tramping of twenty-six thousand men, clogging noses and throats and obscuring the countryside on either side of the narrow road.

Bryony left Ned with Claude Blanchard at the hospital in Williamsburg. The Frenchman accepted the charge with an easy shrug. He had three hundred men to care for with only one helper; a small boy would make little difference. Bryony rode out of Williamsburg on her raking gelding, adapting with the ease of familiarity to his awkward gait. She kept well to the rear of the marching
column, holding a handkerchief over her mouth to prevent choking on the dust. At noon a halt was called, and she sat under a giant cypress, waiting patiently as cooking fires sprang up along the roadside despite the heat. Ben, she presumed, would be with his mountainmen, tramping stolidly in their baggy britches and bare feet. They were marching ahead of the French column in whose rear she had found herself, so she was quite safe from detection at this point.

A chill message came down the line from General Washington as the men sat eating and laughing in the broiling heat. It was a message to remind them forcibly that this respite was but brief. If the British came out to meet them, they were to fight hand to hand, using the bayonet.

Bryony ate her bread and cheese, drank a little water from a trickle of a stream, and turned her attention to the tricky matter of how and when she should disclose her presence to Benedict. There was nothing he could do about it once she was in the siege lines, but if his anger was very great, it would make it even more difficult to persuade him of her need—a need that she had little reason to believe he would understand, anyway. But if she left him to do what she must without his understanding, without his agreement, then only the bleakest of futures lay ahead for them—if, indeed, they would have a future.

Once the march was resumed, the column divided, the French moving off to the left, the Americans to the right. Bryony also went to the right. It was late afternoon when the American column was halted at a swamp where the bridges had been burned. A troop of green-coated horsemen rode out of Yorktown but were turned
back by a few rounds of grapeshot, and the army settled down to make open camp while the bridges were rebuilt across the swamp.

Benedict was with Washington and his staff officers, meeting under a mulberry tree that served to take the place of a headquarters tent, when Bryony rode up. “Good evening, gentlemen.” She swung off her horse. Her face was pale and set as she walked over to them, leading her mount. “I beg your pardon for interrupting, General Washington, but may I talk with Colonel Clare?”

Benedict’s first thought was that something dreadful had occurred. With a low exclamation, he strode over to her, not waiting for a response from the general. “What has happened, Bryony? Whatever could have brought you here?”

She looked uncertainly at the group under the tree. They were all regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. She had little difficulty understanding both reactions to the presence of a woman at this moment and in this place. “Please, I must talk with you,” she said in a low voice that throbbed suddenly with intensity. Her gaze locked with his, urgent with appeal and with something indefinable that filled him with a deep foreboding.

He turned back to the general, offering a word of excuse, then took the gelding’s reins and walked toward the concealment of a small wood. “I am having difficulty believing that you could do this,” he said. “I cannot imagine what could have happened to have brought you here.” There was sharpness in the words, but his tone was puzzled rather than angry, and the eyes probing her face for answer were quiet and warm.

“Nothing has happened,” she said slowly, feeling for the words that she had rehearsed over and over, but that now had deserted her. “There is something that I must do.”

Ben felt a little chill run up his spine as his foreboding expanded, emptying his mind of all else. He said nothing, just waited.

“I must go into Yorktown.” There, she had said it. With none of the softening explanations or pleas for understanding, she had said it.

The gelding lowered his head to crop the grass at his feet, and the rein tugged in Ben’s hand. He let it slip through his fingers while his mind tried to encompass what she had said. “Why?” The word hung in the hot, muggy air.

“My father is there.” She reached a hand to pull at the horse’s rough mane as if the little gesture could restore normality between them.

“Go on,” Ben said, coldly now.

“I am a Paget, Benedict. I have tried to deny it, to submerge myself in Clare so that I will not remind you of what you hate, but I cannot do it.” She looked at him, seeing the cold rejection in his face and accepting it, sorrowfully but with the knowledge of its inevitability. “I must reconcile the two parts of me. I love my father and cannot deny him, not even for you, who I love more than life itself.”

She searched his face for a response to this declaration, but his eyes had flattened and there was no emotion to be read. She swallowed and continued. “I must make peace with my father before I can live in peace with you. I do not ask that you do so, also. I would not expect that. But I wish you to understand my need.
Afterward, I will return to you, to go again where passion drives … if you will have me.” She looked over his shoulder and into the rapidly darkening wood, where the whine of swamp mosquitoes rose to promise misery.