Daring In a Blue Dress (18 page)

He thought for a moment, then applauded politely. “Brava, Mercy.”

Lisa
tch
ed, and with a last lingering look at Alden
(my rant clearly had no effect on her), she hustled her hips out of the room, murmuring something about attending to Lady Sybilla's latest literary output.

“That's your idea of support?” I asked Alden, my lips thinned.

He shrugged. “It was the best I could do on the spur of the moment. If you give me ten minutes, I could write you a supportive note.”

“All right, but later.” I couldn't help but smile at him. “I like your notes.”

He smiled back. “I like yours, too. I particularly like the one you slipped into my pocket yesterday, with the drawing of—”

He evidently remembered there was someone else in the room, and stopped.

Fenice, busy with her phone, paid us no attention.

“Yeah, that's not for public discussion,” I said, my cheeks warming a little at the memory of the drawing I'd done of a depiction of him and me engaged in one of the more athletic positions from the Kama Sutra. “So! You were chastising me. Are you done with that, or should I explain more why I told Fenice what was going on?”

“I'm done,” he said with a mock sigh, but his lips were warm when I leaned in to kiss him. “But please do not tell anyone else.”

“I won't. And I'll tell Fenice not to tell anyone else, too, since I assume she is the one who told Lisa about our plans. What are you going to do this afternoon?”

“I have to run into town to pick up the things we need,” he said with a sidelong look at Fenice, who had finished with her phone, and was in the act of packing up several icy bottles of water for the refreshment of the afternoon students. “A friend of the chemist who
ordered the . . . erm . . . objects, and who was with a criminal investigation branch for several years, is going to meet me here later to show me how best to apply the substance.”

“Awesome! I'll see you later, then. Here, Fenice, I'll take some of those down to the garden with me once I grab a quick sandwich.”

“Thanks, Mercy. The caterer didn't bring nearly enough water for a day this hot.” Fenice staggered out with a box filled with water bottles. I followed a short while later, hastily eating a chicken sandwich as I made my way down to where the students of the day were reclined in whatever shady spots they could find, enjoying their tongue sandwiches.

The next two hours passed with speed while I ran three more students through their archery paces. Just as I was putting everything away, a huge hand reached out to tap me on the shoulder.

“Your name is Mercy, isn't it?”

I turned to find the big red-faced man named Barry Butcher smiling at me. “Hello. Yes, I'm Mercy. You're Mr. Butcher, aren't you?”

“That's right. Barry to my friends. I've seen you with Alden Ainslie, haven't I?”

“Well . . . yes, I know Alden.”

His smile grew. “Our Mr. Ainslie knows what he's about all right. He's quite the man, although I will admit to being somewhat frustrated with him right now.”

“Oh? In what way?” I was a bit wary, not quite comfortable talking about Alden to a man I didn't know well.

“It's his stubbornness in holding out for a better offer.” His smile changed to a frown. “The Hairy Tit
Conservancy has made him a generous offer for the house and lands—a quite generous offer—but he simply refuses to listen to it. I don't suppose you are a twitcher?”

“Twitcher being bird-watcher?” I made a noncommittal gesture. “I like birds, but I don't go out of the way to study them, although I did think of becoming a zoologist once. But I was more interested in mammals, particularly African mammals. I want to save all those lions and elephants and rhinos that are being hunted into extinction.”

“Now, that's just exactly what we at the conservancy are doing,” he said, his frown melting away. “We want to preserve and protect our friend the Hairy Tit, and we have a prime opportunity to do that, but Alden is being stubborn, very stubborn.” He shook his head. “Perhaps you could talk to him for me? Point out just how many birds he'll be saving if he allows us to take over conservatorship of the precious breeding grounds?”

“I'm sure you're eloquent enough for both of us,” I said, smiling a wholly false smile, but determined not to get into whatever business Barry was trying to conduct.

His smile slipped a notch, but he nodded, and murmured something about being grateful for anything I could do.

I edged around him. “If you'll excuse me, I have to go see if there's a student waiting for me.”

“Ah, there I can help you.” He gestured toward the archery butts. “Or rather, you can help me. I was hoping you could find time to teach me some practical uses of a bow and arrow.”

“Practical?” I rubbed my nose. “I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Rabbits,” he said, nodding toward the line of woods that stretched beyond the far pasture. “I've got a little
garden, you see, and it's overrun with rabbits. I'd take a shotgun to them, but the missus, she doesn't like that. Plus, it's the devil's job to clean buckshot out of a rabbit carcass.”

I kept my lips from curling in disgust. I might be an occasional meat eater, but I'd never eaten a bunny, and didn't intend to change that fact. However, it didn't mean I could hold others to my standards. “I'm afraid I've never done any bow hunting, Mr. Butch—Barry.”

“But a target is a target, isn't it?” he said, giving me a little prod in the ribs that sent me staggering a couple of feet. “If I paid, oh, say, double the fee, do you think you could take me out to the field and teach me to shoot at a few things?”

“I don't want any part of shooting animals,” I said firmly.

His eyes, an uncanny pale grayish brown, narrowed. “You one of those vegans?”

“No, but I am an animal lover, and I don't like hunting in any guise. I'm a bit surprised that you are into it, frankly, since you are with the bird conservancy group.”

“Rabbits that eat your garden are not the same as endangered birds,” he retorted.

“I'm not going to debate you on the point, since I realize that you choosing to thin the rabbit herd on your land is your own business.”

“That's the ticket,” he said, totally ignoring my comments to clap his giant hand on my shoulder. “I knew you'd be up for the job. I'll just go pay the lady with her arm in a sling, and then you can take me out to the fields, and we'll do a little shooting.”

“I just said I wasn't going to shoot any animals—,” I called after him as he strode away.

He raised a hand to show he heard me, and a few minutes later, over my continued protests that all I would do was teach him how to shoot stationary objects, he carried two of the student bows, a stack of paper targets, and two quivers full of arrows. I had my borrowed bow, and spent the time it took walking out to the far pasture quizzing him about his experience with archery.

“Did it as a child, of course,” he said, tacking one of the targets onto a tree stump that sat just outside the pasture, on the fringe of a small wood that divided Alden's land from the next fields. “Da used to say I had a right eye for it, but of course, a shotgun is more efficient, so once I learned to shoot a proper weapon, I didn't go back to this.”

I said nothing other than to give him basic instruction on how to hold the bow, notch the arrow, and aim at the target.

“You certainly didn't lie about your eye,” I told him a half hour later, collecting the remains of seven paper targets. We'd scattered them around the edge of the small wood, taping them to a fallen tree, a couple of low-hanging branches, and a small clump of shrubs. “You have the makings of a very good archer.”

“Aye, but these are just static targets,” he said, waving one of the bows toward the woods. “It's a world of difference hitting a moving one.”

“Very true, and that, as I explained numerous times, is not something I'm prepared to teach you.”

He eyed me speculatively. “I bet you could do it.”

“Yes, but I've had training in moving targets. My college used to have competitions where we had to do all sorts of crazy shots, including through small objects like oranges and grapefruit, and hitting the bull's-eye painted
on a dummy on a pulley that was jerked across our line of vision. The best, though, was what we used to call our spy missions. Our instructor would go out into a local forest, and hang a shirt with a heart painted on it from high up in a tree. We had to hunt down the target, and then hit it in the heart, if we could. It was great fun, and I won that particular contest three months in a row.”

“Now, then,” he said in a warm, approving voice. “That must have been something to see.”

“It was kind of fun,” I admitted, glancing around to make sure we'd picked up all the bits of paper.

“What say we have a wee competition ourselves?” Barry suggested.

“For what?” I asked, taking a peek at my watch. Barry had paid double the normal fee to do this spontaneous shooting, so I felt obligated to give him his full hour, but at the same time, I very much wanted to get back to the others. It wasn't that he made me feel uncomfortable . . . I simply did not enjoy being alone with him.

“Well, if you want a prize of some sort,” he said slowly.

“No, no, I meant what sort of competition did you have in mind?”

He thought for a moment, then gestured at a group of somewhat stunted fir trees. They were about twelve feet tall, and clustered together tightly, too tightly to allow any one of them to grow to its proper size. Beyond them, I knew from rambles with Alden, was a rocky outcropping that dropped down into a small ravine ending in the pasture of a sheep farmer who was his neighbor. “What say we each take a turn playing your spy game? I'll hide a target for you, and you can hide one for me, and whoever wins will buy the other a pint at the local.”

“All right,” I said, willing to do just about anything to finish up our hour and get back to the Hard Day's Knights area. “What do you want to use for a target? I'm afraid we're out of paper ones.”

“Anything wrong with my shirt?”

He was wearing a blue checked short-sleeved shirt.

“You'll ruin it,” I said, eyeing him warily as he started to unbutton his shirt. To my relief, he had a tank top under it.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he said, pulling the shirt off, and giving me a big wink. “I never liked this shirt. My wife bought it for me at a jumble sale. Now, then, you take half, and I'll take half.”

With a loud ripping noise, he tore the shirt in half as easily as I'd have torn a piece of toast. “We don't have anything to paint a heart on it,” I said, holding his shirt with the very tips of my fingers.

“Let's just say we have to hit the center of the target. Now, you go that way—” He pointed to the right, where the clump of firs gently swayed in a light afternoon breeze. “And I'll go through to the other side of the copse. Shall we meet back here in five minutes?”

“All right.” I trotted off in the direction he pointed, choosing what I thought would be a difficult spot for him to shoot (into the sun), and tied the shirt around the trunk of the spindliest of the trees.

“I set you a right challenge, I did,” Barry said as we rendezvoused. “I'm thinking you won't be claiming this win.”

I smiled politely, not really giving a damn whether I did or not. “Good luck with yours.”

“Aye, same to you, same to you.”

I wandered around the area from which I'd seen him
emerge, but didn't see any blue cloth hanging anywhere. The sun was lower in the sky now, stretching long shadows, and dappling through the copse with long, golden streamers. Birds chattered overhead, with flies buzzing around in an intensity that warned I was close to the boundary of the sheep farmer. Five more minutes passed and I was just about to call it quits and go back to Barry when out of the corner of my eye I saw a blue flutter. I headed toward it, pulling out an arrow to set onto the bow, frowning at the devious way Barry had hidden the target. The cloth was barely recognizable as such through a clump of broad-leaved shrubs, with fleeting glimpses of it visible as the branches moved gently in the breeze. I took aim, held my breath, and was just about to release the arrow when something struck me as odd.

A faint noise sounded to the left of me, followed almost immediately by a startled yell.

“What the hell?” I jumped forward, aware of the noise of someone moving through the trees to the left, and Barry calling out to ask if I was all right.

I pushed through the shrubs, tangling my hair and dress on them in the process, which is why it took me longer than normal to emerge from the other side. When I did, I stopped in horror. Before me, Alden stood, one hand braced against a tree trunk as he yanked an arrow from it.

“Holy crap, Alden!” I hurried forward at the same time Barry crashed his way through the shrubs. “Are you OK? Are you hurt? Who shot at you?”

“I'm not hurt,” he said, glaring at the arrow before looking up at me. His frown deepened as his eyes went to the bow I held, and the quiver slung over my back.
“As to who shot me, I believe you could answer that better than me. What the hell do you think you're doing shooting out here? There are any number of people who come through this copse—it's part of the right of way that leads to the coast. That was an extremely dangerous thing to do, Mercy.”

“I didn't shoot you!” I said quickly, showing him the arrow in my hand. “I was going to, thinking you were Barry's target, but something didn't feel right, so I stopped. But I did hear someone else shooting.” I spun around to pin Barry back with a mean look.

“It wasn't me,” he said quickly, glancing around. “I was over there, to the south. I heard Mercy cry out and came to see what was the matter.”