Kate Moore (12 page)

She leaned across the last few inches separating them and pressed his lips lightly with her own. And though she heard his breath catch in his throat and felt his hands tighten around her wrists, the greater wonder was that in bestowing her kiss she should be so shaken, so eager to press not just her lips but her whole self to him. She drew back a little, fighting off the shameless longing. “Tell me who you really are,” she urged.

His eyes opened at that, and he looked up at her in bleak silence. He released her wrists. “Is our spy gone, Meg?” he asked. The change in his mood was so abrupt that for a minute she stared at him uncomprehending. Then she glanced at the hillside above them. Esau had indeed gone.

With only a little awkwardness they separated. He turned from her at once and reached for his waistcoat and jacket while she busied herself gathering the remains of their picnic with trembling hands. When he faced her again with his cravat tied, he seemed to have returned entirely to the aloof role he chose to play for the brothers. His eyes would not meet hers. Neither spoke as they descended the path to the village.

Margaret was free to think, but her thoughts chased each other about so that she could not understand herself. Her body felt peculiar, shaky, as if she had had a fright. Gradually, with the rhythm of their walk, her confusion narrowed to a single, painful contradiction. She must stay as far from him as she could; she wanted only to draw closer. The little breeze, which had teased playfully all afternoon, grew steady and strong, blowing in distant clouds and piling them up overhead so that when they rejoined the brothers and mounted their horses, the sky was dark with threatening clouds.

11

D
USK OVERTOOK THEM
on the road. A parley in the gloom as to whether they should push on or seek shelter degenerated quickly into a shouting match between the brothers, with the rising wind snatching away half their words. Then a traveler coming upon them from Amarante itself settled the dispute, for, according to him, they would find no accommodations there. The town, he claimed, was filled with Holy Week pilgrims. Jacob pressed the man for details. And Drew’s translation of the ensuing exchange filled Margaret with dread. The pilgrims were members of a
cofradia
, a brotherhood, journeying to Zamora for Holy Week. Jacob’s obvious satisfaction with this information could only mean that they could expect to meet the Viper soon.

Esau, who had been most in favor of stopping along the road, soon found a deserted barn. Three of its stone walls were standing, but the roof had fallen in at one end in a tangled pile of charred timbers. They entered through a doorless portal in the south wall, and for a moment Margaret stood unmoving, her senses adjusting to the calm of the interior after enduring the buffeting wind for so long.

Apparently others before them had used the place as a makeshift inn. A circle of stones surrounded a pit of ashes, and most of the wood in the place had been pulled down. Esau promptly broke apart the few remaining stall partitions, and soon a fire blazed, casting eerie shadows about the empty barn. Jacob and Drew settled the horses and donkey along one wall near the fallen timbers. The animals were restless with the storm but weary enough to accept the meager provision made for them. The men dragged their saddles to the fire for seats while Margaret set out the bread and roasted meats they carried with them.

Later she thought how pleasant it would be to sit by such a crackling, warm fire out of the wind, talking to her thief, if they had not just passed such an awkward afternoon, and if the scrutiny of the brothers from across the flames were not so disconcerting. Jacob regarded them with cold speculation. And Esau, who ate and drank steadily without glancing at his food, fixed Margaret with a look that made her feel she was likely to be his next course. A sharp word from the thief drew Esau’s gaze away from her. With ill-disguised resentment the big man set down his food and shuffled off to fetch a board for the fire. Margaret turned to thank the thief, but he was looking down, trailing a stick across the dirt floor between them. She watched as he drew a square and filled it with intersecting lines. When he began to collect and arrange pebbles and bits of wood, she recognized the figure as a makeshift chessboard and joined in the search.

“How will you distinguish your bishops from your knights?” she asked as he filled more of the squares. “They seem much of a size.”

“Ah,” he said, “don’t you see the bishops’ mitres?”

Margaret confessed she did not. “I think it more than likely we will not know our knights from our pawns before the opening gambits are complete.”

“Are you afraid to match wits with me then, Meg?”

“Never,” she said. “You open.” He did so and soon engaged her in play, taking such outrageous risks she was obliged with every move to consider whether he meant to trap her. At length, as she had predicted, bishops and knights, rooks and queens, were hopelessly confused, and they abandoned all pretense of serious play.

Suddenly she was aware, as she had not been in the heat of their play, of the two men on the other side of the fire. The flames were lower, the shadows in the barn more pronounced, and Margaret felt distinctly uncomfortable. The thief’s moves, now languid and indifferent, seemed to occupy only his fingers. She sensed that his thoughts, like hers, were on their companions.

He had been turning over a pebble in his fingers and placed it idly in one of the squares. “Your play, Meg,” he coaxed. She knew there was no play, but she gave the mock chessboard her attention and deliberately moved one of the small stones.

“Why do they stare so?” she asked lightly, trying to master her growing unease.

Her thief made another meaningless move before he answered. “They are waiting for us to go to bed,” he said. It was the sort of remark he had teased her with many times, but the words, uttered in a flat, hard voice, sent the barest shiver through her.

Occupied as she had been with their game, she had not considered sleeping arrangements. It could not be safe for them to sleep in this great open space with the two brothers near. Always before there had been doors to close and lock. Tonight even if they retreated to one of the far corners of the barn, the noise of the storm would conceal approaching footsteps. They might take turns watching through the night, but Margaret doubted either of them could stay awake long. If Jacob had his way, she and the thief would be attacked and overcome without warning.

She must not let the prospect scatter her wits. The brothers had not agreed to kill them, and Esau might yet prevent Jacob from acting. But they would be spared only if they could preserve the fiction that she was the thief’s mistress. Until this afternoon they had kept up the pretense by retiring together behind closed doors. Behind those doors her thief had teased her to be sure, but he had never offered her any true insult, rather he had eased her embarrassment in every unfamiliar and awkward circumstance. All the advances in their intimacy had been made before one or both of the brothers.

The thought made her cheeks burn and to put it aside she asked, “Do they mean to attack us?” She heard every blast and rattle of the wind, every restless movement of the animals, every crack of the fire as she waited for his answer.

“I think not,” he said, “but they do expect me to make love to you, Meg.” He looked at her directly then, holding her gaze with his own, his eyes hot blue, the color of the flame just where it licks the wood.

Her blush of a moment before was a mild sensation compared with those that now assaulted her, a wild fluttering of her heart and a dizzying rush of her blood that rendered her momentarily speechless.

“It is just like you to say that, to put me to the blush,” she managed after a pause. “But I know you don’t mean to do it, and you are saying it just to make me forget they are apt to murder us.”

He laughed. “Or each other, Meg. You have to admit that’s a possibility.”

They lapsed into silence, which the brooding presence of the brothers soon made uncomfortable.

“You do have a plan, don’t you?” Margaret asked.

“I plan to make them think I am making love to you.”

She did not doubt the necessity of doing as he said, and the wisdom to stay away from him was too new, too contrary to the longings of her heart and body to guide her now. But what did she know of lovemaking? Did the man do everything? She had heard young married women speak disparagingly of “the act.” What had they said? Whatever the exact movements required, her afternoon with him had proved they would be indecorous and exciting. Surely such acts could only be performed in the dark.

“Will you tell me what to do? I can imagine some things, but . . .”

“What do you imagine, Meg?” he asked, and she heard both amusement and that unsettling change in his voice that awakened sensation in her in the most embarrassing places.

“Shall we be obliged to kiss?” she asked, careful not to look at him.

“Will you mind very much if we do?”

“As we did this afternoon?” She dared to look up. He sat perfectly still as if he could not move, or dared not.

“Not precisely,” he said. After a pause he stood and offered her his hand. “Let’s make our bed, Meg,” he suggested. She nodded, accepting his help.

He gave an order to Esau about the fire and another to Jacob about the animals. As the brothers moved to do his bidding, he and Margaret pulled their saddles, blankets, and valises to the darkest corner of the barn. After they had arranged their bed, he turned away from her and stretched out his arms, holding his greatcoat like a curtain behind which Margaret shed her outer garments and lay them across one of the saddles. She buried herself in the blankets, keeping her cloak tight about her and the largest blanket over her as he had directed.

Though her person was securely covered and she had been near him often in dishabille, she felt the inadequacy of any covers to keep out invading sensation. It was not only that the roar of the wind sounded in her ears, or that the smells of musty hay and charred wood caused her to wrinkle her nose, or even that sharp stones cut into her back—these were surface impressions, easily distinguished from one another. It was his closeness that touched her everywhere at once, overwhelming her senses.

Without turning his back on the brothers, Drew stepped over Margaret and began to shrug out of his own clothes, piling them on top of hers. When he had divested himself of coat and jacket, neckcloth and waistcoat, he sat on the other saddle and pulled off his boots. All his movements were slow, almost exaggerated, and easily recognizable even in the gloom of their corner, except one. In putting his boots aside, he had removed the pistol from his jacket pocket and placed it on the ground next to Margaret’s head.

He pulled his shirt free of his breeches and began to undo the buttons. Though this revealing of himself to her was an intimacy greater than any so far, his ease in doing it lessened her uncertainty. And she could not look away as she had schooled herself to do that afternoon. The smoothness of the fair skin, the glowing warmth of it did not surprise her, but the clean structure of him did.

The steel breastplates hanging in dozens of ancestral halls like her own were mere caricatures of these subtle contours, exaggerating the symmetry of swell and hollow that suited this man so well, the swells suggesting power and strength, the hollows, gentleness and vulnerability. Then there was a scar, a slash of whiter skin, shiny and taut across his right side above the band of his breeches.

He knelt beside her on the damp ground, and without thought she reached toward him and drew her finger along the scar. It must be an old wound and could no longer hurt him she knew, but his flesh quivered under her touch and he drew in a breath through his nostrils. She drew back her hand.

In half a minute he seemed to recover. He released the fall of his breeches. That did startle her, but he smiled in his teasing way.

“Turn your face toward our watchdogs, Meg,” he said. “You must tell me if they make any move against us.”

She nodded and dutifully turned her head toward the brothers. Drew had arranged their valises as a sort of barricade, leaving a space through which Meg could plainly see the two men on the other side of the fire. There could be no doubt they were watching every move her thief made. At her side he lifted the blanket over her and slid under it, but he held himself above her so that she felt only the warmth and the nearness of him.

He began to whisper to her, his lips close to her ear, his breath stirring her hair and sending rills of sensation through her. She wanted to turn toward him, to forget the evils of their situation, but he reminded her not to.

“You have been brave so far, my girl,” he whispered. “Be brave for me tonight.” Keeping up the flow of words, he nudged her knees apart with one of his own, but he still held himself poised above her.

“Have you been to the theatre, Meg? Have you seen the villain thrust through the heart with a wicked enough looking sword, heard the horrified gasps of the audience?”

“Yes,” she answered. She felt herself under some sort of spell invoked by the low, rough quality of his voice.

“But then the fellow stands to take his bow with the others. You had been so convinced of his death a moment before. Then you are relieved. It was an act after all.”

“Yes,” she whispered, beginning to understand what he intended.

“Tonight,” he said, “we convince our audience, but our act will leave you unmarked, Meg, unsullied. Do you understand?”

She could not speak, but nodded her head. Then he lowered himself to her, brushing his body once against her hipbone with a light touch. Her cloak was thick enough, but she felt the stroke of his body and the tremor that shook him. She had to turn to him then. He held himself rigidly above her. His eyes were closed tight, and his breath blew hot and harsh against her chest where her cloak covered her breasts. She put her hands to his fair curls, and gently raised his head. He gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes.

Then he leaned across the inches that separated them. In that first moment, the intensity of his kiss shut out the world beyond their corner, and Margaret let her fingers drift lightly from the sides of his face to his shoulders. Then his weight came to rest upon her, no more than a gentle press, but everywhere at once so that she became conscious of the contours of her body and understood their womanliness. Immediately he lifted his lips from hers.

“Forgive me,” he murmured. His kiss changed, and he began a rapid rocking of his hips against hers. The fierce kiss and exaggerated movements meant to deceive their enemies made Margaret feel herself once more an unknowing girl. But she did not shrink from his embrace. Under the show of passion, she felt the honest desire. So, although he pushed violently against her and ground her mouth under his, and though rocks too small to be seen cut her back and her heart was breaking, she simply held him.

Abruptly, he slid off of her, pinning her right arm beneath his chest. He appeared perfectly still as if he had fallen asleep, but she could feel his heart pound, his flesh tremble, and his breath pent in his chest. Bruised and dazed as she was, she knew that his actions had hurt him more than her. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to hold back stinging tears. She could not give way to sobs now without endangering their performance.

When the immediate torment of his interrupted passion had in some measure subsided, Drew raised his head and surveyed the barn. He was not surprised to discover Esau asleep and snoring raucously, but to discover Jacob and one of the horses gone brought him instantly to his feet.

He glanced at Meg. She, too, slept, as quietly and uncomplainingly as she did everything. There she lay on the cold, damp ground in the rough blankets, one white arm outstretched, her dark curls framing her pale, tear-streaked face. How had he gone so far in his game to bring her to this?