Shadow among Sheaves
Page 3
William’s eyes followed the path of Lord Barric’s gaze for barely a second. “A foreigner,” he supplied without embellishment.
Barric looked back to the girl who knelt on the ground like a shadow spread low beneath the grain. Her hair was the blackest he had ever seen, nearly the same color as her deep-set eyes. “Yes,” he replied flatly, studying her hands as they swept through the fallen stalks. “I can see as much for myself. But who is she?”
“She’s a beggar.”
No sooner were these words spoken than the girl straightened her back to lift her eyes toward the sky, seeming to measure the sun by its warmth on her face. Beggarly though she was, her movements were slow and thoughtful, as if her skin was but a somber veil draped across her back. His voice sounded suspicious when he finally asked, “Where did she come from?”
“One of our workers caught her stealing grain. I told her she could take what scraps she wanted—just for the day.”
Barric’s gaze swung back to William. “And you thought it right to give to her out of my pocket?”
William stood his ground, unflinching despite the edge in Barric’s voice. “It didn’t feel right,” he insisted. “Sending her away. And I’ve heard talk of her in town these past few weeks. Let’s just say folks haven’t taken too…kindly to her arrival.”
Barric made a sound behind his closed lips. “I see. And have any of my workers given her trouble?”
“For stealing out of your pocket, you mean?” William smiled faintly. “I’d have thought you’d be the first one in line to give her trouble. My lord.”
Most days Barric couldn’t stand the blunt way his steward spoke to him, as if he matched Barric rank for rank. It had been that way ever since they’d been boys, when William’s father was brought to Misthold to serve as steward to Barric’s. For years Barric and William were surly playfellows, until William was sent to a middling class boarding school and Barric to study at Eton.
When Barric’s parents had died in a boating incident, he had risen from a boy of fifteen years to a landed earl in a single, wretched morning. From the young Jack Fairfax, as he’d been named by his parents, to the imposing and powerful Lord Barric. He had left off with school and returned at once to oversee Misthold. His father’s title had fit him rather poorly, then, like adult clothes too large for a child, but he had still managed to accomplish far more as Barric than he ever might have as Jack.
Then William’s father had died, a year after Barric’s, of consumption. Almost as soon as William had returned to Abbotsville, Barric found himself at his door, all but demanding that William step into the position of steward. It had seemed a logical choice at the time. Surely William knew his father’s work as well as Barric knew his own, and he was familiar. But perhaps there had been more to it than that. Though Barric usually glowered in its presence, he had always admired pluck.
“If I’m going to give anyone trouble,” Barric said at last, “it would surely be you.”
Again, the steward glanced at the beggar. “True enough, but I’m not the one your men are making eyes at.”
“Your point is noted. So, tell me—what is our little thief’s name?”
“I didn’t ask her,” William admitted. “Of course, if you are curious, you can go ahead and ask her yourself.”
William tipped his head toward the girl, daring Barric to ask her, but Barric scanned the other workers in a show of feigned disinterest. As if an earl would deign to speak to a foreign, thieving beggar, he reminded himself somewhat reluctantly. As if he owed the girl anything when she was already walking away with pockets full of his grain.
CHAPTER 2
Rena walked quickly, eagerness spread across her face like a banner. She cut through the patchwork clustering of fields, trying to reach home faster than the winding roads usually allowed. Though her bag was now weighted with grain, she felt far lighter than she had in many months, with the threat of starvation held at bay momentarily. She now carried enough food to feed both herself and Nell for a week.
The fieldworkers were beginning to turn in for the day, the sun barely lighting them from an inch above the horizon. She pulled the bag’s strap tighter across her chest, breathing in through her nose. Most days she closed her eyes and imagined the smell of India still lingered on her hands and neck like a perfume. She missed the scent of India’s impressive heat. She missed the Eastern color palette which swirled in serpentine ribbons across her memory, smelling of citrus rinds and black spice.
She studied the English horizon as she pushed her way through a prickly hedgerow separating one master’s field from another’s. Jogging roads connected coastal cliffs to sprawling fields. The line of earth teemed with a patchwork of various crops, many of them tall enough to brush her belly, some towering even higher. Hills plunged downward toward the fields, the highest slopes topped by the occasional grand estate with high-arched entries and sculpted casements—each structure stood watch over its valley like a great imperial eye.
She pondered all of this vastness, willing herself not to be impressed. She could not attach herself too much to Abbotsville’s lovely trees, though they blushed with golden leaves, rich with color. Nor could she find comfort in the rows of sun-kissed crops or the hills shrouded in greenery. For what would be left for her in this foreign place when all of that grandeur was dead and barren, buried in snow? The trees flashed the brightest right before they died. Much like Edric, she thought with a shudder, England was a young world forever dying, its bursting colors draining slowly away into a muted shade of drab, English gray.
Parting through one final stretch of wheat, she stepped back onto the main road, leaving the labyrinthine fields behind her as she turned at last toward town.
“Well, now, who do we have here?”
Two men stood in the road. Rena nearly plowed into the one who had spoken, startled from her private thoughts, but then her hands came up at the last moment, pushing her back from his wide chest. Two gray hunting dogs lurched forward and began barking up at her. The bouncing sound rubbed at her nerves and made them feel raw.
As she stepped back from the dogs, the man’s companion smiled his smooth agreement. His face was half-hidden in shadow, slanted with the faltering light. “It must be that little Indian chit we’ve heard so much about,” he observed, tapping her in the ribs with his walking cane.
Even more than she despised the man’s amused grin, Rena hated that he had called her an it. The men were both handsome, young, and well dressed, their features angled in twisted amusement. Edric too had inherited power and youthful charm. But these men were nothing like Edric, and it grieved Rena to remember her husband while pinned in place by their sly, hunting smiles. She glanced down the lane, toward the bridge, trying to think up an excuse for leaving quickly. How many steps would it take for her to reach the bridge? Ten? Twenty?
The second man’s eyes flickered toward the field and back to Rena. He was tall and lanky, as ramrod straight as the walking stick still dangling from his hand. “She’s been strolling through your fields, Thomas.”
The accusatory note in his voice wedged between Rena’s ribs like a spike. “You’re Lord Barric?”
The man smiled his slow answer, but she still doubted him. “I didn’t realize the field was yours,” she explained, trying to sound polished and poised. The dogs meandered curiously, moving in tighter and tighter circles around her. She eyed their slavering snouts, but even with the snorting growls, the beasts did not seem nearly as dangerous as their masters. She redirected her gaze to the men, watching their teeth flash white in the dusky air.
Sensing her scrutiny, Thomas shifted his eyes to hers. His thick black hair was elegantly tousled, with trim sideburns angling low around a sharp, pointed chin. “I think you ought to pay me for tramping your Indian feet across our land.” He smiled dangerously. A subtle mustache cut a thin line above his slender lips.
The sound of horse hooves clattered somewhere in the distance, but neither of the men ma
rked the sound. Rena clutched the bag of grain closer to her chest, still reeling from the man’s fiendish insult. “I haven’t any money,” she said stiffly, trying to sound like her father. Influential. A woman of words, commanding respect. “Let me pass.”
Stepping into a spot of dwindling sunlight, Thomas scanned her speculatively. She flinched when she noticed his eyes were blue like Edric’s and yet held not a scrap of his kindness. He smelled sharper too, as if he dabbled on too much cologne, the eau de toilette Englishmen so often used as aftershave. “Friend of ours had a bibi back in India. A little thing like you. Perhaps you could take off those shoes and dance for us. Dance like her.”
Rena’s blood heated as he all but called her a concubine. The horse hooves, which had begun as a muted thud moments before, began to sound crisper, nearer. The taller man looked curiously in the distance, but Thomas did not pull his eyes from Rena’s. She wondered if whoever was coming would even bother to deliver her, or if it might be another man like them, cruel and entitled. “Leave me alone,” she said at last. “Bibi or not, I’d never let you touch me.”
“Look at that chin,” Thomas scoffed and touched her anyway, flicking his fingers beneath her jaw. “How high she keeps it lifted—as if she isn’t as sullied as the dirt soiling her dress.”
Rena ignored the itching urge to wipe her face with her grimy hands. She didn’t need a mirror to know she looked wretched. For the first time since marrying Edric, she missed the veil she had worn in her father’s house, which had shielded her from hungry eyes like theirs, commanding respect and honor. Though many of the English had denounced the Hindu practice of purdah as cruel and slavish, wearing her veil had also made Rena feel like she had held some unspoken worth, a secret.
But there was no veil when Thomas’s friend swooped forward, seizing the bag from her grasping hands. “And what are we guarding so carefully, eh?” He threw open the flap. His fingers were thin and long as he reached inside. Skeleton fingers, Rena thought dizzily. He lifted his brows as he tipped the bag upside down, littering the ground with her grain.
“Stop it!” Rena choked, and for the first time she heard her own desperation, a shrill sound which was unfamiliar to her tongue. “That was given to me! As a gift!”
But the man simply smiled, malevolence gleaming beneath his shadowed eyes. The dogs were circling closer to her ankles, throats burbling low with growls. Unwilling to beg any longer, Rena turned on her ankle to run.
“Hold on to her!” ordered Thomas, stepping over Rena’s fallen bag. The other man’s walking stick fell to the ground as his hands locked around her forearms from behind, pulling back on her limbs like levers until she struggled to remain on her toes. She shrieked, desperation climbing up her throat as Thomas stalked toward her.
She bit his hand when she found it too close to her cheek—and Thomas swore explosively, striking her hard across the face. Rena swallowed another scream. Her blood boiled and churned as it rushed to the skin. In India, she was her father’s daughter, beloved and shrouded; here she was bruised, a worthless girl with foreign eyes whose only wealth was in the abundance of her own grief.
The horse and rider were now nearly upon them, kicking up a deafening clatter in Rena’s ears. From behind, she felt the man who held her draw a nervous breath, his hands slackening slightly as he hissed Thomas’s name in subtle warning.
But Thomas ignored his friend, fingers pressing like spikes into Rena’s cheeks even as the soft whinny of a horse could be heard from a few feet behind. “We ought to tie you down in that field,” he spat in her ear. “Let the crows play with you. How long do you think it would take people to notice you were missing? You think anyone would even care to do anything about it?”
“I would.”
As Thomas spun around to face the intruder, Rena’s eyes darted right, where a suited man sat upon a black stallion, watching them with a stony expression. In the emerging moonlight, his hair gleamed copper red, stylishly short but still messy along the arch of his brow.
Ignoring Rena’s slight cry of protest, Thomas jostled her behind him and lifted his chin to the horseman. “Cousin,” he greeted at last, a cordial smile on his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. “Didn’t expect to see you back for several weeks yet. Tell me, how is Charlie these days?”
Rena closed her eyes, feeling the cold fingers of defeat brush across her skin. Cousin. As if she could place her hope in a man who shared blood with either of these monsters. The newcomer’s expression cooled even more, until, surprisingly, Thomas released her.
She didn’t want to hear what Thomas and his friend might say to the red-haired newcomer. Perhaps they would call her a harlot for the lodging she’d taken at the Gilded Crown. Yes, she’d heard that title whispered on more than one occasion as she hunted for work through town. Or perhaps Thomas would say she had stolen the spilled grain from his field. Without an ally, she could be hurled in prison or worse for such an offense.
“We were just having a bit of fun,” the friend explained feebly when he realized the rider would not answer Thomas’s question. He inched back a few steps from Rena, putting distance between them, and snatched up his walking stick from the ground. “Perhaps things got out of hand.”
The rider angled his head as he slowly replied, “Perhaps.”
“Oh, don’t be such a bore,” Thomas chided. “You remember Sir Ellis Andrews, yes? From Oxford.”
The rider did not mark this reintroduction. Sir Ellis Andrews fiddled his walking stick from one hand to the other.
“And what are you about this evening?” Thomas challenged in a far less obliging tone. “Aren’t you usually rolling up your shirtsleeves to muck around with the field hands?”
“As chance would have it, I was on my way to call on your father.” The rider spoke in a voice so bored it sounded half-dead. He raised a brow. “Give him my regrets, won’t you? It seems you will be arriving without me.”
Sir Ellis nodded his anxious agreement to the veiled dismissal, but Thomas would not be cowed. “I haven’t yet concluded my business here.” He inclined his eyes at Rena. As his gaze touched her skin, fear muddled her mind, until she could hardly sort out his words against the pounding in her own ears.
At that, the red-haired man swung down from his stallion, his booted feet connecting sharply with the ground beneath him. He and Thomas matched stares. Thomas was shorter than his cousin, scrappier of build and perhaps a few years younger. For a moment, Rena wondered if they would come to blows, but Thomas must have sensed in the other man’s gaze that he lacked some upper hand, for he nodded his head in slight acknowledgment and signaled for Sir Ellis to follow him up the road. Rena drew a steadier breath as she at last saw Thomas’s back turned in retreat.
“Fair bit of warning,” Thomas added, angling a look over his shoulder. He nodded his head at Rena and sneered at his cousin. “The girl bites.”
“Fair bit of warning,” the red-haired man replied, his steely gaze boring into Thomas’s back. “So do I.”
Even after Thomas and Sir Ellis had skulked away, mortification and fear lingered heavily in Rena’s chest. The red-haired stranger watched his cousin’s retreat with a tight frown. When he raked a hand distractedly through his hair, Rena followed the gesture, staring slightly. She had never seen red hair before. Edric’s was a dusty brown color, the same shade as the earth when faded by the sun. But this man’s hair was red. Different. Foreign. The color of copper.
As Rena waited for him to speak, she pressed both hands to her face. There she felt the sting of Thomas’s blow on one cheek, the flush from raw panic on the other, which was all she needed to remind herself she was still quite alone with a man. “I must go,” she announced stiffly. “I’ll be missed.”
The man stirred as if he had entirely forgotten she was there and turned to face her. He scanned her in quick appraisal, his gaze darkening as it came to rest on her face. “He struck you,” he said as if he had only just remembered, and stepped closer to her.
“Look at me,” the stranger ordered, cutting her off. After what had happened with the other men, it took Rena a moment before she felt daring enough to meet his gaze dead on. When she did, the corners of his eyes creased slightly. “Do you think I am like them?”
She studied him for a slow moment, watching his eyes shift and narrow as they awaited her answer. He did seem different from the others. Not just in his appearance but in bearing. His eyes were hard, but they did not seem cruel. Though he stood proud and tall, he did not feel dangerous. She released her pent-up breath and slowly shook her head.
He broke his eyes from hers. “You were in my fields today.”
Lord Barric. Though this man matched far more closely whom she’d pictured than the cruel and entitled Thomas, Rena was nonetheless back on her guard. The steward had said Lord Barric was the master of Misthold and all the fields surrounding it. Such a man would have considerable power. He would have both money and influence, would brush shoulders with the local magistrate. And she had stolen from him.
“I was given permission,” she explained hastily.
“Yes, so I was told.” He paused, his eyes missing nothing. “I was also told my steward caught you stealing first.”
Ashamed, Rena’s eyes fell to her feet and stayed there. “I did not mean to steal from you.”
“Explain yourself, then.” This time she didn’t mistake the edge in his voice. He was not interested in hearing vague excuses. Only the truth.
“My mother-in-law hasn’t had a full meal in days.” She broke off, still feeling the weight of his stare even though her face was tipped down toward her feet.