by Eris Adderly
A single curt nod, as though it excused the complete lack of answers, before the chaplain said again: “He does what he must.”
Emmat watched him turn the horse about and set the beast to a trot, back the way he’d come. The way Vane would come, if he ever bothered to return.
Sunday.
She eyed the coarse cloth sack and sighed.
* * * *
Three more days without rain meant there was no wet pattering to hide the hoofbeats. The dull rhythm on the earth, that ominous tattoo, sounded its warning from the great silence of night.
Vane.
There was just enough time for Emmat to harness and tame her own heartbeat down to a matching pace while the hangman reached the lean-to and tethered his mount.
It was Sunday, as the chaplain had guessed. The lamp’s yellow flame shuddered in the air on Emmat’s behalf. The bright, guttering tongue would be the only permissible outlet for her nerves. She stood from the room’s single chair to peek through parted louvers again, squinting into the moonlight after the hangman.
She had to look twice, at first, to be sure this was Vane returned to his home and not some new set of troubles. Instead of the black mare he’d ridden back from the hill, the tall figure tied up a pale-coated mount. When he turned from the beast and made for the house, however, there was no mistaking that walk.
Emmat rounded to the far side of the table, squared her shoulders.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
If her eyes could have bored through wood, she would have skewered him on the other side of the door.
“The lamp,” he said with that unmistakable growl of his. “Out with it.”
What can he do that he’s not already done?
“No.”
Her chest swelled, ready to bolt or to fight. Or perhaps both at once. When there was no reply and the tension became suffocating, she added, “You can stand out there all night, husband. I’ve nowhere to be.”
He’d have to put out the last of the fire in the fireplace, as well, she noted, if he wanted total darkness again. She’d set as many obstacles in his way as she could manage.
Whether it was her pointed use of his new title, resignation to the reality in which she’d already seen his face, or some other motive, the door swung inward, revealing Bartholomew Vane.
He went unhooded now, his black shirt and breeches topped only by an eye patch, which told her not only about the viability of the damaged eye, but about the limits of his resolve to persist in concealing himself.
The door pivoted shut with the help of his boot and the armful of the cloak he’d stormed out with so many days ago fell in a discarded heap across the foot of the bed. His eye never left her, as though she might be the one to attack him.
For a long, hard minute, they glowered each other near to stone, until Emmat had her fill.
“Sit down,” she said, nodding to the now vacant chair.
He sat, though she saw his limbs fold into position with a slow, suspicious tension. Who was he to be wary in front of her?
These thoughts could wait, however. There would be no answers, no discovery at all if she let him shake off his uncertainty and gain the upper hand again. He may have relieved her of her dagger, but Emmat had other weapons.
She turned to the small pot of gruel the low flames in the fireplace had been keeping warm and spooned a helping into the only bowl she’d been able to find. There had been oatmeal among the things the chaplain had brought, and it made for a welcome change from the same salt beef she’d been eating every night.
Emmat slid the bowl with its spoon across the table to give off steam in front of the hangman.
“Eat.”
A mistrustful eye flicked down to the gruel, back up to her.
“Oh, for—”
She grabbed up the spoon, swallowed its contents, dropped it back in the bowl. The hangman made some grudging noise of acceptance and Emmat stepped back to lean against the sideboard, her arms coming crossed over her chest.
“Douse that bloody lamp,” he said again, lifting a laden spoon.
She didn’t bother to look down at the top of the sideboard, where the flame’s host burned as defiant as Emmat herself.
“I won’t,” she said, “and neither will you. Eat.”
He held her gaze for the space of two deep breaths, grunted, and bent to the meal.
There was nothing in the close space of the hangman’s house for a time but the ripple of fire from hearth and lamp, and the regular dull clank and scrape of utensil against crockery.
Emmat watched him eat. He was methodical about it. Slow but relentless as he worked his way to the bottom of the bowl. His jaw flexed and a connected triangle of muscle at his temple moved as he consumed the simple fare.
He does what he must.
The chaplain’s words came drifting back as Emmat studied the scarred man before her. The man who was strenuously ignoring her for a bowl of gruel.
They had something in common, didn’t they?
The more she fed the thought, the more it grew. He’d removed and paired her boots on the floor some time during that first night. Drawn the blanket over her against the chill. Bathed after her scathing remarks. Insisted on a wedding so that, in some convoluted way, things might be proper. Insisted on covering the chaplain’s expenses.
Insisted on having her come under his touch.
You imagine a long line of women waiting for a chance to be the hangman’s wife?
Looking at him now, the violent signature of flame scrawled across his features in the truth of the lamplight, Emmat saw his early words for what they were: not a cruel taunt, but a bitter reality to which the man had resigned himself.
A normal man might have a wife. An executioner might have a wife. It was not unheard of. But Vane? Should he bare his disfigurement and add to the spectre of the gallows looming dark and ever-present? There was no need to ask what this would do to a man’s opportunities.
And Emmat. Had her parents brought her up to be a thief? Of course not. Could she have left them to fend for themselves, under the care of the incompetent Peter when they squandered their meagre earnings on drink? When their father had slipped in his own vomit and had injured his back beyond his ability to perform any sort of saleable labour? No, and no again.
She’d done what she had to do. They both had.
Bartholomew Vane, the hangman, and Emmat Bird, the highwayman, had both chosen paths they knew were wrong. When circumstances bore down from all sides, squeezing and crushing, obliterating sense and twisting morals, each chose desperation over decency, legality.
She’d brought in coin the only way she knew how. He’d brought in a wife, a companion, the only way he knew how. The only way in his mind he could ever have these things.
Vane pushed the emptied bowl away on the table. Met her gaze again.
In that moment, Emmat made a different kind of choice. Asked a different kind of question.
What if.
The thought compressed her, made her eyes grow hot in a way she preferred to avoid.
What if she’d awakened this morning and their past had never been? What if they were no more than husband and wife?
His shoulders sloped as he leaned back in the chair, palms on his thighs, the lines of his face hanging, tired. A man who had seen bad and expected worse, and no longer possessed the will to care about either.
She blinked rapidly, shooing the rush of unwelcome emotion.
What if none of it had to be this complicated?
Emmat inhaled, coming to a decision. He had to be a man in there somewhere, didn’t he?
“What of the horse?”
His eye dropped to the table again and he sighed.
“Mercy.”
It didn’t sound like a plea. She stilled herself, waited for him to continue.
“In eleven years,” he said, fitting the empty bowl with intense scrutiny, “I never took an assistant. My Mercy knew what to do. When to pull the cart.”
“She came up lame.”
Vane wouldn’t look at her now. The rest needn’t be said. The hangman rode with Mercy no more.
“And the other?” Emmat tried for some way to resurrect a conversation. Some means to step out from under the leaden mantle that had fallen over his shoulders just now.
“Borrowed.”
She raised a sceptical brow and he surprised her with an elaboration.
“Joseph Winters. Undersheriff’s cousin. His eldest was conscripted. Won’t be needing a horse in the navy. The beast is mine until I’ve coin for another of my own.”
It might have been the most the man had ever said to her all at one time. Emmat cocked her head.
“Joseph Winters,” she repeated the name. “Any relation to Christopher Winters?”
“His younger son.” The good eye moved back up to hers. “You know him?”
“Knew him.” The younger Winters was at sea, as well, but certainly not on any of Her Majesty’s ships.
“How did you know him?” Vane sat up straighter.
Is he…is he jealous?
Emmat dropped her arms, levered herself away from the sideboard.
“We only met once or twice,” she said. “Travelled in the same circles. My brother knew more of him than I did.”
Maybe the man relaxed a small measure at this, it was difficult to say. Either way, Emmat’s feet chose a more direct route through her curiosity than her cautious thoughts might have and carried her around to Vane’s side of the table.
Without pause, she slid onto his lap, backside coming to rest on his left thigh, her knees between his. The hand that had been where her bottom was fell away to the side, as if he were unsure where to put it now. Odd, for a man who knew right where to put himself during any of their previous encounters.
They were almost of a height, this way, and Vane elected to meet her two good eyes with his one. It flashed the volatile grey of a summer storm from beneath a dark brow, heavy with unknown burden.
Cringe, the hard stare told her. Look away. I defy you.
Emmat did none of those things.
She held him there, unwithering, allowing him to see her complete lack of fear, of pity. The air grew thick between them, near to the point of crackling. Her left hand rose to the ruin, fingertips dusting the mottled jaw.
Like the promised lightning, his grip surged around her wrist, tightening down until she was sure the bones would grind together. But that was all.
He didn’t yank her hand away, didn’t curse her or push her from her perch. All he offered was a pained scowl. A pained scowl and, after an interminable period in which the only movement was the rise and fall of two chests, each labouring with challenge, a sigh. A loosening of his grip.
He let go her wrist.
Emmat’s palm slid up, her thumb nudging the eye patch out of place, over his brow. It came off completely and she laid it aside on the table, her touch coming back to the scar-smooth skin. She drew a thumb over his cheekbone. Back to what was left of his ear.
The hangman sat so silent, so still, his face a perfect mask for any thought or sentiment lying behind, Emmat wasn’t sure what she might ask, or how. There was no way to know if her next wrong step might send her spilling, broken to the ground.
Mismatched eyes stared back at her, one the colour of rain-laden clouds, the other a pitcher of milk with a drop of ink swirling to the bottom. She slid her hand down to the side of his neck, careful as though the damage was still fresh.
“What happened?”
Several patient breaths passed before he answered.
“Jonas Hollow happened,” he said, his grey eye going distant. “Or at least his family did.”
“How do you mean?” She took care to keep her voice low, undemanding.
“Judge thought he should swing for his crimes. His kin didn’t. He wasn’t in the ground a week before I woke up to my house on fire.”
Something about the way he said it softened her against him. His words were so free of ornament, of emotion. As though it were an inventory of goods he was recounting rather than a vicious attack upon his person. What else had this man endured to make such a trauma seem worthy of so little passion?
And yet his stoic explanation belied the severity of his reaction the night she’d revealed him with the oil lamp. Apathy did not send a man storming out into the night, not to return for a week and a half.
Such was the whole of it. The work Vane had chosen—or perhaps fallen into, for all she knew—came with a price: there were those who hated him for it. And now he spent his days hiding. Just as she did.
Emmat felt that great unnameable urge welling, filling the space inside her ribs, sending the balance seated low in her belly flipping end over end. It expanded and pressed against her walls until it nearly hurt, and the intensity of a held gaze would not be enough.
Reason flung to the wind, Emmat tilted down for a kiss.
The hangman turned his head.
An angry passion took her then. The hand she’d been resting on his neck flew to his jaw again and—with no little resistance—she made him face her.
The storm in his eye raged. His nostrils flared.
He? He would resist her?
How dare he!
“You can fuck your wife in the dark, but you can’t kiss her properly in the light, is that it?” she said, heat in her voice as she prevented him from looking away again.
Perhaps it was her brazen words. Perhaps it was the truth of the thing, laid bare at last. Perhaps, like Emmat, Vane stopped worrying about anything else but what he wanted at that moment. She saw the blaze jump between them, sparks blown on a gale.
“Well?” she demanded. “Is it?”
Violence.
It was the only way to describe the way they came together when the burning floor of tension collapsed.
Lips, tongue, and teeth; nipping, tasting, pulling. These were the things that should have happened first, and now the thief and the hangman worked in a frenzy to catch them up.
The hand he’d dropped to the side was at her waist now, squeezing her closer. When his other hand caught up the back of her neck to draw her further into the delirious kiss, Emmat felt a trill of something wicked go dancing along her spine.
They broke apart for long enough to stare at each other in a sort of breathless disbelief. He’d taken of her, and she’d given of herself, in far more illicit ways, but this, their first kiss, was the most intimate contact yet.
When they leaned in again, urgency gave way to deliberation. Emmat felt herself relaxing into the circle of his arms in a way she hadn’t yet allowed herself. She came to know, through slow, thorough kisses, the very flavour of the man who’d made her his wife. The new, soft answer of his mouth bore the tang of need waylaid over lonely years.
His affection grew bold again and moved from her lips to her jaw, her throat. There was no helping a whimper when he latched onto the skin beneath her ear, sucking, testing her with his teeth.
He left her no time to grow accustomed, however, as his efforts flourished downwards in the glow of her new acceptance. The column of her neck was humid with kisses, the hollow of her throat moistened with the lap of tongue. His supporting arm at her waist was a blessing, for without it she might have collapsed in a heap on the floor.
When he arrived at the valley between her breasts, the grip of abandon left him. The hangman buried his face in the pale flesh piled above her stays, stilled his fervour, and inhaled. At the end of a silent, heavy stretch of moments in which he did nothing but breathe her in, the hands that had been roaming, squeezing, slid around her ribcage, arms following to enfold her in warm possession.
Vane turned his cheek to lay it on her breast. He stayed this way, eyes closed, unmoving. After several heartbeats passed, Emmat reached careful fingers around to pull the tie from his hair, loosing the dark queue over his shoulders.
She raked her hand through the wavy mass, separating it, cradling his head where it seemed he needed to rest.
How was this the man who’d spirited her from the crest of Gallows Hill, who’d dragged a chaplain to marry her under threat in a lightless stone house, miles from anywhere?
How was she the same Emmat Bird to allow it? And not merely to allow it, but to hold him to her, to see in him this…this long-harboured emptiness, and to want to fill it.
It flew in the face of reason, but some immaterial voice suggested if she were to place her own empty spaces against his, she would find the void made whole.
She took the risk.
“Bartholomew.” The name fell light as a sheet of parchment brushed from the surface of a table.
His shoulders heaved with a low grunt she might have mistaken for a chuckle in a less serious man.
“I haven’t been ‘Bartholomew’ since I was a boy,” he said, not raising his head. “Just Vane.”
Emmat decided to interpret this as a preference, and tried again.
“Vane.”
This name was different. A single syllable, pointed at one end and rounded on the other. A name made to penetrate with a single, piercing motion, but also made to smooth over the damage as it passed.
Flashes of prior nights together made her shift on his lap, a familiar warmth building.
“Yes?”
No more than breathing from the man, but Emmat could no longer be still. Not with the quickening pace of her own thoughts, her own wants.
“Husband,” she said with more force, “please.”
This made him lift his head.
Emmat’s lips came apart. Her breasts rose and fell above the limits of her stays. A grey and a white eye met hers and, though the colour didn’t match her green, their reflection was one and the same.
Lust.
He descended on her again, explanations unneeded. A brief return to her lips, her throat, before a less disciplined tour of her neckline. While teeth and tongue laid claim to bosom from above, buttressing palms rose to gather from below.
Emmat could feel him against the back of her thigh, hard, eager. Uncertainty gone, she slid a hand between them, filling her grasp. He hissed.