Gallows Pole

by Eris Adderly

  “Emmat.”

  There was a turmoil of hands. He kneaded hip, breast, and thigh in a euphoria as she stroked and massaged the length of him through the weave of his breeches.

  “Sweet Christ,” he said, gripping her by the upper arms and separating them to catch his breath.

  Vane came to his feet and Emmat floundered, losing her perch. Before she had her bearings, however, he had her back flat on the table, the spoon and empty bowl clattering to the floor in the wake of his sweeping hand.

  He came between her dangling legs, covering her, suspended on his elbows, kisses rampant again.

  This time her clothing was no barrier. His fingers hooked over the top edge of her stays and yanked them low with the linen of her shift. Her breasts freed now to neither darkness nor the concealing press of mattress made her cheeks flush. Vane hadn’t seen her bare, despite where his hands and everything else had gone in the black of unlit night.

  As he bent to the feast, her hand rose without thought to the right side of his face.

  Her wrist whipped overhead, pinned to the tabletop by his gripping hand before she managed the barest brush of flesh. A warning rumbled in his chest: he didn’t want to be touched there.

  His mouth sampled every bit of flesh except the twin, pink buds, and they hardened, shameless in their straining for inclusion. As he teased, the fingers of his restraining hand twined together with hers; a reassurance. It was quite possible Emmat had soaked through her shift.

  She still had a free hand and used it to test a notion, bringing it to the undamaged left side of his face.

  He let it stay.

  Her fingers slid through his hair, lingering at the back of his head.

  Hot and wet, he took the first nipple.

  “Oh God!”

  It should not have felt this way. The deliberate suckling should not have made her spine curve, her knees bend and her feet want to hook around his thighs. It should not have had her hand fisting in his hair to hold him to her breast, but Hell’s teeth, it surely did.

  The second rosy tip received the same hungry attention. Emmat found her hips rolling with unabashed need against the man wedging her apart atop the table. Fabric rasped over her swollen sex. Rasped, and rasped some more.

  Vane was pulling her skirts out of the way.

  He let go her nipple with a wet smack and she heard wood grate over wood. His weight lifted from her. She sucked in air as the pressure on her chest abated, damp flesh exposed and cooling. When she raised her head, she saw him sit. Saw him lower his face.

  “Vane!”

  His mouth turned her wrong side out.

  It was a sweet, escalating madness he wrought, destroying her with every liquid pass of his tongue, every unavoidable pull of his lips. When he had her writhing, muttering nonsense, his fingers came to join in her undoing.

  Emmat’s backside lifted off the table when he curled them inside her. Her throat loosed an animal cry, head tilted back, when he latched onto her most sensitive pearl of flesh, tongue flickering, circling. Rough hands and a relentless mouth shaped her into a gasping, craven thing.

  He did something with his hand. There was pressure, a tapping.

  “Vane, I—”

  There it was, resonant like the single metallic clang of a bell. Her eyes had reached the limit to which they could roll back into her head.

  “Oh my—!”

  The rest was lost in her orgasm. Her lungs seized up, her body clamped down, and the hangman dragged her pulsing and jerking over the edge. If only it could be enough.

  The moment her vision swam into focus, Emmat was rabid.

  “Husband,” she said, voice ragged as wet fingers slid from her. “Husband, please.”

  There was no need to elaborate. There was no need to ask him twice. He was on his feet, tearing at his breeches, spreading her again with his hips.

  Warm, heavy cock lay along her furrow, slick in a moment from the proof of her desire. A nudge became a push and Vane was inside.

  Sort of.

  She made a face. The table was too short. He felt it, as well.

  With a growl, he had her gathered up, an arm at her waist, another under her bottom, ready prick grinding between them as he sent the chair toppling and backed them towards the bed.

  To Emmat’s surprise, he came down on his back, pulling her astride his hips. Questions be damned, she gathered away the layers of fabric that had shifted during their move and joined them again, raking her soaking folds over his length. When she lifted herself on her knees, his cock sprang up beneath her in perfect alignment, so that she only had to—

  “Emmat!”

  She slid down in a rush, the reins of friction loosed by wet anticipation.

  Dear and holy Lord!

  She was full. Packed to the quivering edge. With him. With Bartholomew Vane, the executioner. With her husband.

  Her cheeks flexed, body ground forward, drawing him out before sinking back to take him in again. His hands came to her hips, thumbs curling in over the bones, gripping, stilling her. She saw him drawing deep breaths through his nose, eyes wide and serious. Emmat was not the only one overwhelmed.

  An intense moment of heated staring, and then his hands rose to her waist, her ribs.

  “Come here.”

  She bent to him, lowering herself to her elbows, meeting him with a kiss made of surrender and want. He piled up handfuls of skirts and shift over her lower back, exposing them to the free air. There were palms, splayed fingers gathering her backside in handfuls, spreading her wide.

  He began to fuck.

  There was no one else to see, but Emmat revelled in the way he had her parted, open for the spearing of his cock, on display, denial of what they did impossible.

  His forearms settled at the small of her back, crushing them together. Her noises of encouragement got lost in his mouth as he worked himself in and out, knees slipping further apart in her loss of control.

  “Please,” she said, turning her head to get her words around their kiss. “Please, I need you.”

  “You have me.” His response was hot at her ear as he pumped, squeezing her tighter at the waist. “By God, do you have me.”

  The sentiment clutched at something in her chest, but her greed spoke aloud.

  “I need you on top of me.”

  She shoved herself up on her hands, checking his face for understanding.

  He understood.

  In a breath she was flat on her back, mattress prickling away, Vane nudging again for entry.

  “Take this off.” She plucked at the front of his shirt.

  One impatient hand reached back to haul the coarse linen over his head. Emmat yanked the sleeves down his arms and he drew out of them, repositioning himself even as she threw the garment to the floor.

  He pushed a gasp out of her as he thrust home, hilting himself into the clutch of her heat. The dovetailing of their bodies assaulted Emmat with an impossible perfection and, for a moment, she was still.

  Vane had topped her before, but only in the dark. Now the lamplight wavered over the muscle of his chest, his shoulders. It brought her the angle of his jaw, the line of his mouth. The violent path of flames past spilled down over his collarbone and onto the upper half of his left arm. His grey eye waited for judgement, but she could find none.

  What she couldn’t do was keep her hands off him. Neck, chest, back; Emmat didn’t care. Her fingers caressed and accepted, and her new husband had her, willing and free.

  His hips found some rhythm only he understood and he set about relieving her of her sanity. For long moments he would fill her by slow, tortuous inches, only to have her squirming, whimpering, before he’d loose whatever demons he kept in check and begin driving into her with a savage will.

  Insatiable, Emmat got her hands beneath the waist of his breeches and pushed them low, past the flex of his backside. Muscle bunched under her palms, delivering that perfect cock to her depths, filling her with the irrational truth that two
and one could be the same.

  It was his turn to come to his elbows, grinding into her even as her booted heels had to be making marks on the backs of his thighs.

  A thumb slid over her lower lip, dipping below her chin. Vane’s hand trailed the moving column of her throat and he pinned her, this time with the excruciating honesty of his eyes.

  “Emmat,” he said, riding slow. “I… just…”

  She held him close with her legs crushing their intimacy against itself, her heart beating a mad and bloody song within her breast.

  The fear of his own words seemed to choke him then, as he dropped to her neck, kissing, sucking.

  If he’s afraid of it, what does that make you?

  “So lovely,” he was muttering into the crook of her shoulder. “So, so lovely, Emmat.”

  There was no time for introspection. His right hand found the back of her knee, hoisting it and dragging her closer still. There was less distance to his thrusts and his breath came quick.

  The new angle ground them together, wet, sensitive flesh working against muscle and bone to restrict the hum of her pleasure down to a focused, keening note.

  “Please, Vane.”

  She struggled to stay in the current, her body straining. If he could just—

  “I can’t,” he said to the side of her face. “ ’S too much.”

  The drag, the friction. Emmat felt it.

  “You can! You just need to— Yes!”

  She convulsed around him, somehow clamping down and bursting open at the same time. For such a frenzy, it was as if each contraction winked past in a diurnal pulse. When the blood ceased its rush in her ears, the hangman was repeating her name.

  “Emmat,” he said, the rocky tumble of his words ground smooth for her alone. “Emmat, will you …”

  “Mmm?” She tried to rouse him from his distraction, but she was plenty distracted herself.

  “Dear God!” His arms and chest tightened. “Will you have me, Emmat?”

  It was a question made for kicking down doors.

  “I’ll have you, husband.” The answer came hot with conviction. “I’ll have you.”

  His cock plunged home. Whatever he tried to say next was lost in some animal snarl of completion. Her kisses peppered his neck, his collarbone. Hot seed filled her hidden places; the places only her broken executioner could touch.

  When they slowed from the grip of delirium, they were a pair of beings, changed. They’d come to the reckoning as hangman and thief, but found themselves bound in it, husband and wife.

  Why, then, as the haze of euphoria settled, did Emmat feel as though she waded through a sort of dream? The sort where something faceless and dreadful gives chase, her limbs mired in sucking mud as it twisted nearer.

  Why, oh why, for all the blissful distance they’d come, was the notorious Red Bird terrified?

  * * * *

  They lay entwined, the lamp and fire doused, the covers drawn up, the new reality a salve, mending wounds. He brushed her brow with a kiss.

  “I’ll be gone near a fortnight this time,” he said, shifting the arm he had draped over her hip.

  Emmat adjusted the tangle of their legs and spoke into the warm pocket of air she’d grown between her face and his throat. “Then wake me, will you? No more slipping out before dawn.”

  She felt him nod against the top of her head.

  “Will what the chaplain brought you be enough?”

  “It will.”

  Their voices were quiet. The earlier storm had left them exhausted, spent.

  “Is there anything I might bring? When I return?”

  Emmat surveyed her mind, which was fast tumbling towards sleep. The days spent alone in his absence had driven her nearly mad with boredom. It was not a life she knew how to manage.

  “Things to write with, I suppose. Or things to read, if they can be managed.”

  He huffed a chuckle into her hair. “Thieves read?”

  “This one does,” she said ignoring his needling.

  What else? What else? Anything?

  “A hen or two, perhaps, and we can have eggs. And a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Hay barn’s full of mice,” she said, drifting already.

  “Mmm. I’ll see what can be had.”

  Her thoughts blurred as the slow rhythm of his breath, his heartbeat, seduced her away from coherence. It was all so domestic. Eggs. A house. A husband.

  The comfort was unfamiliar, yet almost irresistible in its call. But somewhere, somewhere, Emmat thought she heard a key rasping in a lock, the bars of a prison closing in at her back. Freedom grinned with wicked teeth, its price concealed away in a fist, promising ease if only she would please step right this way.

  The way was black, and Emmat slept.

  * * * *

  Bartholomew Vane swung from the saddle of the borrowed gelding, not bothering yet to unhitch the cart. The sun warmed the tip of his nose, his cheeks, as he went unhooded in the daylight, the eye patch his only concession to the ghastly work of the flames.

  He fixed his intention on the door to the stone house and didn’t know whether to grin or grimace in fear. The hangman fished from a pocket what was probably the thinnest, plainest gold ring in the whole of England. He had no intention of telling her how he’d come by it.

  It’s time to act as a man again, Vane.

  Indeed, it was time to do a great many things more respectably. That the fiery thief had accepted a hangman was more than enough to ask of any woman. The two hens clucked away in their cage in the back of the cart.

  The smile won out.

  He inhaled and went to the door, swung it into the house.

  “I’ve come back sooner than I thought, Emmat,” he said, pleased with the surprise he’d been able to contrive. His eye adjusted to the dim light in the little room.

  “Emmat?”

  The stillness was immediate, the certainty final.

  It might have been something in the quality of the air that told him. Something flat, lifeless. There was no need to go and look again outside. The ring became a dread anchor in his palm.

  He’d showed his face. He’d dared to imagine it could be some other way. It had bought him, for his troubles, the very same measure as it had the first time, years ago.

  She was gone.

  Emmat Bird, his impossible, lovely wife was gone.

  He wanted to watch it burn to the ground again. Only this time, he’d set the fire himself.

  Part 5

  Hangman, Hangman, Upon Your Face a Smile

  The itch.

  The itch had got to her. No more than two days after Vane’s departure. The four stone walls crowding in, the silence of the countryside in his absence. An unbreakable tether circling tighter at her ankle; a single word.

  Wife.

  Emmat shuddered.

  The morning he set out again on his circuit, he’d left the dagger he’d taken from her on the table as a sign of the mending between them. It belonged to her. It had been hers in the first place. It was hers when she took it up again and fled, dashing Vane’s fragile new trust into a thousand tiny pieces as she went.

  This itch was simply too great. It probably made her a horrible person, like a great many other things, but it wouldn’t be still. It clawed and pestered and whispered away in her ear that this was no sort of freedom—accepting, ravenous kisses or no. No sort of freedom, at all.

  It was this feeling of dread that caused her to be here, miles and miles from the lonely house, approaching the oily, flickering windows of possibly the most disreputable alehouse in three counties. It didn’t even have a sign over the door. The surrounding night whispered unhelpful reminders of Vane demanding she “douse that bloody lamp”.

  The distance a body could cover on foot, if one had a will, was quite impressive. And if one had a horse? Emmat grimaced. What was one more theft?

  She could tumble in a bed, call out a name, feel warm under the caress of sweet words from a man wh
ose years had been bitter. She could even begin to feel …

  But none of it mattered. These things were not the whole of a life. A single room, a man who left her alone at least four days out of five. Years of coming and going as she pleased, answering to no one’s preferences save her own, had her pulling at the bonds of marriage despite the man to which they held her.

  A man who, once the layers of secrecy fell away, had turned out to be quite proficient at scorching her to the bone in a way no other had before him.

  “Bah!” She dashed the thought away aloud, butting the pub’s ill-fitted door open with the heels of her palms. So a man cared for her. Then what? It would not be enough to fill every hour in the day.

  “Well if it isn’t our Miss Red!” came the brassy voice from across the room as soon as she ducked into the greasy lamplight. “And in a dress like a proper lady, d’ye see, Worrall?”

  “Bugger off, Pyke.” She tossed him a rude look.

  The proprietor—and self-styled purveyor of wit, or so he imagined—lounged on a long bench, the heels of his worn-out shoes resting crossed atop the adjacent table, his shoulders leaning against the wall. Smoke curled from a pipe he’d been gesturing with, and Emmat wondered what scheme he’d managed this time to get him money for such things as tobacco.

  “We thought ye was in London, Red,” said Roger Pyke, retracting his legs from the table top as she took her own usual seat next to the stairwell.

  “And why would you think that, Pyke? Worrall.” She nodded acknowledgement to the leathery rope of a man the proprietor had brought into his taunts. Francis Worrall was no thief, but his addiction to dice meant he enjoyed his cups well away from anywhere frequented by people he owed money.

  “Well, that scrawny brother of yers was in here not much more than a week past,” Pyke said. “Told us ye’d sent him for the Henley take. Said he was going to meet you with it in London.”

  “Did he, now?” Emmat asked the question more to herself than either one of the men present.

  Bloody Peter. There’s that tidy sum gone, then.

  “Miss Margery!” Pyke hollered into the stale space of the common room. A spare-looking woman, perhaps just north of twenty, banged in through the kitchen door, blonde hair hanging in wisps, gaunt cheeks ruddy from the heat of the back room.