He lurched as Charity kicked at him.
“Hold there!” cried Jan, giving Charity a rough jerk. “We could put leg irons on her at the forge.”
“Ah, but we might injure her ankles and the patroon would not like that,” said Jochem, speaking with slow deliberation as his hand again began its quest about her lower hips. Charity struggled and gave him a venomous look. He spat and added, “Suppose the patroon has a change of heart? He would not then want her to be marked. She’s a fine-looking wench and may yet come to her senses and obey him.”
“What then?” demanded Jan impatiently.
“I know a better way,” said Jochem.
He passed a heavy chain around Charity’s neck, ran it over to the wall and secured one end to a great iron ring. Then he took the other end of the chain, now looped lightly around Charity’s neck, and ran it through a ring in the opposite wall. “Will you fasten this for me, Jan, when I say it’s tight enough?” he asked, returning to Charity, who stood stiff and tense. “Now sit you down on the floor,” he said, pushing her down ignominiously. Working the chain around her neck, he pulled it sufficiently taut so that if she tried to maneuver her head to free herself she cut off her breathing entirely. She knew she would not be able to stand or to lie down, because the chain became unbearably tight if she moved. She could but sit on the earthen floor, feeling the weight of the heavy chain around her neck press down wearingly into her soft flesh.
“Tight enough?” growled Jan.
“Almost.” Jochem bent over her, ostensibly to adjust the chain, but actually to keep it so taut that she could not speak. While her hands tugged at it in agony, he explored her breasts, pawing, pinching. Charity writhed, feeling her senses begin to leave her as the chain tightened. Finally, Jochem loosened it a little and said, “There, that’ll do.” She began to cough and still could not speak when they left her. As she heard the sound of a heavy key turning in the lock, she gave a sob and tried to move. Instantly the chain bit into her throat. She realized that she must stay awake to live. If her head sagged too far her breath would be cut off and she would surely suffocate.
She swallowed and coughed again—this time not from being half strangled but because she had caught cold lying on the damp ground while Pieter had his way with her. Soon her body was wracked with coughing, and every cough sent a pain through her throat as the chain constricted around it and threatened to strangle her.
When the paroxysm was over she sat weakly blinking and gulping in air. A roll of thunder startled her and she jumped and groaned as the chain tightened punishingly around her white throat.
There was going to be a storm. . . . She looked up at the light showing through the chinks in the roof overhead. When the rain broke, she would be drenched, sitting there immobilized on the damp ground. She began to shiver. But after a while she stopped shivering and started to feel hot. She wiped her face with the skirt of her dress and tried holding the heavy chain in both hands so that they would not choke her when the paroxysms of coughing came.
Time passed. Sometimes she heard voices outside but no one came near her. Through the roof chinks the murky gray from the overcast sky deepened as night came. They were going to leave her here ... all night.
She shivered again. She was very cold. They had not left her a blanket or a shawl. She presumed that was part of the patroon’s punishment—no food, no warmth, no comfort. Just to sit here on the cold floor through the night—a floor that would soon be wet when the rain began coming in through the roof—and contemplate submission to him.
She was damned if she would submit! Better to die!
She moved against the chain with violence and the resultant pain drew a moan from her inflamed and aching throat.
The thunder boomed again. And then again.
The long rolls of thunder that resounded from hill to hill made the blockhouse seem to be under cannonade, and the small scurrying noises that might be rats sent a black fear through her. During that time of rage and terror, her will hardened and Charity became a woman of stone, a woman with a dark hatred of men and all their works.
If she got out of there, she promised herself vengefully between groaning and coughing, if she got out alive, she would use men as evilly as they had used her! She would exact her own payment from the world of men, if she were ever released from this foul prison.
She fought to keep from fainting, for to faint was to die. If she sagged against those chains in her weariness, her rasping breath would be instantly cut off.
She managed to straighten up once again. Doubtless Killian was sitting comfortably at dinner now, beside a submissive Annjanette, while his wife lay listlessly upstairs. Doubtless he was enjoying his food, his wine, contemplating her plight alone in the blockhouse with grim amusement.
And Pieter, who had pretended to love her so desperately, and who was now proceeding happily downriver on his way to his betrothed in Amsterdam, had left her to this!
Indignation warmed her for the moment, and her back straightened in fury so that she did not sag so painfully against the chains.
As the hours wore on and darkness came, the chinks in the roof were hardly lighter than the dark interior of the blockhouse. Strange noises floated in and out of the blackness surrounding her. Then she heard something strike the door, and she shrank back in terror. The wind again, throwing a branch against it, she told herself. A token of the coming storm. No, this time there were voices, too, and the scrape of metal.
One voice she recognized as Annjanette’s saying furiously, “I tell you it is the key. I took it from the patroon’s room myself!” Then, “If you implicate me in this, Jochem, I will drag you down with me!” And an answer she could not catch.
As the door swung wide, Charity stared wild-eyed at the dark shapes of her rescuers.
Annjanette stumbled toward her. “Do not think I do this for love of you, Charity,” she said in a hard voice. “I do it only to get you gone. Killian looks at you too ... often.”
“No matter why you do it, Annjanette, I thank you,” croaked Charity. “But—what about this chain?”
“Jochem will strike it off,” said Annjanette coldly. “Then you may make your way upriver or down—to the devil, for all I care. Hurry, Jochem, before I am missed.”
Jochem, who had brushed by Charity, hammer in hand, now stood by the wall. “I am waiting for the next thunderclap,” he said impassively. ‘“Then the noise will not be marked from the house.”
Charity closed her eyes and tried to swallow. Jochem was holding the chain against the wall too tightly for that. Dizzily, she prayed for thunder and in a moment her prayers were answered when a flash of blue lightning illuminated the scene. Then Jochem brought his hammer down upon the ring to set her free. Charity rubbed her bruised throat, unable for the moment to speak.
“I have only this advice for you,” said Annjanette threateningly, as she pulled Charity to her feet. “And that is, get you gone. If you return to Daarkenwyck, Killian will wring the truth from you, and we will both die.”
Charity nodded dumbly.
“Out now,” said Annjanette. “I must lock this door before I leave. How you escaped will remain a mystery—they will say you were a witch.”
“Where will I go?” Charity croaked. “I have no money, no—”
“That is Jochem’s affair. He has a boat hidden.” Annjanette pushed them both out the door and struggled to lock it, but Jochem had to help her. Numb and weak, Charity leaned against the log wall for support.
“Why are you doing this, Jochem?” Charity asked, confused, when Annjanette had gone. “The patroon may kill you for it!”
“He’ll not be findin’ out,” he crowed, “because Mistress Annjanette had the chance to get the key which I had not—so he’ll not be lookin’ in my direction. Nor will he miss me tomorrow while I take you downriver, for he thinks I am off to check the bouweries. The patroon, he would not have let me have a boat. He would have me workin’ instead on repairin’ the buildings a
nd things what nets me no money. So I made a boat that he does not know of. And while he looks for you with dogs and men, beatin’ the brush for you, we’ll be floatin’ down the river in my boat. I have it hid now under yon clump of willows.” He nodded. A paroxysm of coughing wracked Charity.
“And what is your price for all this, Jochem?” she gasped, when she could speak again.
His eyes gleamed. “Ah, that I lay with you just like Pieter did—I saw you out here dancin’ naked on the grass!”
Charity flinched.
“My price is that ye lay with me this night and before dawn I’ll push us off in my boat, headin’ downstream and we’ll be gone from here before the sun is up.”
But her escape might be discovered before then. The patroon might drop in to see how she was enduring her confinement and find her gone. Then dogs and men would beat the bushes . . . and they would find them. She shivered.
“It’s cold and damp on the grass,” she objected.
“The blockhouse?” he suggested.
Charity shuddered. “I’m afraid to stay here lest I be discovered. Couldn’t we lie in your boat?”
He shrugged. “One place is as good as another.”
“Then let us go there,” said Charity. “It’s going to rain any minute and we’ll be drenched out here.”
He saw the logic of that. “There is a piece of canvas in the boat,” he said eagerly. “We could lie in the boat and pull that over us—twould keep out the rain.”
She nodded, coughing again. “Hurry then.” She took a step and had to put a hand on his arm for support. “The next lightning bolt will show us plainly to anyone who is looking out the windows.”
He looked apprehensively up toward the great house. “That’s true,” he muttered, and hurried her along the murky darkness until they reached the clump of willows by the bank. She was running, choking back a coughing fit, and when he stopped she bumped into him. He smiled at the contact of her soft body against him and reached out to fondle her. But she brushed him off irritably, saying the storm might break any minute, they had best get in the boat.
As if to underscore her words, there was another jagged flash of lightning, a long peal of thunder and the rain began. They were somewhat protected under the willows, but Jochem reached quickly for the rope that held the rowboat, tossed back the canvas that lay in it and gestured her inside.
Charity’s eyes lit on what she had been hoping for—an oar. She reached down and picked it up. “I can’t lie on this thing,” she cried fretfully. “It will break my back. Let’s leave it here on shore.” She turned as if to toss the oar away and brought it up hard against the side of the Dutchman’s head. All the hatred she felt for the patroon and his lying son, all the indignation that rose in her at what she had suffered at the hands of men, were focused in that sudden hard swing of the oar. As Jochem staggered, she swung it again, striking him in the forehead.
He went down like a stone on the muddy bank.
Charity collapsed, in a paroxysm of coughing, into the boat. After a while she got her breath and, struggling up weakly, she regarded the fallen man. In that fierce moment, she did not care if he was alive or dead. Her experiences at Daarkenwyck had hardened her. She remembered how cruelly tight Jochem had drawn the chain around her throat. No, she did not mind cheating Jochem of his evil sport with her. Doubtless the cold pelting rain would soon bring him around. She looked up at Daarkenwyck, whose lights she could see through the moving branches of the willows, and for an evil moment she hoped she had killed him, and only wished it had been the patroon instead.
With difficulty she untied the rope that held the boat and let it fall into the bottom. On the bank, Jochem groaned slightly. She did not look at him. She shoved at the bank and then at an overhanging branch with the oar, and the boat moved sluggishly out into the rain-pelted river. Between fits of coughing, she paddled until the current caught her. Then she huddled, stiff with cold, beneath the bit of canvas and let the current sweep her along.
Except for her earlier experience in the blockhouse, she had never felt so physically miserable as she did huddled there, wet and cramped and half frozen by the cold rain. She slept a little part of the night, and woke at dawn with a raging fever. The rain had stopped, but her boat had become entangled in some overhanging branches and was now firmly moored by them to the shore.
With trembling hands she worked frantically to free the boat from the entangling branches, stopping sometimes to wait for coughing fits that left her weak and dizzy to pass. How long had she slept there, trapped thus? she wondered uneasily. At last she was free of the branches and paddled weakly out into the mainstream again. Shivering in her wet clothes, she tossed the oar into the bottom of the boat, pushed back her long wet hair with weary fingers and tried to dry out the bit of canvas she had huddled under, against the dampness of the coming night.
For hours she drifted, sometimes sleeping in the bottom of the boat, sometimes using the paddle to bring the boat more centrally into the river. But mainly she slumped down and let the current sweep her along.
It was dangerous, she knew, traveling by daylight. But she also knew that her chills and fever were becoming worse, that there was a pain knifing through her chest when she coughed. She must get far away from Daarkenwyck as fast as she could, so she huddled beneath the canvas whenever she passed anything that looked like a human habitation and hoped anyone seeing the boat from shore would think it only a drifting rowboat that had come loose from its moorings.
The sun came out and dried her hair and her clothes—but she was hot with fever and parched with thirst. Reaching stiff fingers over the edge of the boat, she cupped her hand to bring up the clear cold river water. It revived her a little. She fell back and looked up at the hard bright sky.
Dizzily she sat up.
That odd configuration of trees over there, surely she had seen it before. Had she dreamed it? Now as she looked at that bit of shoreline it seemed to drift past her toward the south.
Toward the south! She was moving upstream! Back toward Daarkenwyck and its dread patroon!
In her fever and fright she had forgotten that this was the river the Algonquins called “the water that flows two ways.” The river current had been carrying her south, but now the tidal current was sweeping her back toward the north!
She glanced behind her, upriver. She could see something, just coming around the bend. Was it the patroon’s river sloop? It was, it was! It seemed pale gold in the distance behind her, but it had sails, while she had only oars to pit against this tide that drove her back upriver.
Perhaps they had not yet seen her. She must be a mere speck on the river compared to the big yellow sloop with its billowing white sails. She seized the oar and, dizzy and weak, paddled as hard as she could toward the western shore, which happened to be the nearest. Reaching it, she slid her boat beneath the overhanging branches of an enormous oak that grew close to the water’s edge. The vegetation was heavy there, and she was able to maneuver the rowboat out of the water, sliding it along the ground to wedge it firmly, with the last of her strength, between some young saplings. Well concealed by the leafy cover, she crouched down to watch the approach of the menacing yellow sloop.
Her heart pounded fiercely as it came nearer, but it stayed, she noted, near the opposite shore, sailing along quite briskly. She remembered vaguely Killian mentioning that the currents were uneven on different sides of the river. At least they had not seen her, for the sloop went on past, to disappear downstream.
Now she had another problem. If she moved on downstream, she might be running into Killian’s hands. If she reached New York, he might be waiting for her there, with big Jan scanning the river to greet her as she arrived. Or, at any time, the long yellow sloop might turn around and she would run into it coming back upstream.
She had not eaten for a long time, and saw nothing edible nearby. She realized that she was very weak and wracked by fever, yet she dared not try her luck upriver. Surely Killia
n van Daarken would have put the word out that his demented cousin had wandered away and must be returned to him. Men would consider it a good deed to return her to Daarkenwyck!
She shivered.
And heard a sound in the underbrush behind her.
The blood seemed to freeze in her veins. There were black bears in these woods, she knew, and wolves and mountain lions, as well as smaller deadly things—timber rattlesnakes and copperheads. She forced herself not to panic. Instead, she stood up to see what caused the noise.
It was a horse! Saddleless and bridleless, it was not too prepossessing an animal. It looked at her gravely and continued chewing some succulent grasses it had found at the river’s edge.
She looked about her. A horse! The perfect answer. She would ride him downriver, hiding whenever she saw boats. There must be berries and other things to eat along the way that would sustain her until she reached civilization.
She edged toward the horse, being careful not to frighten him, and spoke soothingly. He was quite tame and willing to let her approach. She came up and patted his head and he nuzzled her hand. Now she leaned against him weakly, gathering her strength.
Without protest, the horse let her pull herself up on his back and at her urging walked obediently downstream for a few yards. After that he veered off into the trees. She tried to turn him, but he would not turn. Stubbornly, he continued his jogging gait into the trees. She realized then that he was walking down one of the tiny paths that led through the forest—some Indian trail probably, winding through tamaracks and elms and flowering dogwood. She hoped desperately she would not end up in an Indian village and considered sliding off his back and going back to where she had hidden the boat.
But she had made her decision too late. They had crossed several other paths and she had got her directions confused. She might not be able to tell which path led to the river. Far better to be lost on horseback than afoot!
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