“Duncan,” he corrected her. “My name is Duncan Fitzhugh.”
She swiftly tore the petticoat into strips, then seated herself next to him to apply her handiwork. “Well, Duncan Fitzhugh, if you don’t take this seriously, you will shortly be the late Duncan Fitzhugh.”
He watched as her fingers worked swiftly, capably. She’d done this before, he thought, and often. “You do this well.”
Beth continued binding his wound, taking care to make the bandage just tight enough to stem the flow, but not so tight as to cut it off completely. “I’ve had practice.”
How did a young woman become versed in bandaging wounds? “Men dueling over your favors?”
She raised her eyes for a moment. “No, I’ve shot men who have been after my favors, then felt moved to prevent them from bleeding to death, much like you.”
Duncan laughed at her serious tone, then groaned as pain seared through his shoulder.
“Be still, sir, or it’ll go hard on you.” He had no sense at all, she thought, with a shake of her head. She inspected her work. “There, that’ll have to do until I take the bullet out.”
“You—?” He drew his brows together. The closest he’d come to being ministered to was by Samuel. The man, his mentor and surrogate father from his street urchin days, after his mother had died, lived in the manor with him now and was originally a barber by trade.
She didn’t know whether to be insulted or amused by the astonished expression on his face.
“Me,” she replied. “I will have to get you to your home. A shot of whisky might help the pain.”
“A shot of you might do the same,” he guessed. This one would be an adventure, he’d wager. An adventure on a path he would like to explore.
Before she could respond, a bloodcurdling scream echoed just beyond the coach. It jarred Beth’s very bones.
Duncan looked startled. The cry sounded as if it was only half human.
“That would be Sylvia,” Beth told him with a sigh. Poor thing had probably awakened befuddled to see the carnage about her. “Sylvia,” Beth called over her shoulder, her voice stern. “Calm yourself. It’s all right. I’m in the coach.”
The next moment, there was the sound of clawing at the door, sounds made by a frightened animal seeking to escape. Beth opened the door and looked at Sylvia’s face. It was paler than a sheet.
The shock she felt intensified when Sylvia saw Duncan lying sprawled on the seat. Her breath hitched in her throat as she tried to speak. Sylvia pointed behind her, her hands shaking.
“There are—there are—“
Very deliberately, Beth bracketed the woman’s wide shoulders between her hands. She spoke in a measured cadence to calm Sylvia down.
“Yes, I know what ‘there are.’ They’re both dead. This one,” Beth nodded toward Duncan, “is obviously not. Bleeding like a stuck pig, he insists on behaving like a rutting one instead.”
Duncan felt himself sinking and fought against slipping away into a numbing darkness. He hadn’t the strength to sit up. With a sigh, he resigned himself to his position for the moment. “You wound me, mistress.”
“Not I. ’Twas the highwayman’s sights you were in, not mine,” she said pointedly.
It was not wasted on Duncan. He smiled. “It is ‘mistress,’ isn’t it, and not ‘madam’?”
The man’s nerve staggered her. Here he was, bleeding badly, a bullet lodged in his arm, and rather than think of his wound, he had attached his thoughts to that part of his anatomy that was, in all likelihood, less than useful at the moment.
Sylvia was quick to stop her when Beth opened her mouth to reply. “Don’t tell him anything, Beth.”
“Beth, is it?” Her name was Beth. It was a beginning, Duncan thought.
She was far from afraid of a wounded man. One well-placed blow would leave him unconscious. Beth saw no harm in answering his question. ‘To satisfy your curiosity, it is Elizabeth Beaulieu. Mistress Beaulieu.”
The smile was arrogant and cut to the heart of her, mocking her bold stand. “That only whets my appetite.”
Beth glanced outside. The rain, once again, was abating. It seemed as if it would continue this way indefinitely, surging and retreating like a band of marauding Indians.
“I was speaking of your curiosity, not your appetites, sir.”
“ ‘Duncan,’ “ he urged, wanting to hear his name on her tongue.
“Sir,” Beth repeated obstinately. “All right, I’ve done what I can with you at the moment.” She needed fresh water, preferably boiled, and fresh bandages, as well as a knife to remove the bullet with. “Did you say you lived somewhere close by?”
“Yes.” He was going to lose consciousness, Duncan thought with growing alarm. He gripped it tightly, like a beggar his only coin.
He was growing pale, Beth observed. The ball had to come out. And she needed poultices before a fever began to claim him. She leaned closer to him. “Where?”
His voice was growing faint and he cursed himself for it. “Three miles from here, due east.”
“East?” Sylvia bleated, as she peered out of the coach. Directions were all one and the same to her. Despair began to grow. All was lost. The driver was dead, and the only man who could help them looked as if he was going to die at any moment.
The poor, silly goose, Beth thought. She would have been infinitely happier at home, talking to her pets, tending to her garden.
“I know which way east is, Sylvia,” she assured her gently.
“Somehow, I knew you would,” Duncan breathed, his world shrinking quickly to a small, rounded spot.
“But how will we get there?” Sylvia wailed. She caught herself, knowing she was whining. But her look implored Beth for reassurance. “He can’t drive us, and the driver is—“ She covered her mouth suddenly as her stomach rose to her mouth.
“The driver is past helping us,” Beth agreed. She bit her lip. The last thing she wanted to do was leave the man out here. It wouldn’t be right. He would be fodder for animals. She motioned Sylvia out of the coach. “Since you’re awake, you can help me with him.”
Sylvia nearly stumbled as she climbed out. “Help you do what with him?”
“Get him into the coach.”
Sylvia’s eyes grew large as she shrank back against the side of the coach. It was slippery with rain. “But he’s—“
She wasn’t getting anywhere by coddling the woman. Beth took a sterner tone.
“—Most likely a Christian who deserves a decent burial. I can’t bury him here. I’ve no tools to do it with. But perhaps he has a family, people who need to mourn him and place him in his final resting place.” Please God, she thought, don’t let it be that way with Father. “At any rate, we can get him to Mr. Fitzhugh’s house. Once there, someone can contact the proper authorities about this and our consciences will be clear.”
Sylvia knew it was useless to say that her conscience was clear now. She glanced toward the driver. The man was dirty, bleeding, and dead. She cared for none of that, least of all the last. In her heart, Sylvia bewailed the timidity which had prevented her from resisting Dorothy Beaulieu’s request to accompany her eldest on this journey. Much as she loved Elizabeth, Sylvia had no illusions as to her influence over the young girl. Traveling with her would only bring one chaotic disaster after another.
Tiny black eyes looked at the young girl in supplication. “But how—?”
Beth could only shake her head. Sylvia was always defeated before she ever began. “Between us, we can do this, Sylvia.” She stared at the dark haired, faint-hearted woman as if willing some of her own determination into her. “Now.”
The last thing Duncan remembered thinking was that, wounded or not, he shouldn’t just be lying here. He was a man and Beth was just a wisp of a thing, though she possessed a tongue as sharp as any cat o’nine tails. He should get up and help the headstrong little vixen before she hurt herself dragging the driver to the coach.
Duncan got as far as reaching for
the coach door before darkness slipped over him again. It consumed him.
“Damn,” he muttered, as he pitched into blackness.
Chapter Five
Getting the driver into the coach proved to be a far more arduous endeavor than bringing Duncan to the same destination. The other man was built like a barrel; because he was dead, he was about as maneuverable as one filled with lead. There was no way they could carry the man between them. Though it seemed irreverent, Beth finally resorted to dragging the driver by his feet until she reached the coach.
Uttering a cry low in the back of her throat, Beth managed to right him and pushed him into the coach, but his lower body still dangled without. She circled the coach and climbed in from the other side. Grasping his hands, she struggled to get him completely inside. It was as if she were pitting herself against a boulder.
“Push, Sylvia,” she growled at the inert woman. “For pity’s sake, push. He can’t feel you doing it!”
Hesitantly, moaning under her breath, Sylvia laid her hands on the man’s posterior and pushed as Beth had instructed her.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Sylvia clucked, shutting her eyes more against the immodesty of the act than against the rain that was falling with renewed vengeance.
“It seems less right to leave him here in the mud,” Beth pointed out as she struggled.
There. Done.
Sylvia looked over her shoulder at the last body on ground. She shuddered. “Are we taking that one with us, too?”
Still squatting beside the body within the coach, Beth rested a moment before getting down to join Sylvia. She shook her head.
“No, that one deserves to lie and rot here until Saint Peter comes looking for him.”
“Lucifer would be more the way of it,” Sylvia pronounced.
Beth shrugged. “Whomever.” Shielding her eyes, she looked up at the sky. There was no sign that the rain was going to relent today. “We’d best be on our way quickly.” She nodded toward the highwayman. “He might have had confederates.”
Sylvia hadn’t thought of that. She drew closer to Beth, then turned to board the coach. She stopped abruptly, a fresh dilemma presenting itself to her. Both feet on the ground once more, she turned toward Beth and bleated, “But where’m I to sit?”
Beth saw no problem. She gestured toward the interior of the coach. “The other bench is empty.”
She looked around for Duncan’s horse. It was still standing where he had left it. The horse was well trained, she thought. With slow, measured steps, she approached it, holding her hand out. When he didn’t back away, she stroked the fine, silken muzzle.
“Oh, you’re a handsome one, you are.” Taking his reins, she led the stallion to the back of the coach and tied him to it. She had no intention of leaving the animal out here. In all likelihood, the horse was probably the only thing Duncan owned.
Sylvia shadowed Beth’s steps, taking three for each of Beth’s. To a distant observer it would have appeared to be a nervous little dance.
“In there?” She pointed behind her. “You want me to ride with a dead man and a scoundrel?”
Beth tested the reins to assure herself that they were securely fastened. Satisfied, she rounded the coach and looked inside. Duncan was still unconscious. It was better that way; less pain for him. Sylvia tugged on her arm for her attention.
“That scoundrel,” Beth reminded Sylvia, “saved our lives.”
Sylvia remained unconvinced. She had lived twenty more years than Beth and had seen much of man’s lasciviousness. It had never, of course, been directed at her, but she was aware of its existence nonetheless. She pursed her lips. “For himself, no doubt.”
Beth gathered up the horses’ reins. “He’s badly wounded, Sylvia. He can do you no harm.”
That was the trouble with this child, Sylvia thought mournfully. Elizabeth knew nothing of the wicked world. A man could always find a way to have his way with a woman. Sylvia raised her chin.
“Any man can do you harm.”
There was no time to stand and argue. Beth shrugged. “Fine, then you can ride with me.” She placed a hand on the coach wheel to steady herself as she judged the distance to the top.
Sylvia watched her young charge wide-eyed. “You’re driving the coach?”
She said the words in the same tone she would have employed questioning Beth’s sanity if Beth had announced that she was going to throw herself from the Liberty Bell tower in Philadelphia and fly.
Poor Sylvia, such a mouse. “The coach cannot drive itself, and the horses don’t know the way.”
Wrapping the reins around her hand, Beth hiked up her skirts and placed a foot on the first step. The horse closest to her snorted, moving slightly. The coach shuddered as Sylvia squealed, prepared for the worst. Beth held fast and gained the top.
Sylvia released the breath she’d been holding, amazed that Beth hadn’t fallen and injured herself. Agility of this sort, like a common cat’s, wasn’t seemly. Didn’t the girl see that? As for her suggestion, that, of course, was preposterous!
She attempted to reason with her, knowing it was hopeless. The girl was as headstrong as a wayward mule. “But it isn’t seemly for a young woman to be driving a coach like some common peasant.”
Images and illusions had never been important to Beth. “Neither is remaining here, shivering in the rain helplessly while he bleeds to death,” she nodded toward the interior of the coach, “and we catch our death of cold.” Bracing her foot against the brake, she balanced the reins in her hand and then looked down at Sylvia. The woman remained stolidly stationary. “Well?”
There was no response. Neither choice was good. Sylvia looked from one unsatisfactory place to the other as she wrung her hands.
Though she had vowed to be patient with the woman, Beth felt that Sylvia had well exceeded her allowance for the situation.
“Sylvia, we haven’t all day, and the rain is beginning to fall heavily again.”
Still the heavyset woman remained where she stood, her face a mask of indecision. “I—“
Beth had had enough of this foolishness. “Get in the coach.”
Distress at the notion of being in a confined area with a dead man seized her. Religious to a fault, Sylvia still believed in the existence of ghosts.
“But—“
Beth gripped the reins. “Now! Or I swear I shall leave you here.”
Horror stamped its imprint on the round face. “You wouldn’t.”
No, she wouldn’t, even though she was sorely tempted. But Beth was secure in the knowledge that Sylvia was too fearful to risk the chance. Beth raised the whip in her hand as if to snap it over the horses’ heads. She looked down at Sylvia one last time.
“All right, all right, all right,” Sylvia cried. As if a pack of wild animals were snapping at her heels, she scrambled into the coach. Fear thickened her throat as her eyes bounced from the dead man on the floor to Duncan and back again. “But your mother shall hear of this. This I swear to you upon my immortal soul.”
Beth was counting on it. “Fine. Then perhaps the next time I need to make a long journey, my mother will refrain from sending you with me.” She glanced down to make certain that Sylvia had closed the door.
Sylvia dug her wide fingers into the coach door, holding on for dear life. “Nothing could please me more.”
Beth snapped the whip and the horses were off. “And neither me.”
With a quick forward lunge they were off, heading due east.
Duncan had been drifting in and out of a dark, formless world. He was aware of a body being deposited into the coach and of a faint buzzing about his head that turned into a caterwauling. He opened his eyes just as Sylvia was struggling into the coach.
“She’s a virago, isn’t she?” His eyes drifted toward the ceiling.
Smarting at being ordered about by a mere chit of a girl, angry at the indignities she had been forced to suffer, Sylvia sniffed.
“A hellcat from the day she was b
orn, they tell me.” It suddenly occurred to Sylvia who she was addressing. She shrank into her seat, not an easy matter, given her girth. “Keep your distance, sir.”
He couldn’t have risen up if the coach had been on fire. Her order struck him as humorous. “Your wish is but my humble command, madam.”
“Mistress,” she corrected primly.
“I rather thought that,” Duncan muttered softly, a moment before he slipped away again.
Samuel ran his hand through his hair, causing a ripple in the thick, silver mane. There was no getting away from it, he thought, as he paced about the small tower room. Old age was besetting him. Together with unnecessary, unwanted aches along his lanky, thin-boned body had come a change in temperament.
He had transformed into a worrier.
Fifteen years ago, this would not have transpired. He’d been too full of life to worry about its possible ramifications. Where once nothing had concerned him except the next meal, the next full wind, and the next wench, and not always in that order, now concern would gnaw at him with the annoying persistence of a galley rat.
It was Duncan’s fault, all of it. Nothing but Duncan’s fault. Duncan had been the one who’d taken him away from his element, taken all of them away. For Duncan had been the leader since before the time he had reached full manhood.
Samuel sighed. The rain increased the ache in his bones, fouling his mood further.
It had been too long since they’d been at sea, living by their wits, their fates in the hands of Neptune, he mourned. He ran his hand lovingly along the smooth, cylindrical spyglass as if it were the long, supple limb of a willing woman.
Much too long.
The land did things to a man. It civilized him, for one. The very word left a bad taste in Samuel’s mouth. The land made a man think of things such as harvests and tax collection. On the sea, the only harvest was one they’d reap from another ship and the only tax collector was fate, not some flesh-and-blood man with too much kidney pie and spirits in his belly.
Moonlight Surrender (Moonlight Book 3) Page 4