Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two

by Erinn Ellender Quinn

  He said so.

  She nearly dropped the things she’d bundled.

  She looked at him, her brilliant blue eyes wide as an owl’s. “Ye see him, then? Ye see him, too?” she asked, as if everybody didn’t.

  “Damned hard to ignore betimes,” he grumbled. “No offense.”

  The Captain surprised her—not the easiest thing to do, with the gifts she’d been given. Beth clutched the ritual tools she’d wrapped and wondered if he had any other abilities. If he could see one ghost, what else might he perceive? Doing what she had, performing her new moon ritual despite his insensate presence in the adjoining room, should she be worried?

  Possibly. Yet the vague threat she felt seemed from a source beyond these walls, rather from the Captain himself.

  Beth turned her attention to other, more immediate concerns, the first of which was Sophie, singing by the door, demanding her turn to void.

  “Coming, Sophie.” Beth let the fox out and left the door propped open, should her familiar choose to come back in rather than dash off through the orchard and into the woods, in search of something meatier than invalid fare.

  Food. Next on her list of things to do, now that her altar was cleared, hopefully with none the wiser.

  Back home, they still burned witches. The Captain might never know how much she risked last night, doing ritual here rather than in her secret place in the woods, witnessed only by the oak trees that could keep a secret, and the fox who was her familiar, and Herne, who would have missed her, although she was not certain he would have worried overmuch, forest spirit that he was.

  She promised to make it up to him. Today was June 9th, and summer solstice was coming. Twelve days and counting, Herne. I promise.

  The Captain would be well enough by then. He’d be up at the main house, ensconced in the master’s chambers, recovered enough to sit outside in the shade with a glass of lemon and honey water during the heat of the day. Well enough to rattle around the empty halls at night and rediscover his library, where he might just lose himself in books, enough to forget everything that he might or might not have seen here.

  Chapter Two

  Beth’s father, William Robert Gordon, came from a clan famous for their way with horses, and the Gordon blood flowed true in his veins. He had found his wife when a mare was ailing, and he’d sent for the local healer he’d heard about. Although Jannet Mercer arrived too late to save the horse, she’d left with his heart in her pocket and he’d never looked at another.

  Eventually, they found a way around family objections and were joined in marriage, raising six bairns past infancy, three boys, three girls. The youngest, they named Elsbeth, after Jannet’s favorite auntie.

  It was clear, early on, that Beth was a gifted child. She was a bright, happy baby who started talking before she was six months old. Thankfully her walking took a little longer, because once she got going, Jannet was hard put to keep up with her. Beth wanted to see everything, touch and feel and smell and taste whatever she could wrap her chubby little fingers about and gather to her heart. She was less interested in people than in animals, and the laird’s fine horses proved her favorite beasties. Her father thought that the way she touched them and talked to them, and the way they responded, it was almost as if they were conversing.

  One day, Beth was playing near the hearth while Jannet was bundling medicinal herbs to hang dry, and Auntie Elsbeth came to visit, wanting to finally see her namesake. Jannet directed her to the best chair for the task, with generous arms and a wide seat cushioned in flame-stitched fabric. Elsbeth settled herself in, and Jannet scooped up three-year-old Bethie and put her in her great-auntie’s lap.

  It was Beth’s first time experiencing her gift, her curse, of touching someone and knowing who they truly were, of feeling someone’s pain and seeing what had caused it.

  Beth didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand, not at three years of age. But her kind heart and her natural intuition led her to kiss her auntie’s wrinkled cheek and pat her hand like she’d seen her mother do when someone hurt. “It’s all right,” she told her, crying now, tears falling like a spring rain. “He willnae hurt ye.”

  The change in Elsbeth was immediate. She almost dropped Beth on the floor in her haste to get her off her lap and away from her.

  Jannet had seen what happened and rushed to Beth’s side. “Dearling? Why the tears?”

  “He hurt her,” cried Beth.

  “Who?”

  “Rob.”

  Jannet’s head snapped, and with one look at her auntie’s face, Elsbeth’s childhood shame was secret no more. Jannet read it in her face, in her eyes. Eyes that held the awful truth of what wee Beth had said, that Robert—her grandfather’s brother—had hurt her. It had forever been Elsbeth’s secret shame, and now Jannet knew, too.

  And Beth was right. Robert would hurt no little girl ever again. They’d buried him a year ago, a crotchety old man with few to mourn him and no one who missed him when he died.

  Jannet thought back to her own childhood, how Auntie Elsbeth had ever avoided Uncle Robert at family and clan gatherings, how she’d keep an eye on Jannet when Robert was near, how once she’d questioned her about how Robert had touched her when he’d taken her on his lap and held her. Elsbeth, remembering what had been done to her, was making sure he didn’t try anything with Jannet. Without Jannet’s knowing it, she’d been protecting her from what had happened to her.

  But for wee Bethie to feel it, it was beyond fathoming. There was no one in her family with the Gift, nothing to help Jannet understand how it worked, or what to do about it. When William came home from the laird’s stables, Jannet told him what had happened, and she learned then what she’d married into—that the women in his mother’s family tended to be something more. With that, he explained his mother’s objection to their marriage.

  His mother had thought it might be better for Jannet to hold out for another, not knowing how their children would be. The first five had Mother Gordon breathing easier. And then came Beth, gifted Bethie, old enough now, she was growing into her own.

  From then on, watching Beth was like watching a turtle, emerging when it was safe, taking refuge in the shell of herself when it wasn’t. Her gift with animals was her saving grace, and she spent more and more time fishing with her angler mother and helping her father breed horses.

  Beth had two older sisters and three older brothers, but she was close to none of them. Her sisters, with their first heartbreaks and girls’ yearnings, were too painful to be near. Beth managed better around her fun-loving brothers and their friends. “Wild child,” they called her, and she was, preferring to roam the moors or swim in the glen or dance in the moonlight, staying away from other people, rather than risk feeling them.

  Beth’s parents had their own problems, being Roman Catholic, and when the old laird died, her father was dismissed from service and left without any means to support the three of them left at home. With five children grown and gone and the situation becoming desperate, he prayed for a miracle.

  It came in the form of the agent of an Irish sea captain named Ian O’Manion, who needed someone to manage his horses in Maryland.

  The thought of sailing across the sea in close quarters with a hundred strangers panicked Beth, but she was seventeen and old enough to understand they had no choice. They could stay and starve or sail to a new life in the colonies, passage paid in exchange for seven years’ service, at the end of which they’d own their own piece of land and could raise their own horses.

  That was the plan. That was the dream, a new start and the promise of a better future. They’d come to The Oaks, and she’d fallen in love with it. All of it, from the big house to the oak grove in the wooded hills behind it, from the Patuxent River in the west to the rolling fields in the east and south, from the sweet water well to the tidy avenues of all the smaller buildings required to run a plantation.

  The overseer’s cottage was closest to the main house. After the bachelor’
s barracks beyond the vineyard at the far end of servants’ row, this cottage was the largest of the neat wooden structures that housed the help. It was a generous space, even split in two. The front door led to the overseer’s office, little used since Philip’s untimely death. A side door opened to the spacious living quarters where she’d spent the better part of last night saving Captain O’Manion’s life, ungrateful though he was for her efforts.

  Wondering if he realized all that he had lost, trying not to mourn it herself, she queried him about breakfast. “How do ye feel?” she asked. “If I know me mam, she’ll have gruel for the fetching.”

  “Mmm. Gruel. Sounds…delicious.” Ian cracked an eye to see if he’d gotten a rise out of her.

  The cheeky thing tossed those wild red curls and dared to smile at him. “Aye. Delicious,” she chirped, and damn near bounced out the door, taking the laudanum bottle with her.

  With Beth Gordon gone and no one else to talk to, Ian addressed the ghost in the corner.

  “Philip, what am I to do with that one? She won’t listen. Won’t let me die. Won’t leave the bottle. What good is she, to either of us?”

  Philip said nothing, reminding Ian of his cell mate early on in Port Royal. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t talk with his tongue cut out as it was. So even if he was innocent, he had no way to communicate beyond painting pictures on the stone floor with whatever liquid was available, water or spittle or piss.

  Ian felt the need to go again himself. He might be left to his own devices, but he was damned if he’d soil his loincloth. It wore him out, but he managed to work himself to the side of the bed, hang his feet over the side with his third leg out, and dribble more piss in the pot she’d emptied earlier. Stowing himself, he leaned to the side and collapsed back on a pillow. It was a herculean effort to drag his leaden lower limbs back onto the bed.

  He was too weak to pull the netting together, but he wasn’t overly worried, flies being less of a problem during the day than the bloodthirsty mosquitoes that swarmed at night and made for misery. He supposed he’d have to credit his beekeeper for keeping him bite-free, from what he could tell, and hydrated. He should have had welted arms and foul breath. Instead his skin smelled of geraniums and pennyroyal and his mouth tasted vaguely of willow bark, honey, and mint.

  Through the netting, Ian’s view panned past the opened door to the living space beyond. He remembered the overseer’s cottage and was quite pleased to pronounce himself more than fair, as employers go. He was in the larger of the two bedrooms off the main living space. If memory served, there was comfortable seating around a fireplace and a dining table with a set of fairly matched chairs. Until last night, Elsbeth Gordon had slept in a borrowed upholstered chair aligned as precise as Newgrange, where she shone like a ray of sunshine through the opened door. She’d rearranged furniture yesterday, and now the table was across the way. It was a safe guess she’d put it there, not so much for him to better appreciate whatever her unencumbered form was doing out there last night as for her to keep an eye on his sorry self while she was doing it.

  Ian wondered what Philip thought of it all. Did his ghost even care about midnight rituals behind drawn curtains, or that Elsbeth Gordon had slept naked in the bed where he’d died?

  He still needed to find an overseer, which might prove deuced hard unless he could get Philip to fully vacate the premises. But, he supposed, he couldn’t point fingers. He was stuck here, too, for now.

  His nemesis returned with a steaming bowl of something that actually smelled tasty. She set the chamber pot aside and helped him sit up, stuffing pillows behind his back and tying a length of toweling around his neck like a bib. He was about to complain, except she climbed into bed with him and fed him a concoction that tasted of oats and mulled wine and a berry conserve and honey and something more exotic that he couldn’t quite identify. And he wondered if her mother Jannet—the herbalist midwife whose cottage was next door—had made it, or had she?

  She smiled and wiped the drool off his chin.

  Ian frowned to think that she was still reading his mind. Jaysus, Joseph and Mary, would he never have any privacy with her? he wondered. The idea was damned disconcerting.

  “I expect we’ll be able tae move ye tae the big house in a day or two,” she promised, scooting off the counterpane and letting the insect netting close behind her. “It’s just tha’ here, ye’re closer at hand.”

  “Wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” he mumbled. He knew it was rather childlike but he was unable to help it. Months of torture and a botched prison escape had a way of making a man not quite himself, but he couldn’t tell her that, any more than he could tell her his real name, not until it was cleared.

  “Please, call me Beth,” she offered, tossing another bone. “And ‘tis a matter of degrees,” she said. “Ye’re gang tae be a bother, regardless. I thought tae make it easy on me mam. She’s no’ getting any younger, ye ken.”

  Thrilled to realize that his fevered brain could actually follow her reasoning despite the brogue, Ian waved his hand, bestowing absolution. The Widow Gordon was, what, in her mid-fifties? Staid, steady, and still able to tend the plantation’s medicinal herb garden when she wasn’t busy birthing babies or ministering to the sick. She had a passion for fishing, and he wondered if she used the quiet time it afforded to pray the rosary for her heathen daughter or her late husband, whom he’d brought over to manage his stables. All three had been indentured for seven years. Fever had carried off the one, but the two females were left, his fisher midwife and his busy, busy beekeeper, together with a small village of other indentures who tilled the soil and reaped the harvest and mucked stalls and sheared sheep and spun and wove, while a pair of hired brothers bred his horses, whose lines had been vastly improved by the blood of Spanish Barbs and Narragansett Pacers.

  Even before the late Philip Rhys Davies had raced off on and toppled with the promising Zeus, the prize of The Oaks plantation was a stallion named Zephyr, fifteen-and-a-half hands high and black as midnight, save for a brilliant white blaze that flashed like lightning on the track. Zephyr was a racer that sired other racers, but the pretty pacers he had thus fathered would be in demand with the fox hunting and pleasure riding denizens of the surrounding counties, once word spread. Right now his men were working to recover from the loss of Zeus, and Philip. They managed the breeding, kept Zephyr busy mounting brood mares, and cared for those expecting the next go-round. They evaluated the one-year-olds and trained the two- and three-year-olds deemed worth the investment, breaking and selling the rest as opportunities arose.

  One of the hired brothers, the farrier Thomas, had let it slip that Elsbeth—Beth—Gordon had the real talent for culling goats from sheep.

  Beth Gordon, who slept with foxes and talked to bees and communed with horses. Who worked magick at midnight and refused to let him die whilst she was doing it. Who’d fought with him and for him and climbed into bed with him when the only way to keep him here was the promise of soft pink lips and delicious pomegranate breasts and those pretty, pretty feet. Whose naked body could have been his for the taking, except…except…

  Dear God.

  Nothing. Nothing. Jaysus, don’t tell me it’s come to this.

  In prison, he’d had time for reflection between the day’s beatings and the night’s violations, and during one of his bargaining sessions with God, should He deem him worth saving, Ian had offered to leave his sailing and smuggling days behind him and retire to The Oaks as just another gentleman farmer, above reproach of the law. His daughter’s marriage had started him thinking, had turned his thoughts to the future and whether it might hold someone to share it with.

  Good luck with that, when Beth Gordon in her birthday suit couldn’t get a rise out of him.

  Maybe it was the laudanum.

  God, let it be the laudanum.

  Chapter Three

  Ian O’Malley liked to think he’d learned a few things through the years. That people don’t always fight fair. T
hat a tattoo had to be exceptionally good to be worth the hurt. That actions accounted for far more than words. That sometimes you had to look really, really hard to see a person’s worth. That a fair wind and a woman’s arms were the closest things to feeling heaven on earth. That he could be wrong.

  Beth Gordon wasn’t just frustrating. She was demanding, authoritative, and decisive, orchestrating the efforts it took to get him well enough to move him to the big house as soon as she deemed it feasible.

  He had won the place on the turn of a card, when he was sailing as Jean Delacorte, pardoned by the King and trying his best to keep his nose clean but nonetheless tempted to stray from the straight and narrow. Seeing as he was wanted by the British for desertion but missing an Irish identity, he’d invented his alter ego Ian O’Manion, transferred ownership, and started to see what he could do to improve on his property.

  The Oaks had been built up from a farm to a farm with blooded horses, balancing crop and livestock production with an intensive breeding program. Ian had depended heavily on his solicitor, whose brilliant mind ranged far beyond mere legalities and delved into realms of science, literature, philosophy, and the arts. If Barry didn’t know something, he knew whom to ask.

  Barry had helped him draw up a business plan and a list of must-haves for the successful operation of The Oaks. Ian had established bank accounts accordingly, both for personal use and for business, with separate balance sheets for all of its facets: horses, livestock, row crops, gardens, orchard, vineyard, and a miscellaneous category for everything else. He had much to learn—who knew that one could collect and store ice and turn a tidy profit come July and August, or which varieties of grapes were best for the table and which ones were only for wine? And although he would have liked to learn everything, discernment dictated delegation. He needed an overseer and foremen and managers who knew their jobs and who could be trusted to do them.