The night of the full moon, the Captain played the fiddle again for her: soft, swelling notes, rife with poignant longing that tempted her to stay with him instead of going into the woods. He didn’t overdo it tonight, but he was still suffering from yesterday’s exertions and she talked him into an early bed, tucking him in with a spoonful of medicine and a promise that she’d see him tomorrow.
Sophie was quiet. The fox was listening, for what she didn’t know. Next spring, now, that was a different story. Sophie would be looking for a mate come January or February or March. She’d be singing duets and digging dens and having kits and she’d have no more time for Beth. Night creatures that foxes were, Beth felt blessed that Sophie chose to grace her with her presence, to the point of altering her sleep patterns to better match their sojourns.
Beth felt the tide, shifting in her body. Sophie seemed to feel it too, with a high step to her trot, as if anxious to return to the cottage at the orchard’s edge. She watched expectantly, pacing as Beth pulled back a rug and retrieved her ritual tools from beneath the floorboards. Beth blew out the candle, and the two of them stepped from the world of man into the magickal night woods and headed for their sacred space.
“Good evening, Herne,” Beth acknowledged the presence she felt beyond, hidden in the shadows. “Taenight’s full moon is all the more powerful, coming so close tae Litha, the summer solstice. Taenight, I’ll be setting intentions, nae just fer meself, but fer a mon, the ane who holds title tae this property and them who live on it, including me. I seek the highest guid fer us both, an’ it harm none.”
Beth shed her dress and cast her circle, enclosing her and Sophie, leaving Herne on the outside, looking in. She spread her cloth and arranged her altar and did her standard full moon observation, but she lingered long, in prayer and meditation, seeking guidance to facilitate the Captain’s healing on all levels, in all times, spaces and places, past, present and future, in all realms and dimensions. She stayed so long, her consciousness drifted away, but when she came back into herself, she returned with the answers she’d sought.
She needed to speak to the bees.
“How do we do this again?”
Ian wasn’t certain he’d heard her right. He swore she told him that a bunch of bees had agreed to sacrifice themselves, for his benefit.
Really? Just like that?
Hail, Caesar. We who are about to die salute you.
Red Beth scowled at him, upset that he’d make light of it. They were her bees, after all—though they likely would have been dead by winter. When late fall came, she would mark a few of the mid-weight hives to save and would harvest the rest. The harvesting, that’s what did it. Sad to think, she had to destroy the things she loved to claim their gifts to her. The difference is, she would talk to her bees and let them know they were appreciated. She would thank them for their sacrifice, then kill them with kindness.
That’s better. She nodded, seeing he was serious now.
She had him strip—purely clinical—and lie on his bed where she draped a towel across his lap and worked her magick on him. She had borrowed her mother’s glass cupping devices and used them alternately to apply bees and herbs burned on ginger slices. The points she treated made no sense to him. What the hell does the inside of an ankle or the web of his left thumb or points high on the outside of his calves have to do with anything? She made him roll onto his stomach, and soon he had a row of welts down the lowest part of his spine.
He’d bathed for her. He had Theo heat water and he’d washed himself and his hair and shaved with a fresh-stropped razor. The first time she’d seen him helpless in bed, he’d just been hauled off the ship that had carried him, wounded, away from Jamaica. Hardly his best impression. Sensing the momentousness of this event, certainly for him, hopefully for her, in a good way, he had made every effort to accommodate. He’d had an extra daybed brought up, should she need to stay that close to him. He’d stocked wine and brandy and whiskey and rum, and sundry food items so that she could forage to her heart’s content. She had him on a special diet, but there was no need for her to suffer unduly.
There were so many unknowns. Symptoms, duration of each one in the cycles of a treatment of indeterminate length, and how many little black and yellow bodies would be piled up at the end.
A week, she had guessed. Maybe two. Or more.
Laudanum proved to be the real bitch. Denying her meant ripping away the illusion of control, any semblance of normalcy as his skin caught fire and his gunshot wound burned and his joints ached and the bee stings left welts like rows of burial mounds on his legs and back and arms. A week later, he was still shaky, with dark thoughts, envying Philip, who’d been broken in two and who’d downed a bottle of laudanum to end his misery.
Red Beth was steadfast in her devotion. Red Beth. A good pirate name, he decided, and fitting. She was damn close to stealing his heart.
Ian wanted to be healed. He wanted to be free of pain. He wanted to pull Red Beth into his arms and bury his body in hers and find the surcease that comes from losing himself in a woman. But it was all in his head, don’t you know? Fading memories of his glory days, reduced to ashes on a slice of ginger in a medic’s pinched-neck glass cup.
Red Beth was relentless. Ruthless. Killed him with kindness, just like her bees. The little bodies piled up—she thought they deserved a Viking burial or some such thing—while his revolted, and the nausea came and he cried in his sleep, something he hadn’t done since his fever broke. And just when he thought he could stand no more, she made him lie on his back with the stingers still in and put bees on his front, above his pubis, and below the outside of his knees and he swore she put a spell on him, because, for the first time since Port Royal, he felt himself coming fully alive, like the quickening of an infant in the womb, with the promise of life that no one but God could see.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Staid, steady Jannet Gordon did not approve. That much was clear from the dour look served up with the Captain’s special diet. But she loved her remarkable daughter, and Beth wanted this done for the Captain. She’d always done her best to grant her daughter’s wishes, within reason, and so she came, three times a day to bring food and check on things, offering advice only when asked and biting her tongue to keep silent the rest of the time.
Nearly two weeks, they’d been at it. They’d started on the new moon and the full moon was tonight. The stingers were out and his wound looked good, puckered with the healthy pink flesh of healing. Beth made him eat the breakfast her mother cooked, then brought him clothes and bade him dress. She wanted to take him to the stables, where Zephyr had a rendezvous with a lovely chestnut mare that had come late into estrus.
For whatever reason, Ian liked to use a front door, whenever possible. None of this sneaking about and appearing suspicious, looking like he wasn’t good enough because he was Irish or because he hadn’t been born into money but had come into it anyway. Now Beth, Red Beth was a back door witchy thing, keeping secrets as if her life depended upon it, which it did. Front door, back door. Once he was healed, he might never see her, unless by design. He knew in his fevered mind, he’d cursed her for not leaving him alone, for not letting him die, but he was really, truly glad she hadn’t given up on him. And if showing his gratitude meant escorting her to the stables to watch a pair of horses go at it, well, he supposed that’s the least he could do.
He layered up in the proper clothes that Red Beth selected and preceded her down the stairs as a gentleman ought, ready to catch her, should she trip on her skirt. The dress she’d worn today was a bright calico print with broad, vibrant flowers that picked up the red in her wild curly hair and the Caribbean blue of her eyes. She had a simple striped linen apron tied around her slim waist and pinned to the fore, and she had chosen to sacrifice herself on the altar of fashion and had slipped into actual stockings and silver buckled shoes.
Forget elbows. Forget knees. Her pretty feet, and the exquisite turn of her slim an
kles. Aye, that’s where she had him.
And he was closer to having her, he hoped, though the only sure thing he had to offer was this plantation. The Oaks was close enough to Annapolis to conduct business and covered over two thousand acres in two counties, spreading from Anne Arundel County and spilling over the Patuxent River into Prince George. Anne Arundel might not be old in the European scheme of things, but a battle of the English Civil War had been waged here in 1655, and colonists who had settled Maryland were, some of them, Catholic, which fit Ian better than other places he’d been. He’d sent his daughter to the Ursulines, to be trained up in the faith of her birth mother and him and to receive the education he could not provide, no matter how much he’d wished to keep Christiana with him. Ah, she made him proud, that one. A bold lass, like his Red Beth.
One of these days, next time either one of his ships slipped up the river, he’d have to take Red sailing and see if she had the makings of sea legs. Once his name was cleared, they could take a trip, the two of them, sail south past Saint-Domingue to Justin and Christiana’s island—
But, no. Beth had her fox and her bees and the horses to talk to and trees to consult. If he asked her to sail away with him and make good on the pirate name he’d given her, she’d just turn him down, wouldn’t she?
Wouldn’t she?
They went out the front door and around the west side, the closest path to the stables out back. As they cleared the rear of the house, Lucy Knowles poked her head out of the kitchen long enough to cast an evil eye at Beth, as if she could feel the tender beating of her pagan heart and was jealous that Beth had more kindness in her little finger than Lucy had in her whole body.
Ian nodded at Philip’s ghost as they passed the overseer’s cottage. Jannet Gordon was headed to the storehouse behind the kitchen with her black cat and a basket of bundled medicinal herbs that she’d cut once the dew was gone and tied to hang dry. A little girl’s sing-song voice tripped merrily from the spinning house, where Miss Denning clacked away on a loom, weaving the fabric that would help clothe his little village.
There was more beauty in the symmetry of The Oaks than he deserved, and he was grateful for someone else’s good taste and common sense planning. Behind the main house, which was big enough to house two or three families, the formal garden that stretched to the orchard was studded with topiaries, patterned with boxwood hedges, and bursting with all manner of colorful, fragrant flowers. A neat row of outbuildings marched on the eastern border: a summer kitchen, storehouse with a drying shed on one end, then the wash house and spinning house. Across the way was servants’ row, with neat little cottages for Philip’s ghost, the Widow Gordon, the Knowles family, and Miss Denning. A well-stocked smokehouse separated the cottages from the vineyard, with its arbors and trellises and assorted berry bushes. At the far end of the grapes, a long barracks housed most of the bachelors he’d collected. The Marshall brothers lived above the carriage house, and his jockey Ralph had recently created a living space above the tack room—although he suspected that was foresight, knowing that eventually he would go and the O’Flaherty boys would need separated, leaving Sean to be surly on his own.
East of the house, he had a perpetual field of timothy, wheat that would be ready in another week or so, and oats to harvest in July. Granaries, silage bins, and corn cribs flanked the garden, marching toward one of the cornfields that had been carved from the great oak woods.
Three of the plantation’s best features were the sweet water well by the kitchen, and, past the herb garden and hen house, the spring house, and an ice house that in some years held little but this summer promised welcome respite from the heat.
The privies and barns and stables were on the far side of the vineyard, with at least a little separation from the pests and scents and offal that go with having outhouses and animals. Pastures held a flock of sheep, enough goats to graze a yard, hogs that were fattening, and milch cows that kept them in cream and butter. The paddocks held dams and colts and stallions and geldings who failed to make the grade and were required to be cut, otherwise he’d never steal a horse’s thunder. Seemed criminal, to nip something in the bud just because he wasn’t enough hands high, but he could see the sense of it, too. Keeping the big boys was meant to improve the lines, but a clever gelding could save a man. Look at him, unable to perform since prison, yet here he was, the ruler of his own little kingdom and provider for every one of its inhabitants.
If God didn’t have a sense of humor, he didn’t know who did.
At the stables, they found that the Marshall men and O’Flaherty boys and Theo had everything under control. Ian still didn’t know why Red Beth had to drag him from his sickbed and make him walk all the way down here, feeling uncomfortably weak as a kitten, when she could just as easily have told him a bedtime story about it. But she’d insisted. Mindful of his indebtedness, he had humored her, and so it was that they had come to this, poised in the role of passive observers in an empty stall, until the mare was brought in. Red Beth excused herself and went over to talk to the chestnut, rubbing her head and whispering in her ear and adjusting the leather cover that would protect her neck from an overzealous stallion’s bites.
Zephyr smelled the mare, even before Thomas brought him into the stable. Outside, he whinnied his pleasure, and he came in dancing with an erection that hung to his hocks. Ian almost called out to beg her not to when Beth dared to approach his horse.
Zephyr reared up, and Ian swore that his heart stopped. It would have been too late; there was no way he would have reached her in time to save her, but the prancing, padded hooves miraculously cleared Beth as they came down. Ian exhaled sharply and released the breath that he’d been holding.
Thomas had his hands full, controlling the stallion and keeping an eye on Beth, who was talking to the beast, no doubt sharing a bit of breeding etiquette, warning him not to play too roughly. Zephyr whinnied, and Thomas waited until Beth was free and clear. She rejoined Ian in the empty stall, closing the short door behind her. Zephyr pranced up to the pretty chestnut mare, who had twitched her tail to the side to ease his way. She was good enough to welcome the stallion’s weight as he reared up and covered her, shoving his massive member inside her and thrusting home like the magnificent stud that he was.
And all the while, Beth stood, almost breathless, watching spellbound, wincing when Zephyr bit at the leather-covered neck. She gripped the door of the empty stall that was their viewing room, and Ian knew she was not unaffected. Forget Zephyr. He watched Beth watching the horses. He listened to her telling breath, and felt the hum in her body that sang to him as surely as the fiddle’s phantom tune.
And because they were in a place where they could see without being seen, Ian stepped behind her and slipped his hands around her waist and pulled her back against him. She shivered, and inhaled sharply, then forgot to breathe altogether. He leaned down, bending until his teeth found the base of her neck. “Red,” he whispered against her petal-soft skin just before he tasted it, tasted her, and asked her to take him home.
“Please,” the Captain begged when she stayed rooted, transfixed, watching his stallion cover the chestnut mare as he wanted to cover her. “Have mercy. Don’t do this to me. You don’t know what it’s been like.”
But she did. She did. She knew exactly what he’d felt. It was her gift. Her curse. Like now, feeling the blood pump in old haunts, the word made flesh, the promise of resurrection fulfilled. The Captain wanted her, and she wanted him to want her, and Herne would just have to understand.
The stallion finished and disengaged, dropping onto all four feet, with his penis tamed and near normal size already, while the Captain’s was just coming to life. She wished he could have taken her right then and there, amidst the sharp scents of the stable as they tumbled in the straw and hay.
They headed for the house, each one priding themselves on moving at a reasonable pace, when every step brought them closer to the bedroom upstairs, with its urn full of dead honeyb
ees and a plate of herbs and sliced ginger root and an odd number of pinch-necked glass cups. Back in the day, Ian could have swept her into his arms and carried her up the stairs. Now it was all he could do to navigate under his own power and pray the feeling wouldn’t go away once they’d gotten to where he could do something about it.
When they reached the front door, he took her hand and pulled her through the house he’d won on a turn of the cards, gotten by chance and kept by pretense, until he could clear his real name. At least his Christian name was the same, and the subtle change from O’Malley to O’Manion was still a damn sight better than the years he’d played Jean Delacorte.
He counted the steps on the sweeping entrance stairs, marked the feet from the landing to his bedroom door, and numbered the eyelets on the back of her bodice as he put his fingers to the task of unlacing them. While he was busy in the back, she unpinned her apron front, reaching around and pulling one tie so that the thing fell free, landing in a puddle on the wide board floor. He opened his mouth on the back of her neck, and he knew she remembered his stallion, covering the chestnut mare, giving her that enormous member of his in a mating that was as intense as it was brief. A stallion did his business in a minute; it took three hundred forty days, give or take, for a mare to finish hers.
Beth felt the Captain’s breath on her skin, like dragon’s fire. No sooner did she wonder if he intended to consume her than he put an arm around her waist, pulled her back against him, and opened his mouth on the base of her neck. He scored it with his teeth, not quite biting, and then he did bite her, inhaling sharply with his mouth fastened on a spot that made her knees go weak. His hands skimmed up her sides and pulled down her bodice; he splayed his calloused fingers and lay claim to her breasts.
Ian wanted it to be good for her. He wanted it to last, but he couldn’t wait for layers of clothes and shoes and stockings, no matter how much he enjoyed a leisurely disrobing. For the first time in months, there was life in every part of him.
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 6