The small shelf of books was most telling. Animal husbandry. Horses. Scottish poetry. A Bible. A psalter. Books on herbs and midwifery and horticulture and dyestuffs. Subjects she’d learned from her father and mother. Not one book was hers.
There wasn’t single history of Italy or volume of ancient poetry, not a grimoire or bestiary or book of shadows to be found. Back door Beth, forced to hide the things dearest to her heart, and who could blame her?
Beyond the upholstered chairs, a small treadle wheel and a stool sat near the flagstone hearth, with a flax break in the corner and a pair of hackles closer at hand. They had been recently used.
“You didn’t tell me you could spin.”
She waved her hand as if it were nothing. “Except fer Harmony, who’s a wee bit young, I think every girl and woman here can,” she told him. “Ye’ve chosen yer people well.”
Ian smiled. “It seems the case.” He rubbed a hand across his beard-shadowed jaw and chastised her for not telling him to shave.
She looked surprised. “I didnae notice.”
He quirked an eyebrow, dubious. “Really? How could you not? I could sell myself for sandpaper.”
She laughed at that. Rather than mind, he was glad to have dissipated some of the lingering sadness over the bees.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, hoping what he was about to propose might take her mind off them completely. “I need to go to Annapolis. See my attorney and banker. Get the terms changed for you and your mother. What say you? Will you go?”
Red Beth froze. He could tell that she wanted to go with him. She wanted to. But…
“What is it?” he asked. What could crush the thrill of adventure that had danced across her face, then disappeared? The way she looked, if he kissed her, he was certain he’d taste only bitter dregs.
“I’m nae guid wie people,” she told him, sitting on the floor and pulling the fox onto her lap to pet.
How was he supposed to respond to that? She was an odd duck, a round pagan heart on a chessboard of mostly Protestant squares. She was a witch and she could tell no one.
They still burned them in Scotland.
“I’ll protect you,” he said, meaning it.
“That’s nae it,” she said, sounding like an old, tired soul. “There is nae ‘protecting’ me. It’s nae who I am, it’s what I am.”
Well, she lost him on that one. Damn it.
“There’s nocht ye can do,” she said softly, sadly.
He begged to differ. “You know I’d die for you.”
The Captain’s declaration should have thrilled her heart, not filled it with dread. He thought she would be pleased. In truth, Beth wanted to cry. She wanted to curl up in his arms and let him think he could protect her. How could she tell him it wasn’t physical, when in some ways it was? How could she explain what it was like for someone to brush against her, accidentally, and know everything about them? To feel someone’s pain and suck it in and spew it out, sometimes violently? It could lay her low, sending her to her knees, or lodging behind her eyes in a massive headache that might put her in bed for a day or two or more.
If she told him, he would know.
He’d know sooner or later. Wasn’t now the better time?
“It’s Tuesday,” she said softly.
“Oh.” The Captain did not like the sound of that.
“I hae a hard time,” she began, “especially in crowds.” She paused with her hand on Sophie’s fur and slanted a look up at him. “I feel things. Nae by choice. It’s something I cannae control. When it happens, weel, it’s nae couthie. Sometimes, it hurts beyond bearing. Someone will brush up against me and I’ll feel their heartache, or their saicret fear, or their oldest knag or freshest pain. And,” she added tacitly, “I will see wha’ brought it aboot.”
“It is Tuesday,” Ian murmured. He went quiet, remembering, thinking, wondering how much, if anything, he had left to hide.
The silence spun out like a linen thread that bound them together in a way he could never have imagined. She’d seen what could make a man want to die. That she would touch him, and let him touch her, was nothing short of miraculous.
“Was it…was it hard?” he asked, humbled.
“Aye,” she whispered. “It nearly killed me.”
She burst into tears, then—something she had not done in front of him, at least when he was lucid. He ignored the aches of his body, thirty-six going on fifty, and got down in the floor with her and Sophie, and scooped the two of them up in his lap. The fox, her services no longer needed, jumped clear and headed out the door in search of something small and furred and tasty. Beth put her arms around his neck and wept until the well ran dry.
“I’m sorry,” he said, petting her. “I should have known.”
“How could ye?” She hiccupped a little, and swallowed the lump in her throat.
“You,” he told her.
Just that.
All he had to do was look and see how things affected her, for God’s sake. He should have noticed.
Why hadn’t he noticed? Unless it was denial. He’d only wanted to forget the nightmare he’d been forced to live. He couldn’t imagine anyone going there by choice.
‘Twas a bloody miracle he hadn’t sent her screaming.
“I’m stronger than I look.”
There she went, reading minds again. Once, he would have taken umbrage. Now he could answer without asperity: “I do not doubt it.”
She felt his bristled jaw, measuring the difference a day made. “I want tae gang wie ye.”
“I know, dearling.” He kissed the top of her head. “I understand.”
Lifting her face, Beth smiled softly and pressed three saltwater kisses on his lips, interspersed with: “I…want…tae…come.” She repeated it in the King’s English, so there’d be no mistaking her meaning, then back to Scotland she went. “If ‘tis nae fer lang, and ye swear tae haud yer wheesht and listen tae me, if I tell ye it gets tae be mickle.”
He went still, then gave her a quick squeeze and a kiss on the forehead. “Done. Pack your things, darlin’ girl. I say we go tomorrow.”
Chapter Nine
They didn’t get away the next day, like he’d hoped, and Beth soon learned the reason for it. She thought they’d be going to Annapolis by horseback. Instead, he’d held out for a boat, stubborn man.
Beautiful, haunted, stubborn man.
He’d captained a ship. He missed it—and he missed the sea, she could tell. But if he could have this much, at least, a sturdy dinghy with a mast and sail, small and easy enough for a healing man to handle on a halcyon Saturday morning, she might just be able to keep him safe until his real name was cleared.
Because it was Saturday, and a weekend, he wasn’t certain what he’d find when they got to the city. He had business to conduct that could require staying over until Monday. She thought he might ask one of the others to go along, in case it was too much, too soon, until she read him. She was flattered that he believed her strong enough, capable enough, to do anything he might need to ask of her. He wanted this to be a trip for the two of them, and though it was possible to go to Annapolis and back in a day, he intended to take his time and planned to spend at least one night, but he wanted to be back before Tuesday.
She walked to the woods, past Lucy Knowles’s spying eyes, and left Sophie in the care of Herne.
Annapolis was overwhelming, a sea port and business center and seat of government. Laws were argued in the second state house, built after the first burned, and rumor had it that a newspaper was coming soon. The Captain found two rooms on the second floor of a hotel with a view of the water and left her in one with the lunch that she had packed.
Her room was next door to the Captain’s, but she had no illusions that he would spend the night in it. That was to maintain the appearance of propriety. Hers was comfortably furnished, with a bed built for two, but not for a man as tall as the Captain’s strapping six feet two inch frame. She was ten inches shorter. It made
for some interesting dynamics.
For now, the bed went unused. First things first, he reminded himself, his gaze wistful as he bid her goodbye. He had business to complete, an overseer to hire, connections to make, palms to grease, a name to clear.
When Ian returned, having managed visits to both his banker and his attorney, Beth was not in her room. She left a note, but because he had come to know her so well, he would have known where to look for her, even without it.
Two doors down was a stable. Beth was talking to the horses when he came in. He stood for a long moment, watching her move from beast to beast, stall to stall, scratching noses and petting necks, making conversation.
Darlin’ girl.
Hearing his thoughts, she turned and smiled at him, warm and inviting. He thought of the bed at the hotel and wished that they were there, not here. The way that his body thrummed, it would not take much to tempt him to take her, hard and fast against the wall that he was leaning on…and yet he made no move to touch her.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, starving himself, and not just for food.
“Aye.” She angled her head, surprised when he stayed where he was, out of reach, denying himself what she seemed more than willing to give.
He straightened. Nodded. “Good. There’s a carriage coming in an hour. We’ve been invited to dine. I picked up a dress. It’s in your room.”
The Captain said so much, so fast, Beth could scarce take it all in. But there was a new dress that he’d somehow procured, and a Saturday night dinner party to attend. A dinner, with strangers.
The shudder she suppressed was not lost on him. “You’ll be seated between Mrs. Atwood and me,” he told her. Crossing to where she stood, he took her hand between his two and held it near his heart, as if he knew how much she needed the reassurance of his touch. “I promised you, I’d keep you safe.”
Beth inhaled a tremulous breath and gnawed her lip while the Captain watched her mind work. A picayune for your thoughts.
No. She could not say the words. She refused to give voice to the doubts that had assailed her. She had wondered if she’d made a mistake, coming to Annapolis with him. She was prepared to be a kept woman. She’d taken him as her lover, but the Captain was a landowner and she was his bondservant, and that much had not changed. So he’d been invited to dinner. She hated to be the bearer of bad tidings, but she would be welcome at no one’s table, given her status. Still, she wanted to see the dress she would have worn.
“There’s tae be a race,” she said, changing the subject. “In September. Ye need tae enter Zephyr.”
She’d taken a chance, going to the stables, but she’d felt a horse limp in and thought to see if she could help. She lingered longer and listened to the other horses, who could talk of little else besides racing. The stable was abuzz with more than flies.
“All the more reason to go tonight. I need the contacts to make that happen.”
Ian was grateful he’d made that earlier trip to Annapolis. Red hadn’t wanted him to ride, but how else was he to sneak a spare dress to the seamstress and have one made up for her?
Her mother was in on it, and Red still hadn’t guessed it.
Ha.
Beth heard it: that single syllable, full of almost boyish glee that he’d managed to keep something secret from her. She should be happy the Captain was healing. Most people preferred to keep their thoughts private, but she suspected that she was going to miss listening in, just a bit.
The room he’d secured for her—for them—was tastefully furnished, with a small table and two chairs, a wash stand with a china basin and ewer, and wall hooks for clothing. The new dress hanging on one of them was blue silk, a few shades lighter than her eyes, and the most beautiful gown she’d ever seen. She looked wistfully at it, and at the pile of petticoats and underpinnings and new stockings and lace cap and white evening gloves and shawl and bonnet spread across the bed’s counterpane. She hated having to disappoint him, when he’d gone to so much expense and effort.
The Captain would surely see reason. It would not do. Did she really need to remind him that more than the Patuxent River divided their stations?
And then he surprised her again.
He took her hand. With a telling glance, he placed in it a beribboned stack of five folded documents. It felt almost like her birthday when she pulled the thin black silk and opened the top one.
She was expecting a change in her term of indenture. A year, he’d told her when she’d agreed to help him break free of the hold of laudanum. She should have belonged to him two more years beyond that. Two more years with her lovely little cottage on the edge of the forest and her bee hives in the orchard and the horses in the stable and Sophie and Herne. But instead of a legal document shortening her service, he’d given her a manumission.
She was free.
As was her mother. And he’d given them one hundred and twenty acres, forty each and her father’s forty held jointly. If she understood the surveyor’s description, it was cleared land, already in production, not some chunk of scrub timber on a floodplain that would need cleared and built on and rebuilt every time another spring flood took it.
She owned a field. Tonight, she could put on a blue silk dress and go to dinner as a free and landed woman.
It was momentous. It was life altering. And it brought her to her knees.
“My darlin’ girl,” Ian crooned, and swept her into his arms, wishing he had time to take her to bed and hold her until she was done crying and see where things went from there. “Twice this week, I’ve made you weep. Tell me it won’t get to be a habit.”
He hated seeing her so. Not just the tears. It was the fleeting look of alarm, the trace of fear, as if she realized the cost of freedom, no guarantees, goals that might never be met despite how hard you worked or how badly you wished for it.
He kissed the top of her head and fingered her wild red curls. “The cottages are yours for as long as you want them. Just because you’re near to gentry now, don’t think I’ll give that pretty backside of yours the boot. I’m hoping you’ll rent me the land, since we’re working it already and this year’s crop is mine. We’ll have to discuss what’s fair, how much to pay your mother for her skills, and what’s a beekeeper worth and all. When you think about it, it’s just a lot of piddling little details to attend to, now that the main thing is done.”
“Can ye afford it?” Beth asked, knowing that money was an issue.
“Dinnae fash yerself.” The Captain teased her in his best Scots brogue, which was poor indeed. She suspected that he’d been forced to tame the Irish in his speech when he was impressed, and sailing with a Frenchman had added an international flavor to some of his phrasings. In the throes of passion, when he was most open and the least guarded, that’s when the Irish slipped out.
“Ye’re daft, mon. And I’m serious.”
Reading minds again, eh?
When she snared his gaze and refused to let it go, he decided that honesty was best. “Well, things are tight, to put it mildly. The books took a blow when I lost Zeus. I’m hoping that fortune will have a fair wind tonight. There’s to be cards after dinner.”
Oh, dear.
“Please,” she asked him, “can we just come back here after dinner? Please?”
The Captain stroked her cheek, tossled her hair, and chuckled. “I’ve the luck of the Irish. It’s a way to get some quick coin. That, with the wheat and oats, should tide us over, until the corn comes in.”
“You cannae play cards. We’ll hae tae think of something else.”
There was an unnatural sharpness to Beth’s voice that raised hackles on the back of his neck.
Can’t? Have to?
“Red?” he asked when he caught her chewing her bottom lip.
“No cards,” she said, the distress in her voice echoed in her troubled eyes. “Ye will nae win. Nae now.”
The hand on her curls went very still when he understood she wasn’t joking.
Oh, R
ed. What have you done?
“Ye were dying,” she whispered, hurting all over again for the pain she’d taken from him. “Ye said that would teach ye tae gamble and win.”
He felt like he’d been sucker punched.
“You’ve cursed me, then? Tell me you haven’t cursed me.”
He held his breath, waiting for her answer.
“Mair of a gris,” she admitted, bowing her head, unable to look at him. “I believed I was doing ye a favor. I cast it on the condition tha’ it harm nane. If ye think tha’ gamblin’s fer yer guid, then ye’ll win when ye play. Just dinnae wager anything ye cannae afford tae lose until ye see how it goes.”
She could tell, he couldn’t fathom it. He had no idea how magick worked, how something he viewed as a curse could possibly be a blessing in disguise.
She leaned away so that she met his eyes. Like green glass, they were. Even more startling in their clarity now that he was free of fever and opiates. She’d seen handsomer men, but she’d never seen eyes more beautiful than his.
“I am a healer,” she reminded him. “Ye are,” she said, “a passionate man. And like most people with passion, there’s a…weakness…in yer nature. Ye latch onto something tha’ takes hold of ye and ye cannae let it go. Before it was laudanum, with ye, it was gambling. Before the gambling, it was women. Before women, it was drinking. Before drinking, it was music. The pattern is there. I but sought tae find a way tae break it, or at least help ye avoid returning tae the one tha’ cost ye most dear.”
She’d never seen him truly angry. The storm clouds, when they rolled in, were brutal. He set her aside and went to the window and stared out over the water.
Damn it, Red.
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 8