“And you think I can? Jaysus, Beth! I’ve got to go, and if you won’t go with me, that means leaving you here with it.”
It.
It.
Ohhhhh—men!
“Do ye hear yerself?” she asked, incredulous. “It? Not, him? Forget that Herne feels male. He might be nothing. Neither male nor female—or maybe he’s both. But whatever he is, he haunts these woods and if I dinnae mind Sophie running wie him, why should ye? He only called her taenight because he kens he cannae hae me.”
Struggling to keep from crossing the floor and taking her in his arms, the Captain curled his hands into fists and dug in his heels. “Does he now?”
“He has since the night I put ye in the circle. He kent then that I chose ye.”
“Then why can’t I come? Why banish me?”
“Because it has feelings. Because it is sensitive tae mine. Feeling the both of ye ready tae go at it, I was getting too upset, and he kens it’s nae good for the baby. Mostly, though… mostly,” she finally told him, “it’s because he thinks tha’ ye’ll hurt me.”
Denial shaped the Captain’s face, from his too-beautiful green glass eyes to his wide, firm lips, to the black beard-shadowed jaw he would have shaved again tonight for her, if they’d only stayed home.
“Aye,” she said. “And ye will. Ye’re doing it right now. I swear, talking tae the moon doth more good. Ye’ve set yer course, and there’s nocht by me tae be done aboot it but ride oot the storm and pray we mak it through tae the ither side.”
He looked at her for a moment suspended in time, then gave her a smile to melt her heart and teased her, the Irish devil. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
Beth tossed her curls at him. “If ye maun go, go,” she pouted. “I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”
“I have no choice, Red,” Ian said more quietly, all seriousness now. “We need money to tide us over, until Zephyr and Patrick win.” He cocked an eyebrow and nodded at her flax wheel. “So unless you can spin straw to gold…?”
Damned if she didn’t look like she was considering it.
Ah, Red.
She let him spend the night.
Her cottage was far enough removed, hovering between orchard and forest as it did, that no one would be the wiser, unless Lucy was spying again. And if anyone else saw the master, walking through his apple trees in the early morning dew, heading for his house, who were they to deny a healing man a bit of circumambulation while the day was yet cool?
The bees would know. Or they should know. If they didn’t, she would have to tell them. Part of her job was keeping them informed, after all. Despite all the shifts in the energies of late, that much had not changed.
Meanwhile, Beth admired the fire he’d built. Friendly flames, they were, illumining the space, dancing on the hearth and drawing up the flagstone chimney. He’d added scraps of hickory and cherry so that it smelled delicious, even with nothing cooking.
Suddenly, she wanted to spin.
She chose not to work the flax. She would have had to get a gourd of water or spit on her fingers, and neither thing appealed. And so she pulled a basket of soft, carded fleece and a lightweight drop spindle that let her spin woolen yarn that was almost as fine as sewing thread.
The Captain pulled up a chair and sat and watched her spin length after length, unhooking and winding and starting the next seamless section. For having so many sisters, he seemed fascinated by the process. If a drop spindle caught his fancy, what would he think when she started knitting booties?
His earlier agitation had given way to grudging acquiescence, and that had yielded to the kind of camaraderie shared by old, married couples who have been together long enough to not need words. He watched her work until the stress of the day and his worry over money took its toll.
Pulling off his boots, still in his breeches and shirt and stockings, the Captain climbed on top of her little bed. Lying curled on his side kept his feet from getting cold, at least. If he’d stretched out to his full length, he’d be hanging over the edge.
“Tall man.”
He smiled, and she smiled and kept right on spinning.
She worked until the fire was low and she had to add wood to keep it going. Then she finished filling her spindle and set it aside. Tomorrow would be soon enough to wind skeins of yarn from it.
The wind had calmed, and the damp night air was unseasonably cool when Beth checked the door one last time. Even before cracking it open, she knew she wouldn’t see Sophie until morning. Herne had called. He would run with their fox all night.
When she was seventeen in Scotland and about to sail to the colonies, she’d read up on the Americas in general and Maryland in particular and had come away with a healthy fear of wild beasts and savages. But it had been a while since the last outrage, and not one of the books said anything of what kind of fey creatures one might meet in the New World. Back home, there were dozens and dozens who dwelt in the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Scotland was rampant with ghosts and with faeries. If you were going to share space with them, you’d best quick learn who was what and which was which.
When she’d come to The Oaks and encountered Herne, with no one to explain him or how she should approach him or honor him, all she could go on was the faery faith long-established in the Celtic countries, and he seemed amenable to that. Learning what he liked for offerings had been as simple as asking the oaks.
She was the only person she knew who’d actually seen an urisk, but stumbling into his glen was an accidental, once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. Here, she had to live with it, with them, called to share a fox’s guardianship with a forest spirit but destined to make babies with a man who had three names. Somehow she doubted that any other Scots-born beekeeper could say the same.
Beth put another log on the fire for good measure, then undid her dress and hung it on a hook. The Captain scooted his back to the wall to make room for her and lifted the covers so that she stepped straight from her petticoat into bed.
He lowered his arm to drop the sheets over her and pulled her into the harbor of his body. Room was a premium, and they must share a pillow, but it was vastly better than the bowels of a ship bound for the colonies where she’d lost the promise of a child.
Beth wondered if she should say anything. She could have told Herne. He’d have seen that and all the more, as ancient as he was. But Ian O’Manion – Jean Delacorte – Ian O’Malley was sinew and blood with a passionate man’s weakness of the flesh. She would have to watch him. When his body ached from hours spent in the tack room punching Herne in effigy, she would have to be there to rub his back and cluck her tongue. She might have to tease him into coming to bed, to keep him from closeting himself with a bottle and seeking surcease in the arms of liquor or laudanum.
One day soon, when his name was cleared and he was free to share the stories, he could tell their baby of its father’s deeds, both great and small: how he’d survived meeting Blackbeard and had sailed with Bonnet and escaped from prison and rescued his daughter. And when shadows haunted his eyes and she saw that yet another piece of his heart needed healed, she would encourage him to find joy in living, to sail his dinghy or play the fiddle or ride his horse, because any of those was healthier than hiding with his ghosts, lost in a laudanum dream.
Not that she could place blame if he did. It was hellish, being a hero.
Against her back, his wide chest expanded, and the Captain blew out softly. Like a phantom note from a fiddle, a single word came on the breath that ruffled her hair.
Aye.
Beth kissed his hand and snuggled back against him, her heart speaking to his in a place beyond words. If he truly must go, he must promise to come home safely to The Oaks, where they would have foals to raise and babies to dandle upon their knees, and a small village’s worth of bondservants to share their good fortune.
If we can but make it past the darkness.
He pressed a kiss upon her head and wrapped a tendril of her h
air around his fingers, anchoring her to him as she lay in the circle of his arms. “We will make it, Red. Tell me you know it. Surely if I can feel the truth of it, so can you.”
She wanted to. Goddess.
He was silent for a long while. Then, from above and behind her came: You said babies.
She smiled in the dark, eavesdropping again. He didn’t mind, otherwise he wouldn’t have rolled out the thought and tossed it at her like he did.
She kissed his hand and said nothing, and that was fine for them both, curled on a too-short bed built for one, sharing a pillow and a hickory-scented fire, as comfortable in their silence as an old couple who had grown beyond words.
Chapter Fifteen
Ian left the next Tuesday. There was no help for it; he needed to be gone and he needed to stay here long enough for the new moon on Monday, so that he could play the fiddle and listen to Philip sing ghostly little folk songs from the distant past, and meet Beth and Sophie at the back door when they returned from her circle, and he could breathe again once he saw that everything was all right.
He took Beth upstairs where they would be alone. He helped her undress and knelt at her pretty feet to kiss her stomach where their child still grew. He’d said nothing of the other, the one she lost, but he felt a twinge of guilt, because she and her parents had been coming here, to him. But speaking of the first one would lead to the father, and he was jealous enough of a nature spirit.
If he’d thought his unspoken musings were private, he’d forgotten with whom he was dealing. She’d heard his thoughts plain as day and decided now was as good a time as any.
Because it was just ahead of Tuesday, he listened.
“I grew up wie him,” she said, remembering. “He was friends wie my eldest brother. I was young, and when I was so verra frightened tha’ my da wanted us tae go tae America, he sought tae comfort me. One thing led tae another, and we kissed. Just that. But it burned, like a fire that refused tae die, made aw the brighter because we kent it could niver be mair. One night, he cam looking for me on the moors. I kent I couldnae hae him, tha’ he belonged tae God….”
She went quiet and let him absorb that bit, how his pagan lover had lost her virginity to a priest. “Aboard ship, I was dying and the seed in me. I needed tae be free of it tae live, and I drank what I needed tae do it. They said it shouldnae interfere. I think it safe tae say, it hasnae lingered.”
“Red,” he whispered, and kissed her fertile belly, and moved lower and kissed her secrets.
Ian hoped she noticed that he’d shaved again just for her.
She pulled the ribbon that tied his queue and wove her fingers in the thick black mane of his hair. He reached around her and grabbed the tempting curves of her bottom cheeks and buried his face in her warmth. With his mouth and his lips and teeth and tongue, he kissed her soft red fleece and drank from her sacred well, while her breath quickened and tremors made her knees threaten to buckle. There was no moonlight tonight, nothing save the soft glow of a single candle flame that bathed the room in gold.
When she told him she could stand no more, that she must lie down, he kissed her again and pushed his tongue into her for one last taste before tearing himself away. She was already naked as a druid at Beltane and soon had him to match, helping him with his shirt and boots, stockings and breeches, pushing him down until he was sprawled on his bed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man without the extra arms and legs.
“Hae ye seen it?” she asked, eavesdropping at the very least. He supposed it was possible she’d gotten a glimpse as well. The longer he knew her, he was increasingly aware that she had depths he had not yet begun to fathom.
She climbed on the bed beside him. Leaning over, she kissed his cheek and touched his face with her fingertips, marveling at the closeness of his shave.
“Fresh stropped razor,” he credited. “And I’ve seen prints. Not the real thing.”
In the candlelit room under a new moon sky, she looked as beautiful as one of Leonardo’s Madonnas. He’d done a bit of traveling and seen some of the world. When his name was cleared, he would not mind seeing a little more, but only if she went with him.
He reached up and drew her on top of him and managed to guide her onto his cock after a couple of collegiate tries. Once she’d taken him in hand and parted herself with the head of his rod, and had found the moist opening beyond, he bucked up his hips and pistoned into her, achieving full penetration in a series of ever-deeper thrusts until he was seated inside her.
She liked being on top, the little heathen. With her knees straddling his hips and her hands on his chest, she pinched his nipples and bit his lip, licking it after. She teased and tasted and the sweet torment grew, until he could take no more and flipped her onto her back so that he could fuck her proper.
He was trying to move past the crudeness of the thought when she touched his face and smiled softly at him, like he was a gentleman farmer and not a sea captain who for years had known only prostitutes, paid pleasure taken against a wall, on a table, in an alley or a rented bed. He hadn’t been born to an estate. He’d won The Oaks on the turn of a card. Hell, he’d transferred ownership to himself when he’d gone from Jean Delacorte to Ian O’Manion. He knew ships, horses, boxing, and music but he’d never known a woman like Elsbeth Gordon.
She deserved to be treated like a lady and he knew nothing of it. The deed to this house had not come with instructions. No one had told him what connubial manners and seductive words and bedroom etiquette the gentry employed that set them apart, that made them any better than someone who’d once sailed with pirates. If it was a matter of language, alluding to ivory pillars and rosy arbors and the sublime rapture of mystical union, then he was going to be found wanting.
Ian was a plain speaking man. He had a cock, and Beth had a cunny, and damned if it wasn’t the best sex of his life.
When he’d brought them both to satisfaction and they moved to the sweet aftermath portion of the program, he pulled her half onto his chest and pressed a kiss to her wild red curls and spoke of the first time he saw her.
“I’d just sailed in on the Annie Laurie, and your father met me at the docks. I remembered thinking what a lucky duck I was, to have gotten a package of Gordons with the skillsets you had. A horse trainer, a midwife, and a beekeeper. Just what The Oaks needed, thought I.”
Beth could not argue the point, and knowing her father was valued was a small comfort. It was sad indeed when someone looked back and felt they’d lived a life wasted or in vain.
“Your father showed me the place, what he’d done, what he planned. Your mother made lemonade, with the sugar and fruit that I’d brought and chips from the ice house, and I thought that there was nothing in this world as fine as Jannet Gordon’s lemonade. And then, when we walked through the gardens, as pretty as you’ll find anywhere, I thought, there was no garden in this world that I could more enjoy. And then,” he said, “I looked beyond the boxwood hedge and I saw you, in the orchard, talking to your bees.”
He’d like to say that he thought she was a goddess come to earth, like Persephone had escaped and brought spring with her. He thought that now, of course, but he hadn’t known her then. He didn’t know the problem she had, feeling people’s hurts and such, and she hadn’t let him close enough but do anything but smile and wave.
“I did notice the red hair,” he admitted, threading his fingers into it and pressing a kiss atop her head. Ginger locks had ever been one of his weaknesses. That, and blue eyes, and shapely ankles and pretty feet.
“I wish…” He heaved a soulful sigh.
“I ken,” she said. “I ken.”
And she did. She knew how much Ian regretted not knowing her before Jamaica, when he thought that his whole life would forever pivot on that point. Before and after. No matter what he did, where he went, what he accomplished, in his mind everything came back to it.
And now he must go away again. He would go where the risk was least for the most return, and if he were lucky,
he’d come home with enough to tide them over, at least.
And if he were very, very lucky, he might just save them all.
It was Tuesday, the fifth of September, when he left Beth crying on the docks, supported by her mother, who’d promised to look out for her.
And staid, steady Jannet Gordon, more familiar with her daughter’s nature than he might ever be, knew exactly what he meant.
Keep her safe. Keep the others away as best you can. Don’t let strangers near her, talk or no.
Jannet Gordon might not like it that her daughter was virtually living in sin with the man who’d brought them over, but any fool could see that he was mad for her. Yesterday while Beth was talking to her bees, he’d paid a call on his late horse trainer’s widow, in hopes of mending any fences before he left. He was respectful, and honest, letting her know their intention to marry as soon as it could be legally done, and he told her that he hoped to talk Beth into a Catholic ceremony in Annapolis.
He had her mother with that one.
He said nothing of the baby; it might be a month or two before Beth showed, and so far her constitution was blessedly strong. Only once had she gone beyond queasiness, and her little heaves were nothing compared to the morning sickness he’d seen with his sisters, who tended to throw up their stockings.
Apples and pears were dropping in the orchard, and corn harvest would start before he got back. Looking at how fast it was drying down, they’d likely start picking ears next week. The last cutting of timothy hay was cured enough to stack, and Zephyr and Patrick were as ready for the race on the twenty-first as anyone could be. Ralph had been bringing along another stallion named Attila, and they’d decided to run him as well. All was well in the world—or would be, once he got the money thing better situated.
He didn’t know if he’d be home by the harvest moon on the eighteenth, but since that was a Tuesday, he’d rather miss it altogether than add another fight to his ledger.
Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Page 13