Chase the Dawn

by Jane Feather

  “Poor little bugger,” one of the Carolinians muttered. “What d’ye intend doing with him, Ben?”

  “The same as the others,” Ben said. “There’ll be someone in the next village who’ll take him in.”

  “How old do you think he is?” Bryony yawned deeply. “He seems such a baby, but that’s probably because he will not speak.”

  “Four or five,” hazarded Charlie. “Young enough to forget, it’s to be hoped.”

  “In which case, he is more fortunate than I.” Bryony wiped their knives clean on the grass, concentrating on the chore with a little frown.

  Ben threw more sticks on the fire. He knew that frown from experience, and it had nothing to do with the task at hand. “Bedtime, I think.”

  The others rose instantly, bidding them good night and seeking their own beds at a discreet distance. Bryony sat looking into the fire, her expression bleak.

  “Sleep on it, lass,” Ben advised quietly. “Things always look less grim in the morning.”

  “I do not believe that Francis is dead,” she said, poking at the fire with a twig. “That night, when he left me on the path to the clearing, he said it was not our last farewell. And something tells me that it was not.”

  Ben sighed. “Basing hopes on feelings and premonitions, sweeting, is not sound practice. You merely set yourself up for more grief.”

  “That is easy for you to say. You have not left behind all those whom you love, who informed your childhood and your growing—” She stopped, shivering at the look on his face.

  “Have I not?” he asked, a mocking note in his voice. “You know more about me than I do myself, it would seem. Or are you simply assuming that I sprang without family assistance into the world?”

  “If I were to assume such a thing, it would hardly be surprising,” Bryony said, meeting the challenge head-on. “I dare not ask questions. As far as I am concerned, I am married to a man who has no family and no history. I have said that I am content to have it so, if that is what you wish. I do not know whether you are a murderer or a thief, or whether you were wrongly accused and sentenced. I know that Roger Martin put those scars on your back, and that you are a runaway bondsman. Which means that you are an outlaw, but I do not suppose that will matter once this war is over. I don’t suppose anything will matter anymore.” They were brave words, but the tremor in her voice could not be hidden.

  “You are not content to have it so,” Ben heard himself say. “And I fear that I was not wrongfully accused and unjustly sentenced. I have committed both murder and theft in the name of justice—but they call it treason.” Why he started on this road after all his resolutions, he would never know, but his feet were firmly on the path now, and he did not think they would stop until the tale was told. Perhaps it was better. She had given up so much for him that maybe he no longer had the right to withhold what he knew she needed so desperately. And there would be a relief for him in the telling.

  “You are talking in riddles.” The firelight caught the bright spark in her eyes as she leaned closer to him. All around them was the silence of sleeping men, broken only by the crackle of a fire, the occasional, desolate hoot of an owl, the rustle of the night breeze in the trees.

  Benedict looked into the fire and saw tumble-down hovels and starving children; women, aged beyond their years by incessant childbearing; men, bowed and broken by the struggle to wrest a livelihood from land that was loaned on sufferance and taken away at whim. He saw families standing by the wayside, their pots and pans and the few sticks of furniture around them, evicted from their homes because their landlord, who had probably never set foot on his land, had another use for it, condemning them to the slow death of starvation.

  “What do you know of Ireland?” he asked quietly.

  Bryony frowned. “Very little. We have considerable land there, I believe. Papa says the people are lazy and ignorant, drunk most of the time—”

  “And on what does Papa base this judgment?” Ben interrupted harshly. “When did he last visit his land and his tenants?”

  Bryony touched her lips with her tongue, feeling the edge of the precipice with a dreadful fascination, wondering if she dared step closer, knowing now that this was what it was all about. This was the stain with which she was tainted. But it was too late to draw back even if she wished. “I don’t think he has ever been there,” she said hesitantly. “He has a steward who sends him monies and reports.”

  “And where do you think that money comes from?” he demanded. “Perhaps it grows in the fields, in the hedgerows, there for the picking?”

  “I think you had better tell me where it comes from,” Bryony said, keeping her voice steady with effort as the fearful foreboding cast its slimy tendrils around her. “I appear to be very ignorant.”

  “It comes from the labor of those lazy, ignorant drunkards,” he said with low-voiced bitterness. “They pay your father rack rent for a plot of land too small to feed their families. They work your father’s land for no wage to help pay their rents. And if they fail …” He shrugged with seeming nonchalance, and the tendrils took hold of her, became tentacles of dread. “Or should your father’s steward decide that he needs their little plot of land, then he will tell them to leave. If they protest, the roof will be burned over their heads, the crops they have planted will be destroyed.”

  “Please …” Bryony broke in, her eyes clouded with distress as she looked into the picture being painted for her. “You cannot be telling the truth. My father would not knowingly permit such things.”

  “Of course he permits them! How else is he to get his rents? Rents that have kept you in silk and satin; your belly filled with delicacies; a blood horse to ride.” Benedict laughed derisively. “And your father will defend to the death his right to do as he pleases with his land and with his tenants, who have no legal redress and mostly cannot read or write because Catholics are denied the right to education.”

  “But what of your family?” she demanded, unable to contemplate the image of her father created by Benedict’s descriptions without making some attempt to defend or to explain—at least to lay his sins at the door of a community rather than an individual. “Are they any better?”

  His face was in shadow, and she could not make out his expression as he said, “I have no family.”

  “They are dead?”

  “I am dead to them.” And then he told her, sparing neither of them a single nuance of detail.

  “So, you are wedded to a traitor who should have paid the traitor’s penalty,” he finished with a bitter laugh. “Hanged, drawn, and quartered … because I questioned the right of men like your father to starve families to death—a right that your father would consider inalienable and the traitor’s penalty well visited on those who would deny him.”

  “It could have been my father who sentenced you. That is what you are saying, is it not?” The puzzle was now in place, and Bryony felt as if she were sitting on some cold, gray beach, contemplating the wreckage of a ship of illusions.

  “Do you deny it?”

  “No, I cannot. And I am guilty by extension. As you said, I have enjoyed the fruits of those labors. No wonder you didn’t wish to marry me.” She shook her head and the black hair swirled, hiding her face from him. “Why did you?”

  “I am not married to your father,” he said quietly. “And I love you.”

  “Not always. Sometimes you hate me. But at least now I understand why.” She looked up and offered him a travesty of a smile, which held so much weariness and hurt that he wanted to weep.

  “I should not have told you.” He reached for her, pulling her into his arms. “I never intended that you should know. I do not really blame you. It is only when the bitterness rises as it does.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand that now,” she said, almost impatiently. “Your friends have died a dreadful death, you lived in slavery … endured such degradation that I cannot bear to think of it….” A tremor ran through her. “And still it continues.
How can you help but be bitter? How can you help but find loathsome those who perpetrate by omission or commission—”

  “Enough!” he said fiercely, crushing her to him, alarmed by her extreme pallor, the haunted distress in her eyes, the sudden fragility of the body he held, as if all the stuffing had gone from her. “You are to say nothing more, do you hear me? It will never be mentioned between us again.” His hand stroked her hair away from her brow, but she began to shake, her teeth chattering as if she were in the grip of an ague, and he cursed himself for the self-indulgent insensitivity that had led him to tell her what he had known all along would cut her to the quick.

  “It may never be mentioned, but it can never go away,” she said with low intensity, resisting the comfort of his hold, turning her jaw against the fingers that would bring her face to his. He could feel the retreat of her self, a shrinking deep down into the core that he could only reach when her body and spirit met and matched his on the ephemeral plane of pure sensation.

  With grim deliberation, he forced her to meet his eyes, his fingers bruising against her jaw as he refused to yield to her mute wish to crawl into her own place, to lick alone the wounds that she should not have to bear. The words of denial were on her lips as he brought his mouth to hers, stifling the negation. Even then she held her mouth closed against him, as if to permit him entrance would expose her to yet more pain. But he explored the tender curves with the tip of his tongue, tasting the sweetness of her lips, the fingers on her jaw holding her immobile. His other hand was behind her, unfastening the hooks of her gown. The soft September night air, tipped with mountain freshness, brushed her bare back, and she struggled against him, in confusion and distress, knowing that he offered sweet annihilation and the loss of hurt, yet resisting the gift in strange, irrational anger.

  The gentle exploration of her mouth changed, became a searing, thorough invasion that forced her lips apart. Her breasts were flattened against his chest as he held her against him as if his heart would beat for them both. His free hand roamed down her bared back, reaching farther to caress her buttocks, lifting her so that she lay sideways across his lap and could feel the hard maleness of him pulsing against her hip. She tried to push against his chest, but the hand on her buttocks gripped tight, clamping her to him as his tongue continued to ravish and plunder her mouth. And within this captivity, this forcing of her self, lay the peace of final surrender, the healing that he would compel her to receive.

  When he felt the fight go out of her, Ben released his hold on her jaw, although his mouth still held hers and his other hand remained firm and warm on her bottom. He pushed the loosened gown from her shoulders, baring the proud mounds of her breasts, moving his mouth to the hollow of her throat, then burning a teasing, tantalizing path to her bosom. The straight black eyelashes swept upward, and Bryony gazed into his face, where the fire’s glow created planes of light and hollows of shadow. He let her fall backward on his lap so that she lay, still now, in offering.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “You must never forget that. It is all that matters, do you understand?” He drew the wadded material of her gown from under her so that she lay naked, the tender symmetry of her body, the pearl softness of her skin brushed by the night air, opalescent in the fire’s glow. “Do you understand?” he repeated with gentle insistence, spanning the slender indentation of her waist with the callused hands of the woodsman fighter.

  Bryony nodded, reaching a hand to touch his face, laying her fingers lightly across his cheek, tracing the strong angle of his jaw, down to his neck, where the tendons stood out, in taut evidence of his urgency and the muscular restraint of that urgency. “I love you.”

  A tiny sigh escaped him, and he began to move over her body with sweeping caresses, his words, expressing his sensuous delight in the glories that he found, filling her with liquid enchantment. He drew from her the murmured responses that he required, obliging her to reveal for him the sites and touches that gave her greatest pleasure. And she was no longer isolated, alone with the pain of a self-imposed responsibility and its guilt. She was fired with the brand of his love, that was taking her, ever ascending, to the moment of obliteration.

  She was still lost when he laid her upon the grass, his black eyes charcoal embers as they devoured her where she lay, awash in languor. He stripped off his clothes, then knelt between her widespread thighs, his body a bronzed and powerful shadow in the deeper shadows of the night. He drew her legs onto his shoulders, slipping his hands beneath her buttocks to lift her to meet the slow thrust of his entry, which seemed to penetrate her core, to fill her with a sweet anguish that she could barely contain, yet could not bear to relinquish. The fire had burned low and the woodland sounds had yielded to the silence of profound night before they came back to themselves, the sweat cooling on their entwined bodies. Bryony cuddled closer into Ben’s embrace, and he reached for her cloak, wrapping her soundly before rebuilding the fire, so that they lay in a circle of warmth and light within the deep dark of the wood. Their companions’ fires had died long since and, before sleep finally claimed them, the lovers could believe that they still existed on their own plane in their own universe, where words were not necessary; their eyes locked in love and the touch of their skins expressed all that ever needed to be said.

  It’s to be hoped we’ll find a likely family here.” Benedict hitched Ned higher on his back, where he was riding piggyback, and frowned at the farmhouse and the cluster of outbuildings that appeared beside the bridle path.

  “Ye take one step on my land and ye’ll be feeding the vultures!” The threat bellowed from the top of the barn and a shot punched into the trunk of a tree behind them. Ben had dropped Ned to the ground and swept Bryony behind him almost before the echo had died.

  “We come in peace,” he called, raising his hands, showing them weaponless.

  Bryony stepped forward. “We would ask for your help for a child—”

  Another shot whined overhead, and Benedict, a violent expletive rending the air, grabbed her roughly, shoving her behind him again. “Stay where you are put!”

  “But I only thought that if they could see Ned and me, then they wouldn’t be afeard,” she explained reasonably. “If Ferguson’s men have come this way, then it is hardly surprising that they don’t welcome strangers.”

  “When folks are scared, they are inclined to shoot first and ask questions later,” Ben pointed out.

  “Then they are as likely to shoot you as me.”

  Ben’s laugh quivered in his voice. “You are a damnably argumentative lass.” He looked around again, then shook his head. “I think we are on a fool’s errand here. We had best rejoin the others.”

  They had broken away from the group earlier that morning, since the pursuit of Ferguson’s band was now taking them off the beaten track, away from the possibility of hamlets or even the lone farmhouse, like this one. Ben was anxious to be rid of the boy, who still had not said a word, although he came trustingly enough into Ben’s arms when his little legs grew weary. But campaigning of any kind was no activity for a child, and this stealthy creeping up on the plundering Tories was fraught with more than ordinary dangers and privations. Bryony seemed to thrive on this hand-to-mouth existence, her body grown lean and taut where it had been slender and fragile, her skin bronzed and freckled instead of cream and rose. Her hair was always tangled and frequently dirty, but Benedict did not think he had ever known her more beautiful—or more achingly desirable.

  “Wait!” Bryony said suddenly as Ben turned to go back the way they had come. “Someone is coming.” A woman, a rifle beneath her arm, appeared in the doorway of the house. Bryony, dodging Ben’s grasping hand and ignoring his imperative shout to come back, ran over to the house. Ben swore again, waiting with jarring heart for another shot from the watcher in the barn. None was forthcoming, however, and Bryony reached the house unmolested. Hoisting the child into his arms, Ben followed her.

  Bryony was deep in explanation when he reached t
he house. Her audience was a gaunt woman with sharp eyes and gnarled hands, iron-gray hair scraped back from an angular countenance. She held the rifle with the ease of one well versed in its use, and she stood, legs apart, with all the stolidity of one who had broken the sod of the frontier and knew its hardness and intractability. She listened to Bryony and eyed Ned, who gazed with his habitual, wide-eyed mistrust from the shelter of Ben’s arms.

  “Scrawny!” the woman pronounced when Bryony had fallen silent. “But he’ll learn to work soon enough.”

  “But he is only a baby,” Bryony said, shocked into protest. “He can’t work.”

  The woman snorted. “There’s no food for idle hands! He’ll chop wood and fetch water, clean out the stables and do most anything for a bed in the barn and his keep.”

  Bryony turned to Benedict, who said quietly, “It is the life he would have had, lass, if he had not lost his family.”

  “But he would have had it with people who loved him,” she said in a low voice, looking around the bleak property, then into the expressionless eyes of the woman. There was no love here. Maybe no cruelty, either, but such a little mite, already battered by the world’s ferocity, would shrivel in this thin, ungiving soil where there was no nurturing warmth.

  Ben set the child on his feet and said, “I will pay for his keep, ma’am, until he is older and stronger … and for a bed in the house.” Drawing one of his few remaining sovereigns from his pocket, he held it out to the woman and said to Bryony, “It has to be, lass.” Taking her arm, he turned her back to the path. She went without protest, knowing that he had done what he could, but she had not taken three steps when a sobbing wail came from behind. Spinning on her heel, she saw the child hurtling toward her.

  “Bryny … stay with me!” Ned flung himself at her knees, clinging and sobbing. It was the first time he had spoken since she had found him.

  “Sweet Jesus!” muttered Benedict, in no doubt as to what was going to happen now. “Bryony, I cannot be saddled with a child.”