It was, in fact, too much for her to absorb all at once, and she kept lowering her eyes to her hands clasped in her lap, much as a child in the presence of something awesomely wonderful and painfully incomprehensible. Riverrun was indeed an enchantment, she thought, and she finally began to understand Eric’s reluctance to abandon it to the unknown. It was the greatest of shames, and surely had to be something of a sin that a jewel as delightful as this had to be lost.
“Sara,” she said to the woman still standing beside her, “why can’t Mr. Martingale sell this to someone? Someone who can take care of it like it deserves?”
Sara tugged at the scarf wrapped about her head. “He tried, child, I don’t know how many times. We had more folks runnin’ through here some weeks back than I ever did see. But they ain’t got the money up here no more. The war done take everythin’. All them fine houses what you see along hereabouts, they ain’t got nothin’ inside ’em no more. If you take my meanin’.” And she thumped her chest with a nod.
“Well, if I had the money, Sara,” Cass proclaimed loudly, “I would buy it in an instant! I wouldn’t let anyone ruin this beautiful place. I’d … I’d.…” She stopped and looked sheepishly up at Sara.
“I know, child,” Sara said gently. “I know what you feelin’.”
The moment was both a poignant and a puzzling one. Cass could not fully understand the sudden rush of sentiment she felt toward a place that not only had she never seen before, but was also in what her family would have called enemy territory—that same enemy that had brutally wrenched her from a world she had once called safe. Much of it, she admitted with a certain confused reluctance, had to do with the curious pull she felt toward Eric Martingale, who was just as much a stranger here as she, when all was said and done. But the rest— perhaps it was a part of the peaceful, almost idyllic setting in which she found herself. Here on the porch, with Sara standing patiently beside her, there was no war, no killing, and the nightmare of her arrival seemed less than real whenever she allowed herself to think about it. Which was, she realized with a surge of relief, far less often than she would have imagined. But then, she told herself, Father had always called her the one with the practicality. And dwelling on nightmares, no matter how real, was hardly practical, especially when her future was still distressingly unmapped.
She drank deeply from the glass and nibbled constantly on the cakes, losing herself in thought, in speculation, until the distant sound of a rider brought her upright.
Sara had gone to her chores. She was alone.
Moving up the path back among the trees, the rider was blurred by the shafts of sunlight piercing the foliage overhead, a ghostlike figure on a large black stallion. She smiled and started to rise, wanting to surprise Eric with her walking; but her arms became rigid and the smile vanished as the rider pulled up in front of the porch and swept off his wide-brimmed hat. He was dressed in close-fitting black from shirt to boots, and a bullwhip lay casually across his saddle. He wore bone-handled pistols on either hip, and his left hand rested lightly on one while the right replaced his hat. His skin was sunburnt and leathery, his long hair a flat black, and from the corner of his right eye to his right ear lay a jagged scar, an ugly white against his complexion. He was handsome, she noted, in a faintly distastefully cruel manner, and when his thick lips curled back into a smile, she could see that he had lost several teeth that had not been replaced by either silver or gold.
He bowed again, and she answered him silently with a brisk nod of her head.
“So,” he said, his smile not fading, “you be the new mistress of Riverrun?”
“I am not the mistress of anything,” she said coldly. “I am a visitor, nothing more.”
“If you say so, ma’am,” he said, resting his hands on the pommel and leaning slightly forward over his mount’s sleek neck. “But now I’m forgetting my own manners, ain’t I? I’m Lambert, Vern Lambert. Used to be the man in charge of this fine place before Mister Martingale came over here from that other place. Now, I’m just a visitor. Like yourself.”
“And what are you visiting, Mister Lambert?” she asked.
“Please,” he said, his face pained. “Since we both be visitors, you can call me Vern, if you like.”
“Are you looking for Mister Martingale, Mister Lambert?”
He stiffened at her emphasized use of his surname, and the smile became a formality. “As a matter of fact, I was kinda hopin’ to find him here, now that you mention it. Him bein’ your … host and all, I wouldn’ta thought he’d leave you alone like this.”
She stiffened at the insolent hesitation before the word “host”, but said nothing. Her leg began to throb.
She sat back, her hands gripping the armrests tightly, while her eyes raked him without bothering to disguise her distaste.
“But,” Lambert said after a careful look around, “I don’t see him nowhere about. Pity. Woulda liked to have a word with him.”
“I can give him your message,” Cass said.
“Thank you kindly, ma’am, but not this one, you can’t. I’ll just have to come back another time, I suppose. Perhaps this evening. I expect he’ll be around about that time.”
Without waiting for a reply, he touched his fingers to his hat, wheeled, and rode back the way he had come. Slowly, as though, she thought, he owned everything he could see from his saddle.
She waited until she could no longer hear him, until the cloud of dust raised by his stallion had settled back to the earth; then she rose as quickly as she could and made her way to the door. She would have to find Sara and get her to tell her where Eric was. At once. He had to be warned, though she was not exactly sure why. A racing chill darted along her spine then as she remembered the scar, and the smile, and the hard look that had darkened his face when he mentioned Eric. Stumbling down the hall that passed by the staircase toward the rear of the house, she suddenly knew without proof that no battle or wartime skirmish had been the cause of Lambert’s injury. And she wondered if the scar and Eric’s right hand were connected somehow.
She had a feeling they were.
And she had another, more frightening notion that Lambert’s visit to Riverrun when Eric was away was no coincidence.
She stopped, looking back to the door, just as a cloud passed overhead and cut off the sun.
Chapter Seven
After flinging open several doors to empty, dust-filled rooms, Cass finally reached the kitchen at the back of the house. It was a huge kitchen, obviously intended to be worked by several people, but now it was deserted. On the right-hand wall a great iron stove held a rotund pot bubbling noisily, and the heads and roots of a number of vegetables lay scattered over a long plank table. The left-hand wall was primarily a massive fireplace filled with kindling. A bewildering array of skillets and pots hung from pegs over the cluttered mantle. Cass called out once, twice, then limped across the floor to the back door and yanked it open. The sun struck her full in the face, and she threw up an arm as though she had been slapped, shading her eyes as she leaned heavily against the frame. There was a surge of panic as the outside fell slowly into focus—a panic that insisted the plantation was deserted and she was alone now to face Lambert and his barely concealed threats. She forced herself to take several deep and calming breaths, stifling the panic into a more manageable tremor of apprehension. There was plenty of time, she told herself as she moved down off the narrow stoop into the yard; Lambert would not be back until nightfall.
The backyard was deep, bounded by the ever-present trees and, like the front, badly in need of careful tending. Though there seemed to have been an apparent attempt to keep nature in check, weeds poked tall through the rough grass and a few wildflowers had taken root here and there along the foundation of the house. A hundred yards back on the left was a collection of motley shacks, their walls canted and roofs gaping with holes: slave quarters, she imagined, but looking so disused that she did not bother to check them. There was only Sara left, anyway, and she
did not think Eric would allow the old woman to live in such squalor. Directly ahead of her, then, lay a long, low stable, and she made her anxious way toward it, cursing her leg violently when it protested the unaccustomed exercise, thumping it hard with an angry fist whenever it threatened to collapse beneath her. To one side of the stable she noted a buckboard huddling in the weeds, probably the one she had been carried back in by Eric, accompanied by Sara’s runaway husband. She hesitated, then heard a snuffling from within and pushed on, shoving open the half-door and finding a weary, ancient roan nudging at the walls of its stall.
Without bothering to search through the gloom for another saddle, Cass snatched a bridle down from its peg. The animal started at the sound of her voice, and tried to back away when she opened the stall door and moved inside.
“All right, my friend,” she whispered, stroking the dirty muzzle, patting the neck that had once been sleek and powerful. “Take it slow, take it slow.” She ran her hand over the roan’s back, caressed its haunches, held a fistful of hay to its mouth, and let it feed as she slipped on the bridle, positioned the bit and led the horse into the open air. Again she called out several times, scanning the yard and back of the house for signs of Eric or the old woman; when there was no answer, she wove her fingers into the roan’s mane and threw herself onto its back. It was not the first time she had ridden without a saddle, but her dangling left leg throbbed without the lifting support of a stirrup. She shifted as best she could to ease the discomfort, then wheeled the roan about and kicked it into a slow canter along a path that led through the trees, and a few minutes later, into a broad expanse of brown field.
She reined in immediately and searched as best she could for something that would lead her to her goal. But there was no one, and nothing. Nothing but a handful of coasting birds high overhead, a faintly moist breeze that gilded in from the clouds moving over the hilled horizon, and the remains of a tobacco crop long since rotted, baked, and slumped to the earth. Stout poles rose bleakly above the ground, poles that would have held the cloth protecting the fragile leaves, now more like dying plants themselves. In the distance on her right stood a curing barn, with another directly beside it, the latter partially destroyed by fire.
She rode through the field without calling out, the only sound the hard thump of the roan’s hooves on the dusty earth. From her brow fell rivulets of perspiration, blinding her no matter how often she wiped them away with her sleeve. Yet she would gladly have been riding at midnight if only to be spared the heartbreaking sight of the plantation’s desolation.
She rode through another barrier of trees, then, and into yet another field. This time, however, when she squinted through the shimmering heat, she saw a dark figure standing beside a horse in the center of the open space. Hesitant, fearful that it might be Lambert again, she angled away from it cautiously, keeping to the shadows of the trees until she recognized Eric’s clothes and, when a hand lifted to touch the horse, his black glove.
Buoyed instantly, she cast aside reservation and dug her heels into the roan’s flanks. At the sound of the approach, Eric looked up quickly, then threw himself to one side and was gone, crouching among the dead plants of his crop. His mount skittered away as Cass called out, waving one arm wildly. When she suddenly realized that Eric considered her a threat, she fumbled behind her neck and loosened the bun, freeing her hair to stream in the air about her, still waving, still praying that he would check first before shooting, and scolding herself harshly for behaving like such a damned fool. And when at last he rose from the ground, a rifle clamped tightly under one arm, she slowed, sagged, and cantered directly toward him.
“You could have been shot, Cassandra,” he said sharply when she pulled up in front of him. “Haven’t you learned never to come up on a man like that? Do you want to get killed?”
Bristling unreasonably, and forgetting the scolding she had just given herself, she slid off the horse and stood with hands on her hips. “I thought I had some important news for you,” she said angrily. “The next time, I’ll be sure to bring a brass band with me.”
“Damn it, woman, I could have put a ball through your head.”
“I didn’t know you were that good a shot.”
“I am.”
She nodded once, briskly, and in the ensuing silence could not help but work at a grin to mirror his own.
Both of them were fools, both acting like children, and as she shook her head in mute apology, she noticed a shallow hole at Eric’s feet, and in it a small wooden chest banded in iron. Eric followed her gaze, reached down, and pulled the chest out, tucking it under his arm.
“The house is not safe for valuables anymore,” he explained as he slid his rifle into its saddle sheath.
“Money for my passage, and a few papers poor Harry is going to need when he wraps up this ghastly business.”
He brushed away the clods of dirt and bits of root still clinging to the wood. “Not much to show for so many years, would you say? This,” and he tapped at the chest, “and this.” He held the black glove in front of his face.
Then be looked up at the sky, now islanded with clouds, blinking rapidly and scowling. “It’s never good, Cassandra, to end something without having something to begin next. Otherwise you do nothing but drift. Like a feather. And like a feather, you’re just as useless.”
She moved to stand less than a hand’s breadth from his arm, impulsively reaching for his hand and taking it in both of hers. She said nothing. She dared not. And she dared not pay any mind to the sudden thundering of her blood in her ears.
A crow squawked overhead. A great gray cloud moved in on the sun, its shadow darkening the trees on the far hills like some night-stalking beast fresh from its lair. A light breeze puffed at her hair, pushed it like a veil over her shoulders and across her face. She tossed her head to fling it away, but Eric stopped her with a touch to her cheek.
“It’s lovely, you know,” he said softly.
“Eric, I have to tell you—Lambert came to the house just a few minutes ago. I tried to find you but you were gone.”
“If you only knew how many times I stood by that damned bed,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard, “waiting for that damned fever to break. I thought you were going to die, Cassandra. I thought you were going to die.”
“I looked for Sara, but she’s gone. I don’t know where she is. Lambert—” She saw the look on his face but could not turn away. Why wasn’t he listening? After all this time, didn’t he understand the kind of danger he was in?
“I thought while I looked at you that in all of London or—” and his smile was wry, “—the colonies, there couldn’t possibly be a more beautiful woman.”
“Damn it, Eric, listen to me! What is Lambert after? If he still wants Riverrun, why don’t you just give it to him and be done with it? You’re leaving, giving it up, so why not just let him have it so he’ll leave you in peace?” She was babbling and she knew it. But the force of those gray eyes, the touch of his hand moving from cheek to neck made her lose what strength she had, and the heat that gusted before the approaching storm made her dizzy. Suddenly, the chest toppled from Eric’s grip and his hands were on her arms. A short-lived burst of fear—as she remembered Josh and Cal and Bobbie and their assault—tensed her, left her, and she struggled only a moment before he drew her to himself and gently placed his lips over her mouth. Sweetly. Dryly. The pressure increasing against her teeth until, without thinking, she parted her lips and admitted his tongue, probing, then sweeping, while his fingers roamed over her back and burrowed warmly in the thicket of her hair.
A part of her mind told her it was the lingering trace of fever that made her feel so weak, but the protest died easily, and she gave herself abruptly to the tingling of her flesh as his hands pulled the shirt from her waistband and insinuated themselves beneath the trousers to cup at her buttocks, massaging the muscles that jumped at his touch. Pulling until she was pressed tightly against him, her breasts aching. She grabbed
the back of his neck and yanked his head down, hard, thrusting herself to him, ignoring the faint pains that were reborn in her injured leg.
Insane, she thought giddily as the cloud pulled behind it a gray darkness from the horizon and blotted out the sun; what would Geoff think if he could— But Geoff was dead a hundred years, and she, thank God, was still alive.
She relaxed her knees and her weight pulled them both slowly to the ground. Still gripping at his hair, his neck, she groaned and licked at her lips when his gloved hand fumbled over her shirtfront, releasing the buttons and pulling her breasts free of their confinement. Her nipples rose to his touch, strained when his lips and warm breath brushed over them and the leaping firmness of her stomach. Then he straightened and, while one hand still kneaded and pressed, his other worked at his belt buckle, yanked at his trousers. Suddenly, he hesitated as he realized through his passion that she was not wearing a skirt for him to raise. Cass opened her eyes at the interruption, choked and laughed at the stunned expression on his face. At first he was angry and she was afraid he would leave her. She pouted quickly, shook her shoulders to redirect his attention and laughed again, delightedly, doing his work for him before tilting her head back to stare at the stormy sky as finally, at last, with a long, low moan of pleasure, he rose and entered her, mulling her own cries with a moist and lengthy kiss. She grabbed at his back and pressed down with her nails, urging him to move slowly … slowly … she wanted it perfect, for just when the storm broke; and as she twisted her fingers into claws and slammed him hard down against her, the first drops of cool rain splashed down on her face.
Finally, after sheltering the horses in their barely adequate stable, they retreated to the kitchen where, laughing and drenched, Eric set the logs in the fireplace ablaze while calling out lustily for Sara to attend them. Cass wandered as though in a daze, and eventually found herself standing over the pot on the stove. Curious, she lifted the heavy lid and peered in at the soup the old woman had been making. She frowned, picked up a wide wooden spoon, and stirred the broth, her eyes blinking as steam rose warmly into her face. She tasted the liquid after a moment and grimaced, turned to speak to Eric and saw him staring at her, admiration unabashed in his dark gray eyes. Startled, she felt herself flush, then smile, before she nodded toward the pot.
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