Seacliff

by Andrews, Felicia

  “I see the lady what thinks she’s English,” he answered flatly, closing the distance again between them.

  “Eng—what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “Oh,” he said, “you goin’ t’tell me you ain’t had nothin’ to do with Lam Johns? With Davy Daniels? With—”

  She spun away from him, fist to her mouth and despair clouding her face. All this way, she thought. I’ve come all this way, and they think I’ve been working with Oliver, with Flint. All this way, and for what?

  A hand clamped hard on her shoulder and whirled her around. She lost her balance, and Wyndym took hold of her arms and half carried her off the road, then released her so suddenly she fell backward, her arms stretched out behind her to prevent her from falling prone. Then he tossed his cloak back over both shoulders and pulled out his pistol. She uttered a muffled gasp, closed her eyes in relief when she saw him lay it carefully beside him.

  “Terry, you’re mistaken,” she pleaded when she saw his hands reach for his belt. “Terry, please!”

  “Bitch,” he said, eyes narrowed, tongue licking slowly at his lips. “Ye has a lot of nerve, I’ll say that much.”

  “Dammit, Terry,” she flared, anger momentarily overshadowing her fear. “Dammit, it’s not what you think at all! I came to see Griffin. I need his help!”

  He paused, buckle in one hand. Then he glanced suspiciously down the trail she’d followed blindly. “Alone, are ye?”

  “Alone?” She almost yelled the word. “Of course I’m alone! You think I brought the king himself with me?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past you. Heard a lot of things since I left last year. Lot of things.” He shook his head, partly in sorrow, partly in anger. Then he flung himself at her before she could roll away, one knee jammed between her thighs while he leaned over her, his breath hot and harsh on her face. She turned away, and he laughed. “You fight like this for Flint, do you?” She spat at him, but he only laughed louder. And when she tried to scream he instantly clamped a palm over her mouth.

  “Now you listen, Lady Bloody Morgan,” he whispered angrily. “I don’t know why you come out here, how you come by us, but it don’t matter. Ye ain’t welcome, not a bit, and I’m goin’ to give you a little partin’ present to remember me by.”

  She shouted at him under his hand, her eyes wide as she strained to make him understand what a terrible mistake he was making. It was to no avail. The more she struggled, the harder he pressed her into the ground, finally rising slightly to plant a knee firmly in her stomach. Air left her lungs in a rush, and a swarm of dark spots passed through her vision. All she could think of was the injustice of it all; all she could do was wriggle and squirm as he pawed at her, snapping open the shirt and exposing her breasts in the gray light. Then he reached for her waistband, and in doing so lifted his hand from her mouth and his knee from her abdomen. Immediately, she brought her own knee into his groin and screamed as he did, pushed him over and crawled back into the prickly protection of a bush.

  Wyndym curled up on the ground, groaning, swearing. Then he rolled into a kneeling position and glared at her.

  “Ye’ll pay,” he warned.

  She tried to close the shirt and stand at the same time. “Terry—”

  “Ye’ll pay,” he repeated, standing and swaying.

  Then a loud thud made Caitlin blink, sent Wyndym sprawling onto his face as a cloud of dust rose from his back. A small, well-fashioned club lay on the forest floor, and as she stared at it a man stepped out from behind a massive black oak and shook his head.

  “Every time I see you you’re fightin’ a man,” he said, reaching for the club.

  “Damn you,” she said, without much force. “Damn you, Griffin Radnor.”

  32

  There were nearly a dozen huts in the small clearing of the pine forest. Most of them were crudely thatched, with small stones painstakingly set in a mosaic-like pattern to form the walls. Over and around them bowers of fresh branches had been thrown to camouflage the huts from passersby. Cooking fires burned in the deep pits only from dawn to sunset; they wanted no intruders attracted to their camp. There were no horses, no dogs. At any given time half the forty men who lived in the village were gone. Some hunted stag in the hills; others sought grouse in the meadows; the rest prowled the coastal roads for signs of British troops. An eerie aura—caused by the lack of women, animals, and foot traffic—surrounded the place. So Caitlin felt.

  “Just before the New Year a patrol found our tracks,” Griffin was saying. “There were only a dozen of them, from a ship set sail out of Bangor. We were sure, when they didn’t return, we would have to find some other place. But no one else came. Those men might not have existed at all.”

  He was lying on a pallet covered with deerskin and pelts taken from winter wolves, the fur intact and soft. Caitlin lay beside him, one hand trailing across the scarred flesh of his chest, the other on her thigh beneath a crude woolen blanket. It was night. A stiff hide covering had been drawn over the door and single window, and a low flame burned in the rough fireplace.

  Remembering Wyndym’s reaction, and that of some of the others when Griffin brought her into the camp, she felt as if she, too, were English. Griffin had reassured her that all would be well, but she was not quite so confident. Too many tales from Seacliff had obviously made their way here, and it would take more than a good-natured scolding and a few promises from Radnor before she would be accepted.

  Now, however, as she nestled in the comfort of his arms, feeling the warmth of his flesh against hers, the past eight months had been reduced to the scattered fragments of a nightmare.

  At his insistence, and in the presence of Wyndym and six others who were apparently the leaders of the band, she had told her story. It had been difficult at first, remembering the pain, the betrayals, and the physical abuses, but as she saw the time pass before her eyes, saw the blood running from Davy’s lashed back, saw the tired and strained Gwen, her voice grew solemn, then impassioned, then outraged. She told them of Oliver’s deceit, of his plan for the mercenaries who were even now turning the valley into a fortress; she spoke with venom in her voice about Flint’s machinations not only against her but against her murdered husband. Then, with a plea for forgiveness unspoken but present, she confessed to her unwitting complicity, her blindness, and blamed it on youth, on glittering gold, and on her awareness, which came all too late, that she was more her father’s daughter than she had ever imagined.

  “You were rather hard on yourself out there,” Griffin told her, caressing the underside of her chin with one finger.

  “Not half as hard as I’ve been inside.”

  His smile was tender as he kissed the top of her head. “You’ve come a long way, Cat, since we swam together in the bay.”

  She giggled. “I didn’t know what a man was, then.”

  “And now?”

  She punched his chest playfully.

  “And you?” she asked after a silence that lasted for several long, peaceful minutes.

  “Me?” he said innocently. “What about me?”

  “I heard you spent your winter with the Irish.”

  He snorted. “True. I did indeed. Cat. I certainly did indeed.”

  “And?”

  “My lord, woman,” he said, half lifting himself on one elbow, “you’ve been through hell and have returned full of fire. Don’t you intend to sleep at all tonight?”

  “I must know,” she told him seriously. “I have to know that the tales I heard weren’t just stories told out of court. Please. Tell me.”

  He settled again, idly stroking her breasts. “There’s not much, Cat. I told you what I’d learned in London, and what you’ve said today has confirmed it. But I’d hoped a case would have been presented to the circuit court when it passed through. It would have been the best way, all in all.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Cat, the English will let us alone when they understand once and for all that we ar
e not the barbarians they’ve been led to believe. My God, they strip our mines of coal for their infernal new factories, they take our children into English schools and make them forget their native tongue, and they take our men into their armies because they fight as well as any ten of their own. But for all that, we mean nothing to them. They think we’re worse than the Irish, not much better than the Scots.

  “But if we show them we respect a just law as much, if not more, than they…” He shrugged. “A battle won, and rather a significant one, I might add.”

  “But you didn’t,” she said, snuggling closer, her mouth against his chest.

  “No. No, I did not, m’love. Mr. Flint, it seems, had other plans. The accusation of murder drove me out, and I found my way here easily enough. Those rumors you heard, that I was sending these men food and gold—all true. I confess it.”

  “And I knew it,” she whispered. “If not in my mind, then somewhere in my heart.”

  He laughed heartily. “No, Cat, not quite. I was not helping murderers and thieves. Every man here, every man I have taken with me, has been exiled because of some unjust accusation by the English. Oh, a few brigands turn up, I admit, but we cast them out just as swiftly as do the English. I want no part of that lot, believe me.

  “I came here, and told them all I knew, and we were only half our present number at the time. Half, Cat. The others, the new ones, you recognize them already from your home.”

  She sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Griff. I don’t think they really believe we’re from the same place. I don’t think they believe we are at all.”

  “Ah, now,” he soothed, running a hand through her hair, “most of them do. I would say, all in all, you did very well by yourself this day. Considering what you’d been through just before, I don’t think I could’ve made a better stand against Flint myself.”

  Then he fell into a thoughtful silence, and she was nearly lulled to sleep when he began speaking again, in bursts of anger, in spurts of frustration. Foot patrols had hounded them from the start—from their first encampments near the valley to ones deeper in the mountains— patrols initially from the British army, then deadlier ones sent by James Flint. When she interrupted to explain briefly about the growing fighting in the colonies, he understood at once why no replacement had been sent. The army was gearing up for something it considered far more important than a ragged band of outlaws who knew the hills too well to be trapped in a day. It also explained why they were able to build this village in the glen without any molestation. The lobsterbacks had been routed to another place.

  But that stroke of good fortune was canceled out by a hard winter. Storms of the sort not seen since Griffin’s youth drove most of the game away and into the English lowlands. With food in short supply, coupled with the continuing harsh weather, it had been only a matter of time before illness struck the band. And when it did, it struck with a vengeance. Men died coughing in their sleep, and others were so weak they were unable to do more than raise themselves from their pallets to take weak broth from their fellows.

  Some of the less confident ones deserted.

  Two more killed themselves in a knife fight over a burned hare’s carcass.

  And Flint never seemed to rest.

  Once he had secured the valley to his liking, and was unable to cajole, coerce, or lie his way into ownership of Falconrest and Radnor land, he began sending small patrols into the hills. Flint’s men scoured every slope, every cavern, every stream. They hunted the so-called outlaws as if they were vermin, or mad dogs, or marauding wolves. Every so often they would find themselves lucky; they would come upon a man or two who had found the strength to forage for food, and kill them without thinking. A few here and there were spared only long enough to be tortured into delivering answers before they died.

  “Ambush,” Griffin said, his voice almost a growl. “Every time it happened, it was the coward’s way, not the man’s. And once, because Flint knew I was nearby, he had one of those boys hanged from a tree and done as you would a stag. Like an animal.”

  He closed his eyes tightly and took a long, deep breath.

  There were other groups of outlaws or rebels in the hills, but too many of them had their own axes to grind, and they simply weren’t interested in joining Griffin and his force. Some were maimed or crippled and wanted only death as revenge; others couldn’t understand dying for a valley most of them had never heard of, not comprehending that if Flint was left unpunished, his madness would increase, and he would attempt to subdue other places. Chaos would reign, and London’s wrath would fall heavily on all of them, so swiftly and so mercilessly that Wales would never recover.

  It was just Griffin then, and a handful of men who were fighting Flint, fighting the weather—fighting with the knowledge that they were outnumbered and doomed to failure. Their only saving grace was the valley spread out before them, acting as a kind of beacon to light the way, to remind them they had a crusade, a mission, a reason to go on.

  News from the valley and from Seacliff had been coming in through Davy and Orin, but recently it had become scarce— since Flint’s men had finished sealing off the valley from the outside world. Randall and the Daniels brothers risked their lives trying to get supplies through—food, bits of clothing, a pauper’s share of ammunition—but heroic though the effort was, the supplies weren’t nearly sufficient.

  They had reluctantly decided then to flee for the winter. If the blizzards didn’t get them, their lack of vital supplies would render them helpless in their battle against Flint. Their first thought was Scotland, but that was quickly ruled out when they realized they’d have to trek through a portion of England itself. They would also find themselves first in the Lowlands, where royalists wouldn’t hesitate to turn them in for gold. Ireland, then, was finally their only hope of survival.

  “We lived like dogs,” he said, his voice soft with fury as he remembered the humiliations. “We weren’t of the church, and we weren’t there to deliver our souls, so most of them ignored us. Hatred of the English was common, but the villages were too afraid of the English guns and swords to shelter us. We hunted as best we could, lived in barns, in sheds… Once I spent a week on a fishing boat. It had been docked for the season, I suppose, and I discovered it quite by accident. A week smelling like cod!”

  He nearly spat in a comer, and Caitlin laughed.

  The vagrant Welsh had scattered at Griffin’s insistence. The two score men then in the band were too great in number to pass unnoticed. But even then, when they scattered, they met disaster. A few were lost to the harsh winter, several to irate Irishmen who saw death in Welsh shadows, and two—Griff winced and shuddered—fell in love and stayed behind to become farmers.

  “Is falling in love so terrible, then?” she asked in feigned reaction to an insult.

  “Well,” he said, “it would be if it were with the women I saw over there.”

  “Those men were frightened, Griff, and they saw beauty where you have no eyes.” She waited for a retort. There was none, and she leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “You heard about Falconrest.”

  “I did.”

  “I saw it burning, Griff. Flint made me watch it bum to the ground. And he laughed.”

  “At our best we were fifty,” he said as if he hadn’t heard. When she frowned he told her by way of explanation that they had tried to ferret out Flint’s weak points once they’d returned to Wales and the snow had thawed. There were, however, far more of the enemy in the valley than when they had left. And they were more deadly. One man did get through— Terry Wyndym—and his report of the villagers’ fear and isolation had disheartened them.

  “Even you?” she said, disbelieving.

  “Cat, a wise man knows when not to bell the cat—when the cat has fangs that outreach a man’s arm.”

  “He’s not a cat!” she snapped, sitting up and slapping his shoulder, hard. “He’s a man. A foul, disgusting, evil man, to be sure, but he’s a man nonetheless. And he made one
mistake after another throughout the winter. His last was in not sending his whole army after me.”

  “Why should he? He knows where you were going. And he knows that he’s no reason to fear a woman being added to this motley group we have here.”

  She scowled. “Pardon me, Mr. Radnor, but I believe I did rather well on my own account.”

  “You did that,” he admitted. “But what does it get you, Cat? Seacliff is still his, and I wouldn’t be surprised if by now he has false papers to prove it’s his, all pretty and ribboned and signed and legal. We still can’t get in without losing too many men. We have food now that the game is back, but what does that gain us, eh? A roll of fat around the belly and precious little more.”

  “Well, for one thing,” she said, “it gets me you, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, does it, now?” he challenged, raising his clefted chin to her. She nodded once.

  “And what makes you say that, Caitlin Morgan?”

  “Evans,” she said. “Oliver is dead, and I am Caitlin Evans again.”

  “All right. Evans. So?”

  She squirmed until she was leaning over him, her breasts brushing his chest, one leg entwined with his. “Griff,” she said solemnly, “I have been after you for half a decade, and I was too blind-sided to know it. And when I did know it, you left me. Not deliberately, and for reasons I didn’t know until now. But when you came to me that night—”

  “You saved my life then, Cat.”

  “—I understood a great deal more than I ever had. I’m not one with words, but I know. I know.”

  She kissed him then. Gently, long, as the shadows of the low fire rippled across them. As the soft summer night wind shook the door’s covering. As a night thrush trilled in the forest around them. She kissed him—his lips, his forehead, the heat of his copper hair, the lids of his closed eyes, his cheeks, his chin, the side and hollow of his neck. She touched each of the scars he had received in his fighting, unable to stop a tear from being shed for each one. It was a crude bed they were in, a rude hut with a dying fire, but for all the jewels she saw glinting in his eyes, the perfume of his love, the elegance of his desire, it could have been Windsor Castle, and she could have been the queen.