Seacliff

by Andrews, Felicia

  He touched her—cheeks, back, breasts, thighs—and she was lying in a shallow, swift-running stream whose movement was like that of quicksilver, her skin straining to receive every caress, every movement. It was cool and it was warm; it was cold and it was hot.

  He kissed her and slipped his hands into her hair, and she was moving with the stream now, the foliage glittering overhead like a flock of emerald birds, the ground beneath her back a bed of down and silk, cloud and sun. Lying atop him she was floating; on her side, and she was dreaming; on her back, and she gripped the bunched muscles of his shoulders and wedded her lips to his.

  When he groaned, she answered; when he smiled, she was radiant; when he paused and mouthed “I love you, Cat,” she felt a release of tears and made no attempt to wipe them away.

  And when he joined with her in a gentle coupling that brought a soft cry to her throat, the scars of his flesh and the scars of her soul faded in a flash of heat that made her gasp, made her laugh, made her sink her teeth gently into his shoulder to keep from screaming her release to the others. It was not embarrassment, however, nor was it shame. This moment, more than their first and more than in her dreams, was shared only by Griffin and herself. Intense. Private. As different from her liaison with James Flint as clear water is from pond water.

  The fire, the hut, and the forest were gone; what remained was a carpet of stars and a moon for a lantern and the smoldering look in his eyes as he leaned down, caressing her breasts almost reverently before kissing her lips, softly, hotly, whispering “Caitlin” before the final moment.

  They moved, and neither guided; they raced, and neither pushed; they expanded and they climbed, and when they fell it was together.

  She wept, and dried her cheeks.

  He held her to him and caressed her languidly, filled her ears with promises of caverns of gold; she held him, and she caressed him, and she accepted the promises with a lazy satisfied grin. And when they slept, her head was in the crook of his arm, her leg over his knees, and her heart so filled with laughter that she kept smiling in her sleep.

  When they awoke, he wondered aloud after a kiss what they might do with their day.

  “Well,” she said, “this is rather pleasant, I must say, but the others will get jealous.”

  “Not as jealous as I if you so much as look at them, my dear.”

  Regretfully, she leaned away from his embrace. “Do you really want to know what’s going to happen?”

  A wary look narrowed his eyes. “Caitlin Evans, dammit, have you seduced me?”

  A playful look touched her face. “And haven’t you ever been seduced, Mr. Radnor?”

  “Never as thoroughly as this.”

  “Then you’ll want to know what I think.”

  The wary expression grew bemused. “I think… well, sooner shot for a sheep as a lamb. All right. Cat, what am I going to do?”

  “You,” she said, “are going to help take back Seacliff.” He waited, thinking, then sighed with melancholy. “Cat, I’ve told you—”

  “No.” She hushed him, closing her lips with a finger. “I heard very well, thank you, what you told me last night. But you didn’t hear what I had to say.”

  “As I recall, lass, you didn’t give me much of a chance to.”

  “Then listen now, and I’ll tell you how we’ll do it.”

  And he did. First grinning, then laughing, then jumping from the pallet and wrapping a cloak over his nakedness to pace the floor and consider. Caitlin watched him with eyes brightly excited, admiring, waiting. She knew the idea would intrigue him, knew too it would lure him because he would be using Flint’s own plans against him. It was an irony, and a fitting reward. He’d be unable to refuse.

  When his thinking was done, he knelt on the floor and took her hands tightly in his. “Cat, you have thought on this, haven’t you? I mean, rather, this isn’t something you’ve decided at the same time you were telling me.”

  “Are you asking if I thought before I spoke?” Reluctantly, and somewhat shamefacedly, he nodded.

  She laughed, grabbed his face and kissed him soundly, then leaned back out of the way when he reached for her boldly. “Sir!” she said.

  “Oh, Caitlin, please!”

  “All right, then,” she said, composing herself and nodding. “I spent days wandering around these damned hills. I’ve spent months as a prisoner in my own house. And the more I heard about Flint’s sealing off the valley and the patrols he boldly sent even to the marketplace, the more I knew beyond doubt this was the only way I was going to get back my home.” Griffin scratched at his jaw. “The others’ll take some convincing.”

  “I’ll convince them.”

  He rose and walked away, rubbing nervously at the back of his neck. “You seem sure, Cat.”

  “I have to. It’s the only way.”

  “Some may die.”

  “Men have died before, for their homes. Lam Johns, for one.”

  He turned and looked at her significantly. “And women, Cat? Do women die, too?”

  She straightened. “I will say this once, Griff, and I will not say it again: I could have chosen death at least twice over this past year. Twice! I chose to live, not because I was afraid of dying, but because my death would have meant little to this valley or to Seacliff. Certainly it would not have delivered my domain free of that bastard’s hands. I do not intend to die now, either. I intend to leave this place as soon as I am able, and go home. You and your men may come with me or not, as you choose. But before this month is over, Griffin Radnor, I will be in Seacliff. And I will be there as its mistress once again.”

  She waited patiently, watching doubt, then admiration sweep across his features. Then he reached out his hand. She took it without hesitation and allowed him to pull her gently from the bed, not into his arms but into a handclasp of allegiance.

  “You’re not the same, are you?” he said quietly. “You’re not the woman I talked to at the ringstones at all.”

  “No, I’m not.” And it was neither an apology nor a confession; it was a bold declaration.

  “Good,” he said with a forceful nod of his head. “In that case, Cat, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  33

  Gwen winced as she lifted the bucket from the well’s rim and placed it on the ground. Twinges from lacerations on her back still bothered her from time to time, but she endured them gratefully. A small price to pay, she thought, for the pleasure of seeing Cat flee Seacliff that night. She looked up. The sky was a perfect blue, as deep as the bay’s low swelling water, as vast as all the earth. Then she glanced toward the house, toward the stables, toward the cottages, most of which were still deserted. Everything seemed normal. Chickens were in the yard, scratching for the meal; dogs were sniffing about the trees and carriage yard, one of them lying in the shade of a lightning-scarred hickory feeding her litter of mud-yellow pups; Davy was walking the horses; Orin was working at his forge; and Mary was near the cliff wall with a large washtub, scrubbing linen clean.

  All so normal, and yet not normal at all.

  After Cat had fled into the storm, Birwyn and a dozen men had galloped after her. They were gone for two days, returning only the evening before, bedraggled, disgruntled, and bringing with them Caitlin’s roan. Gwen had fainted when she heard the news, but Orin had assured her that since the animal’s mistress had not been found there was still hope she was alive, somewhere, perhaps even with Griffin.

  Gwen chose to believe this version. To consider the alternative would have been too much for her to bear.

  Davy waved when he saw her looking on, patted one of the grays fondly on its haunch, and. trotted over to help her carry the water buckets into the cottage.

  “Your back?” he said, kicking open the door with his foot. “A bother,” she replied, “but not a loss.”

  After Gwen had thrown herself atop Birwyn during the melee in the front room, he’d finally managed to extricate himself by tossing her against the paneled wall. At the same tim
e someone had thrown a cushion from one of the chairs, striking a sconce above her and shattering the chimney. When she hit the wall she scraped several shards of glass against her back, and they’d made some minor but painful cuts along her spine. Davy himself, and Orin, were still sporting bruises and a black eye each as a result of the staged brawl, and both carried them as badges of honor, refusing even the simplest of medications to ease the stiffness or the occasional lancing pain.

  “Have ye seen the man?” he said, while she dumped the water into a large wooden barrel they would use for drinking and cooking later in the warm day.

  “Not since yesterday.”

  He grinned and, when she turned around, grasped her in a loose embrace. “He hobbles about like a one-legged chicken. With the walking stick he looks like an old man.”

  They chuckled, but they did not laugh. Flint’s left ankle had been severely sprained from the fall down the stairs, and there was something wrong, too, with his right arm. Davy had raced to the hall in time to see the last moments of the fall, and it was he who had run to Flint’s assistance, and then to Bradford’s.

  But for Bradford, it was too late.

  “He was a fair odd man,” he said as Gwen kissed the point of his chin. “I’d’ve thought he’d be Flint’s man for sure.”

  “No,” she said. “He was the major’s, and no one else’s. And he was no fool. He didn’t believe for a minute that that poor Northumberland lad had done the killing. You could see it workin’ at him from the inside. We’d fought too much, he and I, for him to talk to me. And he was never sure he could talk to the mistress.”

  “But he was a good man at the last,” Davy told her gently. “Without him, the mistress never could’ve done it.”

  Gwen gave a quick, rueful laugh. “I hate to say this, Davy, but I’m going to miss the old fart. He may have been a sod, but…” She shrugged. “Spilled milk, Davy. Spilled milk.”

  The rest of her thought went unspoken. They both knew that all they could do now was wait. Wait to see if Caitlin had survived; and if she had, to see what she would do to get back what was rightfully hers. Meanwhile, they had to live with James Flint.

  Never in Gwen’s life had she seen such fury, such absolute rage in a man as she saw in Flint when he realized he’d been bested. He began screaming at the top of his lungs at the foot of the stairs, and Lordy! She’d never heard such a string of oaths or incomprehensible sentences strung together at once. He must have been in pain, but his yells were forceful enough to stop the staged brawl. It was as if the king himself had strolled through the door. After that, there was much confusion and embarrassment, men running helter-skelter through the house and out into the storm, while the villagers themselves quietly slunk off to their homes. Three days had passed— as had the storm—before anyone saw Flint again. And when he appeared in the kitchen early one morning, Gwen’s first thought was that he was a dead man. His face was drawn, unshaven, badly bruised; his hair was unkempt, and his clothes looked as if he had slept in them. He grumbled about having something decent to eat for a change and left. Shortly afterward, she and Mary were summoned to the front room where he sat on the couch, staring into the hearth.

  “She planned it all, you know,” he said without looking at them. “Everything was planned.”

  His voice was quiet, and all the more dangerous for it.

  “Nobody leaves this place until she is returned, do you understand me?” Still the quiet, still the threat. “You will do what you have to so I do not starve or lack for my comforts, but no one leaves. No one.”

  Mary shrugged as if it didn’t make a bit of difference to her one way or the other, but Gwen, as she left, couldn’t help feeling as if a ghost had walked over her grave. She expected Flint’s men to make reprisals on the village; there were none. And the people she spoke to, those who ventured on occasion up a back, hidden path to Orin’s cottage, said they wished he would do something to relieve the tension.

  No one knew who would suffer first. But sooner or later Flint would have his revenge.

  A week passed, and the only excitement occurred the day Ellis Lynne attempted to leave. Shortly after dawn, a cart piled high with trunks and sacks rolled out of the vicar’s yard. Lynne was driving. And he was alone. He might have made it had not Morag Burton run screaming from the vicarage before he’d circled the commons, shrieking imprecations and waking all those who hadn’t risen with the sun. Lynne tried to whip his pony to greater speed, but the cart was too heavy, too unwieldy, and before he was halfway up the road toward the gap it toppled him and his belongings into a ditch.

  One of the trunks burst open and, as the people gaped in amazement, hundreds of gold coins spilled into the grass.

  A shout rose up, and the villagers charged—not for the vicar, who was groaning and rolling on the ground, but for the gold. Within moments it had vanished, and Lynne was left to right the cart, repack his gear, and return sheepishly to his home. He said nothing about the stolen money. And the following Sunday there was no one in the pews when he ascended the pulpit for his sermon.

  “We wait,” Orin said stolidly on the eighth night, after Gwen had wondered aloud if they shouldn’t at least be trying to contact someone in the hills. “Martin can do nothing with Flint’s men about. Neither can we. We will do the mistress no good by being dead when she returns.”

  “No!” Wyndym shouted, one hand slashing viciously through the air. “I cannot understand you, Griffin. The woman ain’t got her reason, surely ye can see that much. She thinks we’re the whole bloody Brit army!”

  Griffin said nothing, waiting patiently until Wyndym had finished his tirade. He, Caitlin, and eighteen others were in the clearing formed by the rough circle of huts. Many were seated on crude benches, and the rest were either lying on the ground or leaning against the boles of the surrounding trees. They were half the number Caitlin had seen when she’d arrived. The rest had left. They had not deserted, and they were genuinely apologetic. But they had no immediate stake in the deliverance of Seacliff, and so they moved on, deeper into the mountains where they could await either a pardon or some other fate.

  “My God, it’s madness.”

  Caitlin, seated primly on a stump and still in her father’s clothes, stifled an impulse to lose her temper and be done with it. The day after she and Griff had sealed their lives, she had fallen into a three-day cycle of sleeping, eating, sleeping again. Exhaustion had caught up with her in an untimely fashion, and now that she was ready to move, Wyndym and his bristling beard had stepped in her way.

  He was, it appeared, the only one who still did not trust her.

  “Listen,” the young man said, his voice breaking. “I’ll say it for the last time, and you all must listen to me! We are not an army. Twenty if we’re countin’ the lady. Would you have the grace to tell me how nineteen men and one woman are goin’ to attack a valley, stand off nearly one hundred trained men, and take the big house all in one fight?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Lor’, Griffin, it ain’t possible. We can’t do it!”

  Griffin’s clothes were loose, shades of green, and the copper in his hair flared like fire. He walked the width of the circle and stood before Terry, one hand smoothing the front of his shirt.

  “In the first place, Terry, no one said we were going to attack the valley.”

  Wyndym’s hand pointed at Caitlin. “But she—”

  Griffin slapped the hand down, gently. “She said nothing of the sort. Nor has she said anything about taking on all of Flint’s bloody soldiers. We don’t have to! For what has to be done, we have all the men we need right here.”

  A grumbling from one of the others brought Caitlin’s face around. She couldn’t tell if they were agreeing or if they were having second thoughts.

  “M’lady,” one of them said—Willy Jonson, a farmer whose wife had been murdered by Flint’s men after they’d raped her— “ain’t there no other way? Can’t…God help me, can’t the Brits give us a hand?”

&nb
sp; Caitlin smiled at the long-armed, bald man. “The Brits would sooner see us kill each other off. Then they’d have that much less to worry about among the barbarians.”

  A round of quiet laughter, and Terry’s face was dark. He knew when he was beaten, but he still couldn’t help resisting to the last. “I still don’t like it.”

  Caitlin stood, grabbing her cloak from the ground and tossing it carelessly over one arm. Griffin turned to intercept her, but she pushed him aside and glared at Wyndym.

  “Don’t like it, then,” she snapped. “Don’t like it. But we’ve wasted enough time arguing here. The longer we bicker, the more time Flint will have to catch on to our game. We must move now, or we’re done.” Her eyes narrowed, and her voice lowered. “And hear me, Terrance Wyndym—if I have to do it alone, I shall.”

  She looked to Griffin suddenly, then walked into the hut and threw her cloak into a comer. Reaching under the pallet she pulled out a rucksack crammed with rations. She grunted as she lifted it to her shoulders, smiled without mirth as she slid her sheath and dagger into her waistband. Then she stepped outside again.

  “I am going to the sea. Now. The rest of you can do what you bloody well please.”

  Without meeting a single startled gaze she marched from the clearing, looking up only once to check the sun’s position. Five minutes later she could hear footsteps behind her, but she would not glance back. It was a monumental effort she was asking of these men—first to trust her, after all they believed she had done to them, then to follow her into the bastions of hell itself.

  But she hadn’t been bluffing.

  If need be, she would indeed do it all herself—or die in the attempt.

  “It was a grand show you put on back there,” Griffin said as he fell in step beside her. “But Cat, you were taking a bloody great risk.”