"We cannot get out of Camden."
"We shall find a way out."
"Do we have the money and supplies to head east? I don't think so. We cannot leave. We cannot stay."
"Betsy." He gripped her shoulders. "Let's have clear thinking, both of us."
"I am thinking clearly. I think Gates will march on Camden tonight. I can feel it out there. We have to leave now."
"No." He held her gaze with his. "I've heard he's still indecisive. It sounds like he doesn't have a plan for the morrow and will be sitting there when Cornwallis forms a battle line. And if Gates sends that jackal Sumter round again, I guarantee you the redcoats won't let him make off with more men and supplies." Tom enfolded her in his arms. "Listen, sweet Betsy. We're in this together. We'll get through it together, but we have to stay together in action. Are you with me?"
Her face pressed to his chest, she let the beat of his heart beneath her cheek ease panic from her. "Yes."
His shoulders relaxed, and his fingertips stroked her neck. "I shall be back right after five. We can assess where to go from there. You've already fetched the packhorse. All you've left for today is printing work and that meeting with Clark."
She nodded as if to agree with him, but by then, she'd had enough of desperation, enough of watching worry carve hollows beneath Tom's eyes. It was time for a leap of faith. And she hoped her persuasive skills were good enough.
***
Bledsoe the tailor wasn't in, and his shop was closed up. But it was business as usual in the print shop, Harker and Saunders pulling off the back page. Betsy got right to work because it kept her mind occupied, kept her from worrying about when Bledsoe would return. She found herself speculating ten minutes later whether she'd ever be part of a print run again, and realized she was going to miss the business of printing.
At four, just after they'd hung out the last papers, Bledsoe burst in through the front door. "Sumter's at it again! This time he got fifty wagons coming from Ninety Six with supplies and baggage, seventy recruits, and a couple hundred head of cattle!"
Harker roared, "What the hell are the redcoats doing about it? Sitting around on their lazy arses?"
The tailor danced back toward the door. "I heard they gave chase across the Wateree with a retaliatory force. If I were you, I'd close up. I've already sent my lads home."
"Mr. Bledsoe." Betsy stepped from behind the counter. "Please tell your friend Mr. Stoddard that I must speak with him." She'd persuade Stoddard that bringing Tom along would be an asset.
The tailor stared at her, incredulous. "Madam, I shall do my best to get word to him, but I doubt I can reach him with all this military activity."
Dear gods. Stoddard was engaged with the army and unavailable to help her. She'd been a fool, indecisive too long.
"For god's sake, Harker, see her to safety. We'll have battle before dawn!" Bledsoe flung open the door and ran out.
Saunders was looking at Betsy. "He's right, Frank. Get Mrs. Sheridan to safety. You and I can finish up here."
Harker grabbed Betsy's hat. "Let's get you out of this."
Through streets boiling with chaos and summer heat, he escorted her back to the Leaping Stag. He didn't tell her good-bye. He didn't say his usual, "See you on the morrow." He just tipped his hat and vanished into the crowd. From his expression, he didn't expect her back.
"There you is, Miz Betsy." Her face grim, Hattie yanked her into the dining room from the back step as if she'd rescued her from quicksand. Betsy wandered into a common room empty of soldiers. "They ain't comin' tonight. They's all out there." The slave jutted her chin north. "Waitin' to get into it wi' the rebels."
"Where's my cousin?"
"Upstairs in bed wi' a headache."
"Come to think of it, I feel a headache coming on, too."
Hattie's voice followed her up the stairs. "You want coffee?"
"No. I shall just lie down for awhile."
She reached the second floor. Maria and Dolly were chatting in Dolly's room. She slipped into the room she'd shared with Tom for a month, closed the door, and began packing clothing and personal effects. The hum of heightened activity outside intruded. She tried not to think about the tailor's warning of battle, focusing instead on Tom's promise that they'd escape together.
Close to 4:45, when she'd finished packing, she lifted the mattress and pulled out the papers they'd hidden. She no longer needed the cipher key. The spies were in deep trouble, their operations disrupted, their mission at risk. Best to destroy anything incriminatory. After lighting a candle, she fed the translation and key to the flame.
When she lit the letter Clark had received in Augusta, she realized the page below it was blank. Frowning, she dropped the letter in the plate to be consumed, flipped the blank paper over, and looked about on the floor. Where was the letter Clark had written in Augusta but Lucas had been unable to post? She pulled up the mattress again. The letter was missing.
A more thorough search of the room proved fruitless. She tried to remember when she'd last seen that letter. The night she and Tom had translated the cipher? Had she burned it with her mother's letter or the note Clark sent from Log Town? She told herself to quit worrying. Clark hadn't incorporated a secret message into the letter, so there'd been nothing damaging in it for her. And she had far greater concerns.
Oh, how she hoped Clark would let her go when he heard her resolve to leave, but she knew it wouldn't be an easy parting. A man could leave his wife and go to war without a second thought, and other men would support his decision. But let a woman leave her husband, and both parties earned a wicked reputation. Darling, I should never have doubted your fidelity. Bah. Why didn't he realize in Log Town that she was through with him? Get it over with, she told herself, and squared her shoulders.
She exited the house without encountering the slaves and crossed the garden and yard to the stable. The smells of horse and leather greeted her, as well as Lady May's welcome. Betsy smiled and walked to the mare's stall. "Hello, girl. Ready to travel tonight? There's my lady. I know I should have brought you a carrot. Perhaps next time. Say, what's this?"
She plucked down a folded piece of paper dangling from the beams on a string above the mare. Unfolded, the paper revealed another note in Clark's scribbling: I must use extreme Caution today. Meet me in the wine Cellar.
"Leading me on a hunt." Annoyed, anxious to be done with it and free of Camden, Betsy crumpled the paper and lobbed it into a refuse bin beside the door. With a caress for the mare's nose, she strode from the stable.
Her first thought upon opening the cellar door was to fetch a lantern, but she spied a source of light below. Her next thought was far less tangible: a whisper from instinct that something unpleasant waited in the cellar. Indeed, the entire business of her broken marriage was unpleasant, but she saw no way around the meeting.
Exasperated, uneasy, she pushed aside her hesitation and proceeded down the stairs. "Hullo? It's Betsy." Following the light took her to the end of the second aisle and a lantern propped on the bench she'd used to reach bottles stored high. To the left of the lantern was a fresh red rose in an earthenware vase. Dejection prodded her. How like Clark to imagine a romantic rose would help him negotiate.
She noticed a straight-backed chair against the wall to the left of the bench and a musket propped between the wall and chair. A woolen blanket rested on the seat of the chair. She picked up the blanket by the corner. As it unrolled she spotted rope beneath it, two pistols, and a bayonet. Her gaze swept back over the musket and a saber near it. Saber. Cavalry. Dragoons.
Hairs on the back of her neck began a slow polarization. She dropped the blanket. Scent released from it: dark, humid, savage. Every muscle tensing for flight, she spun around.
His laugh rich with joy, Lieutenant Fairfax stepped into her aisle from the shadows of the third aisle, one hand on his hip. "Darling, I should never have doubted your fidelity."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
HE ALLOWED HER to reach th
e steps before giving chase, as if holding off pursuit were the better part of sport for him. On the third step, he snagged her by the waist. She punched his shoulder. He pinned her arms and reduced her to a portable, wiggling mass.
Hauled back down the second aisle, she shrieked. "Help! Hattie! Sally! Help me!" But no one could hear her in the bowels of the Branwells' wine cellar, just as no one had heard Jan van Duser's screams when his hand was severed.
Pressed to the brick wall, Betsy stared at the lantern and red rose. Little black specks spiraled in and out of her vision and gray-tinted the whole scene. With each gasp, she tasted Fairfax's scent. With each second, she expected the burning thrust of his knife in her innards.
But no knife thrust came, and the specks in her vision faded. Still panting, she maintained her stare on the bench, even after he unpinned her and backed away a step. The pieces came together in her head. "You stole Clark's letter. You forged his handwriting."
"Would you have agreed to meet with Lieutenant Fairfax?"
The mockery she saw on his face sent her gaze darting for the lantern. "Oh — oh, g-god." But no gods she'd ever heard of inhabited the cellar. She tried to steady her breathing. "What do you want with me?"
"What does any man want from his greatest source of inspiration?"
"Huh?"
His gaze roved over her eyes, lips, and chin before sweeping across her forehead and capturing her gaze. Mockery vanished, supplanted by idolization. She felt him catch her hands up in his and stroke her fingers with his thumbs. When she darted a glance back at the rose, incredulity and awareness slithered across her like a swamp fog.
There were worse things than enmity to awaken in Fairfax.
"Weeks ago, Mr. Neville told me you'd declared your loyalty to the king. At the time I suspected it a pretense. I was certain you were covering for that rebel husband of yours and the Ambrose spy ring."
"Uh, yes, I suppose it did look that way." Her heart ceased to stammer and assumed a more sedate pace. Perhaps she wasn't in for being murdered in a ghastly manner.
"I'd run out of leads on the spy ring the day I encountered Neville. Can you imagine how dejected that makes me when I'm unable to solve a puzzle because I've run out of leads?"
"Uh —"
"But then your note gifted me with a fresh lead." He brushed the backs of her fingers with his lips and for a moment seemed at a loss for words. "Men have attempted to match wits with me and lost. Never before has a woman done so and managed to stay so far ahead of me and for so long that I must retrace my steps, scouring where I have been for clues. Superior intelligence in a woman. Madam, I am enchanted."
Disbelief punctured her numbness. Enchanted he did seem, but he still had her backed to the wall. Her attempt at a smile foundered. "I assure you, sir, enchantment wasn't my intent."
"Why didn't you simply write the message?"
"I didn't want it falling into the hands of the Ambrose ring and have them recognize my writing. I had a dagger pressed to my throat when I confronted van Duser about my furniture. He'd have killed me if he'd suspected my interference."
Fairfax nodded. "So you sneaked printing it. Excellent. Of course Harker and Saunders denied printing it. I could tell they spoke the truth. It became a mystery to baffle me even in my dreams. I traced your furniture to the plantation of Josiah Carter and found the print of a woman's shoe where the furniture had been stored. At first, I didn't recognize that it was the print of your shoe." He kissed the palm of her other hand. "Mmmm, my mystery woman."
Betsy didn't like the way he kissed her hand. A monster that flayed two men alive, slit the throats of another two, and hacked a fifth man to death wasn't supposed to have soft, warm lips. "Mr. Carter may have stored my furniture, but I assure you he isn't involved in the Ambrose spy ring. And he isn't a rebel."
"Quite. I realized he'd used his own wagon to haul the furniture from the barn and hide it. But after I questioned him, I became certain he wasn't a rebel spy or sympathizer. How cleverly you worded your message to steer implication from him.
"I also appreciate your ingenuity at borrowing the Gálvez family name. I was so surprised to hear it that it threw me off for another half day. I might never have solved the puzzle of my mystery woman had it not occurred to me to return to the print shop and inquire whether anyone helped with the print run." He smiled down at the stains on her fingers. "Lampblack and varnish. Quite the chip off the old printing block, aren't you?"
He drew her right forefinger into his mouth and sucked on it. For the first few seconds, Betsy stared at him in shock while his tongue twirled around her finger. No man had ever done that to her. A tide of gooseflesh, not unpleasant, crawled up her right side before she recovered the sense to yank her finger free. "Stop that." He smiled again and recaptured her hand. "I will appreciate your letting me go now since you're convinced of my loyalty to His Majesty."
While his thumbs continued stroking her palms, he bathed her with that look of idolization. "Such a heady combination, a woman who is both intelligent and loyal. Do you know, where I come from, County Wiltshire, the people thousands of years ago somehow hauled these massive stones about and formed circles and avenues and temples from them to appease the old gods. These weren't gods like that trio of gelded Christian gods. These were gods with power. The supreme deity of them all was a woman. The great mother, the wise woman."
In one lithe movement, he reclaimed the step he'd taken away from her and encircled her waist with one arm, his abdomen and groin pressed to her mother belly. She tensed and pushed at his chest, all hard muscles and heat. When she attempted to back away from him, the brick wall left her no latitude. "You're too familiar. Take your hands off me."
"When warriors returned from battle, they spread trophies at the feet of her priestesses. From among the warriors, her priestesses selected champions and lay with them."
Eyes still wide, she remembered a black cat of her cousin's who'd hunted mice by night, leaving ears and tails on Lucas's back doorstep for the humans to find next morning. How proud and smug the cat had been, too. Trophies. Horror trickled through her soul. Van Duser's hand in the box hadn't been meant just for Abel Branwell. "I never asked for trophies," she whispered.
"Didn't you, though? Betsy, darling, why do I feel you're playing a game with me? I lay on your bed upstairs a week ago fancying I was your champion. But now I sense you've merely been using me to revenge yourself on people who stole your furniture and ruined your happy life in Augusta."
Horror climbed into her throat. "No, no, it isn't so. They're rebels, traitors to His Majesty."
"So I am your champion."
"I never asked for a champion, either."
He lowered his mouth to within an inch of hers. "Either I'm your champion, or you've used me. Let us be clear about this."
Damned if she did, damned if she didn't. But he didn't wait for her to sort out her preference of damnation. The lips that coaxed hers apart were soft and warm and sly, seeking the slippery assent of her tongue, inviting her descent. And descend she did into subterranean caverns carved from her own lust, stymied out of a month of sleepless nights and a physical relationship arrested in its genesis.
Across the roof of her mouth, between her lips and gums, and behind her teeth he painted promises, her introduction into the ecstasy of ancients with bronze weapons, stone temples, and gods of blood and human sacrifice. His hands slid beneath her buttocks, and her body rose in answer to the burrowing heat of his groin, flouting the predilections of her heart and soul and all she'd naïvely labeled as myth. While a sorcerer's lips explored the curve of her chin, the line of her jaw, the hollow of her throat — all softness no man had ever before sought — she recognized in the rattle of her own breath a woman who teetered on the fine line separating true fear and sexual fascination.
Her eyes rolled back, and a dreamy zephyr wove words through her memory. He took his time with me. Oh, yes, he was taking his own, inexorable time. He whispered against her throat, "L
et me taste your shoulders. Take off your tucker." When she hesitated, he kissed the curve of her chin again. "Our greatest fancies are for that which we cannot, dare not do. So dare."
He took his time with me. Margaret had said that. Margaret was infatuated with him. He'd taken his time with her, even as he was initiating his new priestess that very moment.
A chill of strangeness wedged through the spell, granting Betsy the vision of boxes filled with severed hands following her wherever she went, trophies from her champion, a fiend's gratitude for his greatest source of inspiration. Her hands found his shoulders and pushed while she twisted her torso away and gained solid footing, even if her head felt far from solid.
"I-I've an engagement elsewhere and will be missed, so I must go. I should think it obvious that I've not been using you and have told you all I know about the rebels." Hoping to be released, she pushed at his arms again.
He didn't budge and scrutinized her while his breathing evened. "You're leaving Camden. Where are you headed?"
"North Carolina."
"Why?"
"To get away from the war."
"With whom will you stay?"
"Relatives."
Seconds dragged past. "Where is Will St. James?"
Her stomach jumped about, flung acid to the back of her throat. "I don't know. The last time I saw him was last month. He'd made his way back from Havana and hid in my henhouse in Augusta. He had friends to stay with, somewhere in Virginia or the Carolinas, I presumed. He told me so few details."
Fairfax brushed her earlobe with his lips, just enough contact to scurry gooseflesh all over her body and tighten her nipples. "Where was your uncle headed the morning he met you in Augusta?"
She swallowed. No point in maintaining the lie. "Somewhere in the Carolinas or Virginia. He wouldn't say, either."
"And where is Soph — Where is your mother?"
Chill seeped from the cellar floor through the soles of her shoes and spiraled up her legs. Black lace in a box with a parasol. She tensed. He felt it. "I-I don't know."
"I shall ask you again. Where are you headed?"
The Blacksmith's Daughter: A Mystery of the American Revolution Page 28