"I best be gone," I exclaimed, giving Hugh a meaningful glare. "I do not like to be late, for it is very rude and inconsiderate to the other person, who must run about the place to find you."
Hugh shrugged. "My friends always trust me to show up sooner or later."
"Like a bad penny," his brother added dryly.
"Your friends are remarkably tolerant, Master Hugh," I snapped. "I wonder if you would be so sanguine, if you were the one left waiting."
"I thought you were going?" the Captain demanded.
"Indeed. There is certainly nothing interesting to keep me here." I headed for the door Hugh immediately followed.
Will stopped him with a curt reminder about his horse. Hugh replied that he would return later, when the blacksmith was not so busy, adding that the horse was probably up to old tricks again.
"There is a lot of that about," his brother growled.
"Truly, I can wait."
"Take care of your responsibility to the horse."
Tired of their stupidity, I left the forge, but Tewke was not long behind me. Coming out to inspect Hugh's horse, he stopped to warn me, "I would not tarry here. You’ve caused trouble enough. Did you not see how he looked at you?"
"Hugh Carver is nothing to me but a friend."
"It en’t that feller I were talking about."
The Captain appeared in the doorway. "Still not gone, Scrapper?"
I scowled. "Perhaps you do not mind people ordering your life about, but I do."
"You mind people ordering my life about?"
Exhaling sharply, I limped away and he yelled after me, "No thanks for the cured ankle then?"
Squinting against the sun, I shouted my reply. "Do not think to tame me, Captain. Better men than you have tried and failed."
He threw out his arms. "There is no better man than me."
I hurried away, cursing and tripping across the grass, afraid to look over my shoulder, but almost certain that if I did I would see Will Carver’s eyes gradually lighten to a very wicked shade of pale blue. It was there in his laughter, which followed me all across the common and soared around me like a flock of birds against the clear summer sky.
The next day I learned that Hugh was sent to Bedfordshire on a matter of business with their father. Since I had recently put my treasures into his hands this was a matter of more concern to me than it might once have been.
I wandered down the lane to Souls Dryft hoping I might glean some information about this sudden journey, but the only soul to be found was Captain Carver. Balanced up on the slate roof of their dairy, the great lanky oaf was busy hammering loose tiles back into place. Under the midday sun he gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat, having removed his shirt to show off every rippling ridge and hard muscle. I'd never known a man so eager to discard his clothing at every opportunity.
When he saw me advancing down the lane he paused his work, slung his hammer to rest over one broad shoulder and straddled the peak of the roof to holler down at me, "What the devil do you want, menace? How many times must you be told to stay away?"
Arriving at the gate, I stopped and looked in, the breeze catching in my long hair. Suddenly a pair of rangy hounds leapt out of nowhere and lunged at the bars of the gate where I'd entwined my fingers. Their snapping jaws missed my flesh by inches, before Captain Carver whistled a sharp command and they obediently sat back on their haunches.
Eyes shaded from the sun with one hand, I looked up at the man on the roof. "Where is Hugh?"
He slid down from his perch and called out a curt "stay" to his dogs. They sat like statues, ears flat to their heads.
"You keep your dogs well trained," I observed wryly, "like your women."
"What do you want with Hugh?"
"We have a matter of business between us."
"Business?" He sneered. Hands on the bars of the gate, he leaned toward me. "I chopped the little cretin up for firewood, so whatever your business you'd best forget it. Run away now, Scrapper, before the same fate befalls you at my hands."
Rather than leave, I knelt to pet his dogs through the bars. The young beasts, easily distracted from their stern master's command, now licked my hands and pushed their muzzles at me. He would not know, of course, that I'd just enjoyed some bread and honey in the cookhouse. I was sure it must smart for him to see his hounds become my friends with such speed.
When I looked up at him again, he was scowling.
"Your hair smells of lavender," he muttered stiffly.
"Oh." I always bathed with sprigs of the flower in my water, but it felt strange to hear him comment on it. And there was more yet to come.
"At night, sometimes, if it's breezy, I smell the lavender from yonder garden through my window."
So apparently he broke his mother’s rules and slept with his window open to let that scent in.
I stood, sticky hands behind my back. Since he had shared this detail with me, I felt obliged to react with something civil. So I asked what he was doing on the roof of the dairy.
"Elder tree," he explained begrudgingly, pointing with his hammer, "planted by the dairy to give shade, but it brushes against the roof and, when the wind is strong, its branches scrape the tiles loose." He paused and I waited. It was rare to hear him say so many words one after the other and I found I rather liked his voice. It was deep, gravelly. The sort of voice one had to pay attention to. "Rufus never seems to have time to fix the tiles," he continued. "Instead he'd rather threaten to chop the tree down."
"But it's a lovely tree."
He nodded, wiping sweat from his brow with one hand. "My mother cannot bear the thought of losing it. 'Tis the only tree in the front yard, as you see, and she looks upon it as an orphan, transplanted in this place...like her. Somehow it manages to survive."
As he spoke of his mother I looked around him toward the house, wondering where she was today and why she did not come out to see who he spoke with at the gate.
"It bothers Rufus, the scraping and rattling on stormy nights. That's when he talks most of fetching an axe to that tree."
"Yet it remains," I said.
"Yes. My mother gets her way."
I was aware of his gaze wandering slowly over me, following a tendril of hair that had become caught on my bodice. Something molten hot and heavy spread slowly and thickly through my body under his perusal. And then he reached a hand toward the latch, as if he actually meant to let me in.
Suddenly I heard his mother calling to him, and I'm sure he did too, thus the moment between us had passed.
His hand withdraw and fastened into a fist at his side.
"Will!" his mother called again.
After regarding him stormily for a moment, I bit my fingernails and hurried off back up the lane.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"When in doubt," intoned Mary Sourpout, snipping another rose to place in her sister’s basket, "one is better off saying nothing at all."
"But if I say nothing," Millicent Bagobones whined, "then he might leave."
Mary was meant to believe this conversation and her sister’s questions were all theoretical. I, of course, knew differently. Millicent grew impatient with Captain Carver and could not understand why his letters had abruptly ceased. Since Hugh left, I had no desire to continue the deception, so the hiding place in the oak at the crossroads, where we had placed the love letters, now remained empty. She returned from checking each day, her face mournful.
It was now an entire week since Hugh left. In the beginning, I was quite wretched and even lost my appetite, but as the days of his absence grew, so did my vexation. I gave him my treasures in a weak moment. Now I must be patient and trusting, when I was not good at either. That handsome face, so I discovered, soon faded from memory when it was no longer before me, smiling.
As for his brother – I could not stroll down the lane, without him there, prying into my destination and why I had no chaperone. For two days he worked on the roof of their dairy, wearing no shirt and with his bree
ches low on his hips, leaving a great deal exposed to the sun. Not that I took much note. When he looked at me through his gate, those blue eyes revealed a considerable number of nefarious thoughts, while he licked his lips, as if he might take a bite out of me, just as he did to that man in a Thetford tavern.
One morning, as I took a shortcut across one of Sir Brian’s fields, he waited at the hedge, eager to reprimand me for "wandering about the place unprotected."
"You mean unshackled?" I retorted pertly, as I climbed the stile, disdaining his outstretched hand.
He followed me home that day, keeping a careful distance, but never letting me out of his sight.
Now, as I followed my cousins in the rose garden, thoughts of the Captain caused me to prick my finger on a sharp thorn.
"You should go away for a while, sister; let him grow to miss you." Mary smiled at the rose bush. "But then he is an elderly gentleman and it might not do to keep him waiting long."
Forgetting that her gentleman was not supposed to exist, Bagobones complained, "He is not so very old."
"And without a doubt the fellow is gouty," Mary continued. "Practically riddled with it." She rolled her ‘r’s splendidly for effect.
"Indeed he is not!" Bagobones cried. She looked at the last rose her sister had clipped, decided it was too over-blown, and dropped it to the path, subsequently flattening half the petals underfoot.
"You are deliberately blind to Sir Brian’s faults, it would seem."
"Sir Brian?"
Snap! A swipe of Sourpout’s ruthless knife sent another head tumbling into the basket. "That is the gentleman of whom we speak, is it not? He is the last suitor our father permitted." Bagobones muttered something indistinct. Her sister smiled dourly at the rose bush and then looked up, watching a long vee of geese pass overhead. "It sounds to me as if our father should send you to your grandmother in London."
Months ago, Bagobones would have danced for joy at the prospect; now she rearranged the roses in her basket with a nervous, fluttery gesture. "But I am not certain I want to go now, after all."
"A visit to your Grandmama is all we ever hear about. Suddenly, you want to stay here? If there is wickedness afoot, it is my duty to tell our father. And whoever has aided and abetted this will suffer the same punishment."
Now I feared for my own hide.
Silence, but for an excitable thrush somewhere in the bushes. Smugly victorious, Mary swept out of the rose garden, her skirt knocking more petals to the ground.
What began as a foolish prank could soon get me into a mire of trouble, and Hugh had left me alone to face it.
* * * *
It was hot and fusty in the old barn, and we sprawled in the hay, clothed only in our shifts, still damp from an afternoon spent paddling in the stream. Like plants with roots in need of a bigger pot, we were reluctant to lace ourselves back into corsets and tiresome gowns, so we lay there, relishing our freedom of undress, while the sunset filtered through knotholes in the wood, sliding across our upturned faces like the gilt stripes of an artist’s brush. I turned my head in the straw to look at Tilda. Her small face was calm and untroubled, the result I supposed, of having a clear conscience and no wicked thoughts. Her features were neatly placed and usually solemn, giving her the air of one three times her age. When I told her this, she remarked that her premature aging was the result of following me about and trying to keep me out of trouble.
When I laughed at that, she pursed her lips into a prim rosebud. "That Master Hugh," she muttered. "He’s a bad influence." She had some dark ideas about what we did together under the pines on sunny afternoons. In her eyes, I was almost a lost cause.
I realized I’d neglected her lately, lured away from my matchmaking schemes by Hugh’s company; now he was gone, I would make it up to her. It was time she had a love life of her own to worry about.
However, I was soon distracted again. The barn door opened, shuddering on its old, rusted hinges and we slid on our bellies to peer over the edge of the hayloft.
There was only one reason for two people to creep about in that barn, whispering furtively, but it quickly became apparent that this couple were at cross purposes; the woman’s grasping hands were unwanted. Her face turned upward, her eyes closed as she leaned in for a kiss and he left her unsatisfied. Before I clamped a hand over her lips, Tilda, recognizing the woman, let out a shocked cry. Fortunately, the woman below made so much noise with her complaining that they were unaware of us in the hayloft above.
"Why do you spurn me now?" she protested loudly. "I remember a time when you were eager…"
"When I was but a boy," he answered, lazy afternoon sunlight rippling across the broad slope of his shrugging shoulders.
Now she changed her tune, purring sweetly, "Can you not stay a while?" She lay back in the hay and stretched with the speed of a thick glob of treacle.
But he could not be any more disinterested and she was outraged at this dismissal of her favors. With her limited reasoning, she could not understand what else he might want from her. Of course, none of the Gawtrys were very bright. Her little sister Matilda, currently squirming beside me, was the quickest of the bunch, since I taught her to write her own name instead of a cross, but one might say she was the smartest girl in all Sydney Dovedale and that would not be saying a very great deal. Nan Gawtry knew very little of anything beyond churning butter, milking cows and groping in the hay.
With the chapel bell ringing out over the fields, serving a reminder of time passing, he now explained the purpose of their meeting. "Tom Tewke has been more patient with you than any man should. I understand now how he suffers, having similar torment of my own. You will put the fellow out of his misery, one way or the other. Give him your answer once and for all."
"Tom Tewke?" she spat. "Is that all you wanted me fer?"
"Today is a day to put things right," he said, almost to himself, looking away from her at something only he could see.
She sat up, swiping at his legs with her cap. "I suppose I can’t compete with the Earl o’ Bosworth’s daughter."
He glared down at her.
"I hear you are to marry," she added.
He was too angry to reply.
She giggled. "The Earl told your mother, if she could stop you wandering about at sea, then he would give his blessin’. But he does not want his daughter wed to a sailor and it must be done soon, or he shall change his mind again and marry her elsewhere."
"You are well informed in my business."
She leaned back in the hay. "Shall you tell your young wife all about me?"
He looked askance. "Why should I? I rarely think of what I did at fifteen, anymore than I think of what I did at two."
"She will want to know about your other lovers."
"When I take a wife, she’ll accept my past as well as my future and never damn well question me."
Her desperation mounted. "If Tom knew how you seduced me…"
"I seduced you?" He laughed scathingly. "I was just a boy then and you were already a woman of experience." He paused, shaking his head. "In truth Tom Tewke deserves better, but he has his heart set on it and who am I to lecture?"
She was furious, her freckled face the color of boiled ham. "I’ll tell him you were my lover."
"Then you’d best tell him about my father too."
Now she blanched beneath her freckles.
He smiled, menacing and wolfish. "I suppose that is how you knew about Bosworth’s daughter; Rufus told you, did he, while you rolled about in his bed?" Humiliated, she leapt to her feet, slapping his face with her cap. He caught her wrist. "Or was it my brother from whom you heard all this? I know you are his latest conquest."
My heart thumped hard in my breast. I did not want to believe his words, but Nan Gawtry made no effort to deny it.
The Captain continued calmly, "You’ll either marry Tewke, or set him free. Let him find another love. I’ll not see him made a fool any longer. Today all is resolved for him …and for me." H
e threw her wrist aside, but with the force of this action a wooden box fell at her feet. She swooped down.
"Why, ‘tis a ring!"
He snatched it from her.
"You mean to give it to that Earl’s blessed daughter," she cried peevishly, but he merely turned away, forgetting her already, so she made a final assault and launched herself at his back, yelling, "I made a man o’ you." He spun around with her clinging to him, her arms throttling the curses out of his throat.
Someone began to laugh. Loudly. I wondered where it came from, as it rocked our hiding place. Then they both looked up at the hayloft and I realized the laughter was mine.
In two strides he was across the barn, mounting the rickety ladder — our only route of escape. Tilda scuttled for her gown, squealing like a trapped rat, pointing a blaming finger directly at me. Vowing never to bring her on any future adventures, I yelled at my ungrateful cohort to make a run for it; at least one of us should survive to tell the tale. In that hectic moment, I was extremely brave and selfless, a martyr to the cause of oppressed womanhood. He leapt across the loft, but under his weight the old boards gave way, sending all three of us to the hay beneath.
Nan began slapping her little sister about the head and shoulders, while I valiantly fought back, pulling on that yellow hair. Busy as I was in saving Tilda, I had no time to defend myself and suddenly I was hoisted into the air.
"Twice now I find you spying on me!"
I squealed. "You have no right to put your filthy hands on me!"
"Yet no one else is willing to do the deed, it seems." Striding out into the sun, he reached an upturned barrel and sat, throwing me over his lap. Holding me face down, across his knees, he exclaimed, "Now I will have that apology!" But he meant to punish me, no matter what I said and only wanted to hear me plead, out of spite. "Do you know what we do to insubordinates at sea? We give ‘em a damned good lashin’, that’s what. But as I have no cat o’ nine tails, a good spanking will suffice."
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