Judith E French (12 page)

His fingertips touched her secret place, and she ran wet with desire. She raised her hips to meet his long, powerful thrust and cried out with joy as he sheathed himself again and again in her willing flesh.

“You’re mine,” he gasped as he spilled his seed into her. “Mine, Leah, mine.”

She clung to him, lost in the splendor of her own climax, too filled with happiness to think farther than this instant, this shared rapture.

 

Leah held tight to Brandon’s waist and stared around her wide-eyed as they rode through the marketplace of Annapolis to where the sailing ship was docked. She’d given in to Brandon’s plea that she wait until he left before departing for her own village. There had been no mending her riding habit after their pleasure in the barn, so today she was wearing a proper lady’s outfit, complete with red cloak and hood. In such clothing, it was impossible for her to ride astride, so she was sitting sideways behind Brandon on a little leather platform. “Riding pillion,” he had called it. Leah was certain it was the oddest way to ride a horse anyone had ever imagined.

“No need to go without seeing the town,” he’d urged her, “or without taking back gifts for Kitate and your family. I’ll give orders that someone escort you safely to the farthest English outpost.”

They’d ridden down the dirt street that morning, and Leah had gazed in wonder at the houses that rose two and three stories. Each house had windows of glass and a chimney, most had two chimneys, and some even had three or more great piles of brick soaring into the sky. All the chimneys were spewing smoke this day, and the wide streets were crowded with people—more people than Leah had ever seen in one place in her life.

There were white men and women, and blackamoors, and even an Indian or two. Farm women bustled down the street with baskets of bread and vegetables; men lounged in open doorways talking in loud voices, and children and dogs scampered in and out of the throng. Church bells clanged, wagon wheels squeaked, and chickens squawked and scratched in the dust. There were pigs, and geese, and goats being driven up the street by farmers or running loose. Pigeons and shrieking seagulls swooped overhead and dove boldly to steal scraps of food from the ground.

One black woman was leading a skinny red cow with hipbones that stuck up like fence posts. She wore a huge white linen mobcap, and over her shoulder she carried a stick with two pails hanging from it. “Milk for sale,” she called. “Fresh milk.”

“Is that woman a slave?” Leah whispered in Brandon’s ear. She looked admiringly at the large gold disks dangling from the black milkmaid’s ears.

“Not likely. That’s Mary Tice. She’s a free black woman. She owns a farm outside Annapolis. She sells cheese and butter to the ships as well as to the citizens of the town. I’d imagine Mistress Tice is quite well off.”

“Oh. Alex said all the blacks were slaves.”

“And Alex is never wrong, is he?”

Leah giggled and laid her cheek against his back. Tomorrow, Brandon would sail, and she’d never see him again. She pushed the thought away. Today she would forget all bad things to come—today she would enjoy their last day together. “Oh, look!” she cried.

In the center of the marketplace, a dwarf was tossing colored balls in the air and catching them while a little white dog wearing a cocked hat walked back and forth on his hind legs.

“Look at the little man,” she said, “and the dog. Look, Brandon, aren’t they wonderful?” She laughed and drew in a great gulp of air, savoring the wonderful smells.

To the left, a woman had built a fire and was grilling fish. Just beyond her, an old man with a white beard sat on the ground with a basket of brown cakes in front of him. He was holding up the round cakes and chanting a silly song. “Cakes. Buy cakes from old Jakes. They’ll cure your aches. Buy my cakes. ’Cause I bakes—cakes.”

Brandon reined in Caesar and tossed the old man a penny. “Are they fresh?” he demanded.

“Aye, sir, Jakes’s cakes he bakes is fresh, ever’ week, yer lordship.” He jumped up and hurried over with a handful of ginger cakes. “Jakes got no change, sir. No change, just cakes.”

Leah giggled again, then nibbled cautiously at the cake Brandon offered her. “Ohhh,” she cried. “’Tis verra good.” She swallowed the sweet in two bites and reached for two more.

“Greedy wench,” he teased.

“One be for the horse, for Caesar,” she said. “He deserves a treat, does he not?”

Brandon guided the horse through the throngs of sailors and merchants down the line of small open boats moored to posts. Anchored in the harbor were four large sailing ships.

“Lord Brandon!” a seaman called. “Here, sir. I’ll take your mount.”

“Are you from the
Dependable?”
he asked.

“Aye, sir, Second Mate Jones.” He motioned for a boy to take Caesar’s reins.

Leah watched as Brandon dismounted and walked a few feet away to talk quietly to the man. Mouth open, the boy holding the horse stared up at her. Leah stared back.

Brandon turned back and motioned to her. “It’s necessary for me to go out to the ship. It won’t take long, and you can come with me.” He pointed out over the water. “It’s that vessel there, the one with the sea horse on the bow.”

Leah looked at the ship with its three great masts, and then at the longboat that would carry them out to the
Dependable
. Two surly-looking sailors in striped shirts waited in the small boat, their hard hands gripped on the paddles. She took a deep breath. “Nay, Brandon mine,” she said. “I wait for ye here, with Caesar. Such water be not for us.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, lifting her down from the horse. “It’s perfectly safe. We’ll see the ship and be back in time for the noon meal at the inn.”

She gave him a teasing shove and shook her head. “Nay, Brandon viscount. I dinna like your boats, nay the big one, nay the small. I shall stand here on solid earth until ye return.”

His face colored. “Don’t make a scene, Leah.”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Something was wrong. It wasn’t like Brandon to try to force her to do something against her will. She backed away a few steps. “Go on. I’ll wait for ye,” she said again. Her mouth was suddenly dry. The strange way he was looking at her made her stomach do a sudden flip-flop. “Brandon?”

He moved before she had a chance to run. His fingers closed over her wrist. She screamed and struck at him with her free hand, but he swept her up in his arms and scrambled down into the waiting boat amid the laughter of men on the dock.

She struggled against him as tears of anger ran down her face. “Let me go!” she insisted. “Let me go!”

“You’re my wife,” he whispered harshly into her ear. “You’re my wife, and you go where and when I tell you.”

“Nay,” she flung back. The tears were coming so fast that Brandon’s face blurred before her. “Dinna do this,” she begged. “Dinna.”

“Hush,” he commanded. “Hush. You’ll hurt yourself.” She got one fist free and struck him square in the eye. “Ouch! Damn it, Leah.”

He pinned her arms against her side, and she slammed her head against his chin. “Let me go!”

“Cut it out, woman, or I’ll tie you like a trussed goose. I swear I will.”

She caught the skin of his neck between her teeth and bit him as hard as she could. Blood ran down his white shirt, and he grabbed hold of her hair and snatched her head back. “Damn ye!” she cried. “I’ll never forgive ye for this! Never!”

Leah was still fighting and cursing him when they tied her wrists and ankles and hauled her aboard the ship in a net.

 

L
eah leaned her cheek against the window of the bouncing coach and stared out at the gray countryside. Chestnut, elm, and oak lined both sides of the narrow dirt lane, but occasionally there was a gap in the trees and she could see open rolling fields through the winter-bare branches.

The air was damp, heavy with unshed rain. The gloomy skies had threatened a downpour since the coach had departed from the thatch-roofed village inn early that morning. The windows of the coach were covered with leather curtains to protect the passengers against the elements, but Leah had pulled hers aside, trading a measure of comfort for the sights and smells of the outdoors.

“Leah? Are you cold?” Brandon asked.

She felt the weight of a fur robe tucked around her shoulders, but she gave him no sign that she’d heard or noticed. Ignoring Brandon had become a habit.

He leaned close to her and whispered. “How long is this going to go on? We’ll be at Westover by dark, and I’ll not have you insulting my family with your sulking.”

Her shoulders went rigid as she turned and gazed into his face. “What is between thee and me,
uikiimuk,
concerns no other. Ye need have no fear.” She kept her face expressionless, concealing the pain and anger that had nearly driven her mad in the months at sea.

“I’m not a monster, Leah,” he said. “How many times must I tell you I’m sorry? I’ll take you back to America as soon as I can.” He glared at the maid in the seat across from them, and she averted her gaze. “You are my wife, and you must start acting like it.”

“Aye,” she murmured. “So ye say.” She turned back to the window, shutting him out of her world, trying to shut out the memory of bitter words and broken promises.

If the English preachers were right about there being a hell, Leah had no fear of ever going there. She had already been in hell . . .

The morning Brandon had carried her aboard the
Dependable
was indelibly etched in her mind. She had fought him for hours; she had even tried to knife him with a silver letter opener. Once, before the ship had sailed beyond the sight of land, she’d nearly jumped over the side. In the end, Brandon had locked her in the tiny cabin alone and found sleeping space elsewhere.

He’d not hit her—not once—not even when she’d thrown the meal in his face. She had called him liar and deceiver, and she had sworn that she would never forgive him as long as she drew breath.

“Cut-ta-ho-tha!”
she had spat at him, using the term given in contempt to those condemned to burn at the stake. “Better I had let them kill you.” She had said those terrible words, but she had not meant them . . . not even then. In a small corner of her heart, she would always love him, no matter what he did to her. But she had said the words, and she had read the pain in his eyes. Worse, she was glad she had hurt him.

The childish ranting and the striking out had passed once the ship was so far at sea that she knew there was no chance of escaping. It had crossed her mind that there was an ultimate escape—she could take her own life. Brandon could not hold her prisoner if she wished to die. But that thought passed, too. She was many things, but coward was not one of them. She would face life . . . face the true curse of her amulet.

“I will not be defeated by my father’s magic,” she swore to herself in that dark cabin. “By
Inu-msi-ila-fe-wanu!
I will meet the curse without fear, and I will win!”

. . . You will be taken from your family and friends to a far-off land,
Father had said. But he had promised more than heartache.
You will be granted one wish. Whatever you ask . . .
he had said.

If the amulet had the power to curse, it also contained the power to bless. Leah had clung to that hope, and hope had kept her from losing her mind on board ship, in a place where there were no trees, no grass, no eagles soaring overhead.

The stench of the ship would remain in her head as long as she lived. The air beneath the decks smelled of rot, and vomit, and mold. The cabin was so small she could cross it in four short steps, and there was no window. When the weather turned bad and the ship rose and fell at the mercy of the waves, the cabin became a den of misery. The backbone of the vessel creaked and groaned and threatened to snap, drowning captain, crew, and passengers in the bottomless deep.

After a few days, when she’d learned that the maid Nancy, the girl Brandon had brought to wait on her, was living in even more miserable quarters, Leah allowed the frightened girl to share her cabin. Nancy believed that Leah was crazy . . . perhaps she had been for a while. She’d gone nearly a week without eating until Brandon had taken hold of her shoulders and shaken her, forcing her to look at him.

“You’re not a wild animal, for God’s sake,” he’d shouted. “You’re an intelligent woman. Now start eating what they bring you, or I’ll pour it down your throat.”

She’d thought about that for a few hours, and then she’d allowed Nancy to help her dress in one of the English gowns. When Brandon had returned to her cabin to ask her to join him for the evening meal, something he had done day after day, she had accepted. She’d accompanied him to the captain’s cabin and sat at the table with Brandon and the other important passengers. She had eaten a little, but she hadn’t spoken to any of them. It became her custom for the remainder of the voyage.

On good days, she walked with Brandon on the deck. If he asked her a question, she answered. If he touched her, she didn’t protest, but she never touched him voluntarily. Above all, she refused to let him sleep in her cabin. She would accept that she was his prisoner, but among the Shawnee even a prisoner had rights, and she would never let him forget those rights.

She had believed that the voyage would never end. She was wrong. At last, they had begun to see birds, and other ships, and finally, far off along the edge of the world, a shoreline. The
Dependable
had sailed up a river Brandon called the Thames to a great English town.

London. Leah shivered as she remembered the crowded narrow streets and the dirty, thin urchins. Beggars crept from the alleys to hold out stumps where arms had once grown, and babies too small to walk played in fetid ditches.

Brandon spoke to her of great houses, of kings and balls and pleasure gardens. His face lit with excitement and he gestured with his hands as their coach rumbled past enormous churches and palaces. But his words fell on deaf ears. To Leah, the English buildings were only cold stone, gray and dirty, without life. She saw none of the splendor. Instead, she saw the blackened faces of emaciated chimney sweeps and heard the weeping of hungry, homeless children.

Each pitiful child reminded her of her own lost son. Kitate was only three, hardly more than a baby. How could he understand why his mother had gone away and not returned? Did he believe she had abandoned him as her father had abandoned her? Or did Kitate think she was dead? Perhaps it was better for him if he didn’t think of her at all, if he forgot he had a mother. She would never forget him, and if she lived, she would find a way to return to him and to her forest home.

The coach lurched sideways, and the horses’ hooves clattered across a low stone bridge. Leah raised in her seat and peered out at the meandering stream below. A skim of ice had formed in the eddies, encrusting the rocks with a silvery sheen. Beyond the bridge was a small village of stone cottages with thatched roofs.

The coachman reined in the team with a shout. “Whoa, whoa, there!” He leaned down from his box. “Herring Cross, yer lordship,” he called in a hearty voice. “Nooning.”

Brandon laid his gloved hand over Leah’s. “We’ll stop here for a while,” he said. “The innkeeper serves a wonderful kidney pie, if my memory serves me. We can walk a bit beside the water, if you like.”

Brandon’s manservant scrambled down from his seat beside the coachman and brought wooden steps to aid them in their descent from the high vehicle. The coach was a rented one, Brandon had explained earlier, and had none of the luxuries of the private Kentington conveyances. Leah allowed the servant, William, to take her hand and help her onto the dirt road. Brandon and the maid stepped out behind her.

Leah turned back toward the bridge. She heard Brandon’s footsteps, but she didn’t acknowledge him until he tucked his arm through hers.

“Mind your skirts,” he cautioned.

She glanced down at the yards of cream-colored satin and sighed heavily. Corsets, petticoats, and hoops made her feel like a wild creature in a trap. The English garments twisted a woman’s body into an unnatural shape and made it impossible to run, or to climb a tree, or even to sit in comfort. Brandon’s tight breeches, ornamented waistcoat, and wide cuffed coat with silver buttons seemed just as ridiculous.

“The hem of your gown is trailing in the dust,” Brandon insisted.

She yanked the dress up, wishing for all the world she could strip away these hated clothes and ease her pinched toes into a pair of soft leather moccasins. Brandon had insisted they remain in London until a complete wardrobe of new, stylish clothing had been made for both of them. A sour-faced woman had spent days teaching her how to walk and sit without sending the hoops and the skirts over her head and exposing her private parts to anyone passing by.

She had stood for hours being pinned and pushed, tucked and tilted, and she’d accepted the torture without complaint—as she would have had she been a prisoner of the Iroquois. Her face had been painted and her hair curled. When she looked into a mirror, a stranger stared back at her, but Brandon seemed pleased.

“We’ll make a great lady of you yet,” he’d declared.

“But I am already a person of worth,” she’d answered. “My mother was a great lady, and she had no need of English finery.”

“I’m sure she was,” Brandon had agreed, “but this is England. Here you must follow the customs, or people will believe you a savage.”

A crow dropped out of a tree and lit on the bridge wall. He bobbed his black feathered head up and down and regarded Leah solemnly with beady eyes. She laughed.

“That’s good to hear,” Brandon said, squeezing her arm. “I was afraid you’d forgotten how.”

A tear formed in the corner of Leah’s eye, and she blinked it away. What use was it to tell Brandon how he’d hurt her by his betrayal? How could she ever make him understand that he’d destroyed their love when he’d made her a prisoner? He’d told her he was sorry, but
sorry
was only a word.
Judge a man by his actions, never his words,
her mother had told her.
Words slide off the lips like water off an otter’s back.

Leah leaned against the cold stone and stared into the icy water rushing below. “I have nay forgotten,” she said softly. “’Tis only that I have had little to laugh about.”

Brandon freed his arm and dropped it around her shoulder. “That will change, I swear it. We’ll make a new beginning between us. I know England is strange to you, but you’ll like it once you grow accustomed to our ways. There’s so much I want to show you.”

She raised her eyes to meet his. “There be only one thing I want of ye—to go home.”

His features hardened. “I’ll take you when I can, Leah. Right now, I must think of my father and my responsibilities as his heir.”

“Aye,” she said coldly, “so ye tell me.”

“This isn’t going to be easy for either of us. You’ll only make it worse if you keep treating me like your enemy.”

“But ye are,” she replied in her own soft, lilting tongue. “And I am held captive in a far-off land by a Scottish curse and a husband I cannot trust.”

 

Lord Kentington snatched his wig from his bald head and flung it into his bedchamber fireplace. “Preposterous!” he roared. “I’ll not have it!” Clouds of smoke and the foul stench of burning human hair arose as the wig ignited. Brandon’s mother screamed and fell back into her chair, nearly squashing her small, spotted lapdog. The dog yipped as one maid began to fan her choking mistress and the second ran to open a casement window. “No son of mine shall be wed to a red Indian heathen!” Kentington shouted.

A footman pulled the blazing wig from the hearth and stomped on it. The dog ran under Lord Kentington’s high poster bed, barking in a voice much too loud for such a tiny animal. Lady Kentington began to weep.

Seemingly unconcerned, Brandon stood inside the closed bedchamber door, arms folded across his chest. He and Leah had arrived at his father’s country house after dark the night before. His parents had both already been asleep, and knowing there’d be a scene, Brandon had ordered the servants not to wake them. For the same reason, he’d asked Leah to remain in his chambers while he had a private reunion with his doting parents.

“I’ll not have it, I say,” his father repeated loudly. “Annul her or shoot her, I care not—but get the red baggage out of my house.”

“Raymond,” Brandon’s mother wailed. “Calm yourself, for pity’s sake. Remember your condition.”

Brandon stepped aside to let the footman pass with the smoldering wig held at arm’s length on the end of the poker. “Cease your caterwauling, Mother,” Brandon said. “If he can still bellow like a bull, he can hardly be at death’s door.”

“You insolent young pup! I’ll disinherit you! Cut you from my will!”

“If you could, you’d have done it long ago, Father.” Brandon approached the great Elizabethan bed cautiously, keeping well out of reach of his father’s silver-tipped walking cane and the dog’s teeth. “This is hardly a fit welcome home for your only son and his bride,” he said, flashing a smile at his mother.

Lady Kathryn sniffed and wiped her nose with a lace handkerchief. “A pagan woman, Brandon. How could you?”

“No more pagan than I, Mother. Leah’s a good Catholic, and we were married by a priest, not a medicine man with a bone through his nose. She’s the natural daughter of a Scottish earl—if that matters to you.” He arched an eyebrow rakishly at Lady Kathryn. He’d only half believed Leah’s romantic tale of a noble father, but he knew his mother would grasp at any pretense to quality for his bride. She’d always adored him and upheld him to his father through thick and thin. Mother had her standards, and to her, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman was infinitely more worthy than any commoner.