Silver Tears (11 page)

He heard the bushes rustle to his right, and a gun barrel gleamed in the moonlight.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Phips said with a soft laugh. “Finally decided to join us, did you?”

“Not a minute too soon, it seems. You’ve got company up ahead.”

“I know all about them. Gomez spotted the bastards hours ago. That’s why we stopped here. I didn’t want to risk Alice’s life, or my own, either, for that matter. Gomez told me they had bloody scalps at their belts.”

“That they do. I listened in for a while. They just sacked a village down the coast. Since they had no prisoners, they must have killed the women and children, too.”

“Bloody beasts!” Phips spat on the ground.

“Maybe we’ll pay them a surprise visit in a bit. They’re pretty drunk now. Won’t be long till they pass out.”

“Good idea, Gunn. Come on. You look like you could use a drink yourself.”

“Is Alice all right?”

“Fine. Sleeping in the wagon over there.”

“She decided to go to Boston, eh? Well, I’m hoping to change her mind about that and settle her right into my cabin for the winter.” Gunn laughed softly.

“You can’t expect Lady Alice to live with you like she was a squaw woman, Gunn.”

“You mistook my meaning. What I’m saying is that I reckon it’s time I got hitched, don’t you, Will?”

“By damn, I was hoping you’d come around. But Boston’s still your quickest route to the altar, my friend. By the way, Captain Hargrave’s with us. In your absence he came along as Alice’s driver and self-appointed protector.”

“Hargrave!” Gunn spat. “I’ll be glad when I’ve seen the last of him. I don’t trust that seagoing weasel. It’s a wonder he didn’t hornswoggle Alice on the trip over from England. But he’s out of the picture for good now. I’ve made up my mind. I think I’ll just go surprise her.”

Before Phips could stop him, Gunn went to the wagon and threw back the flap. The bright full moon flooded inside, freezing Gunn in his tracks. There lay Alice, curled up in Jonathan Hargrave’s arms, smiling in her sleep. He could only imagine what was going on underneath that warm fur robe, but he couldn’t help thinking the worst.

“Goddamn you to hell, you slimy bastard!” Gunn’s roar seemed loud enough to wake the drunken Indians up the trail.

Alice sat up in bed with a shriek, staring in horror at the dark figure peering into her wagon.

“Jonathan!” she screamed, glancing wildly about the seemingly empty wagon. “Indians!”

“It’s all right, my dear.” His big hands gripped her shoulders, pulling her back down into the warm robe. “Just snuggle up close. You’re safe with me.”

“Like hell, she is!”

Gunn was inside the wagon in a minute, hauling the captain out of Alice’s bed. He smashed a fist into Hargrave’s face, sending him sprawling to the frozen ground outside, then leaped on top of him. The two men rolled and tumbled, socked, bit, pulled hair and beards. Only when they both slumped to the ground, exhausted, did the fight end.

Alice knelt in the back of the wagon, clutching her unlaced bodice, begging them to stop, but they never heard a word she said.

When it was over, Gunn was the first to his feet. He stumbled over to Alice, gripped her arms, and pulled her mouth down to his. His hard, rough kiss lasted a long time.

Alice’s head was spinning when he finally released her. This was the way a kiss should be, this was the way a man should be. Gunn was back—so was the fire in her blood. He was all she had remembered, all she ever wanted. She leaned forward, waiting for him to take her into his arms again.

Instead, he said in a surly voice, “Better think over what you’re passing up, woman. We could be damn good together, me and you.”

“Gunn, wait!” she cried, but he leaped on his horse and thundered off into the dark forest.

A
s soon as Gunn rode out, Alice gave Captain Hargrave a piece of her mind. She warned him to keep his distance and stay out of her wagon, her bed, and her bodice. He didn’t argue, but he didn’t agree, either.

Finally she turned her back on him to go to the edge of the clearing, where she meant to stay until Gunn returned, if it took all night. She intended to explain everything the minute she saw him. But nearly an hour passed and there was still no sign of him.

Suddenly gunfire and shrieks erupted through the forest. By dawn the six murdering Indians lay dead, a testament to Gunn’s rage and frustration. But Alice knew only that the man she loved was somewhere out in the woods fighting. What if something terrible had happened to him?

She had all but lost hope when she heard the sound of a horse’s hooves down the trail. A moment later she saw him.

“Gunn’s back!” she cried out to the others, too relieved to try to hide her excitement.

She ran toward his oncoming horse, ready to welcome him with open arms. A million thoughts crowded her mind. Ever since he’d left, she’d been trying to decide what exactly she would say to him, how she’d explain her feelings. The past days with only Jonathan Hargrave for company had made her realize that Christopher Gunn was the only man who could make her truly happy. She’d been so afraid she’d never see him again, but here he was, riding hell-bent toward her as she raced to meet him.

Abruptly she stopped in her tracks and her hands flew to cover her mouth.

“Oh, no!” she murmured. “Oh, please, no…”

Slumped on the back of his mount, Gunn stared down at her with strange dull eyes. The Indians had taken their toll before they died.

“You’re hurt,” she said, reaching toward him.

“It’s nothing, a scratch. You should’ve seen the other fellow after I finished with…” His voice trailed off as his body went limp and he slipped from his horse to the ground in a crumpled, bloody heap.

“Good God!” Phips hurried to Alice’s side as she knelt on the ground next to the unconscious man. “What’s he gone and done now?”

“He’s got an arrow through his leg, and he’s lost a lot of blood. Get him into the wagon, quickly,” Alice commanded with authoritative calm.

Phips and Gomez jumped to obey her orders. Moments later they had Gunn stretched out on his left side on blankets with a fur robe covering him. His huge frame took up almost the entire space in the small wagon.

After first shooing the two men out of her way, Alice climbed in next to Gunn.

“What are we going to do?” Phips asked of no one in particular. “He needs a surgeon. We’ll have to carry him back to the fort.”

“No!” Alice snapped. “We can’t take him back over that rough trail. He’s bleeding too badly. He’d probably be dead by the time we got him there.”

“But we can’t just sit here and let him die,” Phips insisted.

“I know what to do,” Alice assured the others. “My mother was a charm-woman. She taught me the healing arts. Boil some water.” As the men looked on, amazed, Alice turned slightly away from them, pulled up her gown, and ripped off one of her underskirts, tossing it to Phips. “Tear this into strips and boil them. Now, leave us be. I have work to do.” When no one reacted, Alice yelled, “Well, move!”

They did. Even Captain Hargrave jumped to obey her orders, stoking the fire with more fatwood until it blazed under the iron kettle.

Left alone with Gunn, Alice eased the sharp hunting knife from his belt and carefully split the tight leg of his buckskins all the way to the hip. Peeling back the bloody fabric, she surveyed the damage closely. She probed the gore with her fingers until she felt the sharp tip of the flint arrowhead. It had passed through the flesh of his upper right thigh, luckily missing the bone. Gently she tugged at the shaft, trying to get a grip.

Gunn moaned and his eyes shot up. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

Alice almost smiled when she realized his gaze was fastened in horror on the bloody knife in her free hand. “Easy, Gunn,” she whispered. “I’m only trying to help.”

“Trying to castrate me is what you’re doing, woman. Get away from me!” He struck out wildly with his right hand, knocking Alice aside, but also hitting the shaft of the protruding arrow. His shriek of pain was horrible.

Alice yelled to Phips, “Come help me. Bring whiskey, if you have any.”

Phips fed his injured friend enough firewater to render a lesser man unconscious, but Gunn remained alarmingly aware of the arrow through his leg. His cursing was the most eloquent Alice had ever heard.

“You’ll have to hold him down,” she told Phips.

“Oh, really?” he replied. “Me and how many others? You don’t know this man’s strength when he’s riled.”

“It won’t take but a moment,” Alice explained.

“What won’t?” Gunn demanded. When neither of them answered his question, he roared, “Get that goddamn woman away from me, Will. She tried to castrate me, I’m telling you. I want her gone!”

“Easy, man,” Phips soothed. “We’re both here to help you.”

Gunn lapsed into a new flourish of colorful curses when Phips clamped strong arms around him to hold him steady.

Alice took a deep breath. First she wiped the blood from the tip of the arrow so she could get a better grip. The flint head was lashed to the shaft with strong strips of rawhide.

“Hold him very still,” she told Phips quietly. “I have to cut the arrowhead off. If he moves while I’m using the knife… just hold him so he can’t move.”

Alice gripped Gunn’s leg with all the strength in her left hand while she carefully sawed at the rawhide. The tip of the sharp knife was only a hair’s breadth from Gunn’s already damaged flesh. She breathed again once the arrowhead fell away from the shaft.

Phips expelled a long, pent-up breath, too. “Finished,” he said. “Thank God.”

Alice shook her head. “No, we’ve only just begun. You don’t expect him to walk around the rest of his life with that arrow sticking through his leg, do you? Now comes the hard part. Give him more whiskey.”

After several long guzzles, Gunn began drunkenly singing a delightfully raunchy ditty. Alice tried to keep her mind on her work and off the song’s words, which included an especially explicit verse about “Lovely Lady Trump, who taught young King James to hump.”

While Christopher Gunn, a true baritone, detailed in song all Lady Trump’s erotic tricks in the royal bedchamber, Alice gripped the shaft of the arrow with both hands.

“Hold him down,” she warned Phips quietly. “If he jerks before I pull this free, it might break off in his leg. Steady…” She paused and took a deep, calming breath. “Now!” she cried, yanking with all her strength.

Gunn’s scream of pain would have put a whole raiding tribe of Abenaki to shame. The curses that followed were enough to make the most sea-bitten jack-tar pale. Finally he fell back, silent and exhausted.

“More whiskey,” he pleaded.

Phips looked to Alice. She nodded her consent. Fifteen minutes later Gunn had all but forgotten his pain.

“I think he’s unconscious,” Phips said in a worried tone.

“Good. I hope he stays that way for a while,” Alice replied. “Hand me the whiskey bottle, if there’s any left.”

First Alice washed Gunn’s thigh carefully, then she poured the remaining whiskey into the wound. Her patient flinched even in his unconscious state.

“Now bring me those strips of cloth you’ve boiled.”

When Phips was gone, Alice reached in her jewel box and brought out a velvet pouch that had traveled with her from England. Carefully she selected the proper dried herbs, leaves, and mosses, those that would draw out poisons from the blood, relieve swelling, dull pain, and, in time, cure Gunn’s ugly wound. When Phips returned, she pressed her poultice firmly to the torn flesh, then wrapped the boiled strips of linen round and round.

Finished at last, she sat back, wiping the sweat from her brow. Gunn moaned softly. She glanced at him. He was coming around. She called for a cup of boiling water. When Phips brought it to her, she mixed more leaves from her pouch, concocting a foul-smelling tea. She slipped one arm under Gunn’s head and held the cup to his lips. He made a grotesque face as the vile odor reached his nostrils.

“What the hell are you trying to do now, woman, poison me?”

“I’ve done all I can to cure your wound. This will cure your hangover as well.”

She forced the hot liquid between his lips. Gunn came up sputtering and spitting, but fell back when pain shot through his leg.

He looked up at her with a decidedly little-boy expression on his rough, bearded face. “I feel like holy hell, Alice.”

She smiled at him and smoothed his hair back from his forehead with one cool hand. “At least you can feel, Gunn. That’s something, isn’t it?”

He returned her smile and closed his eyes, weariness etching lines around his eyes and mouth. “Yes, I suppose so.” He sighed deeply, then slipped off to sleep.

It was late that night before Gunn awoke again. Alice sat nearby, fast asleep. The robe had slipped from her shoulders and he saw that she was trembling with cold. As carefully as he could, Gunn, still lying flat, eased himself toward her, inch by inch. When he was close enough, he lifted the fallen fur and tucked it around her shivering body. She sighed and cuddled into the newfound warmth.

Gunn lay very near her now, close enough to reach out and touch her. Tentatively he let his hand stray under the fur robe. She had twisted and turned in her sleep, hiking her skirts up about her knees. Gunn touched the cool flesh of her leg. When she didn’t move, he let his hand slide up, shoving her petticoats higher still, until his palm lay molded to the warmth of her inner thigh.

He closed his eyes, willing the pain away. If only he could move close enough to take her in his arms…

Alice was dreaming a lovely dream. She’d been cold, shivering in the wintry blast, when suddenly heat had flooded her whole body. She felt as if she were drowning in sunshine or swimming naked in a warm, bubbling spring. She was all alone, but it didn’t matter. The earth and sky and sun were hers. She watched herself rise from the shining waters, her arms high above her head, her breasts glistening with droplets. A hot breeze played over her, seeming to touch her here, then move on there. It wrapped her legs in softness, slid up her thighs until she tingled all over. But there it stopped.

Alice sighed, frowned, and, still sleeping, wriggled down. Her playful breeze slipped higher, finally touching the throbbing spot that ached to be caressed by its warmth. She felt the heat intensify until it glowed inside her.

Gunn settled back, watching Alice’s face in the light of the pierced-tin candle lamp hanging from the wagon’s rib beam as his fingers gently continued stroking her. She moved again, pressing harder against his touch. She moaned softly, but her smile remained. The more she reacted, the more he wanted her. He uttered a moan of his own when he realized that the pain in his leg wasn’t all that was throbbing.

This was madness. He had to stop before he drove them both wild. Slowly, carefully, he slipped his hand from between her legs and out from under the fur robe. He lay very still then, his eyes closed, willing his erection to fade.

Alice awoke abruptly. Something, probably a strange sound in the night, had caused her dream to fade just as she was reaching the loveliest part.

Sighing with disappointment, she glanced over at Gunn. As long as she was wide awake, she might as well check on her patient.

Gunn froze when Alice’s hand touched the blanket covering him. Feigning sleep, he yanked the edge of the fur from her hands, pulling it back up to his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Gunn, but I have to check your bandage.”

“Later,” he growled. “It’s too cold.”

“Now,” she insisted.

The next moment he felt a cold rush of air as Alice lifted the fur robe from his legs. Still gripping the blanket in his hands, he peered over the edge at her. Alice’s cheeks had reddened and her mouth was open in a small O.

“The bandage seems fine,” she murmured, quickly trying to pull the blanket back down.

Gunn stifled a chuckle. “It feels too loose. Maybe you’d better tighten it since you woke me up anyway.”

“It’s all right,” she insisted.

“Tighten it!” he commanded.

Alice’s hands shook as she unwrapped the linen strip from his upper thigh. As determined as she was to keep her eyes on his wound, they strayed in spite of herself to the throbbing shaft, which had escaped his knifed-off buckskins.

“Ow-w!” Gunn howled. “Dammit, woman, be careful!”

“I’m sorry, it’s just… well, I never. I just don’t understand, Gunn. I used the herbs to prevent swelling, but…”

Gunn sat up as best he could, staring at Alice’s face. She looked mortified, paralyzed, scared out of her wits. Any other woman would have been sobbing buckets if she was that frightened. But Alice just sat there, dry-eyed, staring at the “swelling” between his thighs. You’d think she’d never seen a man before.

“It’s not your fault, Alice. I mean, it is in a way, but it’s not because you didn’t use the right medicine.”

He could hardly believe his eyes as he watched her reach out one trembling hand toward him. She wasn’t going to… she couldn’t be about to… Gunn threw his head back and moaned with pure pleasure, but her touch lasted only an instant.

Quickly Alice pulled her hand away. “Oh, Gunn, you’re burning up with fever there, too. What can I do?”

His disappointment angered him. He felt like yelling at her, “Goddammit, woman, you’ve had a husband. You know what to do!” But before he said anything, he stopped and thought about it. Who knew what old Lord Geoffrey had taught his young bride? Maybe the old fellow had never bedded her and she was a total innocent. Then he remembered the sight that had sent him dashing off to kill six Indians and almost get himself murdered in the bargain. There’d been little doubt what she and Hargrave were doing on this very spot. He allowed himself a small, sardonic smile. That’s what this innocent act was all about: Her shock was well planned to make him think that nothing had happened between her and the captain.