Exile’s Bane (9 page)

“What ye say is true.” Peg’s lower lip extended into a pout. “But I still say I saw it, that ye love this man, whether ye realize it or not. He will change thy life.”

I could not accept this idea, no matter my blossoming feelings for the cavalier captain. The light faded, due to incoming storm or nightfall, I was not sure which. The window before us hung like a featureless shadow. With a shake of my head to match my thoughts, I leaned morosely forward to watch the hot wax curl off the top of the candle on the table. It slid down the candle’s length to the holder, where it hardened into a translucent lump.

“I am not in love with Duncan,” I said with sudden decisiveness.

“Ye dream the future.” Peg crouched forward as though to stand up, but did not, her face flushed in irritation. “
I
see hearts.”

“That is generally true.” With a quick glance around us, I nodded slowly at my combative cousin, uncomfortable giving any credence to my dreams. “Except that I just met the man this morning. He has been kind and useful. But love?”

“I saw the passion, no more than an hour gone. Ye should marry him and forget Tor House.”

“All I have ever cared about,” I said to Peg, my voice breaking, “is my place at Tor House and a deep yearning to be loved for myself, unrelated to my duty or my worth as head of a valuable marriage portion.” I shot up to my feet, pushed the wobbling chair away, and stalked off into the darkness. My childhood dream, which I thought I had outgrown, came full upon me. To be appreciated for who I was. Such a rare commodity in this world of necessary dynastic marriages. And I had hoped to find this spark, this vibrant attraction that now haunted me, with a proper suitor.

“Ye never told me this.” She sat at the table in the little circle of light, eyes wide.

“It is what I am,” I said. Since it was right in front of me, I climbed into the carved chair. My feet fell nowhere near the floor. I felt the size of a child.

“Then listen to me. I know what is right for thee, cousin. Give it some thought before ye throw him away. He cares for thee. Take him.”

“That is mad. I will do no such thing. I like him, Peg. That is all.”

“Why, Elena, I did not know ye kissed men ye like. Have ye then kissed Captain Wallace, too?”

“Duncan is different,” I said, looking away into comfortable darkness.

“What, pray, do ye intend to do about it?”

“Nothing,” I said. I climbed off the big chair, went back to the table, repositioned the chair, and sat down. “I have to get to the King.”

“Ah, so thy heart has no say in it?”

“My heart and my duty are at Tor House, as you should well know.” I unclipped my hair from its tight closure at the back of my head and worked my fingers through the hopeless tangles. “May I use your brush?”

“As ye wish.” She studied me for long moments, her dark eyes alight. Finally, her mouth compressed, and her face drooped in disappointment. She shrugged, pulled her brush from her dress pocket, and handed it to me. “I will help thee. Petition the King, we will. But I have no interest in being left to the terrors of an angry earl and his countess. We must plan this well or we will both hang.”

As the light went out, we lit a second candle that we found in the windowsill. Cold crept into the house. Huddled at the table, we took turns taking hopeful glances at the hearth, but delayed starting a fire. It was full dark by the time Thomas returned. He rushed in the door, closed it tight, his face drained of color, and jerked the window curtain closed. The rush of air from the door passed, and the flickering candles reclaimed their steady flame.

“Well, what news?” Peg asked.

He busily disgorged his pockets onto the table. Maybe three handfuls of oats for the horses, a withered apple, a hard loaf of bread, and four wedges of white, unhealthy looking cheese.

“Did you get any information about the roads?” I asked.

“No. The King is not in Oxford. He is in the field. There is no way to know where he is.”

“And how do ye know this?” Peg asked. She watched his reactions carefully.

“Actually, I have known. I just remembered while I was in town. Neighbor Sims, who lives beyond the church ruins, told me this not a week ago, hoping the King was headed to Bolton. Sims is a staunch Royalist, you know. Very few of those in Bolton.”

He put his hands in his pockets and looked from one of us to the other.

“Everyone I know in town is confined indoors or wandering the streets, homeless and starving. They’ve had to resort to looting and murder to survive. The gangs are no better than the Roundheads. Colonel Rigby has taken over. The townsfolk live under constant threat of violence.” He moved to the big chair, settled into it, his eye on me now, the expression on his face turned rigid. “I ran into that tinker friend of yours. He threatened me and told me I had to come back to the house, and I think I know why. A gust of wind whipped his cloak up and I caught a glance of his sword, too fine a sword for a tinker to own. He wore good cordovan riding boots, too. This fellow was on his way out of town. Isn’t that strange? With a nasty storm approaching? Eh? What could it mean?”

“I cannot imagine,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant. I pretended to study the pathetic bits of food my precious gold had bought.

“Well, I can,” Thomas railed, his voice an octave too high. “The King has treated with the Scots and they are out there on the moors ready to descend upon us.”

“Eeewww! Bloodthirsty MacGregors come screamin’ down out of the highlands,” Peg cried, palms on her cheeks in mock terror. With an unbelieving look at him, she threw up her hands and laughed. “Thomas, y’re daft.”

“Stop it.” He grabbed Peg’s shoulders and shook her. When he let her go, his eyes remained wild, though his words came out in the proper octave. “Whatever comes, I believe the Scot’s advice was good. We will wait here. No chasin’ after the King this night or tomorrow. Something untoward is going on.”

Peg tried to break the bread, but ended up sawing it apart with Thomas’ knife. I took the apple to Kalimir and a small quantity of oats to the horses in the miserable stable. In my travels, I found the privy and happily relieved myself.

When I returned, Peg was questioning Thomas about his neighbor, Sims. She handed me two pieces of hard bread and some cheese.

“Roundheads are going around demanding provisions and housing,” Thomas said to me.

“Have you seen any of them here yet?”

“No, but I won’t be surprised if they come.”

“We must barricade the door. If they find us we could be shot . . . or hanged,” I said, heart in my mouth. Peg and I looked at one another. “Or worse.”

This, then, was one of the problems Duncan had referred to. But Duncan’s promised protection would not be here for many hours. In anxious concern, I clenched my hands together in my lap to keep from ravaging my fingers. Finally, I ate the bread by holding it in my mouth until it softened, then adding some of the rancid cheese. Famished as I was, I barely choked it down with a swallow of water from the cistern.

“Maybe,” Thomas said, finger pressed to his lips. He looked at me from his wooden throne, eyebrows raised in expectancy. “Maybe Prince Rupert is coming. They say in town that he relieved Tor House.”

“True,” I said, putting a hand on Peg’s arm. She seemed about to jump up and hit him or, worse, to expound on the subject.

“So, if it is Prince Rupert’s forces approaching Bolton . . . that makes sense, actually.” He jumped from his chair in a huff, stopped dead in the midst of his forward motion, lost in thought for a long moment, then raised a questioning finger. “So, they are coming from Tor House, yes?”

“We have no way of knowing that, Thomas,” I said. “Do not get carried away with this idea. We need to stay here, where it is relatively safe.”

“Devlin would be with them,” he said to Peg with a sly look. “Bolton owes him fealty.”

I shook my head in frustration and rising concern.

“Well . . .” He hung before me, desperation dark and ugly in his handsome face. “Captain Wallace,” he said, a strange new urgency in his voice, “is he still the house guard commander?”

“Of course,” I answered, unsure of his reasoning. “I cannot return. The earl would kill me, and you, too, for harboring me.”

“Oh, I am not so sure of that.” He strode back to the chair and slapped the chair arm. “He has to get his hands on us first. Tell me, is the house guard still loyal to you?”

I squinted up at him, mystified. “Probably not. Why?”

He leaned toward us in the candle light, his face brilliant with excitement.

“This is our chance. We will depart in the morning for Tor House and, without a drop of blood being shed, take the house in the earl’s absence. The house guard have served you all your life. They will rally to us, Elena. I know they will.”

“No, Thomas. We stay right here.” I shook my head in amazement at his ability to skip from an untested conclusion into outrageous action.

Chapter Eight

The incredible sound of hundreds of clashing swords woke me in the night. A frantic gasp escaped me. I jerked my head aside to find Peg asleep in the dim shadows close beside my pallet. With a shuddering hand, I seized a handful of the cloak that covered me. The solid feel of the heavy material, Peg’s soft snore, and the frenzied thud of my heart slowly convinced me of the here and now of the dark far corner of Thomas’ house.

But the dream still held me.

A black cloud of gun smoke drifted over me, stinging my eyes. The ground vibrated under my feet with the pounding hooves of thousands of charging war horses.

Holy Mother.
My mind convulsed and the vision released me. Sweat ran off my face in waves, my chemise stuck to my skin under my twisted dress. I kept as still and silent as my rasping breath allowed. Slowly, my racing heart and labored breathing returned to their normal rhythms. In desperate need of a human touch, I reached across the gaping floor boards toward Peg, but did not touch or wake her.

The night’s vision had been my most grueling dream yet. A long tapestry of horrors, a massive battle of flowing and ebbing horse and troop movements, outright death by sword, pike, and gun shot. Men crushed in the press. There had been no recognizable face, no familiar ground, nothing to connect it to me, which made it easier to shut away in my mind.

By the time the gray light of morning entered the house, I had myself under control. I pinched my cheeks to ensure color in my face, rose and went outside into the rain-washed morning. Black storm clouds floated ominously low over the earth. The town lay quiet behind me. I inhaled the brooding, charged air. A quiver began deep within me. With the King out of reach, my uncle could do whatever he pleased—if he caught me.

“Another dream, then?” Peg’s soft exit from the house was followed by her considered approach.

“No,” I lied. I pointed off toward the shadowed moors in the distance. “They are there somewhere. Duncan . . . and Uncle Charles.”

“Yea, and the prince.”

I nodded. At mention of him, it struck me that the only reasonable approach to the absent King was through Prince Rupert. I had a chance, for he was the King’s beloved nephew as well as commander of his armies.

Yelling in the distance caught my ear. It came from the west, toward the church ruins. I watched four to six distant men move lethargically across the wet grass. They raised their fists and shouted angrily at one another. One of them saw me and pointed. Desperate eyes sunk deep in their heads, they all shifted their path and began to run toward us.

With a ragged intake of breath, I pushed Peg toward the house and raced around the corner to the stable entrance. I slid my sword from its saddle sheath, went back out, secured the stable door, and fled into the house.

“Thomas. Get up,” I cried. The door banged shut behind me.

“Damnation,” Peg said. She threw the curtains aside. “What do they want?”

The first of them turned in through the gate.

“Whatever they can carry away. Maybe the house itself,” came Thomas’ low voice behind us. “I
told
you Roundheads and some homeless Bolton scum were breaking in to local homes, looting and killing. They probably want the house to barricade themselves in, unless they’re rampaging soldiers.” Still in the wrinkled clothes he had slept in, he jerked a board off the closed-off door that led to the stable. “We must get to the horses and escape. Help me open this.”

“Ye never should have boarded this up in the first place,” Peg scolded. She pulled uselessly at the larger plank below the small one Thomas had already ripped off. Peg looked back at me and stared, her face slack with surprise. “What are ye doing?”

“It’s too late for that,” I said to Thomas, who heaved at the second board on the door. I hefted my sword until I found the best handhold.

At that moment the door burst open and three men rushed in, one with a matchlock musket that he must have stolen from a soldier, for these were not well-equipped military types, as Thomas had suggested, but ragged local men, starving and threatening to kill to get what they needed.

The lead man was huge, his round face bearded. He had little eyes and a projecting mouth, like a bear’s. He laughed when he saw me with the sword extended toward him.

Movement stopped. Despite my wobbly knees, another inch closer to any one of us, and he would laugh no more, for I would take off whatever got in the way, be it his arm or his hairy head.

The bear-faced man lifted his musket, but had to lower it again to find the lit cord. He found the smoking cord, but not quickly enough, for Thomas, who had moved close to me when the looters came in, wrenched the musket away from him, yelling at the top of his voice.

“Out, get out,” he screamed. He flipped the heavy gun and, using the reinforced stock as a club, knocked the closest man to him in the head. The man fell backwards in the doorway. Thomas’ eyes few wide open as though he just realized what he had done. He cringed and backed away.

“Give us food and we leave you be,” someone squealed in the cramped crowd in the doorway.

The bear-faced man moved aside and stayed where he was. I advanced a step, brandishing my sword, and covered Thomas’ retreat. Peg glared at Thomas, grabbed Mrs. Reedy’s wooden mallet off the hutch, and wailing like a banshee, chased the crowd out of the house. She ran right over the man still prone in the doorway. He must have been stunned, for he jumped up after being trampled and ran off behind them. Thomas, who would not be belittled by a woman, maybe especially Peg, took a wild swing of the musket and followed her out the door, leaving me alone to deal with the disarmed, bear-faced mongrel.

He lowered his shaggy head at me, and I swung at him, but he jumped back beyond my reach. Pacing closer, I went to swing again, but my toe caught on one of the open spaces between the floor boards. The floor pitched up into my face.

“What’s a girl like you doin’ with a fine sword like this anyways?” He caught me and wrenched the sword away. “I have somethin’ much better for ya,’ darlin’.”

The sword clanged to the floor. He grabbed my shoulders and sunk his mouth into my neck, sucking at the soft skin there.

I shrank away from his touch, but he pushed me up against the hutch. A hand pawed at my skirts. My mouth opened to scream, but nothing came out.

Frantically, I pushed my attacker away with one arm and lifted the other to the overhead cabinet behind me. Arm painfully twisted, I felt for the knob with a flopping hand while I beat the hairy head with my left fist. Finally, I flipped the cabinet door open. When I twisted around to reach into it, my attacker must have thought I was goading him on, for he chuckled in my ear, his breath smelling of rotten flesh.

“No’ a bad idea, aye?” He worked my dress up over my hips and dropped his mouth to my breast. A grimy hand reached up to certainly tear open my bodice.

The gun slipped into my hand, my arm swung down, and I crammed the charged pistol into his upper gut. He stiffened, and it went off with a muffled bang. He slumped to the floor, blood and gore running out of a black hole in his stomach.

Running feet came through the doorway and I looked up into the disgusted faces of my childhood friends. They came closer and leered over the body.

“Where were you?”

“Making sure they do not come back,” Peg said, in a tiny voice that told me she had been carried away by Thomas’ infamous, generally useless enthusiasm. “Did he hurt thee?”

“No,” I croaked, with an accusative look at the two of them. My lower lip quivered. I felt violated, wanted to scour my skin where my attacker had slobbered all over me.

Thomas gawked at the pistol, still smoking in my hand. I explained how I came to have it, then carefully replaced it in the cabinet, admonishing him to leave it lay.

“Ye should have stayed with her,” Peg yelled at Thomas.

“Leave him alone,” I said to her quietly. I picked up the sword, stood it beside the doorpost and went to the cistern, suddenly drained and desperately tired.

“Ye could have been ruined. Why do ye protect him?” she cried.

“He is my friend, and yours.”

She made a rude noise.

Shortly after that, my face still damp from my ablutions, a crack of thunder shook the house. Thomas ducked as though someone had swung at him. The thatch roof rumbled above us, and driving rain sluiced down over the open doorway. In the back corner, water plopped onto the floor from a leak in the thatch. Finally, Thomas dragged the body of my attacker out into the rain.

Still in nerveless shock, I had no remorse for the man’s death. Peg eyed me critically, closed the door, and went to work wiping up the gore where the man had died. An old cook pot that I found in the big bottom drawer of the hutch served to catch the drip in the corner, but we would have to watch it, for at the rate the rain was coming in it would fill up quickly.

Thomas returned, soaked through. He changed clothes and for sometime watched the window, but finally retreated to his big chair to study his fingernails.

With one particular lifeguard captain in mind, I made myself comfortable in one of the chairs at the table and stared out the window at the slanted, gray deluge. The road across the moor had been muddy when Duncan and I rode it the day before. Thousands of mounted cavaliers would turn it into a bog in this downpour. Empathy stirred my thoughts for the miseries they surely endured.

In the steady, drenching rain of early afternoon, the rumble of cannon fire and the escalating pop of musketry sounded outside Bolton. It came from where Duncan and I had ridden companionably off the moor. Hours later, the rain reduced to a sprinkle, the three of us crowded into our open door. Clouds of gun smoke roiled upward into dark rain clouds that hovered over the town.

In the field beyond the church ruins, a long, ragged line of Roundhead soldiers scrambled in terror over the horizon, looking frequently back the way they came. A small group of soldiers came toward the house. Some of them slipped and fell on the wet grass. Those few jumped up and continued to run. All of them had empty hands and wide, fearful eyes.

“Run for your life,” one of them yelled as he approached our gate.

“Prince Rupert and his devil dog. They’re comin’,” cried another, right behind him.

“They’re killin’ ever’body.”

I reached for my sword.

“No, wait,” Thomas said, a hand on my shoulder to restrain me. “They are not coming here.”

He was right, for each of them, running as though Boye himself was indeed behind them, ran on past the gate and disappeared into the hedges east of us.

“What is happening?” Peg asked.

“You heard them. Prince Rupert’s forces have breached the town defenses and are showing no mercy,” I said.

“Yes. I believe you’re right,” Thomas said, with a look at me of new respect.

Not long after, four Royalist cavaliers, their red sashes prominent even through the rain, dismounted at our gate. One of them, in a canvas rain cloak, strode to the door. The soaked white feather in his wide hat drooped pathetically.

“Open the door,” I said, pushing Thomas forward.

Thomas cracked the door slowly, unsure of what we would find. I leaned around him, and he looked down at me in alarm. But with a wide, thankful smile, my heart lifted, for I recognized the cavalier’s easy manner and his striking blue eyes.

“Sergeant Burke?”

“Lady Elena?” He looked relieved.

“Come in. Bring your men in,” I said.

Thomas disappeared into the house.

The sergeant entered, and Peg closed the door behind him.

“I am glad to find you all here safe. You must remain inside. Captain Comrie’s orders.”

“Is the captain well?” I clenched my fingers together tightly and anxiously awaited his answer.

“Last I saw him, yes, my lady.”

I patted his wet gloved hand, thankful for that news.

“What is happening, Sergeant? Have your troops taken the town?” Thomas asked.

Peg hovered behind him.

“Rigby came out to meet us, but we broke ‘em.” A slow smile appeared under Sergeant Burke’s extensive mustache. “The town is ours.” The smile disappeared and he leaned toward me in unease. “There is still fighting, fierce and confused. It could go on well into the night. We will keep you safe.”