Scandal's Daughter (13 page)

“I cannot go on,” she moaned as he dismounted. “I’m so sore I shall never walk again, never mind ride.”

Himself weary after all day and half the night on horseback, James let an edge of annoyance creep into his tone. “Come on, we cannot stay here. I have not the least notion where we are. We have no choice but to go on.”

“I know.” She turned towards the other pony and waddled two awkward steps, her legs far apart.

The tender skin of her inner thighs must be rubbed raw, James realized. Unaccustomed to riding astride, she was not merely stiff and tired like him, as he had supposed, but in pain. When he had suggested it, he’d expected a short, fast ride not this endless jog.

“You had best come up before me, seated sideways,” he said, hoping his own strength would hold out. “If we continue at a walk, as I expect we will since we have wounded among us, it won’t be too difficult.”

He lifted her up on the pony’s withers and mounted behind her. With one hand entwined in the mane, her other arm—at his insistence—around his waist, she sat quite straight, balancing with apparent ease as he urged the pony forward.

“That’s much better,” she said gratefully.

At first James found it easier too, without the drag of her hanging onto him behind. But as they rode on, her shoulders drooped and soon she slumped against his chest. Without stirrups to compensate, he had only the grip of his tired thighs and knees to keep him from sliding backwards. The ride became a nightmare of endurance until at last he was forced to call to the nearest partisan for help.

“Kyrie, will you be so good as to take up my wife before you for a while?”

Unfortunately Cordelia recognized the Greek word for wife. She stiffened in outrage. “I’m not your wife!”

“For the present you are,” he said with what patience he could muster. “They saw us together in the tent, remember.”

Silenced for a moment, she again protested as the obliging Greek stopped beside them, dismounted, and reached up to lift her down. “You cannot expect me to ride with a man I don’t know.”

James ran out of patience. “Better a noble patriot you don’t know than an unprincipled scoundrel you do,” he snapped. “Stop arguing, woman, unless you prefer to ride by yourself.”

He might as well have saved himself the trouble, since the partisan, uncomprehending, set her on his pony’s back and mounted behind her even as they spoke. They rode on.

Down they rode into woodland, and out into dew-drenched meadows as the sky began to pale. A flock of sheep and goats scattered bleating before them, the bellwether’s bell ting-tonging. A ragged shepherd boy, seated on a rock, lowered his pan-pipes to stare. His wild, airy aubade followed them as they paused by a shallow, stony stream to let the ponies drink, then splashed through.

Before the sun rose, they came to a flat-topped, grassy knoll crowned with gnarled, silver-green olive trees and the dark, slender spires of cypresses. James was bone-weary. He had dismounted and tied his pony’s bridle to a sapling before he noticed the ruins.

The sapling was forcing its way between cracked flagstones, companioned by thistles and dandelions and willowherb. Nearby a toppled pillar lay where it must have fallen an age ago, for ivy entwined it and moss grew thick on the north side. Scanning the scene with tired eyes, James thought he made out four rows of pedestals where pillars had once stood. The partisans used them as convenient stools.

By daylight they were not a prepossessing group, tattered, grimy, unshaven, some with bloodstained bandages to indicate their hastily bound wounds. As they arrived at the ancient temple, they tethered their mounts and piled their muskets before the man who must be their leader. Seated on a truncated pillar, he sent several of his followers to stand guard among the trees. Two men levered up a paving stone and began to stack the muskets in the hole revealed beneath.

“James!”

He swung round as Cordelia slid down from the pony. Her knees buckled and he just caught her before she subsided to the ground.

“Efcharisto,” he said to the partisan who had taken her up.

“Efcharisto,” Cordelia echoed.

The man nodded, his face surly as he turned away to tie his mount. He strode off to speak to the chief. James supported Cordelia to the nearest pedestal, cushioned with a mat of dead leaves and ivy, and she sank down onto it.

“I cannot believe I thought I was tired before.” Her face was drawn, her hair, uncovered after their hurried departure, dusty and coming loose from its braid.

He grinned. “Amazing what one can do if one has to, is it not?”

“Amazing, but I pray we don’t have to go any farther for at least a few hours.”

“You stay here. I’ll go and see what their leader has to say.”

“Pray give him my heartiest thanks. He may have made us ride a thousand leagues in a single night, but when I consider the alternative...”

“Complaining would appear churlish,” he agreed lightly, forgiving her snappishness in the night. She was burned to the socket.

As he started towards the chief, the man stood up and beckoned impatiently. He was burly, and taller than most of the others. James thought he was the one who had cut open the tent and led them up the hill. For someone about to be thanked for a daring and courageous double rescue, he looked to be in no good temper.

The partisan who had carried Cordelia on his pony stood beside the chief, looking as disgruntled as his leader. If he had not wanted to help, he should have said so before, James thought.

The chief stepped forward. “Stavros here says your wife is not Greek, and he suspects you are not either. I myself thought your speech odd, but there are many dialects in our country. Are you one of us?”

“I admire your struggle for freedom from the Turks.”

“Are you Greek?”

“No, I and my wife are Swedish.”

“By the gods of the underworld,” the ancient oath exploded from his lips, “you are right, Stavros! We lost four comrades and risked all our necks to save a pair of foreigners, may Christos forgive me. Enough is enough. Let them fend for themselves now. Time we went home.”

And within a very few minutes, James and Cordelia found themselves alone in the ruined temple, with no horses, no baggage, no food, and no idea where they were.

Chapter 13

The patter of rain on the leaves overhead woke Cordelia. Beside her James stirred in his sleep, brushed a spider from his cheek, and rolled over. His arm settled across her breast.

She removed it, placing it firmly by his side. He need not think that because she had been forced to pretend to be his wife she was going to succumb to his undeniable charm. Last night he had taken advantage of her despair at the prospect of being forced to join Mehmed Pasha’s harem. She had responded only out of a need for comfort. She was not a wanton like Mama.

Green light filtered down through the canopy above. So far no raindrops penetrated the thicket of ivy, bramble, and laurel roofing the corner where a tree had fallen across a tumbled pillar. The bed of dry leaves underneath her smelled faintly musky—a fox’s den, James said. If so, the fox had not disturbed their sleep.

The leaf-bed rustled as Cordelia shifted. The sting of her skinned inner thighs cut through the overall ache of her abused body. She did not want to move, to get up, to walk in search of help.

Nor did she want to lie here getting wetter and wetter while the light faded until they had no choice but to spend the night in their borrowed shelter. She watched a drop gathering on a leaf, growing, collecting the insidious leakage until it was heavy enough to trickle down and splash, plop, right on James’s eyelid.

He shot up, clapping his hand to his eye as if he’d been hit by a fist, not a drip. “What...Ouch!”

“You’ve got your hair all entangled with the briars. Keep still. There...”

“Ouch!”

“And there. Now lower your head, carefully. That’s right.”

“Did you hit me in the face?”

“Certainly not. It’s raining and a drop landed on you.”

“I dreamt I was King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, being shot in the eye with an arrow. Just a raindrop? Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. I watched it fall. That was a quick dream.”

“Thank heaven. I did not enjoy it. Couldn’t you have stopped the drip, or at least diverted it?”

“I didn’t want to move. But I suppose we will have to.” Another leaf disburdened itself on her sleeve. She sat up cautiously, hunched over. If her long hair mixed itself up with the brambles she’d have to cut it off—not that they had anything to cut with.

She was hungry and thirsty, too.

“I daresay we had best be on our way,” James agreed reluctantly. “We shan’t stay dry here for long. I wonder how late it is. It’s much darker, but perhaps that’s because of the rain.”

“It’s all very well saying we must be on our way, but which is our way? The partisans went off in every direction.”

“Sneaking home to their various villages, I imagine. At least it suggests there are a number of villages around. We’ll go downhill and follow the first stream we come to.”

“As we are on a knoll,” Cordelia pointed out, “every way is downhill. And the first stream is right this minute flowing down my neck.”

“Then let’s go,” he said with infuriating cheerfulness. Twisting onto hands and knees, he crawled out into the downpour. “Come on—no, wait. Take off those trousers, first.”

“What!” she gasped. What he had said of the pleasures of undressing lying down returned to her. Surely he had not decided to assault her here and now?

“The less Turkish you look when we find a village, the better. And sore as you are, you’ll probably find it easier to walk without the cloth rubbing your skin.”

How did he guess she was so sore? He should not be thinking about that part of her at all! He was right, though; she’d do better without the trousers. Kneeling, she reached under her petticoat, untied the drawstrings at knee and waist, and pulled them off.

With the trousers rolled up under her arm, she crawled out of the fox’s den. The rain slashed down, a chilly, autumnal downpour. James was already bedraggled, his brown hair plastered to his head. No more than she had he contrived to bring a headdress from Captain Hamid’s tent.

He pulled her to the slight shelter of the nearest olive tree and looked her up and down. “Respectable, no, but at least not Turkish. It’s a pity you have no covering for your head. Could you wind your trousers into a turban?”

“Then I’d look Turkish again. Which reminds me, why on earth did you tell them we are Swedish?”

“The Turks are looking for an English couple. If I’d said we were Macedonian, or Croatian, or Albanian, in the first place someone might know the language, in the second they’d probably hold some ancient grudge against the people. Sweden’s far enough away for them very likely never to have heard of it.”

“Next time say Polish. At least I speak that.”

“You do? You continually amaze me. Well, perhaps we can pretend Polish girls never wear a headdress.”

“Oh, just a minute, I have an idea.”

James watched, puzzled then amused, as she arranged the waistband across her forehead and tightened the drawstrings at the nape of her neck. Her hair was inside the trousers, rather insanitary but she was so filthy anyway it hardly mattered. The wide legs hung down her back like a cloak. At least the rain would not run down the back of her neck for a while.

“If we were in London, you’d set a new style,” James said with a grin. “I’d say we have a couple of hours of daylight left. Let’s go.”

The heavy rain prevented any view of their surroundings from the top of the knoll, so they set off down the slope at random. The short turf had curious horizontal ripples, as if it had once been a wide staircase. At the bottom the old approach to the temple continued in a track comparatively clear of undergrowth, so they followed it.

As she plodded along, the rain began to seep through Cordelia’s clothes, thick homespun though they were. The top of her head was sodden, but the quadruple thickness of the trouserlegs still protected her back somewhat. James, with no such protection, must have water running in a constant, clammy stream down his neck. She glanced at him, ready to commiserate, only to find him walking jauntily, as unconcerned as if he was strolling through an English meadow on a summer’s day. Infuriating man!

Soon the track met another, wider and well-used though rough and stony. On its far side, a line of yellowed willows marked the course of a stream, beyond which rose a steep hillside.

“Downstream,” said James firmly, so they turned left, picking their way between pothole puddles, their shoes squelching.

Cordelia’s limbs ached, her sores smarted and she was growing more and more soggy and chilled when a rumble and squeak behind them made them both turn. An oxcart loomed through the rain, lumbering down upon them at a speed minimally faster than their slow walking pace.

The driver, a withered old man with a red nose and a toothless grin, reined in his great, stolid beasts. He gestured wordlessly to James and Cordelia to climb up.

“Efcharisto!”

James lifted Cordelia up onto one of the solid wooden wheels and she scrambled into the back of the cart among earthenware jars packed in straw. Some smelled of pine resin and alcohol, others had greasy splashes on their lips—retsina and olive oil, she guessed.

James joined her. The old man grunted at his team and off they rumbled, jolting over the stones. The squeaky wheel was music to Cordelia’s ears.

“This is heaven!” she said, scrunching down into the straw.

James looked at her. Looking at him, wet, cold, dirty, his forehead scratched by the brambles, she had a very good idea of what he was seeing. They both burst out laughing.

The old man glanced round, grinned his toothless grin, and shrugged his shoulders.

“If this is heaven,” James said, “where are the manna and honeydew? I could eat a horse and drink a lake.”

“Perhaps you can persuade him to let us roast one of his oxen. At least ask him if he has a water-bottle.”

This James did. The old man mumbled something, shrugged again, and passed back a bottle. James handed it to Cordelia, who took a long swig.