Wicked Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (46 page)

      
"Right now I don't care about any of it. I'm sorry, Papa. All I want to do is put this hellish war as far behind me as possible."

      
"What will you do?" Devon asked.

      
Alex shrugged. "I can't return to London with the war going on. Anyway, it would hold too many memories of Joss. For now I think I'll head back to Savannah."

      
Devon nodded. "Your Aunt Madelyne's all alone at the Hall while Quint's in Washington conferring about British attacks on coastal shipping. You might spend some time with her," he suggested.

      
"With four married children living on adjacent plantations, I doubt she's alone much," Alex replied. "I think I'll go to the city house for now. After that..." His voice faded as he envisioned the bleak, endless years ahead without Joss. How would he bear it?

      
Ah, Joss, if only we had it to do over again, I'd not be such a fool.

      
Neither man paid any attention to Poc, who sat quietly, staring down the river.

* * * *

      
Joss sat in the bottom of the canoe clutching her spectacles in one hand while she concentrated with all her strength on not being sick again. Each morning for the past two weeks—about midway through the hellish trek to the fort—she had been unable to hold down anything solid save dry biscuits. She was uncertain whether it was caused by the stress of her captivity or a reaction to the vile diet Kent gave her.

      
In truth, she was too weary to think straight after the hairsbreadth escape from the burning stockade. Shuddering, she could still smell the acrid scent of smoke and hear the hideous shrieks of war cries blended with the screams of the dying. After she and Kent had parted company with McQueen and his warriors, the American had taken her into the fort. He'd locked her in a cramped, filthy room with two other female captives, then began drinking through the night.

      
The attack had come just after sunrise. Kent had raced into the room where she lay. In the confusion she had struggled to reach the pack with her father's timepiece, but Kent cursed her and dragged her away. All she had been able to save was the pair of spectacles that were in her pocket. She could still see the woman and her daughter, cowering in their bed as Kent seized hold of her, yelling that their passage south had arrived in the nick of time.

      
Two white men, dressed in buckskins, had paddled up to the rickety little dock as gunshots flashed and flames leaped higher around the stockade. By the time they boarded the canoe and reached midstream, the fort had been taken. Unaware that the very man who had given them their muskets was in the canoe, the Red Sticks fired at the little craft, killing one of the paddlers. Bullets flew into the river all about them, splashing water into the canoe as Kent and the other man paddled furiously to get out of range.

      
The days blurred together on the water just as they had on her overland ordeal. All she knew was that Kent was a traitor to his country, in the pay of the British. He and his companion were renegades of some sort. Joss still had no idea what Kent or those who employed him planned to do with her. She was only relieved that he had made no sexual overtures.

      
Kent and his companion feared her illness was some sort of plague she had contracted from living among the Indians. "If not for my plan, which requires a Blackthorne woman, I'd kill you now and have done," he had snarled at one point when she sat retching near the fire while the other man broke camp.

      
The surge of nausea passed and Joss looked out across the river plain, ignoring him. The landscape had been subtly changing for the past day. The dense, wild overgrowth of woodlands was giving way to open flat delta lands crossed by a lacework of narrow, twisting channels that Kent referred to as bayous.

      
Alligators swam silently, looking like sunken logs until a canoe was almost too close to avoid snapping teeth and deadly tails. Tall white cranes stood on stalk-thin legs in the shallows, sunning themselves, while brightly colored small birds sang in the lacy canopy of trees scattered here and there in the exotic landscape.

      
The body of water they were on had grown sluggish and wide, muddy brown as it emptied into a vast bay. Joss knew Kent was taking her to Mobile, which was on the gulf in Spanish Territory. Then she saw the fort in the distance, a hulking stone monolith of Moorish style architecture. It sat perched on a high embankment at the edge of the bay. Beyond it a small but obviously European-looking settlement stretched inland. The narrow streets and overhung galleries spoke of its Franco-Spanish origins. It looked alien and slightly menacing to Joss.

      
"Welcome to Mobile, Mistress Blackthorne," Kent said mockingly.

      
As they neared the fortification, Joss saw the sentries' bright scarlet uniforms. Englishmen! She felt a swift surge of exhilaration as the gates swung open. They climbed to the top of the high fortress wall, then entered a long narrow corridor and walked to a set of double doors guarded by two sentries standing at rigid attention. At Kent's signal, they were admitted to a large conference room.

      
Several men clustered about a massive, ornately carved oak table, pouring over the maps and papers spread all over its surface. One wore scarlet and the others white. Her heart hammered in her chest as she mentally prepared her speech while Kent was announced.

      
"I've brought a captive I believe may be useful to you," he said without preamble, raising the end of the rawhide cord binding her so that her raw wrists were jerked roughly.

      
Joss started to speak but the words froze on her tongue when the English officer turned to face her. Cold yellow eyes swept from her head to her feet and back with mocking contempt. She would never in her life forget that haughty, aristocratic face with its cruelly perfect features marred only by the saber slash across his eyebrow.

      
Colonel Sir Rupert Chamberlain studied the tall, slim woman standing before him. He smiled chillingly as he walked closer, circling her as if inspecting a blooded horse. He remembered the ghastly eyeglasses but there was a far different aura about her now. She had quickly gathered her wits and stood coolly self-possessed under his gaze in spite of her ragged, filthy clothing and sunburned skin. Odd, he thought, he'd never before noticed that her body was so well molded or that she had such a splendid mane of hair, now bleached tawny gold by the hellish tropical sun.

      
"Alex Blackthorne's wife," he murmured, almost to himself.

      
"Sir Rupert," she replied as formally as if they were in a London drawing room. "I'm surprised you remember me." A chill of foreboding washed over her as he dismissed the Spanish officers, leaving them alone with only Kent.

      
"Oh, I remember that mongrel's peculiar bluestocking bride. You were the talk of the ton, m'dear. Everyone wondered whyever a young rogue such as he saddled himself with a homely Methody miss. Must've been true love, hmm?"
 

      
When she did not reply, Chamberlain turned to Kent. "I must confess when I received your communication I was intrigued, but it was the Caruthers bitch, not this one, you'd set out to capture."

      
"McQueen took the wrong Englishwoman, but I decided it really did not matter as long as she's a Blackthorne. As soon as that pair of vipers learns that we have her we can lure them into a trap," Kent said with a cunning smirk.

      
"No!" Joss cried before she could stop herself. Kent brought her up sharply with a hard yank on her bound hands.

      
Chamberlain tsked mockingly at him, then said, "Do act civilized, Willie, even if you are a colonial. Untie the lady's hands."

      
Kent's eyes narrowed with barely leashed anger, but after a moment's hesitation he slipped a blade from his belt and slashed the rawhide cords, freeing her. "How soon can a message be dispatched to the Blackthornes?"

      
Joss stood flexing her fingers, trying to restore circulation in her hands as Kent waited impatiently for the colonel's reply.

      
Chamberlain sauntered lazily back to the table and glanced at the maps and the latest communiques from his superiors in the Bahamas. "It would do little good to worry about trouble from the Blackthornes now. I do not believe I shall send any word that we have her," he drawled. "Perhaps if you had brought the mother-in-law, I would have considered your plan, but now I find another comes to mind."

      
"Are you mad? This is our perfect opportunity to stop the Blackthornes from holding the Creeks in the American camp," Kent said with incredulous anger. "I risked my life to get her to you and now—"

      
"And now," Chamberlain turned to Kent and said in his clipped voice of command, "you are dismissed, Mr.Kent.... Oh, yes," he added silkily, "I do believe there is a small matter of payment, your thirty pieces of silver as it were."

      
Kent accepted the curt dismissal with glowering bad grace, quitting the room in stiff, furious strides.

      
When they were left alone, Joss asked, "What do you plan to do with me?"

      
"What indeed," he said, his cold yellow eyes suddenly turning almost orange with fury as he raised his right arm, which he had until now concealed at his side. Joss could not prevent the gasp of revulsion that escaped her lips as he stretched forth the hideously deformed hand. He pulled off the glove from the withered limb, which was grotesquely blackened from damaged circulation and resembled a claw more than a human appendage.

      
"Well you should cringe, madam. This is what your husband did to me, consigning me to this wretched backwater filled with rabble and redskins. Unimpaired I'd have been on the front lines with Wellington, defeating the Corsican. But I'm nothing if not determined. I practiced with my left hand until I could use it with the same skill as I had my right. A year spent in utter misery, fumbling and failing, struggling and finally succeeding inch by bloody inch! Blackthorne should have killed me when he had the chance."

      
An icy dread swept her, leaving her faint and nauseated. She remained upright and met his eyes by sheer force of will. "I repeat, sir, what do you plan to do with me?"

      
"All in good time, Mistress Blackthorne, all in good time," he replied, ringing for a guard. "In the meanwhile, I shall have a maid attend your needs. Consider yourself a guest here at Fort Charlotte." He turned to the guard who had just entered and said, "Give her the room adjacent to mine...across from the one my wife is occupying."

      
At her shocked gasp, he smiled that cold, awful smile once more. As she was led away, she thought of Rupert Chamberlain touching her with that ghastly clawlike hand and her stomach churned.

      
The hour was very late when the door to her room swung open, its rusty hinges creaking as Sir Rupert entered. He held the branch of candles high to better illuminate the curtained bed. When he placed his knee on the mattress, Joss awoke with a start. A low scream tore from her throat as she rolled away from him, scrambling to sit up.

      
"It will do no good. Scream down the whole bloody fort."

      
"What of your wife? Surely—"

      
His harsh bark of laughter interrupted her. "That voyeuristic little slut would relish watching us. She does that, you know. Don't look so shocked. Your Methody innocence is really quite appalling. However, I shall enlighten you," he purred, continuing to unfasten his trousers. "There are places in London, very expensive playgrounds for the nobility, where one can obtain gratification that way. Perhaps your Alex frequented such. I know his uncle has done so.”

      
As he spoke the nausea, quite familiar now, began to churn once more in her stomach. She knew the meal they'd fed her earlier was coming up, along with the large tumbler of water she'd drunk before retiring. Just when he reached out and seized a fistful of her hair, yanking her back across the bed, she gave a great shuddering heave and vomited all over his arms and chest.

      
He released her with an obscene oath and scrambled from the bed, still cursing violently as he tried to brush the noisome mess off his jacket. Oblivious to him, Joss hung her head over the side of the bed while the wracking spasms continued, gradually subsiding into painful dry heaves. She collapsed onto the mattress, utterly spent and miserable as the colonel stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

      
For the next several weeks, Joss had a reprieve because the colonel was summoned to a meeting with the British high command in the Bahamas. In spite of her status as his personal prisoner, she cajoled the Spanish commandante into allowing her to walk along the terreplein with a soldier for escort. By the end of the week she was permitted to go into the town under guard and browse through the public market. Owing to her far greater proficiency at French, she gleaned much from the predominantly French-speaking inhabitants regarding the comings and goings of trading and naval vessels in the Spanish seaport that was effectively controlled by the British at present.

      
She formulated her plan, which necessitated waiting for the arrival of a British man-o'-war, the
HMS Runnymede
, three days hence. If only Sir Rupert did not return first, she would have her chance. Not wishing to bring retribution down on her maid Esmeralda, Joss confided nothing to the faithful servant. On market day the following Tuesday, she went to town as customary but carried hidden inside her unopened parasol a heavy iron poker from the fireplace.