From somewhere beyond her vision she heard the thin piping of a tin flute, and she was reminded of her brother Rafe. During the hottest part of the day, when work was halted, he would pull a reed flute from his hip pocket and serenade the birds, and her, with the sprightly tunes he had heard in Gettysburg the day or the week before. Gettysburg.
She let the curtain drop and the world was shut out. Then she wandered from room to room in the three-story house, looking at the shadows, touching her aunt’s collections of delicate china figurines, her painted plates displayed on the walls, the oil portraits of her husband’s sea-merchant family. There were no servants now; her aunt had let them all go. According to Cavendish, she had not wanted them to see her wasting into the mere shadow of a woman who had once weighed a full fifteen stone.
The house was old already, musty with Agatha’s ghost and the memories of the times she herself had spent there. She became impatient, waiting for Eric who was concluding his business at the wharf, but it was fully dark before she heard his familiar footfall on the front steps, his delicate and mocking knock on the door and the immediate turn of the knob before she could take a step to answer. She was in the living room, a smaller room than the one where she had entertained the lawyer, and a blazing fire in the grate warded off the chill she felt despite the glow from the lamps she had lighted throughout the house. It was August, and she was cold.
When he entered, Eric tossed his hat on the rack by the door and stepped over the threshold, grinning at her. “Well,” he said, exhaling a deep breath, “it’s done and it’s done. The day after tomorrow, just past dawn.”
Cass said nothing. It had already been five weeks since their flight from the hell at Riverrun, and it seemed an eternity to her. They had kept to the back roads and trails through the forests to avoid the troops retreating steadily southward and the roving gangs of farm boys and ex-slaves who preyed upon the helpless to keep themselves alive. They also ducked the Union patrols that might ask too many problematic questions of the Briton in hostile territory. And each night, no matter how tiring their running had been, no matter how dangerous the situation at hand, they had lain beneath some ancient tree or on the low banks of a meandering stream, and he had undressed her slowly, carefully, as though she were too fragile to touch until he had divested himself of his clothes and stretched out beside her. He massaged her aches, then, and drove the horrors of the day into the shadows where they belonged. He stroked her flesh with the light touch of one finger, teasing her neck, her breasts, the promise of her thighs. His lips skated over her from toe to chin, his breath taking away the night’s chill; biting tenderly, sometimes fiercely, while she stretched her arms up over her head and drew his attention and his lips to her breasts so her hands could wrap themselves in his hair and guide him to each screaming, straining, aching part of her skin.
One night, lying at the foot of a low mossy hill, she had listened as he entered her to the distant roar of guns that lit the sky like lightning. He had been nervous that night, and it had taken all her skills to bring him to the state where he would do as she willed. And she did will, and he did respond.
She had been deliriously happy in spite of daily evasions of death, and had prayed the perverse idyll would never end. But it had finally ended when they reached Chesapeake Bay and hired themselves an unquestioning, and richer thereby, fisherman to take them north.
It was curious but throughout the entire time, Cass had sensed an aloofness about him, a distraction even in the heat of their lovemaking, that disturbed her and made her wish she could have a closer peek at the soul that lay beneath his troubled exterior, mirrored in those changing gray eyes. A trouble more and more symbolized by the black glove he wore even while bathing in a river or pond. Once she had tried to strip it from him in playful romping, and he had slapped her hard, knocked her off her feet, and glared down at her. He had not said a word. She only looked up at him and wondered.
“Dawn,” he whispered, and she was snapped back to the present.
Two small divans were set perpendicular to the hearth and he sat opposite her, a marble coffee table squatting on bronze legs between them. From a silver serving tray he lifted a decanter of red wine, poured them both a glass, and lifted his in silent toast. She barely sipped at the warm liquid, could barely bring herself to look at him. Surely, she thought, he couldn’t be so callous as not to know what I’m thinking.
“Cass,” he said suddenly, “I suppose this will be our last night together. I should be on the Ship, the
Gull’s Wing
, just after sunset tomorrow.”
“What?” She slammed her glass onto the tray with such anger, that its slender stem snapped, the pieces scattering to the carpeted floor.
Eric blinked and raised a palm, and Cass bridled at the way his gray eyes grew wide. “Wait a minute, Cass, surely you don’t think that I—that I—come, surely you don’t—”
“Don’t what?” she said, rage rising in her like the fire of a potent brandy. “Don’t expect me to go with you?” Her laugh was short and bitter. “But why should I, after all? You saved my life and I saved yours, and that, in anyone’s ledger, makes us even, I suppose. What does it matter, Eric, that I’m to be thrown from this house within the week, once the papers are signed and the buyer takes over? Do you care?”
“Cass, please, I didn’t realize—”
“Of course not, Eric. All you can think of is tearing my clothes off, dumping me on some filthy patch of ground and proving that you’re better than I by—” She rose and moved behind the divan, her hands gripping the curved wooden trim tightly. “Yes,” she said, her voice dangerously low. “Yes, you go to your precious England, my love. Don’t worry a hair of your head about me.”
“Cass, if you’ll just—”
“Be quiet? Listen? Will I make out all right, is that what you want to know? Of course! I’m a woman. There are dozens of things I can do, aren’t there? Why, just this afternoon that slimy bastard Cavendish couldn’t keep his eyes off me, and me in mourning weeds still. I could easily go to him, couldn’t I? If not as a wife, then as a mistress. He has money. He could save this house if he had a mind to.”
“Cass!” Eric leapt to his feet, and she was momentarily taken aback when she saw the gray eyes darken nearly to black; but her rage took over again, and she ignored the warning sign.
“I suppose you know,” she said, “that I wrote to Mr. Jackson, one of my neighbors back in Gettysburg. He owns a store. He’s going to sell the farmland and forward me the money as soon as he can. He’s an honest man, Eric, really he is. He and a few others … they found what was left of …” Her voice faltered then until the anger reasserted itself. “They were buried in the churchyard. The money will come to me soon, I hope. But in the meantime, what will I do, Eric, with you sailing to England?” She moved away from him as he took a step around the divan. “A mistress! But of course, why not a mistress, Eric? After all, that’s what my skills are, aren’t they? And it would be so much better than strolling around the streets at night, looking for men from the ships, or men in uniform, or—”
He grabbed at her arms and shook her, the look on his face so darkly intense that she exploded in laughter and twisted free to run into the hall. “Eric Martingale, when you’re back in England and saving your precious money and company, I want you to remember me, and remember me well. I’ll not be one of your whores in the stories you’ll tell to your friends, though. And you must promise me that much, at least. Promise me that, Eric, before you say goodnight. And get the hell out of my house!”
She watched as he stiffened, reached down and picked up the remnant of her glass. Casually, as though it were merely a leaf, he squeezed the jagged bowl until it shattered between his fingers. Then he threw away the shards and moved toward her, heedless of the blood she saw staining the back of his hand. She edged away, lifting one foot to the bottom step of the staircase, one hand grabbing onto the tulip-shaped knob of the newel post.
“Cassandra,” he said, “I was going to ask you to come with me.”
“No,” she said. “No, you weren’t. You’re just saying that now. You’re just saying that, Eric Martingale, because I’ve scarred your damned codpiece so badly you think you have to—”
His gloved hand moved so rapidly she had no time to duck away. His palm struck her squarely across the mouth and she staggered backward, only her grip on the post keeping her from falling.
“Damn you, woman,” he whispered savagely, a shock of brown hair falling over his forehead. “Don’t you ever tell me what I’m thinking, or what I’m doing.”
He took another step toward her and, instead of running, she threw herself against him, one hand up to rake at his face, the other around his neck to draw him closer. But his arms tightened quickly about her waist, his free hand snaring hers and bending it back over her shoulder until she gasped.
“You’re a bitch, Cassandra,” he said in a rasping snarl.
“I’ve never pretended to be anything else,” she said angrily. “I’m not like those fine Philadelphia ladies. A poor farm girl is all I am, and I damned well like it.”
He laughed suddenly, throwing her off balance, then pressed his lips to hers and held them there as she fought to break free, twisting her head from side to side until he released her wrist and filled his hand with her hair, yanking it sharply, making her yelp, kissing her until her rage was banished and she moved slowly against him.
“Upstairs,” he whispered, his triumph undisguised.
“You will not tell me what to do or what to think,” she said in perfect imitation of his own accented command. And as the gray eyes lightened in a true smile, she pulled him down to the floor, fumbling with his waistcoat until her fingers had freed his shirt from his waistband and her nails caressed roughly the jumping muscles of his chest and stomach. At the same time he wrenched the hat from her head, tore at the bodice of her mourning gown until her breasts sprang free and he covered them with kisses, exciting them, making them strain for more. The carpet beneath her was grating, abrading, and she knew her back would be bruised from the pummeling it would receive; but she no longer cared, no longer minded, not as long as she was in the embrace of her lover’s arms and thighs.
“Damn you, Cassandra,” he muttered softly. “Damn you.”
She smiled as she tucked her chin to his shoulder and guided his hips in their rhythmic rise and fall; smiled at the pleasure of the fire that raged in her loins and threatened to turn her to cinder and ash; smiled because she knew he could never leave her now, would have to take her with him to England because she was too much a part of everything he had left, and he knew it.
He cursed her while she rode to the crest of the wave that held her up and laughed at the shadows of her dead aunt’s house.
L
ater, as they lay in bed and touched, caressed, fondled lovingly, Cass drew his head to her breasts and pressed it tightly to the soft, fleshy pillow. He murmured something she could not hear, and did not care about. The room was dark; there was no fire in the grate as the summer heat finally broke through her premonition’s chill and bathed her skin in salty perspiration.
“Eric,” she said quietly when she sensed he was about to fall asleep. “Eric, do you have to go to England? Now, I mean?”
He shifted until he could look up at her, a slight frown visible even in the darkness. A carriage passed by outside, the cobblestones slamming against wheel and hoof like rifle shots.
“I have business,” he said.
“I have business, too,” she said quietly. She moved her eyes from his and gazed up at the canopy, a darker cloud in the dark room that settled over her like the warning of a storm soon to break. Eric shifted suddenly to lay on his back, his hands cupped behind his head, and she knew what he was thinking: that revenge of the sort that had plagued her since that fire-filled day in July was a task suited for men only, and for women only in dreams. But she had no intention of being “only a woman,” not as long as four men still walked the earth with blood on their hands, the blood of her own veins, the blood of old Sara.
Most women, she knew, would wring their hands and wail throughout the day and fall into the arms of the first sympathetic man who might or might not do something to ease the ache in their hearts. She, on the other hand, was her father’s child, and Aaron Bowsmith, if nothing else, had taught her in his dying that the price of life was not cheap, and those who took it obligated themselves to pay the cost. The disadvantage of her sex, an accident of birth, could be turned into an asset if she could control herself and her passions long enough to see the world clearly, and not through the eyes of a whimpering female.
“Cass,” Eric said, “I want you to go with me. It would be unbearable for me if I had to put an ocean between us.”
“And for me,” she said, taking his hand and gripping it tightly to show him the truth of her words.
“And this idea of yours, to get these men, to get Lambert. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right somehow.”
“Why? Because I’m a woman?”
He chuckled in the dark. “That, I think, is not what I meant. I know you too well after all this time, Cassandra Bowsmith, to believe your sex would stop you if you put your mind to something. No, that’s not it, exactly.” He rolled onto his side and propped his head up on one elbow, staring at her intently. “You’re a different woman, Cass, than any I’ve ever met. You’ve torn me in two, and I frankly don’t know what to do about it. At home there’s fumbling Harry, trying to keep the family from collapsing into bankruptcy, and here there’s you, trying to salvage a family’s honor. There’s not much difference there, except in the manner of the doing.”
He fell silent, and an ache in her breast swelled to the breaking point. She knew what he was going to say before he spoke again, and a tear shimmered at the corner of one eye.
“Cass … Cass, my family needs me, too. I don’t know that I can rightfully desert them.”
She said nothing.