“And Cass, you’ll need money to do this thing. You’ll have to hire men to do the searching for you, you’ll need a place to stay while you’re waiting for their news, you’ll need food and clothing and everything else that - goes with just living. And what will you realize from the sale of your aunt’s house? What did the man say, enough to tide you over until you can find other means? That doesn’t sound like very much to me, Cass, not enough to do what you’re trying to do. Cass, come with me. Come with me and marry me and I’ll show you something of England you’ve never dreamed existed. It would take only a year or two, I promise you. A year, Cass, until the business is set again. Then, I swear I will bring you back and if it takes my last farthing I’ll help you track down the men who hurt you.”
Not hurt me, she thought; killed me inside. And she blinked her eyes rapidly as if that alone would drive away the temptation to yield to his enticements, the soft sound of his voice in her ear with the promises of security and revenge rolled into one neatly tied package. She wanted to do it, remembering her anger that evening with him when she thought he would leave without asking; but now that he had asked, had even proposed marriage, she fought the idea as being too safe and secure. It was, in the telling and the dreaming, so safe that it was suspect. Not that she did not believe that he meant what he said; she was sure he did, but what if she went with him and he changed his mind and somehow managed to soften her resolve? How could she live with herself? And how could she make her way back here alone? “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” her father had always said. The devil you know. The devil you don’t.
The tears came quietly, before she knew she had talked herself out of a husband and into a maelstrom. She cried silently, her shoulders moving, her lips tight between her teeth.
And finally, when she drew up the sheet to wipe at her face, Eric sat up, crossed his legs, and lay his hands upon his knees. His voice was taut, partly in anger and partly in frustrated resignation. “On the other hand, I could always delay, I suppose.”
It was an offering of tentative peace, and she nearly snatched at it until she thought, and knew that forcing him to stay would mean stoking that furnace of rage he carried within his breast and sometimes allowed to show in those eyes. He would love her now, hate her later, especially if he received word that the company had fallen. If I only knew more about him, she thought while he waited for her reply. Despite their intimacy, both emotional and physical, she realized that he was still an enigma to her, a puzzle she had accepted without question because nothing had happened until now to make her delve deeper.
“You can’t,” she said, her tone flat.
“I can.”
“No,” she whispered, then thrust herself into his arms and let him rock her gently.
“Then I can do this,” he said, his words muffled in the soft cloud of her hair. “I can make arrangements for you … of the sort that would let you … well, live properly.” He put a hand under her chin and lifted her face. “I’ll not have you any man’s woman but mine, Cass. And if you’ll not go with me to London, then I’ll promise you this—that I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She wanted to tell him that he was leading her back into a dream they had had after Riverrun, a dream that would be so easy to fall back into with no compunction. “Eric,” she said, “I don’t want any promises.”
“But Cass—”
“No,” she said sharply, perhaps more so than she’d intended. “I don’t want any promises. There are too many miles, too many days. But I’m not so proud as to be foolish, either. I’ll accept your help. But I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t be silly, Cass.”
She broke away from him and slid off the bed, moved to the window and looked out over the street through the thin film of curtains. There were lights in the windows opposite, a man walking below with a lantern in his hand, horses and riders, a landau that made all the other traffic give way before it.
“I will pay you back, Eric,” she repeated. “Whatever it is, I will pay you back.”
“But you’re a woman, Cass!”
She spun around, hands held tightly to her sides, chest rising and falling with furious determination. “I know what I am, and I know who I am.” She stepped to the side of the bed and knelt on the mattress, the look in his eyes as they focused on her breasts no longer exciting her. “I will do what I said I will do, and it doesn’t make much difference to me now whether you believe me or not. I will do it! Now let’s stop talking, all right? It’s late, and I have a lot of things to do tomorrow.”
He seemed angered by her outburst, and for a moment she thought she had lost him by her declaration. Instead, however, he laughed loudly and long, grabbed at her arms and pulled her down on top of him. She struggled when he tried to kiss her, wriggled to get away from the hands that roamed at will over her body, and finally aimed a slap at his head to keep him away. He only laughed all the more heartily, however, and pinched at one thigh until she yelped.
“Whatever you say, wench,” he said, grinning, rolling her breasts in his palms until she could not contain the moan that struggled in her throat, the curses that followed it, and the lovemaking that drugged her into a sleep dominated by dreams of a storm-tossed sea and a pair of gray eyes that rose from the water; gray, and searching, before turning to black.
Chapter Nine
T
he following day, near to noon under an overcast sky threatening rain, Cass left Eric snoring in the bed and dressed again in her mourning clothes. Now that she had determined not to leave the country—and, she thought with a twinge of guilt, perhaps give up the one chance she would have at a happiness she might never again know—she realized that the only person who could help her in an effective way was Hiram Cavendish. Through his good offices, she might be able to find a decent place to stay until her plans were more firm. And the more she thought about it, the more anxious she was to begin. Toward the end of the night, the sea that had been in her dreams was replaced by the faces of the three men who had raped her and destroyed her home. The problem was getting to them now that they had fled into the unknown territory of the South. She remembered the last night of the carriage’s wild ride through the countryside, and the shots that had been fired and the sound of the man falling into a body of water. It had felt like heresy, but she had prayed upon awakening that whoever it was had not been killed or captured, but was still alive and waiting for her. It was a fantasy, wishful thinking, and Eric would have been rightfully scornful had she told him.
And what would he have said if she’d mentioned the last of the dream—the scarred face of Vern Lambert superseding all else with his demonic leer? Him she would save for the last, because the one thing Eric did not know—and would not know if she could help it—was her plan to return to Riverrun. She knew that Lambert would be there and nowhere else. It was what he had been after, and since Eric had deserted it, she was sure he would have lost no time in reclaiming it as his own.
She stood in the front hall and looked back up the stairs. For a moment she could see a vague impression of Agatha standing at the top of the landing, scowling and shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Aggie,” she said to the spectre of her conscience, “but I have no choice.”
She drew on an elbow-length pair of black gloves delicately laced at the cuffs and retrieved a parasol from the stand near the door. Carefully, she removed from her expression all traces of her grim resolve, replacing it with the proper attitude of solemn alertness she knew her neighbors required. Not, she thought with a mirthless grin as she reached for the knob, that they approved of her at all; they must have seen Eric’s coming and going over the past several days—the coming early in the evenings and the going the following mornings—but at the moment she did not care what they thought or whom they told. Gossip, in whatever form, was too trivial a matter now to concern her. She had more important things to worry about first, such as living. And dying.
The street, as usual, was crowded, but no one seemed to notice her as she descended the steps and joined the throngs that moved to and away from the square at the end of the block. For once she was glad that she could move anonymously amid so many different types of people. Philadelphia, as its citizens were quick to point out to the uninitiated, the symbolic as well as the actual birthplace of the new nation, was for many immigrants and diplomats the first port of call after New York in the New World. As a result, there was a grand mixture of costumes and languages in the streets, as well as the rough, crude dress of outland men and women who drifted into the city from the mountains and plains in the less developed sections of the land between here and the Mississippi.
Hooves and carriage wheels lifted a frightful clatter over the cobblestones; laughter and jeers, the distant sound of band music on the green at the square, all made Cass more positive than ever that her decision to remain had been the proper one. The only mark of guilt she bore, and which she successfully suppressed, was her decision not to return to Gettysburg. She could not. Once she had learned from Mr. Jackson what had been done with the bodies found in the wreckage—the root cellar having collapsed when its supports burned with the house—she could not bring herself to view what she had once known as a moderately thriving farm. She did not want cinders and ash to mar that memory. Later, she thought, when all is done, I’ll go back and visit the graves. Later, but not now.
And when the letter to the merchant had been written in Cavendish’s presence and dispatched by the fastest means possible, it was as though a gentle chain of elegant fashion had been taken from around her neck. She was unalterably free. At first a pleasantly giddy, then darkly melancholy feeling. But nevertheless, she was free to do what had to be done.
She walked quickly to the corner and paused, looking at the trees dotting the square beyond the low, polished, black iron railing that bordered it, the grass where a number of children played and nurses walked quietly with their infant charges. It should be a portrait, she thought as she turned to her left; something to hang in every room in every house, a reminder that life goes on when war is too far distant to blacken the sky with smoke and the night with the voices of cannon.
I’m being morbid, she told herself, and with a quick shake to drop the cloak that had settled round her shoulders, she headed quickly past Independence Hall toward the business district in which the old lawyer kept his firm. She noticed, as she walked, a number of young men and wondered why they too were not in uniform.
She decided they must be the lucky ones who had the money to pay other men to replace them in the draft.
Money, she thought; it all came down to the amount of money one had. It buys places to live, food to eat, and protection from the fools who run countries as stupidly as they had run this one. Stupidly, she added silently, to let it tear itself apart because some men were too greedy to see beyond the color of their gold to the color of human beings.
A buckboard laden with bolts of cloth and barrels of foodstuffs swerved suddenly in front of her and she stepped back with a sharp cry while the driver wrestled with whip and reins to calm the horses drawing the vehicle; and as she did so she bumped into a man who had moved too closely behind her.
“Excuse me,” she muttered, pulling her skirts away from the dirt kicked up by the team.
“Not at all, Miss Bowsmith,” the man said, touching his fingers to a gray silk hat and moving away quickly.
She nodded absently and walked on, glaring at the buckboard still having trouble in the middle of the street, tying up traffic now as several carriages tried to maneuver around it and caught themselves in positions where backing up was the only possible extrication. It wasn’t until she had reached the section of the city she’d been heading for that the realization struck her that the man she had collided with knew her name. She stopped, nearly bumping into someone else, and gazed back in the direction from which she had come. The man was long gone, however, and she could not remember seeing his face. It puzzled her, especially since she was almost completely unknown in Philadelphia; but, she told herself, there was nothing she could do about it, and so she promptly put the thought aside.
T
he Cavendish and Roe law office was in a narrow cul-de-sac flanked by similar firms, all uniformly somber in the faces they presented to the world. There was no foot traffic here, nor were there any carriages tethered to the brass rails when she turned into the street and headed for the fourth door down. She walked more slowly now, suddenly apprehensive about her reception. Cavendish would certainly disapprove of her coming, especially after the cold way she had treated him the day before, and he was, she thought, just the type of wizened old man who would bear an unreasonable grudge for the smallest slight as long as there was no money to be lost thereby, even glimpsed in a client’s future. She hesitated and very nearly turned herself around before an abruptly cold gust of moist wind pushed at her skirts and hat. With an angry glance at the sky and a shake of her head, she pushed open the glass-paned door and tried not to wince at the high-pitched bell that jangled insistently at her entrance. She paused on the threshold for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting inside, a light filtering through dust-gray curtains on the windows and hardly augmented by the few lamps scattered about the reception area. Beyond a low railing a short distance into the room was a large, canted desk at which sat a young man in short sleeves, his collar held by only one button, working diligently at a ledger book easily as long as his arm. Cass waited a moment for him to look up since the rest of the area was deserted, then coughed impatiently into her fist. The man looked up, scowling, and brushed back a thick lock of hair from his forehead. Cass smiled at him and his scowl vanished as he scrambled to slam the book shut and fasten his collar with fumbling fingers. He then slipped into his broadcloth jacket and hurried to the railing’s gate.