A horse rode across the porch, and Cass backed away from the glare of a torch thrust into one of the shutters. It was pushed out immediately, and as it was a man fired and another man grunted and fell. Cass prayed it wasn’t Amos.
Another torch was lighted and thrown, another, and one more. The riders divided and swept around the sides of the house, but Cass was ready, and several of her people immediately left their first positions for their already posted secondary ones.
A sharp crack!
Lambert had his bullwhip out, and was thrashing at the air methodically. Cass frowned in puzzlement until she realized that he had not, as she’d expected, come foolhardy to the fight. As long as there was darkness, his face would not be seen, and as long as he kept silent his voice could not be recognized. So his whip spoke for him. His men dispersed, and the air was filled with the voices of their weapons.
Glass shattered, and Melody screamed.
Fire was slowly growing along the porch railing, and there was nothing she could do about it but shrink away from its betraying light.
A man shouted and fell headlong from a tree, struck the ground sickeningly and twitched once before a horse was ridden callously over him.
There was firing from the kitchen, from the ballroom unused since the night she had thrown open the house to the glares of her enemies, from an upstairs window, until an answering volley was followed by more breaking glass and the scream of a man cut off as he hit the ground.
Smoke filtered into the house. She wiped at her eyes, grabbed Rachel as she passed, and told her to wet some rags and make the men tie them around their noses and mouths. Rachel said something as she darted away, but Cass could not hear her.
Another horse pounded over the floorboards outside and she fired blindly at the passing blur. A man threw up his hands and fell into the railing’s blaze, knocking it away, catching at his clothes, though he made no sound. Then she slammed the door and barred it, raced from room to room to kneel by her people and fire once and leave, with a light punch to their arms or a smile or a quick kiss to a wound.
On impulse, she raced upstairs to see how David was faring, found him standing at his window, a brace of pistols smoking in his hands. She had no idea who he was firing at, or thought he was firing at, but it made no difference as long as he kept the raiders running.
But when she came to the head of the stairs, she saw a great orange glow through the shutters of the dining room windows. Amos was pushing aside the bar on the door, opening it, and hoisting two buckets of water in his hands. She screamed at him and took the stairs down two at a time, one hand outstretched as though she could reach him and pull him back inside. But by the time she reached the floor he was gone, a brief dark figure against the flames. Without thinking, then, she raced out behind him, snatching a pistol from Melody as she ran. The heat slowed her. She raised a hand against it and the glare before she was able to see the old black throwing his first water at a ribbon of flame that moved slowly toward the house wall.
A rider appeared at the porch’s far side.
Cass shouted and fired. She missed, and would have thrown herself at Amos to knock him aside, when an arm thudded against her shoulder and pushed her hard into the wall. A revolver came up, gleaming gold in the firelight, and shot the rider from his saddle, shifted and shot another who had come to his companion’s aid. Cass turned.
The hand that held the weapon was encased in a black glove.
BOOK FOUR
Riverrun
1867
Chapter Twenty-Seven
C
assandra had no idea how much time had passed, only that it had done so in a series of images: the riders suddenly fading back into the trees without firing another shot; the groans of the wounded rising over the crackling of the flames; Amos leading a bucket brigade to douse the fire on the porch; Rachel and Melody standing in the middle of the foyer and weeping with joy; the men applauding her before moving to tend the wounded and the dead. Leaving her, finally, alone in the kitchen with the man who had saved her. And she still didn’t believe it. She reached out across the table and set her palm to his cheek, tears coursing down her cheeks, her head shaking slowly.
“I’m dreaming,” she said finally.
“I could say the same,” he answered softly. “Dreaming that every time I come across you, you have to be rescued from one thing or another.”
“There were days when I thought you were dead,” she said, dropping her hand to cover his. “Days when I thought you had deliberately deserted me—the carriage, that woman—I don’t know why. And days when I knew—when I knew—that you were still alive and for some reason couldn’t get to me. Those were the worst times, Eric. God, those were the worst.”
Eric Martingale nodded his understanding, his eyes caressing her face with a gaze, relearning its contours and remembering. And then, at her gentle prodding, he sat back to stare at the ceiling and explain how he had come to leave her.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he said. “I did intend to stay behind. I may have been foolish, but I was telling the truth, Cass. I was telling you the truth. I never made it back to the ship. As I was heading there, I was dragged into an alley, and that’s the last thing I knew until I woke up a day or two later and found myself bound and gagged and sitting in cold water. It must have been Forrester and one of his lady friends who played the charade; and it would have been simple because I had only previously contacted the captain by messenger. So I thought then that I was done for, and was sitting in hell, waiting for my final justice.
“As it turned out, however, my luck wasn’t even that good. I was on a ship bound for the eastern Mediterranean. From all that you’ve already told me, I’ve no doubt at all it was Forrester again who engineered the whole thing. He paid the captain well, and I was not permitted to see daylight until we were over a month at sea. That’s when I learned of my destination, and of my status as a prisoner. But I’d no intention of going that far, none at all. I knew that if I were still alive by the time the trip ended—and I had my doubts, I can tell you— I wouldn’t be for very long after that. So I slowly made myself known to several of the crew, got them at least to untie my hands so I could lose to them at gambling. They were a miserable lot, Cass, and I don’t know what it was that kept them from cutting my throat while I slept.
“All I do know is this: we were forced to land late one afternoon in the midst of a horrendous storm. It was a small vessel, scarcely adequate for an ocean crossing, and there was no one more surprised in the world than I when it was announced we had passed through the Pillars of Hercules into the Mediterranean.
“The storm nearly capsized the ship, and the captain quite suddenly forgot about me in his attempts to save himself and his cargo. As quickly as I could then, I unbound myself and waited, praying that I would not have to swim for it since it was so viciously dark that I had no idea in which direction land lay. But we did find haven in a small—and small is hardly the word for it—harbor on what I later discovered was the southern coast of France, between Spain and Italy.
“I made my way topside, then, the ship still tossing and bucking despite the protection the harbor offered, and since no one cared anything about me, they never bothered to check on me. So over the side it was for me, into water so damnably cold I nearly froze the instant I struck it. I was angry, though, Cass, angry enough at my unseen enemies to make my way to shore and slip away. For all I know, that captain never did find out I had escaped; he very likely assumes I was washed overboard while we were still in open water.”
Cass shuddered and hugged herself. “But why did it take so long to get here? I don’t-”
“Patience,” he said with a familiar, loving grin. “You haven’t learned it yet, have you?”
She almost argued with him then, but scolded herself and her temper, and resumed an attitude that prompted him to continue.
“I told you I was in France. And an Englishman in France is scarcely welcome, these days. And I was ill, very ill, starved to the point of death, weak from the fever I quite naturally picked up during my escape. I could barely walk, much less run to your side. In fact, as I was later told, I was delirious. I wandered about the countryside in a daze for nearly a week before I was taken in by a family of farmers—I do seem to serve as a magnet for farmers, don’t I?—and nursed back to health.
“It took months, Cass. My muscles had grown so childlike that I almost literally had to be taught to walk again. And I was stricken with headaches that tore my skull apart and blinded me for hours on end. I was told, when it was over, that at least twice I had been given up for dead. Twice. When I was already dead inside because I was not with you.”
He shook his head slowly, reached for a glass of wine, and sipped at it carefully.
“There was a debt to pay, then. When I had finally recovered fully by the end of that winter, I could not just leave without a gesture of gratitude. The old man had only one son left to him by that time—the others had long since died in the shadow of the late Napoleon’s allure—and the farm was too much for him to handle. So I remained through the early summer, using the work to rebuild myself to my former state of fitness. They never asked me how I had come to the state in which they had found me, had therefore not known I was English because I had had the presence of mind to keep my speech to a minimum.
“Fate, unfortunately, was not done with me yet. Realizing how dangerous it would be for me to cross the French countryside, I managed to secure a position with a coach line that ran over the Pyrenees to Madrid. I had come to the conclusion that it would be far easier to take the extra time and move into Spain and then into Portugal than it would be to chance being unmasked as a citizen of one of France’s bitterest and oldest enemies. My more than workable knowledge of Spanish, in addition, would stand me in good stead while I worked.
“What I did not know, however, was that crossing the mountainous divide between the two countries was far more hazardous than I had ever thought possible. Though the weather was good, and the work on the coach minimal—lackey, for the most part, to those making the arduous journey—the Basques of northern Spain were causing a great deal of trouble for any and all travelers.
“And the way my luck had been running,” he said with a wry grin, “it came as no surprise to me when we were attacked before we completed our descent. I took three blades high in my back and was left for dead with the others. When I came to, I thought I had been mistakenly sent to some heavenly rest instead of that rather tropical place where I fully expected to end up.” He laughed, then, at the look on her face and squeezed her hands tightly. “I wasn’t delirious, Cass, only taken in with the driver to a small and incredibly lovely convent, of which there are a great number scattered through the Spanish countryside.
“My previous, shall we say, misadventure came back to haunt me this time. I was not as well recovered as I’d thought. The winter, too, was bad, and I suffered through several bouts of fever and infection before I was able to get back on my feet. Then, pacing myself far better than I had before, I made my way—as I had originally planned—into Portugal to the sea. A collection of sour jobs I would rather not mention eventually landed me a place on a westbound trader. I landed in New York, coached to Philadelphia, and …”
He spread his arms wide as if to say, “The rest must be obvious.”
Cass, however, could not find the words that rushed into her throat, fighting each other for utterance, making her stammer instead. She was still struggling for the belief that would allow her to truly know that Eric was sitting opposite her in Riverrun, that the story she had just heard was not some fevered fragment of a dream she had conjured to convince herself that he was, against all odds, alive and well. The touch of his hands, the steady gaze of his eyes …
She wept, and did not resist, when he rose and pulled her up with him, cradled her against his chest, and murmured softly into her hair. She wept, and did not resist, when he crooked one arm behind her knees and lifted her, swaying for balance, and strode slowly out of the kitchen toward the staircase.
The tears slowed, then renewed themselves when he climbed without hesitation toward the room in which they had first begun their sparring, and their loving. He knew. Cass could not believe it, but somehow Eric knew that this was where she had made her privacy. He did not even hesitate when he crossed the threshold; there were no second thoughts, no last-minute doubts.
A single lamp burned on the left side of the bed. The windows were slightly ajar to the predawn chill.
The smell of summer’s preparations for dying were mingled this time with the acrid odors of charred wood, of lingering smoke, of horses’ sweat and mens’ anger.
There was a fleeting moment of disorientation when she thought she heard the cries of the fighting all over again, and the shots, and the screaming; and then it was done and she was standing with her hands on his shoulders, studying the gray eyes for signs of change, the sweep of his brown hair for signals of graying. Her finger traced his angles, his depressions, moved slowly around the outline of his lips until he caught it between his teeth and bit down, gently, while one hand worked to free the shirt from her shoulders. She shuddered. He smiled, and kissed her, and she fit herself against him, and it was as though he had never left. Nothing had changed. Nothing, she told herself, would change without her dying.
She wanted it to be fast.
Eric would not have it; he had been too long gone from her bed and her side, and as they stretched out on the, mattress, the tension in his muscles made it clear that he, too, was fighting the temptation to engulf her rather than love her.
With the lantern at his back, he shifted until the light fell on her figure—a slight, joyful smile on his lips as he began at her eyes and, with a trembling finger, traced every inch of her flesh as though he had chanced upon the world’s finest treasure.