His eyes found her.
“Judith Mercer,” he called in a fine, declaiming voice, “I have come, with your father’s approval. Will you have me for your husband?”
She looked at the hand he offered her, there, across the room. A flood of memories cut through the hazy thicket of her mind. Leather thimbles, three drops of blood, the strands of her hair becoming the means to raise his sails. She saw the hands grasp the coat of the doctor on the dark night of his fall, demanding the chance at his mobility. Then those hands were lost in the softness of Hugh’s gray cat, whom she’d wished to be at the moment he stroked her. Finally, she saw those beautiful hands vainly trying to staunch the flow of her father’s blood, his hot tears dropping, mixing with the red.
Now those hands desired hers, after everything that had passed between them. They trembled a little as her silence wore on. He was used
to silence, as she was. It was not the silence that caused his shaking.
He’s afraid,
Judith realized. Afraid, standing here, in the midst of these people who believed him to be a murderer.
—Of course he’s afraid. Brave people are not senseless ones, Judith, her
father admonished.—
Now. Answer the boy.
She stood slowly, then stepped forward. “I am charged to love thee, Ethan Randolph,” she said, “by the Light which dwells within my breast. I take thee as my helpmeet, with no law but love between us.”
She placed her hand within the strong, fine palm. Judith looked up. The sweat on his brow glistened like morning dew as he smiled.
She reached for her cape hanging from a peg on the wall. Another hand grasped her wrist, twisted.
“Thee chooses death, Judith Mercer,” Prescott Lyman warned.
“I listen to my Voice,” she said quietly.
“Thy Voice!” he said, his own echoing with scorn. “It was drowned silent by this murderer’s purpose!”
“No.”
“Release your hand or I will cut it off,” Ethan said with a steely sureness. She saw the gleam of metal in his hand and felt afflicted with deep revulsion. No more. No more knives.
Prescott Lyman complied, but his eyes grew more inflamed once he’d lost contact with her. “Nothing! Take nothing!” he shouted at Judith. “I would have thee naked before us in thy shame!”
She heard the shocked murmurs of those at Meeting. She felt the searing heat of Ethan’s anger.
“I need nothing,” she said, taking her lover’s arm. The door was so far away. She must keep walking, she told herself, though each step was like one taken in a nightmare, impossibly heavy. But she must reach the door, so they could all see this was her will.
Outside, the wind blew at her face and her knees gave way. She felt Ethan’s steady grip below her ribs as he leaned over her.
“Laudanum,” he said, his disgust tempered by sorrow. For her. He was not all anger. The sorrow was a gift from his heart. It overwhelmed her. No, she must stay alert, or she would slow him down. They would catch him. He wrapped her in his coat and lifted her onto the horse’s saddle. Once he’d mounted behind her, he gently eased her left leg over. She whimpered in surprise.
“You must ride astride, Judith,” he said, “so I might keep you steady.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
“That’s good,” he encouraged. “Now anchor your feet between my calves and the horse.”
“Like this?”
“Perfect,” he said, when she knew she’d done it in a far-less-than-perfect fashion. Voices rose behind them. Judith felt his body lean over to protect hers. He urged the horse to a full gallop.
T
hey remained on roads and traveling trails throughout the night, some so overgrown it seemed Ethan’s horse forged them. Judith tried to stay alert. But once he was sure that none were at their heels, he slowed their pace and encouraged her to rest, steadying her with a grip on his trousers’ braces. She dozed fitfully against his chest as he clucked soothing sounds that he’d used while tending animals and children. Were they for her or his horse? It didn’t matter, she loved the sounds and the steady beat of his heart. As dawn was breaking, they picked a trail through bush before stopping at a small stream.
When Ethan eased her down, Judith collapsed in the tall spring grass. He dismounted and was beside her in an instant.
“Stiff. My legs are just stiff,” she protested, leaning on his shoulder to rise. “Don’t, Ethan. I can—”
“Hush.”
He lifted her high and walked a steady gait that astonished her. Under the new leaves of a sycamore he finally set her down. He folded her gown’s skirt, then her petticoats back. She winced under his hands’ gentle touch on her legs.
“They are coming back? You feel the prickling?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good. Keep moving them, yes?”
“Yes.”
He kissed her cheek shyly, before standing, walking to his saddlebags, then the creek nearby. He returned with a small basin filled with cool water. He dipped his handkerchief into it and, ignoring his own mud-spattered state, gently bathed her face and hands. Judith couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done that for her. She felt her senses coming alive again under his touch.
“Ethan?”
“Yes, love?”
“Where are we?”
He wiped the last line of mud from her forehead. “I’m about to have a look around.” He disappeared above her, into the limbs of the sycamore.
“No acrobatics!” she admonished.
His laughter sounded like music.
When he dropped down at her side again, his face was flushed with exertion and happiness. “I got a good view of the land around, Judith. Appears to me no one’s following. And there’s a town in sight. With a steeple. I think it would be safe to—”
“Ethan, why are you wearing Dr. Foster’s clothes?” she asked. “And riding his horse?”
His face pinched, dissolving a measure of its happiness. “I had to run away.”
She touched his hand. “Did the magistrates decide to accuse?”
“And ignore your testimony? No. They released me. Jordan took my place so I could escape my brothers.”
“Why?”
“They won my freedom by promising to keep me a life prisoner at Windover.”
She traced the line of bitterness around his mouth.
“You and Dr. Foster—you deceived your own brothers?”
There. She’d coaxed a half-smile from him. “Jordan almost played his part too well.”
“What do you mean?”
“He stumbled like a drunken man. Winthrop carried him to the coach over his shoulder.”
“No! And still thought it was thee?”
“I suppose so. I was busy listening to Clayton’s pious rationalizations, said to keep his own precious soul feeling clean about the abduction.”
Judith hid her giggle behind her hand. “Ethan, thee must not speak so!”
“Why must I not? They are insufferable, unmanly cowards! Done in, now. Oh, I’d give the next three tobacco crops to see the look on their faces when they discover they’ve captured Jordan Foster!”
They were both laughing now. Judith didn’t know which felt better—her own laughter, or listening to his.
“Oh, but Sally! And your poor mother!” she realized suddenly.
“Poor? Triumphant, you mean. It was Mother’s idea. And it worked, imagine that!” The dark eyes turned serious again. “I cannot go home, Judith. And I cannot remain here in Pennsylvania.”
“We cannot,” she amended quietly.
He smiled slowly. “It’s true, then,” he whispered. “You did marry me, there in your Meeting House?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’d best be about the business of marrying you back.”
Their noses were almost touching. “Ethan,” she confided to him, to the air of wild spring beauty around them, “I’m afraid.”
“So am I,” he whispered softly. “You’ve chosen a renegade, Judith. In my own family, and with your people until I can prove myself innocent of your father’s murder.”
“How?” she whispered.
“By finding this murderer of your family.”
“My family?”
“Yes. Eli told me the story. Of your climb up the chimney, my strong, brave wife.”
She began to tremble. He took her arms. “Are you afraid of me, Judith?” he asked, searching her eyes.
“Not of you. For you.”
“I see.” He smiled. “That’s allowed. In moderation.”
She touched his face. “Thank you. For coming for me, Ethan.”
“I hope you do not regret your decision,
ma chere,
even if we manage to stay clear of both factions looking for us, I have only the slightest prospects.”
She rested her fingers in his windblown hair and stroked his sooty jaw with her thumb. “Your prospects indeed,” she whispered. “What about mine? I don’t have so much as a cloak to keep out the cold.”
“I do not have a name,” he countered sadly.
“That’s how I found you. And I loved you then.”
“Did you? You did not only pity that scrawny, crippled sailor?”
“Who knew the constellations, who sewed better than I? And stole a piece of my soul I’ve now given him forever.”
“Judith,” he said in a gruff whisper, “I don’t believe it yet.”
He held her close, kissing her temple. She shivered with happiness, though he must have thought it was with cold. “Let’s get you covered. And we must gain that paper.”
“Paper?”
“One that says we’re married. Who will give us one of those? The church down there?”
“I don’t think so. Churches mean banns and ceremony, and—” She felt cold and sick, just thinking about another religion, one with precepts and doctrine and no Inner Light. Ethan took her hand.
“Of course. We’ve had our church wedding, such as it was.”
“At knifepoint?” she realized.
“Well, yes. But I would not have threatened had he not held you so! Prescott Lyman never had you to lose, did he, Judith?”
“No, love.”
“Good. We need the legal paper. From whom would we get that?”
“The justice of the peace, I believe. Do you think it safe?”
“If any discover we’ve been here, they’ll know only that, not where we’re going.”
“Where
are
we going?”
“You see?” He laughed, standing, then pulling her to her feet. “They won’t even be able to drag that out of you!”
“I
t’s her people against it?” the tall, lean matron at Ethan’s side asked.
“Yes,” he admitted, because he was afraid to lie to a woman who reminded him so much of his sister. “How did you know?”
“Couples dressed as you, hard-traveled strangers, with no baggage, they usually come in the middle of the night, not in the light of day. But they’re always eloping on account of they’re underage, or their folks are dead set against it.”
“We’re not underage.”
The woman laughed. “If I’d thought you were, my husband would have sent you home with a lecture ringing in your ears a while ago.”
Would this woman say, if someone asked, that Judith was lucid, clear-eyed, with enough of the vestiges of the laudanum gone when they wed? Would the paper stand, bind them, allow no man, no court, no Elder, to pull them asunder?
He tried to concentrate on the scene in the adjoining room of the comfortable house on the edge of Pelhamtown, Pennsylvania. There, in the hearth room, Judith was surrounded by the woman’s four small daughters, each contributing spring flowers to the wreath for her hair. White larkspur mingled with huckleberry and lavender.
The fifth child, a boy, had run to fetch their father, the justice, who was presently helping a neighbor to mend a fence. Or was he bringing the magistrates down on them?
Ethan felt his heart pound harder, felt a twitch start, beside his eye. Christ, stop that. The smallest child climbed into Judith’s lap to place a dandelion beneath her chin. A born mother. Prescott Lyman was right about that. Another worry. Could he give her a child? Or was he sterile like his brothers?
“Why, you’re afraid she’ll refuse you, even now,” the woman said.
He nodded. Of course he was worried about that. Would Judith, now clear-eyed, say yes to him? Mrs. Curtis offered him a small glass filled with a ruby-colored liquid.
“I usually leave this to my husband, later. But you’d best swallow it
now, young man. Good,” she purred as he obeyed. “Ease your mind, Mr. Randolph. We’ve yet to lose a bridegroom.”
The door opened and a man whose head skimmed the rafters of the room entered. He was aproned and muddy and had the most open, congenial expression Ethan had ever seen.