An Infamous Marriage (16 page)

They hurried inside and to their separate rooms to trade their finery for older and warmer attire. Within half an hour they were alone in the bastle barn, seated on the straw in an empty box stall across from Penelope’s.

For now the mare seemed hale and strong, though restless, so they settled in for a long vigil. Elizabeth had brought an old woolen blanket in addition to the warm pelisse she wore buttoned to her neck, but Jack had only his army greatcoat, and on impulse he draped it around her shoulders and took the blanket for himself.

She snuggled into the greatcoat, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “It smells of wood smoke.”

“And so it should. I’ve stood before many a campfire in it, though not all of them fueled by wood. I’m glad you don’t find that it smells of buffalo dung.”

At that she stopped burying her nose in his coat and wrinkled it instead. “Buffalo dung?”

“Yes. The Indians of the prairies burn it for the same reason we generally burn coal—wood is too rare and precious to waste on a fire.”

“I like coal better, though I should like to
see
a buffalo someday. You hunted them with the...the Sioux, was it? I remember something of the sort from one of your first letters.”

“If you can call my part in it hunting. I observed and tried not to get in the way. You never saw such riding, and bareback, without stirrups to keep their balance.” He wove a tale of the hunt and the feasting that had followed after, while Elizabeth sat enthralled.

“The one thing I don’t understand,” she said at the end, “is what you were doing there. That prairie is part of American territory, isn’t it? That they bought from France, oh, ten or twelve years ago.”

“It is,” he assured her. “Which is why I tried to say so little about it at the time. I wasn’t there officially as a British officer, but in the guise of a trader, trying to see how the Indians were disposed if war came.”

“And how were they disposed?”

“Oh, a good number did fight on our side, but I think many of them saw the war as too far from them and their interests. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. The buffalo country is such a desert, all grass with hardly a tree to be found. Perhaps the Americans will leave them in peace.”

“I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t land that’s good for buffalo be just as good for cattle?”

Jack sighed. “I suppose it would. I hate watching this happen to men I counted as friends, men I fought alongside, and knowing there isn’t a single thing in the world I can do about it. And I’d love to condemn the Americans for it, but I doubt we’d be behaving any better if the colonies had never revolted. It would be
our
immigrants and
our
colonists’ sons hungering for new land, and it would be the growth of
our
farming and trade to deal falsely with the Indians and take it away from them.”

“But Bonaparte would never have sold all France’s North American lands to
us,
” Elizabeth said.

“No, but that would have been all the more reason to settle every scrap of land up to the Mississippi, to keep the French from attacking us there. Who knows? If there had never been a revolution in America, perhaps there wouldn’t have been one in France, and the last twenty-five years would’ve been a golden age of peace.”

Elizabeth laughed. “So everything is America’s fault?”

Jack chuckled, then shook his head. “I wouldn’t go so far as that. It gives them too much credit.”

They sat silently for a time. Jack checked on the mare, then returned to the vacant stall, this time sitting beside Elizabeth rather than across from her. He had never wanted a woman more, and he could not understand how he had ever thought his wife was plain. So her coloring, size and form were nothing out of the ordinary for an English woman. What of it? Her soft, light brown hair suited her smooth, fair skin, and her changeable hazel eyes were every bit as entrancing as sky-blue or flashing black ones.

He wanted to show her the world, to give her everything she thought impossible to have. He wanted to see her full of joy. He wanted to watch her lose her bitterness and unhappiness, too much of which had been of his own making, but he didn’t want her to lose her clear-sighted cynicism, the edge that sharpened her wit. He wanted her to be herself, her happiest, truest self, and all his. And he was beginning to suspect he was in love with her.

* * *

Elizabeth saw the ardor in Jack’s eyes as he settled down beside her. Did he think he could seduce her in a stable, on a bitterly cold night, with Penelope ready to give birth, if not any moment now, any hour now? It was madness. They would surely freeze and have their most intimate parts mauled by straw if they made the attempt.

Yet didn’t that make this safe? For all that she had been willing to go to bed with Jack tonight, before they’d been called to this foaling vigil, part of her was still afraid that in giving herself to him she would lose the only scrap of power she had. But she could be near him now in the cold stable without fear that the situation would get out of hand. If he asked for too much from her, all she would have to do was remind him where they were. And so help her, but she was coming to like her husband so much. After years of solitude, it was lovely to have him near, to enjoy the bracing conversation of an equal mind, someone who had lived in the wider world she had only read of and longed for.

But it wasn’t just his mind that drew her. She loved to watch him move, tall and strong, graceful despite his slight limp. They had ridden out together that morning, and she had almost forgotten to concentrate on managing her pony, so caught up had she been in the easy, assured way Jack sat a horse, as if he and the great beast were one being. She could easily imagine him on the vast prairies of North America, hunting buffalo, instead of merely inspecting the upper sheep pastures of a modest Northumberland farm. And then there were his hands, so large and strong. It made her blush to think of it, but she had taken to dwelling on every smallest touch those hands had given her in the past week, whether a light brush of her shoulder as he helped her with her cloak when they were leaving the Ildertons’ dinner party, or their all too brief clasp at her waist as he helped her dismount after their ride had ended. She was even mad for his hair, all thick and dark but for the strands of silver that troubled him so. She wanted to sink her fingertips into it, to see if the silver wings over his ears felt any different than the rest of his brown curls.

Without conscious decision, she shifted to lean her head against his shoulder. Even with the layers of blanket, greatcoat and clothing between them, the solid, living reality of him sent a jolt of awareness all the way down her spine—or perhaps that was from his sharp, indrawn breath.

The barn wasn’t wholly silent. Elizabeth could hear Penelope pacing her stall and the other horses shifting and snuffling in their sleep, all as though from a great distance. Her breathing and Jack’s, both ragged and unsteady, echoed in her ears like a gun’s report.

Moving as slowly as if she were a skittish horse who might startle away, Jack shifted until his arm was around her back and the blanket covered them both. He sighed and tightened his arm around her waist, and she leaned back until her head was tucked neatly in the crook of his chin. Could he hear her heart hammering? How could he not, the way it pounded against her eardrums?

She felt him turn his head, and his lips brushed her forehead.

She sighed. She shifted and he shifted and before she knew it, she was half in his lap, lying in his arms, her lips mere inches from his. In the flickering light from the single lantern hanging in the stable corridor, his eyes were enormous and dark.

“It’s very cold tonight,” she heard herself say.

He nodded. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it snows again by morning.”

His breath was warm on her face and sweet, still scented with the port he’d drunk at the Ildertons. “Straw makes a prickly bed,” she pointed out.

“Uncomfortably so,” he agreed.

“Penelope might need us at any moment.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“I wanted to make sure you understood.” Her voice shook.

“Perfectly. If we were to, say, kiss just now, nothing else could possibly happen.”

They had both drawn closer now, and Elizabeth wound one hand around his neck, sinking into his hair, mentally cursing the gloves that kept her from feeling it properly. “Nothing at all,” she whispered, pulling him down to her.

Her eyes fell shut as his lips met hers in a sweet, leisurely caress that demanded nothing. He broke the contact only to kiss the corner of her mouth, nuzzle her nose to nose and then come back for more.

Elizabeth sighed, opening her mouth, then daringly let her tongue dart out to taste his soft lips. He went stock-still for the space of a heartbeat, then groaned, hauled her against him and plunged his tongue deep into her mouth.

After that it was all touch, all sensation. She had wanted it to be cold, wanted them hemmed in by clothing and blankets, but all the layers seemed a great nuisance now as she wrapped her other arm around Jack’s shoulder and they twisted together until she was lying on the open greatcoat with him poised above her, the fresh straw springy beneath her. She loved the weight of him pressing her down into the straw, big and strong and male. She’d been alone too long, untouched too long. Why had she been delaying this?

Through all the layers separating them she could feel his male hardness, pressing insistently at her hip, and she twitched appreciatively against him. He growled—noisy beast, this husband of hers—and raked a hand down her side to cup her posterior and pull her against him in a rhythmic rocking motion.

He broke the kiss but stayed close, nose to nose, breathing hard. “Oh, God, Elizabeth. Is it really that cold?”

Some distant part of her murmured she might regret this in the morning, but she ignored it. “I’ve never been warmer,” she gasped.

She kissed him again and he began to work at the buttons on her pelisse. This wasn’t how she’d imagined this, but she didn’t care. That same distant part of her mind commented that the mere thought of a stable was going to set her to blushing from now on, but she didn’t care about
that,
either, and—

A shrill neigh, almost an equine scream, shattered the peace of the night.

Reality rushed back like a gust of cold air. Jack pushed up on his hands. “Penelope.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, unable to meet his dark eyes.

He moved to rebutton her pelisse, but she pushed his hands away. “I’ll do that. Go to her.” They would never forgive themselves if anything went wrong with Penelope, and they had more than enough guilt between them already.

He nodded and scrambled to his feet, muttering curses as he came down awkwardly on his right leg, then hurried across the corridor into Penelope’s stall. Elizabeth got to her feet and followed as quickly as she could untangle herself from her twisted skirt and petticoat and their rumpled nest of blanket and coat. It was just as well, she told herself as she fastened her pelisse tight up to her neck again. This was no way to consummate a marriage, scrambling together in the straw, overcome by desire that had somehow blazed up from a single kiss, for God’s sake.

It couldn’t have taken her more than half a minute to get herself sorted out and into Penelope’s stall, but Jack had transformed completely from passionate lover into worried horseman. The mare was down on her side, and he was crouched by her hindquarters, biting his lip.

“Her water’s broken, but there’s no sign of the feet yet.”

Elizabeth nodded. That was a bad sign. For a mare, a good birth was a quick birth. “I wonder if the foal’s legs are bent,” she said. A foal needed to emerge feet first, its long legs stretched out straight, with its muzzle along them, or it would get stuck in the birth canal until both mother and foal died.

Jack stood and began divesting himself of his coat. “I’ll check.”

To her surprise, Jack looked pale and sick at the thought. He had grown up around horses. But, then, he had also joined the army as an undersized lad of sixteen, and an infantry regiment was no place to learn the management of a foaling gone wrong. “No,” she heard herself say. “I’ll do it.”

“What?” He gaped at her. “I’m not afraid.”

He was, or he wouldn’t be so quick to deny it. She began unbuttoning her pelisse again. “But have you turned a foal’s legs before? I have.”

“But...why? Don’t the Purvises...”

“They cannot be everywhere at once during foaling and lambing season. I learned.” She shrugged of her pelisse and regarded her tight sleeves with dismay. Normally she wore men’s clothing when she helped with foaling or lambing, but she hadn’t been quite willing to do so before her husband. “Do you have a knife?”

“Of course. What do you need?”

She held out her arms. “Cut off my sleeves.”

“What?”

“Cut them—they’re too tight to roll up. It’s my oldest dress, it’ll be ruined after this regardless, and we haven’t time.”

He shut his mouth in a tight line, nodded once and pulled a penknife from his coat’s tail pocket. Swiftly but carefully he slit each sleeve along the seam all the way up to where they met the sleeve puffs at her shoulders and ripped them free.

Bare-armed, Elizabeth sank to her knees behind Penelope. Gooseflesh stood out on her skin, but in her anxiety to save the mare she had chosen to have bred just once more, she hardly felt the cold. She waited for a contraction to pass, then took a deep breath and reached up the mare’s birth canal. She found the foal’s bent knees, unmistakable bone in the tunnel of slick muscle, then followed the legs up to the tiny chest and pushed the foal as hard as she could, back up the birth canal.

Another contraction struck, and Elizabeth pulled her arm free to wait it out. Jack was watching her, wide-eyed, as he crouched by the mare’s back, stroking her and murmuring reassuring noises. “I think I can turn the legs next time,” she said.

He nodded speechlessly.

The contraction ended, and she went back to her work. Fortunately, the contraction hadn’t been strong enough to undo all she had done to reposition the foal. She found the bent legs again, so slender and fragile, and carefully felt down the first one until she reached the tiny pastern. She took hold of it and gently pulled it straight—there!—then repeated the maneuver with the other leg just in time to beat the next contraction.