Bewitching the Baron (18 page)

O’Connor’s eyes flicked to something behind her. She half-turned, and saw the crowd that had gathered at the door, their faces both guarded and eager.

She turned back to the smith and spoke softly. “You know me, Mr. O’Connor. Have I ever done you or your family any harm? Have I ever done
anyone
in this village any damage?”

She could see his internal battle rage a moment longer, and then he relented, gesturing with his hammer to the back of the smithy. “He is back there, in the corner. Will not come out.”

Valerian nodded and slipped past the smith, winding her way through the equipment and piles of metal to the far corner. Eddie sat on the floor, arms around his knees, crooning to himself. He had not shaved, his chin was stub-bled with irregular patches of hair, and his face and clothes were smudged with soot.

Valerian sank onto her knees and set down her basket. “Eddie?”

His glazed eyes blinked at her voice, then focused on her. Horror crept over his features. His hands dropped to the earthen floor, and he scrambled against the dirt, trying to shove himself farther away from her, his efforts voided by the wall at his back.

“Eddie, stop it.” Valerian ordered. “I am not going to hurt you.” She reached out a hand and placed it on his knee. He stilled. She locked his eyes with her own and concentrated on her breathing, bringing it down to normal and calming herself, then sent that calmness to him through her hand and her gaze. She felt her palm grow warm, and imagined the heat spreading up his leg to his heart. Within a few minutes his breathing was matched to hers, and some of the color had returned to his face.

“Tell me what scared you,” she said softly, and she sent her senses searching through his body for any injury.

“You said she would have no pleasure of me,” he said flatly. “And then the owl came, and I could not feel me self.” He looked down at his breeches. “And when I look, I cannot see it.”

“Can others see it?” She could sense no wound upon him, only hunger and exhaustion.

“Gwen says she can, but I cannot. The owl took it from me.”

“The owl took nothing from you,” she said calmly, putting the force of her will behind the statement. “Everything is where it has always been. You are whole and healthy.”

“I have not lost it?”

Valerian could see the thought swimming in his mind. The lack of sleep and food had confused his thinking beyond his normal impressionability. A dim acceptance of her words began to form in his eyes. He saw her as enough of an authority on this topic to believe her, the calm she had sent through her hand allowing him to accept her words.

“Witch!” Gwen’s voice screeched from behind her. “Get away from him, you cock-stealing whore of Satan!”

Valerian began to turn, and Gwen struck her on the shoulder. She lost her balance and slid off her knees onto her hip, her hands on the ground to catch herself. She saw the blur of motion and something black in Gwen’s hand, then felt the sharp blow as the girl stuck her forehead. A searing pain followed a moment later and she fell to the floor, blood running down into her eyes.

“Feel for your cock now, Eddie!” Gwen crowed triumphantly. “I have scored her above her breath. If ’twas she who put the spell upon you, you will have your cock back.”

Valerian put her fingers to the gash on her forehead, stunned by the attack. No one had ever struck her before. There was an old superstition that drawing a witch’s blood from above her breath—her nose and mouth—would break a spell, but she could hardly believe someone had used it against her.

“It is back, I feel it!” Eddie cried out.

The gathering of villagers drew an awed breath, then erupted into a confusion of angry words and crowded forward to the corner where the three young people crouched.

Valerian’s forehead throbbed, and the blood was making it hard to see. The press of bodies and the tone of the crowd unnerved her as she had never been unnerved before. They did not sound in the mood to listen to reason, not when Gwen’s attack had to their eyes broken the spell. No matter that he was free of his delusion moments before Gwen hit her with . . . with what?

Valerian found the black object on the ground, and picked it up. It was a scrap of iron, and one edge was wet with her blood. She dropped it and began to scoot away towards the large sliding shed doors at the rear of the shop.

Someone noticed her movement, and eyes turned from Eddie and Gwen to herself. She wiped blood out of her eyes and felt a chill in her flesh as the malevolence in the faces above her became clear.

“Do not come near me,” she warned in a voice made high by fear, and shakily she stood, backing away to the shed doors. She could only presume that a wariness of her evil powers held the crowd as she fumbled one of the doors open.

“Do not let her escape!” a voice cried. Valerian’s eyes flew to the speaker, Mrs. Torrance from the inn. “She will be after your own children next,” the woman said. “Christ will protect you from her evil.” She came lurching through the crowd, and her forward motion freed the villagers from their own inertia.

Valerian turned and fled through the doors, lifting her skirts to keep them from hindering her. She slipped and almost fell in the mud in back of the shop, then gained her footing and ran around the building to the cobbled main street of the town.

Some of the crowd had come back out through the front door of the smithy, and they shouted when they saw her. There was no place to hide here on their own ground. All she could do was run. She heard more shouts behind her and put all her strength into her legs, sprinting down the center of the street.

She cast a glance over her shoulder, and saw that two men were bearing down, their long legs and light clothing giving them every advantage over her. She whimpered low in her throat and faced forward again just in time to see two mounted riders emerge from the side street right before her. She could not deflect her path in time, and ran with a thud into the side of the nearest horse, startling both it and its rider.

She and the horse danced out of each other’s way, Valerian pushing against the warm body of the mount and the leg of the rider, desperate to escape prancing hooves and buffeting horseflesh.

Nathaniel fought to control his mount, simultaneously taking in the chaos that he and Paul had ridden into. He would know Valerian’s black hair in any crowd, and but for it might not have recognized her terrified face, covered with blood, as she was jostled between the horses.

He bent down to seize her, pulling her bodily up onto his mount. Beside him, Paul unsheathed his sword with a distinctive ringing sound that was a clear warning to all who approached. Whatever Paul’s thoughts on Valerian, Nathaniel knew that he could count on his loyalty as a friend.

Valerian briefly continued to struggle, then looked up into his face, and when he saw recognition register, she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. Fury roiled within him that anyone had dared to harm her, and that she had been chased down the street like an animal.

“Halt!” he shouted to the villagers in the voice he had used as an army officer.

The approaching mob, that had slowed when the riders appeared, now stopped completely.

“What has happened here?” he demanded. “Who did this to Miss Bright?”

The crowd shifted, and he easily read the emotions of the villagers. They looked like a group of unrepentant children, not sorry for their actions, but certainly considering the welfare of their own skins now that authority had arrived. He felt loathing for them swell within him.

“Speak, goddamn you!”

Several flinched, and heads turned towards Gwen, who was just now bringing up the rear of the group. Nathaniel locked eyes with her.

“You. Come up here.”

Gwen gave a defiant toss of her head and strode forward, the villagers parting before her.

“Your name, girl.”

“Gwendolyn Miller, my lord.”

He did not like the tone of her voice. “What part have you in this affair?”

“I have done nothing wrong, my lord.”

“As I act as magistrate of this district, I will be the one deciding that. Unless you think you are better suited to the task?”

“No, my lord.” A little of her confidence slipped, and she shifted her eyes away from him.

“You are the girl involved with young Eddie, are you not?”

Her blue eyes flew back to him, surprised that he knew anything of her. “Yes, my lord.”

“And you are the one who has been spreading tales that Miss Bright casts spells and sends owls after young men.” He could not keep the disgust from his voice, and indeed did not even try. “You say she stole Eddie’s privates. Tell me, what do you think she did with it once she had it? Do you suppose she tanned it and mounted it on the wall above the mantel?”

A nervous chuckle escaped from a few of the men in the mob.

“She did not steal it physically,” Gwen protested. “ ‘Twas the spirit of it she stole. I held it in my very hand, and yet he could not feel my touch, no matter how I rubbed it.”

There was a burst of laughter this time, except from Gwen’s father. He pushed his way through to his daughter, turned her to face him and gave her a resounding slap across the face. “I for one would like to know what my daughter was doing holding a man like that,” he said, then slapped her again.

“Father!” she pleaded, her hands on her cheeks, and tears starting in her eyes. “I did nothing wrong. I was checking him for injury.”

“Miller,” Nathaniel interrupted. “If I may continue?”

The barrel-chested man nodded and stepped back, keeping his eyes on his disgraced daughter. It was apparent to all that Gwen had not heard the last of this from her father.

Nathaniel whispered to Valerian. “Lift your head. Turn to them.” He felt her arms tighten around him, and with his own hands coaxed her to unbury her face from his jacket and turn.

Some of the women gasped, and more than one man looked away. The wound to her forehead, though not large, had bled profusely. Valerian’s face was coated in crimson, her light blue eyes all the more startling in contrast. Gwen herself grimaced.

“Are you the one responsible for this?” Nathaniel asked Gwen.

Gwen chewed her lip, then, prodded by her father and knowing half the town was witness to what she had done, nodded. “But it broke the spell!” she immediately protested. “He could feel it again as soon as I scored her. That proves she cast the spell.”

“There is no such thing as witchcraft. It is clear to me that Eddie had at least one motivation for claiming he could not feel his manhood.” He paused, and there was an answering wave of laughter in the group. “And it is also clear that there was never any physical harm done to him, by your own word. The only person I see who has been injured is Miss Bright.”

“Gwen will see a proper punishment from me,” the miller said, gripping his daughter’s arm.

Nathaniel narrowed his eyes at the pair. Gwen had harmed someone he cared about. He had the power to wreak his own vengeance upon her, and he would use it. “Certainly you may impose whatever punishment you wish for your daughter’s private misbehaviors. This, however, has been a public affair, and as such should be dealt with in a public manner. Are there stocks in this village?” he asked the crowd.

“Aye, in front of the market square,” Mr. Torrance, the innkeeper, said. He cocked his head back towards the ten-by-ten-foot roofed area with open sides where goods were sold on Saturdays. “But they have not been used in years. The hinges are all but rusted off.”

“Then perhaps young Eddie can make new ones.” Nathaniel allowed himself a moment of pleasure at the irony of this arrangement. “The stocks will be repaired, and Gwen will spend one day in them, sunrise to sundown.”

Gwen gasped in outrage. “The stocks!”

An excited babble immediately erupted from the villagers. Nathaniel was distracted from the uproar by a fist rapping on his chest. Valerian was glaring up at him through her blood and disheveled hair.

“You cannot put her in the stocks!” she protested. “She should never have attacked me, but she thought she was helping Eddie. Let her father deal with her.”

Nathaniel barely listened to her words. The blood on her face was too vivid, too glaring a reminder that a wrong had been done. Perhaps the stocks were too kind.

“Are you listening to me?” Valerian asked. “She is a misguided girl. Do this, and the village will not thank you for it.”

“What do I care whether they thank me?” Nathaniel asked. The idea was ludicrous. “You need your wound tended. I will take you to your aunt.”

“Nathaniel, do not do this. She is being punished enough with this humiliation right here.”

He touched the skin near her wound, where the blood still seeped out. He showed Valerian the brilliant stains upon his fingers. “The longer I look at you, the more certain I become that the girl should be whipped.”

Paul interrupted quietly. “Then perhaps we should get her cleaned up.”

Nathaniel returned his attention to the crowd. “Gwendolyn Miller will spend Wednesday in the stocks, as a reminder to herself and the village that witchcraft does not exist, and that persecution of a woman for that reason is forbidden by the laws of England. Now go home, the lot of you!”

The group slowly broke up. Mr. Miller nodded to Nathaniel and pulled his forelock, then jerked Gwen’s arm to make her curtsy. He whispered something to her that made her cheeks flush.

“Thank you, milord,” Gwen mumbled, her face scarlet. She pulled free of her father and stalked away.

“Paul, will you make sure the blacksmith’s son knows about the hinges? I do not see him here.”

Paul sheathed his sword. The look he gave Nathaniel was filled with unspoken comment, but Nathaniel knew he would not contradict him here in the middle of the street.

“I will take you to your aunt.” Nathaniel nudged his horse.

“She is visiting her daughter.” Valerian gave him directions.

He kept Darby to a slow pace, not wanting to jostle Valerian. He tightened his arm around her waist, and pressed his lips against her hair above her ear. She sat sideways across his lap, her head bent forward. She had one hand pressed against her forehead. He could not see her face, and she was as still as stone. Protectiveness washed through his blood like an illness, making his muscles weak with concern for her now that the danger was past.