Julie Anne Long (16 page)

She pretended to mull his question. “Not just at this very moment, I should think,” she said thoughtfully.

“
Oh
—
dear
—
God
—” John gasped.

“Now, Edgar,” Connor said, very reasonably. “You are aware I am an excellent shot, are you not? Lock your pistols, drop them, and kick them over to Ned.”

Edgar dropped his pistols and gave each of them a disconsolate kick. Rebecca obediently plucked them off the ground.

“If ye’d only just give over the locket, guv . . .” Edgar said despairingly.

“I told you before, Edgar, we haven’t a locket,” Connor replied, his consonants spires, his vowels great shining unbridgeable moats. The lord was back.

“Aye, guv, but ye said before ye ’adn’t a girl, either, and John ’ere said—”

Connor smiled a smile that held all the warmth and understanding of a scimitar blade, effectively slicing Edgar’s sentence in two.

“Tell me who sent you.”

Connor feared he knew without a doubt who had sent them, and her name was Marianne Bell, now known as the Duchess of Dunbrooke. Marianne Bell would see him in hell before she would ever get her hands on the very incriminating locket.

Behind them, a saddle creaked; the dangling ruffian seemed to have recovered his senses and was wriggling about, attempting to free himself of the stirrup.

Sweat had created a slick over Edgar’s chalky face.

“We told ye all we know, guv, we did. ’Er Grace sent us. By way of ’Utchins. Ye can shoot me now, guv, but I can tell ye no more.”

Connor let a moment of silence beat by to allow Edgar to fully enjoy the feeling of having a musket pointed directly at his face.

“And why does
’Er Grace
want to kill me?”

“We wasn’t t’ kill ye, guv, until ye gave over the locket. Oh, unless ye’d gold specks in yer eyes. I . . . I . . . don’t suppose ye’d tell me whether ye’ve gold specks in yer eyes?” Edgar hazarded weakly. It was a desperate act by a man who meant to earn his pay.

From his position on the ground, John groaned, a sound of pure frustration. Clearly Edgar had said too much.

A chill curled down Connor’s spine. He stared at Edgar, stunned.
Sweet Mary Mother of God
, he thought, though he was not at all Catholic.
What kind of farce has my life become?
She
knew
. Marianne Bell knew, somehow she knew, that Roarke Blackburn, currently living as Connor Riordan, was the man traveling with the girl who had stolen the locket. And what were the highwaymen’s orders, Connor wondered, once they had retrieved the locket? No doubt it involved his murder. For Connor, alive, was a threat to all that Marianne had fraudulently achieved. He saw that very clearly. He also knew, with an unshakable gut-level certainty, that Richard’s murder had been no coincidence.

Behind him, a rustle in the dirt in the road and the squeak of leather told him that the ruffian on the ground was attempting to right himself by grabbing hold of his horse’s stirrup.

“To horse, Ned,” Connor said. Rebecca shoved one of her new pistols into her waistband and Connor almost smiled when she frowned down quizzically at the other three, wondering where to put them. She glanced up, saw urgency in his eyes, and stuffed her absurd bouquet of pistols quickly into the pack strapped to the brown mare. Almost as an afterthought, Rebecca bent down and retrieved her cap, cramming it down over her head. Her hair fluttered out from underneath it, an incongruously bright and cheerful thing in the aftermath of violence.

“If there is a next time,
gentlemen
,” Connor said, in the tone one would use to invite the vicar to tea, “I will kill you in the slowest, most painful imaginable way. I am weary of games. Kindly convey my regards to
’Utchins
and
’Er Grace
, and tell them I recommend they cease their pursuit. Good day.”

Connor doffed his hat briefly, while John remained curled on the ground and Edgar continued to sweat from frustration.

But John’s awkward position on the ground afforded him a unique view of the aristocratic madman. And when Connor doffed his hat, the afternoon sun struck sparks from very distinctive, quite unmistakable gold specks in Connor’s eyes.

Connor nudged his horse to move alongside Rebecca’s.

“We are going to
run
,” he hissed into her ear. He could see that she still had the unnaturally blanched skin and hot eyes of the righteously furious. He smiled at her, an enveloping smile of tender reassurance, a teasing warmth kindling his eyes. Rebecca returned his smile with one that was full of the sort of joy most inappropriate to the occasion.

“Now,” he whispered.

They kicked hard. Their horses wheeled briefly in surprise, then stretched out into a blistering run just as the first greasy ruffian made it to saddle.

Their mounts were swift, but hooves were soon thundering uncomfortably close behind them; Connor glanced back over his shoulder and saw the greasy ruffian riding recklessly, his pistol hand waving free. Sunlight glinted on the barrel of the man’s pistol; it seemed their pursuer meant to have blood for his humiliation. Connor swore savagely, slowing his mount just a little to ensure Rebecca remained in front of him. He had no choice but to shoot. He lifted his musket and turned to aim.

It was too late. A sudden blow to his arm was already giving way to numbness. He glanced down, watching as though in a dream as the red of his own blood rose up through his shirt.
Oh, Christ above, oh, God, help us, I’ve been shot
, he half thought, half prayed.
That bastard has the luck of the devil; he shot me.

Connor squeezed off a shot, then watched with both a crisp sense of accomplishment and a sense of despair as the ruffian jerked in his saddle, his hand pressed to his chest, his horse stopping, rearing in sudden confusion beneath him. Connor had so hoped to never take another life, and cursed as he felt his own crystal-edged thoughts dimming as the ragged circle of red on his arm darkened and spread. Pain was yet to come, Connor knew. Pain would be fortunate; it would mean he was still alive.

Behind them, far behind them, clouds of dust rose in the road. The rest of the men were now following. But Connor knew this country well, and he knew his destination. As long as he could stay lucid, he knew he could lead Rebecca to safety and these men would never find them.

“
Rebecca!
” he screamed. She glanced over her shoulder and pulled her horse to follow when Connor jerked his horse hard to the right. They galloped off the road, plunging over low fences, through thick stands of trees, the leaves lashing at them, the coats of their gratifyingly game horses blackening with sweat. Connor wove a path from memory, a path that careened through a meadow sprayed in bluebells that gave way to a brief swooping valley that led into a wood that grew more dense and shadowy as the sun slowly dipped lower in the sky. Their hoofbeats were soon muffled by deep layers of soft old leaves.

After what seemed both an eternity and merely an instant, they came upon it: the hunting box, his father’s rarely used, discreetly located hunting home in the woods. Connor had been certain it would still be here, relatively untouched; these woods had been part of his family’s holdings since Edward III. He pulled his wet horse to a halt and managed to dismount without stumbling too badly. And then he lifted his pack from his horse with his good arm and stared at the hunting box blankly for a moment, as if trying to remember why he was there.

Rebecca pulled her heaving mare up next to him and swung herself to the ground. She bent slightly, breathing hard, before straightening herself to look around. She began to smile, but something in Connor’s face stopped her.

“Connor?” she said, puzzled. And then she saw the blood on his arm.

There was a buzzing in his ears. He put his hand against the door of the hunting box and it gave, swinging open. He looked out at Rebecca from the doorway, noticing that the light pouring down through the leaves had turned her hair into a soft molten halo.
She has lost her cap
. “Becca,” he thought he said, for he could not hear his own voice, and then the black came in from the sides of his vision like a curtain pulling closed and he fell.

Chapter Eleven

O
h God, Oh God, Oh God,” Rebecca murmured like an incantation over Connor’s fallen body. His head lolled sickeningly against the boards of the floor. She touched his eyes, his brows, as though searching for him, willing him to reinhabit his face; he was breathing, otherwise he seemed lifeless as an effigy. A haze of panic began to move over her eyes.

Her vast and unseemly knowledge of bullet wounds and amputations clamored in her head, words like
bandages
and
suppurating
and
saws
and
opium
and
Peruvian bark
jigging among all the other learned advice from her father’s scientific journals. She gave her head a rough shake to sort it. This did the trick; somehow it all fell into place, the things she needed to do in the order she needed to do them.

She drew in a deep breath to fortify her nerves and pressed two fingers to Connor’s throat. A good pulse thumped there, a bit fast, but strong and even. Rebecca closed her eyes against an almost bruising wave of relief; it meant he had not yet lost a dangerous amount of blood. Her own short sobbing breaths beat in her ears as she considered the chore of unbuttoning his shirt; how ridiculous, how dangerous, even, all those buttons seemed now. She tore it open instead, sending tiny buttons flying like shrapnel across the room.

She only needed to lift him a little to peel the shirt completely away from his body, but she could not. His weight was astonishing; the solidity of his unconscious body as stubborn as gravity itself. It made her absolutely, irrationally furious. She tore at the seams at the shoulder of his shirt, and then lifted the sleeve away from his arm with breathless care. His own blood and sweat matted the hair of his arms, and this made her angrier still; for miles he had bled, leading her to safety. By the time Rebecca confronted her first musket ball wound, a hideous red little crater in the smooth hard muscle of his arm, it had become her mortal enemy, and she would have victory.

The wound was only oozing now; the bleeding had slowed, the blood was congealing. She delicately touched the edge of it; she could feel the ball move. It was close to the surface of the wound, which meant she had a very good chance of retrieving it whole from his arm.

Water. Where was his water flask? She plunged her hands into Connor’s pack and began pulling things out of it in a controlled frenzy, a small sheathed knife, needles and thread, a length of rope, a flint, candles, something wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a brush for the horses, something else wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a couple of meat pies from the Thorny Rose Tavern. All the evidence of Connor’s careful thought and planning, all things she had taken for granted. But no flask. She found his fine brown coat folded neatly and began tugging it out of the pack, but something heavy hindered its progress.
Please be the water flask
, she thought.
Oh, please
.

Fumbling among the folds of the coat, she found a flask in the inner pocket. When she pulled it out, something tumbled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair.

She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off balance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew; she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.

She gave her head another rough shake. Mulling was a luxury she could not indulge at the moment. She sniffed the flask. Whiskey. In the absence of water, it would have to do.

Rebecca spilled a bit of the whiskey in her hands and rubbed them together, creating a little puddle of dirt in her palms, and then she rinsed the puddle away with another prodigal splash. Cleansed as well as she was able, she tugged her shirt out of her pants and, using her teeth and fingers, ripped the hem of it into a length of bandage.

Placing her fingers on either side of the wound she pressed gently, muttering prayers, apologies, vicious imprecations. She felt the ball shift. She pressed again, gritting her teeth, breathing heavily, and this time it surfaced, whole and bloody. With cool antipathy Rebecca held the thing between two fingers and glared at it, then flung it to the floor with an oath, as though concluding an exorcism.

She soaked a bit of the bandage in whiskey and cautiously, in tiny strokes, swabbed the blood away from the hole torn in Connor’s flesh. The edges of the wound were thankfully relatively clean, and Rebecca marveled momentarily at how much her life had changed: she had never dreamed that something like a clean-edged musket-ball wound could cause her to give thanks.

She would need to irrigate the wound, she knew, before she bound it up. She took a deep breath before tipping a bit of the whiskey into it.

At this Connor moaned, a long sound that writhed up out of him like a hot wind blowing through the caverns of hell, and he stirred, his legs moving restlessly. The sound frightened Rebecca nearly witless. “Dear God,” she whispered, but found herself at a loss for words to include in the prayer; it seemed her vocabulary had abandoned her. Of necessity, for the moment, she had become a creature comprised of instinct and nothing else.

Rebecca bound the wound neatly, with exquisite gentleness, then sat back on her heels and stared down at him. She placed a tentative hand on his chest over his heart to reassure herself of its steady beating, and after a moment, unable to resist, her fingers curled into the crisp hair there.

Lord God, the man was lovely in a way she had never imagined. The join of his neck to his shoulders, the taper of his shoulders to his slim waist, the swell of taut muscle above his rib cage, the wondrous texture and temperature and smell of his skin—this hidden beauty made Connor seem a stranger with powerful secrets, like a whole other country with its own laws. A restless curiosity and delight spiked through her, finding its way even through her fear for him. Beneath her hand, beneath his skin, his heart beat. She put her other hand on her own heart, to compare.

“Was it Robbie Denslowe?”

Rebecca jumped, jerking her hand away.

“Robbie Denslowe?” she repeated numbly.

“Who . . . who taught you just where to hit a man?”

Connor’s voice was frayed, dragging, but the sound of it filled Rebecca near to bursting with some nameless emotion.

“Yes,” she said, almost a whisper. She sought his eyes. They were dark and glazed with pain, but behind the pain, he was fully there, indomitably amused and warming at the sight of her. Rebecca uncertainly touched his hand, and his fingers closed over hers tightly.

“Robbie Denslowe should be knighted,” Connor muttered.

He managed to lift one corner of his mouth in a smile before closing his eyes. His face contracted, the quickening of his breath betrayed his struggle with pain. His thumb began moving in an unconscious stroke across the top of her hand.

“The horses?” he asked, after a moment.

“I will see to them,” Rebecca assured him.

“My arm—”

“The bleeding has stopped. I took the ball out, Connor. I took it out whole.”

“Did ye now?” He smiled again, eyes still closed. “Oh, but you are a marvel, wee Becca.” His voice had begun to sound like a sigh.

“A marvel,” Rebecca repeated softly. It was all she could manage. It seemed just the appropriate word for everything at the moment.

“Hmmph,” he said, an ambitious attempt at a laugh. “Wee Becca, I think I shall need to get very drunk, very soon. Take . . . take the musket and knife out with you when you see to the horses. There is a stream nearby . . . ye can find it by sound. And put the flask in my hand, if ye will.”

He gave her hand a squeeze and released it. His face had retreated from her again, contracting. She folded a blanket in quarters and positioned it under his head, and he accepted her ministrations without a word. With one more glance down at him, she picked up the horse brush and the sheathed knife and took them outside.

The horses were nosing about the front of the hunting box quietly, looking for tender grasses. “Come, my dears,” Rebecca said softly. “We are sorry to leave you so long, but we had urgent business inside.” She unsaddled both horses, then unwrapped the brush and gave the mare a rubdown, murmuring to her about her bravery, her speed, her beauty.

And then she turned her attention to Connor’s horse, the gray, and he was told how handsome he was, how valiant, how swift. The horses’ ears twitched forward, enjoying the lilting softness of her voice, the smooth sure strokes of her hands.

“Let us find the stream now, shall we?” She collected the reins of the horses in her hand and shouldered the musket, then stood still, looking up, listening. A breeze shook the dazzling little coin leaves that hung from the aspens; the larger oak leaves waved at her like languid hands, glowing in the lowering sun as if lit from within. Beneath the hushed rustle of the leaves she heard it, a soft melodious rushing. She led the horses toward the sound, stopping every now and then to mark a tree with her knife so she could find her way back to the hunting box.

The stream was a pretty thing, silver and gilt in the sun, winding among large smooth stones, bridged by slim trees thick with leaves. When the horses bent their heads to drink, Rebecca pressed her palms against her weary eyes. They smelled of horses and Connor, musk and salt and blood and whiskey. They spoke of the enormous distance she had come. She did not want to wash them just yet.

Rebecca leaned companionably against her brown mare, then closed her eyes so the remaining warmth of the day could touch her eyelids. After a space of time she let the sobs take her, surrendering to a tangle of emotions that burned and confused and goaded and excited. The day came back at her in a torrent: the gift of an Herbal, Connor’s hands warm against her back when she thanked him. Pistols pointed at her. The fetid breath of a highwayman on the back of her neck, his hand crawling over her breast. Connor bleeding, his head lolling against the floor, his dark hair stark against his white face. His heart beating beneath her hand.

A soft copper lock of her own hair.

And through it all, through all the chaos and terrible, wonderful newness, a strange blooming elation had buoyed her, a hot bright thing that swelled and pressed at the very seams of her being. It demanded release, demanded
something
from her. She wasn’t sure yet what to call it, but she had her suspicions.

She did know it had everything to do with Connor.

She would happily face a dozen pistols, a dozen highwaymen, without flinching. For Connor.

When the sobs had run their course, Rebecca felt renewed and absurdly, dizzyingly cheerful. She knelt next to the stream and rinsed her hands, then splashed a little cool water on her face, a baptism, in a way, of her new self. Today she had taken a musket ball out of Connor Riordan, and he had gripped her hand, seeking strength from her and finding it. This did not tilt the balance between them, but righted it momentarily: Rebecca had not fully realized until that moment how much she had wanted,
needed
, to give something to Connor. One did not need to pose naked on a chaise to feel powerful and womanly, she now understood. One needed only a musket-ball wound and the feel of a beautiful man stroking the back of one’s hand.

The ground felt solid beneath her feet for the first time in days, and Rebecca, relishing her new balance, thrust her arms high into the sky as if trying it on like a coat, and stretched deliciously. Then she turned to lead the horses back to the hunting box, humming a little tune of her own invention.