Seacliff (45 page)

“Have ye seen the man?” he said, while she dumped the water into a large wooden barrel they would use for drinking and cooking later in the warm day.

“Not since yesterday.”

He grinned and, when she turned around, grasped her in a loose embrace. “He hobbles about like a one-legged chicken. With the walking stick he looks like an old man.”

They chuckled, but they did not laugh. Flint’s left ankle had been severely sprained from the fall down the stairs, and there was something wrong, too, with his right arm. Davy had raced to the hall in time to see the last moments of the fall, and it was he who had run to Flint’s assistance, and then to Bradford’s.

But for Bradford, it was too late.

“He was a fair odd man,” he said as Gwen kissed the point of his chin. “I’d’ve thought he’d be Flint’s man for sure.”

“No,” she said. “He was the major’s, and no one else’s. And he was no fool. He didn’t believe for a minute that that poor Northumberland lad had done the killing. You could see it workin’ at him from the inside. We’d fought too much, he and I, for him to talk to me. And he was never sure he could talk to the mistress.”

“But he was a good man at the last,” Davy told her gently. “Without him, the mistress never could’ve done it.”

Gwen gave a quick, rueful laugh. “I hate to say this, Davy, but I’m going to miss the old fart. He may have been a sod, but…” She shrugged. “Spilled milk, Davy. Spilled milk.”

The rest of her thought went unspoken. They both knew that all they could do now was wait. Wait to see if Caitlin had survived; and if she had, to see what she would do to get back what was rightfully hers. Meanwhile, they had to live with James Flint.

Never in Gwen’s life had she seen such fury, such absolute rage in a man as she saw in Flint when he realized he’d been bested. He began screaming at the top of his lungs at the foot of the stairs, and Lordy! She’d never heard such a string of oaths or incomprehensible sentences strung together at once. He must have been in pain, but his yells were forceful enough to stop the staged brawl. It was as if the king himself had strolled through the door. After that, there was much confusion and embarrassment, men running helter-skelter through the house and out into the storm, while the villagers themselves quietly slunk off to their homes. Three days had passed— as had the storm—before anyone saw Flint again. And when he appeared in the kitchen early one morning, Gwen’s first thought was that he was a dead man. His face was drawn, unshaven, badly bruised; his hair was unkempt, and his clothes looked as if he had slept in them. He grumbled about having something decent to eat for a change and left. Shortly afterward, she and Mary were summoned to the front room where he sat on the couch, staring into the hearth.

“She planned it all, you know,” he said without looking at them. “Everything was planned.”

His voice was quiet, and all the more dangerous for it.

“Nobody leaves this place until she is returned, do you understand me?” Still the quiet, still the threat. “You will do what you have to so I do not starve or lack for my comforts, but no one leaves. No one.”

Mary shrugged as if it didn’t make a bit of difference to her one way or the other, but Gwen, as she left, couldn’t help feeling as if a ghost had walked over her grave. She expected Flint’s men to make reprisals on the village; there were none. And the people she spoke to, those who ventured on occasion up a back, hidden path to Orin’s cottage, said they wished he would do something to relieve the tension.

No one knew who would suffer first. But sooner or later Flint would have his revenge.

A week passed, and the only excitement occurred the day Ellis Lynne attempted to leave. Shortly after dawn, a cart piled high with trunks and sacks rolled out of the vicar’s yard. Lynne was driving. And he was alone. He might have made it had not Morag Burton run screaming from the vicarage before he’d circled the commons, shrieking imprecations and waking all those who hadn’t risen with the sun. Lynne tried to whip his pony to greater speed, but the cart was too heavy, too unwieldy, and before he was halfway up the road toward the gap it toppled him and his belongings into a ditch.

One of the trunks burst open and, as the people gaped in amazement, hundreds of gold coins spilled into the grass.

A shout rose up, and the villagers charged—not for the vicar, who was groaning and rolling on the ground, but for the gold. Within moments it had vanished, and Lynne was left to right the cart, repack his gear, and return sheepishly to his home. He said nothing about the stolen money. And the following Sunday there was no one in the pews when he ascended the pulpit for his sermon.

“We wait,” Orin said stolidly on the eighth night, after Gwen had wondered aloud if they shouldn’t at least be trying to contact someone in the hills. “Martin can do nothing with Flint’s men about. Neither can we. We will do the mistress no good by being dead when she returns.”

“
N
o!” Wyndym shouted, one hand slashing viciously through the air. “I cannot understand you, Griffin. The woman ain’t got her reason, surely ye can see that much. She thinks we’re the whole bloody Brit army!”

Griffin said nothing, waiting patiently until Wyndym had finished his tirade. He, Caitlin, and eighteen others were in the clearing formed by the rough circle of huts. Many were seated on crude benches, and the rest were either lying on the ground or leaning against the boles of the surrounding trees. They were half the number Caitlin had seen when she’d arrived. The rest had left. They had not deserted, and they were genuinely apologetic. But they had no immediate stake in the deliverance of Seacliff, and so they moved on, deeper into the mountains where they could await either a pardon or some other fate.

“My God, it’s madness.”

Caitlin, seated primly on a stump and still in her father’s clothes, stifled an impulse to lose her temper and be done with it. The day after she and Griff had sealed their lives, she had fallen into a three-day cycle of sleeping, eating, sleeping again. Exhaustion had caught up with her in an untimely fashion, and now that she was ready to move, Wyndym and his bristling beard had stepped in her way.

He was, it appeared, the only one who still did not trust her.

“Listen,” the young man said, his voice breaking. “I’ll say it for the last time, and you all must listen to me! We are
not
an army. Twenty if we’re countin’ the lady. Would you have the grace to tell me how nineteen men and one woman are goin’ to attack a valley, stand off nearly one hundred trained men, and take the big house all in one fight?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Lor’, Griffin, it ain’t possible. We can’t do it!”

Griffin’s clothes were loose, shades of green, and the copper in his hair flared like fire. He walked the width of the circle and stood before Terry, one hand smoothing the front of his shirt.

“In the first place, Terry, no one said we were going to attack the valley.”

Wyndym’s hand pointed at Caitlin. “But she—”

Griffin slapped the hand down, gently. “She said nothing of the sort. Nor has she said anything about taking on all of Flint’s bloody soldiers. We don’t have to! For what has to be done, we have all the men we need right here.”

A grumbling from one of the others brought Caitlin’s face around. She couldn’t tell if they were agreeing or if they were having second thoughts.

“M’lady,” one of them said—Willy Jonson, a farmer whose wife had been murdered by Flint’s men after they’d raped her— “ain’t there no other way? Can’t…God help me, can’t the Brits give us a hand?”

Caitlin smiled at the long-armed, bald man. “The Brits would sooner see us kill each other off. Then they’d have that much less to worry about among the barbarians.”

A round of quiet laughter, and Terry’s face was dark. He knew when he was beaten, but he still couldn’t help resisting to the last. “I still don’t like it.”

Caitlin stood, grabbing her cloak from the ground and tossing it carelessly over one arm. Griffin turned to intercept her, but she pushed him aside and glared at Wyndym.

“Don’t like it, then,” she snapped. “Don’t like it. But we’ve wasted enough time arguing here. The longer we bicker, the more time Flint will have to catch on to our game. We must move now, or we’re done.” Her eyes narrowed, and her voice lowered. “And hear me, Terrance Wyndym—if I have to do it alone, I shall.”

She looked to Griffin suddenly, then walked into the hut and threw her cloak into a comer. Reaching under the pallet she pulled out a rucksack crammed with rations. She grunted as she lifted it to her shoulders, smiled without mirth as she slid her sheath and dagger into her waistband. Then she stepped outside again.

“I am going to the sea. Now. The rest of you can do what you bloody well please.”

Without meeting a single startled gaze she marched from the clearing, looking up only once to check the sun’s position. Five minutes later she could hear footsteps behind her, but she would not glance back. It was a monumental effort she was asking of these men—first to trust her, after all they believed she had done to them, then to follow her into the bastions of hell itself.

But she hadn’t been bluffing.

If need be, she would indeed do it all herself—or die in the attempt.

“It was a grand show you put on back there,” Griffin said as he fell in step beside her. “But Cat, you were taking a bloody great risk.”

“Did I have a choice?”

He grinned. “Not much of a one, no.”

Worry then creased her forehead. “Do you think I’m being foolish? Stupid?”

They walked on for several minutes, the sounds of footsteps behind them growing louder, more numerous.

“Not stupid, no,” he said finally. “I’m the one who’s been stupid.” He waved off an interruption. “I should have come back at once instead of running off to Ireland. I could have used the storms to my advantage, instead of letting them beat me.” His grin was somewhat abashed. “I’m not used to being on the losing end, you know. I don’t think I like the taste of it.”

“No one does,” she said.

“But me less than others. I’ve been fighting all my life, it seems.

In the army, with the seasons to keep my people alive… with you.” She glanced sideways at him, but kept silent.

“And I’m too damned proud; that’s my problem. I don’t want Randall and the others to think I’ve run out on them.”

“They don’t think that, Griff.”

“They will, if I don’t do something.”

The determination in his voice startled her, and for a moment the ragged edge of fear sliced through her mind. She wanted suddenly to caution him against the temptation to play the hero. She knew it was in him. She had seen it all her life, in their games, in their love play. The only time it had failed him was when her engagement to Sir Oliver had been announced; and then his pride and his profound sense of honor had prevented him from taking what neither of them at the time had really known was his.

Instead of speaking, she laid a hand briefly on his arm and he covered it, just as briefly, with his own.

Lovers they might be for all the obstacles that had been thrown at them, but for the time being they were also comrades in arms. The coming conflict was frightening to think about, and she shuddered. And though she firmly believed what she had told him that first night—that she had no intention of dying—she could not help feeling a twinge of apprehension. This was no game she was playing now.

The stakes were not counters; they were the sum of her life.

T
wo days later they reached an inlet of Cardigan Bay. At its base was a tiny fishing village, with a few scattered farms climbing the mountains’ steep slopes. They had seen no one in their march south, no signs of the army or of Flint’s patrols. Nevertheless, as they dropped wearily to the ground above the village and passed goatskins of water around, they understood they could not necessarily count on every Welshman to be sympathetic to their cause. They’d already seen the phenomenon once, in the halving of their band.

Griffin sat with his hands gripping his drawn-up knees. He scanned the area below, then fiercely nodded to bring Wyndym to his side. “You know boats, Terry. Can you see anything down there to help us?”

Wyndym, who had said less than a dozen words to anyone throughout the journey, squatted on his haunches and peered through the waning sun’s glare at the few skiffs and boats docked at water’s edge or drawn up on the stony beach.

“’Tis a poor place,” he said. “We take even two boats, they’ll be hurting.”

“We’ve no time to go farther north,” Griffin reminded him. “And there’s nothing south of here but Seacliff.”

“Do it matter if the boat be big?” Willy Jonson asked.

Wyndym grunted. “Nope. We ain’t goin’ to sea. We’re just takin’ the coast, nice and easy like.” He pointed his chin toward the stone and wood homes below, then to the shoreline beyond them. “Most any one o’them will do.”

“When?” Caitlin asked suddenly, not liking the way Wyndym ignored her.

Wyndym’s reply was laced with venom: “After sunset, m’lady. ’Less, of course, ye want to walk down there now, have a few words with the folks and tell ’em we’re goin’ to steal their livelihood, but not to worry.”

“Careful,” Griffin said without shifting his gaze from the bay.

An uneasy silence marked an equally uneasy truce as they drifted back into the trees to await sunset. Caitlin, however, could not emulate the others, who had sprawled where they could find meager comfort and were attempting to sleep for the long night’s work ahead. She walked instead out to the slope, then back into the forest, her fingers tingling and her feet restless with the demand to move on.

And she was worried about Terry.

Like the others, he had his family to return to, and thus just as much reason to take part in this as any; but she couldn’t help recalling the harsh, victorious look in his eyes when he’d pinned her to the ground that first day and pawed at her. It had been childish of her to believe all Welshmen were saints and all the English demons; she should have known that even among her own people there were those who could not see beyond their own concerns and lives. They had their own lives, and nothing else mattered. Terry Wyndym, she thought, was like that. And in this situation, where he would put himself before all others, he could be just as dangerous as James Flint or Nate Birwyn.