The Blacksmith's Daughter: A Mystery of the American Revolution (49 page)

Pressed to the brick wall, Betsy
stared at the lantern and red rose.
 
Little black specks spiraled in and out of her vision and gray-tinted
the whole scene.
 
With each gasp, she
tasted Fairfax's scent.
 
With each
second, she expected the burning thrust of his knife in her innards.

But no knife thrust came, and the
specks in her vision faded.
 
Still
panting, she maintained her stare on the bench, even after he unpinned her and
backed away a step.
 
The pieces came
together in her head.
 
"You stole
Clark's letter.
 
You forged his
handwriting."

"Would you have agreed to meet
with Lieutenant Fairfax?"

The mockery she saw on his face
sent her gaze darting for the lantern.
 
"Oh — oh, g-god."
 
But
no gods she'd ever heard of inhabited the cellar.
 
She tried to steady her breathing.
 
"What do you want with me?"

"What does any man want from
his greatest source of inspiration?"

"Huh?"

His gaze roved over her eyes, lips,
and chin before sweeping across her forehead and capturing her gaze.
 
Mockery vanished, supplanted by
idolization.
 
She felt him catch her
hands up in his and stroke her fingers with his thumbs.
 
When she darted a glance back at the rose,
incredulity and awareness slithered across her like a swamp fog.

There were worse things than enmity
to awaken in Fairfax.

"Weeks ago, Mr. Neville told
me you'd declared your loyalty to the king.
 
At the time I suspected it a pretense.
 
I was certain you were covering for that rebel husband of yours and the
Ambrose spy ring."

"Uh, yes, I suppose it did
look that way."
 
Her heart ceased
to stammer and assumed a more sedate pace.
 
Perhaps she wasn't in for being murdered in a ghastly manner.

"I'd run out of leads on the
spy ring the day I encountered Neville.
 
Can you imagine how dejected that makes me when I'm unable to solve a
puzzle because I've run out of leads?"

"Uh —"

"But then your note gifted me
with a fresh lead."
 
He brushed the
backs of her fingers with his lips and for a moment seemed at a loss for
words.
 
"Men have attempted to
match wits with me and lost.
 
Never
before has a woman done so and managed to stay so far ahead of me and for so
long that I must retrace my steps, scouring where I have been for clues.
 
Superior intelligence in a woman.
 
Madam, I am enchanted."

Disbelief punctured her
numbness.
 
Enchanted he did seem, but he
still had her backed to the wall.
 
Her
attempt at a smile foundered.
 
"I
assure you, sir, enchantment wasn't my intent."

"Why didn't you simply write
the message?"

"I didn't want it falling into
the hands of the Ambrose ring and have them recognize my writing.
 
I had a dagger pressed to my throat when I
confronted van Duser about my furniture.
 
He'd have killed me if he'd suspected my interference."

Fairfax nodded.
 
"So you sneaked printing it.
 
Excellent.
 
Of course Harker and Saunders denied printing it.
 
I could tell they spoke the truth.
 
It became a mystery to baffle me even in my
dreams.
 
I traced your furniture to the
plantation of Josiah Carter and found the print of a woman's shoe where the
furniture had been stored.
 
At first, I
didn't recognize that it was the print of
your
shoe."
 
He kissed the palm of her other hand.
 
"Mmmm, my mystery woman."

Betsy didn't like the way he kissed
her hand.
 
A monster that flayed two men
alive, slit the throats of another two, and hacked a fifth man to death wasn't
supposed to have soft, warm lips.
 
"Mr. Carter may have stored my furniture, but I assure you he isn't
involved in the Ambrose spy ring.
 
And
he isn't a rebel."

"Quite.
 
I realized he'd used his own wagon to haul
the furniture from the barn and hide it.
 
But after I questioned him, I became certain he wasn't a rebel spy or
sympathizer.
 
How cleverly you worded
your message to steer implication from him.

"I also appreciate your
ingenuity at borrowing the Gálvez family name.
 
I was so surprised to hear it that it threw me off for another half
day.
 
I might never have solved the
puzzle of my mystery woman had it not occurred to me to return to the print
shop and inquire whether anyone helped with the print run."
 
He smiled down at the stains on her
fingers.
 
"Lampblack and
varnish.
 
Quite the chip off the old
printing block, aren't you?"

He drew her right forefinger into
his mouth and sucked on it.
 
For the
first few seconds, Betsy stared at him in shock while his tongue twirled around
her finger.
 
No man had ever done that
to her.
 
A tide of gooseflesh, not
unpleasant, crawled up her right side before she recovered the sense to yank
her finger free.
 
"Stop
that."
 
He smiled again and
recaptured her hand.
 
"I will
appreciate your letting me go now since you're convinced of my loyalty to His
Majesty."

While his thumbs continued stroking
her palms, he bathed her with that look of idolization.
 
"Such a heady combination, a woman who
is both intelligent and loyal.
 
Do you know,
where I come from, County Wiltshire, the people thousands of years ago somehow
hauled these massive stones about and formed circles and avenues and temples
from them to appease the old gods.
 
These weren't gods like that trio of gelded Christian gods.
 
These were gods with power.
 
The supreme deity of them all was a
woman.
 
The great mother, the wise
woman."

In one lithe movement, he reclaimed
the step he'd taken away from her and encircled her waist with one arm, his
abdomen and groin pressed to her mother belly.
 
She tensed and pushed at his chest, all hard muscles and heat.
 
When she attempted to back away from him,
the brick wall left her no latitude.
 
"You're too familiar.
 
Take
your hands off me."

"When warriors returned from
battle, they spread trophies at the feet of her priestesses.
 
From among the warriors, her priestesses
selected champions and lay with them."

Eyes still wide, she remembered a
black cat of her cousin's who'd hunted mice by night, leaving ears and tails on
Lucas's back doorstep for the humans to find next morning.
 
How proud and smug the cat had been,
too.
 
Trophies.
 
Horror trickled through her soul.
 
Van Duser's hand in the box hadn't been
meant just for Abel Branwell.
 
"I
never asked for trophies," she whispered.

"Didn't you, though?
 
Betsy, darling, why do I feel you're playing
a game with me?
 
I lay on your bed
upstairs a week ago fancying I was your champion.
 
But now I sense you've merely been using me to revenge yourself
on people who stole your furniture and ruined your happy life in Augusta."

Horror climbed into her
throat.
 
"No, no, it isn't so.
 
They're rebels, traitors to His
Majesty."

"So I
am
your
champion."

"I never asked for a champion,
either."

He lowered his mouth to within an
inch of hers.
 
"Either I'm your
champion, or you've used me.
 
Let us be
clear about this."

Damned if she did, damned if she
didn't.
 
But he didn't wait for her to
sort out her preference of damnation.
 
The lips that coaxed hers apart were soft and warm and sly, seeking the
slippery assent of her tongue, inviting her descent.
 
And descend she did into subterranean caverns carved from her own
lust, stymied out of a month of sleepless nights and a physical relationship
arrested in its genesis.

Across the roof of her mouth,
between her lips and gums, and behind her teeth he painted promises, her
introduction into the ecstasy of ancients with bronze weapons, stone temples,
and gods of blood and human sacrifice.
 
His hands slid beneath her buttocks, and her body rose in answer to the
burrowing heat of his groin, flouting the predilections of her heart and soul
and all she'd naïvely labeled as myth.
 
While a sorcerer's lips explored the curve of her chin, the line of her
jaw, the hollow of her throat — all softness no man had ever before sought —
she recognized in the rattle of her own breath a woman who teetered on the fine
line separating true fear and sexual fascination.

Her eyes rolled back, and a dreamy
zephyr wove words through her memory.
 
He
took his time with me
.
 
Oh, yes, he
was taking his own, inexorable time.
 
He
whispered against her throat, "Let me taste your shoulders.
 
Take off your tucker."
 
When she hesitated, he kissed the curve of
her chin again.
 
"Our greatest
fancies are for that which we cannot, dare not do.
 
So dare."

He took his time with me
.
 
Margaret had said that.
 
Margaret
was infatuated with him.
 
He'd taken his
time with her, even as he was initiating his new priestess that very moment.

A chill of strangeness wedged
through the spell, granting Betsy the vision of boxes filled with severed hands
following her wherever she went, trophies from her champion, a fiend's
gratitude for his greatest source of inspiration.
 
Her hands found his shoulders and pushed while she twisted her
torso away and gained solid footing, even if her head felt far from solid.

"I-I've an engagement
elsewhere and will be missed, so I must go.
 
I should think it obvious that I've not been using you and have told you
all I know about the rebels."
 
Hoping to be released, she pushed at his arms again.

He didn't budge and scrutinized her
while his breathing evened.
 
"You're leaving Camden.
 
Where are you headed?"

"North Carolina."

"Why?"

"To get away from the
war."

"With whom will you
stay?"

"Relatives."

Seconds dragged past.
 
"Where is Will St. James?"

Her stomach jumped about, flung
acid to the back of her throat.
 
"I
don't know.
 
The last time I saw him was
last month.
 
He'd made his way back from
Havana and hid in my henhouse in Augusta.
 
He had friends to stay with, somewhere in Virginia or the Carolinas, I
presumed.
 
He told me so few
details."

Fairfax brushed her earlobe with
his lips, just enough contact to scurry gooseflesh all over her body and
tighten her nipples.
 
"Where was
your uncle headed the morning he met you in Augusta?"

She swallowed.
 
No point in maintaining the lie.
 
"Somewhere in the Carolinas or
Virginia.
 
He wouldn't say,
either."

"And where is Soph — Where is
your mother?"

Chill seeped from the cellar floor
through the soles of her shoes and spiraled up her legs.
 
Black lace in a box with a parasol.
 
She tensed.
 
He felt it.
 
"I-I don't
know."

"I shall ask you again.
 
Where are you headed?"

She swallowed again.
 
"I told you, to North Carolina."

"Not to Ninety Six?
 
Neville told me you had an aunt who lives
there.
 
Martha Neely."

She sighed, still clinging to the
hope that she could bluff.
 
"Oh,
very well, I may as well admit it.
 
I'm
going to stay with Aunt Martha in Ninety Six."

Fairfax showed his teeth in
something that looked like a smile but wasn't.
 
"Would it distress you to know that Mrs. Neely died back in
May?
 
Neville checked the town
records."