The Heiress (17 page)

With that she turned back toward the camp, but Jamie caught her arm. Joby had always said that a woman had only to tell Jamie a sad story and he turned softer than rainwater.

“Frances,” he said softly, “it is not so. You are a very sweet woman. Any man would be happy to have you for his wife.”

“Oh, Jamie,” she said and threw her arms around his neck. “I knew you loved me. I knew it. I will make you the best of wives. And your family will have warmth and food and all the best that the Maidenhall money can buy. You shall see. You will be the happiest man on earth.”

Pulling away from him, she took his hand. “Come, let us tell the others.” Her eyes lit as an idea came to her. “Yes, and you must write my father. I will write him too. We will put our letters together and send them by the same messenger. I am sure my father will agree, as he will love having a daughter called by the
title of lady. Come, come, do not hesitate.” Pausing, she looked at him. “Is something amiss? Is not this what you wanted? You are going to be married to the Maidenhall heiress. Please tell me now if this is not what you wanted.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “This is what I must do. It is what my family needs.”

Stretching out her arms, Frances twirled about. “I am the happiest woman on earth. And you? Are you not also happy?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “very, very happy. Truly happy.” But there was only the sound of sad resignation in his voice. “Come,” he said slowly, “we must return to the others.”

“Yes, we must tell them,” Frances said happily, then paused. “But, Jamie, dear, let us not tell about the letters to my father. Axia will … Well, you know what she is like. We will just say that we are to be married secretly. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, then with a great sigh, Jamie followed her down the path back to the camp.

My dearest sisters,

All your dreams may come true. It seems that I may be married to the Maidenhall heiress. No, do not think it is a love match, it is not. Frances is in need of rescuing. She needs protection and we need a new roof. Is that not how all the best marriages are arranged?

However, I do not believe this marriage will take place as I am insisting on begging her father's permission. As he has already contracted for his daughter's marriage, I cannot see how he will agree. But Frances thinks he will give his permission; then we must be married immediately.

I will let you know what comes of this.

Do you remember Axia who I told you about? She is proving herself to be quite useful, as she buys and sells wherever we go. Although she told outrageous, but highly amusing, lies to make the sale, she sold an entire wagonload of cloth for coins and animals. Then she traded some of the animals to a country merchant for a hundred pairs of shoes, and she used the coins to buy a thousand buttons from a widow walking back from her husband's funeral. Afterward, she put all of us, except the heiress of course, to sewing the buttons on the shoes and the next day sold them for twice what she'd paid for them.

Rhys says that in one week she has tripled the value of the original cloth, and he laughs that in a month she will be able to buy a house. But I fear that Rhys may be in love with her. And Thomas too.

However, due to Axia's bargaining, I have not spent any from the Maidenhall purse for days now.

We will be staying at Lachlan Teversham's house for a few days while we await the arrival of the Maidenhall wagons and the letter from Frances's father, so you may write me there.

I send you both my love and my prayers.

Your loving brother,

James

PS. I am sorry, but that purple silk doublet was ruined when Axia set fire to it and to me, but do not worry, for the burns healed quickly.

*  *  *

“Well?” Joby asked her sister. “What do you think now? He is going to marry the Maidenhall heiress, I am sure of it. I am sure Perkin Maidenhall will be delighted for his daughter to marry Jamie. After all, he
is
an earl.”

“I am not so sure,” Berengaria said as she breathed deeply of the aroma of the flowers that grew in the tiny garden behind the old castle. “Do you think if this rich man had offered his daughter to Jamie, our brother would have refused the Maidenhall heiress? Would any man? So there must be hidden reasons that he offers her to a rich merchant's son, as there are many impoverished titled men who would have taken her.”

“True,” Joby said thoughtfully but not wanting to think about that. “What do you think of this Axia?”

Berengaria hesitated before answering. “I think she is the most interesting person I have ever heard of.”

“Interesting? I would imagine that woman walking back from her husband's funeral did not find her ‘interesting'. It is a wonder someone did not put this Axia in a dunking stool.”

“On the other hand, what was the woman going to do with a thousand buttons? Perhaps she was grateful for someone stupid enough to want to buy them.”

Joby stopped walking and looked at Berengaria. For some reason, their roles seemed to have reversed. Usually, it was Joby who was cynical and disbelieving, but now Berengaria was the one putting grief on a monetary level. For some reason, there was something about this Axia that Joby did not like.

“Oh, Joby,” Berengaria said with a sigh, “are you never romantic? You are afraid that our dear brother, who is
very
romantic, will fall in love with this impoverished Axia and we
will never have enough to eat.”

“According to you, he already is in love with her,” Joby muttered. “But what do you mean that our dear brother is romantic? Was it romance that has made him such a good soldier?”

“Of course.”

“You are crazy! What is romantic about killing and maiming?”

“You know very well that Jamie hates all that. What he loves is the feeling of honor and justice and fighting for good over evil.”

“True,” Joby said slowly, “but what does that have to do with this Axia? I think she is making our brother demented. He says she has set fire to him.” She narrowed her eyes. “I would like to set fire to
her.”

Berengaria looked sightlessly into the distance. “Will you gather me some of those cherry blossoms? By the smell of them we will have a good crop this year.”

Taking her dagger from her side, Joby cut some branches off the nearest cherry tree. “What shall we write to our brother?”

“You mean, what can we write to him to make him truly fall in love with this rich woman who he says he might marry but admits that all he wants from her is a new roof?”

“Exactly. You do not think Jamie's sense of honor would extend to love in a marriage, do you? We are too
poor
to think of love.”

“And he has too many burdens,” Berengaria said with bitterness. “Mother and I are—”

“And me,” Joby said. “I want to be like the queen and never
marry!”

“Well, I want to be like a queen bee and have a thousand children, all of them pulling on my skirts and wrapping their arms about me.”

Joby gave a little smile. “There's always Henry Oliver. He'll give you—”

“I'll get you for that,” Berengaria said and reached for her little sister.

I
t had been raining heavily for several days. The streams were swollen, and the roads, already bad, were quagmires, sucking at the horses' feet, amassing on the wagon wheels so that they would hardly turn.

Jamie knew that he was feeling sorry for himself as he tried to direct the moving of the wagons through the mud. When had he become responsible for merchant wagons and quarreling civilians? He had always been a soldier, a younger brother who was not to inherit the title and the estate so he had to make his own way in the world in his chosen profession of the military.

But there was no estate, was there? he thought as pulled his horse to stop once again. The rain was coming down so hard that he could barely see, could hear nothing over the pelting of the heavy stream onto the ground.

Dismounting, he stalked through the mud to the wagon where it was once again stuck. The mud was up to his ankles, and it seemed as though he was covered with the cold, wet slime. Of course, even as he made his way through the muck, he knew that his real problem was not the rain, but Axia. Sometimes it seemed that before he met her he'd never had a problem in his life. What was the struggle between life and death compared to what he had been through since he'd met her?

Just when he'd thought they were becoming friends, everything had changed in an instant. Before he could stop her, Frances had run back to the campfire and loudly announced that she and Jamie were to be married. Jamie didn't think he'd ever forget the look on Axia's face. Betrayal, hurt, disbelief, all registered in her eyes for just an instant before she turned away and stopped speaking to him altogether. Since then, twice he had tried to talk to her, tried to explain that he was not a free man, that, for him, marriage was business and he could not follow his heart. For if he did follow his heart … But Axia would not listen to him. Each time, she'd jerked away from his grasp and refused to speak to him. And later, when he thought about his heart and his duty to his impoverished family, he thought that perhaps it was better that Axia wasn't speaking to him. But two days later when she informed the others that there had been an accident and the rest of that wheel of cheese had somehow rolled from the wagon, he felt like weeping.

But his mood had reversed when this morning Axia had
presented Rhys with a little pillow stuffed with the goose down that she had been saving for Jamie.

So now, in a few hours, God willing, they would be at the house of his friend and former comrade-in-arms, Lachlan Teversham, and there would be dry beds and hot food and perhaps they would all feel better.

Through the rain, Jamie could just see the dragon wagon, as everyone insisted on calling it, as it made its way down the road ahead of them. On Jamie's orders, the two women were in that wagon, as it was lighter and had a better chance of getting through the mud. This wagon, fully loaded down with tents and what furniture they had, tended to get stuck often.

It didn't take Jamie but a second to see that he was going to have to push. Rhys and Thomas both—damn them!—were riding by the other wagon, so that left only the driver and him and Tode, who was inside, to try to get the thing out.

At first Jamie was studying the wheel so intently that he didn't hear Tode's voice as he shouted from beside him. “Rocks! Put rocks under the wheels. Tree branches. Anything.”

Jamie nodded. Of course. His mind was so distracted by his personal problems that he couldn't think of the simplest things. George sat in front, trying to control the nervous horses from the lightning that flashed all about them, while Jamie and Tode tried to find anything they could to put under the right rear wheel to give it some solid ground to move onto.

“Can you push?” Jamie shouted to Tode and saw him nod. Water was cascading down his face, dripping off his nose, and making runnels in the deep scars that distorted his face.

After Jamie alerted the driver, he put his shoulder to one
side, and Tode followed him, his short legs deep into the mud.

“Ready?” Jamie shouted, then as they heard George crack the whip, they pushed. It was not easy to find traction in the ooze, and they kept slipping, but Jamie could see that the wagon was about to be freed. “Again?” he yelled. “Harder! More muscle!”

Just when the wagon was nearly free, when it looked as though another two minutes would have them on their way, Jamie landed flat on his back in the mud with a hundred pounds of enraged female on his chest.

“He cannot! He cannot!” Axia screamed at Jamie, hitting him about the face and chest.

Putting up his arms, Jamie tried to protect himself from her blows; beneath him, the mud sucked at him like a great sea monster meant to devour him. It was Rhys who grabbed her about the waist as though she were a sack of grain and lifted her off Jamie.

Jamie was so deeply stuck in the mud that he had to pull himself up by holding onto the wagon wheel. “What is wrong with her?” he yelled, swiping at the mud covering his face with his hands.

Still holding Axia's struggling body as best he could, Rhys gave a shrug.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Axia screamed with all her might, struggling as hard as she could against Rhys.

After bracing himself in preparation for her attack, Jamie nodded to Rhys to release her.

But once free, Axia did not go to Jamie, but ran as best she could through the mud, her skirts thrown over arm, toward
Tode, who was slumped against the back of the wagon. Putting her hands over his destroyed face and trying to wipe the water away, Axia looked at him hard, but Tode didn't seem to have any life in him as he leaned back against the wagon, his eyes closed.

“Look what you have done!” she screamed at Jamie. “May the devil roast you!” She looked at Rhys. “Help me. He must get inside the wagon.”

Both Rhys and Jamie stepped forward, but Axia blocked Jamie and the look she gave him made him back away.

They are lovers,
Jamie abruptly thought.
That is why she is so protective of him. That is why she does not want other men near her. Those two are lovers!

Now, anger gave him new energy, and when Rhys stepped back out of the wagon, Jamie shouted to the driver and the two men pushed. Suddenly, Jamie seemed to have the strength of Hercules, and when the wagon rolled out of the mud, he kept on pushing.

When Rhys put a hand on his shoulder, Jamie ignored it and kept pushing. Under the rain and mud, sweat was pouring off of him. It took all Rhys's strength to pull Jamie away from the wagon. And when Jamie turned to his friend, the look on Jamie's face made Rhys step back. Without a word exchanged between them, Rhys mounted his horse and rode toward the other wagon.