Vixen (28 page)

The three figures backed out of the building, latching the door behind them. Then they flew across the courtyard, no longer worrying about hugging the shadows, and disappeared into the underbrush along the driveway.

The straw caught, but it burned slowly at first. Thanks to Billy’s lack of husbandry, it was mixed with wet straw that had been moldering in the kennel.

Hugo caught the faint smell of smoke from the open library window at the same time one of the horses
screamed in terror. The scream woke Chloe instantly, and as instantly she recognized the sound.

She was out of bed and down the stairs without thinking. Hugo was already wrenching at the locks on the side door as she raced across the hall.

“What is it?”

“Fire,” he said curtly.

“What the ’ell’s goin’ on?” Samuel, pulling on his britches over his nightshirt, hopped down the stairs.

But Hugo had the door open and was out in the courtyard. Smoke poured thick and black through the open stable window and wreathed under the door. The stamping of hooves and the high-pitched, terrified screaming rent the air in a horrific cacophony.

“Get back!” Hugo bellowed as Chloe bobbed up beside him. “And stay out of the way!”

Chloe jumped back obediently as he wrenched open the door, leaping to one side as he did so. Flame licked out at them, and the roaring and crackling of the straw pile added a hellish din to the already ear-splitting noise of terror.

Hugo covered his face with his arm and plunged into the smoke. He knew where each of the horses was stabled. The bolts on the stalls were too hot to touch, and his fingers blistered as he hauled them open. The animals were not tethered, but they were too terrified to find their own way through the smoke and flame.

He grabbed the mane of his own black stallion and dragged the terrified animal out of the stall, praying one of the powerful hooves wouldn’t fell him as die beast reared and plunged. But as he smelled the fresh air, he charged forward, knocking Hugo to his knees as he raced into the courtyard.

Samuel was beside Hugo now, wrenching at the bolts of the other stalls. It was impossible to see anything now, and they were guided by the screams and stamping
hooves. Hugo could smell his own hair singeing, his skin was burning, his nostrils like cinders, his lungs heaving with the lack of air.

Dapple was released. Samuel was struggling with one of the two hunters, both of which were too terrified to find their way out of the stalls. Suddenly Chloe was beside him. She had the hunter by the mane and was leading him around, her voice, choked with smoke, speaking to him with a desperate urgency that was still somehow quiet and soothing. She pointed him toward the opening and slapped his rump.

As he lunged forward, she left Samuel and was stumbling down the aisle, her head buried in the sleeve of her nightgown. Her chestnut was at the far end of the aisle, with Rosinante. She could free only one of them.

The chestnut was young and inexperienced. He resisted all her efforts to lead him. By now her head was about to explode, her lungs were on fire, and she knew she was going to lose consciousness. With a last effort born of desperation, she scrambled halfway up the scorching wooden rail of the stall and fell forward on the gelding’s back. Somehow, she got one leg over and kicked hard with her bare heels against his flanks, steering him out of the stall. The gelding exploded out of the stall and out of the stable into the courtyard.

Hugo was staring frantically around the courtyard as the released horses milled and stamped and whinnied. It was a bright night, the moon hanging full and round, low in the sky. Billy had appeared now, his face white in the moonlight, his usually vacuous expression a terrified blank. But Chloe was nowhere to be seen.

“Chloe!” Hugo bellowed in desperate fear just as the chestnut hurtled out of the burning building, his eyes rolling, lips pulled back over great yellow teeth.

“Goddammit!” Hugo yelled, his fear turning to rage. He grabbed Chloe by the waist and swung her off the
horse, holding her in midair. Her eyebrows and the wisps of hair on her forehead were singed, and black tears of pain and desperation streaked down her smoke-blackened cheeks.

“Of all the lunatic, reckless things to do,” he raged. “I told you to stay back.” He shook her as he held her off the ground, beside himself with terror-induced fury.

“I had to rescue Petrarch,” she cried as impassioned as he. “Petrarch was still in there! I couldn’t leave him.”

“Petrarch?” For a moment he was bewildered, then he understood. The damn chestnut had finally been christened. “I was just going in for him,” he declared, setting her on her feet with a jarring thump.

“But he couldn’t Wait!” she cried, rubbing her tears with the back of her hand, smudging her face with black. “I couldn’t wait for you…. And Rosinante … he’s still there.” She dived suddenly beneath his arm and raced to the stable, ignoring everything he’d just said.

“Chloe! Come back here!” He lunged and caught her arm, spinning her away from the burning building. “Didn’t you hear a word I said?” He almost threw her backward into Samuel’s arms. “Don’t let go of her!” Then he dived once more into the smoke-filled stable, stumbling down the aisle, crouching low to the ground. By the time he reached the end stall, his lungs were about to burst and he was blinded with smoke. The heat was so fierce, he could feel his clothes beginning to smolder, scalding his flesh.

Somehow, he grabbed the mane of the enfeebled nag. The hair was burning to the touch and he could smell the animal’s scorched hide. He hauled him backward out of the building, thankful that the years of deprivation had reduced the beast to a weight that he could physically control

He staggered into the yard just as his lungs were
about to yield to the smoke. Rosinante buckled at the knees and fell to the cobbles, where he lay on his side, his flanks heaving, foam bubbling from his mouth, his eyes rolling.

Chloe dropped beside the nag, tears still pouring down her cheeks. She laid a hand on the animal’s tortured flank and then looked up at Hugo. “Put him out of his misery. He can’t breathe. Hell never recover from this.”

“I’ll fetch your pistol,” Samuel said.

He was back in a few minutes and silently handed the pistol to Hugo. Chloe was still crouching beside Rosinante, murmuring to him as if she could somehow reach him through his agony.

“Go into the house, Chloe,” Hugo commanded brusquely, bending to lift her to her feet. “Right away.”

“It’s all right, I don’t need—”

“Go! And put that kitchen overcoat on while you’re about it.” He knelt to place the pistol against the animal’s head. The shot rang out and Rosinante jerked once and was at peace.

“I’ll kill Jasper.”

The soft-spoken ferocity of the statement brought Hugo to his feet in one movement. Chloe was standing to one side, out of his line of sight as he’d shot the horse. But she was still coatless and had clearly remained in the courtyard.

“I told you to go into the house!”

“I didn’t need to,” she said, her mouth taking on the stubborn line he was beginning to know.

“Go and put a coat on!” he ordered her in clipped accents. A battle royal with his willful ward would have to wait until the fire was under control.

Chloe went for the coat without further protest and then ran to join them at the pump, where they were frantically filling buckets.

’Til work the pump,” she said, seizing the handle from Billy.

Half an hour later, the blaze was under control. The stable was solidly built of lime-washed stone, and while the straw and the wooden partitions of the stalls burned merrily, the flames finally exhausted the fuel.

Chloe was drenched with sweat from pumping the handle, her hands blistered, her nightgown beneath the overcoat torn and black with smoke, her face and hands and feet as filthy a£ a coal miner’s. But without flagging she turned to calming the horses and settling them in the barn, where the stench of charred wood and burned straw wouldn’t reach them. While she was thus occupied, the three men heaved Rosinante onto the cart and buried him in the far field.

It was past four o’clock before Billy went to his bed in the loft above the old dairy, and Hugo, Samuel, and Chloe staggered into the kitchen.

“Cup O’ tea won’t come amiss, I reckon,” Samuel declared, setting the kettle on the range.

“I’m parched,” Chloe agreed, shrugging out of the overcoat. She rubbed her stinging eyes with the heels of her palms.

“Come here, you.” Hugo took her by the waist, lifted her, and sat her on the table. ’You and I need to have a little talk, my ward. Leaving aside that inexcusable piece of arrant interference over … over whatever you call him”—he clutched at the air—”Petrarch … I gave you two direct instructions, which, on both occasions, you chose to ignore.”

“But you’d forgotten about Rosinante,” Chloe protested. “I had to go in after him.” Her position on the table meant that she was obliged to look directly at her guardian as he stood in front of her. It was not a comfortable exercise. Hugo was as filthy and as weary as
she, but his eyes were dauntingly severe and his jaw was set in an uncompromising line.

“You did
not
have to,” he said forcefully. “I had just forbidden you to go anywhere near the fire, and you weren’t going to take a blind bit of notice. Do you think I say these things just to exercise my vocal chords?”

“I couldn’t think about anything but the horses. And you
had
forgotten about Rosinante.” Seeing him for a moment without a response, she rushed on in swift self-defense. “And I didn’t need to go inside when you shot Rosinante. I’m not such a milksop. It was the least cruel thing that had ever happened to him, poor soul.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes with her filthy sleeve. The lace edging was torn and unraveling, and she began to pull at it. It gave her the opportunity to look down and away from that unwavering scrutiny.

Hugo put a finger under her chin and tilted her face. “In ten years at sea,” he said deliberately, “no one ever,
ever
disobeyed an order of mine.”

“Too interested in keepin’ a whole skin,” Samuel observed, measuring tea into a pot. “Powerful ’ard the navy is.”

It occurred to Chloe that Samuel was on her side. “But this isn’t the navy,” she pointed out.

“No, it’s not, for which you may thank your stars.” Hugo lifted her off the table. “In view of the circumstances, I’m going to let it go this time, but you’d be making a great mistake to assume any precedents.”

The storm seemed to have blown over. Chloe shifted the subject to good purpose, saying with the ferocity of before, “I’d like to stick a knife in Jasper.”

“So you’ve said.” Hugo sank into a chair with a weary groan. “What makes you think your brother’s responsible?”

“It’s obvious. It has his mark all over it,” she said. “He
never forgets an insult or an injury, and he doesn’t scruple what methods he uses to get even.”

“ ’Ere, get this down ye.” Samuel put a mug of tea in front of her. “A tot o’ rum in that wouldn’t do ’er any ’arm,” he said to Hugo.

“There’s a crock in the pantry, isn’t there?”

“Reckon so.” Samuel fetched the stone jar of rum and poured a dollop into Chloe’s tea. He doctored his own similarly and sat down in his usual chair by the range, closing his eyes.

“Once, when a man offended Jasper … he wouldn’t sell him a horse or something … Jasper arranged to have the stream that watered his orchard diverted. And I know he poisoned old Red Biddy’s drinking trough and poisoned her cow because she’d cursed him once.”

“How do you know these things?” Hugo sat up, no longer weary. He’d put nothing past Jasper, but he hadn’t realized that the man’s evil was so well known.

Chloe shrugged, sipping her tea. “Jebediah, the poacher, told me. He knows everything that goes on.”

“Mmmm.” Hugo sipped his tea in silence, a deep frown corrugating his forehead. Jasper had taken up the gauntlet with a vengeance, it seemed, and the duel would continue until one of them was defeated. Chloe had to be protected first and foremost. Only when she was safely beyond her brother’s reach could Hugo turn his attention to the more personal vendetta that this had now become.

Chloe Gresham needed a husband … and soon.

“So what are we going to do?” she said. “We’re not just going to let him get away with it, are we?”

“What do you suggest?” He smiled slightly at her intent, ferocious expression, “I doubt he’ll let you come close enough to stick a knife in his ribs.”

“Burn his hay ricks,” she said promptly. “What’s
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander … but
we
won’t hurt anyone,” she added, tears suddenly sparking anew in her eyes. “What if you’d been asleep, or if we hadn’t woken? Or if we were too late?”

“None of those things happened,” he said soothingly. “Don’t dwell on might-have-beens, lass.”

“It was too late for Rosinante.”

“It had been too late for Rosinante for a long time.” Suddenly, he stood up and his voice took on a completely new tone. “You look like a chimney sweep. You can’t possibly go to bed in that condition.”

“What do you mean?” But he’d already left the kitchen.

Chloe lapsed into a fatigued trance, sipping the comforting brew in her mug until she tipped it up, draining the tea, and yawned. “I can’t stay awake another minute.”

“You can stay awake long enough to clean up.” Hugo spoke from the doorway. He carried the brown velvet robe she’d worn before, a thick towel, and a cake of soap. He beckoned. “Come on, lass. It’ll be a bit chilly, but we’ll get it over with quickly.”

“What are you talking about?” There was something about the gleam in his eye that made her uneasy.

“You’ll soon see,” he said, and the gleam intensified, his lips twitching with a secret amusement that increased her suspicion.

Samuel stood up. “I’ll be off to me bed,” he said deliberately.

“No, don’t go, Samuel.” Chloe put out a hand to stop him.

He glanced at her and shook his head. “Sir ’Ugo’s right. A proper little sweep you are. Wouldn’t ’ave happened if’n ye hadn’t gone into the stable.”

“But I thought you were on my side,” Chloe wailed.