Drums of Autumn, Page 79

  “Not bad, not bad,” he said, judiciously. “All right, open your mouth.” He let go of her hair quite suddenly and her head snapped back. Before she could jerk away, he had seized her by one ear, twisting slightly.

  “Bite me, sweetheart, and I’ll mash your nose flat. Eh?” He brushed his closed fist lightly under her nose, nudging the tip with a massive knuckle. Then he took a firm grip on her other ear, holding her head immobile between his big hands.

  She concentrated on the taste of the blood from her cut lip, the taste and the pain of it. With her eyes closed, she could see the taste, salt and metal, a burnished copper, shining pure in the dark inside her eyes.

  If she vomited, she would choke. She would choke, and he would not notice. She would strangle and die, and he wouldn’t stop. She put her hands on his thighs to brace herself, and dug her fingers into the heavy muscle, pushing back as hard as she could, to resist the battering. He was humming, deep in his throat. From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues. Wiry hairs brushed her lips.

  Then Leroi was gone. He let go of her ears and stepped back; unbalanced, she fell forward on hands and knees, gagging and coughing, the strings of saliva from her mouth tinged pink with blood. She coughed and spat, and spat again, trying to clear her mouth of foulness. Her lips were swollen, and throbbing with her heartbeat.

  He lifted her effortlessly, hands under her arms, and kissed her, tongue thrusting, one palm cupping the back of her head to keep her from pulling away. He tasted overpoweringly of brandy, with a faint nastiness of decaying teeth. The other hand, at her waist, roamed slowly downward, kneading her buttocks.

  “Mmm,” he said, sighing pleasurably. “Bedtime, eh, sweetheart?”

  She lowered her head and butted him in the face. Her forehead struck hard against bone, and he uttered a sharp cry of surprise and loosened his grip. She wrenched free and ran. Her flying skirt caught on the doorlatch and tore, disregarded as she hurled herself out into the dark companionway.

  The sailors were at supper; twenty men sat at a long table in the mess at the end of the companionway, twenty faces turned toward her in expressions ranging from startlement to lascivious interest. It was the cook who tripped her, sticking out a foot as she dashed past the galley. Her knees hit the deck with numbing force.

  “Like games, do you, sweetheart?” It was Bonnet’s voice in her ear, jovial as ever, as a pair of hands scooped her up with disconcerting ease. He whirled her to face him, and smiled. She had hit him in the nose; a thick trickle of blood flowed down from one nostril. It ran over his upper lip, and followed the grooves of his smile, thin lines of red showing between his teeth, and dark drops dripping slowly from his chin.

  His grip on her arms tightened, but the merry glint shone as ever in his light green eyes.

  “That’s all right, sweetheart,” he said. “Leroi likes games. Don’t you, Leroi?” He glanced down, and she followed his gaze. He had shed his breeches in the cabin, and stood half naked, Leroi brushing against her skirts, quivering with eagerness.

  He took her by one elbow, and bowing gallantly, gestured toward the cabin. Numbly, she stepped forward, and he took his place beside her, arm in arm, nonchalantly exposing the white cheeks of his buttocks to the stares of his gaping crew.

  * * *

  “After that…it wasn’t so bad.” She could hear her own voice, unnaturally calm, as though it belonged to someone else. “I didn’t—didn’t fight him anymore.”

  * * *

  He hadn’t bothered to make her undress, merely untucked her kerchief. Her dress was made in the usual fashion, with a low, square neckline, and her breasts were high and round; it took no more than a casual downward yank to bare them, popping them up over the edge of the bodice like a pair of apples.

  He mauled them idly for a moment, pinching her nipples between a large thumb and forefinger to make them stand up, then pushed her toward his tumbled bed.

  The sheets were stained with spilled liquor and stank of perfume and wine, and overwhelmingly of the rank, heavy odor of Bonnet himself. He shoved up her skirt and arranged her legs to suit him, humming all the while beneath his breath. Farewell to you all, ye fine Spanish ladies…

  In her mind’s eye, she could see herself thrusting him away, flinging herself off the bed and running for the door, skimming light as a gull down the dark companionway and bursting up through the grated deck to freedom. She could feel the wooden boards under her bare feet, and the glare of the hot summer sun in her dark-blind eyes. Almost. She lay in the dim cabin, wooden as a figurehead, tasting blood in her mouth.

  There was a blind, insistent prodding between her thighs and she convulsed in panic, scissoring her legs. Still humming, he thrust a muscular leg between her own, brutally nudging her thighs apart. Naked from the waist downward, he still wore his shirt and stock. The long tails drooped around Leroi’s pale stalk as he rose up on his knees above her.

  He stopped humming long enough to spit copiously into his palm. Rubbing roughly and thoroughly, he eased the path and then set to business. With one hand clutched firmly on her breast, he guided himself with the other to an inescapable berth, making a jovial remark about the snugness of the accommodation, and then loosed Leroi on his mindless—and mercifully brief—gallop to pleasure.

  Two minutes, maybe three. And then it was over, and Bonnet lay heavily collapsed upon her, sweat crumpling his linen stock, one hand still crushing her breast. His lank fair hair fell soft against her cheek and his exhalations purled hot and damp on her neck. At least he’d stopped humming.

  She lay frozen for endless long minutes, staring up at the ceiling, where the reflections from the water danced across the polished beams. He sighed at last, and rolled slowly off her onto his side. He smiled at her, dreamily scratching one bared and hairy hip.

  “Not bad, sweetheart, though I’ve had livelier rides. Move your arse more next time, hm?” He sat up, yawned, and began to straighten his attire. She edged toward the side of the bed, then, sure that he didn’t mean to restrain her, rolled abruptly off and onto her feet. She felt light-headed and desperately short of air, as though his bulk still pressed upon her.

  Moving in a daze, she went to the door. It was bolted. As she struggled to lift the bolt, her hands shaking, she heard him say something behind her, and swung around in amazement.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said the ring’s on the desk,” he said, straightening up from retrieving his stockings. He sat down on the bed and began to pull them on, waving casually at the desk that stood against the wall. “There’s money, too. Take what you want.”

  The top of the desk was a magpie’s nest, littered with inkpots, trinkets, bits of jewelry, bills of lading, tattered quills, silver buttons, ragged bits of paper and crumpled clothing, and a scatter of coins in silver and bronze, copper and gold, currency of several colonies, several countries.

  “You’re offering me money?”

  He looked up quizzically, fair brows arched.

  “I pay for my pleasures,” he said. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  Everything in the cabin seemed unnaturally vivid, detailed and individual as the objects in a dream, which would vanish with waking.

  “I didn’t think anything,” she said, her voice sounding very clear, but distant, someone speaking from far away. Her kerchief lay on the floor where he had thrown it, by the desk. She walked there, carefully, trying not to think of the warm slipperiness that streaked down her thighs.

  “I’m an honest man—for a pirate,” he said behind her, and laughed. He stamped once on the deck to settle his foot in its shoe, then brushed past her and lifted the bolt easily with one hand.

  “Help yourself, sweetheart,” he said, with another casual wave toward the desk as he went out. “You were worth it.”

  She heard his footsteps going away down the companionway, a burst of laughter and a muffled remark as he met someone, then a shift of his voice, suddenly clear and harsh, shouting orders to someone above,
and the tramp and scurry of feet overhead, rushing to obey. Back to business.

  It was sitting in a bowl made of cowhorn, jumbled with a collection of bone buttons, string, and other bits of rubbish. Like him, she thought, with a cold clarity. Acquisition for its own sake; a reckless and savage delight in the taking, with no knowledge at all of the value of what he stole.

  Her hand was shaking; she saw it with a vague sense of surprise. She tried to grasp the ring, failed, gave up. She scooped up the bowl and emptied its contents into her pocket. She walked down the dark companionway, her fist wrapped tight around the pocket, holding it like a talisman. There were seamen all around, too busy about their tasks to spare her more than a glance of lewd speculation. Her shoes were perched on the end of the mess table, bows perky in a shaft of light from the grating overhead.

  She put them on, and with an even tread walked up the ladder, across the deck and gangplank, onto the dock. Tasting blood.

  * * *

  “I thought at first I could just pretend it didn’t happen.” She took a deep breath, and looked at me. Her hands folded over her stomach, as though to hide it. “But I guess that won’t work, will it?”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking. It was no time for delicacy.

  “When?” I said. “How long after…um, after Roger?”

  “Two days.”

  My eyebrows lifted at that.

  “Why are you so sure it isn’t Roger’s, then? You weren’t using pills, obviously, and I’ll bet my life Roger didn’t use what passes for condoms in these times.”

  She half smiled at that, and a small flush rose in her cheeks.

  “No. He…um…he…ah…”

  “Oh, coitus interruptus?”

  She nodded.

  I took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips.

  “There is a word,” I said, “for people who depend on that particular method of birth control.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, looking wary.

  “Parents,” I said.

  46

  COMES A STRANGER

  Roger bent his head and drank from cupped hands. A piece of luck, that flash of green, pointed out by a finger of sunlight stabbing down through the trees. Without it, he would never have seen the spring, so far off the trail as it was.

  A clear trickle bubbled through a crack in the rock, cooling his hands and face. The rock itself was a smooth blackish green, and the ground all round was boggy, rumpled by tree roots and furred with a moss that grew brilliant as emeralds in the fleeting patch of sun.

  The knowledge that he would see Brianna shortly—perhaps within the hour—soothed his annoyance as effectively as the cool water eased his dry throat. If he’d had to have his horse stolen, it was some consolation that he’d been close enough to reach his destination on foot.

  The horse itself had been an ancient nag, barely worth stealing. At least he’d had the sense to keep his valuables on his person, not in the saddlebags. He clapped a hand against the side seam of his breeches, reassured to feel the small hardness snuggled against his thigh.

  Beyond the horse itself, he hadn’t lost much more than a pistol—nearly as ancient as the horse and not half so reliable—a bit of food, and a leather water flask. The loss of the flask had troubled him for the last few miles of hot, dusty walking, but now that minor inconvenience was remedied.

  His feet sank into the damp ground as he stood up, leaving dark streaks in the emerald moss. He stepped back and wiped the mud from his shoe soles on the carpet of dry leaves and crusted needles. Then he dusted down the skirts of his coat as well as he could, and straightened the grimy stock at his throat. His knuckles rasped the stubble on his jaw; his razor had been in the saddlebag.

  He looked a right villain, he thought ruefully. No way to meet your in-laws. In truth, though, he wasn’t much concerned with what Claire and Jamie Fraser might think of him. His thoughts were all on Brianna.

  She’d found her parents now; he could only hope that the reunion had been so satisfactory that she’d be in a mood to forgive his betrayal. Christ, he’d been stupid!

  He made his way back toward the path, feet sinking in the soft leaf-layer. Stupid in underestimating her stubbornness, stupid not to have been honest with her, he amended. Stupid to have bullied her into secrecy. Trying to keep her safely in the future—no, that hadn’t been stupid at all, he thought, with a grimace at the things he’d seen and heard in the last few months.

  He pushed aside an overhanging limb of loblolly pine, then ducked with an exclamation of alarm, as something black shot past his head.

  A hoarse craawk! announced that his assailant was a raven. Similar cries gave notice of the arrival of reinforcements in the trees nearby, and within seconds, another black missile whizzed past, within inches of his ear.

  “Hey, bugger off!” he exclaimed, ducking away from yet another croaking buzz bomb. He was plainly near a nest, and the ravens didn’t like it.

  The first raven sailed back for another try. This pass knocked his hat into the dirt. The mobbing was unnerving, the sense of hostility out of all proportion to the size of his adversaries. Another came in, zooming low, and struck him a glancing blow as its claws ripped at the shoulder of his coat. Roger snatched up his hat and ran.

  A hundred yards up the trail, he slowed to a walk and looked round. The birds were nowhere in sight; he’d passed their nesting place, then.

  “And where’s Alfred Hitchcock when you need him?” he muttered to himself, trying to shake off the sense of danger.

  His voice was damped at once by the thick vegetation; it was like talking into a pillow. He was breathing heavily, and his face felt flushed. All at once, it seemed very quiet in the forest. With the ceasing of the ravens’ racket, all the other birds seemed to have stopped as well. It was no wonder the old Scots thought ravens birds of bad omen; spend much longer here, and all the old ways that had been no more than curiosities would be flourishing away in his mind.

  Dangerous, dirty, and uncomfortable as it was, he had to admit the fascination of being here—of experiencing at firsthand things he’d read about, seeing objects he knew as museum artifacts being casually used in daily life. If it wasn’t for Brianna, he might not regret the adventure, in spite of Stephen Bonnet and the things he had seen aboard the Gloriana.

  Once more his hand went to his thigh. He had been luckier than he’d dared hope; Bonnet had had not one gemstone, but two. Would they really work? He ducked again, having to walk half crouched for several steps before the branches opened up again. Hard to believe that people lived up here, save that someone had cut this trail, and it must lead somewhere.

  “You can’t miss it,” the girl at the mill had assured him, and he could see why. There wasn’t anyplace else to go.

  He shaded his eyes, looking up the trail, but the drooping branches of pine and maple hid everything, presenting only a shadowy, mysterious tunnel through the trees. No telling how far it might be to the top of the ridge.

  “You’ll make it by sundown, easy,” the girl had told him, and it was late midafternoon now. But that had been when he had a horse. Not wanting to be caught on the mountainside in the dark, he picked up his pace, straining his eyes for sunlight ahead that would show him the openness of the ridge at the end of the trail.

  As he walked, his thoughts ran inevitably ahead of him, quick with speculation.

  And how had it gone, Brianna’s reunion with her parents? What had she thought of Jamie Fraser? Was he the man she’d been imagining for the last year, or only a pale reflection of the image she had built up from her mother’s stories?

  At least she had a father to know, he thought, with a queer little pang at the memory of Midsummer’s Eve, and that burst of light in the passage through the stones.

  There it was! A lightening of the dense green shadow ahead; a brightening as tongues of sun struck autumn leaves in a flare of orange and yellow.

  The sun dazzled him for a moment as he came out of the tunn
el of greenery. He blinked once, and found himself not on the ridge, as he had expected, but in a small natural clearing, edged with scarlet maples and yellow scrub oak. It held the sunlight like a cup, dark forest spreading beyond on all sides.

  As he turned about, searching for the continuation of the trail, he heard a horse’s whicker and whirled to find his own elderly mount, jerking its head against the pull of a rein tied to a tree at the edge of the clearing.

  “Well, I’ll be buggered!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “How the hell did you get up here?”

  “The same way you did,” a voice answered him. A tall young man emerged from the wood beside the horse, and stood pointing a pistol at Roger; his own, he saw, with a sense of outrage as well as apprehension. He took a deep breath and choked down his fear.

  “You’ve got my horse and my gun,” Roger said coolly. “What else d’you want? My hat?” He held out the battered tricorne in invitation. The robber couldn’t possibly know what else he carried; he hadn’t shown them to anyone.

  The young man—couldn’t be more than in his teens, in spite of his size, Roger thought—didn’t smile.

  “A bit more than that, I expect.” For the first time, the young man took his eyes off Roger, shifting his glance to one side. Following the direction of his gaze, Roger felt a jolt like an electric shock.

  He hadn’t seen the man at the edge of the clearing, though he must have been there all the time, standing motionless. He wore a faded hunting kilt whose browns and greens blended into the grass and brush, as his flaming hair blended with the brilliant leaves. He looked as if he’d grown out of the forest.

  Beyond the sheer unexpectedness of his appearance, it was his looks that stunned Roger into speechlessness. It was one thing to have been told that Jamie Fraser resembled his daughter. It was another to see Brianna’s bold features transmuted into power by the stamp of years, and fronting a personality not only thoroughly masculine, but fierce in aspect.

  It was like lifting his hand from the fur of a handsome ginger cat, only to find himself staring into the unblinking gaze of a tiger. Roger barely kept himself from taking an involuntary step backward, thinking as he did so that Claire had not exaggerated a single thing in her descriptions of Jamie Fraser.

  “You’ll be Mr. MacKenzie,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. The voice was deep but not loud, barely lifted above the sound of the rustling leaves, but Roger had no difficulty hearing him.

  “I am,” he said, taking a step forward. “And you’ll be…ah…Jamie Fraser?” He stretched out a hand, but quickly let it drop. Two pairs of eyes rested coldly on him.

  “I am,” said the red-haired man. “You’ll know me?” The tone of the question was distinctly unfriendly.

  Roger took a deep breath, cursing his own dishevelment. He didn’t know how Brianna might have described him to her father, but Fraser had evidently expected something a good deal more prepossessing.

  “Well, you—look quite a bit like your daughter.”

  The young man gave a loud snort, but Fraser didn’t look around.

  “And what business have ye wi’ my daughter?” Fraser moved for the first time, stepping out from the shadow of the trees. No, Claire hadn’t exaggerated. He was big, even an inch or two taller than Roger himself.

  Roger felt a stab of alarm, mingled with his confusion. What the hell had Brianna told him? Surely she couldn’t have been so angry that—well, he’d sort that out when he saw her.

  “I’ve come to claim my wife,” he said boldly.

  Something changed in Fraser’s eyes. Roger didn’t know what it was, but it made him drop his hat, and half raise his hands in reflex.

  “Oh, no, ye’re not.” It was the boy who had spoken, in an odd tone of satisfaction.

  Roger glanced at him, and was still more alarmed to see the lad’s big, bony knuckles white on the pistol’s grip.

  “Here be careful! You don’t want that to go off by accident,” he said.

  The young man’s lip lifted in a sneer.

  “If it goes off, it’ll be no accident.”

  “Ian.” Fraser’s voice stayed level, but the pistol lowered, reluctantly. The big man took another step forward. His eyes were fixed on Roger’s, deep blue and slanted; unnervingly like Brianna’s.

  “I’ll ask only the once, and I mean to hear the truth,” he said, quite mildly. “Have ye taken my daughter’s maidenheid?”

  Roger felt his face grow hot as a flood of warmth washed up from chest to hairline. Christ, what had she told her father? And for God’s sake, why? The last thing he had expected to meet was an infuriated father, bent on avenging his daughter’s virtue.

  “It’s…ah…well, it’s not what you think,” he blurted. “I mean, we…that is…we meant to…”

  “Did ye or no?” Fraser’s face was no more than a foot away, completely expressionless, save for whatever it was that burned, far back in his eyes.

  “Look—I—damn it, yes! She wanted to—”

  Fraser hit him, just under the ribs.