AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(10)
His interest in her surprised him. She was a Royalist, and he was now in the Cromwellian camp. She had grown to an adult among the aristocrats; he, among humanity’s backwash. She believed in a God who cared; he believed in a god who didn’t give a damn.
“I have no idea who the father is. Rasannock – the sachem’s nephew – stayed on here at the Virgin Queen Tavern after he recovered from a bout of spotted fever for which I was treating him. After that success, I was entrusted with the well-being of the sachem’s daughter who was in her latter term with child. But, alas, the babe was born early, and the sachem’s daughter succumbed to hemorrhaging.”
He was tempted to point out that losing a valuable patient seemed to run in her family of physicians, but this brooding comment would also reveal that that he knew her identity.
“You understand, I may not be accorded a hero’s welcome at the Lenape village,” she continued. “Not with the sachem’s beloved daughter dead and buried outback of my inn. Peminacka is a mercurial man. There is no accounting for the swing of his moods. Profoundly greedy or frighteningly sadistic one moment and the next congenial and generous. But compassionate he is not. For the Indians compassion is a weakness. I – and, mayhap, those with me – could quite as easily be staked out and burnt as crisp as bacon.”
Not stirring from his position for fear of forcing a hasty retreat upon her, he eyed her from beneath lids half-mast. “I shall be ready to travel within the week. But that is not why you stand here now, is it?”
She closed the door behind her and eyed him bravely. “You gave me a second chance during our chess match, Adam.”
In her voice there was no foolish pretense. “Take the ribbon from your hair.”
She stared back at him for a long moment. Slowly her hands raised, and her fingers unknotted the wide band of blue velvet. She shook her hair loose and let it fall past her shoulder blades. Never had he begun to want a woman so much.
He held up welcoming arms, and she came into them, reclining her much smaller frame alongside his length. Her quivering flesh, raw with yearning, took him aback. Neither of them had silly expectations of sentiment, and yet he knew they both hoped to find something meaningful, something ineffable – at least, for the remainder of that magical night, that Christmas night.
*
That morning Evangeline’s arm reached to wrap around Adam’s hard suppleness and encountered emptiness. Well, not quite. Her fingers floundered upon, first, the still warm linen bedsheet – and then, upon a small hard object.
She sprang upright and stared at it. A sugar cane stalk. God Almighty. The very same symbol engraved upon his saddlebags. The symbol that proclaimed his possessions.
Her now wide-awake gaze drifted from the green sheathed cane, lower, to the linen sheet with its small splotch of blood. Her maidenhead’s blood.
Then inner images cascaded over her vision. Her pale too-thin body, uniting in a drive toward that completion with his darker, smoothly muscled one. She now knew his body better than she did her own. Her ecstatic outcries that mingled with his exultant ones might have been but a dream were it not for the cane stalk and the tiny, tell-tale crimson stain. At that small outpost on an enormous, unexplored continent, they could have been indeed Adam and Eve.
Except a bare twenty miles away camped William Craven, who would destroy her if he but knew of her existence as Eve Wainwright, within easy reach of his long arm of retribution.
And where was Adam Sutcliff? She knew not where he had gone nor why, but she doubted not that he would return to her. Not because of the passion they had shared but because his single-minded pursuit was the land purchase. His intention was to win, at all costs, in every arena. He was that rare kind of man.
She would do well to remember that, to remember that he had merely been making use of her. And do well to forget what he had made her feel. Not only the carnal pleasure. But for a brief few moments, he had made her feel she was not lonely . . . and alone . . . trapped between a vast ocean and the edge of a vast wilderness. Even her three friends had not been able to fill that aching void.
He had asked of her if she were brave enough for the truth. But what was her own truth? Had she surrendered to him to broaden her options, should William accompany Adam on his return? Or, if she was to be honest, had she surrendered because she was drawn to him by a strong tidal-pull tug on her emotions?
She should feel guilty. She did. But there was the matter of survival. She could not trust that he would return alone. And, too, had she not given him something in return for the second chance he had rendered her in their chess match? Something precious maybe to her, but not necessarily to him . . . her maidenhead.
She felt off-center, disoriented; strangely like the momentous day she had smelled and heard the contagious, excited roar of the unwashed crowd jostling around her, that day that she had also heard the thuds of the executioner’s axe, taking from her the last of her family.
And then from this morning’s misty memory, that last kiss, a lingering whisper near her ear, as she drifted in and out of sleep, before he took his leave . . . “Tis never when one deliberates, milady.”
A warning? Her mind retraced the hours and minutes of the evening before. Twice ‘deliberate’ had tripped upon his tongue. Once, when informing her he took a lengthy time to make up his mind . . . the other, when quoting Marlowe, “When both deliberate the love is slight.”