AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(21)
The pair glanced at each other, then Browning said, “Err, we’ll make sure your lady doesn’t escape, sire.”
The trading post’s shingled roof and solid barred doors offered some protection for life and property – especially, the immense amount of merchandise contained within. Yet its shingled roof and barred doors, and even its windows’ strong shutters, common to most households, would be ineffectual against a mob.
Of course, he did not represent a mob, so breaking through and disassembling the shutters with his dirk in the quietest manner possible took considerable time.
From the back of the trading post came the loud, sporadic snorts of old Larss, snoring. No sooner had Adam slid his lengthy frame through the window he had judiciously selected at the far side of the trading post, than, like a weasel, Bonnie Charlie popped in behind him.
“Well, well, well,” Adam whispered, “If it isn’t one of the Lady Evangeline’s three wise men.”
“Hmmph” Bonnie Charlie said in disgust, his breath fumed by rum. “Yew’ll have her at the Rocks an hour before dawn?”
“If I must drag her by her hair, aye.”
“Yew harm a hair on her head, and I’ll eat yewr heart with chicken gizzards for breakfast tomorrow.”
“T’would help if you had teeth.” As wood-wise as any Indian, the old geezer was, nonetheless, at the tail end of his years, and Adam had his reservations about how reliable he was. “See to it that you get my horse – and whatever mounts you can steal for yourself and Lady Evangeline – past the guards on duty at the livery stable.”
“Those musketeer jinglebrains aren’t yewr worry. It’s the militia scout Risingh has summoned. A renegade Mingo, Catamount can track a single pesky mosquito in a swarm of ‘em and is said to be meaner than any trading’ post squaw.”
So far, Adam felt, his luck had held. Upon his return from the Sovereign and a disgruntled Craven, running into Bonnie Charlie leaving the trading post had been like finding a four-leaf clover. Now, his luck just had to hold long enough to reach the Lenape. “Listen, I need bed linens – and a machete.” He figured he was as good with a machete as Bonnie Charlie would be with the tomahawk.
“Last I wuz here, I spotted a sickle, ‘long with the knives and hatchets yonder on the wall, back of the counter. And linen’s? Printz Hall’ll be the closest yew’ll get to bed coverings, lest yew’ll settle for a horse blanket.”
“Get them then,” he said, “the horse blankets and sickle.”
The scant moonlight seeping through the trading post window fell upon the string of beaded moccasins lined up in front of the counter. His’s mind’s eye recalled Evangeline. She was nigh a quarter the size of him. Her small foot, not much longer than the length of his palm. When he had kissed the arch of her foot, her wide-eyed response of shock had been quickly followed by a half-gasp, half-moan. Her explosive sensuality had astounded them both.
Within mere seconds, he assembled between the folds of one of the two horse blankets the quintessentials for the journey.
Parting ways with Bonnie Charlie outside the trading post, he returned to a pacing shrew. Shakespeare knew of a way to tame the shrew. Adam knew only of one way to subjugate her. But that was not what he wanted. Nor she. She wanted explanations.
She whirled at his entrance. Her eyes, questioned his. Behind those iridescent blue orbs, he perceived suspicion, a certain reticence, and, aye, the charged attraction of an electrical thunder storm. It had been that way between them since first sight.
He reminded himself that this past year, he had been besieged by many females interested in his recently elevated status. Hell, females had been interested in him from the time he was twelve.
“You’ll need to catch some sleep now,” he said, setting the bundled collection of trading post items on the bed. “Because rest – and food - will be a luxury from this moment on.”
“Then you are still committed on heading for the Delaware Nation?”
He unbuckled his rapier and placed his flintlock pistol and dirk on the shelf. “We are still headed for the Delaware Nation. If you remember, that was the wager you forfeited.”
Dropping onto the bed’s pathetic mattress, he took her by the hand and drew her down to sit on his lap. Her back was as stiff as a ramrod. She would not look at him. He detected, as when with her before, the lavender scent of her hair and her clothing. She must drape her freshly-washed clothing to dry on a lavender bush.
“I got us into this mess by not telling you everything, Evangeline. By not telling you that I suspected your identity even before I called at your inn on Christmas Eve. My inquiries in the area for a reliable negotiator with the Lenape sachem provided a description of my memory of you. I had seen you once, at court, and had not forgotten.”
She slanted him a skeptical glance. “The world is full of blue-eyed, blonde females. And, especially here in New Sweden and New Amsterdam.”
He grinned. “But few on conversant terms with the Lenape – and even fewer distinguished by the Christmas star on their forehead.” And none with her fire, her pluck, her vulnerability.
Her eyes narrowed with incredulity. “You saw that – my pox scar -- from a distance at court?”
“And few with the vibrancy of . . . how did one Danish planter I questioned put it . . . ‘of a feu follet?’ A fire within, as how I recalled you then.”