AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(27)
‘Full tilt’ meant as fast as his sickle could swipe the brush from his path, which was damnably fast, given his youthful experience with the bite of the plantation overseer’s whip.
“How far behind do you think is Catamount?” Those soulful eyes were looking up at him with trust.
She was a fool. He hitched a final knot around her waist, then threw the saddlebags over his shoulder. “You would do well to consider feeling his breath upon your nape.”
With that, he spun and trotted off in the predawn down the path that sloped away from the cavern into the forest. For less than a mile, he hacked his way through the snow-wet shrubbery, then he felt the tug on the reins and turned. She had gone sprawling face first over an exposed, humped sycamore root. He retraced his steps and scooped her up by her armpits.
“Watch the ground,” he instructed, ignoring the exasperated huff of air she blew out.
Once more, he set off through the thorny, entangling brush. For the next five or so miles, she did not once trip. But later, when a panther screamed, she lunged for him and tripped again. Chuckling to himself, he scooped her up with a hand beneath one armpit and steadied her.
Indignantly she tugged away and brushed herself off. “A pox on you, Adam Sutcliff, if you laugh at me.”
The sickle was not as proficient as a machete would have been. Shortly after full sunrise, he had cleared their way through to a meadow. He paused at its edge to let her catch her breath, while his gaze swept the frost-tipped, high grass.
A creek ran through it, and on its other side, two does had halted in drinking, their heads lifted to sniff the air. Suddenly, their white tails flashed as they bounded in leaps toward the forest on the far side.
“What frightened the – ”
His raised hand stalled her whispered question. Indeed, what had frightened them? In answer, a bear lumbered from the woods’ far side and broke into loping pursuit of the deer.
He turned his attention back to her and took note of how her cloak, dress and petticoat hung in shreds below her thighs. Brambles has scratched her bare legs, above her moccasins. Briars had clawed her dirt-smeared face and yanked her hair from its knot at her nape, where twigs and leaves nested in the frizzled mass of curls. She stood, swaying with exhaustion.
She was the most beautiful woman the good God had ever created.
“How much longer?”
“By dusk, if we keep moving – and no one catches up with us.”
“I cannot. I simply cannot go another step.”
He frowned. “You are so certain of what you cannot do? While Craven is so very certain of what he will do – he, being a fervent man of patriotic duty – when he hauls you before Cromwell’s court.” He refrained from adding that he considered Craven’s lofty principles overrated.
Her chin lifted with determination, but before she could take a step past him, he leaned over and, wrapping an arm around her waist, hoisted her up onto his back and shoulders. “Hang tight,” he said, latching an arm under each of her thighs. “We’ve got a muddy meadow and a freezing creek to forge first.”
Indeed, as he strode into the meadow, his boots sank deeper. Lifting each from the sucking mud became more difficult. Why had he not better prepared with moccasins for himself? Her warm breath on his neck, her breasts pressed against his back, and her legs wrapped so intimately around his midsection only increased his frustration.
Crossing the creek was more of a challenge. The thigh-high water, icy from melting snow, slammed against him, filling his boots and nearly knocking him off balance. Her arms tightened around his neck. The weighted saddlebags came damned near to drowning them both.
At last, he made it to the opposite bank, only to have his slick boot soles slide in the slippery, muddy ooze. Down he and Evangeline thrashed, back toward the water line, before they clawed and hauled themselves up through the snow-and-mud-caked grass to the top of the bank. They sat and stared aghast at one another.
She, first, broke out in laughter. “Truly, Adam, you look like a Blackamoore!”
He resisted the mad impulse to make love to her. Chuckling, he scooped and lobbed a daub of mud at her. “Then that makes two of us.”
With an outcry, she swiped the splatter from her chest but missed the delightful speckles on her face. “Aye, but tis you who is the blackguard.”
Though it was but a jest, instantly he knew that therein lay her true feelings. Still, she doubted his sincerity. And, indeed, so did he. He had an estate to regain. Yet, his yearning for her was a force to be reckoned with. Taking her hand, he hefted her erect. “No time to dawdle. Best we make haste.”
Accustomed to the torpid vegetation of the tropics, he found this fortress forest of cold, hard wood required all his attention and effort. Constantly, he kept a vigilant eye for the tree’s thickest bark or heaviest moss, which signaled north for him. When he stumbled across an accumulation of well-traveled paths, he knew he was drawing near their destination.
An hour or so before sundown, they staggered into the Lenape village. Protected by a wooden palisade, it consisted of perhaps a hundred domed and timbered huts chinked with clay. With vociferous shouts and whoops, women and children poured out to either confront or greet the pair who limped in. Amidst the formidable, clamoring welcome party, he shifted the waist of a dragging Evangeline he cradled from his right to his left arm.
“We wish to pay homage to your sachem, Peminacka,” he told the snaggle-toothed old squaw, at the foremost of the mob. Like the other women, she sported red dots on her cheeks and eyelids.