AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(7)
She froze. What a blunder. She had temporarily named the baby after her father and brother, both blessed with the given name Robert. “Neither,” she muttered and quickly rose. “The bairn sleeps. While I return him to his cradle, you would do well to consider your next move.”
She escaped up the steep stairs and knelt to ensconce the infant within the cradle. Hands braced on the puncheon floor at either side of the cradle, she hung her head and struggled for composure. Deep shuddering breaths rifled through her body. She now strongly suspected she was Adam Sutcliff’s quarry. She had to bleed every second out of every chess play from hereon.
When she returned below, she found him in the kitchen. He had returned the empty cow horn to the sideboard. She paused just inside the doorway and watched as he hunkered on the brick floor before the hearth’s embers to sample the cranberry and clove sauce. His presumptuous, proprietary manner, making himself at home as he was, irritated her beyond endurance.
“Do you find it to your liking?” she inquired, each word eked out from between tight lips.
Slowly, he pivoted on the one knee to regard her. His gaze traveled her length, from her scuffed clogs, past her food-stained apron and threadbare drab, Puritan’s gray dress with its starched white cuffs and collar, up to her hair’s frivolous blue velvet ribbon – and then returned to lock in on her censorious gaze. “I find everything here to my liking.”
She wheeled to return to the main room but at his explosive, “God’s bones!” spun back. His palm cupped his cheek. Instantly, she realized what had happened. Dripping partridge fat had ignited in the coals and popped, burning him.
Swiftly she crossed to kneel in front of him. With care, she moved his hand and scrutinized a red, blistering welt the size of a half-pence on his cheek. That close, her gaze was entrapped with his. Lightning crackled through her, from her hair that felt like it was standing on end to her toes that tingled.
Snatching her attention from his snare, she pointed to the stool. “Sit.”
She broke away and headed out the back door, where she scooped into her cupped hands piled snow that had scurried against the log wall. When she reentered, she was relieved to see that he had obeyed her and was sitting on the tall stool, his long, booted legs stretched out. A grimace flattened those beguiling lips.
She slapped the snow against his cheek a little more heartily than warranted, and he winced. “Methinks you enjoy my discomfort, Eve.”
“Keep the snow pressed again the burn,” she said, dumping the second handful in his, “and you may escape disfiguring that popinjay’s visage.”
At that, he grinned. “Then, you will admit, I am handsome.”
She crossed to the sideboard, and, with her back to him, paused for one long moment. . . treat him and risk exposing her past? Yet both her brother and father had taken the Oath of Hippocrates, to treat one and all regardless. Could she do any less?
She opened the sideboard’s upper cabinet doors. One shelf contained a pill board, mortar and pestle, and even a pair of iron forceps Gantu had fashioned for her. On another shelf reposed drug jars of green glass, filled with powders and ointments – chamomile, camphor, laudanum, and vervain – all meticulously arranged and categorized in a notebook she kept.
From behind her, Sutcliff reached around for one of the glass jars, his fingers brushing her shoulder. Instantly, she stilled. He was so near, she could feel his heat.
“Foxglove – for burns, is it not? Interesting, your physician’s collection – and your fascination with the healing arts.”
His warm breath on her nape triggered pleasant shivers throughout her. She squirmed around, palms braced on the sideboard, to face him. At once, she realized her egregious error. She had aligned her body, knee to breast, with the thrust of his, placing herself in a most vulnerable and indefensible position. She felt fearfully excited. Breathless, she murmured, “Exactly what service is it you desire of me?”
He passed the glass jar to her keeping and planted his palms adjacent to hers on the sideboard. “You are brave enough for the truth?”
Her gaze never wavered from his. “Aye.”
“I shall not deny what has been on my mind from the moment I first beheld you, framed in the warming light of your doorway. And that desire for you has been upper most on my mind since – and, too, a driven curiosity about a young woman of your looks and temperament.”
His admission weakened her guard. “Then that is it? What it is I forfeit should I lose – a night in your bed?”
“No.” He rolled his eyes. “Your virtue is safe from my ravishing as long as you really want it to be. By the time I saw fifteen years, I had learned that it was far more pleasurable to be sought out. And what I desire of you could never be a forfeit, as you so deem it. It should be a splendor . . . for us both . . . or nothing at all.”
“I – I do not understand.”
“Desire – require.” He shrugged his shoulders. “A vast difference. So, here is the service I require of you – your assistance in negotiating with the main sachem of the Lenape. It is said you have established friendly relations with the sachem, Peminacka. I will need your intercession for the purchase of land our Lord Protector wishes to award to certain Puritans for their meritorious performances. That will require our traveling to the sachem’s village – a round trip, I estimate, of a week or so.”