My Lady Jane(81)

They ran on and on until the sky turned a fiery red. They’d lost their pursuers hours ago, no baying dogs or thundering horses behind them now, but they still kept up a steady pace through the woods. She was just about to suggest that they make camp when they came upon a small, abandoned farm. Gifford paused at the edge of the trees, giving Jane a chance to appraise the tumbledown cottage and the barn tucked behind it.

“This seems a good place to spend the night, doesn’t it?”

Gifford made a noise that sounded like assent and she slid from his back to look around. Pet ran with her, tail flagged with canine joy, stopping every few feet to check for danger. They found none. The cottage was in bad shape, the thatched roof caved in and the rooms full of birds and mouse nests, but the barn still seemed intact. They could take shelter there.

Jane’s legs were shaky from riding so long, and her whole body felt weak with hunger, but she was able to haul open the barn door just wide enough for a saddled horse to fit through, and then Gifford trotted inside, pausing to nose at her shoulder as he passed.

“I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. Oh. Sorry, G. Not you, of course.” She pulled the door closed. There was a rusty lantern hanging on the wall, and she moved to light it. Then she turned to Gifford. “Now let me take that saddle before you ruin it when you change.”

Pet zipped around the barn, sniffing here and there. Then, just as Jane was about to get to work, Pet ran back to the door and scratched to be let out. She looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“You should have gone before we came inside,” Jane muttered and opened the door a crack. Alone with her horse husband, Jane set about unbuckling the girth and relieving him of his humiliation. He shook and stretched at the sudden freedom, then—to Jane’s horror—rolled on to his back and rubbed himself against the dirt floor.

“Now that’s just ridiculous.” Jane snapped the blanket, making drops of sweat fly off, and laid it over a post to dry. The saddle followed.

It wasn’t long before sundown, so she dropped the cloak near him and dug through the saddlebag to search for additional clothing.

Nothing.

Instead she found a bag of cured meat and two containers of water. She’d drunk an entire flask of water and wolfed down nearly half the meat before she realized she ought to wait for Gifford to change, and give him the bigger share. Surely he was as hungry and thirsty as she was. He’d been on his feet all day.

“It seems we’re going to have to fight for the clothes,” Jane said. “One of us should get the shirt and trousers, and the other the cloak. As for the boots, they don’t fit me anyway, so you’ll just have to keep carrying me.”

A burst of light filled the barn, and then Gifford said, “As you wish.”

“G!” Jane spun around to find Gifford just pulling the cloak around himself. Impetuously she ran to embrace him, in spite of their awkward (and scandalous, though they were married, so did it really count as scandalous?) clothing situation.

“Jane.” He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

It surprised her, this sudden gesture of affection, but she welcomed it.

“We survived the day,” she said against his chest. “We both kept our heads. Hoorah for us.”

A laugh rumbled through him. “So we did. Hoorah.”

She pulled away to smile up at him, and felt a paper crinkle in her breast pocket.

“What’s this?” She vaguely remembered feeling a folded parchment in the shirt earlier, but she’d been too busy fleeing for her life to give it any attention. She took it out and instantly recognized her own handwriting.

It was the letter she’d sent to Edward before she’d left for her honeymoon.

“Peter Bannister slid that under my door in Beauchamp Tower.” Almost hesitantly, Gifford brushed Jane’s face and smoothed back her hair. “I thought you might want to keep it.”

“Thank you.” All at once she felt safe, for the first time since their last night in the country house. She was tempted to snuggle back into the circle of his arms, but the letter seemed important. “Why would Peter Bannister want you to have this?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I thought he was just giving me something of yours. To comfort me.”

She turned the paper over. On the back there was a single word scrawled: skunk.

Her breath caught. “This is Edward’s handwriting.”

Gifford frowned. “Edward’s?”

“Edward’s! I’d know his writing anywhere. You see how he shapes the s? When we were younger we had this one terrible tutor—Richard Cox was his name—and he was always going on about Edward’s ghastly penmanship. ‘You should write like a king,’ he always chided him. He made the king copy pages and pages of the letter s.” She smiled at the memory. “Poor, dear Edward.”

“Yes, poor, dear Edward,” Gifford agreed faintly. “So what does skunk mean?”

“I don’t know. I—” She gasped. “Our gran—my great-grandmother, his grandmother—turned into a skunk. She was banished to an old abandoned castle in the north years ago. I’ve visited her there. It’s called Helmsley.”

“Does that mean Edward is alive?”

“I think it does.” She hugged Gifford again, elated by the idea of seeing her cousin. “If Edward’s alive, then he’s heading to Gran’s and we can go there, too, and then everything will be all right, you’ll see, and you and I can—”