The hostage bride b 1, p.24
The Hostage Bride b-1, page 24
part #1 of Brides Series
It was a four-hour ride to Decatur village, so it would be around a twelve-hour walk. And once she reached the bleak featurelessness of the Cheviot Hills, she would have no landmarks, only whatever prods her memory might give her. But she could look for the sentry fires. That ring of fire high on the hilltops would guide her from a good distance away.
She would need wine and food. Water she could find along the way. She had very little money left over from what Giles had given her in Edinburgh, but conscience forbade her using that for this purpose. Reluctantly she laid the two silver shillings on the washstand. Then she went to the kitchen to scavenge. It was still very early and only a sleepy scullion was about, poking at the fire and yawning his head off. He didn’t acknowledge Portia’s presence.
It seemed too short a time from the moment of decision to the point when she was ready to leave, but for such a momentous undertaking her preparations were minimal. She had a flagon of wine and a package of bread, cheese, and cold meat wrapped in a cloth. She was wearing britches under her riding skirt. Two pairs of stockings. A thick woolen cloak and gloves. Her few keepsakes were distributed throughout her various pockets.
Now all she had to do was bid farewell to Olivia and manage to get herself out of the castle without drawing attention to her departure.
The second task was going to be the easier, Portia knew as she made her way to Olivia’s chamber.
Olivia was still asleep, but she awoke when Portia shook her shoulder gently. “What are you doing so early?” She sat up blinking, regarding Portia with puzzlement. “Why are you all dressed to go out?”
Portia sat on the side of the bed. “I have to go back to Decatur village,” she said. “Your father has set a trap for Rufus and I can’t let him fall into it.”
“No, of c-course not,” Olivia said, her gaze fixed wonderingly on Portia’s face. “But what trap?”
Portia explained and Olivia listened, her brows drawn together over her deep-set eyes.
“Will you c-come back?” she asked, but the bravery in her voice, the pain in her eyes, told Portia that Olivia knew the answer.
“You know I won’t be able to. Your father will never welcome me again.” Portia leaned over and kissed Olivia’s cheek. “But this isn’t goodbye. Somehow I know it isn’t. I don’t know where I’ll go after I’ve warned Rufus. But I’ll try to get a message to you, to let you know what happened.”
She frowned in thought, then was struck by an idea. “I tell you what, I’ll leave messages on the island in the moat, under that boulder where the ducks gather when it rains. Look for something there whenever you can. Promise?”
“I promise.” Olivia forced a smile. “Go!”
Portia kissed her again quickly and stood up, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Just one more thing.” Her voice was urgent, eyes intent. “Olivia, you must pretend to know nothing about me… about why I’ve left or where I’ve gone. Can you do that?”
“Of course.” Olivia sounded indignant that Portia should have doubted it. “Now go before I start c-crying.”
Portia hesitated for a second and then left before she gave in to her own threatening tears.
She left the castle through the wicket gate in the north keep, telling the guard that she was going to feed the ducks. It was such a common occurrence that the man merely nodded, exchanged a few words about the weather, and let her through.
It was full daylight now. The sky was clear and there was very little wind. It seemed auspicious weather for the trek that lay ahead. The path dropped steeply into the valley, then wound its way for several miles along the valley floor before climbing up into the first series of hills leading into the Cheviots.
Portia walked briskly, swinging her arms, humming to herself to keep up her courage. When she could, she walked parallel to the roadway, concealed behind hedgerows. A lone woman was easy prey for anyone with hostile intent, not to mention the troops of soldiers who regularly crossed her path. Fortunately, tramping feet, the fluting of martial pipes, and the steady beat of the drum heralded the latter’s approach in plenty of time for her to seek concealment.
She ate some of her small store of food at noon and rested for a while, but it was too cold to sit for long on the hard ground, even with a hedge as windbreak at her back. She passed a few hamlets and several isolated cottages, gradually becoming aware that the shadows were lengthening as the light was slowly leached from the sky. She’d been walking since eight that morning, and each step was becoming an effort. She had no idea how much farther she had to go, and once it was dark, not only would she never find her way but the already freezing temperature would plummet. She would have to find shelter. Some cottager would surely take her in.
The countryside had so far borne few signs of war, but that changed just after Portia had reached her decision to seek shelter. She had been walking down a narrow lane with high hedges on either side. A faint smell of lingering smoke was in the air, but she put it down to a farmer’s bonfire or late stubble burning, until the hedge suddenly gave way to open fields on either side of the lane.
The fields were burned to the bare earth; trees, so painstakingly planted as windbreaks against the vicious gusts blowing off the hills and the moors beyond, were scorched skeletons against the darkening sky. The skeleton branches had rags dangling from them, and as Portia approached she saw that the rags were corpses, hanging from nooses, twisting in the freshening wind. They had been there for several days, and they bore the insignia of Lord Newcastle’s royalist troops.
Portia turned aside, retching in disgust at the stench of corruption, the eyeless sockets, and the great flocks of black crows circling and cawing around their carrion feast.
A pathetic whimpering came faintly from the ditch alongside the gallows field as she stumbled away from the atrocious sight. She tried to ignore the sound but it went on, pathetic and yet insistent with a kind of last-chance desperation, and finally she turned back, averting her eyes from the gallows as she tried to trace the sound.
Its source proved to be a puppy, not more than five or six weeks, Portia judged. Not old enough to be motherless, certainly. It lay in the ditch, liquid brown eyes staring up at her from beneath a matted curly fringe. Its coat, in a most improbable shade of mustard, was a tangle of burrs and knotted curls.
“Oh, what an unprepossessing little thing you are,” Portia murmured, feeling an instant bond with the abandoned waif. She bent to pick it up. It shivered against her, all skin and bone and wet hair. A scrap of material fluttered around its scrawny neck. It was a piece of a royalist flag.
Portia glanced involuntarily to the killing field. Had this puppy been a troop mascot? It seemed likely. A mascot left behind to starve in the aftermath of atrocity.
“Come on, then, pup. For some reason, I get the impression you and I are two of a kind.” She tucked the creature under her cloak, against her heart, and felt the rapid fluttering of its own heart and the involuntary tremors, which slowly died down as the puppy warmed up.
Now she had to find shelter for the two of them. It was almost full dark, and what little warmth there had been in the day had fled under the rising wind. Portia trudged down the lane, even more wary now. The barbaric troop of parliamentarian soldiers who had committed that atrocity could still be around, and even if they were long gone, the local inhabitants would be afraid and more than ordinarily suspicious of a stranger.
She came to a hamlet about two miles farther down the road. The cottages were shut up tight, only the thin plumes of smoke from their chimneys indicated habitation. She chose the cottage nearest the small church and, with a boldness she didn’t feel, knocked on the door.
There was no answer. She knocked again and waited. No sound, no sense of life. And yet she knew someone had to be sitting before the fire whose smoke curled from the roof. She knocked again and called softly, reassuringly. Maybe if they heard a woman’s voice, they would open up.
Nothing. She walked back into the lane and surveyed the house as it squatted in a bare vegetable patch. The windows were shuttered, showing not a speck of light.
Portia shivered. She had never before felt so completely alone, and she was very frightened. She was as frightened of the cold, of the impossibility of spending a brutal February night without shelter, as she was of human attack. The puppy whimpered. The animal must be starved. Was it old enough to eat bread and meat and cheese?
But first they had to get out of the night. The sky was black with cloud, utterly lightless, and the wind was rising. The church would offer sanctuary. It would be cold and hard, but they would be out of the wind and safe from human interference.
She opened the lych-gate and trod up the path to the church door. It was a small Norman church, a huddle of gray stone, with a rose window over the arched oak door. Portia lifted the latch and pushed, praying that it wouldn’t be locked. The door creaked loudly as it yawned open onto the dark, damp chill of the vestibule.
She stood accustoming her eyes to the darkness, and slowly the font, the long rows of pews, the glimmer of the altar, took shape. Maybe there were priest’s vestments in the sacristy, something at least that she could wrap herself in. There was the altar cloth, but that seemed somehow sacrilegious.
She approached the altar and sat down on the top step against the communion rail, unwrapping her cloak to lift out the puppy.
“So, what sex are you?” It was too dark to see, but her searching fingers found the answer quickly enough-definitely female. The little creature licked her hand and whimpered again.
Portia set her down and opened the cloth package of food. The puppy scrabbled frantically against her knee as she smelled the meat. Portia took her knife from her boot and cut the meat up into the smallest pieces she could and laid them down on the altar steps. The puppy seemed to sniff and the offering disappeared.
“I have a feeling your need is greater than mine,” Portia murmured, cutting some more. She fed all the meat to the puppy and drank the wine, feeling it warm her on the inside at least. She contemplated lighting one of the altar candles but decided that showing a light would not be wise. She had no idea what kind of reception she’d receive from the hamlet’s inhabitants, but from what she’d seen of the shuttered cottages, it was wise to assume that it wouldn’t be friendly.
The puppy, its belly full, trotted off into the darkness. Portia, guessing what she was after, scrambled up hastily. “Wait… you can’t be uninhibited in a church.” She scooped her up and carried her back outside. In the churchyard, behind the shelter of a yew tree, they took care of nature’s needs, then returned to the church.
Portia found a threadbare cassock in the sacristy and wrapped herself in it. She sat with her back against the altar and closed her eyes. The puppy crawled up onto her lap and dived under her cloak and cassock, seeking her warmth.
“It’s all right for some,” Portia said, shivering. The trip outside had undone all the good of the wine and she had only a swallow left.
It no longer seemed sacrilegious to make use of the altar cloth. She couldn’t imagine God would be offended if it would save one of his creatures from freezing to death where she sat.
Even with the altar cloth, it was too cold to sleep. She was bone weary, every muscle tensed against the deep ache of the cold. “You know something, Juno, if that ill-tempered bastard of a Decatur is in the least ungrateful after what I’ve been through, I shall take my knife to his throat,” she muttered into the puppy’s neck, finding some comfort in talking aloud even to an animal who couldn’t talk back.
Why had she decided to call this unprepossessing scrap Juno? The question flitted through her brain without stopping for answer. Her mind began to play tricks. She thought she was back in her bed in Cato’s castle. Then she was back in St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh listening to Jack curse her up hill and down dale because she hadn’t brought him enough brandy to keep the demons at bay. Then she was in a sunny meadow along the river Loire. The sun was hot on her back, baking her bones, and Jack was sitting a little way away from her playing dice with a pair of itinerant peddlers who were only just beginning to understand that the man they’d thought would be an easy mark was going to take them for everything they possessed, right down to the boots on their feet.
She brushed at her cheek where a fly was buzzing her, disturbing the glorious lethargy of the sun’s heat, the lovely crimson-shot blackness behind her closed eyes. The buzzing continued. Annoyed, she slapped at it and something nipped her finger hard enough to jerk her back to grim reality.
She stared blankly at Juno, who stared back with her liquid brown eyes filled with anxiety. The puppy had been licking her cheek, sensing that she was slipping away into some landscape from which she might not return.
With a violent shiver, Portia leaped to her feet, dragging the altar cloth tightly around her as she began to walk the nave, up and down, up and down, until she was wide-awake and the blood was moving, if sluggishly, in her veins. She was still colder than she ever remembered being, but she was awake and alive.
She went to the door and peered out. The darkness was graying slightly, but the sky remained heavily overcast. “I think we’d do better on the move, Juno. I’d rather face a band of brigands than freeze to death here.” She replaced the altar cloth and the priest’s cassock, ate the last crust of bread and gave the cheese to Juno, then set her face to the wind, the puppy huddled beneath her arm.
By full dawn it had begun to snow, and she was now threading her way through the trackless wastes of the Cheviots, the only witnesses to her passing a few miserable sheep huddled beneath the scant protection of leafless trees. Thirsty, she made a hole in the ice covering a small stream. Juno drank greedily but the water was so cold it gave Portia a screeching headache. Tears of misery and desperation were falling unbidden and unheeded, freezing on her cheeks. She shivered convulsively, her clothes no more protection now than if she were naked. Only the puppy kept her going, created a small spot of warmth against her chest.
The snow grew heavier and she could barely see a step ahead of her, and now she no longer knew whether she was going in the right direction or merely round and round in circles. Nothing mattered except to keep putting one numb foot in front of the other as she stumbled into the wind-driven snow.
When she first saw the diffused glow through the white veil that smothered her, Portia barely heeded it. She’d forgotten what she was looking for… had almost forgotten who she was. There was just the single driving force-to put one foot in front of the other.
But her feet took her upward toward the glow without conscious instruction from her brain. She stumbled in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, wrenching her ankle. And then she lay there, sobbing with pain and cold and terror, knowing that she was going to die where she lay, in a snow shroud.
Chapter 15
Pitch torches flared through the white. Voices came at her from far above. Hands lifted her, and Portia clutched Juno to her with every fiber of her remaining strength.
Someone was forcing her lips apart, forcing her to drink. She coughed, choked with shock as the fiery spirits burned her gullet. An acrid ammoniacal smell burst through the darkness blanketing her senses, and she opened her eyes with a shudder.
“Lord love us, but if ‘tain’t the lass from Granville.” George’s voice was astounded. He pressed the flagon to her lips again. “Drink, lassie. Y’are near perished.” Anxiously he passed the vial of ammonia beneath her nose while she was trying to drink, and she choked again, spluttering the rough brandy over her cloak.
A brazier glowed in the small watchman’s hut, and it was warm and frowsty with the mingled smells of sweat and frying onions and ale. Juno wriggled out from under her cloak and jumped to the ground, making immediately for the brazier, where she nestled close, shaking herself.
“Lucifer an‘ all ’is angels! What’s that?” George exclaimed.
Portia couldn’t speak. Her lips were numb, her tongue seemed frozen to the roof of her mouth, her jaw was locked. She looked helplessly at George and his much younger companion, who both stood staring at her as if she’d emerged from the spirit world.
George scratched his head. “Jamie, run down and fetch the master. Tell ‘im ’tis the lass from Granville… come back fer some reason.”
Jamie enveloped himself in his cloak, took up a pitch torch from the sconce on the wall, and set off at a scrambling run down the path to the village. He raced down the narrow lane and stopped, panting, at Rufus’s house. He banged on the door and shouted.
“Eh, m’lord! Come quick! Y’are wanted quick up top.”
Rufus flung open the door. “What is it? Soldiers? Raiders?” As he spoke he grabbed for his swordbelt hanging on the hook by the fireplace.
“No… no… ‘tis not soldiers, sir.” Jamie shook his head vigorously. “No, nor raiders neither.”
Rufus buckled his belt, his movements no longer so urgent. “What is it, then, Jamie?” The lad was a little slow, and badgering him only flustered him.
“Mr. George, sir, sent me to tell ye.”
“To tell me what, Jamie?” Rufus slung his cloak around his shoulders.
“ ‘Tis the lass from Granville,” Jamie pronounced proudly. “She’s come back, but Mr. George don’t know why. But she’s ’alf perished. Thought she was dead, we did, lyin‘ there in the snow an – ”
He got no further. Rufus had pushed past him and was racing up the lane. He climbed up the hill, his pace barely slowing, and strode into the hut, banging the door shut behind him.
“Holy Christ!” Two strides brought him over to where Portia was huddled on a three-legged stool beside the brazier. Her lips were blue, and he could see where her tears had frozen on her deathly white cheeks. Snow still clung to her eyelashes, and the fringe on her forehead was stiff with ice.
“What have you done?” he whispered. “What have you done to yourself?” He dropped to his knees, brushing the icy fringe from her forehead. He chafed her cheeks between his palms, desperate to see the life and recognition return to the slanted green eyes. She was staring through him as if she didn’t recognize him.
