Chase the Dawn

by Jane Feather

  “I believe so.” He sighed. “We are not getting anywhere, are we? For the most part, your memory is intact; there is just one large chunk missing.”

  “But it is the most important chunk of all,” she maintained, suddenly desolate. “What am I to do?”

  It was a question exercising her companion considerably, but more along the lines of what was he to do. He appeared to be stuck with this stray waif, and from what he had seen of her so far, she did not strike him as a particularly biddable creature. She had a potentially dangerous curiosity that he dared not satisfy.

  A low whistle sounded through the clearing, and he stiffened. He’d told William to come only under cover of darkness. He whistled back, a soft, trilling melody barely distinguishable from a bird call.

  Bryony looked at him in astonishment. “You are signaling to someone?”

  “Yes, someone that you may not meet.” He stood up. “Come into the cabin.”

  “But why may I not?” She found herself being pulled behind him, as she clutched the blanket convulsively, and there was a quality to his hold that sent a shiver of apprehension down her spine. The gentleness had gone, replaced by a taut determination.

  He did not answer her, merely swung her onto the bedstead. As she struggled upright, vociferous protest on her lips, he took a thin strip of rawhide from the shelf. “I am sorry, but this is necessary for your own safety.” The mouth, which she had seen only curved with amusement or softened with compassion, was now a thin line within the neat, rich copper beard, and his eyes no longer glowed; they were hard black stones that glittered without warmth. Even as she cried out in fury and sudden fear of this stranger, he took one of her wrists and bound it with the leather band to one of the forked poles that formed the frame of the bed. “I won’t be gone long.” He ran a finger between the hide and the skin of her wrist. “If you do not pull on it, it will not chafe. Just lie quietly and try to sleep.” Then she was left in the dim light of the cabin, a prisoner tied to the bed, with no identity, no name, no sense of self or of her place in the world.

  When Benedict came out of the cabin, William was waiting at the edge of the clearing. His heavy peasant face was set in an obstinate glower, which caused Benedict to sigh in anticipation of trouble in the offing. William was spokesman for the band, more because of his natural aggression than for any articulate tact.

  Deciding to take the offensive, Benedict strode across the clearing, his face hard. “You were told not to come here in daylight.”

  “The men want to know what ye be goin’ to do with her.” William’s balding head jerked toward the cabin. “Unless she be dead.”

  “No, she is not.” Benedict moved into the trees, gesturing imperatively to William that he follow. Although he knew the girl could not get to the window, he never dropped the habitual caution that had kept him alive for the last five years. “She is my responsibility. You need have no fear that I will allow her to endanger anyone.”

  “Who is she?” demanded William, unappeased.

  “That I do not know, my friend, and unfortunately, neither does she.”

  William’s button eyes widened in incomprehension. “Don’t quite take yer meaning.”

  “Amnesia, William.” The word clearly meant nothing to the other man, so Benedict explained the situation succinctly.

  “Then turn her loose,” William said with the happy beam of one who has hit upon the perfect solution. “If she’s not going to die after the burning, then she can make her own way. She won’t know nothing, won’t have anything to tell.”

  “You are a fool,” pronounced Benedict with calculated insult, knowing that the other man stood sufficiently in awe of his leader’s intelligence and planning ability to be cowed by the accusation. “Do you think I am about to let loose an unknown quantity who was present at the burning of the Trueman barn? When I know who she is, then I shall decide what to do with her.”

  William struggled with this idea in the long silence that followed. He was not one of the brightest members of the band by any means, but once an idea took root he could be relied upon to stick with it through thick and thin. And he carried a great deal of weight with the others—not least because of those powerful blacksmith’s shoulders and brawny forearms, and the huge hands that could wrestle an ox. “Reckon so,” he pronounced eventually. “Could be a Trueman, after all.”

  Benedict shook his head. He had some knowledge of the construction of the Trueman family. “There is no daughter, and the girl wore no wedding ring, so she is not married to one of the sons. Trueman has no kin except his immediate family.”

  “What’s to do, then?” William asked.

  “Listen to the gossip and tell the others to do the same. If she’s from these parts, the news of a missing girl will take flight soon enough.”

  “Aye, ‘tis true. And ye’ll be keeping her close till then?”

  You do not know how close, my friend, Benedict thought, remembering the fury and the fear in those deep blue eyes as he had bound her to the bed. But what else could he have done? “Aye, I’ll keep her close, but you do not help by seeking me out when it’s forbidden.” He returned to the attack, sharper now with his own annoyance at what he had been forced to do.

  William shuffled his feet on the pine needles and looked suitably discomfited. “I’ll be off, then. Ye’ll send word?”

  “I’ll send word.” Benedict watched the burly figure melt into the trees as if he were a part of them, then turned back to the cabin in the clearing. The scream reached him before he gained the center—a scream that rose in an eerie crescendo, galvanizing him into a headlong dash for the door.

  The figure on the bed twisted and thrashed, the deep blue eyes wide with blank terror. The blanket had fallen to the floor with the wildness of her movements, but Benedict barely noticed as he bent over her, swiftly unfastening her captive wrist. “What is it, lass?” His voice was gentle as he came down on the cot beside her, sliding an arm beneath her to draw her against his length. She came shudderingly into his embrace, tremors racking her slim frame.

  “Who am I?” Ceaselessly she repeated the whimpered question. “There is nothing there, nothing but darkness.”

  “It’s there, sweeting, you just have to find it.” His hands were all over her, the soft, sweeping caresses insisting that she acknowledge the humanity that in her dream seemed to have been denied her.

  “There is nothing, just an abyss. I am at the bottom of a chasm … I am nothing, nothing.” She sobbed out the black terror of nothingness, struggling for words to describe the devastating knowledge of annihilation.

  “You are real, Bryony. Real and alive. Can you feel this?” Urgently, instinctively, he brought his lips to hers, locking on to her mouth in a kiss of honeyed sweetness as a hand moved to one breast, closing over the soft mound, a fingertip circling her nipple.

  Bryony inhaled deeply of his scent, the very real scent of sun-warmed skin, of fresh sweat, of the soap-washed linen of his shirt. She tasted salt and sun on his lips, felt the tangible, soft prickle of his beard against her face. And she felt the tightening of her breast’s crown beneath the insistent fingertip. It was an exquisitely pleasurable sensation, as exquisite as the feel of his lips on hers, of his other hand stroking over her buttocks as he held her against the long, lean length of him.

  One minute there had been only the abyss of a historyless anonymity, an insensate vacuum with no grip on reality, and now there was this. Pure, joyous sensation to fill the chasm, offering the handholds that would wrench her back into the world. Her mouth opened to him, her back arching to thrust her breast against the palm of his hand as she curled her legs around his body, responding in her innocence to the memories of bodily joy.

  Benedict’s world tilted as he drank greedily of her sweetness, recognized the demand she was making, and wondered for one bewildered second what she was. Not the innocent he had thought her. The cleft of her body was pressed against the hard throb of his penis, her fingers twining betwee
n the buttons of his shirt, twisting in the soft hair of his chest as she brought her lips to his throat, teasing him with her tongue. He groaned, and groaned again as her opened body pressed with increased fervor.

  “Love me,” she whispered. “Make me feel.”

  His hands caught her shoulders, flipping her onto her back with the force of desire now beyond control. He was on top of her, his mouth closing again over hers as their tongues warred, then danced, then plunged in a wild spiral of passion that excluded all but their partnered bodies and this utterly imperative passion. He tugged at the waistband of his britches, and she helped him, pushing them off his hips, her hands running in greedy exploration over his chest beneath his unbuttoned shirt, over the narrow hips, enclosing that burning, throbbing shaft that lifted to her touch.

  Drawing her beneath him again, he parted her willing thighs and for one instant paused on the threshold of her body. Her eyes were closed, her face lost in joy, but as he gazed down at her, the long black lashes swept up, showing him the appeal and passion in those velvet-blue eyes. “Love me,” she whispered.

  With a little sigh, he guided his surging entry within the moist tenderness of her core. There was a moment when he sensed the resistance that he had never expected. He checked himself with a soft-breathed curse and the tautening of his muscles, but her hands went to his buttocks, gripping with that urgent demand, and it was too late. She could not breathe for a second as the aching fullness stretched her, then it yielded and her cry of pain was more an exhalation of relief. Benedict brushed his lips over her damp temples, touched the corners of her eyes, trailed to the sensitive corner of her mouth, while he cupped her breast, sliding his thumb over the pliant and responsive peak. As he felt her relaxation, the suppleness of her body, he eased deeper, and her eyes shot open at the prickle of pleasure that ran across her nerve centers.

  Watching her, he set the rhythm, which she picked up with the ease of an established lover, but he was too lost in the glory of this fusion to question any further. They rose and fell together, and Bryony was conscious only of the wonder of her need and the amazing wonder of its satisfaction. His hands closed over her buttocks, lifting her to meet him as he reached the very center of her self, and the steadily growing blossom of pleasure inside her burst into full bloom, and she cried out against his mouth. As her body convulsed around him, Benedict thrust once more, holding himself within her as his own fulfillment throbbed.

  They lay entwined, sweat-slippery skin molded, hearts slowly settling as the fever abated. Bryony fell into a second oblivion, the sleep of emotional and physical exhaustion, but just before she slipped over the edge, she heard a soft, explosive execration that seemed to make no sense. And then she heard no more.

  In the name of the Almighty, man! The girl was in your charge.” Sir Edward Paget paced the stone-flagged terrace overlooking the broad sweep of the James River, his agitation more clearly expressed by the fact that his wig was askew than by the heat of his remarks.

  “No, Edward, she was in mine,” Eliza Paget moaned, dabbing at her beaded upper lip with a lace-edged handkerchief. “You cannot hold Mr. Trueman to account.”

  “You, madam, have never been able to take charge of your daughter in proper fashion.” Sir Edward rounded on his wife, the irascibility that he usually kept in check when talking to her bubbling over under the press of near-ungovernable anxiety. “I should never have permitted the visit, but I cannot forever be accompanying you on your social gadabouts.”

  Eliza Paget whimpered, and Charles Trueman shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “She cannot have been taken from the house, Paget,” he said, “even if her disappearance had anything to do with those damn bandits. They came nowhere near the house. The arms were stowed above the smokehouse, and the barn they fired was at the far side of the stableyard. Old Jebediah remembers little before they clubbed him, but he swears he saw no woman.”

  “You have found nothing?” Sir Edward buried his nose in a tankard of nutmeg-laced toddy. “No trace at all?”

  “Nothing.” Trueman shook his head in bewilderment. “Not a sign of an abduction—or of worse.” He looked anxiously at the distraught Eliza, whose sobs became noisy.

  “Go inside, woman! Your sniveling doesn’t help,” her irate husband snapped, and his wife made haste to obey, the streamers pinned to the sides of her lace coif fluttering away from her head as she scurried from the terrace and into the relative cool of the central hall.

  “I’ve had the woods beaten and every inch of the estate combed,” Trueman said, his tone businesslike. “The household slaves have been questioned repeatedly. Not one of them saw or heard anything untoward.” He chewed his lip for a minute before saying tentatively, “There would be no reason for Bryony to … well, to leave of her own accord?”

  Sir Edward’s generally pale, well-bred countenance darkened. “That is calumny, sir.”

  “No, I beg you not to take it as such,” his guest made haste to conciliate. “It is just that, well, young girls do get strange notions sometimes. I just wondered….”

  “Bryony has never had a strange notion in her life,” said her father. “She’s headstrong, I grant you, but she has more sense in that head than half the women in the county put together.”

  Trueman was inclined to ascribe this to paternal bias. Who ever heard of a twenty-year-old girl having anything in her head beyond balls and visiting and games? But then, as Mrs. Trueman had remarked only that morning, if Bryony Paget had been wedded and bedded these two years past, as she should have been, none of this would have happened. It was unheard-of indulgence for Sir Edward to agree to a postponement of a wedding that had been arranged since the young couple had been in their cradles. It was actually rumored that Miss Bryony had told her father she was not yet ready for matrimony, and Sir Edward had agreed without a murmur. No one, it seemed, had given a thought to the prospective groom, so Francis Cullum grew more disconsolate by the day.

  Following this reflection, Trueman suggested, “I suppose Francis has no light to throw on the matter? He left to ride home immediately after dinner, complaining of a powerful migraine.”

  “No, he has nothing at all to offer, beyond the fact that he spoke with her at dinner and she seemed her usual lively self.” The English aristocrat took another turn around the terrace, trying to grapple with this near-inconceivable fact: his daughter, in sound mind and body, had disappeared off the face of the earth, transported on clouds, it would seem, from the solid, dependable household of his old friend and under the very eye of her mother. The only other peculiar circumstance of that night had been the Patriot raid on the cache of arms hidden in the smokehouse, and the burning of Trueman’s barn.

  The bands of Patriots were becoming increasingly bold as the war in the North dragged on and the British seemed incapable of crushing, once and for all, the American forces under General Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. But abduction of innocent maidens had not so far formed part of their activities. Sir Edward Paget was an Englishman first, a colonist second, but it was surely incidental that the maiden in question was the daughter of one of the most prominent Loyalists in the colony, now that the Crown’s governor had fled his palace at Williamsburg as soon as the town had become a hotbed of revolutionary turmoil.

  “I will bear you company home, Trueman,” Paget said heavily. “Maybe I can elicit more from your household and the man Jebediah than you could. Someone, somewhere, must have seen or heard something, even if they don’t realize its significance.”

  The other man nodded and stood up, settling his sword more snugly against his side, adjusting his crimson brocade waistcoat over a portly belly. “I am more sorry than I can say, Paget.”

  “Aye,” the Englishman said with a curt nod. “But I’ll find her if I have to turn over every stone in Virginia.” He bellowed a command and the dignified figure of his butler appeared before the echo had died down. “Tell your mistress I am going to Trueman’s,” Paget instructed. “I’ll be gone two
or three days. She’s to send word there if anything comes to light.”

  The two men left the terrace, taking the broad walk bordered by large flowering laurels and catalpas, which led down to the river highway and the landing stage where Trueman’s boat waited.

  Inside the mansion, Eliza Paget flew up the graceful stairway with its carved step ends and newel posts, her hand barely skimming the rich mahogany handrail, to seek refuge in her chamber. She knew her husband blamed her for this dreadful happening. If only she had been able to give him more children, but of the six she had borne, only Bryony had survived to adulthood. The five little graves beneath the oak tree were a constant reproach.

  Her husband, that man of stern and rigid principle, a man of short temper who did not suffer fools gladly, was ultimately responsible for anything his daughter might do. He had indulged her from the moment she had said her first words, had encouraged her defiance of her mother, had supervised an education that went far beyond the requirements of a girl whose only role in life was to be a good and obedient wife, a loving mother, and a just plantation mistress.

  If only he had insisted that the marriage to Francis Cullum be celebrated on Bryony’s eighteenth birthday, as the betrothal contract had stipulated, none of this would have happened. If only his daughter had been taught to recognize the duty she owed her parents, instead of cherishing this shocking assumption that she had the right to dictate the terms of her existence. For that, Edward was to blame. If Bryony carried such an assumption into marriage, she would be storing up a life of misery for herself. Eliza had learned by heart the Virginia Gazette’s description of a “good wife,” one who was humble and modest from reason and conviction, submissive from choice, and obedient from inclination. A husband had the right to expect such a wife, and it was the parents’ duty to ensure that their daughter would fulfill those expectations.

  But none of these truths could assuage the mother’s grief as she thought of her daughter and remembered only the warm, loving nature, the sunny temper, the quick consideration of others; she forgot the obstinacy, the sharp tongue, the indecorous habit Bryony had of always speaking her mind, no matter to whom, and the exasperating reluctance to devote her time to the embroidery, music, and drawing lessons essential to the education of a well-bred young lady.