by Jane Feather
Bryony had climbed through the unglazed aperture and dropped to the ground beneath almost before this thought had come and gone. As she cowered against the back wall, she heard the squeak of the door and then the slight shuffle of a moccasined foot on the earthen floor. Her tunic, she noticed, seemed to blend into the earth as she wormed toward the trees on her belly, expecting any second to hear a shout or feel a clutch at her ankle. But she reached the green, shady refuge safely. She did not get to her feet, however, until she had crawled on pine needles several yards farther. Trembling, filthy, and wearied by that unaccustomed mode of progression, she stood up and set off on tiptoe through the trees.
“Tod, you will take your men to the right wing.” Benedict’s forefinger jabbed at the spot on the map spread out on the long oak table in the farmhouse kitchen. “Joe, to the left. I will take the front. There are sentries posted at each entrance, shifts changing every four hours. We make the raid one hour into the night shift, at one o’clock. That should give us time enough to be well away before the shift change.” He glanced up at a dour, heavyset farmer whose corncob pipe filled the already stuffy atmosphere with acrid fumes. “You’re responsible for the wagons Joshua.”
“Aye.” Joshua nodded phlegmatically. “Three of ’em should do it.” Sun poured through the two glazed windows that pierced the walls whose plaster of oyster-shell lime shone dazzling white under this illumination.
“Knives only?” said Tod, upending a rum bottle into his tankard.
Benedict nodded bleakly. “Absolute silence, or we’re lost.” He sliced into the raised crust of a giblet pie and carried the pewter spoon to his lips. “My compliments to your lady, Joshua. This is a fine pie.”
“We’ll all be lost if the British take Charleston,” muttered a young man with a shock of bright red hair and an educated voice. “Georgia was lost as soon as they took Savannah. South Carolina’ll go the same way, you mark my words. And what’s the South to do without its major seaport?”
“Don’t be such a pessimist, Dick.” Benedict spoke briskly, pushing the pie toward the young man. “If Lincoln fails to hold Charleston, General Washington will send reinforcements from the North. And we’ll be ready to welcome them with an entire armory and a band of Patriot soldiers well trained in the underbelly of this war.” A smile lit his eyes, and he helped himself to the rum bottle. “Every weapon we take, my friends, is one less for the Tories.”
“And every dead sentry, one less to fight,” someone growled.
“True enough,” Ben said without expression. He looked at the grandfather clock and pushed back his chair. He’d been away from the cabin for three hours, and it would take him an hour to return, on foot and by way of the little-known trails. “Rendezvous in the usual place, the first night of the new moon.” He waited until they had all gone, except Joshua, whose house it was. Farmers, gentlemen, laborers—a diverse group with a shared aim. They would drive the British occupation from American soil and fulfill the goal of independence asserted with such magnificence three years earlier. Benedict Clare would help them, avenging his own wrongs and those of his friends as he fought the same enemy he had fought in his homeland, fighting for the same cause. He had lost once, but he would not do so again. Next time, he would die first.
With a gesture of farewell to his monosyllabic host, he slipped out into the July afternoon. The farm was isolated, set well back from the river and the main thoroughfares on land. It could be approached from any number of directions and, as such, provided the ideal meeting place for men who did not wish to be seen traveling in one another’s company. Benedict made for the trees, seemingly uncharted to the ignorant eye, but for one who knew them they were a positive maze of intersecting trails easy enough for the educated eye to read.
He reached the clearing an hour later. The three Indians sitting around the stone fireplace hailed him cheerfully. Benedict returned the greeting in correct form before asking where the girl was.
“She crawled off into the woods,” one of them said easily. “But we came to see you, Ben, not her.”
“When did she go off into the woods?” he asked, apprehension prickling his scalp.
“When we arrived.” The Indian looked up at the sun. “Some three hours past.”
“Death and damnation!” Ben swore. “Why did you not stop her?”
“Came to see you, not her,” the other repeated calmly. “Heard you’d got a woman, though.” He offered a serene smile of congratulation that was not returned.
“Which direction did she take?”
“Over yonder. Went through the window at back.” His informant gestured behind the cabin. Then a rather surprising thought seemed to strike him. “You want to find her? It shouldn’t be difficult—not if she doesn’t know the woods.”
It was not an offer to be refused. These men would see tracks invisible to Benedict, and the woods were vast. What on earth had possessed her to break her word? There was nothing remotely alarming about his three visitors, who would have arrived perfectly peaceably … unless you were an aristocratic planter’s sheltered daughter whose head had been stuffed with the old stories of savage massacres. It would not need many promptings of a rich imagination to send such a one scuttling in panic. Understanding reduced his anger to exasperation, but it could do nothing to allay his fears for her—an inexperienced baby loose in the woods with only half her memory.
His companions read answer in his expression and loped off into the trees at the rear of the house. Benedict stood irresolute. It was a waste of time and effort to join them; it was not as if he could be of any assistance. And she might find her own way back. In which case it would be better if he was here.
Bryony, in fact, had long ago given up all hope of ever being able to find her way back. The world consisted of trees—monumental, gnarled oaks that blocked the light of the sun; huge, spreading chestnuts whose leaves filtered the light that dappled the mossy carpet at her feet. There were bright animal eyes, too, and rustlings; the knocking of a woodpecker, much less alarming than the funny snaking slithers that brought clammy sweat to the palms of her hands. Every now and again, she would remember that some snakes lived in trees, waiting curled against a gray branch for a movement beneath; and when she remembered that, Bryony thought that death was probably preferable to the terror of anticipation. It seemed that, except when she was with Ben, there was only terror.
She stubbed her toe on an upthrust root and dropped to the ground with a moan of misery, rubbing the injured foot. A sudden shiver ran down her spine. Abruptly she looked up—into a grinning bronzed face. Bryony screamed, leaping to her feet. She continued to scream, drowning out the words of the Indian, who was joined almost immediately by his two companions. Then a flat palm slapped against her right cheek, and she fell silent with a sobbing breath.
“Your pardon,” the Indian who had struck her apologized carelessly. “But you weren’t listening. Ben wants you back.” He gestured with a flick of his hand to the right, and Bryony belatedly came to her senses. She had run needlessly from Ben’s friends. The doeskin tunic she was wearing—hadn’t he said it came from a friend? Tears of mortification at her foolishness stabbed, and she blinked hastily. A finger prodded her in the small of the back, and she realized that she was still standing in the same spot. “Not good for a man’s woman to run off,” the owner of the finger declared.
Bryony’s tears dried miraculously. “I am not Ben’s woman!”
A disbelieving “humph” came from behind her, and the finger jabbed again. She set off in the required direction, thinking with an absurd and slightly hysterical bubble of laughter that her three captors obviously did not realize they were responsible for her flight. And how would Benedict see it? The thought sobered her instantly. She had violated her parole. But surely he would understand.
She found herself in the clearing in a ludicrously short time—an embarrassingly short time! No more than a quarter of an hour, yet she had been wandering, lost, for an eternity.
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“Sweet Jesus!” Ben strode toward the little group. “You gave me your word!” His hands closed over her shoulders, his eyes charcoal embers as he shook her. Bryony pushed vigorously against his chest with clenched fists.
“I was frightened!” she protested, instinctively adopting the policy of attack as the best form of defense. “I do not know who your friends are! I know nothing about you. You left me here alone—”
Ben silenced her with his mouth, hard in its enforcement, yet making his own statement of relief. Their audience, appearing to find nothing untoward about the spectacle, returned to squat at the open-air hearth as they had done throughout the afternoon. The trouble with the woman had simply delayed their talk with Ben, but patience was a quality they had in abundance.
“Where have you been?” Benedict demanded, releasing her lips at last.
“I do not know,” she said miserably. “To hell and back, I think. There is so much to be frightened of, Ben, when you have neither comprehension nor memory to make sense of things.”
Slowly, he nodded as he made space in the circuitous turmoil of anger and relief for empathetic understanding. He smoothed the tumbled hair from her brow, his thumbs massaging her temples as a rueful smile played over his lips. “Poor lass. You are having a rough time of it, these days. A little brandy, I think, is called for. Come and be introduced properly to my friends.”
“I thought I was not supposed to meet your friends.” In spite of a distressing afternoon followed by inordinate relief, Bryony was still capable of challenge.
“That depends on the friends,” he said in a level tone, refusing to pick up the glove. “You can do no more harm to these than they can do to you.”
Bryony frowned. “The Indians are not connected with your ‘business,’ then?”
“A logical enough conclusion,” he said with an easy nod. “They’ll not, however, expect you to participate in our conversation, so you will not embarrass me by remaining after you have been introduced, I trust.”
“I am not an Indian woman,” Bryony pointed out.
“That is not in dispute, but it won’t alter their view of the matter. And as they are my guests, I will not offend their principles.” It was said very gently, accompanied by a smile, but Bryony was in little doubt as to the nature of the request—it was not one that brooked refusal.
“I have remembered about the war,” she said, preferring to allow his statement to go by default. “At least, I have remembered some. I would like you to tell me the bits I have forgotten.”
“We will discuss it later.” Without further ado, he led her over to the fire stones, where with immaculate formality he introduced her to the three men. Then he asked quietly, “Would you bring us the bottle of brandy, lass? Take some for yourself, first.”
So, in addition to absenting herself from the conversation, the woman was required to wait upon the menfolk. Something niggled at the back of her mind as she went into the cabin—a sense of déjà vu. Somewhere, sometime, she had felt this same irritation, yet knowing, as she did now, that the irritation was not considered acceptable or justified. Rules were rules, and one should not attempt to change them. Or, at least, that was the received wisdom.
Bryony poured brandy into a cup, which she left on the table, then took the bottle outside, presenting it with a mock curtsy to Benedict.
The black eyes sparked with laughter. “So, you haven’t forgotten your manners, then,” he murmured, taking the brandy. “Try to rest a little now. You are still not fully recovered, and I don’t wish to have an invalid on my hands again.”
She smiled appreciatively, recognizing the delicate way he had ensured her compliance with his guests’ rules while giving her the perfect self-motivating excuse for her absence. And truth be told, she was very weary.
An hour later, Benedict’s guests took their leave. A glance in the cabin told him that Bryony was fast asleep, and he took his gun and went out in search of their dinner. It was the devil’s own nuisance that she had recalled the war. Once he had satisfied her hunger for the details, she would draw the obvious conclusion—that he himself was hip deep in the civil strife.
His eye caught a flash of gray in the undergrowth. His musket bellowed, and the flash became still. It was a plump hare, more flavorsome than squirrel, which was an acquired taste and one that it was reasonable to assume had not so far been acquired by Miss Bryony.
“Are you fighting for the Patriots or the Loyalists?” Bryony asked him as he came back toward the cabin. “I have been trying to light the fire, but I do not seem very good at it.” Her cheeks smudged with soot and her hands caked with ash were ample evidence of this fact—that and a very dead fire.
So, she had already reached the correct conclusion without help from him. Her sleep had obviously renewed more than her physical strength. There was little to be gained by further concealment. He dropped the bloody carcass on the grass and squatted down beside her. “Let me show you. It’s just a knack.”
Bryony sat back on her heels and watched him with undisguised admiration. “You are so competent, Ben.” Her eyes flicked to the dead hare. “I suppose you are going to skin that now.”
“Unless you wish to eat it with the skin on,” he suggested with a gravity belied by the curve of his mouth. “Or do you care to attempt the task yourself?”
“No,” she said with repugnance. “If I were not so hungry, I do not think I should care to eat it, either.”
“Well, there are some carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions that you can peel and chop,” he said cheerfully, indicating a small sack leaning up against the cabin. “A gift from our friends this afternoon. In the pot with the hare, they will make an excellent stew.”
“I suppose so.” Bryony sounded a little doubtful. She was quite sure that she had never peeled a vegetable. “You did not answer my question.”
Ben pulled his clasp knife from his belt. “No, I did not.” Dragging the hare toward him, he turned it over and slit its belly.
Bryony averted her eyes. “You don’t really need to, because I think I can guess. You are a Patriot. I remembered what the war is about, you see, when I woke up, and I do not think that Loyalists live in woods.”
“And what are you?” he asked, pausing in his task.
Bryony sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve made my head ache with thinking, but there is still nothing there. I know that I must be one or the other, because everyone is, are they not?”
“All but the dying and the lunatic,” he agreed.
“Well, what do you think I am?”
“Impossible to say.” He shrugged, wiping his bloody hands on the grass. “Trueman’s Tory, though, and you were at his house.”
“He would not entertain a Patriot?”
“He might.” Ben quartered the hare and threw it into a pot. “There’s been no real fighting in these parts, yet. Rhetoric, certainly, gathering of arms and training of militia; but families and friends are living with split loyalties. When it comes time to bear arms, then the divisions will make themselves felt.”
“And that time will come soon?” The deep blue eyes held him with their intensity, their passionate need to people the wasteland of her mind with sense and facts.
He could not refuse her that understanding; could not condemn her to wander in the confusion of a suddenly imposed, arbitrary ignorance. “Georgia and some areas of South Carolina have fallen to the British expeditionary force and the Loyalists. Charleston has been under attack since May. If it falls to Clinton and Cornwallis, then the rest of the Carolinas will follow. Virginia, logically and geographically, comes next.”
That was what she had been trying to remember this morning. But the voice that accompanied the revived memory still remained an elusive echo. “So you are preparing for this? Preparing to meet the Tories and the British if … when … they come?” It was presented as a question, but it was fundamentally rhetorical.
Ben opened the sack of vegetables and upturned i
t on the ground before her. Wiping his knife clean, he presented it to her, handle politely forward. “Your job, Miss Bryony.”
She grimaced but attacked the task with grim determination. “You were working for the Patriot cause when you fired the barn that night?”
“Yes.” He sat back and watched her, a smile tugging his lips at her struggles with a potato.
“Doing what?” She held up the potato for inspection. “It doesn’t look very clean.”
“Stealing arms.” He stood up. “I’ll fetch water from the creek. When they’re washed, I expect they will do.”
“And you did not want me to know of these things because when … if … I remember who I am, it might be difficult for us?”
“Basically,” he agreed, picking up the kettle. “If I find I’ve a passionate Tory under my roof, one who knows a great deal more than she should about me, we would both be in danger. As would those with whom I work.”
“But now I do know.”
“Yes, you do.” A sheen of mockery filmed his eyes—a mockery that encompassed them both. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, lass. I held out for as long as I could against the odds presented by a somewhat determined waif with a wonderfully passionate hunger for the glories of loving.”
Bryony smiled with pleasure. “It was quite unexpected,” she announced, almost smugly. “I do not think I had felt it before.”
Benedict roared with laughter. “There is a world of difference between feeling such a hunger and satisfying it, sweeting. I suspect that you have been tormented with the feeling for quite some time, but its satisfaction is customarily confined to the conjugal bed. And you appear to have no husband, for all your advanced years.”
“Well, what happens now that I know about you?” Bryony found both his laughter and his statement a little galling and reverted to the original topic.
His laughter died. “We will have to wait and see what your memory turns up. There’s no point crossing bridges until we reach them.”
He went down to the creek, leaving Bryony to wrestle with recalcitrant vegetables, and to reflect that, in truth, she still knew very little of the man. His history was as closed to her as her own, and was likely to remain so if Benedict had anything to say about it. It was a history that had scarred him, and she was somehow convinced that the worst scars were those she could neither see nor touch.
