Chase the Dawn

by Jane Feather

  “No,” he agreed with a tight little smile that fortunately Bryony did not see. “Quite customary. You made no objections?”

  “I did not really have any, until … well, I did not have any. We have known each other for years and have always liked each other. One does not marry for love, after all.” She shot him a challenging look. “If one did, matters would be a little different, would they not?”

  Ben simply inclined his head. “So, why are you not married to this worthy gentleman?”

  Bryony bit back the angry retort at his thinly veiled sarcasm. “I wished for a little time … time to be free and to be myself—a self-indulgent whim, you understand?” She glared at him. “But Papa agreed that the marriage should be postponed until my twenty-first birthday. Francis and his father could not really argue, so …” Another shrug.

  “I see.” Sir Edward Paget must be an indulgent father, he reflected. Indulgent, understanding, and loving. But the way a man conducted himself in his private affairs was not always reflected in his public conduct. He could be as gentle as a lamb with his daughter, and yet be as roughly brutal as he pleased to those unfortunates who depended on his generosity for survival, without anyone remarking on any dissonance.

  Bryony felt a graveyard shiver run down her back at the stark, bleak bitterness on his face. Nothing she had said could have caused that look. Hesitantly, she put her hand out to touch his. “What is troubling you so, Ben?”

  He shook his head briskly, as if to dispel whatever cloud hung over him. “Continue with your story, Miss Paget. I am fascinated. What has this Francis done to cause you to wish to break off such a mutually advantageous arrangement?”

  Bryony flinched at the cold, ironical tone. “You’re not really interested,” she said, exchanging the chewed stem of grass for a fresh one. “I think I will go to bed.”

  “You have not yet had your dinner,” Ben pointed out, laying an arresting hand on her shoulder. “And the sun has only just gone down.”

  “I am not hungry, but I am sleepy.” She made to rise, but the hand on her shoulder held her down.

  “I crave pardon, Bryony lass. I have had an uncomfortable day,” he apologized softly. “I am truly interested in the story. There are times when my dark side makes itself felt, and I cannot always prevent it.”

  “It is my fault. I know it is, but I don’t truly understand why.” She gazed, wide-eyed with the appeal for enlightenment.

  Benedict sighed, running a hand up the back of her neck. “Sweeting, you must accept it when I say it is not your fault. More than that I am not prepared to say, and you should be aware by now that there are things about me you may not know. I have told you this often enough.”

  It was so much easier to relax against the hand massaging her neck, to let her head rest against his shoulder, to accept that this dark side would soon give way to the sun’s light and everything between them would be as it was before this morning. So much easier to believe that than to fight to understand what had happened, to shiver in the chill of hurt and incomprehension. Hesitantly, feeling for words, she told him about discovering Francis in the pantry, about his passionate, despairing appeal that she continue with the wedding, about the confusion that had led her to the stableyard in the early hours of the morning that had brought her and Benedict together.

  Ben listened in silence, amazed at the matter-of-fact acceptance of Francis Cullum’s predilections exhibited by this tender, well-bred young lady. Some devil in him found aspects of the situation hilarious, but he controlled the reaction severely. It was not in the least amusing for Bryony Paget, for all that an outcast from that society might take wicked delight in such an overturning of well-laid plans.

  “So, you see, I really do not know what to do,” she finished. “If Francis wishes to take his pleasure in that manner, then it’s nothing to do with me, but I cannot marry him, knowing that he prefers men to women. I don’t think I could even if he said he liked women, as well,” she added thoughtfully, and Benedict, his control finally defeated, whooped with laughter.

  “Now, what’s amusing?” Bryony looked at him in puzzled indignation. “It doesn’t strike me as in the least funny.”

  “Forgive me. It is you who are amusing, sweeting. Young ladies of your background and expectations are not supposed to know of such peculiarities, and you are certainly not supposed to condone them.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I have had an unusual education. I am very well-read in the classics, you understand, and in ancient times such fancies were perfectly acceptable.”

  “Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “I seem to remember that from my own schooling.”

  “You are making fun of me again,” she accused.

  “Heaven forfend!” His hands lifted in horror, and she fell on him, fists flailing in feigned indignation. They rolled together on the grass, burying the real emotional disharmony in a mock physical battle. Each knew that this was the case, and each, in cowardice, eagerly grasped the opportunity to retreat from the pain by denying, for the moment, the rift that had so suddenly sprung between them.

  Try as she might during the next few days, Bryony could no longer deny that rift. Ben was preoccupied and took to going off into the woods for hours at a time. True, he always came back with game of some kind, but Bryony could not deceive herself that hunting for the dinner table was his sole motive for these expeditions. If it were, he would have allowed her to accompany him, as she frequently had done in the past. But the first time since his return from Williamsburg that she tentatively suggested bearing him company, he produced a list of tasks around the cabin that were apparently imperative and would keep her busy for the better part of the day; the second time, he responded with a blunt, unadorned refusal. She hid her hurt as best she could, and greeted him cheerfully and without recrimination on his return, but she did not again risk the pain of rejection. Instead she waited in forlorn patience for the invitation that was not issued.

  On the fifth day, Bryony decided that something had to be done. She had racked her brain for some way in which she was responsible for his withdrawal, but she came up with nothing that could have caused this degree of resentment. Her Loyalist background was problematic, but surely no more than that. She would not betray Ben and his men, and she was no fervent proponent of the king, so there should be no cause for quarreling between them on that score. Perhaps, therefore, it was nothing to do with her. Perhaps something had occurred that Ben would not—or could not—share with her. Perhaps she should offer him comfort and reassurance, attempt to take his mind off whatever was distressing him in the only way she knew, offering the healing love of her body with a generous spirit that would make no demands of its own.

  Benedict, although he slept beside her every night, had made no attempt to touch her beyond a brief goodnight kiss. She had assumed he was exhibiting a natural delicacy about her monthly indisposition, but such consideration was no longer relevant and maybe he was waiting for her to signal that fact.

  With a plan of action came relief. She had spent too long agonizing in indecision and incomprehension. It was time to take matters into her own hands. Humming cheerfully, Bryony found soap and towel and set off for the creek. No longer bothered by sharing her bathwater with fish and water beetles, she washed her hair and every inch of skin, then lay on the bank, allowing the sun to dry her before she returned to the cabin.

  Instead of the doeskin tunic, which by now had most definitely seen better days, she donned Benedict’s nightshirt, freshly washed and sun-dried, taking as much care as if she were dressing for a dance as she rolled the sleeves artistically. She gathered the material at her slender waist, wrapping a cravat around as her sash, tying it in a neat bow at her back. Ben had a comb—missing several teeth, certainly, but a comb, nevertheless—and she put it to good use, drawing it through the shining blue-black silken waterfall until not a tangle remained. There was no mirror, but somehow she knew that her eyes were bright, her skin clear; Ben, in the time before thi
s estrangement, had told her so often how he loved the way the sun had colored her complexion that she could picture her features without difficulty.

  Then, as eager and as carefully prepared as any bride anxious to please her groom, Bryony went outside to sit in the evening sun and await the returning hunter.

  Benedict, in the company of three Indians, a deer slung on a pole between two of them, emerged laughing into the clearing and then stopped, the smile fading from his face as Bryony stood up, turning to greet him. The fine weave of the lawn nightshirt did little to conceal the shape of her breasts, the dark shadow of her nipples, the soft lines of her body. Her eyes, in the instant before she registered his companions, shone with the luminous glow of anticipation—the glow they always bore when she contemplated lovemaking—and her arms lifted toward him. Then they fell to her sides so rapidly that he could almost have imagined the invitation.

  He felt a sick sinking in his belly, remorse mingling with compassion, as he understood what she had been intending as she waited, so fresh and eager, for his return. He knew he had behaved abominably to her in the last few days. Somehow, whenever he saw her, heard her voice, watched her move with the unconscious certainty of privilege, all the memories so firmly controlled, the bitterness carefully reined so that it provided only constructive force rather than destructive inefficiency, were triggered into life again, obscuring clarity and rational purpose. Bryony Paget bore no personal responsibility for the horrors that he and others had endured, but she belonged to the perpetrators, had learned their values and ideals, had absorbed a self-image that placed her without personal effort on the pedestal of the master race, both in Ireland and here in the Colonies—the English. And that image, as well as her unquestioning acceptance of the privileges that accompanied it, was manifest in every move she made, every word she spoke, so that constantly and quite unconsciously she exacerbated the deep-rooted sores on his soul and he reacted with blind unkindness.

  Ben pulled himself together as one of his companions cleared his throat. Bryony should not be standing there in that semitransparent shift, her loving purpose nakedly revealed as much to his friends as to himself. He strode rapidly across to her, leaving the Indians, who, standing utterly motionless, seemed to fade into the background of trees as if understanding that their presence was for the moment awkward.

  “Sweet heaven, lass! We are in the middle of the forest, not in the boudoir of a bawdy house!” The low-voiced exclamation sounded harsh when he had wanted it to sound gently teasing. He kissed her quickly, before the deepening hurt and embarrassment in her blue eyes could overwhelm him. “You are a sight to enflame even the most jaded spirit,” he whispered, his lips brushing the sensitive corner of her mouth. “But it is not a sight I am prepared to share. Where is your tunic?”

  Bryony shrugged with a fair assumption of carelessness, fighting back the wave of mortification. “I felt like wearing something clean after my bath, that’s all.” Her eyes went over his shoulder to the three men and the dead buck, and the joyful glow, the energy of decision, ran away from her like drops of oil on stretched hide.

  “Go and put it on,” he insisted. “It is hardly fair to torment those who may not accept the invitation.”

  “I did not know …” she began, then turned with a helpless little shrug to the cabin. “I will stay inside until they’ve gone.”

  “They will stay to sup with us,” Benedict told her. “We must divide the buck, since we caught it together, but we intend to roast a haunch and share it tonight.”

  “My company will be unwelcome, in that case,” she said in a dull monotone. “Your friends will not choose to break bread with a woman.”

  Benedict caught her arm as she moved toward the cabin. “You will eat with us, and you will help me prepare the meal,” he stated. “I have told them so already, and they expect it.”

  “And if I do not wish to?”

  “Why would you not wish to?”

  “Perhaps for the same reason that you do not wish for my company.” Her voice was dull, flat, and she stood passively, still turned toward the cabin, waiting for him to release her arm.

  Benedict’s hold tightened. “I am not going to embark on an unseemly squabble in front of my guests. We can discuss this later, but for now you will please change your dress and come back out here. If you refuse to join us, you will insult them and humiliate me.”

  “When last they were here, my presence would have done both, as I recall,” she snapped. “What has changed so radically?”

  Benedict sighed, hanging on to his temper by a thread as he recognized that she did have a point. “I invited them to share our meal,” he said quietly, “making it clear that if they accepted the invitation, they must also accept the rules of my fireside. They are most courteous men, Bryony, and having accepted graciously both the invitation and the condition, any alteration in either would cause them grievous insult. Do you understand that?”

  She did, of course, although definitions of courtesy were obviously open to interpretation. “Yes. I’ll go and change.”

  “Thank you.” Releasing her arm, he offered her a small bow that in different circumstances would have entertained her. But now, with her healing plan in ruins, her grievances relegated to the status of an unseemly squabble, there seemed little reason for amusement.

  When she came outside again, once more respectably clad in her tunic and moccasins, her hair tied back with the cravat that had served as a sash for the nightshirt, she found the fire already blazing and the four men occupied in butchering the deer. Bryony picked up the kettle and headed for the creek, averting her eyes from the butchery. Mint and cress grew in lavish profusion around the creek, and she gathered a bunch for a salad, reflecting that since meeting Ben she saw her surroundings with new eyes—recognizing in perfectly ordinary plants, grasses, and bushes the makings of a quite tasty dish or accompaniment to the abundance of fish, fowl, or game. He had taught her with painstaking care on those occasions when they had roamed the woodland together—on those occasions when he had seemed to welcome her companionship.

  Absently, she sat back on her heels, gazing across the creek to the reed-thatched marsh beyond. She had to return home. There was nothing to keep her here anymore—no hope for a permanent future—and she could not evade the responsibilities of her identity for much longer. But she did not want to part from Benedict like this, unable to understand and therefore unable to change his abrupt, bewildering indifference to her that had come out of the blue and at times seemed close to dislike.

  “Bryony? What the devil are you doing? This is no time for daydreaming!” Ben’s voice, raised in exasperation, brought her to her feet automatically. “I need this water, and I need your help,” he declared testily, taking the kettle from her. “In case you have forgotten, you are not lounging around on a terrace, sipping orange-flower water and waiting for your dinner to appear as if by magic, prepared and presented by unseen hands! If you wish to eat, you do your share.”

  Tears pricked behind her eyelids at this blatant injustice. “I do do my share!” She yelped as he pushed her in front of him with a light but definitely scolding smack on her bottom. “Don’t do that! I am not a donkey!”

  As rapidly as it had arisen, his irritation seemed to vanish under the indignant glare she threw at him over her shoulder. “I beg your pardon,” Ben said in perfunctory apology. “I cannot imagine how I could have made such an error.” His lips twitched and he put the kettle down, grabbing Bryony around the waist, bringing her hard against his body. “Cry truce, sweeting.”

  “But it is you who are quarreling, not I,” she said. “I don’t understand what has happened. I cannot seem to do anything right.” The temptation to sink against him, to drop her defenses and melt into his strength sang a siren song, but she resisted it, afraid of another rebuff, which painful experience had taught her could follow this moment of warmth, without a word of warning.

  His expression softened and a long finger traced t
he straight line of her mouth. “I am an unmitigated bastard,” he said remorsefully. “I must wrestle with my own demons, sweet Bryony. I cannot help it if I must do so alone.”

  “I should leave you, then,” she said. “Return home, become again Miss Bryony Paget with an insoluble problem.” There was no note of question in her voice, no request for reprieve from the inevitable.

  “You must decide that for yourself,” he replied, wondering why he was not endorsing a resolve that he had made for himself and was the only avenue open to either of them. “Come now, we cannot talk of this further with venison to cook and guests to entertain.”

  It was a strange evening that Bryony passed. Their visitors barely acknowledged her presence, but neither did they show her the least discourtesy on the occasions when they were obliged to notice her. The stone cider jar emptied over the course of the evening, and Bryony, interpreting correctly a glance from Ben, fetched the brandy bottle from the cabin. Benedict, she noticed, showed little sign of being the worse for drink; his three visitors, on the other hand, began to have difficulty putting their words together coherently and coordinating their movements.

  A heavy yellow moon hung in the purple sky, and the air was redolent of wood smoke and roasting venison. Mosquitoes whined in the close, humid night, and Bryony gave up slapping at them since they only renewed the attack when her hands were elsewhere.

  “Go to bed,” Ben said into her ear. “They will bother you less inside if you hang the blanket over the window.”

  She had been intending to wait up with him until the visitors left, had been hoping that the moment of warmth beside the creek could be kindled anew, and, as they took pleasure in and of each other, that they could touch truth, reach some point of understanding. But she rose, bade them all a soft good night, and retired into the cabin. The blanket over the window kept out the mosquitoes, but it made the atmosphere in the cabin insufferably hot. She lay naked, sprawled on the bedstead, the sheet cast aside, feeling the sweat dew her skin simply with the effort of breathing. The rise and fall of voices murmured beyond the door, broken by an occasional crack of laughter and the sound of liquid slurping into a beaker.