“Please,” the housekeeper begged. “My master is not well.” She put her arms around Peregrine and covered his nakedness. “Go,” she said. “He is ill. He cannot harm you now, and when he awakens he will remember nothing.” Peregrine’s body convulsed, and Annemie pushed him gently back against the heaped pillows.
“Will you give us time to get away?” Bess asked.
“Yes,” Annemie replied. “Go now, while you can.”
Bess tugged at Kincaid’s arm. “He’s having a seizure,” she said. Kincaid lowered the pistol. Together they stepped back over the windowsill and out onto the veranda. “What of the guards?” she whispered.
“They’ll give us no trouble,” he answered.
As they moved away from Peregrine’s bedchamber into the garden, Bess heard Annemie crooning to her master.
“I’m here, my sweet. Annemie is here, and no one will harm you.”
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” Bess murmured to Kincaid. His skin was hot, and he was hurting terribly; she could tell by the unnatural way he moved.
“Aye, you’d have me stay aboard the Tanager and let ye sell yourself to that popinjay.”
“I had a plan.”
“To hell with your plan.”
“You’re near dead on your feet.”
“I’m nay dead yet, am I?” he snarled.
“Give me that pistol,” she insisted. “Damn, you’re bleeding all over me.”
“Who’s the man here, ye or me? I’ll keep my weapon.”
She staggered under his weight while tears rolled down her cheeks. “Stubborn fool.”
“Aye, I am that.”
Miraculously, they saw not a soul as they crossed the garden and neared the stables. Bess prayed that the stable hands didn’t sleep with the horses. She knew that Kincaid could never walk as far as Kingston Harbor. Her only hope of getting him there was astride a mount.
“Where are ye takin’ me?” he demanded. “This isna the right way.”
“I’m going to steal us a horse.”
“Hellfire and damnation. And who is it that made my life a misery because I borrowed a horse?”
“Be still,” she whispered. “You’ll wake the dogs. Are you drunk, to ramble so?”
“I’ve not had a drop.”
She eased him down to the ground. “Wait here while I see if I can get a horse.”
“I was stealin’ horses when ye were—”
“Hush,” she said, putting her fingers over his mouth. “Hush, Kincaid.” For a few seconds, she leaned against him and held on to him tightly. “I’ll get us a horse, darling. I will. We’ll go back to the ship and. . .”
She trailed off, suddenly realizing that she had no idea which way to go. “I don’t know where the harbor is.”
“I do,” he said, breathing hard. “But I’m not so sure I can stay on that horse if ye catch one.”
She kissed him, one brief kiss, and then she was up and running across the open space to the stables. She reached the building and pressed herself against the wall, then felt her way to the first set of Dutch doors. Each stall opened outward; she remembered that much. The question was, where could she find a saddle and a bridle in the dark? And if she did, would a strange horse let her saddle him and lead him away without making a fuss?
The first stall was empty. The second contained an animal too flighty to try to steal, but at the third she was lucky. The animal was wearing a halter and was tied by a length of stout rope to a ring in the far corner.
Running her hands over the mare, Bess spoke soothingly to her. When she was satisfied that the animal was gentle, she tied the end of the rope into a slipknot, forced the mare’s mouth open, and eased the loop over the horse’s lower jaw. The rig made a crude bridle, but it was better than none. When the mare didn’t protest, Bess led her out of the stable and back to the spot where she’d left Kincaid.
“No saddle,” she apologized as she helped him to his feet. “But you won’t have to walk.” She led the horse to a mounting block and held her still while Kincaid struggled up onto her back. Then she hiked up her gown, swung up behind him, and dug her heels into the mare’s side. “It’s going to be all right,” she said, as much to convince herself as to convince Kincaid. “We’ll get back to the ship and sail out of Kingston Harbor before Peregrine Kay can stop us. We’re going home, Kincaid. Home to Maryland. We can be married in the church at Oxford and—”
“We’ll not be wed,” he rasped.
“What?” She swallowed back the disappointment. “But I thought—”
“I love ye, Bess. I’d die for ye. But I dinna wish to wed with ye.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve had my fill of cheating women. I’ll not lay my heart open to be broken again.”
“Cheating? You call what I did cheating? I never meant to sleep with Kay. I—”
“Dinna lie to me, woman. Ye did mean to sleep with him. Ye told me so yourself.”
“I did, but that was before. Damn it, Kincaid. It was to save us, so that we could get away. And then Annemie and I made this plan—”
“I’ll not change my mind. If I’d not come for ye, can ye swear ye’d not have let him have his way with ye?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“No. But ye would have.”
For a long time they rode in silence. And when he finally spoke, it was to say, “I’ll take ye back to Fortune’s Gift, Bess. I’ll see ye safe on your land. But then we’ll divide our gold, and we’ll each go our own way.”
“But I didn’t sleep with him,” she protested.
“Ye still dinna listen, do ye?” he said. “ ‘Tis your way, Bess. Ye set your mind to a thing, and then ye do it—no matter what I think. I want no wife who will not heed me, and I want no woman who thinks so little of my honor that she’d make herself a whore to save my life.”
“You’re a fool, Kincaid,” she murmured.
“Maybe.”
“I carry your child.”
He sighed. “If that’s true, then we’ll have the ship’s captain marry us. I’d not willingly bring another bastard into the world, and I’d not shame ye publicly. I’ll give him a name, and I’ll send you money for his upbringing. But I won’t live under your roof, Bess.”
“You’d abandon your own son?”
He forced a bitter laugh. “If ye like, ye can send him to me and I’ll try my hand at being a father. But you’ve a way with helpless creatures. I’ve no doubt you’d be a better mother than a wife. And a damn sight better parent than I’d be.”
“I want you to stay with me. I love you.”
“And I love you, lass. But a house canna have two masters, and we’d be forever fightin’ to see who wore the breeches in our marriage.”
“Kincaid!”
“We’ll speak no more of it, woman. I’ll see ye safe home, and I’ll do my duty by ye if we’ve made a child between us. But I’ll nay change my mind about this, and that’s the end of it.”
Chapter 24
Maryland, May 1726
Bess climbed into the high two-wheeled dog cart and took the leathers in one hand. With a flick of the reins and a loud click, she urged the dapple-gray hackney into a swift trot down the curved front lane of Fortune’s Gift. The baby kicked Bess hard and she laughed as she caressed her swollen abdomen with her free hand. “Soon, little one,” she murmured. “Soon you’ll be born, and out in all this big, bright world.”
Bess smiled with satisfaction as she looked at the wide field of tobacco spreading down to the river on her right. The fragile plants were green and upright, promising to make the best leaf crop she’d ever had. On the other side of the lane marched tall rows of Indian corn.
The showy gelding’s slim legs moved gracefully in long, low strides. The high red wheels spun merrily as the fancy yellow gig fairly flew over the hard-packed road. It was a sparkling late spring day—one which promised a warm afternoon and lengthening sunlight for the burgeoning crops—and Bess was still seeing
the beauty of the Eastern Shore with an almost hushed reverence.
The winter voyage home to Maryland from Jamaica had been uneventful and swift. And with the treasure the Scarlet Tanager had carried, Bess had been able to clear her debts with Myers and Son, and purchase supplies to rebuild all that had been destroyed by the marauders’ attack. Even after she had divided the gold with Kincaid, there was still enough to assure Fortune’s Gift’s future for a long time to come.
As the road ran down to the water, it split into two paths. One led to her dock, where the Tanager and two smaller boats were anchored; the other, to the pastureland and, beyond that, the edge of the virgin forest Kincaid was clearing for new tobacco fields. Bess reined in the dapple-gray just enough to keep from overturning the cart and headed left onto the woods trail.
She glanced at the brownish-green surface of the river, edged by thin strips of buff and, interspaced with clumps of cattails and ferns. A great blue heron tucked in his wings, stretched out his long neck, and drifted down to perch on cranelike yellowish legs in the shallows. Farther out in the current a rusty-headed canvasback bobbed, tail up, then vanished beneath the water. And just to the left of the dirt lane, a red-winged blackbird swayed on a willow branch and scolded the passing horse and cart with a sharp chek-tee-err.
Bess smiled and called, “Good morning to you too.” Not even Reverend Thomas’s unexpected visit just after breakfast had been able to ruin her lighthearted mood. She’d given the disapproving cleric twenty minutes to tell her that her behavior was a disgrace and that people were talking, offered him breakfast, and made her escape in the dog cart.
She had cared not a fig for neighbors’ gossip, that she—large with child—was still an unmarried woman. Kincaid had tried to force her to wed him on the ship once it had become evident that she was telling the truth about being in the family way. But she’d refused.
“When I marry, I marry for life,” she’d informed him. “Since you have no intention of staying on Fortune’s Gift with me, then I have no intention of becoming your wife and making myself subject to a man who will be conspicuous by his absence.”
“Ye canna make our babe a bastard!” he’d threatened.
“Why not? It never killed you,” she’d replied.
Their relationship had been stormy after that. Kincaid had insisted that he was leaving once she was safely home—but it had been three months, and he was still here. Bess chuckled to herself. First it had been the tobacco seedlings . . .
“I’ll nay go until the seeds have sprouted in the woodlots,” Kincaid had proclaimed sternly. “If they are not tended carefully, you’ll lose them all.”
“I’m capable of overseeing the seedlings,” she’d retorted. “Who do you think did it last year?”
“Last year ye were nay a woman with a swelling belly.”
A rabbit darted across the pathway, but the dapple-gray horse never missed a stride. Bess was glad she’d brought the cart this morning and not dragged herself up into the saddle. Riding astride was definitely more difficult with a great bulge in front of you, and Velvet, the mare she usually rode, had an aversion to rabbits. If she’d ridden Velvet, she might have been rudely dumped on her bottom.
Let’s see, she thought, returning to the subject of Kincaid. After the seedlings were safely up and transplanted, then it was the dock that needed rebuilding, and then the barns. After that. . .
“I’ll see your corn crop in, and then I’m going. There’s nay use to argue with me, Bess. I’ve made up my mind,” he’d said in that deep burr that never failed to make delicious shivers run up arid down her spine. “I’ve my own future to consider, and it’s growing late for me to think of spring planting on my own land.”
There was no denying that having Kincaid to direct the farm workers and the lumbermen was a great relief. The grumbling from the bond servants had lasted just long enough for Kincaid to knock the first troublemaker head over heels. After that, whatever the inhabitants of Fortune’s Gift might think about Kincaid’s dubious past, they gained respect for him with every passing day. When Kincaid gave an order, men and women jumped to obey.
And he worked as hard and long as any field hand on the plantation. From early dawn until dusk, he rode the fields, carried fence rails, chopped wood, and hoed tobacco seedlings. Bess usually saw him only at the light meal in the late evening, when they sat down together in the great hall. By then, he’d washed the dust from his body and hair, tied his golden hair back in a damp queue, shaved, and changed into a gentleman’s shirt, waistcoat, and breeches.
And for a brief few hours, Bess was able to pretend that they were man and wife. They rarely argued anymore. He was too excited about the day’s progress and the plans for expanding the southern fields. They laughed and talked together like old friends, each one eager to share humorous incidents and dreams with the other.
He had taken her advice about his name. His freedom-from-indenture papers, now duly recorded in the courthouse in Annapolis, read Robert Kincaid. She never called him that, of course. For her, he would always be simply Kincaid, and no matter how respectable he became in the future, she knew that he’d remain—in her mind—an adventuresome rogue.
For the past week, Bess had missed their evenings together. Kincaid had informed her that he was going away on business matters and that he would return by Saturday. This was Sunday morning. When Vernon had brought the horse and cart around to the door, he’d assured her that he’d seen Kincaid having breakfast with the timber crew. Bess assumed that he’d returned sometime in the night and had slept in the bachelor quarters rather than come into the manor house and risk waking her.
They slept in separate rooms. It was not by Bess’s choice. Married or not, she would have been willing to go on as they had begun. She missed him beside her at night, and she missed his lovemaking terribly. But so long as he remained stubborn, she had been determined not to beg him to return to her bed.
But today, when she’d awakened alone and lay curled around a pillow, feeling Kincaid’s child kick within her, she’d decided they’d played the game long enough. She had fretted over his absence and worried herself sleepless that he’d find a plantation for sale and not return to Fortune’s Gift at all. Today she would confront him and insist that he realize he’d been behaving like a spoiled child.
He loved her and she loved him. There was no reason that they shouldn’t marry and live happily ever after. Actually, she’d wrinkled her nose and laughed aloud over that. Happily, perhaps, but never peacefully. . . They were both too volatile to get by without arguing from time to time. . . and—she had to admit it—locking horns to see which one would get the better of the other.
And since she’d already decided to become a dutiful wife, Reverend Thomas’s sermon had been “preaching to the saved.” I consider Kincaid my husband anyway, Bess told herself. Hadn’t they pledged their love to each other and lived like a married couple? If they weren’t handfasted in the old custom, then who was? She’d never felt she was sinning in giving and taking Kincaid’s love. He was the only man for her, now and forever.
“In this world and the next. . .” she whispered to the dapple-gray horse. The animal flicked his ears, tossed his head, and quickened his trot.
Big trees, mostly oak, maple, and chestnut, stretched eastward from the river as far as Bess could see. A few charred stumps and piles of branches were scattered along the woods line. A team of spotted oxen blocked the road ahead. From the forest came the ring of steel against green timber.
“Gee-hah!” the driver called. The huge beasts threw their massive shoulders against the thick leather harness and moved an oak log along. “Mornin’, Miss Bess!” The workman touched his hat in greeting.
Bess waited until the oxen had dragged the log off the path, then flicked the reins again. The gelding trotted into the shadowy woods, and the sounds of chopping grew louder. A crash and the crack of breaking limbs came from her left. She slowed the dapple-gray to a walk and guided the cart p
ast a pile of fresh-cut logs. Under the direction of a black man, another team of oxen was attempting to pull a fallen tree loose from the tangled underbrush.
“Mornin’, Miss Bess,” Big Moses said. He pointed with the tip of a bullwhip. “Mr. Kincaid’s back that way.”
“Thank you.” Bess remembered that Kincaid had told her last week that he’d hired Moses Walker and his team of oxen to help out with the lumbering for a few weeks. “How’s Sally and that fine boy of yours?”
“Right as rain, both of them. Sally says you call her when your time comes.”
Bess nodded her thanks. She halted the gelding, climbed down from the cart, and tied the horse to a tree. Then she picked her way carefully through the chips and branches in the direction Big Moses had pointed. She found a game trail and followed that through a stand of cedar and found Kincaid busy chopping down a tall, straight beech tree. A dark-haired man, his face in shandows, stood next to him with a broadax in his hand.
When Kincaid caught sight of Bess, he said something to his companion, handed over the ax he was using, and hurried toward her. “I didn’t look to see ye this early,” he said. He was stripped to the waist and grinning like a man who’d just won reprieve from the hangman.
“Good day to you, sir,” she said, stopping and waiting for him.
“Ye didn’t ride out here, did ye?” he asked.
“No, I did not. I brought the dog cart.” She smiled up at him. “Welcome home, Kincaid.”
He took her arm gallantly and escorted her, not back toward the woods lane, but off through the forest into a small clearing. Then he stopped, caught her around the waist, and lifted her up onto a broad, flat-cut stump. She sat there, skirts spread around her and legs dangling over the edge. The stump was high enough so that her eyes were on a level with his. “I missed you,” she said shyly. Now that she was face-to-face with him, it wasn’t so easy to say what she’d practiced in her mind.
“I thought ye might.” His features were immobile, giving no hint of what he was thinking. Only his nutmeg-brown eyes twinkled with mischief. “The crews dinna work so well when I’m nay here, do they, lass?”
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