Cressida's Dilemma
Page 17
Elizabeth had survived by quarantining a little piece of her mind and soul, so carefully shielded that Silas would never guess that’s where she went when he invaded her body. If he did, he’d crush her.
Tonight Silas laboured longer than usual. In the half light of the long summer evening, as Elizabeth disconnected her mind from the body she hoped her husband would soon surrender, she wondered if, like her, he was more afraid than he cared to admit.
With a grunt and a frenzied series of jerking thrusts, Silas finally came, his body a suffocating dead weight for a few moments before he rolled off her belly. To her surprise, he put his hand upon her arm and drew her closer.
“You have been a good wife.” His perfunctory praise concealed more emotion than she’d received in many a year. Elizabeth felt suddenly proud. She was a good wife. She’d not married Silas for love but she’d obeyed her father’s dictates—in the end. Once she’d made her vows she’d toiled and suffered in the execution of her wifely duties, and she’d never complained.
As for her husband, Silas had never pretended to be anything other than he was—hard, uncompromising, unforgiving. And loyal. She had to grant him that. He would risk his life to protect the castle that was home to so many. And his family.
Tomorrow, when the boiling oil spilled from the battlements and swords were drawn, shedding blood on both sides, Silas would be in the thick of it, protecting the honour, lives and livelihoods of the hundreds of peasants who depended upon him.
The brief touch of his hand across her shoulder might have been affection, for he said, almost gruffly, “Aye, Elizabeth. The children would only have complicated matters. You were right to insist they be sent away.”
The fact that Silas was endorsing a stipulation she’d made several weeks ago, which he’d been so against at the time, defied every facet of his unforgiving, unyielding character.
He went on, “They are safe and when we are gone they will be raised as godly Puritans to avenge the deaths of their parents.”
The innocent faces of little Oliver and Agnes blurred in Elizabeth’s mind, coalescing into the cold, hard-planed angles of her husband. Elizabeth had always been a hard-working wife but she was determined—a trait for which she’d been punished and for which, in this instance, she’d been prepared to suffer greatly. Last week the children had left for the protection of Silas’ kinsman, a day’s ride away.
“You think we will die, husband?” She desperately hoped not to die and wanted to be reassured. She knew it was a weakness Silas would not indulge. Silas had never indulged her, though God knew he’d desired her from the first moment she’d changed from the child of his father’s friend to a comely maid of fifteen. Foolish child that she’d been, she’d thought she could turn it to her advantage. That she’d experience more kindness at the hands of her new husband than in the household of the father who’d bartered her and laid waste her dreams of happiness with the one man she’d truly loved.
“The Lord in his infinite wisdom will decide our fate. We will accept it with dignity and courage. Now sleep, for we have an early start.”
* * * *
They were up well before dawn, stationed upon the ramparts while the men rallied their defences.
Once again the breeze carried the scent of the enemy’s campfires. Elizabeth studied her husband as he gazed, with clenched jaw and balled fists, upon the farming land that had belonged to the Drummonds, extensive now after five generations. He was proud of what his family had achieved—justifiably so. Like his father, he’d been driven to acquire, not for personal gratification but because thrift and industry were manifestations of his esteem for his Creator.
He turned suddenly and must have seen the fear Elizabeth was trying so hard to conceal. His brows contracted. “Do not be afraid, wife. You will find the courage when you need it.”
She nodded, staring across at the beech wood from which the first soldiers in the column were emerging, like a thin ribbon of gaudy colour.
As a concession, the reassurance of his words was immense but glossed over, as Silas snorted his derision. “We might as well have a party of primping princesses wielding metal batons. They have the numbers but we have God on our side.” He gripped her upper arm, his thick fingers biting into her flesh, pulling her with him to the northern ramparts. He’d performed his husbandly ministrations, offering her all the kindness of which he was capable. Now it was time to brief her on her responsibilities. “While I am engaged in the fighting you will muster the women and boys into a tight force to repulse the enemy with whatever weapons can be spared. God knows, you are not versed in the violent ways of men, but He will condone the killing of these infidels. As many as you can, wife.”
The blood lust in his eyes struck fear into the core of her soul. Silas used violence sparingly but efficiently. She suspected he’d relish dying on his sword…after he’d used it to slit the throats of and disembowel as many of the opposing forces as he was capable. The flicker in his eye suggested he was close to embracing what lay ahead.
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About the Author
Historical Romance author, Beverley Oakley, took her passion for handsome rogues and worthy heroines to new heights when she worked in the back of low-flying survey aircraft over Greenland and French Guyana in the 1990s.
Her imaginative forays into the ballrooms of Regency high society, scribbled on paper during long and turbulent survey lines, were counterbalanced by the efforts of her mostly male fellow crewmembers to teach her an appreciation of a cold Windhoek Lager or fiery KWV Brandy; so three-month contracts away from home were borne with as much enjoyment as fortitude.
While Beverley’s broad repertoire of fictional heroes was fine-tuned through years of working in the male-dominated safari and airborne survey industries, her mostly nineteenth century heroines, by contrast, live very sheltered lives.
Beverley now lives with her family in Melbourne, Australia, twenty years after hitching her star to the Cessna Caravan (now a Boeing 777) of the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a campfire in Botswana’s beautiful Okavango Delta where she ran a safari lodge at the time. She teaches creative writing, makes historical costumes and works as a Disaster Events Researcher.
Beverley’s latest project is set in Colonial Lesotho where she was born and where her father prosecuted medicine murder and illegal diamond buying cases in the African kingdom’s rugged mountains during the 1960s.
Email: beverley.oakley@gmail.com
Beverley loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.totallybound.com.
Also by Beverley Oakley
Bodices and Boudoirs: The Cavalier
Totally Bound Publishing