by Fortune Kent
“To the estate?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where is—?” She held her hand over her mouth. How much did John know?
“Dr. Smith? You’re looking for Dr. Smith, aren’t you?” He snorted. “Don’t worry, I know why you’re here. I know what’s going on. You think I’m a flunky, don’t you? That’s why you never paid me heed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m just as good as you are. You’re such a proper lady that you think you can look down your nose at me.”
“You’re wrong, John. I don’t think anything of the kind.”
John shrugged. Beth inched away from him and saw her shadow move on the wall. The candle. She ran her hand over the splintered surface of the table. Where was the candle?
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” John said. “You’re here and you’re not leaving. Dr. Smith can’t help you. What’s more, you can’t help him, now or ever.”
“I thought—” she began.
“I know what you thought,” he broke in. She kept her eyes on him to make sure he didn’t discover her hand searching for the candle. “You expected a meeting of the anti-renters here,” he went on, “with the militia close behind.” He smiled. “Mr. Jeffrey told me. There’s no meeting, least not on the island. Mr. Jeffrey tricked you. Tricked you good, he did. There’s nobody on this island but me.” He paused and smiled again. “And you,” he added.
“Then Jeffrey knows you’re here?”
He reached for her arm. “Enough talk,” he said just as her hand touched the candleholder. Her fingers tightened on the metal rim, and she flung holder and candle as hard as she could. They thudded on the wall, the candle out, the holder clattering to the stone floor. The stove glowed a dull red in the darkness.
Beth leaped to one side, tripped on a chair, recovered, and ran in the direction of the door. Her outstretched hand struck the wall hard, making Beth draw in her breath and bite her lips. She felt for the door but brushed cloth. John laughed, gripped Beth’s wrist, and thrust her hand cruelly behind her back so she was forced tight to him. She cringed from his breath, rancid in her face.
He swung Beth around and pushed her before him across the room and along the wall until she stumbled, and he shoved her face down on the bed. He groped in his pocket with his free hand and released her arm and grasped her foot. Beth twisted to free herself as he tightened a cloth around her sore ankle and tied the other end to the side of the bed. When he finished he stepped back. She heard a scratching and a light flared to etch the room in clear outline—the stove, the table, a chair lying on its side, John Price bending down with a long match in his fingers. He found and lit the candle and returned the light to the table.
John pulled a man’s old cloak from beneath the bed and threw it over her. When he leaned down and caressed her cheek with his calloused band, she buried her face in the straw mattress.
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head. “You have spirit.” He buttoned his coat. “I’m going across to the house,” he told her. “I’ll be back.”
She heard his boots clump to the door. “And soon,” was his parting shot. The door opened and closed, and a bolt rasped into place on the far side.
Beth sat up wearily, the cloth cutting into her leg. She saw the candle flame as a blur through tear-filled eyes. Her face was chill from the night air coming in the window above her head while her feet, close to the stove, tingled warmly. She reached for the strip of cloth on her leg, found it to be a thin scarf, pulled the end without result, so she worked the strands back and forth until the knot loosened and pulled apart.
A way out, she thought, I must find a way to escape. She looked about the vault, a colorless room of blacks and grays. The walls were stone blocks, gray where heated by the stove, elsewhere dark with moisture. The floor was also stone while over her head heavy timbers crossed from wall to wall. A stovepipe angled from the back of the stove, section joined to section until the final one disappeared into the ceiling where the opening, a hand’s length across, was protected by a circular metal flange.
She swung her legs from the bed and limped six paces to the far wall, six more paces to the door where she tried the handle, knowing the gesture was futile. The door, she discovered, was completely cast iron on this side. There were no openings.
She returned to the stove and noticed for the first time a scoop-shaped scuttle on the floor half-filled with coal the size of darning eggs, saw kindling thrown in a disordered pile nearby. The windows, examine the windows. The bed creaked as she stood on the mattress and looked through the two uncovered rectangles, each a foot and a half wide and a foot high, each with a series of close-spaced bars which effectively imprisoned her.
Beth sat on the bed, alone, abandoned, without hope.
The warmth of the stove made her drowsy and her eyes closed. She forced them open and pinched her cheeks to stay awake. The stove. Somehow the stove could help. Old and rusted, potbellied, the stove hunched black and awkward on curled legs. A small stove, one a man’s arms could circle, with an embossed black design twining about the sides to enclose a letter written in fancy script, the letter W.
She unlaced her shoes, placed them on the floor, and lay back, arms and shoulders sore from the rowing, her ankle throbbing. She was weary, too exhausted to move. Her eyelids pressed down heavily and sparks whirled before her. Sleepy, so very sleepy. Nothing mattered except the warmth of the fire and from the cloak pulled to her chin. And the deep, heavy quiet. Beth slept.
She woke to find the candle burning with a steady flame and the darkness still enclosing the vault. She had dreamed, she knew, and she groped along the corridors of her mind to find the memory of the dreams.
Door after door seemed to ease shut just as she attempted to peer within. At last she found a door partly open, and she looked inside and saw a brilliant summer day, like a picture in a child’s storybook. The sun was golden, the mountains emerald green, and the river reflected the deep blue of the sky and the drifting white clouds. A man stood in front of her pointing to the river. Jeffrey? No, but the resemblance was striking, for he was tall with the same black hair and deep-set eyes. Older than Jeffrey.
The scene dissolved and Beth hurried on along the corridor. No more doors were open. Wait, the last one. Inside it was night. Again a single figure, a sentry struggling in the waters of a whitecapped river. He wore a brown uniform with a white strap diagonally over his chest, a tall cylindrical hat, leather strap about his chin. He sank beneath the water, and the last she saw was his upraised right arm, fingers clutching skyward. You come up three times before you drown, she thought, and waited, watching the bubbling water rise and fall over him. She knew he was dead.
She slept again, a short sleep troubled by phantoms, and she awakened tired. At least she had not had, or did not remember, the dream she feared: the dream in which she searched for the three doors while the water climbed higher and higher on her body.
The bolt rasped and the door opened to let in the blackness from the corridor beyond. John Price entered, his figure darker than the black of night. Beth lay inert, all emotion drained from her, forehead and cheeks flushed and warm. The sleep had not rested her; in fact, she felt worse than before. An occasional uncontrollable chill swept up her legs and through her body. John Price was back. Her feeling was one of indifference, of not caring. John set an unlit lantern on the table and then laid his coat with precise care in the far corner. With slow, elaborate motions he took something from his belt, and she saw he held a small pistol in his hand. He placed the gun on top of his coat.
Only then did he approach her. Beth cringed, slid to the far side of the bed, wide awake now. There was something different about John, different from only a few hours before. He moved slowly, with great care, as though very tired and afraid one false move would set in motion a chain of terrible events.
Beth shut her eyes and feigned sleep, sensed rather than saw or heard him come to stand beside the bed and look down
at her. She felt his hand grasp the cloak covering her. He pulled the garment away and dropped it on the floor.
“Sit up,” John told her. His voice slurred, and she knew what was strange about him. He had been drinking.
She opened her eyes and sat, face averted. The room was cool, and she huddled in her jacket, her dress torn and not yet completely dry. John turned to the stove and opened the door beneath the fire, then used a piece of wood to lift the lid.
“Heat’ll be up in a minute,” he muttered to himself, and the glow from the stove seemed to confirm his prediction. “Mr. Jeffrey says I did real good,” he said to Beth. “Mr. Jeffrey says he’ll look out for me.”
“What does he expect to gain?” Beth asked.
“Ah,” John smiled at her. “You are talking. Good. Gain? Time, Mr. Jeffrey says. He says give him a day and with the militia coming and all, he’ll have them farmers eating out of his hand. Says he’ll have this ruckus settled and over and done by the day after tomorrow.”
“John, you’re making a mistake. Let me go. I can take care of you as well as Jeffrey can. Remember, I’m his sister and the estate is as much mine as his.”
John snorted. “You’re no sister of his. Mr. Jeffrey says you’re not and he don’t lie.” He reached for her and tucked her hair, falling free now, behind her ears. She raised her hand to slap him away, and he pushed her backward on the bed.
“Damn, but I’ve taken enough from you,” he said. His hand found the top button of her jacket, and he twisted it from the buttonhole. Quickly he undid the other buttons and pulled the jacket from her shoulders and arms. He took two lengths of cloth from his pocket, and Beth recognized the pattern from a blanket she had seen hanging in the stable. He sat alongside her and held her feet and looped the cloth about her ankles, binding them together, ignoring her futile blows on his back. Turning her over, he held her hands and tied them behind her back.
“There,” he said. “I did for the dog and I can do for you.”
“You killed Thunder?” Her voice was muffled by the mattress.
“Dogs are more trouble than they’re worth,” he said. Once more she smelled the cesspool, saw the cover open and the dull-witted boy crying on the grass, tasted again the bile in her throat.
The room was warmer. John tossed his coat on one of the chairs, returned to sit on the edge of the bed and stare down at her. His hand caressed her hair in long, slow strokes, rubbed her neck, found the buttons down the back of her dress, and began undoing them. She tried to squirm from him, but he only laughed.
She was helpless.
Chapter Twenty-One
Beth felt marooned in time and space—her body, bound hand and foot, lay face down on the narrow bed. John Price loomed above her, the two of them alone within the small circle of candlelight. Outside the vault dark shapes crawled through the jungle-like growth of the island, an island isolated by the torpid waters of the Hudson.
She cringed away from John, loathed him, her body flinching at his touch. To her he was as unclean and as dirty as the scaly creatures slithering under the vines. Yet she lay inert. She no longer fought him. I’ll stand aside, she told herself. Only by separating my mind from what is happening can I save myself. What this man does to this woman—this strange yet so familiar woman—has naught to do with me.
John stretched full-length beside her, and his body forced Beth against the cold stone of the wall. When he undid the second button on the back of her dress, he found her passive. “Ah,” he murmured. “Good, we have time, so much time. Don’t be afraid, I’ll not harm you. I want you to like me.”
“I’ll be gentle,” he told her. “I know women enjoy a man who’s gentle and understands how to treat them. You’ll like me when you get to know me. Women like me. You think I’m a bumpkin who saws your wood and drives your wagons, a know-nothing. I’m not. I’ve been with lots of women. Mary and Lenore and Agnes. And Anne. And more, than those, too.”
His fingers worked down her dress button by button, fumbled under her bound hands. When he reached the small of her back and the last of the fastenings, John spread his fingers, gripped her just above the hips, and squeezed with both hands as though to measure the narrowness of her waist.
He buried his face in her hair. “So soft,” he said, “so soft, so very soft.” He turned his head from side to side until his lips found her flesh, and she felt short nipping kisses on her neck, then her shoulders, his tongue flicking in and out, leaving a dotted trail on her skin.
“I wish I could say what I feel,” he told her. “How I’ve wanted you all this time, watching and wanting and not having. Maybe if I had gone more than five years to school instead of working on the farm. Maybe then I’d have the words to make you understand.”
He lay back and shifted his body so his hip pressed against her. “I rowed over to the island just now,” he said, “and the moon was high and full, and I remembered our preacher reading what a scrivener centuries ago called the moon, ‘A corpse on the road of the night’. I wish I could put words one after the other like that. Maybe if I could read good…” He was quiet. “But I can’t,” he sighed.
His fingers left her waist and played with the ends of her long hair and fondled her ear. “Mmmmmm,” he said and turned to her once more. “Reading, you can have your reading. Reading’s for them what don’t have the real thing This is real, being with a woman; there’s nothing soft and smooth and warm like a woman.” He drew the top of her dress lower and gently rolled Beth over onto her back and slid the cloth to her waist, down her limp arms until stopped by her bound hands. Beth, breasts rising and falling rhythmically under her camisole, lay as in a stupor.
“I was always shy when I was younger, never a wencher or a rakehell. You wouldn’t have guessed, would you? I never knew what being with a woman was like.” His eyes went from her breasts to her face and back to her breasts. “Anne was my first girl. You’re like Anne in some ways, tall and good to look at. And you both think you’re so high and mighty. Don’t know why she was so uppity; she was nothing but the daughter of a Kingston taverner.
“Older than me, she was. Called me her young swain. After she finished helping her mother serve supper, we used to meet in this hollow along the river. ‘Our very own trysting place,’ she said. Left me, Anne did.” His voice became harsh. “Ran off with a riverboat man who stayed at her father’s. She shouldn’t a done that. My fault too, though,” he said, relaxing. “I’m fair. I was young then, didn’t know how to act with a woman.”
He kissed Beth’s unresponsive lips, and his breath was sour from the liquor. She felt his tongue glide over her cheeks and his teeth nip the lobes of her ears, and then his tongue explored the convolutions within. Why does he do this? she wondered. Can this really pleasure him? She felt nothing. Why does he talk on and on? Why doesn’t he do what he must and be done?
His face moved lower, and she could see only his bushy blond hair. She felt his lips on her shoulder and his right hand rough and impatient on her side.
“Did you know,” he asked, “a lot of men pay good money? Probably you never heard tell about those sorts of things, and I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. But right in. Newburgh; there’s a house in Newburgh. You’d be surprised how many men from right here in Canterbury go every payday. I went once, never will again. ‘I don’t have to pay,’ I tell them.”
What was this compulsion of John’s to talk and talk and talk? she wondered. The words jumbled in her mind to become a meaningless puzzle she was too tired to solve.
“All of you are like them women, though, ’cept you don’t charge.” His lips reached the top of her camisole, and he kissed her upper breasts while his hand brushed her hip and kneaded her thigh, bunching and un-bunching the cloth.
“Look at all the women, will you,” he said, “flaunting their bodies at you. Enough to drive a man clear out of his mind. Them and their hourglass figures, dresses flouncing up to show their ankles, cut low on top or the buttons left undone down to here, an
d then they play with the buttons, in and out, come, go, in and out, yes, no. And the way they walk, swinging their hips at you, laughing among themselves, smirking at you over their shoulders. ‘Wouldn’t you like to?’ they’re asking.”
He gazed at her body, the dress rumpled about her waist, her hands tied behind her back thrusting her breasts toward him. Beth stared back unseeing, hair disarranged, eyes glazed, body stiff.
John leaned on one elbow and trailed his free hand up over her hip to cup her breast. He leaned to her, and his lips moved on top of the cloth, searching until they found her nipple. His breathing quickened, and his hand left her breast and pulled the V of her camisole. It stretched downward but did not tear. He placed both hands together at the neckline and pulled apart; the cloth ripped and his hands were inside fondling her breasts.
John stood abruptly and walked to the far wall, running his hands along the sides of his shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said. She heard his breath hiss in and out. “Too fast, I know I’m going too fast. Women like you to be slow; they need time. ’Specially someone like you.” He paced to the stove and back, all the while wiping his hands on his shirt.
“But inside you’re all the same. You all want a man, a real man. Them, you. Everything you do says so. I see you with Jeffrey. I see you with Dr. Smith. I know what you want. You’re no better than the rest of them strumpets. I knew how you were the first night when I got in bed with you when there was the storm outside.” He held her chin between his fingers. “You wanted me then. You lie if you say different.”
He unbuttoned his shirt, and Beth saw he wore nothing underneath. His chest was as white and as smooth as a woman’s.
“Most of the others were the same as you,” he said. “They fought and they begged and they tried to scream at first, but at the last they showed what they really were. Baggage they were, baggage. Of course, I had to be careful, just any wench wouldn’t do.”
Once more he lay beside her, and she saw his white flesh mottled by the candlelight. He didn’t touch her but held himself an inch or two away watching the rise and fall of her partially concealed breasts.
