by Jo Goodman
She broke from his kiss only to whisper throatily against his lips, "Come to me. I need you."
He did not require proof beyond the velvet moistness of her body, but that she spoke of her mind's desire was precious to him. He turned on his back and pulled her over him. The pelisse slid to the floor. He brought her knees forward so she straddled him and her skirts fell about her legs. "Come to me," he said. Rae was at first bemused by this position, but as Jericho guided her hand back to his erection, she understood his intention.
Jericho wished he could see her face as she opened to him, taking him fully into her. He imagined her surprise, her pleasure, her green eyes darkening with emotion. He knew her face would be flushed, her cheeks so pink that the sprinkling of freckles would have all but disappeared. And after a moment her mouth would curve in a siren's smile. She would start to move.
Rahab leaned forward and Jericho's hands palmed her buttocks, caressing them as she clasped him tightly within her. Hesitantly she lifted, then fell, full of wonder at the control she could exercise in this play. She rose again, more confidently, and at Jericho's husky urgings she caught the rhythm that would bind their hearts and minds as one.
Urgency trapped them both, finally driving their movements to a frenetic pace. Jericho's fingers were hard on the backs of Rae's silky thighs. Rae's hands clutched at his shoulders. She arched away from him, her spine thrown into an arc of tension, the long curve of her throat exposed as the first shudder shook her body. Glittery sensation rippled through her.
Jericho wished it might last, that the demons might be kept at bay a while longer, but as he gave himself up to the pleasure that coursed through his flesh and sinew, he knew that the hard reality he and Rae shared was only minutes away.
Replete and drowsy, Rae rested her head against Jericho's shoulder. She could still feel him inside her, a not unpleasant feeling, and she wondered at the path of his seed, if perhaps this time she would conceive. Where once she would have welcomed having his child, it frightened her now. Their hold on life was too tenuous to be complicated by a third life. She could not bear to think she might soon carry a Life she could never take in her arms.
Trying not to betray her tension, she pulled away from Jericho and righted her clothes. Jericho sat up and adjusted his breeches. "Do not say you regret this, even if you do," he told her quietly. "I could better face Sam Judge right now than your recriminations."
"I was not going to say anything of the sort. I am not ashamed. Are you?"
He reached for her, found her hand and brought it to his lips. "No. I am human, and rather than offer it as an excuse, I find that in moments like those just past, I revel in it."
She could not help but smile and brought his hand up to feel it.
"Red, you must believe I love you."
She would have given anything to have heard that while they were at the landing, certainly when they were on the schooner. Now the precariousness of their situation made it seem a confession under duress. "You don't have to say that," she admonished him gently. "I have quite grown used to the idea of loving you without having it returned. It is enough for now that you care for me, and I know you do."
"No. It is not enough. Caring is a paltry thing compared to what I feel." The words rose from Jericho's soul, but they still could not convey the struggle he had had to first admit them to himself. He had thought himself incapable of anything so fine and exquisite as love, when, in truth, he had only been frightened of it. It felt as if he had been on his own forever, needing no one and wanting to need no one, and had come to live his life as if things should never be different.
There were those he counted as his friends, but none he counted as necessary to his happiness. Before Rae came into his life, he had never thought of happiness. His childhood years had been erased by staggering treachery, and his consuming goal was life, at whatever cost to his pride or the rules of conduct that marked his upbringing. In America he had had life and had set his sights on liberty. To cleanse himself of years of servitude and degradation, he had fought for himself and others toward that moral purpose. But pursuing happiness? That seemed more a whimsical touch of Jefferson's pen than a goal to which Jericho could aspire.
Until Rae. She made him happy. He wondered if he could say that to her. Would she understand? Would it make a difference?
Rae's hands touched Jericho's face. Her fingers were her eyes in the darkness of their prison and they studied him, finding the firm thrust of his jaw, the resolute set of his mouth. There was tension in the taut planes of his cheek and a muscle jumped beneath the soft pads of her fingers. But most astonishing was the hint of something wet on his lashes.
Her fingers paused there, not quite believing the evidence of his tears.
Jericho shuddered, expelling a breath he had not known he was holding, as Rae launched herself into his arms and rained kisses over his face, his shuttered eyes, his damp cheeks.
"Oh, Red, you make me happy."
The last flicker of doubt that he loved her vanished. She accepted his words as the tribute they were intended to be. When she tasted his smile in response to her ceaseless kissing she smiled herself, quite happily too, and rested her face against his neck and shoulder, content to hold and be held in this newfound security.
"Jericho?"
"Mm?"
"I did not mean to be cruel when I said those things about comforting you."
"I know." His chest paused in its normal rise and fall as he came to a decision. "I want to explain about that."
She put a finger to his lips. "No, I did not bring it up again to wrest answers from you."
He nipped her finger. "Still, I want to tell you. It is part of what I wanted to tell you at the landing, the reason I volunteered to go to Linfield."
"Oh." She felt shame that her ill-founded jealousy had stopped him and perhaps delivered them to this pass.
"Are you blaming yourself for something?"
"No."
Her denial came too quickly to be believed, but Jericho let it go. What he had to say would soon take her mind from it. For himself it was not at all difficult to lose the train of other thoughts as he remembered Stanhope, magnificent and stately with gray stone turrets that aspired for a place among the clouds and rooms that held priceless treasures on their walls and on their floors.
So he told her, opening himself to her as he had to no other, and, as always, it began with Stanhope....
* * *
There were one hundred twelve rooms, one hundred thirteen if one counted the dungeon. Geoffrey knew because when he had first grasped the concept of numbers beyond ten he had taken his father by the hand and demanded they count them all. To the servants' surprise, Thomas Hunter-Smythe, sixth Earl of Stanhope, gravely followed his young son to every comer of the house and marked a numeral on the door of each room they passed with a piece of chalk. Then, in honor of his son's inquisitiveness, he had refused to allow the housekeeper or any of her staff to polish the markings away. It endeared him to his son, if not to the people whose job it was to keep Stanhope gleaming with brooms and beeswax.
Geoffrey counted everything. There were one hundred fifty-two leaded windows, including twelve of stained glass in the chapel, eight round ones in each of the two turrets, and two odd hexagonal ones on either side of the double-door entrance. There were none in the dungeon. There were seven pieces of artwork on the walls that he liked, and sixty-four that he did not. His father would not let him chalk any of them. Thank God, said the servants, the earl was not entirely gone in the upperworks.
There were four hundred twenty-three books in the library, sixteen jade and porcelain figurines beyond his reach in the music room; fifty chairs could be seated around the table in the banquet room, and there were two silver-handled pistols in a teak case in his father's study. Counting everything was not merely whimsy to Geoffrey. Somehow it made the whole of Stanhope, the estate that would someday be his, less overwhelming to his young mind. He could not conceive of
how it could ever belong to him, but the earl said it was so, and Geoffrey saw no cause to disagree. The servants merely shook their heads, wondering what the earl was thinking, promising to make his by-blow his heir.
Geoffrey did not live with his father at Stanhope. He lived with his mother in Wibbery, at the end of a shady lane in a two-story cottage with boxwood hedges and a flower garden. Most of the time it did not bother Geoffrey that he did not live with the earl, because he could visit as he wished, but he saw that it made his mother sad. She was always most beautiful when Thomas came to visit. "Elise," he would say as she opened the door for him and she would fall into his arms, laughing as if she had forgotten their sad parting of a day, a week, or even months before. Her hair was like corn silk, her eyes the violet blue of forget-me-nots, and her smile always greeted him. She never cried until after he was gone.
Geoffrey was always welcome at Stanhope, unless the earl's wife was in residence. Everyone, especially the earl, agreed it was better for all that Lady Helen found London and her London lovers more to her taste than country life. There was rarely a scene, except when she once happened to spy the earl's brat, as she called him. It was the first time Geoffrey heard the word bastard.
Not long after that he was sent away to school, and there he heard the word frequently. He fought bloody battles in defense of a title he did not have and a label he did. He bore the thrashings of the headmaster stoically, counting every stroke of the birch with concentrated effort. He hated that he had brought shame to his mother and father by his behavior, for he knew from his mother's letters that they were always informed of his unruliness. Sometimes he wondered if he had shamed them by his birth. Gradually he withdrew into himself and could ignore the taunts and curious eyes of the other boys. He possessed a quick and clever mind and learned to channel his bewildered anger into his studies. He read voraciously, took tutoring when it was available to advance himself, and approached every assignment as if his life depended upon mastering it.
Late in the summer of his tenth year he received two letters several weeks apart that turned his world around.
The first was authored jointly by his mother and father, and Geoffrey could see the different handwritings, his mother's fine and neat, his father's bold and sprawling, vying for equal space on the vellum. He knew they had been happy when they had written their missive. With a wisdom that belied his years, he knew they had been in love and laughing with it.
First there was sad news, or rather it was supposed to be sad, but Geoffrey could not find it in his young heart to grieve for the death of Lady Helen. He had never forgiven her for calling him a bastard. Following the paragraph that briefly detailed Lady Helen's passing, the earl wrote that he and Elise were going to be married. There would be a scandal, of course, because he was not hypocritical enough to observe a year's mourning. He was posting the banns, and they were coming to get him as soon as they were married.
Geoffrey held the letter close to his chest, later slept with it under his lumpy pillow, and carried it on his person until it fell apart. His name, the letter had said, would be entered in the family Bible as Geoffrey Hunter-Smythe, and someday he would be the seventh Earl of Stanhope. He didn't give a fig for the title, but that he was no longer the bastard Geoffrey Adams was reason enough for whoops of joy that could be heard all along the school's corridors.
The weeks went by more slowly than he had thought possible as he waited for the arrival of his mother and father. What came instead was a letter.
Spidery, imperfect handwriting introduced the author of this epistle as his father's cousin, Charles Newbrough. He had the regrettable duty to inform Geoffrey that his parents were dead, the victims of a carriage accident on their way to see Geoffrey.
It had happened six days earlier, and Geoffrey experienced a rage that he had not been sent for. It did not seem possible that his parents had been days in their graves, and not only had he not felt their passing, he had not been allowed to see them. Bitter tears splotched the ink, and he crumbled the parchment in his fists without reading the whole of it.
The following day a carriage arrived for him, and he met Charles Newbrough in the headmaster's study. Newbrough was younger than Geoffrey thought his father's cousin should be, and for his insolence in speaking up when he hadn't been given leave to do so, Geoff received a sharp box on his ears from the headmaster. The cousin was then introduced to Geoffrey as the seventh earl of Stanhope. Still grieving for his parents, Geoff had no reaction to this usurpation of his title, if he even noticed it then. He was whisked away from the school with his belongings crated and packed on top of the coach. He bore it all in silence, regarding his cousin's dissolute and bored visage with a discourteous stare. Geoff did not care at all for Charles Newbrough's face: His eyes were small and set wide apart, and the space between them was filled with a beak more suited to a hawk. He was dressed in somber clothes and wore a black armband on his coat sleeve. Geoffrey couldn't help but think it was for show.
In front of the headmaster Charles Newbrough had been somewhat solicitous of Geoffrey's feelings in the recounting of the accident that had killed his parents. In the coach his pretense of amiability was abandoned. Geoffrey was coldly informed that as his parents had never married, he was still naught but a bastard, and an orphan besides. There was no will left by either of his parents; the estate was entailed, so its title fell to the closest legitimate male heir, and that was that. The cottage Geoffrey had grown up in belonged to the estate, and his mother's things had been sold so she might not have the final ignominy of a pauper's grave. Geoffrey was, in short, a penniless bastard orphan.
Geoffrey remembered leaping from his padded seat as the coach rocked along the road and launching himself at his cousin. Lies! It was all lies! If his parents had been killed on their way to get him, then they had already married. He had a letter to prove it. Charles Newbrough had paled then, demanding to see the letter, and it was only then that Geoffrey remembered how, in not being able to part with it, he had caused its destruction. Charles threw Geoffrey off him as if he were naught but a speck of dirt.
Until then Geoffrey had thought his destination was Stanhope. Now he looked at his cousin through eyes that had the last of the shutters removed and understood Newbrough would not be planning to have him anywhere around. It was then that he learned he was going to sea, and to make certain he did not protest too vociferously, Charles Newbrough knocked his young cousin senseless.
Service on the Igraine under the command of Liam Garvey might have been the dream of some young boy already hardened to London street life; for Geoffrey it was no less than five years of unrelieved hell. Not that he did not become hardened quickly. By his twelfth year he had finally lost count of something: the number of times the captain had threatened to use him as a whore. He worked himself to near exhaustion during the day, doing every thankless task assigned to him. At night, at Garvey's whim, he was dragged into the captain's cabin to wait in terror until the impotent captain admitted defeat. He knew better than to speak of the captain's failure lest Garvey make good on his threat to pass him to every other sailor on the Igraine. He became Garvey's whore in fiction, if not in fact.
At fourteen he understood fully what that title had meant and the protection it had afforded him. It was then that Garvey found a softer, more pliable youth for his needs, and let Jericho, as Geoffrey called himself now, fend for himself among the men. By the time he was sixteen he had crippled one man, taken Dugan's ear, and eventually killed another—all because they thought him fair game for their play. For the last he would have hanged had a man's life been worth more on their ship than it was. As it was, he took thirty strokes from the cat and was left to rot in the vessel's dark hold.
He grew to a curious sort of manhood on board the Igraine. Physically he filled out and upward, taking on the hard flesh and muscle of a man, and the scars of the dangerous work and punishment. Emotionally he was much a child, with a child's impenetrable barriers erected against
further hurt. His bright and clever mind became as dull as tarnished brass from ill-use.
He probably would have died in the hold but for the fire that had threatened to damage the Igraine's precious cargo of silks. Fire was every seaman's worst fear, but it brought Jericho's release from the brig, because they needed all hands to fight the blaze. When it was over, no one remembered to order him back. Three days later, in Savannah, he jumped ship.
He survived in the beginning because he learned to steal and was good at it more often than not. When he was seventeen he indentured himself to a planter north of Savannah for the price of four books he stole from Richard Dunna's home. His term of service was seven years—he stayed three because that was how long it took him to read every book in Dunna's library. He began in the fields, working alongside slaves and others like him, but Dunna was curious about a youth who would steal books, and he took Jericho out of the fields after a few months. Jericho worked in the main house, proved himself quick with the accounts, and ate better than he had in years. He was given access to the library, and it was a rare evening that Dunna did not find him, deep asleep with an open book in his hand in the library's loft. When Dunna saw Jericho return the last volume to its place, he knew he was seeing the last of the gravely quiet young man. In the years he had known Jericho, he could not remember hearing above two hundred words come from his lips.
Jericho left Savannah and went south, drifted into spending almost two years with a tribe of Seminoles in Spanish-held Florida, and learned how to move among people again. He traveled north, aimlessly at first, but then he heard of a group of men known as the Sons of Liberty. At last he acquired a purpose.
* * *
"Oh, my dearest love," Rae said softly. Throughout Jericho's recital she had remained silent, giving him respect as well as lending her strength.
Jericho felt the tightness in his chest ease by slow degrees. He was her "dearest love," not her "poor love."
