Marriage Made In Shame(37)

‘Friar caught me...as I came through a glade...of trees. Knocked me clean off my horse and...out cold.’

‘I found him after I had left the carriage. Our driver is dead and so is the other guard.’ Tears trailed down Amethyst’s cheeks and the grime of the day stained her clothes. Baby Robert had been taken upstairs, the housekeeper and two maids seeing to his every need.

‘So he took the track through the river?’ Gabriel asked again, already selecting guns and a knife from a cabinet in the corner.

It would be getting dark in a few hours. He had to find Adelaide before nightfall or else... Shades of what had happened to Henrietta Clements came to mind, but Gabriel pushed those away and barked out instructions to the few male servants he had kept on at Ravenshill after the fire.

‘Lock the doors after I go and don’t let anyone in, unless you can see it is me.’ He shoved a gun into the hands of his elderly butler and gave another to the footman. ‘Cover the house from each direction. If you see anything move, shoot first and ask questions later.’

Daniel had lost consciousness again now, his face pale and drawn.

‘Can you fix him?’ This was barked at Andrew McAuley, the local apothecary.

‘Yes. It is a surface wound. The bullet passed through the muscle on both sides, which explains the bleeding, but it is already stopping. But he mustn’t be moved for a good few hours until the blood sets.’

‘Very well. Amethyst, find some blankets from upstairs and make him warm. Get the housekeeper to make you a hot drink as well. You are shaking.’

And with that he left, the house behind him and the greying dusk in front.

Friar had gone to the old homestead near the quarry, he thought, as he mounted his horse brought to him by one of the stablehands.

‘I heard about your wife, sir, and I hope you find her soon. The building near the slopes of scree could be where he has taken her if the other lady was correct in her directions.’

‘My thoughts exactly. I want you to go up to the house and get the butler to give you a gun. If I am not back by the morning, tell Lord Montcliffe to organise a search party and send for the constabulary. Go and find Alex Watkins, too, and make certain he is armed.’

‘Very well, my lord,’ the other answered, holding the reins as he mounted and then handing them to him. ‘Good luck, sir.’

Then Ravenshill was behind him as was the growing, swirling wind. He’d have to be careful with that. If Friar’s horse smelt his one...?

He left that thought alone and thundered onwards.

* * *

Adelaide was tied to a tree, the bindings at her neck cutting off breath so that she had to sit up and tip her head backwards slightly just to gain air.

Don’t panic, she thought, as she watched George Friar. Don’t move, either. He had split her lip as he had hauled her from the horse and she had a pounding headache from where he had knocked her unconscious with the back of his heavy knife in order to tie her down.

She was expendable now. Gabriel would come and it did not matter if she lived or died. Friar had made that point eminently plain.

‘Do anything to annoy me and you are dead.’

The wind blew in steadily, a low and keening cry as it hit the tall pines and whistled through them. The sound of her heart kept the rhythm of the wind, too, thump, thump, thump, in her ears heavy and hard.

She felt sick and began to shake. If she vomited, she would be dead, the oxygen she took nearly too minimal to allow life even as it was. She swallowed back the bile as well as she was able and thought of Gabriel.

If he came straight through the path, that would be the end of it, but this was his land and he would know the traps. She prayed Amethyst had thought to see which direction Friar had struck out in as spots of white began to dance in her eyes, heat rising like flame across her.

A slow death. Unnoticed. Degree by degree. She could not even whimper for fear that Friar would kill her. Heavy dread gathered across pure hate and the waste of everything spread over that.

To only just find happiness and then to lose it. She had finally understood what it was to be loved without reservation, without limits and now to have it snatched from her. No, she could not allow it.

Sitting up straighter, she tried to find the little air still left to her and clamped down upon her shaking.

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

* * *

His wife was dead. He could see the whiteness across her face and the blood at her lip and eyes and head. The ropes had killed her, tightened by fear as a collar about her neck and from this distance he could see no movement and no breath. Her hands lay crooked at her sides like wooden marionettes in the Marais in Paris, abandoned after a puppet show.

Nothing mattered any more save to kill Friar. He came from the trees at the side with a guttural scream and fell upon the man before he had the chance to lift his gun.

One slice with his knife and another to the stomach; let him bleed out everywhere, his guts spilling on to the ground beneath him. A fitting end.

And then he was at the side of Adelaide, cutting the ties, loosening the ropes and laying her on the ground. Amazingly she took in breath, a huge gulp of air that changed her pallor from white to red in a matter of seconds and allowed her to lift one hand to his face, fingers shaking as she grasped his hair.

‘You are...here. I prayed to God...that you would come, but...’

He simply lifted her, away from the cottage, away from the stinking, bleeding body of Friar, away from the ropes and the reminder of what had been. She was recovering quite rapidly, her arms gripping his and her voice stronger. He thanked the Lord for it.

‘I love you, Gabriel. I knew you would come for me.’

When he sat her against the wall at the back of the house he began to laugh, the shock of escape perhaps, and the luck of it.

God. They were both alive and safe. She still lived and breathed and was. Alive.

The feeling of power hit him like a heavy blow right into the groin, taking the deadness and replacing it with pure and unadulterated lust. Vital. Quickened. Energetic. Any humour fled.

‘I want you.’ The words were out before he knew it.

‘I want you, too, to forget,’ she returned, reaching up and he lifted her skirts as she opened her legs. The blood beat through him out of control and frantic. If he wasn’t within her he would die, it was that simple.

Not just want, either, but need, and not just need, but desperation.

When she bit into his shoulder to hurry him on, he moved her thighs over him and sank in, as far as he could go, claiming her as his own.

‘Mine,’ he cried as he felt the giving.

Her breath caught as the barrier of her virginity fell away and he stopped, dead still, giving her the time she might need to accommodate him, both their hearts beating in unison and desire. Her nails dug into his skin, keeping him close.

He rode her with the thought of possession, pressed in tight with the understanding that they could both be saved by it and survive with the oneness and the relief. Almost seven months of grief and loss flowed now into elation and when she shouted out and arched he went with her willingly, the spill of his seed deep in her womb as her muscles clenched and held him still.

Life and lifeless lay on each side of the same coin, happy and sad separated by a thread. This was the little death the French spoke of, the place where nothing else mattered save sensation, the suspension of energy whilst time stopped and each separate beat of two hearts lay perfectly merged, blended and united.

He turned her head and kissed her in the same hard way, deep and rough, and she kissed him back, without reserve or restraint, giving as good as taking.

This was not the time for a fragile tryst or a tentative trust. His body shook with the want of her and he felt himself harden again.

‘I love you. I love you more than life itself and if I lost you...’

She placed a finger on his top lip.

‘There are no ifs, Gabriel. I will never leave you.’

She smiled as she drew him back in, guiding him to the slickness of her centre. This time his ardour was quieter and more tempered, fierceness buffered and held in check. The wrath was gone, but the wonderment still lived on, her warmth and her tightness. The bruising around her neck was already turning black and the cut on her head had begun to bleed. But he could not stop and tend to her just yet, the shake of fear still in him, the fright of loss unquenched. He felt the crescendo before it even came, cutting into him like a hot knife across butter, the relief of it making him shout her name again and again in pure and honest gratitude. The noise of the pines above snatched the sound away.

Afterwards Gabriel took her in his lap and wrapped her with his cloak so that they were enfolded in the darkness and the quiet. The moon had risen, the light of it spilling through the trees and across them both.

Unreal and shadowed.

‘You are no longer impotent?’ There was humour in her whisper and he drew his hands through his hair.

‘Rage has cured me, I think, and fear. When I first saw you I thought you were dead and then I was in you, scrambling for life and love and for ever.’

In the moonlight he saw her smile. ‘I think all those rumours about your prowess might very well be true. But from now your expertise is only for my benefit.’

When he laughed the sound travelled through the glade and then echoed back, the small joy bouncing and reverberating against the trees. Like music.