‘Francis.’ She said his name out loud, liking the music in it and the softness; the name of one of the angels in the Bible. She smiled thinking of his darkness and the scar emblazoned as a brand across his cheek. She wondered how he had got the mark and made a note to ask him. He had said something of the war in Spain if she remembered correctly and being lost in the mountains outside Corunna. The same war where his primary job had been that of a marksman, shooting the enemy when backs were turned or when they had thought themselves safe.
A dangerous solitary occupation she imagined, cut off from others, left to the elements. She had read the stories of the Peninsular Campaign and seen the pictures. She wished he was here next her so that she might turn and take him in her arms to keep him safe or to feel him inside her making her want things she had never thought possible.
A little later the door opened and he was there fully dressed, back today in unbroken black.
‘I wondered when you would wake. You have been sleeping like the dead.’
His eyes were soft, licked in warmth and his hair was back in its severe tie, dragged back off his face.
Reaching up she took his hand and laid it across one breast. The change in temperature between them was startling and arousing.
‘I want you.’ Her words. Uncensored. Shocking in the daylight. She did not even blink as he watched her but moved up against his hand and pushed all the covers away.
The tangle of her hair and the ruin of the sheets. A fallen angel, shattered by passion.
When he sat and lifted her onto his lap she had no recall of him unfastening his fall as his manhood came within her, no warning, no caution. The ache of it made her arch back, but he did not break his motion, intent on his lesson, his mouth against the column of her throat and biting down.
And this morning he taught her that loving need not always be soft or gentle. The other side of the same coin of passion had its paybacks though and when she bit into his shoulder he came, the hot rush of completion running over the cold shiver of truth. Only with each other were they whole.
Then he laid her back and pulled the covers across her. ‘Sleep now, Sephora, until I come again. No one will disturb you.’
And he did come again once in the afternoon and then in the evening to take her in the way he wanted, slow and quiet. It was a netherworld she lived in waiting for him, only breathing until he was there again, the strength of his hands against the sheltered softness of her body.
He rarely spoke and she did not either. She had not asked for the words and he obeyed her. A taken wife used with care until every part of her body became accustomed to his touch.
And when the stars rose amongst the darkness he had food brought to the chamber and he bathed her in a warm and soapy bath and dressed her in a nightgown of fine lawn. The bed was made up too, crisp and new and as he tucked her within it, he kissed her on the forehead and left.
She woke again in the early hours after midnight, refreshed from so much sleep and he was not there. Taking a heavy blanket from the bed she draped it about herself and left the room with a candle to light her way, reasoning that her husband would be downstairs in the library she had seen yesterday.
He sat on a wide leather chair with his feet up on the windowsill and the room was freezing. When he saw her he smiled but didn’t move at all. ‘I don’t sleep well.’
‘And you like the cold?’
Each window was full open, and the cloth from around his neck was discarded on the floor, the vivid scars on his throat easily seen in the moonlight.
‘Maria told me the story of what happened.’ She gestured with her hands. ‘Adam Stevenage relayed it to her. I hope you do not mind?’
‘It’s only a story,’ he said suddenly. ‘Just words.’
‘Can you give me the truth of them, then? I would like to hear it from you.’
Shrugging his shoulders he leaned back, the brutal marks dark in the soft fold of his skin.
‘It was near Christmas and it was cold. I remember looking up in the early dawn and seeing a shooting star and wishing on it. Gold, I asked. I wanted gold to come home and live on and to save the Douglas inheritance as well as to show others here that I was not feckless and reckless and dissolute. I wanted enough to start a family with and to know my neighbours; all the things others so effortlessly seemed to manage but which were lost somehow to me.’
His words were made slower with drink. Whisky, she determined, by the little that was left in his glass.
‘My partner Seth Greenwood came down in the morning and I was tired. He’d risen warm from the bed of his wife and I envied him that. I could hear his babies crying even at that distance and see the flame of the fire against the glass. A home.’ He looked at her then. ‘There is a certain appeal in the word, I always thought. More so perhaps because I never had one.’
Leaning forward, he half filled his glass again and she did not try to stop him. Let him lose himself in the arms of drink she thought as she had lost herself in the embrace of passion.
‘Kennings came after the day broke, quietly on a down-wind track. I saw him come and thought he was there to talk. The dogs didn’t bark though and I should have taken that as a warning. They didn’t bark because he had already been to the house and done his business.
‘I think he’d cut through the tethering of the platform against the bank, maybe when we were away the afternoon before registering our claim. Kennings did not know that then. It was only later he’d have realised that it had all been for nothing.’
His eyes met hers. ‘And that is the final irony of what did happen. The nothingness. The futility. The empty void of oblivion that held no payback for anyone.
‘He shot at us as the rig collapsed. I felt the bullets rifling through the water, five or six perhaps and loaded quickly, but then I hardly think he’d shoot slow with the stakes so high.
‘The first two ripped across my arm and the third went into Seth’s shoulder. When the water ran red and there was only silence Kennings probably thought he’d done his job and all that was left was to make certain that the claim was his.
‘I couldn’t lift Seth up out of the water so I stayed there with him. Hours later he slipped away into the river and I was hauled up into the teeth of a furious lynch mob wanting revenge and retribution. Seth’s wife had been found by then, you see, and the babies, and Kennings had spread the word that I had done it. Jealousy was the motive, he said, and greed.
‘Seth’s body was gone with the river somewhere, Kennings bullet in him and I was so freezing I could barely talk enough to give my side of the tale.
‘They hanged me from a cottonwood with its bare winter branches and its ragged bark, but they picked the wrong bough and the branch broke. When the lightning came a second later there were those in the group who felt strongly about signs from God and his omnipotent displeasure and so I was brought instead into town, the rope still around my neck and my throat swelling.’ He smiled, but there was no humour there. ‘If the damn hanging did not kill me then its effects nearly did. And after,’ he stopped and swallowed. ‘Afterwards breathing at night was always harder and I could not lie down for a long, long while.’
‘Even now?’
He nodded. ‘Especially now when there are so many more to keep safe.’
Suddenly she understood why there was a gun next to him and another on the flat of the sofa. ‘It’s Anna? You know who tried to kidnap her?’
‘Only a list of suspects, but I am narrowing it down.’
Panic made her stand. ‘It is dangerous, Francis. These people have already shown what they are capable of.’
‘Clive Sherborne was running his own sort of books and because of that Anna is in danger from those who knew about it.’
‘How do you know this?’ She was simply horrified by what he had said. ‘Who are they?’
‘I’ve had people investigating Sherborne’s murder since it happened. Anna’s guardian, Clive Sherborne, had been providing the finance for a number of years to bring spirits in illegally from France, but he got too cocky with the merchandise. He onsold some of the brandy to London pubs at a rate that was more than what it should have been and pocketed the difference. The man who killed him found this out.’
Her mind whirled into a hundred directions and then they all converged into one. She knew the moment he saw the conclusion she had reached as eyes bruised in anger, fell away from her own.
‘Anna was there.’
‘I think Sherborne was in it deeper than his lawyer realised and it was easier to involve a child in the transactions than another adult who might betray him.’
‘My God. The nightmares...?’
‘She thinks she is next.’
This explained why she had wanted all the reassurances of never being sent away from them and why she seldom liked to go outside. But it also threw up other worries.
He reached for her then, opening the cocoon of his blanket, his sleeve pulled back in the moonlight and his jacket gone. Positioning her own wrap over them both she came in tight against him in her thin nightgown and felt his utter warmth and safety.
‘It’s like that time in London,’ she whispered and he tilted his head, still watching the landscape before the house.
‘What is?’
‘You will save her just as you did me.’