AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella Read online

  “Keep the snow pressed again the burn,” she said, dumping the second handful in his, “and you may escape disfiguring that popinjay’s visage.”

  At that, he grinned. “Then, you will admit, I am handsome.”

  She crossed to the sideboard, and, with her back to him, paused for one long moment. . . treat him and risk exposing her past? Yet both her brother and father had taken the Oath of Hippocrates, to treat one and all regardless. Could she do any less?

  She opened the sideboard’s upper cabinet doors. One shelf contained a pill board, mortar and pestle, and even a pair of iron forceps Gantu had fashioned for her. On another shelf reposed drug jars of green glass, filled with powders and ointments – chamomile, camphor, laudanum, and vervain – all meticulously arranged and categorized in a notebook she kept.

  From behind her, Sutcliff reached around for one of the glass jars, his fingers brushing her shoulder. Instantly, she stilled. He was so near, she could feel his heat.

  “Foxglove – for burns, is it not? Interesting, your physician’s collection – and your fascination with the healing arts.”

  His warm breath on her nape triggered pleasant shivers throughout her. She squirmed around, palms braced on the sideboard, to face him. At once, she realized her egregious error. She had aligned her body, knee to breast, with the thrust of his, placing herself in a most vulnerable and indefensible position. She felt fearfully excited. Breathless, she murmured, “Exactly what service is it you desire of me?”

  He passed the glass jar to her keeping and planted his palms adjacent to hers on the sideboard. “You are brave enough for the truth?”

  Her gaze never wavered from his. “Aye.”

  “I shall not deny what has been on my mind from the moment I first beheld you, framed in the warming light of your doorway. And that desire for you has been upper most on my mind since – and, too, a driven curiosity about a young woman of your looks and temperament.”

  His admission weakened her guard. “Then that is it? What it is I forfeit should I lose – a night in your bed?”

  “No.” He rolled his eyes. “Your virtue is safe from my ravishing as long as you really want it to be. By the time I saw fifteen years, I had learned that it was far more pleasurable to be sought out. And what I desire of you could never be a forfeit, as you so deem it. It should be a splendor . . . for us both . . . or nothing at all.”

  “I – I do not understand.”

  “Desire – require.” He shrugged his shoulders. “A vast difference. So, here is the service I require of you – your assistance in negotiating with the main sachem of the Lenape. It is said you have established friendly relations with the sachem, Peminacka. I will need your intercession for the purchase of land our Lord Protector wishes to award to certain Puritans for their meritorious performances. That will require our traveling to the sachem’s village – a round trip, I estimate, of a week or so.”

  Relief swept over her. Then Sutcliff’s mission had naught to do with her role at the court of King Charles. “And that is it? That is all?”

  His eyes searched hers, delving behind them even. “Aye,” he said, at last, “that is all that I require of you upon your match loss.”

  She could practically inhale the force of his male energy. Despite her age of two and twenty, she had been kissed only two or three times. She had been so caught up in the healing arts that she had given neither thought nor time to such foolishness as courtly love and chivalric romances. And now that seemed all she could think about.

  “And if I win,” she pressed, “the one-hundred gold doubloons are mine?”

  “You will not. Besides, the doubloons have been allocated by Cromwell himself for the land purchase.”

  “You cannot be serious? The Indians have no use for money. They want kettles, blankets, hatchets, needles, looking glasses, and – “ her mouth tightened, “doubtless, you will want to ply them with rum.”

  “But money will buy all that. Come now,” he said, taking her hand with the casual air of a man accustomed to compliance at his slightest whim. “Treat this blasted burn and let us return to our match.”

  Latching onto the green glass jar, she followed him back to the stool, where he resettled his lengthy frame. While she mashed a portion of the jar’s contents, mixed with water droplets, into a paste in her palm, he watched, his head cocked for her ministrations. “I trust my wellbeing into your hands, fair maiden.”

  She slanted him a sly glance. “Have you considered how easily I could poison your rum and claim the doubloons for my own?”

  “But, upon my death, dare you risk apprehension by Baron Craven and his contingent of troops?”

  The glass jar shattered on the brick floor. She took advantage of the mishap by swiftly stooping to gather the shards and evading Sutcliff’s watchful regard.

  With her father’s wholehearted approval, her childhood friend William Craven had courted her -- and, aye, she had cared about him and been attracted to him. Had even been betrothed come close to wedding him. But William had returned from a French diplomatic mission a changed man, siding more often with Parliament and its leader, Cromwell.

  Appalled by Cromwell’s radical Puritan beliefs and ruthlessness with those who rebuffed him, she could not conceive of marrying a man who supported such oppressive views – where a child could be put to death for cursing his parents.

  She had ended her betrothal with William weeks before the wedding date. It was a scandal that had Whitehall whispering behind oscillating fans and beringed hand.

  She knew well this friend from her girlhood years – and knew she had wounded him grievously. Extraordinarily clever, he was a well-meaning man, but also a proud man who was certain he knew what was right. This was a man who never forgot and never forgave.

  “The Baron, he is here?” she mumbled, sucking a fingertip pricked by a glass splinter, as she collected the last of the shards. “Nearby?”

  “With a landing party twenty-three miles north of here,” came Sutcliff’s sugar-and-pepper voice from above. “Merely a show of force to the Hollander’s East India’s presence here, while I procure the land.”

  Her mask of composure regained, she stood and placed the glass remnants on the sideboard next to the corn ears waiting to be husked. With inordinate attention, she smoothed the salve plaster onto his proffered cheek.

  “I warn you that the sachem would consider it a dire threat should the Baron and his soldiers accompany us. But, then, I shall win this match, regardless, and you shall be on your way back to the Baron tomorrow morning.”

  He stood, towering over her. “I suggest we resume our game then.”

  Yet, with his ushering hand at the her back, just above the swell of her bottom, he paused in the kitchen’s half-doorway and glanced up. “Although our Lord Protector deems tomorrow Foolstide, I believe Druid custom has it that refusing to kiss while standing under the mistletoe is bad luck.”

  His arrogance was beyond belief. “Eternity will come before you receive a kiss from me.”

  With a slow smile that was at once both threatening and exciting, he said, “There is nothing I enjoy more than a challenge.”

  “I, as well.” Her acknowledgement caught her by surprise, but in a flashback she saw that it was the challenges that had bestowed the zest to her life.

  Their mugs replenished, they sat opposite each other once more, her mind wholly focused on the dream of bettering her impoverished, primitive lifestyle and foiling the machinations of this man, whom she suspected knew far more about her than he professed.

  One by one pawns were traded off, a knight sacrificed, a castle surrendered.

  Then, when her fingers lingered overly long on her bishop, his hand captured the forefinger that absently stroked the length of the chess piece

  “Your bishop bleeds.”

  “What?” She glanced down and saw that her cut fingertip had smeared the piece’s white glaze a dull crimson.

  “You have pricked your finger.” H
e lifted and placed it between his lips to gently suck its tip.

  At the pleasurable but unsettling feeling shooting through her, she trembled. A fool, she was. Letting these unnerving and hereto unexperienced sensations rattle her strong grounding.

  She yanked her finger away and quickly moved her bishop – which he just as quickly captured. And other pieces, as well. Yet, for several hours more she postponed what would seem the inevitable, her queen continuing to both protect her king and evade Sutcliff’s superior positioning strength.

  Oh, he was good, very good. Brilliant, in fact. The pieces dwindled on both sides. And then, at long last, it came – the recognition of her defeat. They stared across the board’s battlefield at one another. “It would seem, Eve, that we have met our match in each other.”

  Her gaze was as forthright as his. “Aye, that we have. The hour grows late. Tomorrow we can discuss the details of the journey to Peminacka’s village. Tis time we retire.”

  As if she could sleep, when but a doorway away lay her enemy.

  §§ CHAPTER THREE §§

  Boothosed feet crossed at his ankles and arms locked behind his head on the straw pillow, Adam Sutcliff regarded the bedchamber’s low timbers that had forced him to bow his head upon entering – something he had sworn at thirteen never to do once he escaped his servitude. Oh, how low his high and mighty family had fallen.

  That he had survived at all was a miracle, when life expectancy of an imported bond servant or slave on Barbados’s sugar plantations was seven years. He had not allowed himself the luxury of making friends. All too often from among his lowly ranks a friend, or foe, fell victim to either fatal burns when boiling cane juice in huge vats or, when feeding sugar stalks between the giant millstones, was pulled between its rollers and crushed to nightmarish pulp.

  And while he was cutting cane by 7:00 in the morning, his former boyhood friends back home in Wiltshire might be playing a game of stoole-ball before school. Nay, better no friends and no loss. And as for Christmas, what a damnable, disappointing myth.

  Completing his seven years of servitude, he had parlayed both a friendship with the plantation owner’s son into an unparalleled education and three-hundred pounds due upon expiration of his servitude into a plantation investment that garnered modest affluence back in England.

  More readily, his thoughts turned to Eve – a facetious name for the Lady Evangeline Bradshaw. He had been in charge of the Ironsides troop that had removed the King, under house arrest, from Holdenby House. For but a moment, Adam had glimpsed the terrified expressions of the royal attendants – and had caught Evangeline Bradshaw’s spitfire one. No man who had looked upon the daughter of Dr. Robert Bradshaw could ever forget her, despite her passing herself off now under another name as a common inn proprietress.

  As if Lady Evangeline could ever be common. The singular, albeit common, pox scar astride the bridge of her nose marked her as someone special, if her vibrancy did not. And it was that vibrancy which attracted him. Nigh thirty years he had spent in believing one woman was as good as the next. Oh, some were better than others . . . for that purpose and period in his life.

  However, his purpose at this period in his life was focused solely on securing once again the rights to his family’s estates of England’s Blackmore Forest, in Wiltshire.

  Under the Norman yoke that began in 1066, prosperous settlements had been disrupted, houses burned, peasants evicted – all to serve the pleasure of the foreign tyrant in creating Royal Forests for the sole hunting use of the aristocracy. Harsh punishment awaited any starving soul found poaching within the Royal Forests.

  That antiquated royal prerogative had died out – until King Charles had revived the practice. To finance the civil war that had broken out in 1642 between Parliament and Charles, he had levied steep fines on property that had been in generations of families, who regarded the forest land as their own.

  Sir James Sutcliff had been hanged without a trial for poaching, his family had been turned out like beggars, and their manor sold out from under them for revenue.

  One day Adam’s mother did not return to the warren in which she, he and his older sister Tess subsisted. Rather than starve on the streets, he had eventually signed himself at thirteen into servitude. What had become of his mother he had no idea, and Tess, last he heard, had died pandering her wares in a brothel.

  A family he may no longer have, but, at least, with his completion of this land transaction for Cromwell, he would finally secure the return of the Sutcliff estates.

  And what would become of the Lady Evangeline Bradshaw? Cromwell had a chopping block with her name on it. When her brother, a Royalist doctor, had failed to save one of Cromwell’s sons during an emergency gallbladder surgery, Cromwell had been hell bent on chopping down the entire Bradshaw family tree and had charged the Bradshaws with treason, as months before he had the King.

  Adam could only surmise that if Lady Evangeline disliked him now, how much more would she when she learned it was he who had delivered her brother and father to the executioner’s axe?

  As if summoned by his thoughts, the door quietly opened, and there she stood . . . manifesting his erotic fantasies conjured during many solitary nights, when no female mortal substitute would do. Only the fleeting memory of her exploding through him sufficed his body’s roaring releases.

  He was clad only in his breeches; she in her snowy white shift. Her luminous skin was like poured cream, with a quick-to-blush tone. Her heavy tresses were reined in by a mere ribbon.

  “In a few more days or so,” she said, her hand on the door latch, “when the babe is fit enough for travel, I can return him to his people. I can introduce you then to the Lenape sachem, the babe’s grandfather.”

  “Who is the father?” Craven might have once captured Evangeline’s affections, but he had most certainly not fathered the wee one. Was she opportunistic enough to have given herself to one of the Lenape, perhaps in trade for the Inn property?

  His interest in her surprised him. She was a Royalist, and he was now in the Cromwellian camp. She had grown to an adult among the aristocrats; he, among humanity’s backwash. She believed in a God who cared; he believed in a god who didn’t give a damn.

  “I have no idea who the father is. Rasannock – the sachem’s nephew – stayed on here at the Virgin Queen Tavern after he recovered from a bout of spotted fever for which I was treating him. After that success, I was entrusted with the well-being of the sachem’s daughter who was in her latter term with child. But, alas, the babe was born early, and the sachem’s daughter succumbed to hemorrhaging.”

  He was tempted to point out that losing a valuable patient seemed to run in her family of physicians, but this brooding comment would also reveal that that he knew her identity.

  “You understand, I may not be accorded a hero’s welcome at the Lenape village,” she continued. “Not with the sachem’s beloved daughter dead and buried outback of my inn. Peminacka is a mercurial man. There is no accounting for the swing of his moods. Profoundly greedy or frighteningly sadistic one moment and the next congenial and generous. But compassionate he is not. For the Indians compassion is a weakness. I – and, mayhap, those with me – could quite as easily be staked out and burnt as crisp as bacon.”

  Not stirring from his position for fear of forcing a hasty retreat upon her, he eyed her from beneath lids half-mast. “I shall be ready to travel within the week. But that is not why you stand here now, is it?”

  She closed the door behind her and eyed him bravely. “You gave me a second chance during our chess match, Adam.”

  In her voice there was no foolish pretense. “Take the ribbon from your hair.”

  She stared back at him for a long moment. Slowly her hands raised, and her fingers unknotted the wide band of blue velvet. She shook her hair loose and let it fall past her shoulder blades. Never had he begun to want a woman so much.

  He held up welcoming arms, and she came into them, reclining her much smaller fr
ame alongside his length. Her quivering flesh, raw with yearning, took him aback. Neither of them had silly expectations of sentiment, and yet he knew they both hoped to find something meaningful, something ineffable – at least, for the remainder of that magical night, that Christmas night.

  * * *

  That morning Evangeline’s arm reached to wrap around Adam’s hard suppleness and encountered emptiness. Well, not quite. Her fingers floundered upon, first, the still warm linen bedsheet – and then, upon a small hard object.

  She sprang upright and stared at it. A sugar cane stalk. God Almighty. The very same symbol engraved upon his saddlebags. The symbol that proclaimed his possessions.

  Her now wide-awake gaze drifted from the green sheathed cane, lower, to the linen sheet with its small splotch of blood. Her maidenhead’s blood.

  Then inner images cascaded over her vision. Her pale too-thin body, uniting in a drive toward that completion with his darker, smoothly muscled one. She now knew his body better than she did her own. Her ecstatic outcries that mingled with his exultant ones might have been but a dream were it not for the cane stalk and the tiny, tell-tale crimson stain. At that small outpost on an enormous, unexplored continent, they could have been indeed Adam and Eve.

  Except a bare twenty miles away camped William Craven, who would destroy her if he but knew of her existence as Eve Wainwright, within easy reach of his long arm of retribution.

  And where was Adam Sutcliff? She knew not where he had gone nor why, but she doubted not that he would return to her. Not because of the passion they had shared but because his single-minded pursuit was the land purchase. His intention was to win, at all costs, in every arena. He was that rare kind of man.

  She would do well to remember that, to remember that he had merely been making use of her. And do well to forget what he had made her feel. Not only the carnal pleasure. But for a brief few moments, he had made her feel she was not lonely . . . and alone . . . trapped between a vast ocean and the edge of a vast wilderness. Even her three friends had not been able to fill that aching void.