“As he often does,” Brianna said dryly. “What on earth did he do this time?”
“Just being who he is.” Roger leaned back, relaxed, and his eyes met hers, still amused but quieter, with a softness in their depths that said he’d like to be alone with her. “The Reverend Thomas made the point that as I was Colonel Fraser’s son-in-law, my being a fully ordained minister was bound to have a beneficial influence on the colonel and thus indirectly on a great many other souls, your da being their landlord. And the Reverend Selverson, as it turns out, actually knows your da and thinks well of him, despite him being a Papist, so …” He held out a hand, flat, and tilted it to show the turning of opinion in his favor.
“Well, Da’s a man that could use a priest, more than most,” Marsali said. Everyone laughed, and so did Brianna, but she couldn’t help wondering what her mother might have to say about that.
“IT’S ONLY TWO dozen guns,” Roger said, shucking his black coat in the loft before dinner. “But they’re rifles, not muskets. I’ve no notion of their quality, because they’re coated with grease and wrapped in canvas and buried under two hundred or so pounds of Jamaican bat guano, but—don’t laugh, I’m not joking.”
“I’m not,” she said, laughing. “Where on earth did they come from? Here, give me that, I’ll take it down and hang it in the airing cupboard—it smells like …”
“Bat guano,” he said, nodding as he handed her the limp, damp coat. “And sweat. A lot of sweat.”
She eyed his torso, and the white shirt now pasted to it, and turned to fetch a fresh—well, dry at least—shirt from the trunk.
“The guns?” she prompted, handing it to him.
“Ah.” He pulled the wet shirt off with a sigh of relief and stood for a moment, arms outstretched, letting the faint breeze off the river wash his naked flesh with coolness. “Oh, God. Guns … Well. Ye recall Fergus telling us about your Mr. Brumby importing half his molasses and smuggling the other half?”
“I do.”
“Well, it appears that molasses isn’t the only thing Mr. Brumby smuggles.”
“You’re kidding!” She stared at him, halfway between delight and dismay. “He’s running guns?”
“And likely anything else that will make him a profit,” he assured her, worming his way into the folds of the fresh shirt. “Your potential employer appears to be one of the biggest smugglers in the Carolinas, according to one Monsieur Faucette, who dabbles himself.”
“But Lord John thinks he’s a loyal Tory—Brumby, I mean.”
“He may actually be a Tory,” Roger said, turning back a cuff. “Though his loyalty is quite possibly open to question. We don’t know what he was planning to do with the guns, once he got them—but it isn’t likely that the British army is depending on Brumby to get them arms.”
Bree poured water into the ewer and handed him a towel, then closed the trunk lid and sat on it, watching as he swabbed sand and salt and the dust of Charles Town from his face and dried his loosened, sweat-soaked hair.
“So you’re saying the guns you and Fergus just acquired came from Saint Eustatius?”
“So says Monsieur Faucette, under the influence of a generous prompting of rum and gold. I don’t know how reliable information obtained by bribery may be, but I do know—or rather, Fergus does—that most professional smugglers are just that. Professionals, I mean; most of them aren’t doing it in order to support one side of the war against the other; they make money where they can, and often enough, from both sides. And as it happened, I’d given Fergus sufficient gold that he was in a position to grease Monsieur Faucette, who … er … facilitated a meeting between Fergus and the owner of a small trading vessel, who had just brought the guns to Charles Town from Saint Eustatius via Jamaica. Et voilà,” he ended, shaking out the towel with a flourish.
“Awriiiiiight,” Bree said, grinning. “So, if Mr. Brumby is really running guns for the Americans, at least we aren’t hurting him by stealing them to give them to Da.”
“I’m trying really hard not to consider the morality of the situation in any depth,” he said dryly, dropping the folded towel on the trunk beside her. “I’d like to at least make it through ordination before the Presbytery of Charles Town finds out about it.”
His wife made an obliging gesture, drawing her fingers across her lips in a zipping motion.
“So, what did you and Marsali do today?” he asked, to change the subject.
To his surprise, it was her face that changed.
“It—I don’t know how to say it, exactly.” She sent him a sidelong look, half puzzled, half ashamed. He sat down on a keg of varnish, leaned forward, and took her hand, long-fingered and cold, clasping it between his own. He didn’t try to say anything, but smiled into her eyes.
After a moment, she smiled back, though it was only a brief shadow at the corner of her mouth. She looked away, but the elegant, ink-stained fingers turned and linked with his.
“I was embarrassed,” she said, finally. “I haven’t been afraid of a man in a long time.”
“A man? Who? What did he do?” His own grip had tightened on hers at the thought of anyone hurting her.
She shook her head, looking away. Her cheeks were flushed.
“Just a pair of young … jerks. Loyalist jerks, no less.” She told him about the louts who had defaced the tavern’s sign and attacked her and Marsali.
“They didn’t really hurt us. They knocked me over—one of them pulled my feet out from under me, the bastard, and then they started dragging me toward the river, saying they’d thr—throw me in.” Her voice had thickened suddenly, and he heard the rage in it.
“There were two of them, Bree. You couldn’t have stopped them, together like that.” Jesus. If I’d been there, I’d have—
She shivered briefly and squeezed his hand hard.
“That—” she started, but had to stop and swallow. “That’s what Da said to me. After Stephen Bonnet raped me. That I couldn’t have stopped him, even if I’d fought.”
“You couldn’t,” he said at once. She looked down at her hand, and he saw that he’d squeezed it so hard that her fingers, which had been grasping his, had sprung loose under the force of his grip and were sticking out of his solid grasp like a bundle of crayons. He cleared his throat and let go.
“Sorry.”
She gave a small laugh, but not with any sense of humor in it.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “That’s pretty much what Da did, only a lot rougher and on purpose.” The color had risen high in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixed on her hands, now clasped in her lap. “I wanted to kill him.”
“Stephen Bonnet?”
“No, Da.” She gave him a wry half smile. “He didn’t care. That’s what he was trying to make me do—try to kill him—so I’d believe I couldn’t do it, and so I’d have to believe that I couldn’t have done it. He humiliated me and he scared me and he didn’t mind if I hated him for it, as long as I understood that it wasn’t my fault.