102
The Winds of Winter
BAR A FEW SHOWERS and one day of solid rain, the weather held and the roads were not bad. As for armies, though …
His job was to retrieve Dottie and bring her home. No one had mentioned her husband, who was presumably still an escaped prisoner of war. Granted, Denzell Hunter might be with Dottie in Virginia, but if he weren’t … He knew his cousin well; he knew Denzell Hunter well, too, and thought that once Dottie was safe, Hunter would likely have returned to the Continental army, as a matter of personal belief as well as military duty. Uncle Hal had shown him the official dispatches and told him what General Prévost supposed to be true, regarding both British and American troop dispositions. Winter was coming, and all hostilities had essentially ceased up north. Sir Henry Clinton had been lurking in New York since Monmouth, and George Washington—according to Hal’s dispatches, which his uncle had thought likely accurate—was still keeping the main body of his men in winter quarters in New Jersey.
One of Washington’s generals, though—Lincoln, the man who’d mounted the unsuccessful siege of Savannah—had gone north with his troops and was presently holding the city of Charles Town, and Clinton wanted it.
“So according to the latest, Sir Henry was intending to send some fourteen thousand troops down the coast to take the place, once D’Estaing’s frogs quit New York, but he was delayed by needing to go and protect Newport, which is where the frogs went next.” Uncle Hal had riffled through the small stack of dispatches, peering through his half spectacles. “And then the frogs bloody turn up here! You did say you thought you’d seen D’Estaing himself?”
“With my own eyes,” William assured his uncle, who snorted briefly.
“And we know that Lincoln left here after the siege failed and went up to hold Charles Town, which puts something of a stumbling block in Clinton’s path,” Lord John had put in.
“Being that winter is coming, Sir Henry’s intentions may have been further delayed by the weather—and the minor problem of housing his fourteen thousand troops, in case Benjamin Lincoln doesn’t immediately oblige by surrendering Charles Town. That being so, I’ve no idea what you might find if you go through Charles Town—or anywhere near it—but …”
“But it would be a lot faster to go through Charles Town than round it,” William finished, smiling. “Don’t worry, Uncle Hal. I’ll get to Virginia as quickly as I possibly can.”
Uncle Hal’s face, shadowed with tiredness and worry, relaxed into one of those rare, charming smiles that made you feel as though everything would be fine, because surely the world could not resist him.
“I know you will, Willie,” he said, with affection. “Thank you.”
William had therefore set out on his mission with a warm heart, stout boots, a good horse, and a purse full of gold, Uncle Hal meaning to ensure that he would lack for nothing in transporting Dorothea back to her father’s arms. Uncle Hal hadn’t happened to mention any role for Denzell Hunter in these transactions, but Lord John eventually had.
“He’s a Quaker, of course,” he told William, privately, “but he’s also a surgeon in the Continental army. And an escaped prisoner of war—he broke his parole, he says. He may be with Washington now, which means he’s likely in New Jersey. If he is, bloody leave him there and bring Dottie back with you at once, no matter what she says—or does—to you.”
“She’s a Quaker now, isn’t she?” William asked. “She won’t do anything violent.”
Lord John gave him a look.
“Somehow I doubt that religious conviction will be sufficient to overcome Dorothea’s familial tendencies toward high-handedness. Remember who her bloody father is.”
“Mm,” William said noncommittally. He was in fact recalling that the last time he had told a young Quaker woman—Denzell Hunter’s bloody sister, no less!—that she wouldn’t strike him, she had slapped his face. She’d also called him a rooster, which he rather resented.
William hadn’t given Denzell much thought during the discussion of Dottie’s rescue, but if he had, he would have come to the same conclusion as had Papa and Uncle Hal. He would, he thought, send word to Denzell as to Dottie’s whereabouts and well-being, at least.
William was feeling at once slightly heroic, sentimental, and magnanimous. This was largely due to his current feelings regarding Amaranthus, which were confused but suffusingly pleasant. Half of him urgently wished he had taken advantage of Mrs. Fleury’s summerhouse to accomplish the first step of the plan Amaranthus had suggested to him. The other half was rather glad he hadn’t.
In fact, he hadn’t, largely because of Dottie’s baby, and Amaranthus’s reaction to news of her death, which had abruptly made the child real to him. Before seeing Amaranthus’s sudden tears, he had himself felt the sadness of the situation, but it was an abstract sadness, safely distant from himself. But when Amaranthus wept for the child, he had been struck quite suddenly—and painfully—by the realization that she, little Minerva Joy, had been an actual person, one whose death had grievously wounded those who had loved her, for however short a time.
It was the tenderness engendered by this thought, as much as lust, that had made him touch Amaranthus, enter that kiss.
He touched his own lips with the back of his hand. Such a strange kiss, and somehow wonderful. For those few moments, when their lips had met and their bodies pressed together, kindling each other in the wet, chilly garden, it was as though some connection had been forged between them—as though he knew her now, in some way beyond words.
And he’d bloody wanted to know her a lot further—and she him. At one point, he’d slid his hand up the long bare thigh under her skirts, taken her mound in the palm of his hand, and felt the fullness, the slickness of her, wanting him. The pads of his fingers rubbed half consciously against his palm, tingling.
He swallowed and tried to put the memories of Amaranthus away. For now.
But the tenderness remained—and the thought of the baby. That’s why he’d stopped. Because it had suddenly occurred to him that what he was doing might in fact cause someone real to be born.
And that it somehow wasn’t right that he should oblige that someone to take on burdens that were—rightfully or not—his own to bear.
But if I married her, and didn’t go away if she fell pregnant … His son—God, what a thought, his son!—would still inherit Ellesmere’s title and Dunsany’s, but not until he was ready for it. He could prepare the boy, show him …
“Jesus.” He shook his head violently, driving out the thoughts, or trying to. The notion was new, frightening—and quite thrilling, in a way. He pushed it aside, his mind sliding back to its memories of Amaranthus and her soft blond brows, trickling water, pungent grass, and the gleaming black eyes of the watchful toad.
He barely noticed the miles pacing away beneath his horse’s hooves, and stopped only when darkness made the road disappear.
103
Virginia Reel
HE STOPPED FOR THE night in a hamlet some thirty miles north of Richmond. William felt the pull of Mount Josiah: He’d passed within a few miles of the road that would take him there, and for a few moments he was there in spirit, sitting on the broken porch with Manoke and John Cinnamon, eating fried catfish and pig meat smoked underground, the faint sweet scent of tobacco riding on the evening breeze.