“But we’re in time,” she said. “It said 1776; we’ve got time to find them.” She sighed hugely. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was so worried you’d find out before I could get back and I didn’t know what you’d do.”
“What I did do.…You know,” he said conversationally, “I have a friend with a two-year-old child. He says that he’d never in life condone child abuse—but by God, he understands what makes people do it. I feel very much the same about wife beating just now.”
There was a small quiver of laughter from the heavy weight on his chest.
“What do you mean by that?”
He slid a hand down her back and got a firm grip on one round buttock. She wore no underclothes beneath the loose breeches.
“I mean that were I a man of this time, instead of my own, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to lay my belt across your arse a dozen times or so.”
She didn’t seem to consider this a serious threat. In fact, he thought she was laughing.
“So since you’re not from this time, you wouldn’t do it? Or you would, but you wouldn’t enjoy it?”
“Oh, I’d enjoy it,” he assured her. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to take a stick to you.”
She was laughing.
Suddenly furious, he shoved her off and sat up.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I thought you’d found someone else! Your letters, the last few months…and then that last one. I was sure of it. It’s that I want to beat you for—not for lying to me or going off without telling me—for making me think I’d lost you!”
She was silent for a moment. Her hand came out of darkness and touched his face, very softly.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I never meant for you to think that. I only wanted to keep you from finding out, until it was too late.” Her head turned toward him, silhouetted by the faint light from the road outside their refuge. “How did you find out?”
“Your boxes. They came to the college.”
“What? But I told them not to send those until the end of May, when you’d be in Scotland!”
“I would have been; only for a last-minute conference that kept me in Oxford. They came the day before I left.”
There was a sudden spill of light and noise as the door of the tavern opened, disgorging a knot of patrons into the road. Voices and footsteps passed by their refuge, startlingly close. Neither of them spoke until the sounds had disappeared. In the renewed silence, he heard the sound of a conker falling through the leaves, to bounce on the leaves nearby.
Brianna’s voice was oddly husky.
“You thought I’d found somebody else…and you still came after me?”
He sighed, anger gone as suddenly as it had come, and wiped the damp hair off his face.
“I’d have come if you were married to the King of Siam. Bloody woman.”
She was no more than a pale blur in the darkness; he saw the brief movement as she leaned to pick up the fallen conker, and sat toying with it. Finally, she drew a very deep breath and let it out slowly.
“You said wife beating.”
He paused. The crickets had stopped again.
“You said you were sure. Did you mean it?”
There was a silence, long enough to fill a heartbeat, long enough to fill forever.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“In Inverness, I said—”
“You said you’d have me all—or not at all. And I said I understood. I’m sure.”
Her shirt had pulled free of her breeches in their struggle, and billowed loose around her in the faint hot breeze. He reached under the floating hem and touched bare skin, which rippled into gooseflesh at his touch. He pulled her close, ran his hands over bare back and bare shoulders under the cloth, buried his face in her hair, her neck, exploring, asking with his hands—did she mean it?
She gripped his shoulders and leaned back, urging him. Yes, she did. He answered, wordless, opening the front of her shirt, spreading it apart. Her breasts were white and soft.
“Please,” she said. Her hand was at the back of his head, pulling him toward her. “Please!”
“If I take you now, it’s for always,” he whispered.
She scarcely breathed, but stood stock-still, letting his hands go where they would.
“Yes,” she said.
The tavern door opened again, startling them apart. He let her go and stood up, reaching down a hand to help her, then stood with her hand in his, waiting while the voices receded into distance.
“Come on,” he said, and ducked under the drooping branches.
* * *
The shed was some distance from the tavern, dark and quiet. They stopped outside, waiting, but there was no sound from the back of the inn; all the windows on the upper floor were dark.
“I hope Lizzie’s gone to bed.”
He wondered dimly who Lizzie was, but didn’t care. At this distance he could see her face clearly, though the night washed all color from her skin. She looked like a harlequin, he thought; white cheek planes slashed by leaf shadows, framed by the dark of her hair, her eyes black triangles set above a dash of vivid mouth.
He took her hand in his, palm to palm.
“D’ye know what handfasting is?”
“Not exactly. Sort of a temporary marriage?”
“A bit. In the Isles and the remoter parts of the Highlands, where folk were a long way from the nearest minister, a man and a woman now would be handfast; vowed to each other for a year and a day. At the end of it, they find a minister and wed more permanently—or they go their own ways.”
Her hand tightened in his.
“I don’t want anything temporary.”
“Neither do I. But I don’t think we’ll find a minister easily. There are no churches here yet; the nearest minister is likely in New Bern.” He lifted their linked hands. “I did say I wanted it all, and if ye did not care enough to wed me…”
Her hand tightened, hard.
“I do.”
“All right.”
He took a deep breath and began.
“I, Roger Jeremiah, do take thee, Brianna Ellen, to be my lawful wedded wife. With my goods I thee endow, with my body I thee worship…” Her hand twitched in his, and his balls tightened. Whoever had worded this vow had understood, all right.
“…in sickness and in health, in richness and in poverty, so long as we both shall live.”
If I make a vow like that, I’ll keep it—no matter what it costs me. Was she thinking of that now?
She brought their linked hands down together, and spoke with great deliberation.
“I, Brianna Ellen, take thee, Roger Jeremiah…” Her voice was scarcely louder than the beating of his own heart, but he heard every word. A breeze came through the tree, rattling the leaves, lifting her hair.
“…as long as we both shall live.”
The phrase meant a good bit more to each of them now, he thought, than it would have even a few months before. The passage through the stones was enough to impress anyone with the fragility of life.
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the rustle of leaves overhead and a distant murmur of voices from the tavern’s taproom. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it, on the knuckle of her fourth finger, where one day—God willing—her ring would be.