Beloved Enemy, page 7
“No, Ginny. You may not sleep unless you do so on the window seat.” Alex bent over her, lifting her to her feet. His voice seemed incongruously gentle to her bewildered, desperate senses, but there was no mistaking the implacable note. “I wish this to be over soon,” he said quietly, holding her as she sagged against him. “When you have told me, you shall bathe, sleep, and eat, and you and I will begin anew, knowing who and what we are.”
The thought was seductive, almost irresistible. Edmund’s name rose to her lips, and then the image of Winchester jail dried her mouth. She sat again upon the window seat, her head drooping on her chest as she dozed fitfully throughout an interminable afternoon when the nausea of hunger churned in her belly and she hardly knew whether she was awake or asleep. The single note of a bugle hammering insistently, repetitively, created images of battlefields strewn with the broken bodies of the dead and wounded, and she walked amongst them, looking . . . always looking for someone. Her father? . . . Edmund? But she was not searching among the flotsam of the king’s dead, but through that of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell’s men . . .
She awoke from her trance with a cry of terror as a hand touched her shoulder, and she found herself looking into the eyes of the man she had been seeking. It was full night outside, she saw through the window at her back.
“Sweet Ginny, you must tell me.” He spoke softly, urgently. “I cannot bear to see you thus, but I must know. I will promise to keep his identity a secret, will keep the knowledge of their escape to myself, but this is war, my love. I have to know how you have done this thing, and how often, and I have to block further escapes. You have nothing to lose by telling me, since you are no longer in a position to continue this work. But others may try, and all unknowing, they will run their heads into a noose if it is not made clear from the outset that escape from the island is now impossible. If I know the details, I will make the warning manifest. No one will suffer from what you tell me, unless they choose to ignore the warning.”
“You would make a traitor of me?” The tears flowed now, hot and fast, and he held and soothed her.
“No traitor, Ginny, but a pragmatist, one who recognizes the appropriate moment to yield. You will cause no deaths or hardship by telling me, I give you my word. I will simply place guards obtrusively at all points on the island where a boat might slip away, and alert the mainland forces to do the same. You know the places, do you not?”
She nodded through her tears, grateful for the kerchief that wiped her eyes, the strong arm around her shoulders, the broad chest that received her head. Pathetically grateful for the comfort that followed acute discomfort, for the attention that followed blind, cruel indifference. She had heard tell of skillful interrogators, those who waited for the breaking point and then offered succor, support, and understanding. Alex had used those techniques, playing on the weakness of her nerve-strung, sleep-deprived body, her exhausted emotions, her hunger, and her fear, before offering her both excuse and rationale to give him what he wanted.
Even as she despised herself and hated him, Ginny heard her voice stumbling over the answers to his questions. Then he left her for a moment, to give a series of crisp orders, before coming back to hold her again, as she wept in shame at her weakness. Later he carried her upstairs to her chamber, where a steaming tub, floating with fragrant herbs, stood before a fire, newly kindled in the grate. There was food and wine on the corner table.
“I would stay with you, if it were possible,” he said, setting her on her feet, steadying her with one hand. “But you must see to your own comfort tonight, and tomorrow, when you are rested, we will talk again.”
“You promise that no harm will come to Edmund?” Ginny moved away from the steadying hand to find her own grounding on her own still-bare feet.
“Have I not said so?” He smiled sadly. “You hate me, now, Ginny, as you hate yourself. But I will keep my word; and tomorrow, when we talk, you will understand why this was necessary, and why you took the only option you had.”
The door closed behind him, and the iron key turned in the lock. She was a prisoner in her own room, and the man who held the key to the door also held the key to her soul.
She bathed and washed her hair, ate a little of the food, but found, strangely, that she was no longer hungry. The bread and meat stuck in her throat, and the wine sickened her stomach. She crawled into bed and lay shivering, although the room was warmed and comforted by the soft glow of the fire that had always been an incredible luxury even in the depths of winter. Only when she was sick had her mother had the fire kindled, and as a result, Ginny always associated the cheerful crackle with the gently soothing care of her mother and her nurse, with feeling pleasurably helpless and weak. She felt both those things now, but the sensation was not pleasurable.
Sleep rescued her from the lash of her self-disgust, and for twelve hours she was dreamlessly unconscious, waking yet again to the note of the bugle, to a bright, clear rain-washed morning, to the sound of male voices and the tramp of feet. Edmund and Peter would be safe now, if Alex had kept his word. With luck and good friends, they would be on their way to join the main Royalist force in Surrey. Activity and a sense of purpose would do more for Edmund’s health and well-being than any sickroom care she could provide. He was young and strong, and the wound healing well. So long as it did not reopen, he should be able to use the arm again in a week or so. Would he blame her for her betrayal? Would others see her confession as treachery? Could she have held out longer? Would a few more hours have made any difference? She knew that eventually Alex would have wrested the answers from her. She had not the physical strength to resist such deprivation indefinitely. And, while Alex’s feelings for her would not allow him to sentence her to the torturers in Winchester jail, his ruthless single-minded devotion to duty and principle would have allowed him to offer her no quarter, either.
There was a rap at the door, and the voice that she now recognized as belonging to the young man Diccon called. “Mistress Courtney?”
“Yes,” she answered, unafraid that he would open the door, Only Alex would assume the right to enter her chamber, and he would not accord that right to anyone else.
“I am to escort you to the colonel,” Diccon said. “When you are ready.”
“Then you must wait a few minutes.” Ginny slipped to the floor, drawing her nightgown over her head. Her eye fell on the tray of barely touched food, and she realized that she was ravenously, healthily hungry, that she was clean and well rested, that the sun was shining, that Edmund and Peter had escaped, and that Alex Marshall awaited her belowstairs.
She was nineteen years old, an insignificant cog in the machinery of this war-torn world. What had happened between herself and Alex yesterday was an incident of war, simply that. In all such incidents, there had to be both loser and victor. She had lost on that occasion, but because of the strange magic that existed between them, the victor had promised not to take full advantage of his victory. There would be no repercussions, and the only name she had given him had been Edmund’s. All the others, if they now acted with circumspection, would be safe. Ginny, herself, now knew the enemy in the person of her lover, as did he know the both in her. It would be a curious, dangerous game that they played from now on, but it carried the inevitability of destiny.
Ginny dressed herself with care, determined that there would be no further observations of the “gypsy” kind. She put on her best gown—a soft apple green with lace edging to the shoulders and low-cut bosom, where the creamy swell of her breasts rose delicately amidst the lace. The color brought out the rich chestnut highlights in the hair that hung, long and shining with cleanliness, to the small of her back. This morning she did not braid it, but secured it behind her ears with the tortoise-shell combs that had been her mother’s. She slipped into the soft kid slippers that, like the gown, were worn only for special occasions. Such occasions had been few and far between in the last five years, but if ever there were a moment for finery, it was now, when she stood on the brink of an exciting, uncertain fate.
“I am ready, Diccon.” She used his name unconsciously; it was one she had heard so many times during the lonely hours on the window seat that it came naturally to her lips. The key turned, and the door swung open. The lieutenant’s eyes widened as he took in her appearance, so vastly different from the working attire she had worn when first they had come to the house, and even more so from her bedraggled state of yesterday.
She smiled at him and dropped a small, polite curtsy. Diccon blushed and stood aside as she went past him with a satisfying rustle of her skirts. She smiled a greeting to those she met along the gallery and on the stairs, and it was returned instantly. Suddenly these men seemed no longer the faceless captors of her house, members of a brutal invading army. There were people with their own joys and sorrows, their anxieties about loved ones left behind while they went to war, their terrors at the prospect of violent death or wounding, of the surgeon’s knife in the field hospital, of gangrene and typhus.
Alex paced the dining room, waiting for her. How would she be? Mutely hostile in closed-face defiance? Wretched with shame and despair at her breaking? Sharp-tongued and cold-eyed with that bitter irony he had first seen? Any or all of them? Damn this war that had made beasts of them all, that had turned the peaceful peasantry into savages who raped and pillaged, tortured and killed indiscriminately and in vengeance. Civilization had regressed two hundred years in the last five, and no one regretted that fact more than Alex Marshall. And no one felt more passionately that the end must justify the means.
“Good morrow, Colonel.” Her voice was light, the gray eyes smiled, and for an instant he stood stunned. He had seen her beauty from the first, responded to it from the first, had for a few short hours known it in the fullest sense. He had seen her energy, her ability to forget herself and her appearance in the fierce pursuit of purpose. And he had seen her exhausted, crushed, and broken. But until this moment, he had never seen the Lady Virginia Courtney. She swept him a curtsy, perfect in its depth, and he found himself bowing with the meticulous formality of the court.
The dining room door closed behind Diccon, and they were alone in a silence that coiled and wreathed around the tumult of their past dealings, and prepared for the future.
“Are you well?” Alex broke the silence at last, taking her hands, lifting them to his lips to kiss the work-roughened fingers.
“Yes, I am well,” she replied honestly. “But devilishly hungry.” The refectory table carried the remains of breakfast—a soldier’s breakfast of sirloin, fat bacon, coddled eggs, and wheaten bread. A jug of ale stood amidst the wooden platters, knives, and pewter tankards that bore witness to the number of men who had broken their fast.
“What may I serve you?” Alex asked courteously, taking a knife to the sirloin, eyebrows lifted to punctuate the question.
“Everything,” she replied, drawing a stool to the table, keeping her back to the window seat, that mute reminder of yesterday’s agonies.
“When you have finished,” Alex said slowly, “I wish you to show me the priest’s hole and the secret passage.”
“Why?” It wouldn’t matter to show him now, since she could no longer use it, but by the same token, it should not matter to him either.
“I am afraid, Virginia, that I cannot allow you to have secret knowledge of a way out of this house. I cannot take the risk that you might use that knowledge.”
Such a thought had not occurred to her, but she remembered how yesterday, on the beach, she had told him she would evade his guard if she could, to continue subversion as and when the opportunity arose. It was an understanding that lay beneath whatever turns their relationship might now take.
“And if I refuse?” She spread thick golden butter on the rough bread, watching the sunlight dance over the smooth black wood of the table.
“Then my men will find it.”
Virginia looked around the room, imagining it in ruins, the rich paneling prised from the walls by pikes, the glowing floors torn up, the delicate moldings smashed. Only if there were still someone hidden in the priest’s hole, would she allow her father’s house to be destroyed, even if that house no longer belonged to her.
“Would you sack the house?” she asked quietly, knowing he would answer her truly, just as she knew what that truth would be.
There was pain in his eyes, but he still said, “I will do whatever is necessary to bring this war to a speedy conclusion. There has already been too much blood to have scruples about shedding more. To run shy at this point will make futile the sacrifices of those who have already given their lives.”
“But you did not send me to Winchester jail.”
“No.” Alex swatted a fly buzzing at the bacon. “I love you, and I will keep you from harm insofar as I am able. But because I now know who and what you are, I will prevent you from causing harm to mine own cause.”
“That is a fearsome responsibility you undertake,” she said thoughtfully. “To keep safe the lover whilst circumventing the enemy, when the two persons are contained in one body.”
“We shall see whether it is a task to which I am equal,” he replied. “We understand each other, you and I?” His eyebrows lifted again.
“Yes.” She looked at him fearlessly. “Lovers and foes until . . .”
“Until the conflict is resolved.”
“Death resolves many conflicts.”
“And it may well resolve this one, but I will pray for a happier conclusion, Ginny.”
“I also.” She stood up. “Come, I will show you the priest’s hole. The mechanism is most ingenious.” She struck a flint and lit a candle. “There is no light,” she explained, “and I have always been afeard of the passage, ever since Edmund locked me in one afternoon because he wished to hunt hare with the village boys and my presence would have been an embarrassment.”
Alex thought of the wounded man in the boat, the man she had kissed, her cousin with whom she had grown to maturity, and he envied Edmund Verney who had known her in her growing, had teased her, and found her a nuisance.
“I hope he was well thrashed for his unkindness,” Alex remarked, following her into the cold darkness.
“No.” Ginny chuckled, shielding the candle that flickered as she pressed the catch to close the panel behind them. “I did not betray him.”
Her voice faltered, and Alex stated flatly, “You have never done so. If Edmund Verney comes to harm, it will be through nothing that you have revealed.”
Ginny did not respond as she reached the small chamber. She held the candle high, revealing the stone walls, the blood-stained pallet, the wooden pail.
The air was dank and fetid, and Alex could not help his recoil. Better to die in battle, surely, than to cower like rats in this wretched hole? But then he had never been faced with such a dilemma. He had never been hunted, and the battles he had fought he had won.
“We should remove this. It makes the air foul.” He picked up the pail, his voice brisk and matter-of-fact.
Ginny nodded and led the way down the cold steps to the outside door.
They stood in the cool, clear morning, where the sea air was sharply fresh. Ginny breathed deeply of ozone, lifted her face to the breeze.
Alex emptied the pail around the elder bush. “Do you care to ride?”
“Of all things.” She smiled. “But I am not dressed for it.”
“Anymore than you are dressed for scrambling through secret passages,” he teased, removing a cobweb from her hair. “You did not think to change your dress, and your slippers are soiled.”
“We were talking of serious matters, and I forgot such mundane considerations,” Ginny offered.
“And how often do you remember them?” His eyes danced.
“Rarely,” Ginny admitted ruefully. “I was always the despair of my mother.”
“I can imagine.” Alex gave a shout of laughter. “A disobedient, stubborn, little gypsy, I’ll lay odds.” Then his laughter died, and he cupped her face. “You are not so very different now, and, for my sins, I would not have you otherwise.”
“I am neither disobedient nor stubborn,” she said softly, “since there is no one who has the right to command my obedience.”
His eyes darkened. “It is not necessary to repeat that we are in opposition. I understand that fact, but I was talking of the lover, not of the enemy.”
“It will not always be easy to separate the two.” Even as she said this, her arms went around his neck, her body reaching against his length, feeling the warmth of the skin beneath his shirt. It was she who kissed him, this time, her hand palming his scalp as she pulled his head down, standing on tiptoe to assert the equality of love.
When they drew apart, Alex touched her swollen lips. “For this day, we are simply lovers. There will be no words of enmity between us. We will talk and exchange histories, and you will show me this island that you love so dearly.”
“Very well,” Ginny agreed, turning back to the secret door that still stood open behind them. “Do we return as we came to the further detriment of my gown? Or shall we surprise your men by reappearing like ghosts in the yard?”
“We will return the way we came,” Alex replied smartly. “A few more cobwebs will make little difference, and I have no desire to traipse around the house.”
Once again in the dining room, the panel shut tight behind them, Alex blew out the candle. “Put on your riding habit, Mistress Courtney. We shall go exploring.”
The promise contained in the statement made her toes curl in the kid slippers. There would be time and opportunity enough for enmity in the days ahead, when the Roundhead colonel and his Royalist prisoner clashed as they surely would. But today was for loving. “I will meet you at the stables,” she murmured.
