Elisabeth Fairchild (20 page)

He did not look back. He in no way tried to duplicate that night in her room. She wondered if he had found her in some way displeasing--too ignorant, or too ready to succumb. He was a man who enjoyed the hunt. She could see it in his eyes, the alert concentration with which he discussed their mission. Perhaps she was not enough of a challenge to such a man of the world.

At the inns where they paused, exhausted, to rest travel weary bones, they were housed in different rooms, generally booked double with others of meager means. She, with the women, he, with the men.

Their thrown together reality proved strangely intimate yet separate. People surrounded them at all times. Even when they took their meals together they had few private moments. Their conversation focused on Manchester, and Henry Hunt and the huge illegal gathering of reformers in which they went to take part.

“About that night,” she finally said, when they had a rare moment alone.

“Shall I apologize?”

His reaction was unexpected. “Do you feel the need?”

“I do,” he said emphatically, and for the briefest moment she questioned just what need her referred to.

 “Best we keep our heads clear if we are to work together.”

She swallowed hard, nodding, crushed by his complete dismissal of their feelings, of the intense passion she had been sure they shared.

His passion now fixed on the work. She sensed in him a growing anticipation as they neared their destination.

Her heart ached, that it was not for her.

Manchester

Manchester presented them with obstacles from the moment they entered the town’s boundaries. The streets were thronged. Food was in short supply. When they asked about for a room to let, they were met with laughter. At every inn they were turned away, no more rooms available. At guesthouses, they met with the same.

“Thousands have descended upon the city,” they were told. More than fifty-thousand. Most poor or destitute.

The merchants were contemptuous.

“Every barn and stable and hayrick is occupied, the fields south of town are dotted with tents,” one innkeeper ranted.

“Filthy blanketeers! “ another spat. “Stink, they do! Possess nothing more than the blanket with which to wrap themselves at night.”

The butcher told them, “The local roadsides and hedges are scoured bare of berries, nuts and nettles—they are that hungry. Not a live rabbit to be seen for miles!”

From the mouths of one after another they were met with, “In need of a room, are you? Slim chance!”

Persistence, not chance, won them a place to stay. Roger went door to door, in the area immediately surrounding St. Peter’s Field, where Hunt’s speeches were to be held. Time and again he was turned away, by none so vociferously as the fellow who ultimately took his money. He rented them a sparsely furnished apartment overlooking the field, for enough gold coin to make his jaw drop.

A single room. Hastily packed, its owner left them to it.

“I shall be in Clitheroe, “ he said as he bid them adieu. “I have relatives to take me in.”

They stood a moment eyeing their dearly bought setting--a single, narrow bed beside an equally narrow fireplace, a few chairs, a washstand with pitcher and bowl, a chest of drawers, and a window that looked out over St. Peter’s Field.

Dulcie eyed the bed with misgivings, pulse jumping. Nights had never, along their journey, thus far, proved a matter for so much concern.

“Not much, my dear little sister . . .” Roger said, crossing to the window.

He flicked back the curtain, eyed briefly the view, and turning his back to it, leaned upon the sill with the mischievous expression she had long been missing, the same expression with which he had once leaned upon another windowsill. “But the prospect is promising.”

Her heart jumped to hear him say so, for while the view was spectacular, for their purposes, something in the way he said “prospect” made her consider all the potential implications of the word.

A room at St. Peter’s Field

He took the floor, she the bed. Neither slept.

He felt too completely her presence, remembered too vividly the last night they had shared such darkness, such a stillness. He could hear her every breath. The air weighed heavy with a pensive, waiting stillness. It rose from the field below. Dying cookfires carried in the humid, sausage-scented air.

The night simmered, like a soup pot. It smelled of Dulcie. It stirred with her movements and sounded with her sighs. Humid and heavy as aroused flesh it hung--swollen with expectation. He had kept himself in check so well--until now. He had assumed they would find rooms somewhere--separate rooms. Not this. Not undeniable temptation.

His fleshly desire had first given twitch when she took off her bonnet, let down her hair and combed it long and dark, a sooty curtain about her shoulders. He wanted to bury his face in that silken darkness. He wanted to see her wearing the cloak of it, and nothing else.

As she sponged herself clean of travel dust, though he turned his back like a gentleman, and made himself busy cleaning and checking the weapons he carried, a pocket derringer, a dirk strapped to his leg, a fine bladed sword that slipped with the pressing of a button from his walking stick, he caught sight of her pale reflection in the windowpane.

His desire stiffened, throbbing with potential as she bent to smooth the blankets of his pallet, her backside enticing as fabric stretched tight. A passing thought, he considered for the merest fraction of an instant, the crass idea of tossing her skirt up over her head that he might take her.

She did nothing to calm lustful thoughts in dousing the light. In the darkness he heard her step from the spill of her skirts, heard her shake out the dust, heard the faint rustle of fabric as she carefully folded her clothing piece by piece.

Loosening the kerchief tied about his neck, he crossed to the washstand. Wetting it, he bathed his face and neck as he unbuttoned his shirt and returned restlessly to the window. He threw the sash high to allow some small stirring of air.

Then, he ran the kerchief over chest and shoulders, enjoying the brief kiss of cool. The moonlit sheets drew him as she sank into them, as her hand emerged from the coverlet carrying additional pieces of clothing: petticoats, stockings, her chemise.

He poured himself a glass of water, stood by the window drinking, staring hard at St. Peter’s Field, reminding himself why they came, why they shared the room. Unbuttoning his breeches he pulled the tail of his shirt free, leaning against the sill to unlace boots, to strip off stockings. He let his breeches fall to the floor, stood at last, in the moonlight, clad in nothing more than his weaver’s blouse, afraid to cross the room, afraid he would forget all resolve if he took a step in that direction.

For a week in the unseasonably warm temperatures they had shared the same roofs, hour after hour in one another’s company, with little liberty as sister and brother to share the looks he would share with her, to speak, to touch as their past now prompted. They played a platonic relationship in public. Best that way. His mind fixed more completely on the job at hand without her lips to distract him, without the promise of lovemaking to lead him astray.

“Roger.” His name on her lips held such promise he turned from the window, unaware that the moonlight made shadowy silhouette of his desire beneath the tail of the blouse.

“Dulcie?” He liked the sensual sibilance of her name in the dark.

“Do you care for the pillow?” she asked innocently.

The pillow? He cared to pillow his head upon her almond scented breasts, upon the breath stirred curve of her belly, between the milky sweetness of her thighs. He crossed the room, stood briefly beside the bed, looking at the moonlit vision of her, a spill of dark hair upon the pillow, the pale moon of her face in the midst of that darkness, the rest of her hid from him by no more than the sheet.

“Keep it,” he said.

From the darkness floated her concern. “I am troubled by the very softness of my situation, when you are forced to suffer the floor’s unyielding hardness.”

He suffered an unyielding hardness. He could not argue that, but he must get his thoughts out of his pants and onto the business at hand.

“Never mind,” he said. “Sweet dreams now. I would have you fresh. Tomorrow’s gathering promises more trouble than our sleeping arrangements.” He sank to the pallet she had made for him of blankets and coverlet.

She fell silent a moment, the only sound her restless breath as she turned, uneasy in the bed. She plumped the pillow against which he wished to pin her head with kisses.

“Are you as hot as I am?” she asked.

He rearranged the folds of the quilt wrapped knapsack that served as pillow, tried to think fraternal thoughts and failed. “I daresay hotter.”

He sighed, and settled his head, staring at the ceiling.

“Roger?”

The potential of his name on her lips turned him in her direction. Could it be she meant to invite him to share the bed? It had crossed his mind that most of the women he worked with would have offered as much without a second thought, that he might have sated desires, theirs and his, without much thought for propriety, or tomorrows. There was that difference in working with a lady whose father had released her to his care.

“Mmm?” he murmured.

“I am worried about tomorrow.” It had not occurred to him she might be concerned. The brain below the waist controlled him too much to think much with the one above.

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “You know the weaving industry better now than most weavers.”

“That’s not what worries me.”

“What then?”

“I don’t really know.” She sighed. “But there is a heaviness in the air. A weighty, humid sort of threat. Can you not feel it?”

“I feel it.” He refrained from chuckling at his own dashed desires, squelched by her serious tone.

“You will be careful?”

“Of course,” he whispered. “I am ever careful.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

August 16, 1819

St. Peter’s Field

She woke to the tune of a man’s heavy breathing, and through the window, the muted rattle of pots and pans, the bang and tap of hammer on wood. The ceiling above her seemed faintly blue, the window’s light blued as well. Not the purpled light of morning clinging to the shadows. The whole room, even the shafts of sunlight filtering through the curtain, were faintly colored by Roger Ramsay’s presence.

She rolled onto her belly to study briefly her companion’s sleeping countenance. Roger made himself comfortable on the floor. His face, in repose took on a deceptively angelic cast. Shapely mouth and well-boned cheeks slack, cinnamon lashes fanned out against his cheeks, dark chestnut brows winging high into the careless spill of foxtail hair, he looked younger, untroubled by worry.

A hitch in his breathing and she rose, determined to wash and dress before he woke. She stood at the window, pinning up her hair, felt his gaze upon her and could not turn to meet it, least she fall too deeply into the blue of his eyes.

Arms lifted, morning light slanted through the window as she twisted and pinned the dark coil of hair. Through the thin muslin of her bodice, the shape of her was illuminated, temples of temptation, risen with the sun, pink as the dawn. Dangerous. The desire he had so long restrained, broke its bonds.

She did not look in his direction as he stood, but her fingers slowed in the twisting of her hair. He stepped in behind her, slid hands about her waist. She did not jump, or object, or push him away, merely sighed and leaned her head against his chest and let go her hair.

It cascaded over her shoulders and his, brushing his neck, a silken fall of darkness. He buried his face in the almond-scented riches, hands traveling upward to cup her breasts, his pride prodding the curves of her backside through the folds of her skirt. With swift, skin skimming dexterity he unbuttoned her bodice. His hands cupped the warm weight of bare flesh.

She cried out, breath sharp and ragged against his neck, heating already overheated skin. He tipped his head to brush cheek to cheek and kissed her ear.

“It promises to be warm today,” he whispered. His fingers skimmed the length of her ribs. “Very warm indeed,” he murmured.

She imagined what it would be like to give herself up to the heat to which he referred, to make the rhythm of the hammers nailing handbills to the hustings in the field below, their rhythm.

She saw in an instant how it would be, how deftly experienced hands would make short shrift of clothing just donned. Her skirt would rise like the banners that rose even now in St. Peter’s Field. She could imagine his touch, lips, tongue. Heated flesh against heated flesh.

Humid with need, her enthusiasm matched the cheers of the crowd below as they responded to the appearance of a union led into the field to the tune of fife and drum.

She pulled herself from his arms and flung up the sash to breath deep the morning air. “We’ve work to do,” she reminded him, even as she reminded herself.

From the field came the increasing drone of voices, the thud of hammers. The handbills were red and green.

He leaned against the sill beside her, his hand passing from the crown of her head down the length of hair that fell over her shoulder, to touch again the raised button of one breast. “You had best put up your hair,” he suggested gently.

He fixed his gaze outside, on the job to be done. The slogan HUNT AND LIBERTY served as compass for his thoughts. Scrawled on nearby fences, chalked on the paving stones, printed on paper handbills plastered to the buildings shouldering St. Peter’s Field, the symbol of a pike with a sharp blade shaped like a battle axe marked everything. The symbol served to remind him of the potential violence that brought them here, not the pikestaff that throbbed beneath the tail of his shirt. He must not forget it.

He tucked himself in, buttoned his breeches, and turned to find her watching, her hair demurely pinned in a knot at the crown of her head. How long had she stood there eyeing him?