AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(2)
She worried not about hostile Indians. She had won the protection of the Lenape-Delaware, the area’s predominant Indian population. Four years before, she had snatched the sachem’s fifteen-year-old nephew from the ravages of spotted fever. The striking young man now considered himself her guardian, elbowing for that special status, whenever Rasannock could, the fur trapper, toothless old Bonnie Charlie, and brick maker and iron forger, the runaway African slave, Gantu.
The modest ordinary squatted on the primitive road between Jamestown and Boston, where it crossed a path, worn through deep forests by the Delaware Indians as they headed westward to hunt. Behind the inn flowed the South River, her source of baths at dawn, given adequate weather.
The road always stood in peril of being repossessed by that weather and the forest – and was traveled by a few sojourners afoot, an occasional express rider, and, even more rarely, a wagon or cart. A visit this late in the evening by any of the three was highly unlikely.
It was the Roundheads who worried her. Cromwell’s tentacles continued to snake afar to exterminate those who had escaped his executioner’s axe. Her hand clamped on the door’s heavy bar, she inquired softly, “Who calls?” She hoped it was only her imagination – or hoped the caller would possibly not hear her and go away.
“Is there room at the inn?” responded a male voice that was cold steel glazed with heated honey.
Apprehension paralyzed her grip on the bar. “Who calls?” she repeated.
“A pilgrim seeking shelter,” the muffled voice fired back.
Her mind riffled through her options. If the caller was foe, she could expect no assistance from within the tavern. In the scullery behind, her personally designated, sleeping protectors would not likely hear her screams. But, of all days, could she in good conscience turn away a traveler on Christmas Eve? Besides, there was the prospect of lodging payment to raise the inn’s mud-low coffers.
She lifted the latchstring. The door squeaked on rusty hinges. Frigid air howled over her, and the candles guttered wildly in their sconces, and she shivered, as if her body was feeling this was one of those life-changing moments.
The vertical slit provided her view of a tall man in a plain russet cloak, one flap thrown over his shoulder to reveal a pistol, dirk, and rapier at his short-waisted leather doublet. His wide-brimmed hat, pinned to one side, revealed a glimpse of a strong-willed mouth and an iron-set jaw, its cleft chin punctuated with a dark, devilish tuft of hair the size of her thumb pad.
Bucket-top boots made his hose-encased legs appear even longer than they already were. But it was the length of his hair she sought to determine.
Not that length was an assured giveaway as to what political affiliation the man might adhere. Unlike Cromwell, with his shorn locks, his generals, and many of the Roundhead adherents, for that matter, tended to wear their hair at much the same length as their Royalists counterparts – in long, flowing ringlets. This man did wear his locks, as dark brown as the leather saddlebags flung over one forearm, as long as any Royalist.
“You are?” she asked. He was obviously a gentleman, despite his puritan, travel-stained clothing. His very stance proclaimed authority.
He swept his hat off – all it needed was an ostrich plume, and she might have mistaken him for a Royalist and acquiesced at once. But there was no mistaking her extraordinary reaction to him. Handsome he was, aye, but no more so than the gallants she had crossed paths with at court functions. Something inordinate about him caused her heart beat to accelerate, as it would when an adversary was near.
His bow was curt. “Adam Sutcliff., a weary wayfarer.”
The name meant nothing to her, nor signified any danger. Still . . . “What brings you along the highway so late and so far from any hamlet?”
“Tis bitter cold my bones are. For a hot toddy, a warm fire, and a soft bed, I shall regale you with the misfortunes of my travels that bring me here this late of night.”
His brown eyes twinkled, so how could she mistrust him? Her mother’s eyes had twinkled just so, before she had died of pleurisy when Evangelina had yet to reach the age of seven. Except her mother’s eyes had been blue, like hers. The pure blue of a cloudless sky. His were the dark brown of turbulent seas.
Relenting, she opened the door. Wide enough only for him to slip his lean length inside. She judged him to be in his late-twenties or early thirties, no more than a decade older than she at the utmost. Long gloved fingers dusted the snowflakes from his cloak. His nostrils flared – more likely at the aroma of her holy day cooking than the lavender scent she used personally.
Then he fixed his appraising gaze on her. “I have identified myself. And you are?”
She almost blurted, ‘The Lady Evangeline Bradshaw.’
“Mistress Eve Wainwright. Proprietress of the Virgin Queen Tavern.” The curtsy she affected was nigh nonexistent. The slightest bob of her head, at that time of night unadorned by a coif, was more that of royalty dismissing a minion. “Your cloak.”
His grin barely twitched the ends of his mouth. “I can hang it on the pegboard myself – seeing as you are encumbered with that damnably heavy horse pistol.”
Despite the blustering cold that had ushered him inside, she felt the heat of a blush rise from her throat to suffuse her cheeks. She lowered her lids. “Protection is ever necessary in the wilderness, sire.”
“Adam, prithee – if we are to be spending this night in each other’s company.” He hung his cloak, then, removing his floppy hat, he beat it across his thigh. Snowflakes flurried. “I took the liberty of stalling my mount, with a nosebag, in your stable.”