AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(9)
Oh, he was good, very good. Brilliant, in fact. The pieces dwindled on both sides. And then, at long last, it came – the recognition of her defeat. They stared across the board’s battlefield at one another. “It would seem, Eve, that we have met our match in each other.”
Her gaze was as forthright as his. “Aye, that we have. The hour grows late. Tomorrow we can discuss the details of the journey to Peminacka’s village. Tis time we retire.”
As if she could sleep, when but a doorway away lay her enemy.
§§ CHAPTER THREE §§
Boothosed feet crossed at his ankles and arms locked behind his head on the straw pillow, Adam Sutcliff regarded the bedchamber’s low timbers that had forced him to bow his head upon entering – something he had sworn at thirteen never to do once he escaped his servitude. Oh, how low his high and mighty family had fallen.
That he had survived at all was a miracle, when life expectancy of an imported bond servant or slave on Barbados’s sugar plantations was seven years. He had not allowed himself the luxury of making friends. All too often from among his lowly ranks a friend, or foe, fell victim to either fatal burns when boiling cane juice in huge vats or, when feeding sugar stalks between the giant millstones, was pulled between its rollers and crushed to nightmarish pulp.
And while he was cutting cane by 7:00 in the morning, his former boyhood friends back home in Wiltshire might be playing a game of stoole-ball before school. Nay, better no friends and no loss. And as for Christmas, what a damnable, disappointing myth.
Completing his seven years of servitude, he had parlayed both a friendship with the plantation owner’s son into an unparalleled education and three-hundred pounds due upon expiration of his servitude into a plantation investment that garnered modest affluence back in England.
More readily, his thoughts turned to Eve – a facetious name for the Lady Evangeline Bradshaw. He had been in charge of the Ironsides troop that had removed the King, under house arrest, from Holdenby House. For but a moment, Adam had glimpsed the terrified expressions of the royal attendants – and had caught Evangeline Bradshaw’s spitfire one. No man who had looked upon the daughter of Dr. Robert Bradshaw could ever forget her, despite her passing herself off now under another name as a common inn proprietress.
As if Lady Evangeline could ever be common. The singular, albeit common, pox scar astride the bridge of her nose marked her as someone special, if her vibrancy did not. And it was that vibrancy which attracted him. Nigh thirty years he had spent in believing one woman was as good as the next. Oh, some were better than others . . . for that purpose and period in his life.
However, his purpose at this period in his life was focused solely on securing once again the rights to his family’s estates of England’s Blackmore Forest, in Wiltshire.
Under the Norman yoke that began in 1066, prosperous settlements had been disrupted, houses burned, peasants evicted – all to serve the pleasure of the foreign tyrant in creating Royal Forests for the sole hunting use of the aristocracy. Harsh punishment awaited any starving soul found poaching within the Royal Forests.
That antiquated royal prerogative had died out – until King Charles had revived the practice. To finance the civil war that had broken out in 1642 between Parliament and Charles, he had levied steep fines on property that had been in generations of families, who regarded the forest land as their own.
Sir James Sutcliff had been hanged without a trial for poaching, his family had been turned out like beggars, and their manor sold out from under them for revenue.
One day Adam’s mother did not return to the warren in which she, he and his older sister Tess subsisted. Rather than starve on the streets, he had eventually signed himself at thirteen into servitude. What had become of his mother he had no idea, and Tess, last he heard, had died pandering her wares in a brothel.
A family he may no longer have, but, at least, with his completion of this land transaction for Cromwell, he would finally secure the return of the Sutcliff estates.
And what would become of the Lady Evangeline Bradshaw? Cromwell had a chopping block with her name on it. When her brother, a Royalist doctor, had failed to save one of Cromwell’s sons during an emergency gallbladder surgery, Cromwell had been hell bent on chopping down the entire Bradshaw family tree and had charged the Bradshaws with treason, as months before he had the King.
Adam could only surmise that if Lady Evangeline disliked him now, how much more would she when she learned it was he who had delivered her brother and father to the executioner’s axe?
As if summoned by his thoughts, the door quietly opened, and there she stood . . . manifesting his erotic fantasies conjured during many solitary nights, when no female mortal substitute would do. Only the fleeting memory of her exploding through him sufficed his body’s roaring releases.
He was clad only in his breeches; she in her snowy white shift. Her luminous skin was like poured cream, with a quick-to-blush tone. Her heavy tresses were reined in by a mere ribbon.
“In a few more days or so,” she said, her hand on the door latch, “when the babe is fit enough for travel, I can return him to his people. I can introduce you then to the Lenape sachem, the babe’s grandfather.”
“Who is the father?” Craven might have once captured Evangeline’s affections, but he had most certainly not fathered the wee one. Was she opportunistic enough to have given herself to one of the Lenape, perhaps in trade for the Inn property?