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There is no instinct like that of the heart.
–Lord Byron, Don Juan
The meal ended in silence. Ryder removed himself to the settee before the fire. Annis remained at the table, staring sightlessly at her congealing pudding.
After a while, he said, “If I bribe you with a glass of wine, will you come and sit by me?”
She got up and went to the settee like a moth to the flame. The goblet shook in her hand as he poured the dark red wine into it. She drank and kept a vigilant eye on him over the rim of the glass.
“Tell me about your husband,” said her abductor.
She stared at him in surprise. This was the very last thing she would have expected him to be interested in at the moment. But perhaps if she told him everything, he would take pity on her. Or perhaps like Scheherazade, she could enthrall him with a story and stave off her fate for another night. And so she told him her story, the words that had been damned up inside her for so long flowing out of her mouth of their own accord.
She told him how Russell Fulton had come to her slyly, tempting her to become the mistress of her old home and falsely promising to destroy the mortgage note. She told of his drunken rages, his perverse passions, and the hidden violence behind the bedroom door.
She told of how he tried to cut her off from her family, though in secret she would ride to Robson Minor and sit in her family’s parlor, longing like the child she was to weep out her troubles on her mother’s breast. But in the end, she dared not. She knew her family could not help her. They could only suffer along with her. So she kept her terrible secrets.
“Stubborn little fool,” Ryder murmured as if the sixteen-year-old Annis sat beside him to be chided. “Too proud to admit you came a cropper when you married the bastard.”
The older and wiser Annis had to concede that there was truth in this, but the greater truth was that only through divorce or Russell Fulton’s death could she be freed. But divorce she would never consider, for it would rob her of her claim to Robson Major as Russell Fulton’s wife. Later, she realized he was holding the mortgage note in reserve to use against her in just these circumstances.
“You should have killed him.” Ryder’s voice was like stone. “I’ll warrant you know how.”
Oh, yes. She could have killed him a dozen different ways. Poisonous mushrooms, deadly nightshade, powdered rye fungus stirred into his ale. Or she could have resorted to more arcane methods: a maddened hound bespelled into hunting for a human capon, a wild boar with deadly tusks called off of Dartmoor. But in the end, she could not bring herself to use her witch’s knowledge to do murder, for she knew that down that road lay soul-destroying ruin.
Russell Fulton was a twisted aberration. She could not let him twist her soul as well, nor drive her mad, nor crush the optimism of youth out of her. This day I am his to use as he pleases, she told herself every morning, but I won’t be his to use forever. And so, she endured and kept her own counsel and strove to keep up the appearance of a young lady who had married well.
Keeping up appearances wasn’t difficult, for Russell Fulton didn’t want the young wife he paraded to county society to be visibly marred. But marring the body that only a husband may see—that gave him unholy delight. The whip snaps...the body writhes...the eyes tear...the mouth screams...
“Stop it, Annis.”
Ryder had taken her by the shoulder, and she was shocked to find herself shaking and panting in his grasp.
“I thought I was a strong man, but I can stand no more of this. If there’s any justice, the bastard is gone in hell. But that’s no help to you. No wonder you sit here trembling like a doe at bay.”
This comparison did not please her. “I am not trembling, and I’ll have you know I did occasionally manage to give Russell back some of his own.”
His eyes lit. “Did you indeed? Tell me.”
“I almost blush to say, for they will seem like such spiteful schoolgirl tricks.” The words were penitent, but the gleam in her eye was not. “I used to put sleeping draughts in his wine so he would doze off in a harmless swoon. And I would treat his nightshirts with saltpeter to dampen his manly urges. And I would secretly loosen the stitches in the seat of his trowsers so that he was forever having the most vexatious accidents with them.”
Ryder threw back his head and laughed. “Brave schoolgirl. I applaud her. And,” he added in wry warning, “I’ll thank you to keep away from my wine and my wardrobe. Now tell me what else you did to torment the bastard.”
So she found herself telling him the Great Thing she had done, the words spoken out loud for the first time. “It’s a thing that torments him still, even from beyond the grave. I let his murderer go free.”
He saw it at once. “So you saved the animal, did you?”
She nodded. “Yes, though everyone—the magistrate, the stablemen, my family—all of them were nattering at me to have Nero put down. He was a spirited brute, to be sure, but that’s why Russell bought him, so he could crush that spirit. But I vowed to save him if I could. I had Russell’s body put in the icehouse on the pretext that I was too overcome with grief to escort him home immediately, and then”—she gave him a sidewise look—“I contrived a little.”
“Ah,” his voice was warm with amusement and admiration, “and what did you contrive?”
“I declaimed mightily in my best distraught widow manner that I wouldn’t have the beast in my stable another minute. I had him turned out in the lower field, and as it happened there were Gypsies traveling along the road to the Exeter Fair.”
(Actually, the Gypsies didn’t just happen along. She’d Summoned them, Summoned them for three nights running before they finally showed up. Wandering Gypsies truly did have no sense of time.)
“I didn’t think the Gypsies could resist Nero, for he was a fine animal. Late that night, I slipped down to the field, opened the gate, and drove him toward their camp. I’ll never forget that moment, standing under a glorious full moon, knowing that Nero was free, knowing that I was free. And he galloped straight for the Gypsy camp as if he knew that was the only place he would be safe, for anyone else would have shot him for a rogue. And the next morning, lo and behold, the Gypsies were gone, and Nero too. Very neatly done, don’t you think?” She was as pleased with herself as if she’d only accomplished it the day before.
“Magnificently done, I would say.”
“I only hope,” she said pensively, “that the Gypsies were kind to him, for Russell was so very cruel.”
“Never fear, Gypsies have a way with horses. Now tell me more.”
But her interlude of peace with the black knight had ended. It lay dead between them like something broken, for now she remembered who he was, and how she came to be in his power.
“I beg you,” she whispered to him. “Do not do this thing to me. Let me go.”
But he quickly shook his head, as if he had already heard her appeals a hundred times in his mind—and denied them every time.
“I can’t let you go. It’s my nature to fight for what I want, and I find that I want you terribly.” He stood and pulled her up to face him, his hand iron on her arm, not imprisoning, but as if grasping at some will-of-the-wisp that might vanish before his eyes. “I swear I’ll make you forget him. Only don’t run away from me anymore. I love you, and I’m lonely and tired of the chase.”
He drew her to him and kissed her, and she felt his yearning for her, which was like a sword’s yearning for its sheath when the final battle was done. And behind the yearning, she felt his fear of the long road of life without her.
Oh, poor black knight, you are the bravest of men and I have made you lonely and afraid. I won’t leave you tonight. Tomorrow I must, but not tonight.
Softly, but with a note of challenge in her voice, she told him: “Then make me forget him for tonight, Nick—if you can.”
He drew back for a second as if shaken by her sudden yielding. “Annis, are you certain?” But then his old native cockiness came back and he swept her up against him. “Never mind, love. I’ll make you certain.”
****
In the candlelight, they stood by the huge carven bed that the Ryder men slept in when they went a-hunting. Beneath the forest green of her dress, Annis burned hot with desire, but also cold with fear. She stood there gathering her resolve as the candles blazed bright, so bright, to show more truly the awfulness there was to see.
She shivered as she felt his touch behind her, his long fingers skimming over her hair, hesitating for an instant at the topmost button before he began to undo it.
Unable to help herself, she let out a dumb whimper of pain and hunched under his touch, almost ready to turn and strike at him like a wild thing resisting.
He froze for an instant. Then his hands slid apart, one to each shoulder, then forward to cross above her painfully thudding heart. “Hush, my own dear love,” he whispered against her hair.
She stood clasped in the circle of his arms, listing against the heart that leaped for her beneath the opened white shirt and the hard-muscled flesh. They stood so for a good while, she knowing full well that the master of horse was gentling his skittish filly, who had felt the riding crop too harshly. But she was too in need of his tenderness to care for her pride. She warmed herself against his bigness and his strength until she felt almost languorous beneath his touch.
Her head fell forward as he began once again to worry the jet buttons free of their fastenings.
Ryder had had occasion to unbutton a lady’s gown before, though the practice had not made him perfect. The damned buttons gave him a good deal of trouble in the dim light, but Annis did not. She had gone still as a captured doe in a hunter’s net.
Finally, he got the obstinate little pieces of black rock undone only to show her white shift. He was out of patience now and he couldn’t help himself. He was too much the warrior. Every instinct told him he must discover and face and fight this inimical circumstance that stood between him and his woman. He ripped dress and shift and drawers down the back seams, baring her to his sight from neck to calf as the clothing parted in two halves.
She had done herself a disservice to describe herself as hempen, for rather she was filigreed with faint white crisscrosses that began with an unnaturally straight edge exactly beneath her shoulder blades and ran down to her thighs.
Annis, Annis, he silently reproached her, why couldn’t you have stilled that quick tongue of yours? Things might have gone easier for you.
He realized then that she was awaiting his judgment and wilting under his silence.
“Well, my vain darling,” he said softly, “I’m afraid it will take more than this to be rid of me.”
She did not believe him. “You are lying to me.” Her voice trembled. “You are lying to me out of pity.”
There was but one answer to that. He pulled his shirt over his head, stripped off his braces and breeches, and kicked them aside.
His manhood came free. Like a compass needle of the flesh, it rose unerringly toward his best beloved, though she had yet to turn and face him. He stepped close behind her, his desire for her standing up hot and hard and fully aroused against the cruel white tracery on the upper curve of her hip.
“That is no lie,” he told her and lifted her into his bed.
****
She lay englamoured in his arms, as englamoured as she had been in times gone by when the Beltane fires burned under the stars and he came to her May Eve bower as the crowned King Stag—hunter among hunters, man among men, in a time when the rising of the sun and the running of the deer was life itself to the people of the groves.
Countless turnings of the Wheel had reduced his ancient honors to the stag-mummers of country villages, but the man who had once won for himself the seven-tined antler crown remained magnificently the same. Her hands slipped wonderingly over the muscled nakedness of his heavy shoulders and broad back, the flat belly, the narrow hips, the hardened thighs of a horseman who would now ride her.
She marveled that this would excite her, that she could welcome the heat and heaviness of a man’s body on her own.
His mouth was on hers, his ardent hands caressing her, loosening her thighs so that she could take her fill of him as her lover. Loin to loin, shaft to cleft, he sheathed himself in her, his strength contained in hers, his thrusts carrying her along until she caught the ancient rhythm and matched him stroke for stroke.
She heard him groan deep in his chest and then her own blinding, mindless pleasure came upon her as she felt the spill of his hot seed into her womb.
Sated and spent, they drowsed in each other’s arms, lost in as perfect a peace as their contentious souls were likely to get in this turning of the Wheel.
In the last hour before dawn, when the moonlight had already gone away, Ryder awoke and reached for her to find her face wet with tears. “Don’t tell me you think this night should not have been.”
“No,” she whispered in the dark, “it was bound to be, this night.”
“So why these?” He put his hand to her cheek.
“Because,” her voice was very low in the blackness between them, “of all the thousand and one spells that there are in the whole world, there is still no spell that will hold back the coming of the dawn.”
He laughed at her fancy and rolled her under him. “Don’t fear the dawn, love. I promise you our days together will be almost as pleasant as our nights.” And he kissed the tears upon her face and the bittersweet smile upon her mouth and made the dawn seem very far away indeed.