Kitabı oxu: «My Lord Savage»

Chapter One

Cornwall

June 10, 1573

Mistress Rowena Thornhill pressed anxiously against the tower window, her skirt of plain russet billowing behind her to fill the confined space of the landing. For a moment her tawny eyes strained to see the world beyond the leaded diamond panes. Then, impatient with the narrow view, she unlatched the sash from its dark wooden frame and flung it open to the sea wind.

The salty air stung her face and loosened tendrils of her tightly bound chestnut hair as she leaned over the stone sill. Beyond the courtyard, the hilly moor, abloom with clumps of gorse and flowering sedge, swept off in every visible direction, ending to the south with rocky cliffs where seabirds cried and circled above the surging waves.

Threading across the land between the cliffs and the rambling old manor house was a narrow road, rutted almost hub-deep by generations of passing carts and wagons. It was on this road that Rowena fixed her worried gaze, stretching beyond the sill to see the place where it disappeared over the eastern horizon.

No horse. No rider. Nothing. And the sun would be setting in less than an hour’s time.

Her father often made the journey to Falmouth. As a scientist, he liked to wander the docks, buying “curiosities,” as he called them, from the sailors—a monkey or parrot, perhaps; maybe an unusual shell or some odd sea creature plucked from the depths and pickled in salt brine. Any and all of these things he would bring home to his laboratory where he would spend days, even weeks, prodding and observing his new prize and taking copious notes in his leather-bound journals.

In more vigorous years these writings had earned Sir Christopher Thornhill a reputation as one of England’s foremost scholars. But he was getting old now, too old to be riding the long, dangerous road alone. Next time, Rowena resolved, she would insist on his taking one of the stable grooms with him or go along herself, despite his protests that the teeming waterfront was no place for a lady.

She lingered at the window, her fingers toying with the heavy ring of keys that hung from a cord at her narrow waist. How would she face life when her father passed on? she found herself wondering. In the seventeen years since her mother’s death she had filled her days with managing the house and servants and assisting him in his laboratory. This crumbling old manor house and her father’s work had consumed her whole life. But he was nearing seventy, and she could sense the looming frailty in the stoop of his shoulders, the slight unsteadiness of his hands. What would she do when the halls no longer echoed with his ponderous footsteps? What would she do when the laboratory lay still and empty?

Marriage? An ironic little smile tugged at a corner of her too wide mouth. Who but an old sot would want her? A spinster two years past thirty, shy and mannishly tall, with a long, narrow face that had always reminded her of a horse? Even with the enticements of house and land, the prospect of finding a worthy husband was hardly worth considering.

She would, of course, carry on her father’s scientific work. But who would take her research seriously? Who would read the scribblings of a mere woman, let alone give them weight and value?

Rowena’s gaze drifted toward the sea where petrels and kittiwakes wheeled above the cliffs. High above them a single soaring albatross rode the wind, its outstretched wings as still as if they had been carved from white marble.

As she watched the bird’s flight, Rowena was seized by a yearning so powerful that her lips parted in silent response. The walls of the ancient house seemed to close around her, shutting her in like the gates of a prison. The heavy folds of her skirts and the rigid constriction of her corset seemed to drag her down like the weight of iron shackles. Even her own rational mind, hardened by a lifetime of common sense, held her back from following the cry of her heart—to shed the chains of house and clothes and reason, to spread her wings and soar with the albatross over the oceans to places she would never see in her sober lifetime; places whose very names resonated with music—Cathay, Zanzibar, Constantinople, America…

Pulling back into herself she dropped her gaze from the sky to the spot where her long, pale fingers rested on the limestone sill. When she glanced up again there was a dark speck moving along the distant road toward the house.

Little by little the speck materialized into a wagon—a ramshackle one-horse dray with two men hunched on the seat and a long, dark form lying across the open bed. Rowena’s hand crept to her throat as she recognized her father’s gelding, Blackamoor, dancing alongside the wagon on a tether. The gelding’s saddle was empty.

Her long legs took the steps two at a time as she raced downstairs to what, in grander days, had been the great hall. Her slippered feet flew across the rush-strewn floor, their swift passage releasing the scent of crushed rosemary behind her.

By the time she reached the front door, Rowena’s heart was hammering with dread. What had possessed her to let her father go off alone this morning? She should have ridden along on the pretext of some errand or devised an excuse to keep him at home. Whatever disaster had befallen him now, the fault was at least partly her own.

The front doors opened straightaway onto the moor. Rowena burst outside to see that the dray was still a considerable distance off. Too agitated to wait, she caught up her skirts and broke into a headlong run that bruised her feet through the thin leather house slippers. The sea wind tore the pins from her hair as she plunged toward the road. Would she find her father hurt? Ill? Even dead?

At the crest of a long hedgerow she paused for a moment to rest. Her ribs heaved beneath the constricting stays of her corset, and her breath came in agonized gasps, but she had halved the distance between herself and the dray. Only now did she have a clear view of the two men on the seat. One of them was the driver, an unkempt hireling she had often seen in town. The other—

Rowena’s knees buckled with relief as she recognized her father’s stoop-shouldered frame and low-crowned woolen hat. He was all right. She had worried herself to a frenzy for nothing.

But why had he taken the trouble to hire a dray? What was the nature of the dark, mysterious shape that lay across the planks behind him, wrapped in what appeared to be a canvas sail? Had Sir Christopher purchased some exotic new specimen? A large fish, perhaps? A dolphin? A dead seal? She thought of the long marble dissecting table in the laboratory and the exhausting days and nights to come as they labored to learn and catalog their discoveries before putrefaction made the work impossible.

“Rowena!” Her father’s sharp-edged voice rang out across the distance. His arm beckoned her to come, but she was already running toward the roadway, her skirts gathering green burrs where they trailed behind her.

By the time she reached the edge of the road she was too winded to speak. She stood warm and panting, her hair streaming in the breeze as the dray, drawn by a spavined cart horse, lumbered toward her.

“Rowena. Good.” Her father nodded in his terse way. “I’ll be needing some help with this specimen. Ride Blackamoor back to the stable. Tell Thomas and Dickon to be in the courtyard when we arrive. Have Ned clear out the barred room in the cellar and spread the floor with clean straw. Quickly.”

“The cellar?” Rowena stared up at him, dumbfounded. “But how can you mean that? The place is little more than a rat warren! No one goes down there, ’tis so dark and damp and moldy! Father, I truly do not understand—”

“Soon enough you will. Hurry, now.” Sir Christopher reached in front of the driver, seized the slack reins and pulled the plodding nag to a halt. Blackamoor, impatient for stall and feed, snorted and tugged at the tether that held him to the side of the dray.

“Steady, there.” Rowena eased closer to the high-strung gelding, caught the bridle and, with her free hand began unloosing the tether. While her fingers worked the knot, her gaze was compellingly drawn to the canvas-swathed bundle that was lashed with thick ropes to the bed of the dray. From what she could see of the thing inside, she could judge nothing except that it was long—the length of a tall man. Her lips parted in astonishment as she saw a slight movement and realized that beneath its heavy wrappings the creature was breathing.

“Father!” She spun around to face him, her heart pounding. “The beast is alive! You must tell me what it is!”

“Later, Rowena.” He dismissed her demand with a scowl. “The less said here, the better. We can talk at the house. Now, ride.”

The knot parted, freeing the gelding’s bridle. Rowena swung expertly into the saddle, legs astride, skirts bunched over her thighs. As she paused to gather the reins, her eyes fell once more on the dray’s tightly bound cargo.

Mounted, she could see what she had not been able to see from the ground. The edges of the canvas sail had parted at the near end of the bundle to reveal a face.

A human face.

The face of a man.

Rowena’s heart lurched as she leaned closer, oblivious to her father’s impatient glare, oblivious to everything except the sight of those riveting male features.

The eyes, set beneath straight ink-black brows, were closed. Deep-set, they lay in the hollows of a fiercely noble face that seemed all bruises and jutting bones, fleshless beneath taut bronze skin. A lock of black hair—all she could see—trailed across one purpled cheek. For all his evident strength the man looked ill and starved. He smelled of vomit and seawater, evidence of a long, rough ocean voyage. But why in heaven’s name was he lashed to the bed of the dray? Surely, in his condition, there was no danger of escape.

Compelled by a strange urge, Rowena leaned outward from the saddle and extended her right hand toward the stranger’s battered, motionless face. Ignoring her father’s sharp-spoken warning, she brushed an exploring fingertip along one concave cheek. The cool skin was as smooth as the finest tanned leather, the long, rugged jaw bearing not a trace of beard stubble. It was almost as if—

Rowena gasped and snatched her hand away as the man’s eyelids jerked open. The eyes that glared up at her were as black as polished jet—their hue so deep that she could see no distinction between iris and pupil.

But it was not the startling color of those eyes that froze her as if she had been turned to stone. It was the blaze of hatred she had glimpsed in their depths—a hatred so pure, so intense, that it seemed to rise from the depths of hell itself.

She wrenched her gaze away. “Father—”

“Not now, Rowena,” Sir Christopher snapped. “Later, once the brute’s safely locked away, I’ll tell you everything. Go, now, there’s no time to lose!”

Rowena shot her father a look of horrified dismay. Then, knowing there was nothing to be done here, she wheeled the horse and galloped off toward the house.

Black Otter willed himself to not struggle as the two burly white men seized his arms and began dragging him off the bed of the cart. Over the course of the terrible sea voyage, he had taken on the desperate strategy of a trapped animal. Watch and learn. Wait for the best chance. Then strike to kill.

Early in the voyage he had come close to killing one of the men on the ship. The young brute had been tormenting him, jabbing him with the end of a smoldering stick. For one careless instant the fellow had come too close, and Black Otter, driven by pain and anguish, had lashed out at him. Flinging the iron links of his wrist manacles around the sailor’s neck, he had squeezed and twisted, taking a perverse satisfaction in the man’s thrashing, his labored gasps.

Then a shout had rung out from above, and the man’s cohorts had come pounding down the hatch-way to fall on Black Otter like a pack of dogs. They had beaten him so savagely that he had drifted in and out of consciousness for more days than he could count on the fingers of both hands.

That beating had taught Black Otter a lesson he would not forget. Never again would he strike out at his captors without weighing the odds. If there was little to be gained he would contain his fury, caging it like a wild beast. But if the chance came to break for his freedom, he would kill any white person who stood in his way.

Including the woman.

He felt her eyes on him now as he struggled to stand on the reeling ground. Golden eyes, darkly set in a long, pale face. He remembered the touch of her fingertip on his face, her low gasp as he opened his eyes. Had he frightened her? Good, he had wanted to frighten her. He wanted to frighten them all.

Straining against the weight of his shackles, Black Otter straightened to his full height and glowered defiantly at them—the woman, the old man and the lesser people who had come out of the enormous lodge. The two burly men, who seemed to be taking orders from the old one, gripped his arms, half supporting, half restraining. In his full strength Black Otter could have broken their bones with his bare hands. Chained, starved and ill, he had little power to resist.

The woman turned to the old man and spoke. Maybe they were going to kill him now, Black Otter thought. If that was so, he would not submit meekly. Among his own people, the Lenape who lived on the banks of the great sea river, he was a powerful sakima, a chief, as well as an invincible warrior. Even here, in this alien place, he would die a warrior’s death. And he would not die alone.

For all her proper upbringing, Rowena could not help staring at the stranger. Filthy, bruised and unsteady on his feet, he stood between the two stable hands with the majesty of a captive lion. He was taller than almost any man she knew. His pitch-black hair formed a matted mane that streamed past his massive shoulders. His face was striking—but then, as Rowena discovered, she could not look long at his hawk-like features with any kind of ease. The hatred in those infernal eyes blazed back at her with such fury that she was forced to lower her gaze.

Beneath a patina of welts, cuts and bruises, his body reminded her of—yes—the drawing of a Greek statue she had seen in her father’s library. Rowena’s eyes traced the flow of muscles beneath his bruised mahogany skin, their names clicking senselessly through her mind—the deltoids, the pectorals, the flat, hard rectus abdominus that rippled downward to disappear beneath the twisted, dirty bit of leather that covered his loins.

Apart from the loincloth he wore nothing below except a pair of rotting soft-soled leather slippers, the like of which she had never seen before.

As the dray lumbered back toward the road, Rowena drew closer to her father. “Who is he?” she asked softly.

“No need to whisper,” he snapped a bit impatiently. “The primitive wretch has no understanding of the queen’s English.”

“Father, who is he?” Rowena demanded, more forcefully this time.

“An Indian. From America. I bought him today in Falmouth.”

“You bought him? As a slave?”

Sir Christopher looked askance. “Certainly not!” he huffed. “Look at the fellow—far too much a savage for any kind of decent service.”

“Then why would you do such a thing? Out of Christian pity?”

Sir Christopher shook his head, then fixed her with a level gaze. “No, Rowena,” he said, “I bought him as a curiosity.”

“As a curiosity?”

“Yes, my dear. As a rare specimen. For the purpose of study.”