his fingers worked at those laces, until the gown fell apart to the small of her back.
Dimly he was aware that she was choosing this method of making him her slave again, as she had done those years before, when she had come as a bride to the Hall. She had come a virgin to his big canopied bed, but she had brought her library with her, and such wisdom as she had culled from the pages of Ovid and Jean de la Fontaine and Restif de la Bretonne. Her desire to test that wisdom was as fierce as his anxiety to share it. With languor and with hungry sensuality they had learned together the arts of the flesh.
Her thin silken shift parted as he ripped it. Now her entire back was like creamy satin under his hands and fingers, as far down as her rounded hips. Moaning softly, she arched to him. A single movement of his hands would bring gown and panniers, modesty bit and Medici collar from her body, leaving her naked to his eyes.
“Billy Joe! It’s been so long, so long!”
“Too long, Laura. Too long!”
What thought had he for the fact that she was a Tory and he a rebel? She was his wife, and he had not seen her for four years. She was in his arms now and quivering against him, pleading a little, with her wet lips to his ear, her own hands like hungry talons. Of this pressure of lips to lips and hands moving easily on soft flesh he had dreamed in camps from Quebec to Valley Forge. Now the opportunity was with him to turn those dreams to reality.
His cry was harsh and frantic as he brought his arms down, his hands filled with lace and satin. For an instant he paused, staring at the white body that was even more intoxicating than he remembered, and then he was lifting her and moving toward the bedroom suite that he had never seen.
The sweetish scent of bayberry candles, the clink of Stourbridge glassware, and the muted drone of conversation made Stafford drowsy. He lolled against the high back of his Elfe chair, aware that the officers of His Majesty’s Thirty-third Foot, Thirty-seventh Foot, and Royal Welsh Fusileers were drinking his health and the health of his beautiful wife in rich red port. His buff and purple coat and breeches, hurriedly altered and refitted by a tailoress in from the slave cabins on the Dan, fitted him exactly, so that he seemed a very Beau Nash for elegance.
The war was far away. It was good to sit here, with the candles guttering softly, with the wild turkey he had just eaten and the varieties of wines he had quaffed in pleasant toasts to the standards of the several British regiments warm within him. He looked at Laura Lee, and smiled contentedly. In the upper bedroom that long afternoon, she had made his every dream a reality, draining him of the hungers that had run in him for a seeming eternity. He put his thoughts of the war behind him and reached for the goblet that Old Gem was filling.
Over the rim of the goblet he caught Colonel Edmund Emerson staring at him with savage intentness. He had seen men who looked at him like that before, over the muskets that King George III issued to his soldiers. Then Emerson was glancing aside, and Stafford put the look he imagined down to the jealousy that had burned in him that afternoon.
A chair scraped. A scabbard clanked on its chains. Golden epaulets caught the gleam of the table candles. They were rising, these British officers and the women they had brought with them from Winnsboro and from Charles Town, to adjourn to the large ballroom across the hall. The cadence of strings and spinnets was summoning them to the dancing.
“The first dance belongs to me, Laura Lee,” he whispered.
“To no one else, my darling.” She smiled, and the pressure of her fingers on his hand made his heart leap.
He went with her across the hall, the British officers drawing back courteously. He did not see Colonel Emerson staring after him with slitted eyes, did not see him turn on a heel and move toward the tall French windows that opened onto the terrace and to the herb garden beyond.
The nights were cool in November. Colonel Emerson moved to the stone rail of the terrace and stared out over the fall herbs and flowers in their patterned beds, biting hard at his full lower lip.
“Milord!”
It was only a whisper in the night from the darkness below him, but it made the Colonel freeze. He put a hand to his belt, where his service pistol hung, as he leaned over the balustrade.
“Who’s there? Eh? Who is it?”
“Ssssst! Not so loud, milord!”
A big man came out of the shadows, a bulky package in a hand. He was heavy-set, with uncut black hair and small, glittering eyes.
Emerson surveyed him, faint disdain curling his lips. “You want me, my man?”
“You’re a Britisher, ain’t you? A Britisher interested in capturin’ a rebel posing as a loyalist and a man of property?”
There was something in the tone of the big man that caused the Colonel to glance at the French windows off the terrace. He went and closed them, then came back to the wide stone steps that ran down to the garden. A vague hope was blooming in him as he saw the big man kneeling and undoing the green sash with which he had tied his bundle.
Ezra Whipple spread the buckskin hunting shirt wide and laid the green sash on top of it. He held a powder horn carved almost to transparency in his hands, turning it over and over as his eyes caught at the Colonel.
Emerson gasped. “A rebel uniform. One of Morgan’s sharpshooters!”
“Aye! The fringes mark it for a colonel’s shirt, milord.”
Colonel Emerson lowered his voice. “Who owns the thing, man?”
Cunning lay deep in Whipple’s eyes. He shifted restlessly, and sighed. The beating he had taken that afternoon had put the thirst for vengeance in him, but not to such an extent that it removed the greed that was a perpetual fever in his blood.
Putting a hand to his pocket, Emerson drew out a velvet purse. As he hunkered down, he unfastened it and poured a flood of round golden sovereigns into his palm. Silently Ezra Whipple eyed that small fortune, licking dry lips with his tongue. Impulsively he held out his hand for the gold.
Colonel Emerson laughed softly. “Not so fast, not so fast. How do I know it’s worth my gold, this uniform you bring?”
Whipple scowled. His narrowed eyes studied the face of the British officer, reading the sensuality that lay in his too-full mouth, in his flushed cheeks and glittering eyes. For an hour he had lain on the flagging of the terrace, staring in at the diners. He had seen the manner in which this man’s eyes roved the figure of the woman who sat at Stafford’s elbow.
“Ye mind the man in the high splat-backed chair? The man who’s wed to the dark beauty?”
Emerson gasped and hunched closer. “Stafford? God’s my life! Can you mean Stafford?”
“Aye. Billy Joe Stafford. One of Dan Morgan’s colonels!”
Emerson came to his feet. He stood rigid, letting triumph sweep across him. Stafford a rebel! Stafford, now in gentleman garb, out of uniform! He could hang him out of hand, now, to the nearest tree!
As a man might savor old wine, so Colonel Emerson savored the thoughts he held. Now he would not be a trespasser in that big canopied bed above the ballroom. Now he could wed with Laura Lee, and own the plantation she governed. All these fine buildings, the slaves and horses, the meadows rich with wheat and cotton would be his! When the war was over, he would
