Marc had been prepared for some wanton, wild, or uncoordinated coupling, with pent passions unleashed on either side. It was not so. It was measured and tender and playful. Which of them had initiated this mode and kept it going he could not say, nor did he want to. When she sighed against him, he was not sure whether she had climaxed or was simply expressing her pleasure in advance of the event. They rolled then side by side, still connected. She pressed his head between her swollen breasts in what was undoubtedly a maternal gesture, or so he interpreted it. He thought fleetingly of the mother he had never really known.
Just as Marc found his second boot and lined it up with the first one on the cold floor, the baby let out a hungry howl.
“Damn,” Lydia said, releasing him and flinging herself naked from the bed into the shadows of the big room, illumined only by the full flood of moonlight through its narrow west windows. “Don’t you move now,” she sang sweetly, and seconds later the babe’s cries gurgled out.
For a long time Marc lay back under the quilt, savouring his own nakedness and the sensation alive in every inch of his skin, and listening to the suckling sounds of the child. Finally Lydia crawled back in beside him. She shivered deliciously against him.
“I didn’t let the little bugger have all of it,” she laughed. “I saved a bit for you.”
Hours later, it seemed, he fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.
Marc was wakened either by the sensation of falling or the crack of both elbows on the floor. Whatever the cause, he was certainly awake and unmistakably sitting on his haunches in the dark beside an unfamiliar bed. Lydia, delectably nude, was rubbing the glass of one of the windows at the front of the cabin and squinting out into the moonlight.
“Jesus, it’s Azel!” she cried. “He’ll shoot us both!”
Marc leapt into action like a recruit caught napping at reveille. He pulled his trousers halfway up, jammed a foot into each boot, and then, flailing at the bed and the floor beside it, snatched at linens, socks, belt, shirt, and frock coat.
“He’s puttin’ the horse away,” Lydia called to him encouragingly. “He’ll be a minute yet.” She trotted across to the bedroom window and jerked back the gingham curtains. Moonlight poured innocently over their love nest.
“He’ll see my horse in there!” Marc gasped as he stepped into the chamber pot and heard it crack once-like a gunshot.
The voice of little Azel Junior drifted down from the loft: “Da-da home?”
“He’s too damn drunk,” Lydia said. “It’ll be okay, once we get you outta here.” She was helping him bundle up the clothes he had had no time to put on. “Just pull yer big coat on when you get outside.” She tossed it to him, then set about working her shift over the tousled mane of her hair.
“How the hell am I supposed to get out the front door without bumping straight into him?” Marc said as he rolled his uniform into his greatcoat.
Lydia grinned. “We got an emergency exit.” Then she leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, like a mother sending her tot off to his first day at school. Taking his free hand, she led him across to the southwest corner of the cabin to the big woodbox beside the fireplace. “There’s a hatch at the back so’s Azel can stuff his chopped logs in without usin’ the door.”
“But it’s half full of wood!”
She began yanking some of the split logs apart, and he soon joined her. In a minute or so they had managed to clear a wedge of space through which he had no choice but to wriggle fundament-first.
“You better hurry, I hear him shuttin’ the barn door.”
“Da-da home, Mummy?”
The ensign’s rear parts had reached the hatch in the wall. As his legs were pinned underneath him, the only way he could think to open it was to butt it severely. On the third butt the hatch fell. An icy wind took instant advantage. Marc heaved and squirmed and, with a clatter of wood, followed the hatch out into the snow.
Lydia reached down and thrust his bundled clothes after him. “I gotta hop right inta bed,” she whispered. “He’ll be expectin’ to find me warm and ready.”
In more congenial circumstances, Marc might have appreciated the irony of her remark, but the first shock of arctic air numbed everything but his brain. Sheer panic kept it functioning. Marc jammed the hatch back into place and leaned against the cabin wall to get his bearings. The moon had risen, and he could see that he was at the rear of the house. Twenty yards to the side lay the barn and outbuildings. Halfway between, the staggering figure of Azel Stebbins aimed itself at hearth and home-towards the front door, a route that would take him mercifully out of sight and allow Marc to sprint unseen to the barn. Even if he made the barn undetected, Marc would still have to pass dangerously close to the cabin to leave by the lane and through the opening onto the sideroad. The impossible alternative was to take his chances on the drifts in the field, where, in the morning, the tracks of his departure would be stamped for all to see and interpret. He took a deep breath and jerked his unsuspendered trousers up to his waist. Stifling a cry with one hand, he reached down with the other and drew a splinter, agonizingly, out of his left buttock.
Azel was carolling a familiar sea shanty with some improvised taproom lyrics as he disappeared along the far side of the cabin. Seconds later, a door slammed. Marc took off for the stables, having the presence of mind to keep to the trodden path between woodpile and barn-no strange bootprints to be found at dawn by a jealous husband with a harquebus. Luckily, the latter had left the barn doors ajar, so Marc was able to slip quickly inside, out of the wind. With teeth chattering, and in the gleam of a sliver of moonlight pouring through the crack in the doorway, Marc trembled and stubbed his way into his remaining clothes. He had just buckled his belt when he felt a tickle of hot breath on the nape of his neck.
Bracing for a savage blow or the plunge of a dagger, Marc instinctively reached down for the sword he had left at the mill. But nothing happened. Slowly Marc forced himself to turn around and face his ambusher. It was Azel’s mare, unarmed and amorous.
Stebbins evidently had stumbled into the barn, flung the saddle off, tossed a hasty blanket over his mount, and left it to fend for itself. If he had walked it down to its stall, he would not have missed seeing Marc’s horse in the stall beside it. One nicker and the game would have been over.
Marc put his saddle loosely on his own horse, checked its shoeless hoof, and began leading it back towards the doorway. That’s when he heard a floor board creak somewhere above him in the region of the hayloft. This was followed by a kind of scritching sound, as if some nocturnal creature were hunkering down or squirming to get comfortable. A rat? A raccoon?
Slowly he made his way farther into the interior of the barn. He stopped and listened. There was nothing but the contented breathing of animals he could hear but not see. Then a creak sounded right over his head, heavily; it could only be a man’s footfall. Was someone up there hiding from Marc-or spying on him?
While he was trying to make up his mind whether to lie low or flush out the fellow, the decision was made for him. He heard the hayloft door swing open above him on the wall opposite. His man was on the run.
Marc moved silently along the dark corridor between the stalls. By the time he got outside and trotted around to the far side of the barn, all he could see was the hatch swinging on its hinges and a male figure disappearing into the woods fifty yards away. But he recognized the awkward gait: Ferris O’Hurley, without his donkey.
What would O’Hurley be doing hiding out in Azel Stebbins’s barn? Marc was sure it had something to do with the smuggling operation. The Irishmen from the States and their compatriot, Stebbins, were up to their Yankee ears in contraband spirits. But was that all? Connors had been carrying a sackful of brand-new American dollars last Tuesday. And Stebbins was always off hunting without bringing home a deer or a grouse. If it was this gang that Jesse Smallman had been mixed up with last year, it mattered little whether they were smuggling spirits, muskets, or seed money for seditionists: they and the Smallmans were connected in some significant way. Of that he was certain. So, despite the debacle back there in the cabin, Marc felt he had not completely frittered away the evening-if what had taken place in Lydia’s bed could be called frittering.