Standing behind him was Cullah, clad in only his leathern trousers and work boots; he’d kicked Rafe in the head. Immediately Cullah was set upon by the other two villains. I picked myself up, gathering what shreds I could find of my petticoat. Rafe shook himself and joined in the fight, when from the beech tree a roar more bearlike than human made both him and me turn toward it. I looked up to see Jacob, swinging a sword as tall as himself with the speed only a man used to such a weapon could employ. It met one of the brigands right across the neck. The pirate’s hat flew up and across the yard as his head rolled from his body, down his back, and came to a stop at my feet, his eyes blinking three times in surprise, before they shut for all eternity.
Rafe pulled a pistol from his coat and fired, but missed. Cullah sprang at him, knocking him sidelong with the stock of an axe. As he did, the third man circled behind and the head of Cullah’s axe found home in the man’s shoulder as Jacob lunged for Rafe. Jacob’s greatsword pierced Rafe’s upper leg. Rafe cried out, taking yet another pistol from his vest. This time Jacob sent the pistol and the hand that held it deep into the woods with a swing of his blade. Cullah chopped his man in the throat, not severing the head but putting an end to his fight, and the two woodsmen circled Rafe MacAlister on either side.
“You’ve no call to come here, villain,” Jacob said. “You’d be the sea captain looking for our lass, here? Your need for revenge will be your undoing.”
“What’s the scuffle? I suppose you’re bedding the wench?” Rafe asked.
He cradled his bloody, spurting arm in the other, wrapped in his coat, and still spoke as if he would bargain for me. As if I were a slave. A chunk of bread.
I said, “Is it not enough that Saracens took my father’s land? That pirates sold his children as slaves? Is it not enough that my family has lost all that you have lost?”
“I will eat your liver while you die like I did your mother’s.” All the while, he circled warily between Jacob and Cullah.
Cullah looked at me for a moment, then turned to Rafe. “You’ll go to the gallows, that’s all you will do.”
I said, “My mother might see fit to repay you, if what you say is true. The land has been forfeit to the Crown. You could seek recompense from the king.”
“God’s balls, you are a fool besides being a dirty little whore. More fool than your father, curse his eyes. Maybe as tasty as your mother was, though. I rutted her before she died and after, too. She’s deader’n a tinker’s damn. Put down that claymore, Scotsman. Christ. I have need of a drink.” Rafe shrugged and actually smiled, as if making friends with Jacob and Cullah were that easy.
I shook in every fiber of my being. It took all my strength to continue standing.
Jacob lowered the sword. As he did, Rafe said, “So tell me. Is she tight as a new sloop? Have you both been well satisfied?” As the words passed his lips, he used his last strength to find a dagger under his belt and thrust it at Jacob in a mighty lunge. When he raised himself Cullah reacted with what I could only imagine might be the speed and instinct of a lion, for he whipped that broadaxe across the backs of Rafe’s knees, crippling him, sending him into the dirt.
Jacob looked down at his side where Rafe’s blade had slashed him. Rafe groveled on the ground, howling in pain and anger. Jacob and Cullah exchanged weapons, tossing them to each other. Cullah raised the sword high, the basket hilt covering both hands. Jacob stood upon the man’s legs. Cullah put one foot on his chest and leaned on him, the claymore across one arm as if he held a religious article. He said, “Have ye a god, ye bastard?”
“Go to hell,” Rafe snarled.
“No,” Cullah said, quietly as if he were in conversation in a parlor. Then he plunged the tip of the sword through Rafe MacAlister’s throat and said to him, “Go to your god, then. If he lives in hell, so much the better. You’ll feel right to home.”
I ran into the stone house and fell against the fireplace hearth, holding a remnant of my skirt to my face. I wept. Later, wrapped in a blanket, I wept more, resting in Cullah’s arms, on a settle in the top floor of my house, next to the new fireplace where cider bubbled. I felt as if the shaking would never stop, as if I might die from it.
After the sun went down, I accepted the hot cider. By the light of four candles, I replaced a clumsy bandage on Jacob’s side. Cullah went out, saying he would create a coffin for Goody, and it took but a few moments. “She was light as brush,” he said. “Bones and worries, all that was left of the woman.”
I heated water and then turned my head as the men cleaned the sweat and blood from themselves. I wanted a bath, too, but it was not possible with them inside, and it would have to wait. I supposed later that they had done something with the bodies of the three villains. I did not ask.