I felt the hoarseness overtake me and struggled to speak. “I ask only for your help. Someone has charged him with treason. They’ve destroyed his shop and carted away his work. Thrown him in prison.”
He kissed me again, and clinging more closely, knelt before me, pushing one of his legs between my knees. He stopped, his own face reddened and his lips swollen as mine felt. “You can barely speak. Have I aroused you so? After all these years, tell me, what would you do for Eadan Lamont?” Wallace ran his hand up my back and under my bonnet, loosening it, pulling it down, rummaging with my hair so that it began to fall in wisps. “Eadan Lamont, who should have hung when he was eight years old? Who attacked the royal governor in his home and burned it down? Eadan Lamont, who assists your scourge of a pirate brother in taking down my ships and smuggling stolen cargo, so that I am forced to pay more for cannon to defend them than for the cinnamon and silk they carry? That Eadan Lamont? Pirates, you see, are not a noble lot. One of them recognized the sign the so-called Cullah MacLammond carved into the backs of all his work, crated on their ship, as a clan insignia. Lamonts are pathetically uninventive in passing out names. The only one the blighter could come up with was Eadan, and would you imagine it? There was an Eadan Lamont still wanted on the rolls of the royal sheriff, disappeared into the American colonies. Naturally, I had to do my duty as a citizen and turn in a criminal.” Wallace grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled it, jerking it just so that I knew he had me fast. “What would you do to save them both? For August Talbot’s rotted corpse will hang in chains at the crossroads before your own house by the end of this year. When the bones fall apart, I will personally wire them together so he will stare at you with his hollow eye sockets for the rest of your life.”
He held my hair but of course, he did not hold my heart, and though he tore both out, I would flatter him no longer. “I have friends. Powerful friends.” I would ask Margaret’s husband to intercede, I thought desperately.
“Who, Revere? That Frenchman?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that Thomas Gage might not listen to his wife any more than Wallace would listen to Serenity. “I am asking you, Lord Spencer, Wallace, begging you for mercy, for lenience. But if you think I would sacrifice my body on the altar of your pride, you are mistaken. If you think I would betray my husband and my children because I am idiotic enough to believe you mean anything you say, you are mistaken. If you think you are worth having at all, you are mistaken.” With every word I said, he pulled my hair tighter and tighter. “I feel sorry for you, Wallace. Sorry that you will never know love. I would die for Cullah, and I will not lower myself to you for him.”
“I could break your neck, with one”—he tugged—“quick”—he tugged again—“twist.”
I stared into his eyes. “But you won’t,” I said. To my great surprise, there rose a rim of tear in each. I said nothing but kept looking at his eyes. He took his hand from my hair and stood. He walked to his credenza and poured himself another glass of wine, drank it, and poured another before he turned around. I said, “You know the charges could be dropped.”
“You know they are true.”
“What would you have me do? Beg you on my knees?”
“Good day, Mistress MacLammond. Or should I say Lamont?”
I stood and replaced my cap and bonnet, letting the hair hang as it fell. I walked to the doorway and turned.
He drained the wine again. “We shall see who wins this, Resolute. You came here to make a fool of me. Your brother is trying to destroy me. I would as soon watch you hang with him.”
I ran from the house, leaving the front door wide. Roland helped me into the wagon, snapping the reins over the round and patient rumps of our plow horses.
*
All Saints’ Day loomed. I had prepared ribbons and tied them around dried Indian corn in pretty clusters to decorate all the graves. A sudden snowfall melted rapidly and wind dried the ground. The weather warmed, but the golds and crimsons and oranges of the woods gave me no warmth, no joy. My clothes hung on me as if they had been outfitted on a scarecrow. I tried to weave and spin, but my work was not fit for rags.