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At two o’clock that afternoon, Dain stood with his wife at the top of a rise overlooking the moors.
She had asked him to take her to the Haytor Rocks after luncheon. Her pallor and the lines of fatigue about her eyes and mouth had told him she was not up to the climb—or the climate, for even in mid-June, the moors could be bone-numbingly cold and wet. Along Devon’s south coast, subtropical flowers and trees flourished as though in a hothouse. Dartmoor was another matter altogether. It made its own weather, and what went on in the highlands had little to do even with the conditions in a valley not two miles away.
Dain had kept his concern to himself, though. If Jessica wanted to climb one of the peaks of the great ridge bounding the moors, she had a good reason. If he hoped to mend the damage between them, he must show some evidence of trusting her judgment.
She had said, hadn’t she, that she was tired of his mistrust…among a great many other things.
And so he held his tongue now as well, instead of telling her she’d be warmer in the shelter of the immense rock than on the edge of the ridge, facing the arctic blasts.
The brutal wind had sprung up when they’d reached the massive granite outcropping that crowned the hill. The clouds were churning into a sinister grey mass, promising a Dartmoor storm—while a few miles west, at Athcourt, the sun was no doubt shining brightly at this moment.
“I thought it would be like the Yorkshire moors,” she said. Her gaze swept the rock-strewn landscape below them. “But it seems altogether different. Rockier. More…volcanic.”
“Dartmoor is basically a heap of granite,” he said. “According to my tutor, it is part of a broken chain extending to the Scilly Islands. A good part of it utterly defies cultivation, as the flora, I was told, amply demonstrates. Not much else besides gorse and heather is stubborn enough to obtain a roothold. The only plush patches of greenery—” He pointed to a lush green spot in the distance. “There, for instance. Looks like an oasis in a very rocky desert, doesn’t it? But at its best, it’s a bit of marsh. At the worst, it’s quicksand. That’s only a small patch. A few miles northwestward is the Grimspound Bog, just one of many that have swallowed sheep, cows, and men whole.”
“Tell me how you’d feel, Dain,” she said, never taking her eyes from the rugged vista stretching out below them, “if you’d learned a child had been left to wander these moors, unattended, for days, even weeks.”
A dark, sullen child’s face rose in his mind’s eye.
A chill sweat broke out over his flesh and an immense weight filled his insides, as though he’d just swallowed lead.
“Christ, Jess.”
She turned and looked up at him. Under the wide bonnet brim, her eyes were as dark as the lowering clouds overhead. “You know what child I mean, don’t you?”
He couldn’t keep himself upright under the weight within. His limbs were trembling. He forced himself to move away, to the mountainous rock. He set his clenched fist against the blessedly ungiving granite and pressed his throbbing forehead to his fist.
She came to him. “I misunderstood,” she said. “I thought your hostility was toward the boy’s mother. Consequently, I was sure you’d understand soon enough that the child was more important than an old grudge. Other men seem to deal easily enough with their by-blows, even boast of them. I thought you were merely being obstinate. But that, obviously, is not the case. This seems to be a problem of cosmic proportions.”
“Yes.” He swallowed a gulp of stinging air. “I know, but I can’t think it out. My brain…seizes up. Paralyzed.” He forced out a short laugh. “Ridiculous.”
“I had no idea,” she said. “But at least you are telling me now. That is progress. Unfortunately, it is not very helpful. I am in a bit of a predicament, Dain. I am prepared to act, of course, but I could not possibly do so without informing you of the situation.”
The clouds were spitting chill drops of rain, which the gusting wind spattered against his neck. He lifted his head and turned to her. “We’d better get back into the carriage, before you take a fatal ague.”
“I am dressed very warmly,” she said. “I know what to expect from the weather.”
“We can discuss this at home,” he said. “Before a warm fire. I should like to get there before the heavens open up and drench us.”
“No!” she burst out, stamping her foot. “We’re not discussing anything! I am going to tell you, and you are going to listen! And I don’t give a damn if you contract a lung fever and whooping cough besides. If that little boy can bear the moors—on his own—wearing rags and boots full of holes, with nothing in his belly but what he can steal to put there, then you can bloody well bear it!”
Again the face flashed in his mind.
Revulsion, sour and thick, was rising inside him. Dain made himself drag in more air, in long, labored breaths.
Yes, he bloody well could bear it. He had told her weeks ago to stop treating him like a child. He had wanted her to stop behaving like an amiable automaton. He’d received his wishes, and he knew now he could and would endure anything, as long as she didn’t leave him.
“I’m listening,” he said. He leaned against the rock.
She studied him with troubled eyes. “I am not trying to torture you, Dain, and if I had a clue what your problem was, I would try to help. But that obviously wants a good deal of time, and there isn’t time. At present, your son is more desperately in need of help than you are.”
He made himself focus on the words, and push the sickening image to the back of his mind. “I understand. On the moors, you said. On his own. Not acceptable. Quite.”
“And so you must understand that when I heard of it, I was obliged to act. Since you made it clear you didn’t want to hear anything about him, I was obliged to act behind your back.”
“I understand. You had no choice.”
“And I should not distress you now, if I were not obliged to do something that you might never forgive.”
He swallowed nausea and pride in one gulp. “Jess, the only unforgivable thing you can do is leave me,” he said. “Se mi lasci mi uccido. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I should never leave you. Really, Dain, I cannot think where you get such addled ideas.”
Then, as though this explained and settled everything, she promptly returned to the main subject, and told him what had happened that day: how she’d stalked the beast to its lair—in Dain’s own park, no less, where the little friend had broken into the summerhouse, and had been more or less living there for the last week at least.
Dain’s sickness swiftly subsided, and the unendurable weight with it, swept away on a tide of shocked disbelief. The Demon Seed he’d planted in Charity Graves had been terrorizing his own village, skulking about his own park—and Dain had heard not so much as a whisper about it.
Speechless, he could only gape at his wife while she briskly related her capture of the boy, and went on to describe the encounter with the gutter-snipe’s mother.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere about them had darkened ominously. The spitting rain had built to a steady drizzle. Under it, the spray of feathers and ribbons adorning her bonnet had sagged and collapsed, to cling soggily to the brim. But Jessica was as oblivious to the state of her bonnet as she was to the fiercely gusting wind, the fine beating rain, and the black mass rolling above their heads.
She had reached the crisis point in her tale, and that was all that troubled her at present. A crease had appeared between her gracefully arched eyebrows and her gaze had dropped to her tightly folded hands.
“Charity wants the icon in exchange for the boy,” she said. “Otherwise, if I try to take him, she threatened to scream blue murder—because that would bring you into it, and she knows you’ll send him—and her—away. But that I cannot permit, and I brought you here to tell you so. I will find a way to keep him out of your sight, if you insist. I will not, however, let him go away with his irresponsible mother to
London, where he will fall into the hands of cutpurses, perverts, and murderers.”
“The icon?” he said, scarcely heeding the rest. “The bitch wants my Madonna—a Stroganov—for that hideous little—”
“Dominick is not hideous,” Jessica said sharply. “True, he has behaved monstrously, but he received no discipline at home in the first place and he has been much provoked in the second. He was blissfully unaware he was a bastard, or what that meant, just as he did not grasp the meaning of his mother’s trade—until he went to school, where the village children enlightened him in the cruelest possible way. What he is, is frightened and confused, and painfully aware that he is not like other children—and no one wants him.” She paused. “Except me. If I had pretended I didn’t want him, his mother might not have demanded so much. But I could not pretend, and add to the child’s misery.”
“Plague take the black whoreson!” he shouted, pulling away from the rock. “That bitch will not have my icon!”
“Then you will have to take the child away from her yourself,” said Jessica. “I do not know where she is hiding, but I strongly doubt she can be found in less than twenty-four hours. Which means that someone must be at the Postbridge coach stop early tomorrow morning. If the someone is not me, with the icon, it must be you.”
He opened his mouth for a roar of outrage, then shut it and counted to ten instead.
“You are proposing,” he said levelly, “that I toddle down to Postbridge at the crack of dawn…and patiently await Charity Graves’ entrance…and there, before a crowd of bog-trotters, negotiate with her?”
“Certainly not,” said Jessica. “You need not negotiate. He’s your son. All you have to do is take him, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She could not claim she was being tricked—as she easily might if anyone but you attempts it.”
“Take him—just like that? In front of everybody?”
She peered up at him from under her soggy bonnet. “I do not see what is so shocking. I am merely suggesting you behave in your customary style. You stomp in and take over and tell Charity to go to blazes. And to hell with what everyone else thinks.”
He clung doggedly to the fraying threads of his control. “Jessica, I am not an idiot,” he said. “I see what you are about. You are…managing me. The idea of mowing Charity Graves down is supposed to be irresistibly appealing. Also, perfectly logical, since I have no intention of giving up my icon. Which I don’t.”
