Jane Feather - The Hostage Bride

“I have a feeling your need is greater than mine,” Portia murmured, cutting some more. She fed all the meat to the puppy and drank the wine, feeling it warm her on the inside at least. She contemplated lighting one of the altar candles but decided that showing a light would not be wise. She had no idea what kind of reception she’d receive from the hamlet’s inhabitants, but from what she’d seen of the shuttered cottages, it was wise to assume that it wouldn’t be friendly.

The puppy, its belly full, trotted off into the darkness. Portia, guessing what she was after, scrambled up hastily. “Wait… you can’t be uninhibited in a church.” She scooped her up and carried her back outside. In the churchyard, behind the shelter of a yew tree, they took care of nature’s needs, then returned to the church.

Portia found a threadbare cassock in the sacristy and wrapped herself in it. She sat with her back against the altar and closed her eyes. The puppy crawled up onto her lap and dived under her cloak and cassock, seeking her warmth.

“It’s all right for some,” Portia said, shivering. The trip outside had undone all the good of the wine and she had only a swallow left.

It no longer seemed sacrilegious to make use of the altar cloth. She couldn’t imagine God would be offended if it would save one of his creatures from freezing to death where she sat.

Even with the altar cloth, it was too cold to sleep. She was bone weary, every muscle tensed against the deep ache of the cold. “You know something, Juno, if that ill-tempered bastard of a Decatur is in the least ungrateful after what I’ve been through, I shall take my knife to his throat,” she muttered into the puppy’s neck, finding some comfort in talking aloud even to an animal who couldn’t talk back.

Why had she decided to call this unprepossessing scrap Juno? The question flitted through her brain without stopping for answer. Her mind began to play tricks. She thought she was back in her bed in Cato’s castle. Then she was back in St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh listening to Jack curse her up hill and down dale because she hadn’t brought him enough brandy to keep the demons at bay. Then she was in a sunny meadow along the river Loire. The sun was hot on her back, baking her bones, and Jack was sitting a little way away from her playing dice with a pair of itinerant peddlers who were only just beginning to understand that the man they’d thought would be an easy mark was going to take them for everything they possessed, right down to the boots on their feet.

She brushed at her cheek where a fly was buzzing her, disturbing the glorious lethargy of the sun’s heat, the lovely crimson-shot blackness behind her closed eyes. The buzzing continued. Annoyed, she slapped at it and something nipped her finger hard enough to jerk her back to grim reality.

She stared blankly at Juno, who stared back with her liquid brown eyes filled with anxiety. The puppy had been licking her cheek, sensing that she was slipping away into some landscape from which she might not return.

With a violent shiver, Portia leaped to her feet, dragging the altar cloth tightly around her as she began to walk the nave, up and down, up and down, until she was wide-awake and the blood was moving, if sluggishly, in her veins. She was still colder than she ever remembered being, but she was awake and alive.

She went to the door and peered out. The darkness was graying slightly, but the sky remained heavily overcast. “I think we’d do better on the move, Juno. I’d rather face a band of brigands than freeze to death here.” She replaced the altar cloth and the priest’s cassock, ate the last crust of bread and gave the cheese to Juno, then set her face to the wind, the puppy huddled beneath her arm.

By full dawn it had begun to snow, and she was now threading her way through the trackless wastes of the Cheviots, the only witnesses to her passing a few miserable sheep huddled beneath the scant protection of leafless trees. Thirsty, she made a hole in the ice covering a small stream. Juno drank greedily but the water was so cold it gave Portia a screeching headache. Tears of misery and desperation were falling unbidden and unheeded, freezing on her cheeks. She shivered convulsively, her clothes no more protection now than if she were naked. Only the puppy kept her going, created a small spot of warmth against her chest.

The snow grew heavier and she could barely see a step ahead of her, and now she no longer knew whether she was going in the right direction or merely round and round in circles. Nothing mattered except to keep putting one numb foot in front of the other as she stumbled into the wind-driven snow.

When she first saw the diffused glow through the white veil that smothered her, Portia barely heeded it. She’d forgotten what she was looking for… had almost forgotten who she was. There was just the single driving force-to put one foot in front of the other.

But her feet took her upward toward the glow without conscious instruction from her brain. She stumbled in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, wrenching her ankle. And then she lay there, sobbing with pain and cold and terror, knowing that she was going to die where she lay, in a snow shroud.

Pitch torches flared through the white. Voices came at her from far above. Hands lifted her, and Portia clutched Juno to her with every fiber of her remaining strength.

Someone was forcing her lips apart, forcing her to drink. She coughed, choked with shock as the fiery spirits burned her gullet. An acrid ammoniacal smell burst through the darkness blanketing her senses, and she opened her eyes with a shudder.

“Lord love us, but if ‘tain’t the lass from Granville.” George’s voice was astounded. He pressed the flagon to her lips again. “Drink, lassie. Y’are near perished.” Anxiously he passed the vial of ammonia beneath her nose while she was trying to drink, and she choked again, spluttering the rough brandy over her cloak.

A brazier glowed in the small watchman’s hut, and it was warm and frowsty with the mingled smells of sweat and frying onions and ale. Juno wriggled out from under her cloak and jumped to the ground, making immediately for the brazier, where she nestled close, shaking herself.

“Lucifer an‘ all ’is angels! What’s that?” George exclaimed.

Portia couldn’t speak. Her lips were numb, her tongue seemed frozen to the roof of her mouth, her jaw was locked. She looked helplessly at George and his much younger companion, who both stood staring at her as if she’d emerged from the spirit world.

George scratched his head. “Jamie, run down and fetch the master. Tell ‘im ’tis the lass from Granville… come back fer some reason.”

Jamie enveloped himself in his cloak, took up a pitch torch from the sconce on the wall, and set off at a scrambling run down the path to the village. He raced down the narrow lane and stopped, panting, at Rufus’s house. He banged on the door and shouted.

“Eh, m’lord! Come quick! Y’are wanted quick up top.”

Rufus flung open the door. “What is it? Soldiers? Raiders?” As he spoke he grabbed for his swordbelt hanging on the hook by the fireplace.

“No… no… ‘tis not soldiers, sir.” Jamie shook his head vigorously. “No, nor raiders neither.”

Rufus buckled his belt, his movements no longer so urgent. “What is it, then, Jamie?” The lad was a little slow, and badgering him only flustered him.

“Mr. George, sir, sent me to tell ye.”

“To tell me what, Jamie?” Rufus slung his cloak around his shoulders.

“ ‘Tis the lass from Granville,” Jamie pronounced proudly. “She’s come back, but Mr. George don’t know why. But she’s ’alf perished. Thought she was dead, we did, lyin‘ there in the snow an – ”

He got no further. Rufus had pushed past him and was racing up the lane. He climbed up the hill, his pace barely slowing, and strode into the hut, banging the door shut behind him.

“Holy Christ!” Two strides brought him over to where Portia was huddled on a three-legged stool beside the brazier. Her lips were blue, and he could see where her tears had frozen on her deathly white cheeks. Snow still clung to her eyelashes, and the fringe on her forehead was stiff with ice.

“What have you done?” he whispered. “What have you done to yourself?” He dropped to his knees, brushing the icy fringe from her forehead. He chafed her cheeks between his palms, desperate to see the life and recognition return to the slanted green eyes. She was staring through him as if she didn’t recognize him.

He had tried so hard not to miss her. Had tried so hard not to worry about her. He had told himself that a brief and lusty encounter was all that either of them could have expected. She was a Granville. She could never be anything else. She’d defended the Granvilles when he’d been opening his agony to her. She’d ridden off and left him in his pain. She should have understood the desperate rage that had made him say what he’d said, but she’d failed him. She hadn’t been able to put aside her Granville loyalties.

He’d nurtured his anger with a fierce flame, but now as he tried with his own breath to return the living warmth to her face, to her eyes, that anger was as if it had never been.

And she had come back. But why?

He wasn’t going to get an answer to that question in her present condition. Practical concerns drove the rush of emotion aside. He bent and lifted her to her feet, tightening the cloak around her. “I’ll take her down.”

The words pierced Portia’s numbed trance. “Juno!” she managed to say through violently chattering teeth.