The tent stood before us, dark and invitingly empty.
“Aye?”
“Oh, yes.”
The stretcher bearers had taken the lantern, and the setting moon was the barest sliver above the horizon; the inside of the tent was filled with a soft, dusty black that rose up around us in a fragrantly alcoholic cloud—with a faint tang of vomit—when we stepped inside.
I recalled exactly where things were, though, and we managed to push together four of the packing crates. I spread my cloak on these, he took off his coat and waistcoat, and we lay down precariously in the beery dark together.
“How long do you think we have?” I asked, undoing his flies. His flesh was warm and hard under my hand, and his skin there soft as polished silk.
“Long enough,” he said, and brushed my nipple with his thumb, slowly, in spite of his own apparent urgency. “Dinna hurry yourself, Sassenach. There’s no telling when we’ll have the chance again.”
He kissed me lingeringly, his mouth tasting of Roquefort and port. I could feel the vibration of the camp here, too—it ran through both of us like a fiddle string pegged tight.
“I dinna think I’ve got time to make ye scream, Sassenach,” he whispered in my ear. “But I’ve maybe time to make ye moan?”
“Well, possibly. It’s some time ’til dawn, isn’t it?”
Whether it was the beer and premarital explanations, the late hour and lure of secrecy—or only Jamie himself and our increasing need to shut out the world and know only each other—he had time, and to spare.
“Oh, God,” he said at last, and came down slowly on me, his heart beating heavy against my ribs. “Oh . . . God.”
I felt my own pulse throb in hands and bones and center, but couldn’t manage any response more eloquent than a faint “Ooh.” After a bit, though, I recovered enough to stroke his hair.
“We’ll go home again soon,” I whispered to him. “And have all the time in the world.”
That got me a softly affirmative Scottish noise, and we lay there for a bit longer, not wanting to come apart and get dressed, though the packing cases were hard and the possibility of discovery increasing with each passing minute.
At last he stirred, but not to rise.
“Oh, God,” he said softly, in another tone altogether. “Three hundred men.” And held me tighter.
STINKING PAPIST
THE SUN WASN’T YET above the horizon, but the horse park was busy as an anthill, full of grooms, foragers, teamsters, and farriers, all scurrying about their business in an incongruous soft pink light filled with the sound of hundreds of pairs of steadily champing jaws. William picked up the bay gelding’s hoof and held out his hand for the hoof pick his new, small groom was clutching nervously to his chest.
“Now, come here, Zeb,” he said coaxingly. “I’ll show you how it’s done; there’s nothing to it.”
“Yes, sir.” Zebedee Jeffers edged an inch closer, eyes flicking back and forth from the hoof to the towering mass of horseflesh. Jeffers did not like horses. He particularly didn’t like Visigoth. William thought it was just as well that Zeb likely didn’t know what a Visigoth was.
“All right. See there?” He tapped the pick against the shadow: the edge of a small rock that had trapped itself under the curve of the iron shoe during the night. “It’s only a little one, but it feels just like a pebble in your own shoe would feel, and he’ll go lame if we don’t take care of it. Here, it’s not stuck fast; do you want to try?”
“No, sir,” Zeb said honestly. Zebedee came from the shore of Maryland and knew about oysters, boats, and fish. Not horses.
“He won’t hurt you,” William said, with a touch of impatience. He’d be riding back and forth along the columns a dozen times a day, carrying dispatches and gathering reports; both his horses needed to be kept ready, his regular groom, Colenso Baragwanath, was down with a fever, and he hadn’t time to find another servant.
“Yes, he will. Sir,” Zeb added as an afterthought. “See?” He held out a scrawny arm, displaying what was undoubtedly a festering bite mark.
William suppressed the urge to ask what the devil the boy had been doing to the horse. Visigoth wasn’t a bad-tempered horse on the whole, but he could be irritable, and Zeb’s nervous fidgeting was enough to try anyone, let alone a tired and hungry horse.
“All right,” he said with a sigh, and pried the rock loose with one sharp dig. “Better, then?” he said to the horse, running a hand down the leg and then patting Goth’s flank. He felt in his pocket and drew out a bunch of limp carrots, bought the night before from a farmwoman who’d come through camp with baskets of produce on a yoke across her broad shoulders.
“Here. Give him that; make friends with him,” he suggested, handing a carrot to Zeb. “Hold it flat on your hand.” Before the boy could extend this putative olive branch, though, the horse reached down and snatched it from his fingers with an audible crunch of big yellow teeth. The boy uttered a small shriek and took several steps back, collided with a bucket, and fell over it, arse over teakettle.
Torn between annoyance and an unseemly urge to laugh, William smothered both and went to pick his groom out of a manure pile.
“Tell you what,” he said, dusting the boy off with a firm hand, “you see that all my dunnage is aboard the baggage wagon, see if Colenso needs anything, and make sure there’s something for me to eat tonight. I’ll ask Sutherland’s groom to tend the horses.”