Paxton and the Lone Star (63 page)

Bliss stood so abruptly that his chair tipped over behind him. His face tight and red with anger, he stepped around the small table. “Who are
you
to order
me
about, girl?” he demanded fiercely. “You're nothing but a Gypsy. A Gypsy whore, if I don't miss my guess. And say what you will, but I'll have my shilling's worth of you!”

Where was Giuseppe? He should have returned to the tent by now to walk her back to their wagon. Trapped, Adriana searched desperately for a way out of her predicament. She could hear the muffled clamor of voices protesting the closing of the fair, and knew her own screams wouldn't sound much louder to anyone outside—and they might possibly only antagonize her assailant even more. The tent was too tightly pegged down to allow a quick escape under its edge. Bliss now stood between her and the brass candleholder, the only possible weapon close at hand. “Get away from me,” she hissed.

“Get away from me,” Bliss mimicked mockingly, his eyes glittering with lust as he backed her into a shadowy corner. “Not likely, wench.”

Feinting to his left, Adriana ducked and tried to dart under his right arm. Bliss's hand shot out, caught her arm, and roughly jerked her toward him. Before she could shout or scream, his mouth had found hers and was pressing against her lips in a cruel semblance of a kiss. When she tried to drop out of his grasp, his left hand cupped her buttocks and, his fingers digging into her flesh through her skirt, he pulled her lower body against his.

The evidence of his lust was sickening. Enraged, Adriana bit down hard on Bliss's lower lip and tasted blood. Bliss grunted in pain and, backing away, slapped her across the face with enough force to knock her against the wall of the tent. “Bitch!” he growled, wiping the blood from his chin. “Want to fight, eh?” He advanced upon her, grabbing a handful of her blouse and tearing it from her. “Think you have a chance, eh?” He seized her again and jerked her roughly to him. “Too good for Trevor Bliss?”

“Swine!” Adriana spat his own blood into Bliss's face.

Bliss froze, then slowly wiped the spittle from his face as Adriana tried to cover her breasts. “You've done it now, wench. You've gone too far.” The anger had faded from his voice, replaced by the quiet determination of a man who has slipped into madness. “Fight if you want, but little good it'll do you. And I don't mind a bit.”

The only defense against a madman was madness itself. With a bloodcurdling shriek, Adriana leaped at him, her fists bouncing futilely off his chest, her fingers searching for his eyes. Bliss backhanded her and knocked her down, then immediately dropped on top of her, tearing at her skirt with one hand and restraining her free arm with the other. Adriana almost gagged as his tongue thrust into her mouth. She whipped her head from side to side and tried to twist away. Bliss thrust one knee between her legs, and in the process loosed her right arm. Swinging blindly, Adriana's fist caught Bliss in the throat. Gasping, Bliss loosened his grip, giving her the slight space she needed to drive a knee into his groin. Bliss grunted and fell back. The advantage momentarily hers, Adriana slashed out with her nails, and then tried to crawl past him toward the tent's exit.

Blood welled out and flowed down Bliss's cheek. His groin throbbed and his breath whistled in his throat. Beside himself with rage and pain, he lunged after Adriana and pinned her against the floor. Helpless, she lay numb and weeping beneath his weight, tasting the salt tang of blood on her lips, unable to cry out.

He had won! His pain forgotten, dizzy with anticipation, Bliss pushed himself to his knees and fumbled at his breeches. The fight had excited him beyond measure; seldom had he been harder. His, by God! She was his, and well worth the price paid, to judge by the sight of her. Oblivious of everything else, he lowered himself toward her.

“Whoreson bastard!” a voice roared.

Bliss's head jerked around and he tried to climb to his feet. Giuseppe, a blade glinting in his hand, caught Bliss by the collar and dragged him off Adriana. Wanting only to escape, Adriana rolled into the far corner of the tent and huddled defensively.

Giuseppe circled Bliss to place himself between Adriana and her attacker. The knife inscribed a small circle inches from Bliss's face. “Tell me why I shouldn't kill you now, son of a dog,” he hissed. “Tell me why I shouldn't carve your face to ribbons and castrate you like the swine you are.”

“What's happening in here?”

Giuseppe looked up to see old Gregori framed in the entrance to the tent. The momentary distraction was all Bliss needed. Before anyone could stop him, he bowled Gregori over as he bolted from the tent.

“Giuseppe!” Adriana cried.

Stopped by her voice, Giuseppe hurried to kneel at her side.

“No, Brother,” she gasped. “He did not take me, I swear it.” She gripped his arm and wouldn't let him rise. “Do not try to stop him. He will only bring more trouble down on us. Stay with me, please. Help me to the wagon.”

Giuseppe retrieved her shawl from the back of her chair and arranged it over her breasts. “I should have killed him,” Giuseppe said, his rage turning to sorrow as he cradled his sister in his arms. “I am not a man. I should have killed him where he knelt!”

A loud, metallic click punctuated his sentence. “You should have,” Bliss said from the entrance, “but you didn't.”

Giuseppe had never used a firearm, but he knew the sound of one being cocked. “Hush, little one,” he said, gently releasing Adriana. Careful not to move fast, he turned slowly toward Bliss and the twin-barreled pocket pistol that was aimed at him. “If you shoot, Englishman,” he said calmly, “you will die. For my knife will find you …”

He was a blur of motion. His hand dipped to the sheath on his belt, rose smoothly, and loosed the deadly blade. At the same instant, Bliss fired. The shot was followed by a solid, sickening thump as a lead ball tore through Giuseppe's chest. His fingers clawing at the mortal wound, Giuseppe grunted in surprise and doubled over.

Bliss, smiling triumphantly, backed out of sight as Giuseppe collapsed.

“Oh, God!” Adriana sobbed, trying to stem the flowing blood with an embrace. “Oh, God, please!”

“Little one? Little one?” Disbelief written on his face, Giuseppe stared up at his little sister. “I'm sorry,” he rasped, and then he slumped wearily. The light in his eyes faded and flickered out, like a candle in the wind.

Her own pain was forgotten. “Giuseppe!” Adriana screamed, shaking him, trying to bring him back to life. “Giuseppe! No!” Dropping him, she half-crawled, half-ran to the entrance. “Murderer!” she howled into the night. “He murdered Giuseppe!”

Aroused by the sounds of the shot and Bliss's horse galloping away, men ran from every direction toward the tent. Old Gregori, momentarily dazed by the blow he had taken from Bliss, staggered to his feet and into the tent, now filled with acrid powder smoke and the stench of blood.

“Giuseppe is dead!” Adriana cried out in anguish to anyone who would listen. “My brother is dead!”

And then the world tilted crazily. Too late, she realized that she was falling. Footsteps pounded the earth around her, voices were raised in fearful questioning and alarm. There was an inviting pool of blackness in front of her that promised peaceful oblivion and escape from grief. Without hesitation, Adriana dived in, and slipped gratefully all the way to the bottom.

Gregori's voice was quiet and soothing. “Revenge is useless,” he said. “There is no justice for the Gypsy in the courts of the English. You know this, Adriana. Giuseppe himself would tell you as much.”

Adriana rested beside the wagon that until tonight she had shared with Giuseppe. She stared up at the stars, and made no reply to the elder's statement because she knew he was right. The Gypsies were tolerated in England because of the pleasure and diversion their fairs brought to normally dull lives, but they had no legal standing in a country where law and justice were rooted in a system based on ownership of real property, a concept completely foreign to her people. Attempting to bring charges against Bliss would be useless. And, deserving of vengeance though he was, killing him would only bring harm to the whole tribe.

“One day this man—this demon!—will go too far,” Gregori continued when Adriana did not speak. “His deeds will catch up to him, I swear it! Now, you must come away with us. You must go on with your life, Adriana, and put this terrible crime behind you. Giuseppe would want—”

Adriana whirled to face the old man, the icy control and calm she had demanded of herself ever since she had come up from that black pool of unconsciousness finally shattering. “Stop telling me what Giuseppe would want!” she blazed. “Giuseppe wanted to
live
, as we all want to live, but he is dead, and none of us can change that! All we can do for Giuseppe now is avenge his murder.” The Gypsies were readying to leave this place where death had visited them with his ghastly grinning countenance. Middle of the night or not, they were leaving after only one day of the fair. It was for the best, Gregori had decided. “Go with your people, old man!” Adriana said to him.

“They are your people, too,” he told her in a quavering voice. “You will take a man … have children. Life goes on, child!”

Adriana shook her head. Forgotten was Saul, forgotten the ties of blood and tradition that bound her to the tribe. “So it does, and so I shall,” she said with a voice as cold as a winter night. “But not here, for there are things I must do, and I have no wish to harm my people. The path I take can only be traveled alone.”

“You mean to kill this Lieutenant Trevor Bliss.” Gregori's words were a flat statement, not a question.

“I mean to avenge my brother's death.”

“But, child …” The old man was pleading now. “You know no other life.”

Adriana took a deep breath and looked to the stars again, her green eyes searching. “Then, perhaps,” she said, “it is time for me to learn another.”

CHAPTER II

“Tell me, lass, and be true, for it's my future you hold there.”

Work-worn and weather-cracked, the man's hand lay palm upward under Adriana's unwavering gaze. Cold seeped through the shuttered and rag-chinked window, hovered around the table and chairs set close by the hearth. Outside, the sky was dark with clouds and the ground with soot-stained snow. London in January was a dreary place.

The man across the table from Adriana was a tall, spare, hard-bitten sea captain in his mid-thirties. His hair was covered with a black knitted cap and his close-cropped beard trimmed his jawline with a fringe of brown shot through with white. His brows were thick, his eyes dark-brown and stern. Deep lines etched his face, which at one time might have been considered kindly, but by the year of our Lord 1810 could only be called hard and careworn. His name was Isaiah Hawkins, and he was desperately in need of counsel.

Isaiah had expected to find a withered crone when he set out to seek the Gypsy rumored to possess powers beyond those of the ordinary fortune-teller. Angel Street, where she lived, was lined with dilapidated buildings that housed charlatans who existed to cheat poor salts out of their hard-earned wages, and harlots who enticed the unwary to squander whatever money they had left for a moment of love and a lifetime of disease. Number 17 leaned precariously, and its front door was stuck open. The hall stank of an excess of unwashed humanity. The banister was missing from the wooden second-floor landing, which was decorated with the half-eaten, frozen carcass of a foot-long rat. When Isaiah's knock was answered, his surprise had been total, for—bundled though she was against the cold—there could have been no doubt that the Gypsy was anything but a crone.

“I see a white bird,” Adriana said at last, breaking the trancelike silence into which she had fallen. “A stately fowl that glides across the water.”

“A swan!” Isaiah gasped. “My ship, the
Swan of Yorkshire!
She rides at dock along River Street.”

“But not for long,” Adriana said. “The swan is free under a fair sky …”

“Aye, free. A comely brig, she is, eager to leave this black city in her wake. And if she never returns, it'll be soon enough for me.”

It required no seer to sniff out the despair that haunted him, the bitterness that poisoned his soul. “You've had troubles—more than your share,” Adriana murmured sympathetically.

“Troubles, hah! Yes, I'd call them that. A man is bilked of his profits by a lord of the realm. On the next voyage he springs so bad a leak he has to heave overboard a whole cargo of rice or be split in two when the damn stuff swells. And then I return from a hard nine months of dodging pirates and bring to port a load of prime tobacco, only to find the price is down and my creditors are trying to attach my beautiful
Swan
. And if that's not enough, my wife's run off with a tanner!” His face reddened and his eyes bulged. “A tanner, mind ye! A brown-handed, stinking landlubber of a tanner!”

“Perhaps you're better off without her,” Adriana suggested.

“And my cottage, too? That I worked and slaved for, and half-built myself with these two hands? Ahhh …” He stared at his hand a long moment, then suddenly pulled it free of Adriana's grasp. “What's the use? My course is set no matter what you say. The future's fairer elsewhere. I'll sneak some cargo aboard and sell it where I may. I've got plans.” He took out his purse, extracted a shilling, and dropped it on the table. “That's for your time and trouble, lass.”

Adriana slid the coin back to him. “Very little time and no trouble,” she said with a smile as warm as the room was cold. She stood and took two mugs from the mantel. “I'll not take money I haven't earned. Neither will I send a man into the cold without a spot of something hot to warm his stomach. Will you have a cup of tea with me?”