Beth Harlish is powerfully attracted to Ruairi, the leader of the Irish refugees who are encamped on the moor near to her house, but she knows Ruairi to be a charmer. How can she trust him? And, in any case, he and his group will soon move on.

 

They paused in a sheltered glade, and he reached out and took her elbow. ‘Let’s sit a while,’ he said quietly, ‘and talk. Won’t you give me a quarter of an hour?’ He motioned to where the grass rose into a little hummock, then spread his coat onto it. ‘Please?’ A small stream laughed and tinkled between stones, and above them birds flapped and chattered amongst the branches.

Beth’s resistance melted. ‘Very well,’ she said, and lowered herself onto the ground. ‘It is very nice here beside the stream.’

He sat beside her. His hair, in the late afternoon sunbeam, was full of lights and glints. His chin was shadowed with stubble, but his eyes were like vortexes of starlight, pulling her inexorably into them.

‘I like to hear about your childhood.’

She nodded. ‘I’m the youngest, and Frank comes next to me. Frank takes after our father. He was a deep-thinking man.’

‘You are deep-thinking too, Betsey. I think I have never met such a profoundly meditative woman before.’

She smiled. ‘I have had plenty of time for thinking. Our childhood was wonderful, really, but as I have told you, very unorthodox.’

‘Yes. I recall all you told me of it. And you spoke also of your feelings toward this place. Of being allied … and also ensnared.’

‘Yes.’ She plucked a few blades of grass and began to weave them together. ‘But it is academic; for how am I to leave?’

‘Very easily.’ Ruairi lay back and put his hands behind his head. ‘You could marry and go wherever your husband would take you.’

Beth’s heart beat like a trapped bird in her chest. What was he going to suggest? ‘But we are committed to Mr Talbot,’ she said, her voice tight.

‘You are employed by him. ‘Tis not the same.’

She thought about it. ‘I suppose not.’

Ruairi made no reply, and she thought he had perhaps drifted into a doze. She shifted slightly on the grass.

‘Why do you not lie down beside me, Betsey?’ said Ruairi, turning his head slightly to look up at her through his thick dark lashes. ‘It is very comfortable and pleasant, with the song of the birds above and the little brook running by. We cannot always be working, and at the camp I am so often called upon to settle and decide between them. They are like children some of the time, and there is always the worry of where the next day’s work might come from, how we might manage.’

‘You have all the responsibility of it,’ said Beth, feeling a scruple about lying herself down but unable to resist the temptation of it. ‘That is a great deal for one man’s shoulders.’

Even such broad ones as yours, she wanted to say.

His shoulder pressed against her own, the heat radiated from him. His hand brushed hers and suddenly their fingers were entwined. For a working man, his hands were smooth. She stiffened slightly but he made no further move and gradually she relaxed.

‘I suppose,’ she said presently, attempting a note of levity that she did not feel, ‘that you have lain with many a girl like this, side by side in some secluded pasture or woodland dell. I must tell you that it would be most frowned upon should we be discovered. My reputation would be beyond rescue.’

He turned his head towards her and met her gaze, eye-to-eye. ‘Not so very many,’ he said, in a voice so low she could barely catch his words. ‘But I assure you, Miss Harlish, that I would not permit your reputation to be brought into question.’ He lifted a thumb and began to stroke the side of her hand with it, a languid sensuous action that fired bolts of pleasure up her arm. ‘So,’ he said, ‘have you been avoiding me? And why?’

She turned her head back to the patch of sky that showed between the trees. ‘Yes,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I was ashamed. To become intoxicated and then to be carried home like a common dairymaid.’

She felt him chuckle. ‘You were a very decorous drunk,’ he said. ‘No swearing, no lewd suggestions, no bawdy singing and hardly any snoring.’

‘Hardly any?’ She turned to look at him, appalled, but saw the laughter in his eyes. ‘You’re teasing.’

He raised himself up on one elbow to look down at her but he did not relinquish her hand, and in fact used his other hand to part and stroke her fingers. ‘Such tiny hands that you have, Betsey,’ he said, looking down at them briefly. ‘I liked holding your hand that night. If anyone were to be ashamed, it would be me. I behaved in an unmanly way.’

‘It is not unmanly to have deep feelings,’ she said, lifting her other hand so that the four—his hands and hers—were enmeshed and intertwined in a complex arrangement of fingers and feelings.

‘It is unmanly to let them show,’ he suggested. ‘But with you I find my feelings are hard to rein in. There is something about you, Betsey …’ Now it was his turn to avoid her eye. He frowned and swallowed and looked very hard at their hands. At last he raised his gaze to meet hers. ‘You have a way of drawing a man out. Is it a trick? Some kind of sorcery? When I am with you I feel that all the flummery—the niceties and conventions—are needless, and that we are just two naked souls—twin souls—standing in the light of God. Do you feel it, too?’ he said huskily.

Beth made no reply, but bathed herself in the intensity of his eyes, which were now the colour of dark sapphires. Her breathing was very shallow. His head was so close to hers that she breathed in the air he breathed out.

As she did not reply Ruairi went on. ‘There is a star in you, Betsey. A rare star. You shine. When you are near, I cannot keep my eyes from you, or my hands, or my lips.’

The slightest possible lift of her chin would have invited him to suit his action to the word. Time stopped as she trembled on the brink. Then she took a deep shuddering breath, summoning resolve.

She withdrew her hands from his. ‘I think,’ she said, falteringly, ‘that it would be a mistake to remain here much longer. Look,’ she continued, more firmly, ‘the sun has gone and our way is steep and tricky. We must not linger.’

He gave a heavy, heartfelt groan and then got to his feet, holding out a hand to help her up. ‘Very well.’