The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [85]
He blew gently upon her cheek, and her eyes trembled. A thin hand came sluggishly to fend him off. He wanted to share these still, quiet moments. There were few enough such in his life these days, and in Cath’s, he imagined; they seemed a gift, not to be lightly squandered.
She blinked at him, rolled towards him just enough to fold herself into his arms.
“Sergeant Quire,” she said, pressing her face into the crook of his neck. “I thought you might be gone when I woke.”
“Not yet,” he murmured.
They were alone in the rooms. Cath had sent Emma on her way as soon as they came in, a little unsteady on their feet, and the older woman had gone willingly enough, favouring Quire with a knowing smile as she went. A woman in want of a bed would have no trouble finding one in the Holy Land at night.
Quire ran his hand down Cath’s flank beneath the bedding, slipping it over her buttock and on to her thigh. There was comfort even in that simple motion, and the memory it carried of their congress. It called up once more the cleansing, emptying heat of their union; its capacity to banish, for a time, all thought and all self, and free Quire of his troubles and his fears. Fears. That was right enough, and having let the notion of it into his head, he lost hold of his tranquillity. He withdrew his hand, and swung his legs out to sit on the edge of the bed.
“God, it’s early,” Cath moaned, reading by long experience the soft fall of light through the window. “Can we not sleep a bit longer?”
She ran a fingernail down his spine. That made shivers race through the skin of his back. He stood, naked, and stretched his arms. He had never been troubled to hide the scars on his arm from Cath. From the first time she had seen them, her ease at the sight of them had made itself his own. Today, it was his other marks that drew her attention. A great bruise as many-hued as a summer thundercloud was just beginning to fade, spread over his hip and flank where Davey Muir had thrown him into a tree.
Cath reached out to touch it, tracing its yellow-black shape.
“Look at you, Adam. Look at you.”
Her voice was laden with sympathy, with sorrow. That had been, in part, what he had needed last night, Quire supposed: the simple comfort of caring company. He had been drunk, so it was not easy to recall exactly how his mind had been working, but he knew it had been a whole web of longings. All his old affection for her, only sharpened by his long resistance to its call; his selfish need to be taken out of himself for a time, to have another set aside his dark thoughts for him, since he could not seem to do it himself.
There had been no restraining sense of consequence, for he was already accused, and half-convicted, of that which he now did. It had felt the most natural thing in all the world to turn for comfort and companionship to Cath. And she had been welcoming, forgiving. As if he had never wronged her.
Her hand was easing itself around his thigh, straying towards his crotch, and he felt his desire stirring in anticipation of her touch. But he slipped beyond her reach, and began to collect his clothes from the floor.
“Already?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I’ll be back, Cath. I promise you that.”
As he pulled his trousers on, his gaze fell upon an open box sitting by the window. Curled up in it were the amber bead amulets that the Widow’s girls sold as protective charms to their customers. That put a sour twist to the moment, reminding Quire of how many others had shared Cath’s bed, but more immediate preoccupations chased the thought away quickly enough.
“So do you think these things work, then?” he asked, holding up one of the trinkets.
It was not a question he would once have asked, but if he had learned nothing else of late, it was that there were mysteries to the working of the world he had never imagined.