Free Stormfire by Christine Monson

had to set and clear the tables. By the time the kitchen was put in order after dinner, she was numb with fatigue and only too glad to be escorted to her cell.
    For three weeks Catherine saw virtually nothing of Sean Culhane and Flannery, and little more of Liam, who spent most of his time on horseback, roaming the moors with sketch pads. Doctor Flynn she saw not at all, except for a brief post-illness examination. She missed Flynn's kindness, for while she was careful to give no sign of it, she felt her ostracism sharply. To these people, she was a cipher that represented oppression. Peg had no time to talk, and Moora, suspicious of her every move, reported every - thing she did to Peg. The information probably passed to Sean Culhane.
    At first she lived in dread that Culhane would summon her to his bed, but he had not. Like a spoiled child's new toy, she had been discarded after he had dirtied her. Or tired of her. That possibility perversely piqued her vanity. Perhaps once he had taken her virginity, her inexperience was unappealing. He probably had mistresses all over the countryside.
    But pique was slight in comparison to relief at being left alone. Each night in her cell, she uttered a fervent prayer that Sean Culhane might go deaf, blind, and impotent. Her battered, grubby appearance, coupled with Moora's inevitable presence, had effectively discouraged advances from the many men constantly in and out of the house; but now that the bruises had faded and her nose was back to normal, they began to appraise her in spite of her shabby clothes. When, in her ignorance, she tried to wash her velveteen dress as she did herself—in cold, soapless water—the results were disastrous. The jacket hem was raveled, the flimsy kid boots split. Once careless about appearance, she became obsessed with maintaining a semblance of her former neatness.
    Escape was her real obsession. How far the estate was from a town with a British garrison, she could not discover. Virtually no one spoke to her except Peg and Moora; Moora was wary and Peg dropped only what she wanted, giving Catherine the impression she was waiting for something. The servants' conversation usually ground to a halt in her presence.
    The main house, while unguarded, rarely lacked servants near its entrance, and men she assumed to be estate tenants were always about its grounds. A stone Restoration mansion with a terraced entry, it faced a graceful, semicircular bricked court; a terrace with French doors ran the building's length on the sea side. Though the mansion's furniture and draperies were well worn, their quality was fine and the rooms held a king's ransom in artwork. Paintings by Verrocchio and Velasquez and a small Cellini bronze were among the masterpieces scattered about the private family rooms, like the Goya and Rembrandt etchings in Sean Culhane's bedroom.
    The ground floor windows offered only a discouraging vista of starkly beautiful, desolate moors, while the upper stories gave a magnificent, precipitous view of the Atlantic. Furze and sea grass edged a cliff where a smooth lawn dropped abruptly away to the sea. To the north of the house was a battered ruin. Only part of a massive tower remained, bluntly prodding above crumbling adjoining walls whose shattered ramparts backed the sea and north country; the inland walls were low lines of rubble. Apart from the scattered outbuildings, several cavelike stone buildings clustered in a gully and were nearly invisible from either land or sea.
    She supposed the gully buildings to be servants' quarters until the morning she saw "tenants" she recognized from the kitchen drilling with makeshift muskets of rakes and broomstaves. As they marched back and forth in a ragged mass beside the stone barn, her first impulse was to laugh, particularly when she saw them all scatter like a handful of peas and fling themselves behind troughs and walls, then point their ludicrous weapons at one another while Sean Culhane and