Free Chase the Dawn by Jane Feather Page B

it, either.”
    “Well, there are some carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions that you can peel and chop,” he said cheerfully, indicating a small sack leaning up against the cabin. “A gift from our friends this afternoon. In the pot with the hare, they will make an excellent stew.”
    “I suppose so.” Bryony sounded a little doubtful. She was quite sure that she had never peeled a vegetable. “You did not answer my question.”
    Ben pulled his clasp knife from his belt. “No, I did not.” Dragging the hare toward him, he turned it over and slit its belly.
    Bryony averted her eyes. “You don’t really need to, because I think I can guess. You are a Patriot. I remembered what the war is about, you see, when I woke up, and I do not think that Loyalists live in woods.”
    “And what are you?” he asked, pausing in his task.
    Bryony sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve made my head ache with thinking, but there is still nothingthere. I know that I must be one or the other, because everyone is, are they not?”
    “All but the dying and the lunatic,” he agreed.
    “Well, what do
you
think I am?”
    “Impossible to say.” He shrugged, wiping his bloody hands on the grass. “Trueman’s Tory, though, and you were at his house.”
    “He would not entertain a Patriot?”
    “He might.” Ben quartered the hare and threw it into a pot. “There’s been no real fighting in these parts, yet. Rhetoric, certainly, gathering of arms and training of militia; but families and friends are living with split loyalties. When it comes time to bear arms, then the divisions will make themselves felt.”
    “And that time will come soon?” The deep blue eyes held him with their intensity, their passionate need to people the wasteland of her mind with sense and facts.
    He could not refuse her that understanding; could not condemn her to wander in the confusion of a suddenly imposed, arbitrary ignorance. “Georgia and some areas of South Carolina have fallen to the British expeditionary force and the Loyalists. Charleston has been under attack since May. If it falls to Clinton and Cornwallis, then the rest of the Carolinas will follow. Virginia, logically and geographically, comes next.”
    That
was what she had been trying to remember this morning. But the voice that accompanied the revived memory still remained an elusive echo. “So you are preparing for this? Preparing to meet the Tories and the British if … when … they come?” It was presented as a question, but it was fundamentally rhetorical.
    Ben opened the sack of vegetables and upturned it on the ground before her. Wiping his knife clean, he presentedit to her, handle politely forward. “Your job, Miss Bryony.”
    She grimaced but attacked the task with grim determination. “You were working for the Patriot cause when you fired the barn that night?”
    “Yes.” He sat back and watched her, a smile tugging his lips at her struggles with a potato.
    “Doing what?” She held up the potato for inspection. “It doesn’t look very clean.”
    “Stealing arms.” He stood up. “I’ll fetch water from the creek. When they’re washed, I expect they will do.”
    “And you did not want me to know of these things because when … if … I remember who I am, it might be difficult for us?”
    “Basically,” he agreed, picking up the kettle. “If I find I’ve a passionate Tory under my roof, one who knows a great deal more than she should about me, we would both be in danger. As would those with whom I work.”
    “But now I do know.”
    “Yes, you do.” A sheen of mockery filmed his eyes—a mockery that encompassed them both. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, lass. I held out for as long as I could against the odds presented by a somewhat determined waif with a wonderfully passionate hunger for the glories of loving.”
    Bryony smiled with pleasure. “It was quite unexpected,” she announced, almost smugly. “I do not think I had