Once a Rake (Drake's Rakes) Read Free

to before finishing her evening chores.
    As she did every autumn, when the farmyard was perennially muddy and her skin chapped, Sarah wished she were somewhere else. It wasn’t as bad in spring or summer, because then she had growing things, new babies to raise, the comfort of wildflowers and warm skies. Every spring she imagined things could be better. Every autumn she admitted the truth. She was caught here at Fairbourne, and here she would stay. She had nowhere else to go.
    She wouldn’t think of that, though. It served no purpose, except to eat away at her heart. Tucking the bit of blanket on the fence where Willoughby could smell it, she tied him up with a scratch of the ears and an admonition to behave. Then, rewrapping her muffler against the chill, she went about her work, ending with a visit to the henhouse.
    It was when she slipped her hand beneath Edna the hen that she knew for certain who had tied up Willoughby. Edna was her best layer, and yet the box was nearly empty. Sarah checked Martha and Mary and came up with similar results. Someone had taken their eggs. And it hadn’t been a fox, or at least one of her birds would have been a pile of bloody feathers.
    Well, Sarah thought, collecting what was left. Her visitor had earned his meal. She wished she had seen him, though. She could have at least rewarded him with a few scones for rescuing Willoughby from sure disaster.
    On second thought, she considered with her first real smile of the day, maybe not scones. They would be Peg’s scones, and Peg’s scones could be used for artillery practice. No one should be rewarded that way.
    Sarah might have thought no more of the matter if the men hadn’t ridden up. She was just shoving the chicken coop door closed when she heard horses approaching over the rise from the Pinhay Road. She sighed. Now what?
    Giving up the idea that she would eat anytime soon, she gave the coop a final kick and strode off toward the approaching riders. She was just passing the old dairy when she caught movement out the corner of her eye. A shadow, nothing more, by the back wall. But a big shadow. One that seemed to be sitting on the ground, with long legs and shoulders the size of a Yule log.
    It didn’t even occur to her that it could be anyone but her benefactor. She was about to call to him when the riders crested the hill and she recognized their leader.
    “Oh, no,” she muttered, her heart sinking straight to her half-boots. This was not the time to betray the existence of the man who had saved her pig. She closed her mouth and walked straight past.
    There were six riders in all, four of them dressed in the motley remnants of their old regiments. Foot soldiers, by the way they rode. Not very good ones, if the company they kept was any indication. Ragged, scruffy, and slouching, they rode with rifles slung over their shoulders and knives in their boots.
    Sarah might have dismissed them as unimportant if they had been led by anyone but her husband’s cousin, Martin Clarke. She knew better than to think Martin wished her well. Martin wished her to the devil, just as she wished him.
    A thin, middling man with sparse sandy hair and bulging eyes, Martin had the harried, petulant air of an ineffectual law clerk. Sarah knew better. Martin was as ineffectual as the tides.
    Just as Sarah knew he would, he trotted past the great front door and toward the outbuildings where he knew he could find her at this time of day. She stood where she was, egg pail in hand, striving for calm. Martin was appearing far too frequently lately.
    Damn you, Boswell, she thought, long since worn past propriety. How could you have left me to face this alone?
    “Martin,” she greeted Boswell’s cousin as he pulled his horse to a skidding halt within feet of her. She felt sorry for the horse, a short-boned bay that bore the scars of Martin’s spurs.
    “Sarah,” Martin snapped in a curiously deep voice.
    He did not bow or tip his hat. Martin knew exactly what