Elizabeth Lane - My Lord Savage

“Later, Rowena.” He dismissed her demand with a scowl. “The less said here, the better. We can talk at the house. Now, ride.”

The knot parted, freeing the gelding’s bridle. Rowena swung expertly into the saddle, legs astride, skirts bunched over her thighs. As she paused to gather the reins, her eyes fell once more on the dray’s tightly bound cargo.

Mounted, she could see what she had not been able to see from the ground. The edges of the canvas sail had parted at the near end of the bundle to reveal a face.

A human face.

The face of a man.

Rowena’s heart lurched as she leaned closer, oblivious to her father’s impatient glare, oblivious to everything except the sight of those riveting male features.

The eyes, set beneath straight ink-black brows, were closed. Deep-set, they lay in the hollows of a fiercely noble face that seemed all bruises and jutting bones, fleshless beneath taut bronze skin. A lock of black hair—all she could see—trailed across one purpled cheek. For all his evident strength the man looked ill and starved. He smelled of vomit and seawater, evidence of a long, rough ocean voyage. But why in heaven’s name was he lashed to the bed of the dray? Surely, in his condition, there was no danger of escape.

Compelled by a strange urge, Rowena leaned outward from the saddle and extended her right hand toward the stranger’s battered, motionless face. Ignoring her father’s sharp-spoken warning, she brushed an exploring fingertip along one concave cheek. The cool skin was as smooth as the finest tanned leather, the long, rugged jaw bearing not a trace of beard stubble. It was almost as if—

Rowena gasped and snatched her hand away as the man’s eyelids jerked open. The eyes that glared up at her were as black as polished jet—their hue so deep that she could see no distinction between iris and pupil.

But it was not the startling color of those eyes that froze her as if she had been turned to stone. It was the blaze of hatred she had glimpsed in their depths—a hatred so pure, so intense, that it seemed to rise from the depths of hell itself.

She wrenched her gaze away. “Father—”

“Not now, Rowena,” Sir Christopher snapped. “Later, once the brute’s safely locked away, I’ll tell you everything. Go, now, there’s no time to lose!”

Rowena shot her father a look of horrified dismay. Then, knowing there was nothing to be done here, she wheeled the horse and galloped off toward the house.

Black Otter willed himself to not struggle as the two burly white men seized his arms and began dragging him off the bed of the cart. Over the course of the terrible sea voyage, he had taken on the desperate strategy of a trapped animal. Watch and learn. Wait for the best chance. Then strike to kill.

Early in the voyage he had come close to killing one of the men on the ship. The young brute had been tormenting him, jabbing him with the end of a smoldering stick. For one careless instant the fellow had come too close, and Black Otter, driven by pain and anguish, had lashed out at him. Flinging the iron links of his wrist manacles around the sailor’s neck, he had squeezed and twisted, taking a perverse satisfaction in the man’s thrashing, his labored gasps.

Then a shout had rung out from above, and the man’s cohorts had come pounding down the hatch-way to fall on Black Otter like a pack of dogs. They had beaten him so savagely that he had drifted in and out of consciousness for more days than he could count on the fingers of both hands.

That beating had taught Black Otter a lesson he would not forget. Never again would he strike out at his captors without weighing the odds. If there was little to be gained he would contain his fury, caging it like a wild beast. But if the chance came to break for his freedom, he would kill any white person who stood in his way.

Including the woman.

He felt her eyes on him now as he struggled to stand on the reeling ground. Golden eyes, darkly set in a long, pale face. He remembered the touch of her fingertip on his face, her low gasp as he opened his eyes. Had he frightened her? Good, he had wanted to frighten her. He wanted to frighten them all.

Straining against the weight of his shackles, Black Otter straightened to his full height and glowered defiantly at them—the woman, the old man and the lesser people who had come out of the enormous lodge. The two burly men, who seemed to be taking orders from the old one, gripped his arms, half supporting, half restraining. In his full strength Black Otter could have broken their bones with his bare hands. Chained, starved and ill, he had little power to resist.

The woman turned to the old man and spoke. Maybe they were going to kill him now, Black Otter thought. If that was so, he would not submit meekly. Among his own people, the Lenape who lived on the banks of the great sea river, he was a powerful sakima, a chief, as well as an invincible warrior. Even here, in this alien place, he would die a warrior’s death. And he would not die alone.

For all her proper upbringing, Rowena could not help staring at the stranger. Filthy, bruised and unsteady on his feet, he stood between the two stable hands with the majesty of a captive lion. He was taller than almost any man she knew. His pitch-black hair formed a matted mane that streamed past his massive shoulders. His face was striking—but then, as Rowena discovered, she could not look long at his hawk-like features with any kind of ease. The hatred in those infernal eyes blazed back at her with such fury that she was forced to lower her gaze.

Beneath a patina of welts, cuts and bruises, his body reminded her of—yes—the drawing of a Greek statue she had seen in her father’s library. Rowena’s eyes traced the flow of muscles beneath his bruised mahogany skin, their names clicking senselessly through her mind—the deltoids, the pectorals, the flat, hard rectus abdominus that rippled downward to disappear beneath the twisted, dirty bit of leather that covered his loins.

Apart from the loincloth he wore nothing below except a pair of rotting soft-soled leather slippers, the like of which she had never seen before.

As the dray lumbered back toward the road, Rowena drew closer to her father. “Who is he?” she asked softly.

“No need to whisper,” he snapped a bit impatiently. “The primitive wretch has no understanding of the queen’s English.”

“Father, who is he?” Rowena demanded, more forcefully this time.

“An Indian. From America. I bought him today in Falmouth.”

“You bought him? As a slave?”

Sir Christopher looked askance. “Certainly not!” he huffed. “Look at the fellow—far too much a savage for any kind of decent service.”

“Then why would you do such a thing? Out of Christian pity?”

Sir Christopher shook his head, then fixed her with a level gaze. “No, Rowena,” he said, “I bought him as a curiosity.”

“As a curiosity?”

“Yes, my dear. As a rare specimen. For the purpose of study.”

“By my faith, have you lost your mind?” Rowena spun to confront her father, horror overcoming her usual deference. “A specimen, indeed! Father, you can hardly collect and catalog a human being as you would a bird or a fish!”

“And what makes you so sure the creature is human?” Sir Christopher challenged his daughter. “I have it on good authority that his speech—if you can call it such—is nothing but monkey gibberish, and that he attacked and nearly killed a seaman aboard the Surrey Lass. All told, the brute seems considerably more beast than man. Whichever he may be, I mean to study him and find out.”

Rowena’s gaze darted from her father to the tall, dark American savage who, even now, looked ready to spring on her and devour her flesh. Over the years, she had put up with innumerable monkeys, fish, reptiles, tropical birds and even one aged performing bear, all of which her father had kept penned in his laboratory until they sickened in the cold English climate and died—after which they’d gone straight to the dissecting table. Much as it saddened her, she had come to accept the fate of these creatures as part of her father’s work. But a man—even the raw, untutored heathen who stood before them now? No, she would not stand for it! This time Sir Christopher had gone too far!