LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright 1955 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

       REBEL WENCH

       Chapter One

      THE KEY turned in the lock and the door opened on the room he had not seen for more than four years. The low ceiling, slanting slightly where it reached out toward the gable window, the faded pattern of the Chinese wallpaper, the big spool bed with its crazy-quilt covering, all were as he remembered them. Gray dust lay thick over everything, as if to hide his secret from the world.

      The man moved into the room and closed the white pine door softly behind him. A smile tugged at the corners of his wide mouth. Ben Leap had oiled the hinges, as he had been told to do. The man paused a moment, his eyes sliding to the heavy iron-banded chest that stood below a long Elliott mirror on the wall. Then he was striding to the dormer window, lifting the shade, letting sunlight come into the room. He set the long Kentucky rifle he carried gently on the floor.

      The sunlight gilded the white buckskin hunting shirt he wore, with its fringes at sleeves and back, and slid across the green sash about his middle that marked him for one of Morgan’s Rifles. Under the sash was a wide leather belt that held his shot pouch and long knife. He was a tall man, and lean. The breadth of his shoulders stretched the buckskin tight to the muscles that rippled as he lifted the hunting shirt and threw it from him.

      He knelt and worked at the lock on the big chest. Dust rose in a little cloud as he threw back the ironbound top and revealed the blue velvet jacket and breeches and lawn shirt, the riding boots and frilled jabot. A smile twisted the corners of his mouth as he drew out the frock coat and held it up.

      Billy Joe Stafford felt a twist of regret for the might-have-been. Four years in the North, fighting in Morgan’s company against the English lobsterbacks, from Quebec right down through Monmouth and the seemingly endless little fights that followed that debacle. That long, endless winter in Valley Forge. His arm twitched where a white scar marked it: the scar a British saber had put in his flesh on Christmas night of ’77. Four years! Four years without Laura Lee in his arms, without her wide, moist mouth to soothe away his hurts and hungers, without her pale body to entice his senses in the great bedchamber at Stafford Hall.

      The thought of Laura Lee Stafford, that sultry beauty who was his wife, put a tempest of impatience in his blood. He stood and worked at the green sash, at the wide leather belt and deerskin leggins. Naked, he bent to the chest and drew out linen shirt and cravat, breeches and boots.

      He dressed, remembering the day in ’73 he had brought Laura Lee Moulton to Stafford Hall, which his grandfather had built in 1723. Lord, but she had been a temptation in her nightrail, laughing and running from him, bringing him French wines in a crystal beaker and goblet, standing like that in a shaft of revealing moonlight, maddening him. For three years, he and Laura Lee had been lovers. Then word had gone south from Lexington and Concord: The colonies were in rebellion! He himself had been eager to get away, to ride to Fredericksburg and join the company Dan Morgan was gathering: Virginia rifles, and each man of them a sharpshooter. His wife refused to let him go. Laura Lee was a royalist, a Tory.

      Her white face swam before his remembering eyes. Her full mouth was pinched to a thin red line and her dark eyes blazed hotly at him. Her voice was rasping. “You’re insane. Insane! You know that, don’t you?”

      Her ringed hand gestured, making him see the pillared majesty of the Hall, its white outbuildings with their blue roofs and trim, the fields of wheat and cotton, the sleek, fast horses in the west meadows and the herds of cows that would be ambling now through the early dusk, back to their big, clean barns.

      “You’d give up all this to ride with a pack of ragamuffins to fight against your king! With a ragtail mob! And what for? To find yourself face down someday on a field or in a ditch, with your blood oozing out! Dying! You don’t expect to gain anything from this little rebellion?”

      His smile had been a patient thing. In the years of his marriage to Laura Lee, he had learned patience. “The King taxes us blind. His ministers come stalking with their noses in the air, arrogant as peacocks. They take our pride as they take our money. Our English agents conspire with each other to short-change our every shipment. They treat us worse than we treat the slaves!”

      She flung mocking laughter at him. “Tell the rest of the world all that, Billy Joe. Tell me the truth! Tell me that the Stafford blood runs hot in your veins! The same blood that drove your grandfather into seven duels, until the eighth one killed him. The same blood that haunted your father through the last two wars with France, in ’48 and ’56! That gave him the chest trouble that killed him.”

      He said softly, “Because of all that, you find yourself mistress of the richest plantation in the Dan River country.”

      “And I want to keep what I have, Billy Joe! Not just the plantation, but you as well!”

      She had thrown herself into his arms then, and the weight of her soft, fragrant flesh and the touch of her hungry mouth had silenced him. He had been a coward. He had crept from her bed in the early hours of the morning while she lay sleeping placidly, had donned this blue velvet riding suit and written her a letter, then ridden off on one of the plantation’s big stallions to his room at Ben Leap’s ordinary.

      Now he was coming back, unheralded and unannounced, four years later.

      Billy Joe Stafford stared at his reflection in the mirror on the wall. He had put weight on his chest and arms and legs in those four years. His shirt and jacket and breeches were tight to bursting with his added bulk. The pale yellow of his hair seemed almost white against the dark mahogany of his tanned face. The Stafford nose, high and thin, and the Fairfax blue eyes and dimpled chin, which were an inheritance from his mother, mocked at his beating heart.

      Will she be waiting? The words that came up from his very depths, in answer to each throbbing heartbeat, taunted him. He knew the pride that ran in Laura Lee. He had hurt that pride by running away. Now, in this November, 1780, he was coming home, to learn if her pride was still as fierce.

      With steady hands he set the gold-laced tricorn more firmly on his head, then paused for one last glance about the little room

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