A Different Flesh Read Online Free PDF

My thought was to come with you.”
    â€œAnd I,” Henry Dale said. Caleb Lucas echoed him a moment later.
    Tears stung Wingfield’s eyes. Anne leapt from her chair and kissed each of his friends in turn. At any other time that would have shocked and angered him; now he thought it no less than their due.
    Yet fear for his daughter forced expedience from him. He said, “Henry, I know your skill amongst the trees. But what of you, Allan? Stealth is paramount here, and clanking about armored a poor preparation for’t.”
    â€œFear not on my score,” Cooper said. “Or ever I took the royal shilling, I had some nodding acquaintance with the Crown’s estates and the game on them.” He grinned slyly. Wingfield asked no more questions; if Cooper had made his living poaching, he would never say so straight out.
    â€œWhat will the council say, though, Allan?” Dale demanded. “They will not take kindly to a guardsman haring off at wild adventure.”
    â€œThen damnation take them,” Cooper replied. “Am I not a free Englishman, able to do as I will rather than hark to seven carping fools? Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.”
    â€œWell spoken! Imitate the action of the tiger!” cried Caleb Lucas, giving back one quote from Shakespeare for another.
    The other three men were carefully studying him. Wingfield said, “You will correct me if I am wrong, Caleb, but is’t not so your only forays into the forest have been as a lumberer?”
    The young man gave a reluctant nod. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dale forestalled him: “Then you must stay behind. Edward has reason in judging this a task for none but the woodswise.”
    Wingfield set a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “No sense in anger or disappointment, Caleb. I know the offer came in all sincerity.”
    â€œAnd I,” Anne echoed softly. Lucas jerked his head in acknowledgment and left.
    â€œLet’s be at it, then,” Cooper said. “To our weapons, then meet here and away.” Wingfield knew the guard had no hope of finding Joanna alive when he heard Cooper warn Henry Dale, “Fetch plenty of powder and bullets.” Dale’s brusque nod said the same.
    Before noon, the three men reached the spot where the dogs had lost the sims’ scent. As Wingfield had known it would, the trail led through the marshes that made up so much of the peninsula on which Jamestown lay. By unspoken consent, he and his companions paused to rest and to scrape at the mud clinging to their boots.
    His crossbow at the ready, Wingfield looked back the way he had come, then to either side. For some time now, he had had a prickly feeling of being watched, though he told himself a sim would have to be mad to go so near the English settlement after the outrage of the night before.
    But Cooper and Dale also seemed uneasy. The guard rubbed his chin, saying, “I like this not. I’m all a-jitter, as I’ve not felt since the poxy Spaniards snuck a patrol round our flank in Holland.”
    â€œWe’d best push on,” Henry Dale said. “We’ll cast about upstream and down, in hopes of picking up tracks again. Were things otherwise, I’d urge us separate, one going one way and two the other, to speed the search. Now”—he bared his teeth in frustration—“’twere better we stayed in a body.”
    The bushes quivered, about fifteen paces away. Three weapons swung up as one. But instead of a sim bursting from the undergrowth, out came Caleb Lucas. “You young idiot! We might have shot you!” Cooper snarled. His finger was tight on the trigger of his pistol; as a veteran soldier, he always favored firearms.
    Lucas was even filthier than the men he faced. His grin flashed in his mud-spattered face. “Send me back no if you dare, my good sirs. These past two hours I’ve dogged your