Arms of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

man had paid the tax fines levied against him, the tribunal had still found fault when he wouldn’t surrender his last cow for the militia. He’d been hauled away along with his stock and imprisoned for three weeks. And now his wife was dead.
    “I say, do you have a fascination with prisons, or is it a prisoner himself who draws you here?”
    Adam turned round to see Major Dale Ellis in a rumpled, but still elegant, blue frock coat, his usual white wig gone and his blond hair caught back in a queue. Adam’s puzzlement must have shown on his face, because Dale waved a hand at him and smiled.
    “There’s nothing that says I need wear uniform while a ‘guest’ of Lancaster. Anyway, the bloody thing was starting to reek, and I found lice in the wig.”
    Adam grinned. “And I hear the latest saying hereabout is ‘Any fool with a musket can kill a Redcoat.’ ”
    “That is so. Would you care to join me for a cool tankard? I’ve just had word from the infernally slow mails that my wife gave birth to our third son back in Somerset . . . three months ago.”
    The slight irony in the man’s tone made Adam think of how fast a babe must seem to grow, especially to a father who yearned to be with the child.
    “My congratulations, and my condolences for missing so much of the first of his life. But as the Lord would have it, perhaps he may have greater need of you later on.”
    “Spoken like a father.”
    Adam shook his dark head and thrust aside the tantalizing image of Lena carrying his child, her soft belly rounded against the press of her skirt, her cheeks flushed with good health and rosy awareness following his purposeful kisses . . .
    “Perhaps soon then, by the look on your face,” Dale said with a laugh.
    Adam dragged his mind back to the present with embarrassment.
    “Well, being a father is something I didn’t know if I could ever truly become,” the British officer went on. “I had a sire who thought the only way to reach a boy was through a beating; it took a long time to realize that I didn’t have to become what he was.”
    Adam looked at Dale in sudden confusion and wary alertness. It was almost as if the man could see into his own past. He thrust aside the familiar feelings of anxiety that came whenever he tried to recall the tense moments of his latter childhood, when he was seemingly unable to please the man who’d given him life. And it had been sudden too, this displeasure of his father’s. He could remember other times when he was younger that there had been smiles and encouragement from the man. He swallowed and shook his head a bit to clear it.
    “You look thoughtful today, Adam Wyse . . . Considering joining the cause?”
    Dale smiled, but his words struck Adam to the core, and he looked away.
    “Did I say something to offend you? I know the Amish do not fight.”
    Adam snapped his gaze back to the other man’s. “The Amish fight. They struggle to keep their ways, and to keep their sons from running off to enlist. They do fight.”
    Dale shook his head. “Again, forgive me. It was only a joke; I didn’t mean to offend. I say, there’s seriousness in the very air of this place. This country is like a woman. She labors over war to give birth to a new way, a new freedom. And I have never enjoyed watching my wife labor.”
    Adam drank in the words he heard . . . He thought of Mary’s death during labor, the promise, a new way of life . . . It suddenly seemed as though his world was in turmoil, with a strange possibility of freedom at the eye of the storm.
    “About that tankard, then, my good man?” Dale asked.
    “Another time,” Adam replied abruptly, realizing the attention that they were drawing among the passersby—a pacifist and a British major, red coat or not. At any other point he wouldn’t have cared, but today . . .
    “As you wish.”
    Adam heard the disappointment in the other man’s voice and chose to ignore it. Their conversation had unsettled him, and at this point