Heirs of Acadia - 03 - The Noble Fugitive Read Online Free PDF

alongside the planter and could cast his voice along the stone flooring. “Are you certain it was here in God’s house?” Falconer heard the words with their inherent warning from his precarious position beneath the seat.
    “All I know, Curate, is you’re talking overloud for a man standing beside me. And I could have sworn you were addressing another man when I entered.”
    “It is not fitting to swear anything in God’s house, sir. Some would say anywhere else, for that matter.”
    “Aye, so I’m told. Answer me this, Half Priest. Why are you working so far afield from your assigned church?”
    “I seek to do God’s work wherever I am called, sir.”
    “As slippery an answer as ever I have heard.” The boots scraped again. The planter called to his mates, “Search the house.”
    “Sir, I must protest.”
    “Protest all you like, Curate. I’ll do as I please, here and elsewhere. The governor’s interested in finding a certain man, same as me.”
    “Give me his name, sir, and I’ll be better able to aid you in your quest.”
    “Tell me who it was you were speaking with when we entered.”
    “With God,” Falconer’s friend said gently. “I seek as always to draw nearer to my Lord and Savior.”
    Falconer watched from his hanging perch as a pair of boots stepped down the side aisle, pausing now and then to search the pews. Then from behind them came the sound of steel scraping upon steel. Falconer’s entire body tensed as he heard the planter say, “I’ve never shaved a curate. Is that as nasty a sin as filleting a priest?”
    The approaching boots turned and took a half step away. Clearly the planter’s mates were taken aback by a threat upon a curate. Falconer took this as the best chance he would have and lowered himself to the floor. He crept breathlessly to the end of the pew. Moving at lightning speed, he slipped across the aisle and behind the door-curtain. From this safe perch he peered out at the sanctuary through a slit in the drape.
    His old friend and mentor said, “Sir, I remind you where you are.”
    The planter was dressed in tropical fashion, a loose cotton shirt open at the neck and gaping partway down his hairy chest. People of polite society considered such manner of dress most uncivilized. But the planter was a man utterly at ease upon the estate he ruled as a fiefdom, where the town’s morals were a world removed.
    The planter held a curved dagger to the curate’s throat. He twisted it slightly so that it flickered in the candlelight. Clearly the man was enjoying himself. “If you have any interest in seeing the light of another day, Curate, you’ll tell me what I want to know.”
    Falconer felt his entire body clench with the effort it required not to hurl himself through the curtain and into the church. Never in his entire life had he run from a fight, much less from a friend in need. Yet he knew what the curate would ask of him.
    Falconer saw Felix smile and realized he observed a man far stronger than he would ever be. He also sensed the smile wasdirected at him standing there behind the curtain. He heard his friend say, “The death I fear is one you could never inflict.”
    “Bah, more priestly nonsense!” The planter swept the knife across the curate’s throat, and Falconer almost shouted his terror at the prospect of losing his last friend. But the blade had flashed by without touching the skin. The planter jabbed it angrily back into the sheath at his belt and snarled, “All your kind should be tied to the post and lashed to submission.”
    “Our kind, sir? You mean the fellowship of believers?”
    “You know exactly of whom I speak.” The man wheeled about and bellowed, “Did you find him?”
    “There’s no one about.”
    “Search harder! He was sitting beside the curate, I tell you!” Falconer heard footsteps hastening down the stone hall behind him. He slipped into the space between the curtain and a cupboard, crouched down low as he could, and willed