Isabella entered the grounds at a quarter past eleven and was greeted by the Huxley’s dark-skinned butler, who showed her into the grand foyer and up the stairs without a word. “Aren’t we going to the dining room?”
The man didn’t reply. He was sweating when they reached the door to the upstairs sitting room. He held the door for her without once meeting her gaze.
With a frown, Isabella stepped inside.
“Ah, there you are, my lovely. Come join us.”
Isabella let out a small gasp but managed to stifle the scream that lay behind it.
Her betrothed stood in the center of the room, beckoning her with one hand. A pretty slave girl not much older than her was down on all fours beneath him, oriented perpendicular to the man above her. She had been stripped of her clothes. Upon her back sat a freshly opened bottle of wine, two full glasses, and a plate of expensive cheese. On the floor beneath the girl, a large carving knife had been tied to a wooden base. The tip of its blade rested less than an inch from her belly, threatening to penetrate the flesh at the slightest miscalculation. If she arched too high, of course, the food would spill.
Thomas motioned to the butler. “That will be all, Fredrick.”
The man closed the door behind Isabella and disappeared.
Isabella could barely force her own eyes up.
Thomas was possessed of the extraordinary, if severe, good looks of his parents. He was blessed with smooth, pale skin, an oval face with high cheekbones, and thin, English lips. He had the slender hands of one born to royalty, with fingers that might have been suited to harp or piano-playing had he the time and interest. And of course, there was his sense of fashion. He was dressed in one of his most extravagant suits, with a fine leather vest, a red silk cravat, and gold lace embroidered around the sleeves of his coat. With the rich brown peruke upon his head and rouge upon his cheeks, he might have been attending a ball at the governor’s mansion. For all the delight on his thin face, he might have been.
“Come, come! Sit, my love.”
The chairs before them were not chairs at all, but two young men of a slim, muscular build wearing rags. They were on their hands and knees in much the same fashion as the girl.
Oh, to be young and foolish again. To believe that marriage is only for love.
Isabella’s lip quivered. She had never told anyone the things Thomas visited upon those around him. Not her father, not her friends, not even the Lady of the Hill, who might have been the only one to understand. Each visit to the Huxley house revealed a new and terrifying side to her betrothed. Just when she thought she had seen the worst of the house’s sole heir and beloved businessman, he would surprise her with some new humiliation, usually upon those beneath him. How long after their marriage had been consummated would he visit such a thing upon her?
He patted the bottom of the slave closest to him. “Over here.”
She crossed the room and sat down, being as delicate as she could.
Thomas thrust himself down upon the young man on his side. He speared a piece of cheese with a small fork and popped it into his mouth, relishing its chewy texture. “You absolutely must try one of these bonbons, dearest. I cannot lie. They cost a small fortune.”
Isabella skipped the cheese and went straight for the wine. The sudden movement caused the slave girl to twitch, and her belly grazed the tip of the blade beneath her. Isabella’s hand went to her mouth, wanting to apologize, and knowing such a thing would cost her in some subtle and terrible way.
“Don’t mind her,” Thomas said. “Winifred has been such a nuisance this week. Haven’t you, Winifred?” He tapped the girl’s scrawny flank with the tip of the cheese fork.
“I—” the girl stammered.
“You what?”
“I have…Master Huxley. Been a nuisance.”
“Ah, that’s better.” Thomas sighed. “What am I to do with such help? All around me, the throngs of incompetence. First, we have a young man of the mill lose his hand. Then my prize thoroughbred comes down with a cold, thanks to the incompetence of my stable master. And now this. Would you like to tell her what you did, young Winifred?” Thomas grabbed the other wine glass but didn’t wait upon the girl’s answer. “Winifred went and got herself pregnant. Can you imagine? Slaves breeding without consent. It has been sheer bedlam around the house this week, my dear Isabella. Sheer bedlam. I swear, I must employ a man like your Sebastian. A man who knows how to use a whip.”
Isabella thought of Sands’s cruel smile but said nothing. Her usual strategy under such interrogation.
Thomas poked the girl with the fork again. “I told her, ‘Winifred, if you want to keep the baby, you’re going to have to work for it.’ So here we are. She’s been down there since…how long, Winifred? Yes, since last night, I think. Good muscles on this one. Perhaps I’m being too harsh. If the little one wants to survive half as much as its mother, it may be a good worker. Good workers are hard to find. Ah, but I’m boring you. How have you been, my little pigsney?”
“I thought,” Isabella began. “I thought we were to have dinner?”
Thomas slapped the slave girl on the thigh. Another twitch, though she managed to avoid the blade. “Of course we are! I instructed Fredrick to bring the main course as soon as it’s ready. The table is not large, but it is sturdy. Careful, there, Winifred. Your back is arching.” He speared another piece of cheese, then helped guide her spine back into place with one finger. He leaned toward Isabella, whispering conspiratorially. “I told her that if she spilled anything, she’d have to support me standing upon her back. That is something she does not want. Rosila’s sweet potato pie has put a few pounds on me this summer,” he said, patting his belly proudly.
Isabella chewed her lip, trying to tell him something polite and failing to find the words.
Thomas seemed not to notice. He leaned back, swirled a bit of a wine around his mouth, and swallowed. “So tell me, what of your father? Is his estate still in good standing?”
He had the bored, half-interested look of one whose mind was wandering. In that moment, Isabella had a sudden revelation, and it sucked the wind from her.
Thomas had never loved her. His doting letters, his public proclamations, his ridiculous terms of endearment, they were all a facade to facilitate the marriage. A marriage in which he would become the rightful owner of her house, and the sole master and proprietor of the Huxley-Ashford Mill. How naïve she had been. How utterly and completely foolish.
Nothing simpler, the Lady of the Hill had said. How right she had been.
Isabella tried to speak, and then the tears which she had been so diligently fighting began to come. They ran in hot rivers down her cheeks. She had given herself away.
Thomas only arranged his face in sympathy. “Oh, come now.” He retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at her cheeks. “Your father will recover. He is a stout and hearty man, and he cares for you greatly. As I care for you, my little dew drop. Don’t despair. By this time next week, we shall be married, and be thinking of happier times.”
He continued wiping her tears, and then gently, almost tenderly, touched the back of her head. His lips were suddenly moving toward hers, his head tilted in the manner of a kiss. His mouth was curved in a loving smile, though his eyes were as pale and cold as New England snow.
The hollow thud of glass striking wood stopped him cold. He hovered before her, unmoving. His breath was redolent of wine and ginger bark and another vague smell which might have been some mineral, but Isabella chose to think of as hate.
“Winifred?” he inquired.
The cheese plate was still perched upon the girl’s backside, but the bottle of wine had fallen to the floor. It was draining over one of Marianne Huxley’s elegant German rugs. Thomas’s actions, it seemed, had unbalanced the girl too far.
He made a tsking motion with one finger.
“Please, Master Huxley,” the girl whispered. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what, my dear?” He had forgotten all about Isabella and was now leaning dangerously close to the object of his ire.
Isabella found her voice. “Thomas, please—”
“Be quiet, my little lambkin,” he said, without looking at her.
“I’ll take you downstairs,” the girl said. “I can make you happy, Master Huxley. I can do things to help you, like I did before. Just you and me, with nobody watching. Please, don’t hurt my ba—”
For a short, beautiful moment, Thomas appeared calm. Then his hands were suddenly upon her back, pushing downward with a terrifying strength. “You little whore! You shut your filthy, nigger mouth, do you hear me? You will not ruin this day with my wife! You will not ruin it!” He thrust down, and down, pushing her back as if he were trying to close a particularly full clothes chest.
The girl resisted, but he was too heavy. The knife began to bite. A small droplet of blood dripped from her belly like a red tear, disappearing into the purple puddle beneath her. She screamed.
Isabella leaped to her feet. The boy beneath her was looking toward the overturned bottle as a drowning man might look at a rope. On his face was a mixture of pain and rage the likes of which Isabella had never seen. And what would be this boy’s fate if he managed to hurt Thomas and save the girl? Worse than anything she could imagine, most like.
“Stop it,” she yelled, pushing Thomas on the chest. “Stop it! Stop it!
The door burst open, and the towering form of Marianne Huxley loomed before them. Though every bit as thin as her son, she cut a taller and even more domineering figure. “What in the name of God is this racket.” Her inflection carried not a question but a command, one that resonated through the room.
Thomas stood up and steadied himself. The girl stopped screaming.
Isabella, whose tear-stained cheeks were red with energy, wiped her face and tried a small curtsy. “Madam Huxley.”
“Hello, dear.” Then, turning her gaze upon her son, “Thomas, you’ve made a mess of yourself again. Look at your breeches.”
Thomas looked down, and his face flushed. His lower half was stained with wine.
“Go to your room at once and change. I have ordered Fredrick to set the table below.”
Her son pointed to the ground. “I told him he was to bring the food up he—”
“Enough. These foolish games of yours are going to scare your beloved right out of the marriage bed.” She smiled at Isabella, a bird of prey gazing upon a mouse. “As long as you are beneath my roof, Thomas, you will comport yourself as my son. Now go find new clothes and meet us downstairs.”
Thomas sighed dramatically but left the room without a word. At the door, he paused just long enough to give his mother a kiss.
Marianne returned her attention to the room. “Winifred, do clean yourself up and be prepared to help with the second course.”
The girl took a river of pain and buried it somewhere deep. “As you say, madam.”
Isabella wiped her last remaining tear. “Shall I go downstairs?”
“No. You shall come with me to my study until the table is set.”
And with that, Lady Marianne swept from the room. No command of hers needed repeating.
Chapter 9
“I didn’t meet Thomas’s father until the day before our wedding. Did you know that?”
The two of them were in the third-floor library, seated upon chairs which were made—to Isabella’s great relief—of hardwood instead of flesh. The room was twice as large as the Ashford study, but the books in this room looked more ornamental than functional, as if their purpose was to display the accumulation of wealth more than the accumulation of knowledge. Its master’s desk was likewise a giant, gaudy thing made of exquisite ash wood, almost too large to be functional. A portrait of the hook-nosed Brendon Huxley hung on the wall behind it, though Marianne seemed to have no trouble at all operating in its shadow.
“No, madam,” Isabella said.
“I was born in the east of England, in Cambridge,” Marianne continued, as if they had just come from tea time. “My father was a seaman. A wealthy one at that, though I was the youngest of six children, and he wished to marry me young. Brendon’s father was a millwright, and just a young apprentice at that. But he saw a great fortune in the New World. A fortune we would cultivate, and nourish, and one day pass to our children. To our grandchildren.” She enunciated this last bit with great care. “We met, we married, and the very next day, I was on a ship to Virginia with my new husband and a trunk of possessions smaller than this desk. All I’ve ever wanted was to grow this family, but man plans, and God laughs, as the old saying goes.”
A jug of amber liquid and several glasses stood atop an old sideboard, and abruptly, Marianne crossed the room and poured herself a drink. She did not offer one to Isabella. “We had three children, Brendon and I. My youngest, Hannah, died of fever shortly after she was born. My eldest was named Paul. Two years ago, Brendon took him fifty miles west to trade with the Cherokee, along with several other men from town. Their bodies were found two weeks later.” She drank deeply. “They had been—what is the expression?—scalped. Whatever trade they intended was not to be had.”
Isabella had never heard the history before. It made the matter of the Collins boy especially sensitive. “I’m sorry, madam.”
Marianne returned to the desk. “There is a reason Thomas survived, dear. He may not be the gentlest man in the colonies, but he is a survivor. He is clever, and cunning, and ruthless when he has to be. There will come a time when you will be glad to have such a man, a man who will tolerate no slight to his family. It is better you see him as he is now, rather than after you have lain with him in the marriage bed. What a shock that would be.” She laughed, a sound that was somehow amused and sad at the same time. She drained the rest of her glass. “Let us go to dinner, you and I, and we shall put this business behind us.”
Something was burning inside Isabella’s chest. The fire which had caused her so many sleepless nights, the fire which had driven her deep into the forest. She realized with no little horror that now was the moment it was to be born. “I do not think I shall be joining you, madam.”
Marianne sighed. “If you’re worried about the girl, do not be. All men stray from time to time, dear. It is far better with a slave than someone of consequence. We women have ways of dealing with a slave. Thomas, being the boy that he is, was merely attempting to resolve it as a boy does. Rest assured it will all be settled before next week.”
“I will not marry Thomas,” Isabella said quietly.
Somewhere in a distant corner of the house, a longcase clock announced the arrival of midday. The last chime died, and there were several seconds of dreadful silence.
Then Marianne tilted her head as if she had not heard correctly. “What was that, dear?”
“I will never marry your son,” Isabella repeated.
The woman smiled, and her smile was somehow more daunting and terrible than any storm of temper Isabella could have expected. “I do not think that is for you to decide. Your father and I have worked very hard to join our families. It is destined to be.”
Isabella rose to her feet, and while her entire body quaked, she had never been so sure of anything in her life. “Speaking of my father, I shall be returning to tell him what I witnessed today. When the magistrate arrives from the north, rest assured he shall hear of it, too.”
“What ever will you tell him? That Thomas was harsh with his property? Oh my, you do have a lot to learn, don’t you?” Marianne laughed, but this time, there was a hint of falsehood in it. It gave Isabella courage.
She removed her engagement ring and set it on the ash wood desk. The sound it made was thunderous.
There was a knock on the door, and suddenly Frederick stepped into the room, his expression showing he had heard little of what transpired, or at the very least, had learned to pretend he had not. “Dinner is served in the dini
ng hall.”
When he left, Isabella followed him out.
Chapter 10
She was greeted by the clatter of hammers and saws at the Ashford gate. Three of her father’s men were on the east roof, repairing the damage done in the storm. Jacob was on his hands and knees in the center, ripping at a patch of rotten tiles with an iron bar. His breath misted in the cold.
When Isabella was certain he saw her, she waved. He stared a moment, then picked up the nearest hammer and redoubled his efforts at the rotten tile.
“That no good…foolish…mumblecrust,” she muttered.
“Lady Ashford, back so soon?”
Isabella turned to find Sebastian Sands eyeing her suspiciously from the side of the house. She composed herself. “Where is my father?”
“In the study, my lady.”
“Then I must see him at once. Excuse me, Mister Sands.”
Isabella went inside, not pausing to greet the other members of the house on the way through. She opened the study door and found John Ashford in his usual chair, hunched over the table with a dozen documents scattered about him. He was bent over a piece of parchment writing furiously with a quill pen, looking busier than he had in weeks.
“What is it?” he said without looking up.
“Father.”
He put the quill down and looked up. “Elly? What are you doing here?”
She ran to him, throwing her arms about his waist and squeezing with all the strength she could muster.
“What is all this? Tell me, Elly.”
Isabella launched into the tale of the afternoon’s misadventure, beginning with the butler’s silent greeting, and ending with the chat in Madam Huxley’s study. Left out, perhaps wisely, was her strange encounter with the Indian in the makeshift gaol.
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