Marley glanced in the direction he pointed, and even as she looked over, Bronson raised his hand.
With that, the trio headed back. Soon Rashall and Ashanti stood at the table across from Marley—not sitting, simply watching her as if she were about to perform a party trick.
“What?”
Camisha suddenly started screaming. “Ruth—Sukey—Dan—Little Dan—Hattie—get over here now.”
Then she stood by her husband and caught Marley’s gaze, her eyes widening as she gestured toward Marley with her head. Look behind you.
Marley turned, finding Bronson on one knee in the pine needles, holding out a hand to her. Expectant joy sprang up within her, and she placed her hand in his.
“Merrilea Cassandra Miller—my Marley—the night I met you I had grown hopeless with loneliness. I had sailed the world, not even knowing I was searching for you, and had met many who only made my yearning for you grow. When God dropped you into the water outside my ship, I swam out to find my prayers answered. Except for one.”
His chuckle was small and nervous under his breath as he brushed his fingers against the tears slipping from Marley’s eyes.
“Please don’t cry, my darling, for someone will laugh when I do as well, and I would hate to have to thrash poor Raven for that.”
The men and women and children crowded nearby laughed softly.
His voice falling to a whisper, his eyes bright with love for her, he went on. “Answer my only prayer now, my Merri Marley. Tell me you love me, and that you’ll be my wife, my helpmate, my love.”
Overwhelmed, Marley felt Hastings’ gaze keen on her, his eyes filled with warmth and wisdom. “He’s already asked my blessing, Merrilea, and you have it.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The entire gathering shouted with celebration, and they were quickly surrounded by well-wishers and by loved ones. And just as quickly, bottles and jugs were passed for a celebratory toast.
Only then, as Camisha offered the toast, and everyone gathered in wishing the couple happiness, did the glorious reality strike Marley. Today, she realized that her destiny, too, was to become one of these people with whom she’d felt so intertwined throughout her life—the next bride of the Trelawneys of Williamsburg.
“Walk with me?”
She looked up into Bronson’s eyes, dark with happiness in the cooling afternoon. She gathered her cloak more closely around her as he led her across the field, past the ruins of Rosalie, to a copse of huge, old live oaks.
“Do you like this place?”
“I love it. And I love the people.”
“Enough to live here?”
The question took her by surprise, and he laughed. Sitting on an old stump, he went on. “Well, not right away. But I’ve been speaking with Silas, one of the master carpenters who has built Dan and Ruth’s home, and he and Hasty can get started on one for us right away, if you like. We should be able to move in by perhaps the summer.”
“When’s your birthday?”
He frowned in amusement. “Well, I suppose they might make it by then. ’Tis July fourth.”
“Your thirtieth?”
He nodded, drawing her between his parted thighs. His lids half closed in sensuous contentment as he lowered her to sit on one thigh, and one arm wrapped around her, his hand resting low on her waist.
“We need not live here all the time. I have a lovely home in St. George’s that you might prefer.”
“Bermuda, you mean? I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard it’s lovely.”
“It is. It’s quite English, though, and life grows more uncertain by the day. And since you’re from Williamsburg, I thought this might please you.”
He arranged her cloak around her, then slipped his hand inside to rest at her waist.
She laughed at the coldness of his hand, and he smiled easily. “You’ve had quite a bit of blackberry wine,” he said. “Am I perhaps taking advantage, asking your hand?”
“I was just worried about you being cold.”
She pulled the cloak around his arm, and he laughed, drawing her still closer. His hand at her waist rested just underneath the heavy curve of her breast.
Her breath grew shallow as she glanced at the crowd laughing and dancing in the distance. With some effort, he slowly looked away from her, removing his hand from within her cloak.
Then he turned back, catching the ties at the neck and pulling her into his kiss. She framed his face with her hands, her palms spread over his cold cheeks as she kissed him—and he let her. She explored, tentatively, then with bold demand, her thumbs at the corners of his mouth as she opened her own, tasting the cigars and rum on his breath. She gave a sigh of satisfaction as she wrapped her arms around his head, and he held her, enjoying her leisured exploration.
She raised her head only enough to look into his eyes. When they opened, the pupils were large with arousal, and he gazed at her lips.
“Would you have me tonight?” he murmured.
“You mean …?”
He laughed. “Well, that, too, certainly. But our kith and kin are all here. An officiant is here. I sent someone into town to fetch my father and your Nan.”
Her gaze fell away from his.
“Marley, I understand you’re upset with her—”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Then tell me.”
“I will, another time. If she’s coming, I’ll just get over it.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“Well, that tomorrow, I’ll thank you for fetching her.”
“Just to be clear—Daniel isn’t properly licensed to marry us.”
“He need not be.”
His mouth curved with the hint of a smile. “It isn’t a concern. This will always be our wedding day—a day to give thanks. And we’ll build our home here. In the new, grand style, with the columns of ancient civilizations governed by the people. Two stories, with plenty of bedrooms for all the children you should want—and looking out on the river road and on the old Rosalie ruins. Speaking of which—what were you and Camisha and Shonny doing out there today?”
But her attention was distracted on the home he described to her—their home. Two hundred forty years from now, it would still stand on Rosalie—where one of the last surviving Trelawneys still lived.
“I’ll tell you that, also, later. But you know that curious way Camisha has about her?”
“Yes.”
“Rashall was right. We are alike in that way, she and I.”
“Ah, a riddle.”
She smiled at him, reaching out to lightly stroke his curved lower lip with her fingertip. He captured it between his lips, suckling lightly.
“Do you like riddles?”
“What do you think?”
She raised an eyebrow. “All right, then. Let me think. Well. Camisha and I come from the same place, and we were born in the same place. Yet she is thirty years older than I because she left one day earlier.”
His eyes sparkled with concentration as he glanced from her toward Camisha, who was dancing with her husband. Drummers and strummers had materialized as the darkness drew close.
“Give up?”
“Don’t tell me. Let me figure it out.”
She laughed. “You never will. Oh, there’s your father’s carriage. Let’s go get married. Wait, where’s he going?”
“Shh. Stop worrying.”
As they returned to the gathering, Ruth captured Bronson. “Did you set up all those books in my schoolroom? And in those beautiful bookshelves?”
“They were just some shelves Hastings had sitting around,” he said. “I’m glad you like them. Marley suggested you might.”
At that, the older woman caught the younger in her arms. “Aren’t you just an angel. Now you go on up to my bedroom, where you’ll see Camisha working on your wedding gown. You,” she said to Bronson, “You go make your prepar
ations for your marriage bed.”
Stirred, Marley cast a look over her shoulder at him to catch his reaction to that—an understated, erotic smile directly at her. She hurried on to Ruth and Dan’s house.
The noise of the celebration continued as the sun began to sink toward the horizon. A few hundred feet away, on the other side of the James River, three men stood observing with a shared spyglass.
“Told you it was them,” said the smaller, the doughier of the three. “Ripe for the plucking.”
“How was I to know? They were supposed to be in Boston.” This from a man with an eye-patch and bandages wrapped around half his face. Not yet fully recovered from his injuries, Stephen Falligan threw the man a contemptuous glare. How he despised this paederast. How he would enjoy killing him. If only he wasn’t such a clever ferret at unearthing useful information.
“Shut up, both of you.” The third man gazed through the spy glass at the group celebrating, his lean jaw tight with rage at those he saw through the glass.
He was older now, his black hair peppered with white, his clothing far finer than it had been the last time he’d seen Rosalie, that night he’d visited with a torch and a kettle of whale oil. A lifetime had passed since then; he was far richer, he had powerful friends who’d never heard of James Manning, the Rosalie overseer, and he certainly had no need for anything from any of these people laughing and dancing across the way—but for the hatred and rage that had driven him for the past three decades.
And the loss of his two boys.
“You call that ripe for the plucking, you halfwit? I call that a countryside full of slave risings in the making. But I don’t care about them. Thirty years ago I might have. Now, there’s only two I want gone, and it’s that tall, black bitch and her buck, and anyone who gets in the way. I want them dead, and I want them to suffer to the point that they beg for death.”
The man with the eyepatch listened to the bilious rage in the old man. He’d known this man since childhood. He’d once watched him beat a slave child to death for simply touching the stock of the whip that he’d left hanging on a peg. Falligan had felt that lash himself when he sailed with him, after he was driven out of the Royal Navy. The old man was propelled by hatred and imaginary slights the way fools were driven by dreams.
Falligan was a much simpler man, as was his motivation: money. He would gladly take the old bastard’s gold to kill anyone in the group they surveyed; but he would not do so without destroying those who had nearly killed him, and then left him for dead.
“Begging your pardon, sir. In my experience in inflicting pain—and it is indeed extensive—suffering is most elegant when it occurs in the anguish over others.”
“What are you prattling on about?”
“Their eldest, the Raven, and his contemptible partner, Hawk. Their deaths—even better, their suffering to the point of death—would deliver them to the place you wish.”
“Now you begin to make sense. You have a mind like my own boy, Shep.”
“Thank you, sir. I should enjoy making his acquaintance.”
“He’s been gone ten years now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“He ain’t dead. He just lives in another place—another time.”
Falligan exchanged a glance with Snaveling. Unfortunately, the other man noted it.
“Don’t look at me like I’m mad. I know what I speak of.” With that, he placed the spyglass in Falligan’s open palm with a brisk slap.
The men walked through the woods downriver perhaps a mile to the location where the coxswain and two oarsmen awaited their return.
Falligan and Snaveling boarded after the other man, allowing him to choose his seat first. Of all those on the luckless end of this man’s hatred, none were more hapless than black men like those guiding the boat. Always safer to allow him a wide berth.
With long, broad strokes, the men drew them down the James. The wind picked up, the twilight grew colder, and the tide turned as they neared Norfolk, and the oarsmen labored harder.
It was pitch black when they reached the harbor, filled with Royal Navy warships. The men made for a frigate near the shore, and when they arrived, a seaman called, “Who goes there?”
“Stephen Falligan and guests, servants of his royal majesty.”
The men climbed the ladder. A young officer with a log book greeted them. “Your names and your business.” The disdain in the gaze raking them made the question seem beside the point.
“Deepest apologies for our appearance, sir. We were both lost at sea, not so many miles from here. We have yet to replace our clothing.”
In point of fact, this was only half true at best. It could be said that Falligan himself had been lost at sea until a whale boat had come upon him treading water in Massachusetts Bay. And not a moment too soon. The deadly combination of his wounds, his exhaustion, and the unbearable cold had come close to killing him.
Percy Snaveling, on the other hand, had merely overpowered his jailer and gone missing in the night. All three men had turned up at the same shabby public house in Marblehead where they’d met a dozen years before: two, looking for opportunities; the third, his purse fat with opportunity.
The officer sniffed, his gaze on them unimproved with charity for their plight.
“Your business, then?”
“We are here with information that may be of interest to your commander. We wish to see Lord Dunmore.”
“And your names.”
“James Falligan and Percival Snaveling, both of London. And this gentleman is a native of this colony, a respectable merchant, and a Loyalist: Mr. Lucian Caine.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
In the end, there was no better day to wed than the day on which Marley and those she loved celebrated their blessings.
In Ruth’s house, she and Camisha hastily worked an eighteenth century makeover miracle on the bride.
“You really don’t have to go to all this trouble,” Marley said, alarmed at the sudden pile of clothing that appeared on the bed in Ruth’s bedroom.
“Now you’re about my Sukey’s size, so what do you think about this peach-flowered dress, with the ivory quilted petticoat underneath? I think it suits your coloring.”
“It’s gorgeous, but I hate to take Sukey’s clothing!”
The lively animation left Camisha as she straightened and folded her arms across her chest. “Girl, you are making me tired. This is your wedding day. We’ll make Sukey new dresses to replace whatever you take. And that child has way too many clothes already. She’s a grown woman, and that husband of hers dresses her like she’s a little doll.”
Marley gave into their fussing and allowed herself to be scrubbed and rubbed with oils and dressed in finery and, in the end, she glowed with sensual excitement. For the first time in her life, she felt utterly beautiful.
At the end, Ruth opened a small chest with reverential care. She removed a delicate old scarf; once it might have been dyed with yellow bark of the black oak and red berries grown in a mysterious land that would be known as the Dark Continent. Now it held only the memory of those colors, along with a rich heritage of love.
Ruth was filled with sudden emotion as she held the cloth out to Camisha. Camisha hugged her, then accepted the cloth and began to dress Marley’s hair as Ruth spoke, trying to swallow her tears.
“My mother, last time I ever saw her, gave me this down in Caroline, before Lord Windmere bought me and then set me free. One day, she said, we’ll be back together in Glory with our loved ones. I didn’t know it then, but she was saying a Bible verse. ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’
“Miss Marley, I hope you don’t mind, but Camisha told me who you are. I met your beautiful sister Rachel, years ago. She was a kind lady with a good heart, and if it weren’t for your sister and the good she did with Lord Wind
mere, I’d still be a slave. We all would. My Dan, he might’ve been sold away years ago, instead of watching his children grow up, and being able to ransom the freedom of others with the loss of our own.
“I’m saying, you don’t know what tides you turn when you toss a pebble in a river. I see that same kindness in you, that same sight she had, and that Miss Camisha, here, has. I wish you and Bronson every delight in this life. Someday, I promise you, honey, you’ll see your sister again, same as I’ll see my mama and my brothers and sisters again.”
Camisha finished her hair and hugged her. “Honey, don’t cry. Nothing sadder in this world than a puffy-eyed bride.”
After she collected herself and patted cold water on her face, she touched the scarf. Camisha had fashioned her hair into an elegant chignon at the back of her neck, her head and hair all covered with the lovely scarf.
“Now take this,” Ruth said, removing several slender volumes from it, placing them in a drawer, and holding the box out to her. “You put the scarf in this tonight, and send a boy back with it tomorrow.”
Only when Ruth put the carved box with its hinged top into her hands did she recognize it. This was the same beautiful box that one day would hold The Trelawneys of Williamsburg.
Marley held the box to her breast, bending her head to deeply inhale its comforting, familiar cedar. She nodded, unable to speak.
A short tap at the door came, and Sukey entered. “Everybody’s down there,” she said.
The women descended the staircase, but both the house and the clearing were empty. Except for the Trelawney carriage with a brightly dressed footman. He bowed low when they approached and handed the four women inside with elegant formality.
“Where—”
Camisha smirked. “Really? You think we’re going to tell you?”
Marley laughed. “My blackberry wine’s wearing off.”
“Well, we’ll fix that right up before you know it. You definitely want to be able to remember marrying the man you’re marrying.”
They arrived at the river and in the waning twilight, with the ship festooned with evergreen garlands and lit with torches and lamps, the people standing in every inch of space and spilling out onto the dry land, it looked like a welcome from heaven itself. At the base of the boarding steps placed at the side of the ship, her groom stood in a black suit—coat and breeches, silver waistcoat, pale silk stockings and snowy white shirt with a stock tied at his throat—that lent him a startling sexuality, credit he scarcely needed.
Immortal (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Book 2) Page 27
