Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  Abruptly the stretch of houses gave way to jungle, with tree branches meeting above the road, so that the carriage moved through a murky twilight Interlaced among the trees—many of them West Indian mahogany, Duval said—were vines as thick as a man's waist. Beyond the first line of trees, grotesquely beaked parrots and brightly colored smaller birds flashed through the dim light.

  The stretch of jungle gave way to more dwellings. Then Duval stopped before a white one-story house. "Madame Duval will be expecting us. I told her I might bring you back with me." As they went up the flagstoned walk bordered by a tangle of dwarf palms, hibiscus bushes, and trees with large leaves as lustrous as English holly, Elizabeth noticed that the plaster facade of the house, while in need of whitewash, at least was not peeling away in patches.

  Madame Duval opened the door to them. A thin, blondish woman, she had the sort of expression—martyred, and yet tinged with a certain smug moral superiority— that Elizabeth had seen before in the faces of women married to drunkards. From somewhere beyond her came the shrill voices of quarrelling children.

  Madame Duval showed them over the house. As her husband had said, it indeed was rundown. White plaster walls in the long hall were dingy. In the parlor, mahogany and red plush furniture, more suitable to a French middle-class house than to the tropics, looked shabby. In the dining room, where two girls of about nine and eleven stopped squabbling long enough to drop curtsies to the visitors, the blue plush rug bore food stains and the glass chimney of a wall lamp was cracked.

  The two bedrooms, furnished with iron bedsteads and washstands and straw rugs, were pleasant enough, and the larger one had French doors opening onto a roofed terrace. Nevertheless, Elizabeth caught an appalled look on Patrick's face. It was not just the shabbiness that oppressed him, she felt sure, but the smallness. At Stanford Hall, almost this entire house could have fitted into the space between the massive front doors and the foot of the twin staircases. Never mind, she thought. If he could forget Ireland and that cause of his, perhaps someday they would build a spacious villa back in the hills.

  They ended the inspection tour with the kitchen. Although supper's roast fowl sputtered on the fireplace spit, unwashed dishes from some previous meal still littered a bare table. "All is most difficult," Madame Duval explained, "now that one has no servants. And even when one could afford servants, they were lazy and useless. Oh, life on St.-Denis has not been easy for me, madame, what with indolent blacks, and snobbish whites looking down their noses just because my husband..."

  She broke off, as if suddenly aware that such discouraging talk might jeopardize the sale of the distillery. "But to you, madame," she went on swiftly, "the French people here will behave charmingly. Plainly your husband does... does not share my husband's weakness. As for servants, surely they will work for a chatelaine of such competent appearance as yourself."

  Although she was not sure she found it flattering to be told she looked "competent," Elizabeth murmured a thank you. Then she turned and looked out the kitchen's rear window. Beyond it, a garden stretched away to a stable and carriage house. The garden was just a tangle of vines and overgrown shrubbery now, but once the vegetation was trimmed, and the gravel walks raked...

  So close that she flinched backward with a cry, a large brown insect flew past her face and landed on that littered table. "Ma foi!" Madame Duval said with Gallic despair. "No matter how one strives for the cleanliness, one cannot rid oneself of those sales bêtes."

  Elizabeth thought, grimly confident: We will see about that.

  CHAPTER 29

  Three days later Patrick bought both the distillery and the house. Two days later the Duvals sailed for France, and the following day Elizabeth, aided by Jules and Jeanne Burgos, a mulatto freedman and his wife, set about making the house livable. Each morning, Patrick and Colin, in the carriage that had belonged to the Duvals, deposited her at the house, where she stayed until they stopped for her on their way back to the inn.

  After the long idle weeks aboard ship, Elizabeth delighted in using her energy and ingenuity. Walls were whitewashed, floors and windows and cupboards scrubbed. She sold the plush rugs and heavy furniture to a dealer in secondhand articles, and replaced them with inexpensive but clean straw rugs, and white wicker chairs and settees of the sort she had seen in the inn's parlor.

  Exactly three weeks after its purchase, she and Patrick moved into the house. Colin was not with them. Because the house was so small, he had said from the first that he would prefer to stay on at the inn.

  One morning less than a week later, she rode with Patrick and Colin along jungle-walled roads to the distillery. As they turned into the clearing in which the long, low shed stood, she exclaimed, "Why, about half the shingles on that roof look new!"

  "So they are," Patrick said. "What's more, to get the task finished as quickly as possible, Colin and I helped nail them in place." He laughed. "The blacks looked dumbfounded. Apparently they had never seen white men working with their hands before."

  He helped Elizabeth to the ground. Circling one end of the long, one-story building, she and the Stanford men mounted two steps to a wooden platform. On one side of it a small, clear stream ran down the gentle slope, to disappear into a wooden culvert beneath the road. On the other side, a wide doorway in the shed revealed bare-to-the-waist blacks, stirring the contents of the big copper vats above roaring charcoal fires. As she shrank back from the heat and the sickeningly sweet smell of boiling sugar, Patrick said with a smile, "Not exactly like the scent of a new-mown Irish meadow, is it? Come, we'll look into the distillery. You'll find that more pleasant, especially since it isn't in operation yet."

  They moved on down the platform past a long table on which lay a number of formidable-looking cleavers. "That is the chopping table," Patrick told her, "where the cane is cut into short lengths for boiling in the vats."

  Ahead of them at the platform's edge stood a slender black youth holding a long pole that ended in a stout metal hook. As they moved toward him, he deftly fished a rope-tied bundle of stalks—in appearance rather like cornstalks—and deposited it on the platform.

  Elizabeth asked, "Sugarcane?"

  "Yes," Patrick said. "It is floated down to us from a plantation higher in the hills."

  Near the end of the platform they came to the distillery's wide doorway. Because he'd had former experience with rum manufacture, it was Colin who explained the equipment to her. "In those big vats we'll reboil the sugar from the cooking sheds. Do you see those coiled metal pipes? The distilled liquor will run through those."

  "And the big hogsheads over there in the corner?"

  "We'll use those to store and age the rum."

  A few minutes later, leaving Colin to eat the midday meal packed for him by the cook at the inn, Elizabeth and Patrick drove back to the house and to the luncheon that, with the help of Jeanne Burgos, she had prepared that morning.

  In the small ingrown community of St.-Denis, the Stanfords' arrival had caused quite a stir. Even before they moved from the inn to their house, the invitations had begun to arrive. Monsieur and Madame Raoul Gaspard begged the honor of Sir Patrick and Lady Stanford's presence at dinner. Madame Reynard requested the pleasure of Lady Stanford's company at morning coffee. Patrick and Elizabeth accepted some of the invitations. Unlike the Duval menage, none of the households presented a slatternly appearance, but again and again Elizabeth saw expensive, plush-upholstered furniture that seemed so unsuitable in the humid heat of the tropics. And an upland villa they visited, whose owner had started out in life apprenticed to a Paris apothecary, was grand indeed, with a mirrored ballroom and gilded furniture that might have graced a French château.

  That night, as they undressed in the airy bedroom of their little house, Patrick said, "I hope those people don't expect to be entertained here on the same scale. I will be damned if I will spend money on French champagne and pheasant shipped from Port-au-Prince. I need every cent for the distillery."

  "Don't worry.
The people here will be glad to come to your house, no matter what we serve. After all, you're a baronet."

  "I am also," he said sardonically, "a fugitive, probably with a price on my head by this time."

  "To these French people, that is all to your credit Yon are a fugitive from their enemy."

  As often happened, she felt a twinge of sadness at the thought that now she would be considered an enemy of the land of her birth. But she had made her choice that night at Stanford Hall when she had said, "Take me with you." And the sadness slipped away entirely when, in bed a few minutes later, Patrick's stroking hands and nipple-teasing lips and tongue aroused hunger deep within her. Eagerly she accepted the weight of his body and the pounding thrust of him, so pleasurable that it was almost an exquisite torment as it brought her closer and closer to the long, ecstatic, shuddering release.

  But afterward, as she lay quietly beside him in the darkness, she felt a return of that melancholy. Her body and Patrick's each seemed designed to satisfy the physical passion of the other, a passion that only moments ago had fused them together so that they seemed quite literally one flesh. Yet tonight, as always, their minds, their spirits, had held aloof from one another. It had not even occurred to her to tell him of the sadness the thought of En-land brought her.

  Aware that she was slipping into self-pity, she commanded herself to think of something else. Colin, for instance. Now, there was someone who had reason to pity himself, because he was alone in every sense of the word.

  Colin had also been a guest at the upland villa that evening. She had observed that several unmarried young women present, and their mothers too, had bestowed encouraging smiles upon him. As the three of them, with Jules Burgos driving the carriage, rode home from the party, Elizabeth had commented upon how attractive the girls were. Colin said, in a light tone, "Don't start hoping to marry me off, Elizabeth. No woman would have me."

  "That," Elizabeth had said firmly, "is so silly that it does not deserve an answer."

  Seated beside her in the left-hand corner of the carriage, Patrick said, "She is right, Colin. You can have little hope of passing yourself off as a thirty-six-year-old virgin." In the darkness, Elizabeth could not see his expression, but she could hear the amusement in his voice. "Many a wench in the countryside around Stanford Hall could testify that you are not. And besides, there is Catherine Ryan." Patrick paused. "Have you thought of writing to her that you would like her to join you in St.-Denis?"

  Several seconds passed before Colin answered. "It is a rare woman who will follow a man into exile, especially if she is not married to him." As if determined to change the subject, he added swiftly, "Patrick, I saw you talking to Etienne Duchamps tonight. Did you gain any idea of how much rum the Duchamps distillery produces?"

  As she listened to the business talk of the two men, Elizabeth realized that Colin really had not said whether or not he had asked Catherine Ryan to join him. Perhaps, self-effacing man that he was, he had felt he had no right to do so. Or perhaps he had asked her, and the widow had been too afraid to travel to a strange land, or too loath to leave her almost grown sons.

  Well, perhaps sooner or later some St.-Denis girl would snare his interest.

  She became aware that Patrick's breathing had taken on the slower rhythm of slumber. Emptying her mind of thought, she too drifted toward sleep.

  Less than a week later, when a ship from Calais arrived with Georges Fontaine aboard it, Patrick learned that indeed there was a price on his head. At dinner that night in the little Stanford house, with the first spring rains drumming on the roof, he told them that the English had offered a reward of fifty thousand pounds for Patrick's capture.

  "Good God!" Patrick said. "That's a fortune." He added, with a short laugh, "I suppose I should be flattered."

  "The English need desperately to lay their hands on you. They have found only a few arms caches, and those only by accident. And they have the names of none of the other leaders."

  Patrick said, pleased but astonished, "I should have thought that by now..."

  "Apparently whoever informed the English knew no other names, or else chose not to give them. As I told you before you left Ireland, someone had written an anonymous letter to the English government denouncing you. Agents of ours in London got wind of the letter. While the English were still making arrangements to cross the channel and arrest you, our agents dispatched a message to me by an Irish fishing boat."

  Patrick sat silent, frowning. At last he said, "Then probably Henry Owen was not the informer."

  "I agree," the Frenchman said.

  "If Owen had been the one who turned his coat," Patrick went on, "he would have made a thorough job of it. He would have given the names of other Irish rebels he had met with."

  Fontaine nodded. "And he would have given my name. I would not have been free these past few months to travel all over Ireland taking orders for wine."

  Then who was it, Patrick wondered, who had written that anonymous letter? He thought of Moira screaming at him the last time he saw her. "You'll be sorry for tonight!" Could it be that during one of those many nights he had spent in her ornate bed he had said something in his sleep, something that had led her to suspect him? Or, careful as he had always tried to be, had he carried some betraying paper to Wetherly in his clothing? He had a vision of Moira in that luxurious bedroom, going through his pockets while he lay asleep.

  He shot a glance at Elizabeth. Much as he wanted to ask Fontaine about Moira Ashley, it would be best to wait until later. And so instead he began to question the Frenchman about events at Stanford Hall. "When the English confiscated my house and lands, did they dismiss the servants?"

  "Only some of them. I hear the housekeeper and the head footman are still there, as well as the cook and one or two of the maids. An empty house deteriorates, you know."

  Patrick's nod was grim. "And of course the crown is interested in preserving its newly acquired property. Now, what has been happening to my lands?"

  "Your brother's steward... What is his name? Sullivan?"

  "Slattery."

  "With Mr. Slattery acting as overseer, spring planting has begun on both your land and your brother's."

  "Then Colin's land..."

  "Confiscated along with yours, of course." The Frenchman shrugged. "If he had stayed, he might have saved them."

  Poor Colin, Elizabeth thought. Although he had taken no part in planning the thwarted rebellion, he had lost even more than Patrick had—not only his property, but the companionship of the only woman who, apparently, had ever suited him.

  Less than an hour later, Fontaine kissed Elizabeth's hand in farewell. Patrick drove their guest in the carriage back to the inn. On the way, Patrick asked, "Do you have any news of Lady Moira Ashley?"

  "Ashley? Oh, yes, your neighbor. I did hear something. She mortgaged most of her properties to buy stock in some South American company, and lost her entire investment Now she may lose her lands, too."

  Well, Patrick thought, he had warned her. But despite his suspicion that she might have been the writer of that anonymous letter to the English, he found he could take no satisfaction in her plight. He thought of how woebegone she had looked that last night, with the tears of rage and pain running down her face. Always, despite her beauty and wealth and arrogance, he had sensed something pitiable in her, something maimed.

  And certainly he had reason to be grateful for the many hours he had spent with her. Driving beside the silent Frenchman along the stretch of jungle-bordered road, he recalled the touch of Moira's amorously skilled lips and hands, and the suppleness of her body. His thoughts were untinged by any sense of guilt concerning that other woman, now probably undressing in their bedroom. He still felt guilty for his rape of her, and for the quarrel that had led to the loss of their child, and for the circumstances that had made her an exile in a strange land. But sexual infidelity was another matter. Just as he had never felt guilty for enjoying Moira in actuality, he felt no guilt in mem
ories of pleasures in her arms.

  He turned onto the town square and stopped before the inn.

  CHAPTER 30

  Jeanne Burgos, the mulatto housemaid, came in for only a few hours of housework each morning. Since they were short of money, Elizabeth had insisted to Patrick that it was best not to employ a servant full time. The truth was that she wanted to keep busy. She had no intention of slipping into the languid idleness, and consequent overplumpness, of some of the women who played hostess to her and Patrick, and in turn came to dinners served by Jeanne and her husband, Jules. Too, keeping busy helped her hold at bay any tendency to brood over the past.

  Even so, she found herself with leisure time. She spent it reading, or writing to her mother, or driving about in the pony-drawn gig once owned by the Duvals. Sometimes she stopped at the distillery, where Patrick and Colin, in their eagerness to keep the rum vats supplied with cane juice, often stood with their workmen at the long chopping tables, cutting the cane into sections for the huge copper kettles. After that she sometimes took the road that wound up the mountainside—through rapidly cooling air, through vegetation that changed from vine-entangled jungle growth to tall pines—and stopped at a jumble of rough-hewn stones, the remains of an ancient fort. From there her gaze could travel down to terraced cane fields carved out of the jungle, and to the pretty little town, and then out over shimmering water, emerald and turquoise and aquamarine, to the French-held island of St.-Marc and to the dark blue blur on the horizon that she knew was Haiti.