Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  He said, frowning, "Patrick! What do you mean?"

  "Didn't he sleep in your house last night?"

  "You mean he was here?"

  "Of course he was here!" she cried. "I talked to him."

  After a long moment he said, "Then he must have gone away afterward, because I did not see him at all."

  She stood rigid. Last night she had told him that he had killed his own child. She had hurled her hatred at him. And so, after he had made that tormented prayer, he had simply walked away into the night.

  The ground seemed to tilt beneath her feet.

  Swiftly Colin was beside her, his arm around her waist. "Elizabeth! Are you all right?" When she did not answer, he said, "I had best get you back to your house."

  Faint and nauseated, she allowed him to draw her across the clearing. As they neared the door, he said, "You lie down. I will go the the other houses to see if Patrick is there."

  She nodded an agreement. But she knew he would not find his brother at any of the other houses. Patrick had gone, whether back toward Philadelphia, or westward toward Ohio, or along one of the trapper trails that led north and south, she had no way of knowing. All she could hope for was that somehow he would learn that their child still lived, and come back to her.

  ***

  The days lengthened. Amid the rapidly disappearing patches of snow in the woods, blue-flowered hepatica appeared, followed by Dutchman's breeches, with rows of pink blossoms, shaped like miniature pantaloons, hanging from their stalks. The first returning swallows, blue-backed and tawny-breasted, soared and dived through the air above the clearing, and finally selected the leaves of the Jessups' lean-to as a nesting site. After supper, adults sat before their houses in what remained of the twilight and watched the older children play run-sheep-run.

  To Elizabeth the beauty of that spring was like a knife to the heart. So, sometimes, was the sight of Caroline, fully restored to health now, toddling after the older children. Patrick should be there to see his daughter, sturdy legs pumping, golden hair bright, as she ran across the clearing. And Patrick should be there with her. It was torment to lie alone in the warm spring dark, aching to be held in his arms.

  Four evenings after Patrick's disappearance, Colin had urged her to leave New Canterbury. As she sat on the front step after supper, door open behind her so that she could hear the slightest whimper from Caroline's crib, Colin limped across the clearing. He looked down at her through the fading light. "Do you have any plans, Elizabeth?"

  She felt bewilderment "What sort of plan would I have, except to wait until Patrick comes home?"

  The light was too faint for her to see his face clearly. Thus she sensed, rather than saw, the angry scorn in his dark eyes. "How can you be sure he'll come back? After all, a man who deserts his wife, deserts his child, even though he knows she may be dying—"

  "You don't understand! I said terrible things to him! He must have felt that... that the best thing he could do for me was to go away."

  "And leave you without money, without a husband to protect you and provide for you? Elizabeth, this is no place for you now. Let me take you and Caroline to Philadelphia."

  She shook her head. "No, Colin. I want to be here when Patrick comes back. And he will come back."

  "Very well," he said finally. Then, after a long moment: "I'll start spring planting by the end of the week."

  Several more times as the spring advanced, as the graceful catbirds and flame-bright tanagers arrived, and swamp marigolds in the woods gave way to blue flags, Colin urged that she and Caroline retreat to the safety and comfort of Philadelphia. Did she want to risk another such winter for the child and herself in this frontier settlement?

  Each time, Elizabeth thrust his arguments aside. She knew that any day now, any hour, she might look out and see Patrick's tall, lean figure moving toward the house.

  But days stretched into weeks, and still she was alone. And then, one late May night as she sat on the front step in the gathering dark after supper, achingly aware of the beauty of dogwood blossoms like falling snow among the pines at the clearing's edge, she heard Colin lead the horses into the lean-to stable. Strange that he was coming back from the fields so late. The other men had returned almost an hour before.

  A few minutes later, he walked around the corner of the house. Even before he spoke, something in his manner caused her nerves to tighten. He said, "I think we had better go into the house."

  Too frightened now even to speak, she got up and moved ahead of him into the dark room. When her fumbling fingers found the box of flints on the fireplace mantel, he took it from her. A moment later, lamplight filled the room.

  She said, from a dry throat, "What is it?"

  His gaze went from her face to the crib in which her sleeping daughter lay, and then back to her face. He said, in a voice that sounded heavy with reluctance, "A French trapper came through the fields today. He said he had a message for a Mrs. Stanford. When I told him I was your brother-in-law, he gave it to me. I guess he was glad not to have to..."

  Abruptly he broke off. She managed to move her lips. "What message?"

  He reached into the pocket of his gray homespun shirt and held out a folded piece of paper. Like the note Patrick had sent her the previous fall, it was soiled and worn-looking, as if it had passed through many hands. But when her cold fingers unfolded it, she did not see Patrick's bold handwriting, but the labored, semiliterate script of someone who had signed himself "Wm. Carney."

  The note was dated Hagerstown, Maryland, May 2, 1783. The first sentence told her that William Carney was "sorry" to tell her that her husband, Patrick Stanford, had drowned with two other men in Chesapeake Bay.

  There were more words, something about a small boat overturning in a wind squall, something about none of the bodies being recovered. But by then a mist was closing in around her, blurring the written lines. She felt Colin's hands grasping her shoulders. Then, for an interval, she knew nothing.

  Someone was chafing her hands. Lifting weighted eyelids, she found that she was lying on the bed, and that Mrs. Thompson sat on a chair beside her. Colin stood at the woman's elbow, anxiety in his dark eyes.

  Mrs. Thompson said, "That's better." She turned to Colin. "I have some blackberry brandy at my house. Please ask my husband to give it to you."

  Elizabeth's dull gaze followed him as he limped across the room. She would let him take her and Caroline to Philadelphia now. As soon as possible, she wanted to be away from this house, where she had once known happiness as clear and sparkling as spring water, away from this bed, where she had known the ecstasy of love. Because the man who had brought her that happiness, who had awakened her to love and physical joy, had been dead for weeks now, his fine long body buried by fathoms of water.

  CHAPTER 46

  More than a week passed before they were able to leave New Canterbury. Elizabeth certainly never wanted to come back to the place, and Colin seemed equally willing to leave it forever, something that Elizabeth could well understand. No matter how much Colin had disapproved of Patrick at times, he had loved him too, loved him enough to forsake his comfortable life in Ireland and share his brother's exile.

  Consequently, they needed to make arrangements for the disposal of Colin's hundred acres and of the hundred that Elizabeth, as Patrick's widow, now owned. None of the settlers were able to buy them out. But Jim Wentworth had heard from a cousin back in Providence who wanted to bring his family to western Pennsylvania. The cousin would be more than happy to buy a weatherproof house plus two hundred acres of land, much of it already under cultivation. Elizabeth and Colin gave Wentworth the deeds to their property, plus a statement authorizing him to act as agent for its sale.

  As for the wagon and team of horses, they eventually would be driven to a settlement twenty miles to the north, and there become property of the Thompsons' young son and his wife. In the meantime, the wagon would carry the elder Thompsons as well as Colin and Elizabeth and Caroline to Philadelphi
a. The knuckles of Mr. Thompson's hands had become increasingly swollen of late. The interval between spring planting and fall harvest seemed a good time to learn if a Philadelphia doctor could help him.

  With such matters settled, it remained only for Elizabeth to pack the few things she wanted to take with her. They included clothing for herself and her child, and a few precious articles—her grandmother's gold pillbox and ivory fan, her mother's miniature framed in seed pearls—that she had managed to keep with her through the wanderings of the past years.

  At last the wagon lumbered eastward across a landscape washed by summer at full tide. Leaves of oaks and maples and beeches that mingled with the pines were dark green now. American birds whose names Elizabeth had come to know—goldfinches and pine siskins and noisy bluejays—flitted through the trees. Although she tried to hide the fact from Colin and the Thompsons and most of all from her little girl, the beauty through which they moved only intensified her grief.

  They spent the fourth night at a settlement. There Elizabeth found a poignant reminder of Patrick in the form of a Philadelphia newspaper some voyageur had left with the settlers two days earlier. It told how the English Parliament had adopted an Act of Irish Settlement, by terms of which strictures against Catholics were removed, and confiscated lands would be restored to exiles willing to take a new oath of allegiance. Would her stiff-necked husband have been willing to take the oath? Perhaps. If he had lived, perhaps they would have been on their way to Stanford Hall by now.

  Two nights later, after they had made camp at the roadside, Colin and Elizabeth moved away through the trees to get water from a noisy little stream. There in the fern-smelling coolness, Colin filled three buckets and set them on the grassy bank. Then he turned to face her. "Elizabeth, I hope it is not too soon to ask you this. Have you any long-range plans?"

  Although the sun had not set, evening shadows were thick here among the trees. She looked at his face, earnest and troubled there in that dim light. "Not really. But I will have some money. The Thompsons have already paid me for the horse and wagon. And later on there will be money from the house and land. Perhaps I can buy an interest in some sort of small shop, a confectioner's, say."

  "On the other hand," he said quietly, "you could marry me, and we could go the West Indies together. Oh, not back to St.-Denis. I don't think either of us would want that. But there are other islands where I could earn a living for the three of us. I'll have enough money to invest in a distillery."

  She said, a bit dazedly, "Colin, I..."

  "Don't tell me that this comes as any great surprise to you. You must have known that I have been... fond of you from the very first."

  "Yes, I've known." And his quiet sympathy had sustained her, too, at times when Patrick's behavior had been particularly outrageous. "But right now..."

  "I realize it was much, much too soon for me to say this. But I couldn't stand the thought of your worrying about what is to happen to you and Caroline. I wanted you to know that you can turn to me."

  "Oh, Colin! Dear Colin!" She stretched out her hands, and he grasped them. "I do thank you. But as you say, it is far too soon."

  His hands still held hers firmly. She sensed his desire to pull her close to him, and the restraint that kept him from doing so. "Just remember that I'll always be here," he said, and released her hands.

  He picked up two of the buckets. As she lifted the third one, she realized that it was only a matter of time before she became Colin's wife. True, she did not love him, but then, after Patrick, she had little hope of loving any man. As for Colin, "fond" of her as he might be, she was sure that he had never felt for her a shadow of what he had felt for Catherine Ryan.

  Nevertheless, it could be a sound marriage. Reliable and gentle, Colin would be a good husband to her and a good father to Caroline. And she would be a good wife to Colin, quiet and competent and affectionate. And if, in his arms, she often found herself tormented by memories of the lover she had lost... well, pray God that she could hide it from Colin.

  As they climbed through the growing dark toward the roadside campfire flickering through the trees, another thought struck her. She asked apprehensively, "Have you any idea of returning to Ireland? Perhaps, now that Parliament has passed that new act, you could have your lands back."

  "I don't trust the Settlement Act. What's to keep the English from changing their minds? No, I will never go back to Ireland."

  She felt relief. Married to Colin, she would not want to live anyplace where she had lived with Patrick. Better, far better, some West Indian island she had never seen before.

  CHAPTER 47

  Early in the afternoon, more than two weeks later, Elizabeth again stood at the window of a Philadelphia inn. It was not the inn where she and Patrick had stayed more than two years before, but a newly built one, only a few yards from Independence Hall. It was far from being the only new structure. Obviously Philadelphia was prospering. The sound of hammers was everywhere. Fine carriages whirled along the wide streets, and women in what Elizabeth knew must be the latest fashions from Paris looked into shop windows filled with French china, Brussels lace, and Hepplewhite furniture.

  She looked down at her own gown, the same brown merino she had worn when she and Patrick had landed in Philadelphia two years before. Her gown should have been black, of course. But she did not want to use any of her small store of money to buy mourning garments. Besides, now that the Thompsons had gone back to New Canterbury, no one here knew that her husband had been dead for only about two months.

  Since their arrival in Philadelphia, Colin had made no further mention of marriage. From the look in his dark eyes, and the tone of his voice when he spoke to her, she knew it was not that he had changed his mind. He just wanted her to have time to grow accustomed to the idea. She also knew, from a bit of conversation she had overheard in the inn parlor between Colin and another man, that already he was interviewing Philadelphia sugar importers about the possibility of buying a cane plantation or distillery in the West Indies.

  A gong sounded somewhere on the floor below. In a few minutes, one-o'clock dinner would be served. She crossed the sitting room to the bedroom, where Caroline sat on a footstool cradling the rag doll that had been Mrs. Thompson's parting gift to her. "Come, darling." With her daughter's hand in hers, she went out into the hall, passed the door of the single room almost opposite, which Colin occupied, and descended the stairs. After leaving Caroline in the small room where younger children, served by two harassed-looking maids, ate their meals, she went into the main dining room and took her place at the long table. A glance across it and toward the right showed her that Colin was absent. But there were several diners she had not seen before, including a big man with graying blond hair who sat directly opposite her.

  As soon as she sat down, her right-hand neighbor, a Mrs. Yarborough, began to talk of a letter she had received that morning from her daughter in Boston. Mrs. Yarborough had five daughters, all of them great letter-writers. She also had fourteen grandchildren, some of whom had reached letter-writing age. Mrs. Yarborough appeared to have no doubt that line-by-line accounts of these missives, several of which seemed to arrive each day, would enthrall any listener. At first Elizabeth had felt oppressed by that flow of talk, which ceased only long enough for Mrs. Yarborough to chew and swallow an occasional bit of food. But after a week, Elizabeth had learned how to give the appearance of listening, smiling and nodding now and then, while continuing with her own thoughts.

  "Excuse me, Mrs. Stanford."

  With a start, Elizabeth realized that it was another voice, that of the big man across the table from her. She gave him an inquiring look.

  "Excuse me," he said again. "When you said good afternoon to that lady at your right, I could tell you were English, and not long in this country, either. Then, just now I heard the other lady call you Mrs. Stanford, and I got to wondering if you were any relation to this Englishman named Stanford I met in Maryland. I mean, he talked like an Eng
lishman, even though he said he was from Ireland."

  Dimly Elizabeth was aware that Mrs. Yarborough, intrigued into silence, was staring at her. She said, past the quickened pulse in her throat, "What was his name?"

  "I told you. Stanford. Oh, I see. You mean his first name. It was Patrick."

  "When... when did you see him?"

  "Day before yesterday. He's the new overseer at a horse farm down there. That's how we met. I'm a horse dealer. In fact, when I ride back to Maryland tomorrow, I'll be leading two mares for this Patrick Stanford's employer."

  The disappointment she felt was like a physical blow. "For a moment I thought... But it could not have been my husband you met. He... he was drowned more than two months ago." How much she had hoped that this stranger had known Patrick, however briefly, and could give her some bit of information, however small, about what his life had been after that night he disappeared from New Canterbury.

  "I'm sorry for your loss, ma'am." Elizabeth nodded an acknowledgment. "I guess the name Stanford really isn't uncommon," he went on, "and certainly Patrick isn't. But I thought there might be some connection, especially since he mentioned Philadelphia. He said he started out from here two years ago to take up land in western Pennsylvania."

  Her heart was beating suffocatingly hard. "What does he look like?"

  "Tall, thin, dark-haired." The man laughed. "In fact, if he hadn't talked like somebody just over from the other side, I'd have said he had Indian blood."

  After a moment she was able to push back her chair and get to her feet. "Mr.... I'm sorry. I don't know your name."

  "Haverhill, ma'am. Samuel Haverhill."

  "I'm going into the parlor now, Mr. Haverhill. Would you please join me in there as soon as you've finished?"

  He said, curious gaze fixed on her face. "I'm finished now, ma'am," and dropped his napkin beside his plate.