Beneath their thick lashes her turquoise eyes took on a roguish gleam—she would beat Arthur at chess again! He had been so shocked when she had beaten him before, for had he been so sure he could beat her that he had utterly ignored her warning that she and Papa Jamison had played the game almost nightly since Mamma Jamison had died. Indeed, she had already bested Arthur at cards and bowls, and now—perhaps in retaliation—he had promised to teach her to play tennis, a sport King Charles of England favored, and a sport of which Arthur had assured her he was a master. Perhaps he would win at tennis, she thought carelessly, and that would be a sop to his vanity, for Arthur was certainly most monstrous vain!
Arthur had asked her for her hand, striking a pose and kneeling gracefully on the Turkey carpet in Mirabelle’s handsome drawing room—and she had given him a light, offhand answer, not really considering his suit. But so many island lads had asked for her hand that she took proposals of marriage, merrily—and perhaps wisely—as more of a reflection of Mirabelle’s undoubted worth than of her own undoubted charms. Now that she was fifteen, the chase had waxed hot—indeed, she was even now riding away from Mirabelle in the hope of eluding one of her suitors, young Grenfell Adams, who persisted in riding over from Great Grenfell every day and boring her with his incessant poetry.
She was running away from a suitor—but not from love. Love had not yet come her way. Her beautiful face as she rode down the long drive on the prancing silver mare, in her smart dove gray riding habit, assumed a pensive expression. Even Arthur Kincaid, for all his glamour and his Boston money and his vaunted accomplishments, was not the answer. Not for her. Her lover must be something more.
She had never been able to quite see that lover she was so sure would come. Some days the veil had almost lifted and she had thought she glimpsed him fleetingly in her mind... she could never quite see his face, but she could sense what he would be like. She would know him when he did arrive, she was sure of it.
Now, as she often did, she puzzled as to what he would be like. Tall surely, dark probably, for Anna had a penchant for dark-haired men. Above all, he would be manly. His shoulders would be broad—broad enough to carry the world, she thought romantically. His lean body would taper to narrow hips, his step would be light. His voice would carry authority, his gaze would be commanding, his sword lethal. He would stride through life with an arrogant stance and stare down lesser mortals with his cold narrow gaze.
But with her, of course, he would be different—tender, protective, considerate, a tower of strength. She would walk beside him proudly and in all this world she would come first with him.
And that to Anna was burningly important. To be first. Not first in his arms—some other girl would long ago have had that honor with the kind of man Anna envisioned—but first in his heart. For Anna had never known affection as a child. She had grown up without ever knowing her real mother—-Aunt Eliza had never talked about her, except to say that she was beautiful. Aunt Eliza’s homely face mourned at the very mention of her mother, and even a child could see that Aunt Eliza was still grieving for Anna’s mother, who had died before Anna was old enough to remember her.
Anna sighed ruefully as she thought of Aunt Eliza, dead these half-dozen years past, whose grave beneath the cedars she often visited. She always thought of her as a cold but kindly woman, unable to give affection. Even now Anna did not understand that poor Aunt Eliza, so much older than her own mother, had feared to give her love to another charming child who would perhaps—like Anna’s mother—die and break her heart.
The first warm affection Anna had ever known was frail, comfortable Mamma Jamison’s—and even there she had been only a surrogate daughter, replacing little dead Beatrice who had died of the plague in faraway London. Sometimes at her most affectionate Mamma Jamison had even unknowingly called Anna “Beatrice" and Anna had felt tears gathering and looked away quickly from the fond smile on Mamma Jamison’s pale face, and suffered.
After Mamma Jamison’s death. Papa Jamison—who had really only tolerated Anna because it made his wife so happy to have a replacement for little Beatrice, and had always been a little offhand with the child—had changed. Their shared grief over sweet Mamma Jamison’s loss had brought Anna and Papa Jamison closer together. He had come then to consider Anna as almost a real daughter and had promised to leave her Mirabelle—just as Mamma Jamison had promised her she would have the massive silver candlesticks that dominated the great sideboard at Mirabelle, those candlesticks that had been part of the dowry she had brought to Papa Jamison as a bride back in England. Pleased to have the lighthearted young girl flitting around his big house that seemed to him so empty now that his wife was gone, Papa Jamison had calmly rejected all offers for Anna’s hand, insisting the girl would choose for herself soon enough.
Anna had not.
And the reason was not so obvious to the young men who pursued her—else one of them might have overcome it. Blinded by her beauty, sensing perhaps her overwhelming need to be loved, not one of them guessed her blind, unreasoning—and unexpressed—need to be first in the heart of the man who would win her, to be held by him dearer than everyone, everything. And although Anna did not herself realize it, she was even now weeding through her prospective suitors one by one, casting aside in her mind first this one and then that one. Not because they did not love her, but because they loved something else more.
In her slow progress down the driveway Anna had almost reached the gates. Now as she went through them she brought her thoughts back to the present long enough to turn Floss’s silver mane in the direction of Lilymeade and Arthur Kincaid, who was, after all, the best the season had to offer. And her thoughts left that tenuous imagined lover with a crash, for dead ahead was a carriage with a lone woman in it.
The carriage was stopped. It half blocked the road, and Floss, ever of a nervous disposition, reared up on her hind legs and whinnied.
Anna, quick to soothe excitable Floss, saw that the carriage’s sole occupant was a stranger, but a stranger who compelled attention. She was elegantly gowned in apricot satin and stroking with peach-gloved hands a little fox-hued Pomeranian dog which she held on her lap. Her gown was trimmed—unseasonably in this climate—with ermine tails, which gave a rich and somehow exotic effect. But it was neither the handsome gown nor the arrestingly beautiful face of the woman that attracted and held Anna’s gaze, not even the brilliant red fox color of the woman’s massed curls, burning bright against the light. It was the expression on the woman’s half-smiling heart-shaped face. Her orange-plumed hat lay beside her on the carriage seat as if she had settled down for a long stay, and her gaze on Anna was so knowing, so mocking, that the girl was struck by it.
As Anna would have eased Floss past the carriage that nearly blocked the narrow road, the woman leaned forward and said something to the driver that Anna could not quite catch. He nodded his head and the woman waved her peach-gloved hand at Anna and asked her if this was the road to Spanish Rock.
Anna reined in Floss, who danced impatiently on her dainty hooves. “No, ’tis a long way,” she told the woman. “First you must reach Smith’s Parish.”
“Ah, then are there not some caverns of note about?” the woman’s lazy voice with—was it a French accent?—asked her.
“Yes, many,” said Anna courteously. “Crystal Cave and Leamington Cave are the best known.”
“And are they worth seeing?”
“Oh, yes!” Anna’s turquoise eyes flashed as she remembered exploring those caves with Ross. “They have wonderful ice-cool waterways, all underground with tall stone pyramids rising from the floor and long stone icicles hanging from the roof. Papa Jamison calls them stalactites and stalagmites.”
Brightly the woman watched her. Then she raised her peach-gloved hand from the Pomeranian’s silky head and lightly lifted and fingered a necklace of pink pearls set with three heavily worked silver links. Her lips were parted as if she would speak again, her fox-colored head inclined alertly toward A
nna, as she kept caressing the necklace. It was almost as if she were trying to attract the girl’s attention to the necklace.
“And would I reach the caverns by this road?”
“They lie around Harrington Sound. You must reach that by boat.”
“Ah, I would not have time for that today, then.” The lady sighed and gave her Pomeranian’s head a pat. “What a shame!” She did not look at all disappointed. She looked relaxed and happy—as if she was enjoying some vastly amusing private joke. And all the while she was watching Anna with brilliant amber eyes that glowed like a cat’s. This burning interest did not subside as she added, “But I was told there are other sights—some unusual rock formations?”
By now Anna had the strange feeling that the woman did not care at all about her answers, that she was instead listening to her voice as if memorizing its diction, its accent. “Cathedral Rocks in Sandys Parish is perhaps the best,” Anna told her shortly. “But you would have to reach that by boat also.”
“Indeed?” The woman stifled a yawn. “Then I see that I have come all this way for nothing. I shall have to return to St. George.” She gave Anna a half-smile and a negligent little wave of her gloved hand and leaned forward and told her driver to take her back to town. As he moved to turn the carriage around, Anna noticed that it was a rental carriage—the sort of conveyance a stranger to these islands might hire. Then she gave Floss her head and they fled by the little carriage like a silvery breath of wind.
She was conscious of the Apricot Woman’s stare—for that was how she impulsively thought of her: the orange hair, the orange dog, the orange gown—all the way down the road. Anna could feel that calculating stare boring into her back until she was out of sight of the carriage. That woman had been appraising her—but why? She looked back once, compelled by that amber gaze, and saw the swaying orange plumes of the woman’s hat as she leaned out of the carriage watching Anna’s progress, disappear from view.
As Anna entered a heavy growth of cedars and lost sight at last of the carriage, the words the woman had asked of the driver, which had hovered half heard just below the level of her consciousness, came back to her:
"Is she the one?" the woman had asked.
And the driver had nodded.
It was all very strange. Anna had never laid eyes on the woman in apricot before. She was half tempted to turn and gallop back and ask her bluntly what she wanted but something—perhaps some inner warning—deterred her. There had been that behind the Apricot Woman’s smiling gaze and brilliant amber eyes that was threatening. And besides, would she not look a fool dashing off to hurl suspicious questions at a stranger who had only after all asked her for road directions?
Or... she could rein in her horse and sit and wait and watch the woman go by. Perhaps the woman would stop her carriage and speak to her again and that puzzling “Is she the one?" would be resolved. Anna told herself she must have misheard that remark, but indecision beset her, and she brought Floss to a walk.
As she sat there undecided, the night Aunt Eliza died came back to her unbidden. The minister, Mr. Hunt, had been hastily summoned. There had been hurried discussions that Anna had not been permitted to hear. And then Samantha Jamison, who had subtly assumed the role of mother to orphaned Anna, taking over the reins from the faltering hands of her bondwoman Eliza Smith, who lay dying of consumption in one of the big bedrooms of Mirabelle, had surged forward and announced that she would herself take charge of the child that night. But Anna, sensing something wrong when the minister had stayed so long with Aunt Eliza, had leaped up and run out to confront him when she heard his footstep in the hall.
She had stood and stared at him wordlessly, her turquoise eyes big and frightened. “How is Aunt Eliza?” she had whispered, alarmed at his dour expression.
Mr. Hunt was not one to mince words.
“Dying,” he said shortly and Anna had gasped and collapsed back against Samantha Jamison’s lavender skirts, which had by now followed the child into the hall.
“Ye should not have broken it to the child in that way, Mr. Hunt!” Samantha had cried. She clutched Anna’s small shuddering frame protectively to her big billowy body, her taffeta skirts rustling as she did so. “We’d kept the seriousness of Eliza’s illness from her.”
“Then ye should not have,” Hunt snapped, his frown deepening. “For the woman will not last the night.” Too late he realized that the angry face into which he peered was that of the wife of his richest parishioner. Ah, well, he told himself, he no longer had to placate this island gentry. He was leaving the island next week for, hopefully, a better post, and who was he to solve dead mysteries or make things right for those who didn’t deserve it anyway? For Hunt was filled with bitterness. He’d come to this island borne on golden promises and had fully expected to find here a rich and fawning congregation who would bow and scrape before him and beg him to lead them straightaway to heaven. Instead, he was leaving much as he had come, with holes in his socks. His brooding gaze played fleetingly over the indignant mistress of Mirabelle and the goldenhaired child she had chosen to make her own—then his thin mouth closed with a snap. Let them work out their own problems here, for had they not rejected his leadership? With a brusque nod, he left them.
That was all that Anna remembered of the incident. Far more important to her had been her last tearful good-bye to Aunt Eliza the next day.
Mr. Hunt had been replaced by Mr. Cartmell the next week and Anna had had no way of knowing, for neither Hunt nor Cartmell had bothered to tell her, that Aunt Eliza had haltingly dictated her life story to the minister the night she died and had entrusted him with that document, signed and sworn to, along with a small journal written in an aristocratic scrawl. Mr. Hunt had carried them both away with him to St. George, sealed in a big packet, sworn not to reveal their contents and to give the packet unopened to Anna on the day she was married.
Annoyed by the trust, which seemed to him just one more irritating duty on an irritating island. Hunt had thrust the packet containing the document and journal into his successor’s hand with brusque instructions. And eager young Cartmell, who, unlike Hunt, was overjoyed to be here after the dirty fog of London, had breathed deep of the clean clear air free of the scent of sea coal, interrupted with anxious questions about how the “island gentry” could be expected to receive him—and promptly forgot all about the packet his predecessor entrusted to him.
It had not occurred to him to mention it, not even when Samantha Jamison died and Anna Smith, the barefoot waif of unknown antecedents, became to all intents and purposes mistress of Mirabelle, just as she was reputed to be its heiress.
Anna’s mind was still on the day Aunt Eliza died, a day of rain and storm and heavy peals of thunder and great flashes of blue lightning that blinded momentarily the sobbing child by the dying woman’s bedside. Had Aunt Eliza’s mind wandered in those last hours? she asked herself. For she had seemed to be somewhere else, some place called the Scillies, and then in Amsterdam, which was in Holland, and there she had seemed to be entreating some young girl “not to marry him.”
It was all very strange, but it was a puzzle Anna had put out of her mind long ago, and seldom thought about, not even when she visited that lonely grave up in the cedars, for Eliza Smith, a bondwoman, had not rated burial in the stone-fenced family plot at Mirabelle.
Something else stirred in Anna’s mind, some memory from long ago, too deep to be easily dredged up, something occasioned by the sight of that fox-haired woman....
She puzzled about it as Floss dawdled down the road, taking her own time, and she might even have decided to whirl about and wait for the woman to come up, but all such thoughts took flight as she looked up and saw to her vexation that Grenfell Adams was riding down the road toward her. Loping along with his popinjay green shoulders hunched his curly yellow head bent intently over a piece of parchment, his lips mouthing words—another sonnet, no doubt!
Anna would have liked to stamp her foot in irritation, but
her booted foot was in a stirrup and she must not disturb excitable Floss. She had not got away early enough; Grenfell had found her after all!
“Mistress Anna!” Grenfell hailed her joyfully. “I was just on my way to Mirabelle.”
That was hardly news, thought Anna. Grenfell's visits to Mirabelle were a daily occurrence!
“And I’ve written you some verses!” That wasn’t news either. Masking her impatience with a smile, Anna tried to show an interest she didn’t really feel.
“This one I’ve entitled ‘To a Goddess'—that’s you, Mistress Anna.”
“I don’t feel like a goddess, Grenfell, and you will make me a laughingstock if you persist in calling me one!”
“But, Mistress Anna—” Grenfell looked so crestfallen that Anna felt sorry for him.
“It’s all right, Grenfell,” she sighed. “Read on.”
“I kneel before your dainty knees—” Grenfell’s earnest face flushed suddenly. “I do hope you don’t mind my mentioning your knees, Mistress Anna? Some might find that a bit forward.”
“Not at all. Go ahead and mention them, Grenfell. I have a complete set—two knees.” She was half tempted to flirt her skirts so that they showed but decided that would unnerve Grenfell, who was nervous enough already. So she kept her seat calmly on Floss, who was dancing a bit in the dirt of the road, kicking up bits of gravel and dust.
Taking a deep breath, Grenfell began again:
“I kneel before your dainty—er—knees,
And fall beneath your spell.
I know I’ll never love you less
For I love you now so well!”
Watching her for effect and seeing that he had made no impression, he added anxiously, “I could say I kneel before your dainty sofa. I mean, you’d be sitting on it. But then it would sound like I was talking about your—” He reddened.
Rich Radiant Love Page 4
