by Sally Watson
Jade ignored the charm and took note of the smile. William was not of a forgiving nature, and this matter of the fox was quite the most infuriating thing she had done to him since punching him in the nose more than a year ago. Meeting his eyes, she gave him a curtsy so deep as to be a mocking parody of a curtsy, which produced several startled glances from the others and an entirely wrong conclusion from her father. Only William understood perfectly. The mouse was going to behave in a very unmouselike way.
“I think Melanie has something to say to you, William,” said Mr. Lennox. Jade turned a surprised head, shook it emphatically. What was Father thinking of? He was frowning now, his eyebrows saying apologize or else. Jade remained silent.
“Very well,” he said, his voice tight. “Melanie has chosen, rather than apologize for loosing your fox, to have me tell you publicly that I have whipped her severely for it.”
There was a constrained silence. William contrived to look noble and still give Jade a triumphant glance. Lavinia flushed. And Jade, seething and mortified, held her head high and looked altogether impenitent.
Vinnie, fearing lest something even more embarrassing be said, at once asked Mr. Howe in a high sweet voice how his tobacco crop was coming along, and everyone plunged into this subject with almost audible relief. The conversation flowed as if afraid to stop, through all aspects of tobacco: how crops got worse, requiring new land, and prices from England got lower, and the East India Company greedier, so that what with one thing and two or three others, smuggling was as much a necessity here as it was in England. Even piracy was almost respectable and distinctly useful.
“After all, the government’s always been quick enough to hire privateers to harass the Spanish and French and Dutch trading ships, and the pirates just do the same thing independently. And keep the profit for themselves, of course.”
“Except,” Mr. Lennox pointed out disapprovingly, “they don’t draw the line at English ships. Pity. London might not have taken such strong action against them last year if they’d restrained themselves. And after all, some of them are upper class and quite socially acceptable, like Paul Raynor and James Brown.”
Mr. Howe nodded. Then he frowned. “But then there are the ruffians like Blackbeard, and scum like Calico Jack and that jezebel Anne Bonney—”
The ladies looked shocked, Lavinia pained, Matt deeply interested, and Jade truculent. “I thought you said she came from one of the good families in Charleston,” she pointed out. “So why isn’t she socially acceptable, too?” They frowned at her, displeased. “She’s a female,” said Mr. Howe, falling into the trap.
Jade slanted a derisive smile. “Then good birth makes it all right for a man to be a pirate, but worse for a woman?” Matt looked suddenly reflective. (Jade had hopes for Matt.) But the others never noticed that the trap had been sprung—or even existed. They nodded, complaisant and complacent. Of course.
Wrath arose in Jade, and for an instant she hated even her own parents and sister.
“Why don’t you be honest, and just pass a law against women being braver or cleverer than men?” she demanded, scathing, and received a battery of shocked and affronted stares.
“Melanie!”
Jade, not wanting to be sent to her room, subsided. There was a brief silence, not comfortable.
“That was a very sudden storm we had this morning,” ventured Mrs. Howe in the bright tones of one who is tactfully changing the subject. “Young William says he ran into Melanie out riding early.”
Jade chuckled suddenly. “We ran into each other,” she amended accurately, and watched, alert, as his eyes brightened with malice.
“Do you always ride astride like that, Melanie?” he inquired with faintly pained courtesy. “It seems—well—a bit odd for a young lady.”
“Melanie!” squeaked her mother, “you weren’t!” And Jade knew that William knew he had scored.
“Yes, I was.” She nodded, unchastened. “And a good thing, too, or William would probably have unseated me with that great monstrous horse of his.”
Mrs. Howe, sensing a lack of charity toward her William, frowned. Her William at once fired another shaft, not entirely at random. “You shouldn’t come galloping out of side lanes like that. And what were you doing at Mad Maupin’s, anyway?”
“He’s not mad!” blazed Jade incautiously. “At least,” she added with belated and rather lame guile, “he wasn’t when Grandfather used to take me to visit him.” She scowled, hating the indignity of such deceptions. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing Antigone would have done—but then Antigone had only her life to lose, while Jade had fencing.
“Do you visit him very often, alone like that?” persisted the diabolic William, looking like someone trying not to look shocked.
Mr. Lennox, who believed in keeping skeletons within the family, broke in with a smile. “Oh, Melanie never visits him now; not since my parents died,” he said with a smoothness that gave no hint of what he might be thinking—or what he might say to Jade later.
William gave him one pitying glance, instantly covered by a mask of shining good manners. He was a splendid actor, was William, much better than Jade. “Oh, of course sir—er—if you say so.” He looked doubtful.
“I like Monsieur Maupin,” announced Matthew, with a sure instinct that his sister needed rescue.
“He’s an incorrigible old eccentric.” Mr. Lennox, refusing to be drawn, shook a rueful head at his son.
“In—incorgible eccentric,” repeated Matt with satisfaction. “That’s what I’m going to be when I get old, too.”
Jade spared him a thoughtful glance. He might, at that.
Lavinia spared him a disapproving glance, but only briefly. She was busy concentrating shocked reproach at William. She had high principles, had Vinnie, and William had just violated several of them. He would probably come to a bad end, she decided darkly, and she treated him forever after with a manner of frozen sherbet, sweet but icy.
The visit dragged to an end. Jade admirably concealed a sense of sick apprehension. William studied her face and those of her parents in vain for any clues to how much damage he had done. It would be disappointing never to know. When his parents rose to leave, he hung behind, letting the others go out into the wide entry-hall, ahead of him. Melanie, gratifyingly, hung back as well. William smiled. He was about to find out whether he had scored.
He found out at once. Without preliminaries she picked up a small footstool and hit him with it.
The next few minutes were quite simply appalling. And the period after the outraged Howes had led their bruised son away was even worse. Mother had a severe attack of the vapors requiring the urgent attention of Lavinia; and Jade stood before her grim-faced father, her full taffeta skirts still awry from battle, her chin up. She was in for it now—but if only Father would forget the bit about Monsieur Maupin, she didn’t mind.
He spoke at last, looking at her as if she had finally but unsurprisingly sprouted visible horns and forked tail. “Aside from the matter of”—he seemed unable to believe his own voice—“assaulting a guest, I want to know at once whether you went to Maupin’s house this morning.”
Now Jade had no moral scruples about lying in general. In fact, she considered some lies quite beneficial. But a lie to escape consequences was shaming, loathsome, degrading even if one got away with it, and unthinkably humiliating if one didn’t. A whipping was far less damaging to the pride. But the price of truth now was her fencing lessons—and a whipping for Joshua. Jade set her teeth.
“No,” she said, and stuck her chin out.
Possibly it was the chin that gave her away. Her father looked at her with withering contempt that brought a hot crimson blush to her cheeks, and then sent a slave to fetch Joshua. Then for a few moments the silence was broken only by Mother’s vapors, while Jade stared at the floor, stricken with shame, anger, and despair. Poor Joshua, so transparently truthful by nature, about to be confronted with an impossible choice of loyalties—and without ev
en knowing what had already been said, either!
He arrived, uneasy and apprehensive. “Did you accompany Mistress Melanie to Maupin’s house this morning?” demanded his owner brusquely, and watched the slave’s stricken eyes turn helplessly to Jade for some clue.
“Leave him alone!” she cried, reckless. “He has to do what I tell him. He’s mine; you gave him to me,” she added truthfully but not quite accurately. Joshua had indeed been presented to her on her tenth birthday—and taken back five minutes later after she had insisted on trying to free him.
Her father ignored her, kept inexorable eyes on Joshua. “Answer me.”
Jade released the slave from his awful dilemma. “If you want to know, we did go there.” She paused, nursing the faintest of hopes that the confession might be allowed to stop at that. But Father went on staring at the miserable Joshua.
“What for? Have you gone more than once?”
Jade flung her head back and prudence to the winds. Not for her was back-to-the-wall fighting! Her nature was to attack when cornered. “I fence!” she announced. “I’ve been learning for years, and I’m good at it, too!”
It really was as if a lightning bolt had torn through the room. Her mother instantly had a fainting fit, Lavinia gave a scandalized squeak, and her father stood still for a moment, staring at her with an expression she couldn’t at all decipher. Then he jerked his chin at the door.
“Go to your room and stay until I’ve decided what to do.”
She swaggered out, insufferably nonchalant in order to hide her misery. And she stayed all day in her dainty pink room, hostess to a stream of visitors. First there was Zelda, red-eyed, with a tray of good things from cook and a message of devotion from Joshua. Miss Turner, tight-lipped. An astonished Matt wanted to know more about her fencing lessons. A prim Lavinia who lectured until Jade threatened to box her ears. And finally Mother, weeping and reproachful.
It was a hopeless interview. Mrs. Lennox couldn’t in the least understand her changeling daughter and was by now reasonably sure she didn’t want to. Jade couldn’t understand such determined spinelessness as Mother showed to Father and to convention, and didn’t try to hide her contempt. By the time Mother left the room, they were further apart than ever.
And at last the stranger who was her father came and stood staring at her as an unnatural sort of wild animal. Mr. Lennox knew the laws of nature as well as anyone. Boys were meant to be manly, spirited, brave; girls to be feminine, gentle, charming. It was true that his own mother had had rather more spirit than was seemly; in fact the Lennox family had an unfortunate tendency to produce and to marry girls of this sort. He recalled uneasily the tales he had heard of his own mother, and his grandmother, and great-aunts, who did hair-raising things, and of their almost mythical grandmother, the Lady Valerie. . . . And here was his own daughter, with the wildness and perversity of all of them combined, apparently dead to all feeling.
And Jade, wretched behind her jutting chin, braced herself. She felt unbearably vulnerable. How could she ever face life without Monsieur Maupin and fencing?
“I don’t suppose,” her father said heavily, “that it would occur to apologize, or express shame or regret for your behavior?”
It was a novel idea. Jade searched her soul. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you in front of the Howes,” she conceded. “And I’m sorry I didn’t hit William harder,” she added with deep sincerity.
Father reddened, controlled himself. “But not that you lied?” His voice was scathing, and it was Jade’s turn to flush.
“Yes!” she said hotly. “I hated that; you know I never lie; it’s cowardly!” Astonishing that she should have to explain what was so obvious! “But I had to.”
He didn’t understand, of course. “Are you not even ashamed of your iniquitous behavior, aping men, wearing male clothing like a brazen little hoyden?” His scorn was patent. It should have shriveled her.
It didn’t. She wasn’t ashamed of any of these things, and it never occurred to her to pretend that she was. She shook her head.
Incomprehension lay between them, thick and unyielding.
“You can’t go on like this,” he said at last, grimmer than she had ever seen him. “You’re making your mother ill, alienating all our friends, disgracing the whole family. And you think punishment just cancels out whatever you’ve done, leaving you free to go do it again.” This was perfectly true, and Jade didn’t try to deny it. “Will you promise me never again to see Maupin or touch a sword?” he demanded, inexorable.
“No,” said Jade, just as inexorable. Might as well promise not to breathe.
Father must have seen this in her face, for he tightened his lips. “This time there’s going to be no compromise, Melanie. I don’t want to break your spirit—whatever you may think—but one way or another, I am going to curb it. Do you understand?”
Jade grinned defiance. She was just asking to have her ears boxed, knew it, waited for it. But her father just looked at her for a long hard moment and then shrugged.
“Very well, I’ve no choice but to send you away.”
She stared at him, startled and uncertain, the grin gone now.
“When I go to Jamaica at the first of the month, I shall take you to stay with your Aunt Louisa and Uncle Augustus. They’ve been asking to have you visit ever since your cousin Clarinda died.”
“They’ll send me right back,” predicted Jade, always a realist.
“They saw what you were like when they visited us,” her father reminded her, “and are willing to have you anyway. Your uncle trained horses before he moved to Jamaica, he’s handled slaves ever since, and I don’t see why a niece should be all that different.” His face was stony. “In any event, Melanie, they want you at the moment—and I regret that no one in Williamsburg does. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but you’ve only yourself to blame.”
Jade wouldn’t for the world have shown how much it hurt. She indicated that she was delighted to be going anywhere at all. And it was true, she reflected desolately after he had stalked out of the room. Woefully true. She didn’t want to be alienated from her family, a stranger living among them to their great disturbance or sent away in disgrace. She wanted—she wanted to go adventuring with love and regret. She wanted to be sad at the thought of leaving. She didn’t know what she wanted at all.
It was days before she managed to elude Miss Turner and the obligingly short-sighted Zelda, and go back to see Monsieur Maupin, who opened his door quite as if he’d been sitting there expecting her—which he probably had.
“Enfin. My wicked jade of a pupil, who has been even more wicked than usual. Come in, and we will have a most ferocious duel, just in case it is our last. Where is Joshua? And have you hit your unfortunate governess over the head in order to escape?”
“No, I only locked her in her room.” Jade stepped briskly over the threshold. “And of course I didn’t bring Joshua; do you think I want to get him punished?”
Monsieur Maupin regarded her with hooded eyes, half laughing. “And you, ma petite?”
Jade shrugged. “I wanted to see you again,” she said simply. Monsieur Maupin understood, for it was part of the code he had taught her, that he who calls the tune must pay the piper. Once she understood that, he never questioned her right to call what tunes she chose. “You know I’m going away? Father’s been to scold you, I dare say.”
Monsieur Maupin straightened his old-fashioned peruke. “Bien entendu, and very much the angry father, too. But he found it very much uncomfortable because I kept reminding him of when he was a naughty boy and his father and I used to fish him out of the river and smack his bottom.”
Jade giggled irrepressibly and went into the other room to change to her beloved breeches and full-sleeved shirt.
When she came out, they had a splendid battle, no quarter asked or given, which darted all over the large room like a dance of dragonflies: fierce and glorious and swift. The tune was the sibilance of steel on steel, and Jade’s occasion
al peal of joy at a close parry or a skilled feint. There was nothing like it, nothing at all! No score was kept; it just went on until both duelers dropped to the floor in blissful exhaustion. Jade sighed. When again would she know this delight of skilled, precise movement? She caught her breath.
“I can’t give it up! I won’t!” And she set her lips lest Monsieur Maupin think she was whining at consequences, and despise her.
The old man hid his own bitter dismay at losing the one person in the world he really cared for. “Then demand it of God,” he suggested. “Remembering always, enfin, that you will sooner or later be presented with the reckoning, and you cannot then change your mind and say the price is too high, you do not wish to pay. Le Bon Dieu is not mocked, and I think He does not admire quibblers and whiners.”
Jade nodded.
“Swords!” she cried. “Adventure! Freedom! And I’ll pay any price!”
Monsieur Maupin regarded her for a long minute with grave eyes. “Bon. Remember always to demand more of yourself than anyone else,” he warned her. “Otherwise you become merely a tiresome rebellious young girl who wants that the whole world should change to suit her whim. The world is full of such as these; most of them grow up at last, but are not particularly admirable, enfin. They are against everything, for nothing.”
Jade frowned uneasily. Did this apply to her? But the old man was smiling. “You, I think, already fight to a purpose, and soon you will begin to discover what it is and concentrate your energies on that instead of all things at once.” He laughed at her puzzled face, arose. “You shall have a going-away gift from this Mad Maupin which your father will permit you to accept—but which no one but you will enough understand. Regardes-toi.”
He lifted the lid of a traveling box which stood unobtrusively under the window; a beautifully-made old box of satiny wood. “A most suitable gift, non?” he chuckled, and lifted a totally unexpected false bottom. “So small a space under here, just enough, I think, to contain a rapier laid corner to corner and wrapped in a pair of breeches and a shirt or perhaps two—”
