The dasher and lid slipped from her hands, sloshing the golden globs of butter that had risen to the top. Plucking the wooden stick from the buttermilk, he restored it to her numbed fingers. He hunched down before her, his black eyes on a level with hers. “Who is Terence, mistress?”
“Why would you know?”
King George took the opportunity to scale Ethan’s knee and perch on the man’s shoulder, the coon’s favorite place. “His name trembled on thine lips when thee was ill with the pox.”
She set the chum from her and rose, nervously smoothing her apron over her skirt. “I’ll draw your water.”
She swished aside her dress, and he obligingly stood to follow her. As she made her way along the path to the well behind the kitchen, she knew he was behind her though his moccasined feet made not a sound on the pine-needled trail. He was a simple man, she reflected; a man of the earth rather than of the intellect like Walpole, Dr. Johnson, or the American colonist Franklin. And because he was a Quaker, she had no fear of him. Still, as she leaned over the flagstoned well to haul on the pulley, she felt his presence as a powerful force.
“You know, mistress,” he said, lazing against the Well’s cedar post, “Abraham’s servant prayed for God to help him find a wife for Isaac.”
He paused, stroking the coarse, gray-brown fur of the coon who still clung precariously to his shoulder. “When at the well the maiden Rebecca offered both the thirsty servant and his camel water, he knew that his prayer had been answered. He had found the wife he sought for his master.”
The gall of the man! A religious dissenter and a scarred backwoodsman to boot! Pity the poor woman who became his wife. She shoved the oaken bucket at his broad chest. “But I am offering water to neither your camel nor your coon!”
“And I am not seeking a wife,” Ethan replied, his dark eyes dancing.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Over the days that followed she pondered the hopeless situation she had contrived for herself. She could run away, but if she were caught without her indenture papers she would be thrown in the stocks at the very least. Even should she find where Ethan had put the papers, she would have to forge his signature to set herself free.
Supposing she decided to risk running away without the papers, she did not even know where to run. To Boston, where more and more British troops were arriving every week, if what Icabod told her was true? And then to Quebec? And if Terence were not there? Would she return to England?
Her fingers paused in plucking the wild raspberries, and she lifted her head, looking about her for what was really the first time. Overhead a flock of geese winged southward in their V formation. About her the scent of the raspberries and pine needles freshened the air. A short distance away the Chickahominy lazily swished its indigo swath of water against the sloping banks. Would she leave this for London’s soot and smoke and fog, for an arranged marriage with a man of Lord Sandwich’s ilk?
Perhaps she and Terence could start a life here. There was something about the wilderness simplicity that rendered dreams incorruptible.
The beauty of the unseasonably warm October day beckoned her from her task of berry-picking. The sky shimmered a bright blue with a soft autumn haze lingering on the horizon. The leaves of the live oaks and black walnuts and sycamores had already changed to a brilliant red and were beginning to fall.
“ ’Tis a late Indian summer,” Icabod said, startling her. He laid his sickle against a live oak and squatted next to her. “If ye peer through narrowed eyes, lass, the corn shucks will turn into tepees.”
She laughed and did as he said.
“And if ye listen, ye can hear the falling leaves rustle as Indians dance about their campfires. ’Tis the Indians’ war paint that has rubbed off on the leaves and colored them red,” he finished with his hearty laughter.
“Methinks your imagination has become unhinged in this wilderness,” she teased.
He rose to go, clapping his hat on his balding head against the sun’s glare, and looked down at her with sympathy in his drooping eyes. “The colonies are a good place, lass, if ye give them half a chance. And the master—give him a chance, also.”
The master! Up until the night she broached the subject of leaving to Ethan Gordon, she had seen very little of him. He had seldom entered the main house during the day when she swept and dusted and cooked and changed the bed linen at the due times. Only in the early mornings and late afternoons when she served breakfast and dinner did their paths cross.
But now—now that she must return each evening and climb the stairs to his bedroom to place the warming pan, filled with hot coals, between the muslin sheets—her relationship with the man had taken on an intimacy that bothered her. He spoke no untoward words; he spoke rarely. Yet she felt his dark gaze following her up the stairs each evening.
Once, though she had not found him below, she had proceeded to his bedroom with the pan. But as she absently ran the pan over the sheets, concentrating on not scorching them, he appeared in the doorway. Both of them started, surprised at the other’s presence. He was barechested, his shirt slung over his shoulder, and she stared, fascinated by the springy black hair that etched an inverted triangle across his swarthy chest.
His bare chest had recalled the black slaves’ naked bodies, and a sinful thrill had rippled up her spine. The hair that raced across his flesh made the smooth, sleek statues of Greek gods seem effeminate. Collecting herself, she had drawn the warmed sheets over the feather mattress and slipped past him. But that moment the two of them had shared in his bedroom lingered uncomfortably in her mind.
Irritated with her wandering thoughts, Jane returned to berry-picking. Then, as if Icabod’s story had rubbed off on her, three dusky Indians—joined by five more—materialized at the far edge of a fallow squash field. The Indians did not walk single file across the land, as she had seen others do a few times in the past; rather they seemed to stalk toward her, keeping to the shadows of the trees that encroached on the field.
Where was Ethan? Of course—he had ridden over to the Fairmonts’. To feast his eyes, no doubt, on soft, sweet Susan. And Peter—Josiah—Icabod? In the far fields, bundling the threshed wheat. Panic-stricken, she dropped the basket of berries and, clutching her long skirts above her ankles, sprinted for the house. She might just make it to the house before the Indians caught up with her.
By the time she reached the front door, her windpipe was sealed like a tomb and her breath was labored. Barely had she plucked Ethan’s long rifle from its mount above the mantel when shadows darkened the front doorway. She whirled, the rifle cradled in her arms, the barrel leveled at the half-naked forms that blotted out the sunlight. She didn’t even know how to load the bloody weapon. But she hoped the Indians couldn’t know of her ignorance.
“Don’t.” It was all her tongue could manage. The barrel trembled between her sweaty palms.
The Indians, their faces a dark blur in the dim room, looked at each other, gestured at her, and muttered among themselves in what seemed to Jane like threatening grunts. One in the forefront, who wore a lady’s plumed hat with a blanket draped about his lower torso, stepped forward. A short knife glittered in his hand.
She jerked the rifle up to her chest and squinched her eyes closed. Her lungs heaved and collapsed like a bellows. She silently prayed that the rifle was primed.
“No!”
Her lids snapped open. Ethan shouldered past the Indians gathered in the doorway. Numb, she watched him advance on her and gently pry the rifle from her hands and set it against the fireplace. “They’ve come to help bundle the wheat—in exchange for some of it.”
He spoke something she did not understand to the one nearest her, and the Indians faded from the doorway as silently as they had come.
She started to tremble. Belatedly. When her knees sagged, he caught her waist and pressed her against his length in support. “Thee is much thinner, mistress,” he drawled, his warm breath stirring the orange-tipped tendrils that lay damply against her neck.
/> “I hate it here!” she wept. “Danger . . . always danger . . . always work . . . always alone.” Hating her weakness, she still cried copiously, uncontrollably. Susan would have known better. She wouldn’t have trembled and cried at the sight of the Indians.
Ethan bent and scooped his arms beneath the backs of her legs and cradled her against the breadth of his massive chest. “I know . . . I know,” he whispered against her temple as he carried her across the room. “I felt the same way myself once a long time ago.”
He settled in the rocking chair with her slanted across his lap. She didn’t know which surprised her more—that the rocking chair held the considerable weight of the two of them or that she experienced an inexplicable peace settling over her soul. To be held, comforted—it was a feeling of security, that basic nurturance every child needs, that she could not remember experiencing. Her father preoccupied with politics, her mother—Jane wasn’t sure. She suspected a lack of emotional stability in her mother. But then she couldn’t remember clearly the time before her mother’s death.
“I can’t imagine you being afraid of anything,” she murmured into the fringe of his leather shirt that emitted earth’s sweet-pungent smell.
“I assure thee I was,” he said in that curious mixture of Irish brogue and soft colonial drawl. “I came to the colonies as a boy of eight. A skinny, underfed, undersized runt.”
“And I can’t imagine you ever being underfed or undersized,” she said with a chiming laugh.
“Ah, but I was. In Dublin I had been arrested for thievery—it was the only way orphans could survive those hard times. I faced the gallows at Kilmainham Gaol when a nobleman, a proprietor of a small grant west of the Pennsylvania Colony, offered to sponsor a number of convicts. I was one of the lucky ones chosen.” He grew silent with his own reflections.
“And what happened?”
Almost like a pillow, his chest shifted against her cheek with the movement of his shrug. “Fortunately I was bound out to a Quaker couple, Ezra and Miriam. They sacrificed to send me to William and Mary’s preparatory school in the winter months. And I was afraid of everything. Of the dark forests. Of the well-to-do planters’ sons at college. Of the silent, fierce-looking Indians.”
And he was fierce-looking, she thought. And roughly handsome with the sharply planed cheeks and broken nose. “And then?” she prompted.
He chuckled, his breath rustling the ugly tendrils of hennaed hair. She thought how deliciously disturbing his laughter was. It tickled all the way to the pit of her stomach. “Why, I grew, mistress. And grew and grew.” His lips brushed away the tendrils to linger on the delicate flesh that planed her temple.
What he was doing was dangerously distressing. “How . . . how did you come to Virginia?” His lips nuzzled the black sweep of her brow, and she knew what was coming but could not help herself.
“Governor Dunmore awarded me this parcel for my scouting services with the Virginia Riflemen,” he said.
Without her realizing what was happening her face turned up to that bronzed one so close. He kissed her lingeringly, softly, gently. He tasted her mouth, learning its shape and texture. His lips . . . they were warm . . . and the way they moved over hers ... a pleasant creamy feeling eddied through her. Restlessly her fingers plucked his shirt’s fringe. They itched to tunnel through the thickness of that red hair, to—
“Oh my goodness,” she gasped, drawing back. “What are you doing?”
His lips twitched, but a self-anger played there also. “Thee has never been kissed, mistress?”
She had waited all these years for Terence. For her there had been no man, no kisses, no fondling—not even at St. James’s Court where all manner of licentious intrigue went on behind the royal backs of His Majesty and the queen.
With a panicky need to escape she pushed herself to an unsteady stance. But she just stood looking at the man seated before her, his marred face mirroring wonderment.
She was intensely aware of Ethan from her frazzled carrot curls to the tingling tips of her toes. Her fingers uncertainly touched her lips. She wished he would kiss her again. Not just wished—ached. Ached for the completion of the kiss. She fled the room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ethan’s eyes scanned the letter the dispatch rider from Williamsburg had brought that morning. Ostensibly the letter from Massachusetts and Georgia’s agent in London, Benjamin Franklin, was a light, newsy one.
Edmund Burke speaks in Parliament for conciliation with America, but his proposals are turned down. Mrs. Caroline Howard, Lord Howard's sister, has been playing a decisive game of chess with me. Like her brother, she, too, hopes that Great Britain and her American colonies can settle their dispute before events reach a point from which they cannot be reversed.
Between the lines that were penned in the common yellowish brown ink Ethan knew he would find more important information. Fire, which would bring words written in lime juice or milk to light, would have no effect on Franklin’s invisible ink. But potassium chloride would work wonders with litmus paper.
Below his bedroom Ethan could hear the thwack and thump of Jane’s loom. Warning enough that she was otherwise occupied. He set to work with the chemical compound, silently cursing when some words did not develop or others washed out. But by the time he finished enough of the secret missive remained for him to forward its major import on to Dickey Lee in Williamsburg.
The last of the message brought another muttered oath from Ethan.
Intercepted letter to British Secretary of State received from your Lord Dunmore, emphasizing prudent measure should be taken now that the Virginia Colony has raised and trained militia. Dunmore suggests that gunpowder stored in Williamsburg magazine be removed.
Hell and damnation! That explained the man-of-war, the Fowey, that had been reported standing in the York River off Williamsburg.
Ethan slumped back in the chair, his legs stretched out before him, and ran his fingers through his long, thick red hair, mussing the queue’s arrangement. Patrick had been right. He would have to spend more time in Williamsburg, though the fledgling Committee of Correspondence there was not developed to the extent of that in Philadelphia’s or Revere’s in Boston.
From below came again the thump of the batten on the weft of the loom, reminding him of another problem. His maidservant. The Lady Jane Lennox. Though she was performing her tasks better than he would have expected, and had admirably demonstrated a courage he had not suspected the day Mattaponi and his Powhatans visited, she was still the Lady Jane Lennox. She was not some maid to be tumbled in the hay. And yet that was what was too often on his mind.
She was thinner, with callused hands, strained features. That cool composure she maintained had finally cracked with Mattaponi’s visit. And the cracking had not delighted him as he had expected. Instead, fingers of some curious emotion tightened his heart. He could picture the way she moved—like damned royalty with that proud walk and imperious tilt of her head. But it was her inner fire—that taunting spirit that so annoyed, so distracted him from his daily work. And her chiming laugh—it did strange things to him.
For years he had told himself that if he could not have Susan he would wait to take to wife someone so similar that his loss would be muted. But the Lady Jane Lennox was no pale counterfeit. She and Susan were nothing alike. She could not be a substitution for Susan.
Yet he found himself drawn to this tall, haughty woman . . . found himself watching her as she walked from the well to the kitchen . . . found himself wanting to glimpse the occasional childlike sparkle that peaked through the veil of her damnably thick eyelashes . . . found himself foolishly bending to inhale the fragrance of fall’s wild flowers or to run a finger along the downy cattails she set in vases about his house.
He reminded himself that her station in life was too far above his; that without the luxuries to which she was accustomed she would become miserable and make her husband wretched; that she was committed to another man.
Cabin
fever was all it was. Obviously what he needed was to take a wife. He was as randy as a pastured bull. Come May and the General Assembly he would give Jane her freedom and rid himself of her. Then he would begin his search in earnest for a woman to take to wife.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The American espionage network in Boston began as a volunteer group of amateur secret agents. Paul Revere, a silversmith who first set up the American intelligence net, and about thirty others held regular meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern.
This broke the one fundamental rule in all such organizations—that various agents must not know one another. True, all took an oath at every meeting, swearing to reveal their work to no one except John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and one or two others. And true, most of the spies were well-known citizens, established businessmen or tradesmen. But inevitably the personnel changed as a member would have to flee, either from imminent Tory persecution, British confiscation of his home, or because his espionage was exposed by British spies who kept dossiers on such myriad matters as waterfront pubs and dock-side whores.
Ahmad was the most successful of the British spies, for he managed to infiltrate these Boston Sons of Liberty. With his gift for languages, it was easy enough to assume the Yankee dialect. And with his charm for women, it was even easier to convince the middle-aged wife of one of the lesser members of the American espionage network to hire him as a tutor for her two sons. That was how it all started.
The Yankee spy was a grocer named Horgan. Ahmad had readily found the rebel spy’s house, spotting above the door the traditional sign of grocers—three sugar loaves. Horgan was not in that afternoon, but the wife, a little woman in a starched ruffled cap, greeted him cordially. He introduced himself by the name Nathaniel Rand and explained that he was a schoolmaster who left South Carolina to seek employment in Boston.
“Alas,” Horgan’s wife told him briskly, “few are lucky to be employed, what with the British Port Bill and the times being what they are. Best you hie yourself back to the Carolinas, Mr. Rand.”
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