His eyes locked longingly with hers before his lids lowered shyly. “The colonies farther south do not hold education in such high esteem as you Bostonians.” His palms lifted in a hopeless gesture. “But, as you said, madam, it really is a futile effort, what with the times.”
She hired him.
He lived in an attic room of the house, which reeked of fried fish and boiled cabbage. The two sons, aged eight and ten, were abominable monsters who shared their mother’s prodigious lack of intellect. But Ahmad was able to watch the comings and goings of Horgan.
If, after the rotund little grocer left, the Tory spy’s gaze seemed to dwell with a futile infatuation on the myopic wife—well, naturally, her innate generosity and kindheartedness led her to do what she could for the poor bachelor.
And if at dinner the spy found it difficult to control his patriotic outbursts at the indignity Boston citizens suffered under the rude lobsterbacks, the grocer could well understand. From there it was only a matter of weeks until the Horgans were including the good-looking tutor in their small but close circle of friends.
With his droll wit and vociferous resentment of British tyranny, the lonely tutor found consolation in these Yankee bosoms—and, at last, a hint by the good grocer that he might be better able to help his country than by simply educating the ignorant. The grocer’s sly nudge in the ribs was followed by a mention of the Sons of Liberty, and Ahmad innocently responded with the expected question: “What can I, a mere tutor, do?”
Soon after that, with Horgan’s sponsorship, Ahmad was accepted into that intelligence realm that frequented the Green Dragon Tavern. The leaders of the Sons of Liberty naturally held reservations about all newcomers. But then Ahmad knew that, with patience, he would be welcomed with complete trust; that information could quite often be gleaned from those who let things slip due to sheer self-importance.
He bided his time, sitting for the most part unnoticed in the tavern’s wainscotted back room where a welcome fire blazed against the bitter winter-night cold. Silently he listened to the general discussion among the members of the spy net—the vain and wealthy merchant, John Hancock; Dr. Joseph Warren, the probable leader of the ring; Samuel Adams, the rabble-rouser whose red cloak was invariably rumpled and spotted and his wig askew. The last was the most dangerous of the American spies, for Adams had the talent to inflame the colonists through his pen, and to distort events without actually lying.
Yet it was the shipper-merchant Hancock the spy found most cunning. Ahmad would not be surprised to learn that Hancock, who had quantities of tea chests stored in one of his many warehouses, had instigated the now famous Boston Tea Party for the sole sake of driving up the price of tea.
It was these three men, Ahmad deemed, whom Gage would be most interested in when the time arrived to permanently crush the rebellion fomenting in Boston. And that would be soon.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A minor annoyance that was just the bud of the deep-growing tap root set off the argument between two people who for the past months had been warily circling one another like fighting bantams.
Jane finished playing the sentimental parlor ballad, “Rural Felicity,” and launched into “Tally Ho.” Her fingers flitted like fireflies over the harpsichord’s keyboard, while One-eyed Peter played his fife to simulate the horn fanfares of the Virginia fox hunters. Icabod punctuated the fanfares with a jut of his parrot’s nose, and Josiah, grinning widely, enjoyed the camaraderie of the impromptu gathering.
February’s ice-cold rain had drummed out the day’s work, to the delight of the three men who ringed the harpsichord. Ethan, though, was alone in his room—had been ever since that Powhatan, Mattaponi, appeared at the kitchen door that morning, asking in guttural tones Jane barely understood, to see Ethan. After nooning was past, she finally took the opportunity to fondle the keys, and one by one the three men drifted in from the kitchen, drawn by the lilt of the music.
The music was a balm to her lacerated spirit and lonely soul. The winter rains mired the roads, making them impassable, and the isolation could drive a woman to madness. With no visitors to worry about, she had not bothered to cut or re-henna her hair. Now the thick black mane cascaded in an unruly, unmanageable tangle that was dangerous prey to the candle’s leaping flame, and she was forced to restrain the willful hair with a leather thong.
Where now were the diamond pins, the velvet ribbons, the loops of pearls that once graced her lustrous tresses?
With less work to do in the winter, her weight was returning, her face regaining its softer contours. She lifted her face now as her fingers stroked the keys; her eyes closed to savor this soothing product of civilization. She was unaware of the hauntingly beautiful expression she presented to the three men. And cared not. She was lost in the rapturous moment that took her away from the harsh reality that constituted her present life.
“The four of you have nothing better to do?”
The music ceased abruptly. Jane and the three men all turned toward the staircase, where the lower steps were just visible from the parlor. Dressed in a collarless, faded-blue kersey shirt, Ethan stood on the first step, his brown hands braced on the balustrade. His knuckles were ridged with white. She raised her eyes, colliding with his hot stare, and she experienced, as happened quite often these days, the force of its impact. Beneath his half-lidded gaze, she felt like butter left to melt in the sun. If his eyes did not soon release hers, she would be a little puddle on the puncheon floor.
After the night he had held her in the rocking chair, she was different, vastly altered in some subtle way. Under his kiss, she had softened, had yielded. Here was a man she could no longer dismiss with a sneer.
Under Ethan’s annoyed glare, the three field hands sheepishly shuffled out of the parlor as they suddenly recalled pressing duties. Only she was left to face the big man. Guilt—and fear at his displeasure—whistled down her dry throat. She had been playing the instrument he had brought by wagon all the way from Williamsburg—for the sole use of his intended wife!
“Thy frivolity could better be directed,” he snarled. She could almost hear his teeth grinding as he turned from her.
Frivolity!
For a long moment she sat rooted to one spot, the anger in her building. Did anyone in those backwoods even know what frivolity was? Her stunned gaze focused on her reddened hands that rubbed each other in agitation.
Without considering the rashness of her act, she let her feet march her up the stairs. She pushed the door open. Ethan, his back three quarters to her, leaned over the desk. His Bible lay open, and his forefinger seemed to scan verses as he periodically jotted something on another sheet. Sensing her presence, he spun in the chair. She could have sworn a guilty look flashed across his dark face, instantly replaced by one of righteous anger as he shoved back the slatted chair and rose to his enormous height.
Her intestines knotted before this visual sign of wrath, the way she quelled as a child before her father’s explosive temper. Fear fired her words—unplanned, heedlessly spoken. “God-fearing man!” Her finger pointed contemptuously at his Bible. “You fear everything. Afraid to fight, afraid to rebel against wrongs, afraid to take a stand.”
He advanced on her, and her tongue babbled on in alarm. “You’re not much of a man at all. In fact, you make me ill.” She retreated a step. “Your hypocrisy.” The doorknob thrust against her hips. Closed! “Lusting after another man’s wife!”
“Shut up,” he said in a dangerously quiet voice, drawing perilously close to her all the while.
“She’s not yours to have”—her breath sobbed raspingly in her throat—“so you would vent your lust on me!”
He came up short. His eyes blinked. “Lust . . . after . . .” Laughter. “That’s what . . . thee . . . would like.”
She hit then, her fist catching him square in the flat solid wall of his stomach.
He grunted in surprise, and the laughter faded from his strongly delineated lips. Then his large hands shot o
ut, easily cupping her head. She dangled in his grasp, her shoes barely touching the floor, and she was forced to cling to his yard-wide shoulders.
Still, she spewed vituperations that had about as much effect as an axe cutting silk. “A pox on you—you oaf. You son of a sow. You—”
His fingers anchored in the abundant wealth of her hair and tilted her face to match the slant of his hard mouth. His angry kiss silenced her incoherent words, mashing her lips against her teeth. Uncomprehendingly, she welcomed the muted pain. His massive body flattened hers against the door, and she was intensely aware of the thick shaft that pushed against the soft cushion of her stomach.
Then she forgot even that phenomenon as her arms encircled the hard-columned neck. She had been achingly waiting for this. Since his last kiss months before. Too many months.
When his mouth opened and his tongue stroked the soft inner tissue of her lower lip, then shot forward to caress her paralyzed tongue, a thousand summer suns burnished her insides. His tongue thrust deeper, as if it would impale her—and she wanted it to! She heard her own rapid breathing; smelled the musky heat of his body; felt her veins engorged by the sudden rush of blood; tasted the deliciously salty flavor of his wet mouth. Never had she been so acutely alive! And she wanted that life to be crushed from her by this man who had bought her body.
Please . . . let him do what he will. . . . Please—Was that her voice murmuring unconsciously?
He buried his face in the hollow of her neck. His beard- stubbled jaw rasped her skin, taunting her. “Jane . . . Jane . . . thee is a veritable shrew.” His lips caressed her collarbone where it peaked above the drawstringed blouse.
Yes . . . yes. Don’t let it end.
“An ill-tempered wench.” His fingers found the drawstring, and the blouse veed open.
The translucent mounds of her breasts lay revealed. His tongue flicked the alabaster flesh. Her head tilted back, making it accessible even more for her master’s perusal. “I should lash thee for thy disrespect,” he rusked.
“Aye,” she whispered, wanting the touch of his hand. Cream filled the hollows of her insides that were being dug out by this terrible want. In answer his hand cupped one heavy breast, taking the aching, dusky nipple into his mouth. The gentle suction stirred her from the induced languor. “Ethan . . . ’tis wrong . . .” Yet her hands pressed his head against her softness. “I am a . . . virgin. . . .” Oh, dear God, what he was doing felt so good. “. . . could make me with child.”
He lifted his head. Her lips wrapped around an O, and she looked up into black eyes glazed with passion. The back of his arm wiped across those eyes. “Jane . . . I’m sorry, Jane.”
She heard the unsteadiness in his voice and knew that her legs were just as unsteady. If his body released its press on her by only an inch, she would slump ignomini-ously at his boots. She managed a cool, reproving look. “As well you should be!”
At that he threw back his head and laughed. “Ah, Jane! Thee wanted it as much as I did.”
Her insides jelled. “Not until you made me want it,” she said, each word spat through clenched teeth.
His smile waned. He stepped back, and she grasped the doorknob to keep from collapsing. “Thee is right,” he said, turning away. His mammoth shoulders bowed. “Go away. Go on. Leave me, mistress.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
That night Jane huddled against the seeping cold in the narrow bed that was too short for her unless she slept in a fetal position. Her toes were icicles, and she would swear it was because she was so abysmally tall that the blood never found its way to her feet. In the kitchen a fire burned, but the warmth that wafted down the short expanse of hall to her room was negated by the frigid draft that whistled under and between the kitchen’s Dutch door.
In the dark she listened to the burning wood’s heated resin pop and sizzle in the fireplace, while discordance rustled through her sleepy thoughts. She knew it was completely illogical to be bound beyond recall to someone she had seen so few times over the years. But fifty years could pass, and that bond would still be strong. As strong as the bond of blood.
She was bound to Terence by the shared past of her childhood and the future of her womanhood.
And Ethan? “He brings out my baser instincts,” she mumbled against the blanket that scratched her chin. For her, Terence represented security. And Ethan, danger. She felt nothing for the backwoodsman—at least nothing until he kissed her.
Chagrined at her feminine weakness, she burrowed deeper in her blanket, then restlessly shifted on the thin bed ticking. Would Terence never come for her? His lean handsome face was emblazoned on the back of her eyelids, when her name was spoken.
She sprang upright, clutching the quilt to her neck. Orange shreds of firelight flickered about a man’s form. In the dark she was barely able to distinguish the intruder as Ethan. His arms were laden with something she could not make out.
“What do you want?” she managed to get out.
“When the ink froze in its well tonight,” he said, moving unerringly about her room, “I realized you and the others would need more blankets to keep warm.”
So, even this late he worked at his desk. She was chagrined anew that paperwork so easily took precedence over any thought he might have spared to that afternoon and what almost happened between them. But then did he not own her? She meant little more to him than his other indentured servants. He only wanted her service in a different way!
The scraping of flint could be heard, then a small flame flared on the candle’s wick. Its light slowly filled the room and highlighted his face above it. He set the tinder and flint on the metal trunk that served as her nightstand and looked about him at the sparseness of the room—the dilapidated washstand with its ceramic pitcher and base on top and the porcelain chamber pot below; the hand-hewn press, little resembling her elaborately carved armoires that had bulged with watered silks and shining satins, with pearl-buckled pumps and beribboned hats.
“Quite bare for a woman accustomed to bedroom fireplaces and woolen bed curtains to keep out cold drafts.”
“You’ve brought the blankets,” she said testily. “You can leave.”
Shaking out a blanket’s folds, he leaned over her to drape the cover across her legs. “I wanted to talk to thee for a moment, mistress.”
Laughter crinkled lines at the comers of his eyes, and she snapped, “What is so funny, pray tell?”
“Thy night cap is out of kilter.” His large hands caught its dainty edges, adjusting it about her face. “Do not henna thy hair again, mistress. Nor cut it.”
His face was so close to hers that she found herself lost in the depths of those eyes. The eyes, she thought, were the entire man. Neither brown nor black, they were nonetheless luminous with the gentleness inside the man. She had hereto considered his face only roughly handsome, but now she also perceived the deep character sketched by its lines. There was still so much she didn’t know about him.
Her gaze brushed the ravaged patch of skin. “How did that happen?” she asked without thinking.
His mouth twisted wryly. “Nothing so exciting as what your British soldiers must experience. I was but a lad, an ignorant lad, and very cold. I foolishly tried to start a fire by flashing powder in the pan of an old-fashioned gun. The powder exploded and”—he fingered the weltered splotch—“and left this to mark me as a dunce.”
“Oh,” she said inadequately. She could not bring herself to look at him again and instead studied the blanket as if its weave were of supreme importance.
His compelling presence forced her to raise her gaze. At the dark glitter she recognized in his eyes a slight breathlessness constricted her lungs. She was alone with him, separated from him only by her thin flannel nightclothes and the bed coverings. The wind whistled down the fireplace’s great mortared flue, the only sound in the suddenly silent house.
Oh God, she had to escape soon.
“You had something you wished to talk to me about?” she asked, unable to h
ide the timorous quality to her voice.
The spell was broken. He rose, pushing back the dark auburn swath that fell across his broad forehead. “I have to call on the Fairmonts tomorrow. I thought thee might like to come along. We would spend the day. The night’s heavens promise a sunny day tomorrow,” he added, as if to tempt her further.
“What?” she mocked. “A servant gets a day off?”
His smile was impudent. “ ’Tis Sunday.”
The idea was very appealing—until it occurred to her that this was her opportunity to escape. With Ethan gone for the entire day she might just make it to Williamsburg if she followed first the Chickahominy River then the James. There she could find a Tory home and explain who she really was. Once the situation was known, surely the family would help her get to Boston. From there it should be easy to locate Terence.
“I’d rather not,” she said. “Being with people of their quality only reminds me of my present lowly station in life.”
“Thee seemed to enjoy Susan’s company, mistress.”
“Go feast your eyes on your beloved, Ethan Gordon, but leave me alone!”
He eyed her narrowly for a long moment, then gave a half bow and left the room without another word. She was almost sorry for her spiteful words. But whatever attraction she was beginning to feel for this colonial farmer paled beside the vision of Terence. His face and voice had haunted her since childhood—as he would continue to haunt her until the day she became his.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jane watched Ethan gallop off on the dun just after dawn, with the soft shafts of sunlight silhouetting man and beast as one. Quickly she performed her ablutions, this time not bothering with her usual muttered imprecations about the chilling water. Rolling a few of her belongings in her shawl, she fastened the mantle about her shoulders and closed the door on the cabin that had been her home for more than four months.
She was so deliriously happy at the prospect of a reunion with Terence that she wanted to find Icabod, Josiah, and Peter and plant a resounding good-bye kiss on each of their foreheads. Instead, she kept to the early-morning shadows of the trees and made her way down the withered- grass slope toward the Chickahominy.
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