“We know that. But he does move in those political circles occasionally. You might overhear something. Listen. Watch. Think, gal—your fiancé’s life might depend on what you learn!”
Jane drew a deep breath. To lose Terence—how could she go on through life? “If I find the Leper—you’ll find my fiancé for me?”
The old woman drooped a wrinkled lid in a wink. “Agreed.” She leaned forward and opened the coach’s door. “Pay a visit to Lizzie here, child, if you have any information.”
Only half consoled, Jane left. When she arrived back at Paradise Lost, she realized she had forgotten the marketing she was supposed to do. She turned in the hall to make the trek again to Market Square, only to find that Ethan loomed in the library’s doorway. His normally placid expression was rigid with anger, the burn on his cheek almost scarlet. “Thy purchases?”
She swallowed. “I forgot.”
He advanced on her. “Shall I beat thee for thy transgression?”
She remembered Lizzie’s story of Polly suffering Wainwright’s brutal beatings. She took an involuntary step backward but was blocked by the solid wooden door. “You would not!”
“I am sorely tempted, mistress.” His large fingers wrapped about her upper arm, and he pulled her over to the parlor window, drawing back the Venetian slats an inch or so. Dust flurried in the shafts of sunlight. “Look, there, across the avenue.”
She obeyed, seeing nothing out of the ordinary to account for Ethan’s altered behavior. But she was aware of the way he dwarfed her, making her feel vulnerable—and strangely feminine. The knuckles of the hand that gripped her upper arm were pressed against the outside of her breast, and suddenly the room seemed stifling. She managed to swallow. “I see carriages and people strolling.” “The man by the nearest live oak—does thee not re-member him?”
She stared. Beneath the black tricorn the man’s face was narrow and pointed—like a fox’s. “The man who bid against you for me,” she recalled with a shudder.
“Uriah Wainwright—head of the Committee for Safety.”
“And?”
He jerked her around to face him. “The Committee of Safety does more than just ostracize suspected Tories and cause them to lose their businesses and ultimately leave town. They tar and feather—very unpleasant, I assure thee. The flesh peels away in painful patches.” His forefinger reached out to touch the lone pox mark that clefted her chin. “Thy soft skin would never be the same again—and thee would be marked worse than I.”
Marked! She shivered beneath his touch. “But I have done nothing.”
“No? Then why does our friend follow thee? If not to the market, where did thee go?”
Her eyes looked up to meet his defiantly. “I met a woman who came over with me on the Cornwall.''
“And nothing else?”
She shook his hand off her arm. She cordially hated the man. “We fell to talking, and I forgot my errand. That is all!”
“I would not take thee for an empty-headed goose.”
“I wish you had not taken me at all!” she said, and flounced off to the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bram and Susan came to call the following day. At least Jane, who had risen before dawn, managed to dust that morning, though she had yet to hang the Wilton carpet outside and beat it. The tea table and drop-leaf card table, the upholstered settee and tapestried daybed all shone with the beeswax polish. Likewise the spinet, which she didn’t play lest she arouse Ethan’s ire. She thought it strange, because initially he seemed mild-mannered. Only of late had his temper struck sparks.
Susan looked lovely in a mauve gown of the finest lawn with a matching parasol. A lacy little butterfly cap perched on her light-brown ringlets. Jane watched for signs in Ethan’s warm greeting of any languishing lovesickness over the fair young matron. But she sensed that he was not the type of man to pine for what he could not have.
As Jane served the glasses of cool cider, Susan insisted she join her on the settee. “When I saw Ethan in the Apollo Room of Raleigh’s Tavern last night and learned that you were here also, I told Bram we were not waiting a moment longer to call on you.”
Jane knew Ethan had been invited to a reception and private dinner given by the Williamsburg Volunteers the evening before. She spent the evening alone, sulking like a child. Yet the very last dinner she had attended as the Lady Jane Lennox—a royal dinner, no less—had bored her. Until she entered into conversation with the marked man beside her, a conversation that changed her life drastically.
Setting the Paradises’ silver tray on the semicircular side table, she glanced at Ethan. His face was noncommittal. Strange, she often forgot that he was marred. She took her place at the end of the settee, across from the two men, spreading her coarse, colorless skirts with all the grace of a duchess arranging her satins. She poured the cider and passed him and Bram the crystal cups with an assurance and elegance that was innate. She could have as easily been pouring tea at the Governor’s Palace.
“I daresay his dinner partner was the lovely lady with the prettily pouting lips?” she asked of Susan.
Ethan’s lids narrowed at his maidservant’s drollery, but Susan took her cup with a merry laugh. “Margaret Peyton? Hardly. It was the slightly crazy Widow Grundy.” Jane’s gaze flicked uneasily to Ethan.
“Thee has heard of her, mistress?” he asked casually. A coincidence? Or was this man who owned her shrewder than she estimated? Cup in hand, she replied smoothly, “She is the mistress of the woman I spoke of—the servant woman who came over on the Cornwall with me.”
Susan leaned forward. “Meg, you may have come over as an indentured servant, but all of Williamsburg—nay, half the counties of Virginia—prattle otherwise. Your aristocracy is evident in everything you do—your speech, your movements, your fine bone struc—”
“Um!” Bram cleared his throat. Embarrassed by his wife’s candor, he nervously fingered the buckle of his stiff stock. “We called on more important matters, Ethan. The pompous Dunmore removed the powder from the magazine this morning.”
“It does not surprise me.”
“Ethan!” Bram exclaimed. “Where is your rage at the governor’s act? Where is your patriotism?”
Ethan shrugged. “This is what Patrick Henry has been waiting for—one more royal act of tyranny to spark revolution in the colony. This will alienate the colony from the Crown as nothing else has.”
“Word is about that Patrick Henry plans to demand payment in exchange,” Susan added.
“Thee may count on it,” Ethan said with a wry smile at the young woman, a smile that did not quite hide that glimmer of affection that Jane had caught before. “Henry is Virginia’s answer to Boston’s Sam Adams.”
The talk turned to the Second Continental Congress that was sitting in Philadelphia that month. Jane’s concern was not whether or not the colonies would declare independence from Great Britain. Her problem was finding Terence. “What of this Leper and his Colony?” she asked casually.
“Now there is a patriot of the finest water!” Bram exclaimed.
Ethan ignored him and fixed his onyx eyes on her. “Why does thee ask?”
She shrugged carelessly. “My friend on the Cornwall was talking about the man—the mastermind of the inter-colony spy network, I believe she worded it.”
“A daring man!” Susan said with a sparkle in her lovely gray eyes. “And quite dashing!”
“You have seen the Leper?” she asked, astounded.
“Well . . . no,” Susan hedged. “But someone as courageous and patriotic and ingenious as—”
“Zounds, Susan!” Bram interjected. “You make him sound like a Greek god.”
“A leper,” Ethan said drily, “is a far cry from the imaginary beauty of the Greek gods.”
“Well, Nox,” Bram said, “was certainly not renowned for his fair beauty.”
“Ah, but Hades,” Susan interrupted. “Remember—he was a grimly beautiful god.”
The subject w
ent from there to Greek myths, and Jane was no closer to learning anything about the Leper than before.
When Susan and Bram prepared to take their leave, Susan suggested Jane and Ethan attend church that Sunday with them. “Your Society of Friends cannot disapprove a function intended to worship the Lord,” Susan cajoled Ethan.
A look of amusement combined with tenderness crossed his face as he accepted. Jane almost declined Susan’s matchmaking attempt until it occurred to her that Bruton Parish Church was Anglican, the official church of the colonies and controlled by the Crown. It was an opportunity to acquaint herself with any other Tory families in the county.
When she, too, accepted, Ethan’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Would you deny me the right to worship?” she asked archly of him.
“Nay.” His eyes mocked her. “I know thee has prayers for deliverance to offer up.”
By Sunday morning Jane regretted her hasty acceptance of Susan’s invitation. Standing in her shift and petticoat, she realized she had no formal dress to wear. Half an hour later she descended the stairs in a serviceable gray muslin dress, with a soft but threadbare fichu swathed at her throat. Her chin rose haughtily at the startled look in the ebony eyes of the man who waited below, dressed all in black as usual. This Quaker was the grimly beautiful Hades of the underworld who had ridden, not in a chariot as Hades pursued Persephone, but by horse to claim her the day she ran away.
“It had not occurred to me . . .’’he rumbled, his hand motioning inadequately at her attire.
She faced him, their eyes barely on the same level, though she stood two steps above him. Her irritation at the situation she had contrived for herself combined with her humiliation at the role she was forced to play. “What? Concern for your humble servant’s appearance? How noble is the master!”
His lips tightened, but his voice had that calming drawl. “Thee will not provoke me. Come—or stay—as thee desires.”
With that he left. Fuming, she followed him. His stride outdistanced even her long one so that she was forced to quicken her pace the few blocks to the salmon-brick gothic church. From the white, wooden steeple a bell peeled out to the assembly. Only as they reached the entrance did Ethan pause beneath the shade of the towering magnolia to tuck his tricorn under his arm and let her precede him.
It seemed that all eyes were turned on her. From the large square of pews set aside for the governor and Council, there were audible gasps. Dunmore, who sat pompously beneath a canopied chair, whispered something behind his beringed hand to the attractive woman on his left—Margaret Peyton.
Ethan, his fingers firmly gripping Jane’s elbow, guided her first past the pews filled by all classes of colonists, then past the north transept gallery, occupied by the Negro slaves who had their own separate entrance. At last he halted before the pew where Bram and Susan sat. These were the transept pews reserved for members of the General Assembly, most of whom were Whigs bent on separation from the Crown. The tension between these radicals and the Tories sitting with Lord Dunmore seemed almost palpable to Jane.
Smiling in delight when she saw Jane and Ethan, Susan moved her wide hoops aside to make room for the two. The dreary service seemed interminable to Jane—made so by the press of Ethan’s hard flanks against her own. Had she worn a lady’s paniers, there would not have been this intimate touching.
His weather-brown hand rested lightly on the hymnal— and was as large as the song book, large enough to cover her abdomen. At the forbidden thought her skin seemed to tighten over her bones.
Though it was customary after the rector’s sermon to stroll about the grounds, socializing, issuing invitations to dinner, the governor and his retinue departed immediately, thus dashing Jane’s hope of learning more of the parish’s Tory families. In the brick-walled courtyard only Susan and Bram joined Ethan and her, though several children ran to tug on Ethan’s coat skirts, crying, “Windmill!” For them Ethan was a massive toy. And as the children clamored about him, he accepted his role genially, rotating a tow-headed toddler up in the air like the blades of Robertson’s windmill. Did Ethan long for the children that Susan might have provided him?
When half a dozen colonists wearing belligerent expressions gathered before the church’s entrance, the romping halted. Among them was Uriah Wainwright, dapperly dressed in a suit of minister’s gray. Though his countenance was benign as a rector’s, Jane could tell by the way his head occasionally jutted in her direction that he was plotting like a pharisee. A sinister tension slowly pervaded the air.
Ethan set the boy down, and the children scurried away like frightened field mice. A fierce glare replaced the laughter in Ethan’s eyes.
“Pay no attention to the niggling tongues,” Susan counseled, laying a comforting hand on Jane’s arm.
Yet, it was difficult to ignore the rising voice of the little man. “A Jezebel, she is.” His bony finger pointed undeniably at her. “A Tory temptress baiting this God¬fearing patriot with the sin of fornication!”
Ethan’s arm flexed beneath Jane’s hand. “Ethan!” Bram warned. “No. Not here.”
Jane’s lips curled in scorn at Wainwright. “So speaks the sanctimonious Brutus!” Head high, she sailed majestically from the churchyard. Tears blurred her eyes, and she was not even certain which direction lay the Paradise house.
Ethan caught up with her before the courthouse. He jerked her around by her shoulders. “Never leave me like that!”
She would not look at him but fastened her shimmering gaze on the King’s Arms affixed to the courthouse door. “It stings your pride?” she cut. “That a mere maiden would battle when a man of peace will not?”
His fingers gripped her shoulders. “Do not bait me, mistress.”
“I tire of the whispers behind my back, of having my name bandied about as the Whore of Babylon!”
“Shall I marry thee then and make honorable thy name?” he ground out.
Her lids flared. “I—marry you? Never! Better your servant for seven years than your wife forever!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The next few days Paradise Lost became a prison to Jane, for Ethan studiously ignored her by remaining away as much as possible—attending elegant dinners and balls at the governor’s palace and the assembly balls and suppers given at the taverns for all who cared to purchase tickets.
Who was his dinner partner? Margaret Peyton? Susan had casually mentioned that the woman was married to a doddering but wealthy man. At church, the woman looked small and soft, like Susan—except for the eyes. Jane had caught the laughing challenge Margaret’s dark-brown eyes had issued to Ethan. But Margaret could not know that his heart belonged to Susan. How droll that the populace believed Ethan to be enamoured of his maidservant!
Within days Jane received the first of a trickling stream of anxious, wary callers who had heard in that colony of shifting and uncertain political ties that Ethan Gordon’s maidservant was loyal to the king. Always they inquired if the master was away before the tightness eased from their faces.
There was Lucy Barnes, whose husband was a cobbler. Jane sat in the parlor with the sloping-chinned woman and listened to the hesitant words accelerate until the woman’s speech became like a runaway carriage.
“We—me husband and me—don’t want to take sides . . . we love this land . . . my second-born is buried here ... but we love England, too. Why, we were raised there, don’t you see? Like yourself, mistress. We celebrated the king’s birthday and rejoiced at his wedding. We don’t want killing between our own blood. Me husband keeps saying there must be some way we can work this out . . .”
Jane found it incredible that bitter Tory fathers could battle against equally rabid Whig sons. Then again, she also found it unusual that in Virginia it was mostly the rich planters, the colonial aristocrats, who were for the revolution and not the have-nots, as in the other colonies. This gentry was not composed of ambitious men on the make, rebels against the establishment. They were the establishment. Of all the coloni
es, Virginia with its House of Burgesses had been the closest to self-government, and the aristocrats who served in the House of Burgesses were not about to give up that autonomy.
Jane contained her observations before her visitors. Other Tories came. The short, balding William Dribble, a Tory gunsmith who that first hour fell to one knee in courtship of Jane; Cornelia MacAbee, the wife of the wealthy Scottish merchant who was even at that moment negotiating to sell Ethan’s indigo to French concerns; and the Wormelys, the aristocratic planter and his wife who pro-essed they were but passive loyalists—“which is only a little better,” Ralph Wormely announced frankly, “than those who ride the fence—such as your master. One day he will be forced to take sides.”
She refilled Wormely’s cup. “No one forces Ethan Gordon to do anything, Mr. Wormely.” She should know.
She subtly prodded each visitor for information on the Leper’s Colony. All had heard of the underground intelligence organization, but few knew facts of any worth.
Two other visitors came regularly—Uriah Wainwright, who never called but remained across the street before the Lightfoot house, watching; and, of course, gentle Susan. Jane would lead her to the back porch where it was cooler and offer her a cup of cider or julep.
She admired Susan’s sensible accomplishments. The genteel young woman was schooled in the fine arts of the kitchen as well as in the preservation and storing of foods. Jane knew not the first thing about the planting and harvesting of the kitchen’s garden, but Susan was generous in sharing her knowledge. But their conversations did not always concern domestic issues.
“I am afraid Ethan’s reckless actions have earned you Uriah Wainwright’s everlasting hatred,” Susan said during one of her pleasant visits.
“Ethan—reckless?”
“Aye. When Uriah Wainwright baited you before the assembly in the Bruton Parish churchyard. After you walked away, Ethan grabbed the odious man’s stock and cuffed him on the jaw. Bram and the others had to restrain Ethan. Can you imagine?” She dimpled. “Ethan Gordon, a man of peace, forgetting his Quaker doctrine?”
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