Letitia’s cheeks had grown very pink. It was perfectly true—and she could not help but know it—that while great events were happening in the outside world (Charles II had died suddenly in February and his illegitimate eldest son, the wild young Duke of Monmouth, was expected momentarily to sail from Holland and mount a rebellion against his uncle, the newly crowned James II) Williamsburg gossip was generally focused on the tempestuous Lightfoots.
“Surely you cannot fault me for riding about in broad daylight with my cousin!” she cried in her imperious voice.
“You were a bit more than that,” he flung bitterly over his shoulder, “when I had the misfortune to meet you!”
“Misfortune?” Her indignant voice followed him up the stairs. “Indeed ’tis a deal more likely the gossips are discussing you and the way you fawn over that Roland girl!”
“Young Mistress Roland has admirers aplenty without adding my name to her list!” roared her husband from the landing. “You’re only trying to divert my attention from your behavior, Letty!”
Carolina had now gained the first floor. She and her older sister Penny watched, fascinated, from the living room door, as Letitia gathered up her skirts and charged past them. She ran up the stairs and began pummeling her husband on the chest with her fists. “I won’t have you speak to me like that!” she had cried,, almost sobbing. “I stayed with you through the worst times! I’ve been a good wife to you—I have!” He had dragged her into the bedroom from which angry voices had erupted in bursts—and Fielding had ended up taking them all back to Farview Plantation a day earlier than had been intended.
“I’ll be glad to be out of it,” Penny had muttered shortly before leaving with Emmett for her mad dash up the peninsula to the Marriage Trees; She had tossed back her cloud of red hair. “All this constant bickering, all this hatred, I’ll be glad to leave it all behind me!”
It wasn’t so much hatred, thought Carolina, as rage. Rage that they should have been tied together in the first place, she supposed, although theirs had been a runaway marriage. Letitia had had a falling out with her illicit love, Sandy Randolph, Sandy had gone away, and her parents had seized upon his absence to betroth rebellious Letitia to a doddering old gentleman—and she had suddenly run away with Fielding Lightfoot instead.
It hadn’t worked out. Everybody agreed on that. They both had combustible tempers and sharp tongues.
“And you must go too, Carol.” Penny had given her younger sister a troubled look. “Oh, promise me you will—just as soon as you get the chance! You mustn’t stay here any longer than you have to.”
Carolina had been startled by her older sister’s vehemence. “But—but I haven’t anyone to run away with!” she had objected.
“You will have.” Penny sighed. “And when you do, don’t waste a minute—run. You can never be happy here. Don’t you see that Father—” She broke off.
“No, I don’t see,” said Carolina sturdily, for something in her sister’s tone alarmed her.
“Well, I mean—” Sophisticated Penny gave her a worldly look that suddenly took in her youth, her innocence. “I mean all this—this trouble between them. We seem to fire it up, don’t we?”
“You don’t, Penny,” Carolina had said truthfully. “But I certainly seem to.” And she had fallen silent before her sister’s muttered, “Poor little Carol,” and her sudden suffocating hug.
They had not spoken further about it. They had all gone back to Farview—the girls agog with plans.
Ordinarily her parents’ bickering and long silences worried Carolina—as if she were somehow to blame. But not this time. This time she had been too excited over Penny’s impending elopement.
Now, holding a wet sheet cradled against her flushed face to keep it from whipping away from her in the wind, Carolina drew a deep heartfelt sigh. If only she could be riding toward the Marriage Trees today—not with someone dull like Emmett, of course, but with The Golden Stranger of her dream!
“Oh, do come along, Carol!” Virginia’s impatient voice interrupted Carolina’s reverie, even though the sound of that too was almost blown away by the wind. “That’s the last sheet you’re clawing at there. Snatch it up and don't stand there staring toward the north— Mother will see you and be furious. She’s already broken half the dishes over finding Penny missing!”
Galvanized into action by the sudden mention of her mother, whom all five Lightfoot daughters secretly feared—although somewhat less than they feared their tall handsome father with his violent temper and his forbidding expression—Carolina made a snatch for the sheet, which had just blown away from her, and gasped as a sudden gust of wind tore away her blue hair riband, seized her long fair hair to send it flying, and whipped her sky blue linen skirts and frosty white petticoat up above her knees. Even as she was fighting those skirts down—for her mother might be watching from the dining room window and her mother vastly disapproved of Carolina’s lightsome ways, which were too much like her own as a girl—that last damp bedsheet from the wind-whipped laundry slapped her in the face.
Penny had certainly chosen a day of terrible weather, thought Carolina, to elope. But of course it had all been planned ahead—indeed schemed over for weeks by the three older Lightfoot daughters. And the Great Laundry, which took place in large households like the Lightfoots’ every two months, had been unanimously chosen as the time that fleeing Penny was least likely to be missed. But the weather had turned out to be as tempestuous as Penny’s young heart. All along the Virginia Capes it had been a day of wild weather; Carried on the leading edge of a storm that was howling out of the Caribbean, gale force winds had ripped into the Carolina Capes, and from Hatteras to Nag’s Head great seas were even now crashing into the grassy dunes.
The long peninsula where Carolina stood—which the Indians called Accomack meaning “the other-side land” but which Virginians called “the Eastern Shore” —was beginning to feel the brunt of the approaching storm. At the ramshackle wooden plantation house on Old Plantation Creek, built frighteningly near the water and in bad repair (After all, why repair it? They’d soon be abandoning it to occupy the fine new brick house for which Fielding Lightfoot had already laid the foundation near Yorktown!) the enormous laundry the servants had hung out to dry late yesterday had almost all been taken in—along with such clotheslines as had not already been blown away.
Carolina, with her mind still on Penny’s fate and with the damp bedsheet clutched in her arms, was the last to make the trek to the big attic where the sheet would join its fellows, all neatly hanging on lines where they were least likely to mildew. On her way up she passed the servants coming down, and found only Virgie waiting for her in the dimness of the rough-beamed attic.
“Isn’t it exciting, Penny eloping like this?” giggled Virgie. Virgie was two inches shorter than Carolina and considerably plumper; her hair was somewhere between Penny’s true red and Carolina’s shimmering pale silver-gold. She was a strawberry blonde with her mother’s dark blue eyes but without her fire—indeed her placid unremarkable features resembled Aunt Pet’s and looked more in keeping on the older woman than on a girl. She took a deep longing breath. “I wish I were running away to the Marriage Trees!”
“But you haven’t even selected anyone yet!” objected Carolina, giving her older sister a startled look. She and Virgie and Penny had always been closer than the other two Lightfoot daughters, who had straggled along years later.
“I know. Still—I’d run away from here in a minute! Did you hear all those dishes breaking? There won’t be a plate left to eat on, we’ll be back to pewter!” The wind sang eerily around the eaves, seeking to find a chink in the roof that would let it in. Virgie cocked her head, listening. “At least these wind gusts should slow down the horses so maybe Father won’t catch up with Penny and Emmett!”
“Penny and Emmett are battling the same wind,” pointed out Carolina.
Virgie shrugged. “Yes, but Penny and Emmett started out early and it wasn’t nearly
so bad then.” She leaned over to help Carolina pull the last damp sheet taut on the line. “There’s no chance Father will be back tonight unless he gives up the chase—and you know Father, he’ll never do that!”
Somewhat sobered by that thought, both girls picked up their voluminous skirts and hurried downstairs.
They had almost reached the lower hall when their mother’s imperious voice called to them. “Carolina, Virginia, come here.” And the two girls went into the dining room where their younger sisters, little Della and Flo, already stood in awed silence against the paneled pine wall, staring first at their mother and then at the broken dishes that littered the floor.
Letitia Lightfoot, tall, slender and formidable in her fashionable sprigged calico gown, stood at gaze as she surveyed the new arrivals. Her thick honey hair, unfaded by bearing five children, shimmered like Carolina’s though in a deeper hue, but her long fierce blue eyes would never match the calmness of Carolina’s silver gray ones which turned to tarnished silver when she was angry. Carolina returned her mother’s raking gaze innocently.
Where have I gone wrong? Letitia Lightfoot was asking herself as she surveyed what she had wrought.. Why would a daughter of mine run off like that? And with a totally unsuitable boy!
But perhaps the situation could still be saved. Perhaps the girls knew something. Even if Fielding failed to arrive in time to prevent the marriage, there was still such a thing as an annulment if he did but arrive before the consummation had taken place. And perhaps Pennsylvania—for Letitia never called her daughters by the nicknames they used for each other—had plans to marry over the border and then circle back to Williamsburg where Emmett was employed as a clerk.
“Virginia,” she said, addressing her second eldest. “I want you and Carolina to tell me all you know about your sister Pennsylvania’s elopement. Delaware and Florida”—she nodded toward the two solemn tots standing against the wall—“have already told me all they know.”
The two older girls winced at this use of their given names. Even garrulous Aunt Pet had wailed at her niece Letty’s decision to name her daughters for an assortment of colonies instead of decorously christening them “Petula” for her and “Samantha” for Fielding’s mother and so on. To the Lightfoot daughters it was too much to be borne, and they had promptly nicknamed themselves Penny, Virgie, Carol, Della and Flo—but to their mother they remained Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina, Delaware and Florida, and she never called them anything else.
“I don’t really know anything, Mother,” said Virgie nervously.
“Nonsense, of course you do!”
“We know that Penny and Emmett rode off to the north,” supplied Carolina serenely.
Their mother’s face hardened. “You knew they were eloping then!” she surmised with remarkable calm.
“Why, Mother, how could we know?” quavered Virgie, who had not Carolina’s stamina.
Carolina gave her older sister a scornful look. Virgie always folded under pressure. “I knew they were eloping,” she announced with a calm that matched her mother’s. Virgie gave a squeak of fright at this admission.
“And you did not choose to inform me?” Those fierce blue eyes pinned Carolina and the girl felt a shimmer of fear go through her.
“You were very busy,” said Carolina in a moment of inspiration.
“Busy?” Letitia Lightfoot sounded amazed. “You thought I was too busy to be told my daughter was eloping?”
“You were quarreling with Father,” supplied Carolina uneasily.
“Nonsense, I am always quarreling with your father,” said her mother in a quelling voice. “His ways would try the patience of a saint! Tell me, why did you not interrupt this quarrel with news of such importance?”
“But Mother, we could hear you all the way to the stables,” interjected Virgie, seeing a possible way out. “We were afraid to interrupt.”
“Carolina was not afraid,” interrupted her mother her eyes never leaving Carolina’s face. “Carolina is like me—not afraid of anything.”
Carolina regarded her steadily. She wondered what would happen this time—a switching, boxed ears?
“So tell me, Carolina, what are their plans?”
“I don’t think they have any,said Carolina, unhelpfully but with perfect truth. The young couple’s plans reached mainly to the Marriage Trees and getting the knot securely tied. After that they would plunge into Maryland and lose themselves before a furious Fielding Lightfoot could get his hands on them.
Her mother frowned and turned suddenly upon Virginia, who flinched. “And you, Virginia? What do you know of their plans?”
“Nothing,” bleated Virginia. “It’s the truth!” She was almost sobbing.
Letitia studied both her daughters for a long while. Then, “I believe you,” she said in a softer voice. “You will stay in the house—it is dangerous outside, I just saw a tree limb fly by. And you, Carolina and Virginia, will go to bed this night without supper. And you will pray on your knees that Pennsylvania is found and in time.”
Carolina dropped her silver-gray gaze to the random-width oak floor boards lest her mother see the rebellious light in her eyes. If she prayed at all, it would be that Penny and Emmett forever eluded Fielding Lightfoot!
Chapter 2
All five girls trooped out, picking their way over the broken china, and Letitia Lightfoot turned to gaze out the window at a bit of clothesline flying by. Of them all, she told herself, only Carolina was truly like her. Not in looks but in the way she met life—head on and unflinching. She sighed. It would bring her nothing but disaster of course.
It was very hard having all daughters. She remembered Aunt Pet’s plaintive comment when she had borne her last child: “It’s too bad you didn’t have a boy—Fielding would have been so pleased. I really, think that’s the reason you don’t get along.”
Letitia, lying in the big feather bed nursing her newborn daughter, had given her aunt a wry look. She knew why they didn’t get along but she had no inclination to discuss it—with Aunt Pet or anyone else.
“Oh, well,” Aunt Pet had sighed, seeing that expression. “Perhaps you’ll have a boy yet!” Letitia doubted it.
Her first two daughters, arriving barely a year apart, had been born during the years when she and Fielding had gotten along, those first years when, after an ill-considered runaway marriage, she had tried so desperately to love him. Looking back, her gaze turned wistful. The lad from the York and the girl from Jamestown should never have married. Indeed she had only turned to him in desperation when she had quarreled with Sandy and he had left in a huff, sailed away to God knew where. Her parents—already furious that she should be in love with a married man, had seized upon Sandy’s absence to betroth her to elderly Martin Spalding, a widower with nine children, whose holdings bordered Tower Oaks, the Randolph estate along the James River, where Sandy Randolph had grown up.
Fielding Lightfoot’s parents had planned for him to marry dark lovely Amanda Bramway, heiress to the adjoining plantation. Indeed there was bad blood between the Lightfoots and Letitia Randolph’s parents—a trivial matter over a horse race that had rankled and been blown up much bigger than it should have been—so any match between the Lightfoots and the Randolphs would have been frowned upon. Desperate at the prospect of being tied to an elderly man who hobbled around with gout, young Letitia had turned her fiery dark blue gaze upon the likeliest of the eligible young bucks—Fielding Lightfoot.
They had met in secret, pledged their troth in secret, and it had all culminated in a whirlwind—though carefully planned—visit to a friend’s house on the Eastern Shore and a wild dash for the Marriage Trees where a tipsy justice of the peace had performed a ceremony that had chained them together forever.
Yet they had been happy during those first years, spent in Philadelphia, and Letitia had named her first daughter Pennsylvania in celebration of that happiness, and her second daughter Virginia for the home she missed. But then things had begun to go wron
g. Fielding’s ventures into the mercantile world were, failing, for he was at heart a planter, not a merchant. Too proud to tell his young wife they were near ruin, his temper grew short and he bitterly criticized everything—her friends, her housekeeping, even the clothes she wore. Spirited Letitia, not understanding, fought back and their quarrels lingered for days. Finally it was too much. She packed up and left him—took her two children back to her father’s house in Virginia. But eventually, as Aunt Pet put it, she had “come to her senses” and returned to Philadelphia.
Whether she had come to her senses or not, Fielding’s tired words, “We’re ruined,” that greeted her when she arrived had certainly galvanized energetic Letitia into action. She had been a tower of strength in moving their little family back to the Tidewater country —and a temporary home with Fielding’s people. There family quarrels had erupted for Letitia was outspoken and Fielding was blunt—diplomacy was needed and none was to be found. By the time her third daughter was born Letitia was heartily sick of all her husband’s blood relations and she once impulsively told Aunt Pet that she had named her third child Carolina out of an ardent wish to fly away south.
That was the beginning of the worst years when Fielding, no longer welcome in his father’s house, had settled with funds his ailing mother had managed to scrape up into a deserted plantation house on Old Plantation Creek which Letitia named Farview for its long vistas but which was promptly rechristened Bedlam by the wags in Williamsburg, when they heard of the wild goings-on there.
Lovesong Page 3
