Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Safe, I hope, somewhere beyond the Maryland border.”

  “She made it,” breathed Carolina. “Penny made it!”

  Fielding heard that and his dark head swung round. His gaze fixed on Carolina, standing there tired and disheveled in the dawn, and a mixture of emotions crossed his face—resentment, frustration, rage even. That storm was quickly gone and he turned an expressionless countenance back to his wife, but Carolina felt devastated by it. That look had not included Virginia, who was standing nearby just as glad about Penny as she was—it had been meant for her alone. Whoever else he was glad to see, Fielding Lightfoot was not glad to see her. She felt a sudden wash of loneliness, and a kind of inner weeping for herself, the only daughter her father could not seem to love.

  Dully, she heard Letitia’s contemptuous voice ring out. “Safe! Safe, you call it, Field? Your daughter is off marrying a lad with no money and no prospects and you call her safe? She will end up taking in laundry!”

  Fielding Lightfoot, so blazingly glad to see his wife a moment before, now gave her a lowering look. “I’m hungry,” he announced. “And the horses must be attended to. Is there some hot broth about for the men?” When his wife did not answer him he brushed past her and the girls melted away before him as he strode toward the kitchen. “Why, what is this?” he demanded, amazed. “The fire’s out!” He realized suddenly how bedraggled his daughters looked, hovering nearby with their faces and clothes smudged with soot. “And you’re all filthy,” he cried, and turned on his wife, just now coming through the door Behind him. “What were you thinking of, Letty, to let the fire go out? And to let your children run about in this condition?”

  “I was thinking to save your house,” she shot at him. “And the girls spent the night sheltering in the kitchen fireplace—while you were fruitlessly galloping about the peninsula!”

  Fielding’s expression, which had softened as her explanation sank in on him, hardened again at that last remark.

  “Cold food will do,” he said harshly. He turned to the servants. “And be quick. My men are like to fall off their horses from exhaustion after fighting that wind and rain all day and all night.”

  Carolina, watching, thought she had seen the spark that might have united them when he returned flicker and die. They were at odds again, this handsome warring couple.

  Her heart was still aching from that cold implacable look her father had given her, a look she ascribed, in her innocence, to the part he believed she must have played in Penny’s plans for a runaway marriage.

  Ardently, like Penny before her, she wished herself someplace else.

  Chapter 3

  Carolina turned away from the combatants and wandered into the damp world outside. There was work to be done, but at the moment she did not want to gaze upon either of her parents, hero and heroine though they might be. In the wake of the storm she wanted to see happiness around her—and if she could find no real happiness, then she would imagine it.

  She would imagine her father’s homecoming as it should have been—as it would have been, she told herself staunchly, had she been in her mother’s shoes. Her mother should have run to him, clung to him, told him how glad she was that he was safe—and he would have responded. He would have run his long fingers through the halo of her hair and hugged her to him and thanked God they were all safe—even if Penny had eluded him.

  Her foot caught on something and she looked down. Why, it was a doll! It had once been Virginia’s doll and she herself had named it Nan White for a beautiful legendary ghost the servants muttered about. How could it have gotten out here, bedraggled, face down and covered with mud? She picked it up and saw that its painted face was ruined, its once trusting and innocent expression oddly distorted by cracks and hard knocks, its soft kid-covered body soaked beneath its tattered clothing. The two younger children must have been playing with it and carelessly left it on the ground when they had been called indoors yesterday. . . .

  She held the doll up and to her its battered face was still sweet. Her gray eyes clouded. Oh, she had memories of Nan White. . . .

  Fielding had brought the doll home from Williamsburg one day. He had tossed it onto the little blue velvet sofa and gone striding out to find Letitia. But little Carolina, who had observed his entrance from the next room where she had been playing quietly, for Penny was away visiting and Virginia in bed with a cold upstairs had come running in after he had left and seized the doll rapturously.

  This must be the dolly her mother had promised her! It had to be! And oh, wasn’t she wonderful with her slim waist and her hair drawn back from a full high brow? And look at her gown—a magnificent court dress, its flaring skirt held out by a real hoop! Blissfully, little Carolina had rubbed her childish cheek against the softly tinted velvet and striped brocade of the doll’s gown and determined then and there that she would christen her Nan White.

  She had been about to dash upstairs to show her wonderful new doll to Virginia when she heard angry voices approaching and paused.

  Her parents were quarreling when they came into the room.

  Letitia swept in first, stiff-backed in her swirl of purple damask skirts. “I had every right to demand full payment for the mare!” she was insisting. “You were not here and—”

  “But I had told Cart he could have time to pay for her!”

  “How was I to know that? I thought he should—”

  “Damme, Letty,” exploded Fielding. “Why can’t you let me run the plantation while you occupy yourself with women’s pursuits?” His glance suddenly took in little Carolina, cradling the doll.

  “I’ve named her Nan White,” the child announced. She clutched the doll to her in sudden fright as if she sensed that this angry man might wrench it away from her.

  For a moment Fielding glared down at her and the child stepped back before the anger in that look. Then he swooped down and tore it from her grasp. “I bought that doll for Virginia—not you!” he said, anger at his wife harshening his tone. “She’s the one who’s sick upstairs!”

  Indignation made little Carolina cry out, “But Virgie already has a doll—and I haven’t any!” She made a desperate snatch for the departing velvet and striped brocade of the doll’s dress. When she missed, she turned to her mother with a wail.

  “Oh, do be quiet, Carolina.” Intent on settling the matter of the mare, Letitia pushed the child away impatiently. “Aunt Pet will bring you a doll—she promised!” She turned with a swirl of purple brocade to follow Fielding up the stairs. “You must understand, Field, that when you are not here, the plantation still must be run, and I have no intention of standing by and watching everything go to wrack and ruin!”

  Their quarrel raged on, taking itself elsewhere, but to the flaxen-haired child standing there amid the ruin of her hopes, it was only sound and fury. Sick at heart, her knees gave way and she collapsed weeping by the blue sofa. And then, hearing their footsteps coming down the stairs, she scrambled up and ran blindly from the house—and kept on running with tears streaming down her face until she collided with a tree and knocked herself backward upon the grass. At that point, she had wept from pain as well as grief.

  Penny, returning, had had a difficult time coaxing Carolina back in and she had refused to eat her supper, even though her nurse had given her a couple of sharp whacks on her backside for her stubbornness. She had crept woefully into her trundle bed that night, feeling her life was over. Over before it was begun.

  Enthroned in the big bed high above her, still flushed and feverish from her cold, Virginia was clutching the lovely new doll to her and murmuring in her sleep. But lower down in the trundle bed with the white moonlight pouring in through the dormers and spilling over the blue coverlet, little Carolina fought back another surge of tears.

  It wasn’t fair that Virginia should have two dolls and she should have none! And when Aunt Pet, true to her word, had on their next visit to Williamsburg presented her with a doll, Carolina had dutifully curtsied, she had thank
ed Aunt Pet perfunctorily and put the doll on a shelf, never to be played with. For Aunt Pet’s dainty gift was more a doll for display than for a child to treasure. Aunt Pet’s doll had bisque hands and feet, a kid body and a composition head with a black painted coiffure and an intricate gown of delicate gauze. And it was seven inches high—a “doll in a teacup” as it were, not the twenty-inch glowing wonder named Nan White that Virginia, well and running about again, was hugging to her breast.

  When Virginia politely admired Carolina’s new doll, exclaiming over her gown, “Isn’t it beautiful?” Carolina responded with, “If you like her so much I’d be glad to trade her for Nan White.”

  “Trade her for Nan?” Virginia squealed, for she had kept the name Nan White. “Oh, no!” She hugged the big doll to her. “Nan’s twice as nice!”

  Carolina thought so too. Indeed in any fair world Nan White would have been her doll—and Nan White was the only doll she wanted or would ever want.

  But Nan remained Virginia’s doll, closely guarded. And even though Virginia graciously offered Carolina her old doll, Carolina refused.

  She never played with dolls again. In a way she had grown up a little that terrible afternoon when Fielding had glowered at her for daring to touch his gift for precious little Virginia upstairs. Hurt and disillusioned, Carolina had reached that day a vague glimmering of what life was going to be like for her in this tormented household.

  Having Nan White snatched away from her had been her first real inkling that her father did not love her. It was a blow from which she had never really recovered.

  Now in the aftermath of the storm Carolina looked down at a ruined and battered Nan White, carelessly tossed away by children who did not love her as she would have, her once pretty face cracked and damaged by the storm—and abruptly she burst into tears. Hugging the muddy doll in its tattered brocade and threadbare velvet to her breast, she ran in sodden shoes down to the beach where the waves had surged so violently last night, where they were still rough and dangerous. Out of breath, she paused and looked through tear-blurred eyes out over the choppy waters of Chesapeake Bay.

  There was not a soul in sight, not a single sail upon the water. She might have been alone in the world.

  Unwatched by anyone, she sank down on the wet sand and in a childish gesture, Carolina, the rejected child, cradled the ruined doll to her. Virginia had thrown Nan White away, little Flo and Della had other handsomer dolls—they threw poor Nan back and forth between them like a ball and sometimes, laughing, bounced her against the house.

  Well, none of them would ever harm Nan again!

  Silent and in desperate haste, driven by some instinct older than time, Carolina dug a hole in the sand and buried the doll. And with it she buried her childhood— and the last of her hopes that her father would ever love her.

  She stayed there for a long time, with a lump in her throat, looking at the piece of driftwood she had thrust into the white sand to mark Nan White’s grave. And then she got up and stretched and looked out toward the bay where already the water was calming. Life, as she knew it, was beginning all over again—and the glint in her silver gray eyes was very like that in her mother’s dark blue ones. Resolute.

  She had survived Nan White being wrenched from her, she had survived the storm—she would survive whatever came. As she turned and trudged back toward the house, a slight figure in a sooty dress, with soot-smudged fair hair and face, she looked like a chimney sweep. But her heart, with the bright resilience of youth, was already burgeoning with hope. The storm was over—this was a new day! Penny would not be the only one to find a lover, and a new life far from here. Somewhere out there, there was a man for her too.

  A man quite unlike her father. Her father was handsome, true, in his dark debonair way, and quite dashing. But seeing his anger erupt all these years had turned his daughter against all tall dark men. They were overbearing and dangerously jealous—indeed they were not to be trusted at all, of that she was very sure. And they would not continue to love you—of that she was certain as well. If they ever loved you at all. . . .

  No, the man she chose could not be domineering like her father, for all that she frequently admired the way he handled men. He must be more . . . pliable, more charming, more like everybody else. Preferably blond. And smiling. Like the man in her dream.

  None of the lads she had thus far found seemed to quite fit her judgment of what a proper man should be. Men like . . . Sandy Randolph, for instance. Only younger of course. Sandy as he might have been when her mother had first met him and fallen desperately in love.

  A young lord perhaps, fresh out of England with jingling gold to buy a great plantation. Or a merchant’s favorite son, who would inherit an empire of ships and trading posts and take her to faraway exciting places that smelled of spice and danger. But whoever he was, he must be softspoken and charming and given to long meaningful looks and have a deep powerful timbre in his voice that would move and excite her, that would make her feel like a woman!

  Lost in her reverie, she hardly noticed the time.

  By the time Carolina got back to the house, all had been decided. Until Farview could be properly repaired, Letitia and her daughters would go to Aunt Pet’s in Williamsburg.

  “Again?” Fielding was saying ironically as Carolina strolled up. He was standing on the muddy driveway and Letitia was facing him.

  “Of course! I realize we stayed there a long time after the Great Storm, but Aunt Petula will understand.”

  Around them the exhausted men who had ridden north with Fielding had cared for their equally exhausted horses and were now drifting away to throw themselves down in any convenient spot to sleep.

  “I suppose she will understand,” he said, but he sounded reluctant. He moved his big shoulders in his white cambric shirt restlessly, for he had discarded the wet coat in which he had begun his ride north. He was a handsome man, a determined man, was Fielding. And as Carolina looked at her father, saw him tossing back his dark hair with an impatient hand as he once again studied, without much hope, the ruins of his home, she felt very sorry for him—a feeling which was promptly dispelled by his next words. “I suppose you’ll welcome a round of balls with your old flames, Letty.”

  His wife, who had survived this recent ordeal by storm so splendidly, straightened up and gave him a level look. “I promise to enjoy it,” she said in a voice of menace.

  Carolina exchanged uneasy glances with Virgie, who had come out now. All this trouble, which should have brought Fielding and Letty together, was rending them apart again.

  To Williamsburg they went, to Aunt Pet’s two-story house on Duke of Gloucester Street. The house was of rubbed brick set in a checkerboard pattern. Its steeply pitched roof had clipped gables set with five dormers which housed the bedrooms. A pair of handsome tapering brick chimneys towered over each end, and neat clipped boxwood flanked the front steps which Aunt Pet bragged “had been brought over from England, stone by stone.”

  Aunt Pet’s was a favorite place of the girls, for past the wall and the smokehouse and the tiny dairy was an attractive small garden which was their aunt’s pride. It boasted fruit trees and a sunken turf panel in which had been carefully sculpted corner seats shaded by big lacy-leaved locusts, and all of it edged with deep green boxwood and a hedge of carefully clipped live oaks.

  Carolina might have been lonely in Williamsburg had not Sally Montrose from upriver been visiting her great aunt who lived across the street. For Virginia had discovered the miller’s son and was always off to the windmill to buy meal. This was at least three times a week, for colonial meal was unrefined and unbleached and did not keep well. Aunt Pet was adamant about using fresh meal and delighted that Virginia had taken this task upon herself. She would have blanched had she known of the flirtation that was going on at the awkward-looking post mill, the whole superstructure of which revolved atop a single post. While the windmill’s great sails flailed noisily in the wind, Virginia would stroll through the
upper chamber which contained the millstones and the main shaft, talking pertly with Hugh Clemens, the miller’s tall blond son.

  “Hugh kissed me today,” she would report excitedly to Carolina when she returned home. Or, “Hugh says he does not believe in long betrothals,” she would say, blushing. Or, “Hugh says there is need of many good mills in Virginia and that he would like to establish a whole chain of mills, if only he had the backing.” On and on.

  Carolina realized as time went by that this was no summertime flirtation, that Virginia was actually falling in love with Hugh—and wondered uneasily how her mother would take it. Very badly, probably, for Hugh was but one of seven sons of the miller and unlikely to inherit more than a pittance. And for all his blond Viking good looks he had no education, could not even write his own name. Oh, no, Letitia Lightfoot would not approve of Hugh as a son-in-law!

  Her mother was holding up very well during this enforced leave of absence from home. As Fielding had predicted, she was engaged in a perpetual round of balls. Usually she took her two older daughters, eager to dance in their newly stitched up dresses which were of coarser materials than their mother would have liked but which Aunt Pet insisted were the best they could afford “at such a time as this!”

  Carolina was just on the brink of becoming the blazing beauty her mother before her had been, but at the moment her figure was a bit coltish and awkward, her silver-gold hair considered too “theatrical” for one so young—in short she was not the fashion, but she had plenty of time to watch the older Virginia flirt coquettishly with young upriver planters come down the James to enjoy the social life of Williamsburg.

  Somewhat to her regret, the repairs to Farview were accomplished speedily, a new south wing went up to replace the old, and Letitia and her daughters were home again before the summer was entirely gone. Virginia had been desolate at leaving.