Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  Virginia was very depressed. “Whatever you said to Mother yesterday, it made her furious,” she accused Carolina. “She nearly snapped my head off every time I spoke to her! I am afraid she may tell Hugh he is not welcome here.”

  Carolina sighed. She had behaved badly, she knew, and there was really no excuse for baiting her mother like that. She hoped it would not cause trouble for Virgie and Hugh. “I was—irritated,” she admitted.

  “You were irritated?” Her sister looked at her in amazement. “The wonder is you are down here in the garden instead of still confined to your room after daring to mention that she ran away!” Last night Carolina had told her part of what had been said.

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Carolina tried to switch the subject. “Tell me, are you expecting Hugh today?”

  “No,” said Virginia haltingly. Last night she had refused to say whether she had accepted Hugh’s proposal. That annoyed Carolina for, since going without supper last night more or less on her sister’s behalf, she felt entitled to know.

  “The least you could do is tell me what you’ve decided,” she said in a cross voice.

  To her astonishment, Virginia burst into tears and ran away toward the house.

  She must have said yes, surmised Carolina gloomily. Penny had left and now Virginia was about to fly the coop as well. It would leave her alone on this isolated peninsula with few neighbors, two small children, her warring parents and an uninteresting collection of servants. The prospect was not bright.

  But how Virginia would make her escape, only heaven knew, for neither Hugh nor Virginia had any money. Carolina sighed, hoping treacherously that however Virginia chose to resolve her affairs, it would for once not involve her. Perhaps they dared not wait, for it was clear that she could not cover up for Virginia forever. The real state of affairs was bound to be found out. Hugh would be banished and another suitor sought for Virginia. Perhaps that was why she had flung away, crying. Carolina realized that something must be done and done now—but how?

  She looked up in surprise as she saw the carriage being brought round. No one had told her that anyone was going anywhere today. Curious, she strolled toward the front door where the carriage had come to a smart stop and a smiling groom stood ready to deliver the reins.

  A moment later her father came out and both girls gaped at him. Gone were the usual simple broadcloth trousers and plain white cambric shirt in which he rode about the plantation. Fielding was this day splendidly attired in burnished gold satin trimmed in gold braid and gold buttons. A spray of lace edged his cuffs and made startling the big topaz that flashed at his throat. His hair—usually left flying as he rode about the plantation—was concealed by the elegant full-bottomed wig he usually reserved for town, and his boots had so high a polish that you could have seen your reflection in them. He was every inch the gentleman as he turned courteously to his daughter.

  “Carolina, inform your mother that I desire the honor of having her ride with me this morning,” he said in such a stiffly formal voice that Carolina gaped at him.

  A moment later she recovered herself. “Yes, Father,” she said quickly, for his dark frown forbade questions. She ran inside, gathering up her green and yellow skirts.

  She met Virginia coming woefully down the stairs.

  “Something is up,” muttered Carolina. “Father is dressed to the teeth and has asked me to convey a formal message to Mother to go riding with him. One would think they were courting!”

  Virginia’s gloom left her. She was as curious as anyone. But not sparkling as Penny had been. Carolina missed Penny, who had laughed with her at small things, and sometimes tried daring escapades. She sighed. Penny had not surfaced yet. Plainly she and Emmett meant to be firmly established somewhere before they let the Lightfoots know where they were. Which was too bad, because Carolina would have liked to hear from Penny, and none of the Lightfoot emissaries had been able to ferret out her hiding place. Penny was a Master Planner. Carolina hoped that one day she would do as well. She knocked on her mother’s bedroom door.

  Letitia was usually in her bedroom at this time of day. She would slip up the back stairs from the kitchen the moment she heard her husband’s boots clatter down the front stairway, so that she would not meet him. This was the hour when she wrote her letters and read her mail, if any. She looked up as both girls came to the door.

  “Well, what is it?” she demanded impatiently.

  Carolina swallowed her laughter. “Father requests the honor of your company in driving out with him,” she said with a straight face. “He is dressed as if he is on his way to a ball and the carriage is waiting at the front door.”

  To their delight, Letitia looked thunderstruck. “Has Field taken leave of his senses?” she murmured. Then, recovering herself, she rose majestically. “Tell your father that I will be ready to accompany him in a few minutes,” she said tartly. “And that I will be as well dressed as he!”

  “Where do you think they’re going?” wondered Virginia as she followed Carolina downstairs.

  “I don’t know,” said Carolina. “But I’m going to race to the stable and get a horse saddled while she’s dressing. Why don’t you come along? We can appear to be out riding and we can follow them and see what they’re up to!”

  Virginia was amenable, and after Carolina had delivered her mother’s reply to her father, who was pacing up and down in the drive beside the carriage with his head bent in thought and his hands folded behind his back, they rushed to the stable and were mounted and walking their horses down the drive by the time Letitia came through the front door.

  Into the carriage she climbed, helped in with ceremony by her husband, and the carriage started off. The horse, a shiny black gelding and Fielding’s favorite, passed the girls handily.

  “Did you see what she’s wearing?” murmured Carolina, eyeing the gleaming flash of lilac silk and rose point lace as the carriage rolled by them. “That is her new gown, is it not?”

  It certainly was, and both girls were quick to note the high piled hairdo and—

  “Oh, she’s wearing the hat!” wailed Virginia. “The one she promised me I could have when she was tired of it. Oh, I do hope it doesn’t blow away or get damaged by a tree branch!”

  “The hat” was indeed beautiful, of wide-brimmed wheat-colored flexible straw with a sweep of lavender plumes. It had been made in the islands and the plumes added in Williamsburg. Virginia had long coveted it.

  Carolina ignored her. Where her parents might be going dressed so fashionably was much more intriguing.

  The girls followed at a discreet distance. Their father was taking his usual route for a “drive,” a route which led along the bay. The carriage had reached the beach now and was running smoothly across the white sand. A stand of trees now obscured the carriage and Carolina reined up before she left their shelter.

  “I don’t think we’d better follow,” she announced— for well she knew her father was quite capable of turning the carriage around, riding his daughters down and telling them the price of their curiosity was to miss the next ball given in Williamsburg!

  Virginia, who had been thinking much the same thing, promptly reined in her mount. “But how will we see what they are doing?” she fretted.

  “I’ll just climb into this tree.” Carolina rose in her stirrups, seized a tree branch overhead and swung herself up so that she stood for a moment atop her saddle before she boosted herself to a crotch in the branches. “And now a little higher.”

  “You’ll tear your dress,” chided Virginia. To her, clothes were of prime importance. If asked, she would have said with conviction that it was her blue flounced petticoat that had first attracted Hugh!

  “Oh, bother my dress!” retorted Carolina impatiently. She maneuvered herself up higher in the tree until she had a clear view of the bay and the drive along the beach.

  “Can you see what’s happening?” called Virginia.

  “Yes, now I can see them. They’re still driving
along the beach.” Her voice changed, grew excited. “Father’s turned the carriage. He's driving straight into the bay!"

  “He’s mad!” gasped Virginia.

  From her high perch, Carolina was staring, fascinated, out toward the bay. “They’ve gone farther into the water,” she reported. “Both their backs are very straight—I don’t think they’re talking.”

  “Oh, of course they’re talking!” cried Virginia in an agony of excitement. “Nobody would drive straight into the bay without saying anything—not even Father!” And when Carolina was silent for a moment, Virginia shrilled, “Are they drowning?” and then corrected herself in confusion. “No, of course they aren’t drowning. Mother would refuse to drown!”

  “Well, the horse seems to be floundering, he’s going under—no, there’s his head, he’s up! They seem to have come to a halt. The water is lapping around the floorboards of the carriage. Mother’s skirts must be getting wet.”

  “And in her new dress too!” moaned Virginia.

  “Oh, I’d give anything to hear what they’re saying!” What the senior Lightfoots were saying to each other at that moment was indeed edifying. Letitia had maintained a lofty silence as her frowning and elegantly garbed husband turned the carriage toward the bay and drove the astonished horse across the sand into the water. But as that same water licked up over the floorboards and threatened to inundate her lilac silk skirts she had lifted her winglike eyebrows along with her skirt hem and said, looking straight ahead at the seemingly endless expanse of the bay, “Have you lost your senses, Field? This is not a ford! Where do you think you’re taking me?”

  “To Hell,” was the brisk but savage reply. “Where you’ll be much at home, Letty!”

  “Indeed? Then do drive on,” was his lady’s calm rejoinder as she hitched her skirts higher around her lavender silk ankles. “For since it would seem I’m married to the Devil, ’tis only natural you should seek your own domain!”

  Fielding’s dark head swung toward his wife. He regarded her in amazement. From her treetop perch Carolina reported, “Oh, now they’re talking. I’ll wager Mother is giving him a piece of her mind!”

  “Does nothing frighten you, Letty?” he asked wonderingly. “Are you not afraid I’ll do it?”

  “Nonsense, anywhere you’d go I could certainly follow,” was his lady’s tart rejoinder, delivered with a toss of her smartly coiffed curls. “And as for your ‘doing it,’ Fielding, that’s your favorite horse out there fighting to keep his. head above the water. And since you have far more regard for that beast than you have for me, I’m very sure you’re not going to drown him! And in any case, I’ve something of such importance to talk to you about that I intend to hold your ears above the water if necessary until you’ve heard me out!”

  The response to this astonishing speech was a look as blank as any she had ever seen on her husband’s face. For a moment his gray eyes glinted and his taut mouth worked as if he was trying not to smile. Then his white teeth flashed as he gave himself up to mirth. He threw back his dark head, nearly losing his periwig as he did so, and roared with laughter.

  Letitia, still affronted and with a caustic expression, blinked. Then she too saw the humor of their situation, stranded there upon the bright glassy waters of the bay with the white beach serene and deserted behind them and their carriage seeming like a tiny island of civilization adrift in an endless sea. She too threw back her golden head and joined in her husband’s mirth. They both shook with uncontrollable laughter while the unfortunate horse floundered about with eyes rolling and the water came over the footboards of the carriage to wet the forgotten hem of Letitia’s lilac silk gown and cascade over the toes of Fielding’s shiny boots.

  “They must have made up,” reported Carolina from the tree. “He seems to be hugging her—and now she’s hugging him. She’s lost her hat,” she added laconically for Virginia’s benefit.

  “Oh, no!’’ wailed Virginia. “Are they trying to get it?” she asked hopefully.

  “No, they seem to have forgotten it,” replied Carolina with suppressed laughter. “It’s floating away, plumes and all.”

  “Are they still in the water? Are they sinking as they embrace?”

  “No,” said Carolina critically, squinting her silver eyes at the glittering waters of the bay. “The water seems to be over the floorboards now but they aren’t drowning. Now Father’s turning the carriage around, they’re coming out—I can see the floorboards rising from the water and now the wheels.” She choked with mirth. “I’m sure the horse is relieved to be changing directions!”

  “But her hat!” cried Virginia, keeping to the main thrust of her interest. “Surely by now they’ve noticed the hat? Are they trying to rescue it?”

  Carolina could hardly trust herself to speak. Their parents might be out there battling, drowning, perhaps even killing each other—for in sudden rage Fielding might have seized his beautiful wife by the throat and it was not beyond imagining that she might at such a moment thrust a long hatpin into his heart—and all Virginia could think about was a hat! When she spoke, her voice was mirth-laden.

  “No, they seem not to have noticed the hat. The carriage is on the beach now, the horse is shaking himself off—I don’t blame him. They’re sitting there and Mother is shaking out her skirts. Now they’ve turned toward home. They’re driving back—”

  “Without the hat?”

  “Without the hat.” Firmly. “It’s floating out into the bay—oh, there it goes, I can’t see it any more.”

  Virginia wailed.

  “She seems to be leaning on his shoulder,” reported Carolina, who had begun to scramble down from her perch. “It’s obvious they’ve made up and we’d best get out of here—fast. We wouldn’t want them to know we were spying on them!”

  But even as she made her way down she cast one last long look at the sparkle of the bay through the tree limbs.

  Oh, God, don’t let my life be like that! she thought passionately. Don’t let me be like my mother, too imperious ever to give ground! And if I can’t avoid that, at least let me find a man entirely different from my father, not some dark tyrant who will rage at me and never truly love me—not a man that I can never understand!

  “They may have made up, but it won’t last,” predicted Virginia gloomily. She still felt very cut up about the hat. “And besides, my chances were better while they weren't talking. Now that they’re back on speaking terms they may come to some awful decision—about Hugh.”

  Carolina, back in the saddle, gave her sister a sympathetic look. Virginia was probably right.

  The blow fell the following morning. Later Carolina realized her parents must have discussed it during that long companionable walk they had taken at sunset, strolling like lovers beneath the magnolias and oaks, stopping to admire the roses, embracing once or twice.

  Letitia called to Carolina to wait as the others were leaving the dining room after breakfast. Virginia choked but Carolina turned with a sigh. She guessed that her mother would not mince words when she was told to close the door. She was right.

  “I have no intention of letting you wed that penniless miller’s son,” she told Carolina briskly.

  Carolina had already decided on her best line of defense.

  “Very well,” she agreed cheerfully. “I promise not to marry Hugh. But could he come calling now and then?” she asked wistfully, thinking of Virginia. “It does my heart good to see someone so besotted.”

  Her mother drew a quick breath. “What a hardhearted thing to say!” she remonstrated. At her daughter’s indifferent shrug, she frowned suspiciously. “He will never be able to support you, I hope you realize that.” She paused to let that sink in, and Carolina had time to get a slightly new view of her resplendent mother. Letitia was clad this morning in a rippling amethyst silk dressing gown (she had not bothered to dress today, for she intended to go back to bed after breakfast as she and Fielding always did during these brief “honeymoons” in their turbulent marria
ge). Her mother, Carolina thought critically, had a kind of glow this morning; her dark blue eyes were velvet soft, her cheeks had a peachy bloom, and her slight gesture toward the mainland when she spoke of Hugh’s unsuitability had a kind of silken grace that made Carolina realize suddenly what a splendrous woman she must have been at eighteen—such a woman, she realized, startled, as she might herself one day be.

  “I have always realized Hugh could not support me,” she told her mother calmly. “Especially not in the style to which I wish to become accustomed,” she added on a humorous note.

  Her mother gave her a sharp look and her mouth tightened. Her expression showed she didn’t believe a thing Carolina had said and her next words proved it.

  “Last night your father and I came to a decision. You are too wayward and may come to a bad end here. So we are sending you away—to Mistress Chesterton’s school in London.”

  Mistress Chesterton's school! But that was where Sally Montrose had been sent, and she had described it morosely as strict, tiresome, and with never enough food! Granted, Sally was not thin but—

  “I don’t want to go!” cried Carolina, shocked.

  A mocking smile lit up her mother’s beautiful face. “That’s beside the point,” she said. “You are sailing day after tomorrow on the Bristol Maid. We will all go in to Williamsburg tomorrow and stay the night with Aunt Pet, and see you off on your voyage the following morning.”

  “But there may not be room aboard for another passenger!” Frantically Carolina sought for a way out.

  “The captain is a friend of your father’s. He will find a place for you aboard.”

  “My clothes! I lost so many in the storm. I will need new clothes if I am to attend a fashionable school.”

  Her mother frowned. “Yes, I thought of that. We talked it over and Fielding will give you a purse when you board with enough gold to outfit you handsomely in London. Mistress Chesterton can take you to the proper shops and guide you in your selections.”

  Mistress Chesterton! Carolina was speechless. Sally Montrose had described her as a shapeless crone in her dotage who was still wearing a wheel farthingale! And Mistress Chesterton was to supervise the buying of her wardrobe? Indignation welled up in Carolina, for along with her mother’s beauty she had inherited that indefinable sense of style that would make her stand out in any crowd.