For a long time Letitia stood facing her without speaking, studying her daughter by the light of the branched candlestick that reposed on the polished cherry table. Carolina found herself fidgeting beneath that calm appraising gaze. Then her mother lifted the letter negligently.
“The woman who wrote this, who is so high-handed that she ships you home without my permission, describes you as a whore,” she said bluntly. “Are you become one?”
Indignation made Carolina’s gray eyes snap silver. “Of course not!”
“She claims you lured away her daughter’s intended.”
“I did that,” admitted Carolina shamefacedly. “Reba wanted to marry a marquess, you see, but he already had a wife, and it did not work out after all, even when his wife finally did die in Italy—”
“Spare me the details.” Her mother raised a hand to stop this flow of words. “The daughter sounds like an upstart and a fool.”
“The mother is worse,” said Carolina morosely.
“I don’t doubt it. She adds that you roamed London dressed as a man and spent your time gaming!”
“One night only,” admitted Carolina.
The shadow of a smile quirked the corners of her mother’s wayward mouth. “I always wanted to do that,” she murmured. “And your headmistress, the letter speaks of her. ...”
“What she says of Mistress Chesterton is probably true. All the parents have withdrawn their daughters from the school.”
“Indeed?” Letitia pondered the letter in her hand. When she looked up her face was inscrutable. “I am probably beholden to the writer of this letter for letting me know about conditions at the school, but her accusations against you are such that I do not feel inclined to thank her. Try to avoid her sort in future.” She tossed the letter into the fireplace where it burned merrily. She veered to a new subject. “I have had a chance to look at your wardrobe after Virgie unpacked your boxes and I must say that you have done remarkably well with the money I gave you!”
Carolina gave her mother a nervous look. “Especially,” added her mother casually, “since you had almost no money to buy anything with, having given it all to your sister so that she might elope.”
Carolina swallowed. So her mother knew about that! “So I think there is a good deal you have yet to tell me,” said Letitia in a soft, almost menacing tone.
Yes, there was—that she was no longer a virgin and that she was committed to Lord Thomas no matter what the opposition! With a sudden feeling of panic, Carolina found her voice and explained about the clothes. Indeed she told the whole story—leaving out only Lord Thomas, and the reason for Rye’s deserting her in the maze, saying only that he had overheard her tell Reba she would not continue leading him on.
Her mother listened, unmoved. “So you have nothing more to tell me?”
Carolina shook her head. Her feelings about Lord Thomas were too personal, too private—she would share them with no one.
And this very night, by candlelight, she would pen him a letter and give it to one of the servants when they reached Yorktown to be given to the captain of any ship leaving for the Port of London!
“You may go, Carolina,” said her mother with a sigh. “The clothing is winter clothing. It will be packed away while I think about all this and decide what to do.”
The next morning with the dawn they began their Great Move. By boat and wagon their goods were hauled to the new house. Level Green lay on the eastern bank of the York River several miles to the northwest of Yorktown. Laden with furniture, their boat crossed the Chesapeake, moved smoothly into the York’s wide mouth and made its stately way up this shortest of the Tidewater’s four major rivers. Carolina looked up at the long line of reddish rock marl cliffs. Along those bluffs, some fifty feet high, that rose above her, lay the village of Yorktown, paralleling the broad river, its short streets with their neat brick and frame houses bisecting the length of the main street.
And now the oarsmen were bending their backs as they passed other plantations. Beyond Yorktown they passed Ringfield, a solid two-and-a-half-story brick house with a roomy wing, lying on the peninsula where King’s Creek and Felgate’s Creek joined the York. Across from it lay Timbemeck, where the Mann family had lived for so many years.
“But wait until you see our house!” cried Virginia proudly when Carolina turned to admire the buildings and the spring flowers, blooming from plants brought from England. “It will stun you!”
And indeed Carolina was stunned when she saw the house. She had not imagined anything so grand.
“It is the largest house in all Virginia!” Virgie told her merrily. “It has twenty-three rooms—there are three vast wide halls and no less than nine passages. Indeed each wing contains six rooms!”
Carolina stared at the splendid brickwork (“All Flemish bond,” her sister declared proudly), at the elaborate masonry trim (“See the white marble lintels?”). And then her gaze rose in awe, up four stories (if you counted that high-windowed basement) to the soaring leaded roof with its twin turrets. (“All glassed in, don’t they make excellent lookouts?”)
“It will beggar Father!” Carolina gasped.
“So I have told him,” murmured her mother, passing by. “Here, Josh, that table belongs in my bedroom and all that furniture goes to the wing over there.” She nodded to her right. “We will be replacing it when the furniture we’ve ordered arrives from England,” she added over her shoulder.
“Father named it Level Green,” whispered Virgie. “But Mother privately calls it Fielding’s Folly—but she is proud of it all the same!”
And then Fielding Lightfoot came smiling through the front entrance. At sight of Carolina he missed a step, cast a quick look at his wife, then strode forward to welcome her. There was little warmth in his greeting but she told herself it was the unexpected shock of seeing her there.
“Bring that table around to the side,” he directed, turning to the men just then carrying in a handsome trestle table. “I’ll be wanting it in my office.”
“No.” Letitia hurried over to demur. “I have already decided that table should be set by the window just to the left of the—”
“It belongs in my office,” he interrupted impatiently. “I wish to set my small writing desk upon it.”
“Then what will support the tall brass candlesticks?”
“Anything you like can support them! A mantel will do well enough.”
“Fielding, we have already discussed this and we decided—”
They were already quarreling.
Used to that, the girls left their parents outside and passed into the enormous hall paneled with polished mahogany.
Virginia gave a last look over her shoulder toward the sounds of bickering outside. “I don’t understand it,” she puzzled. “They both seemed so happy planning the house. I mean, they were getting along so well before you got home.” She sighed. “Do you think it’s the strain of getting moved in that’s set them at each other’s throats again?”
Carolina shrugged. It seemed to her that all her life her parents had erupted into dissent the moment she appeared. Now her gaze swung from the full-height pilasters of the hall to the upward curve of the grand staircase, its mahogany balustrade handsomely carved into wooden baskets of flowers and fruit. “I can’t believe we’re going to live here,” she cried in amazement.
“Just wait till you see our rooms!” Virgie picked up her skirts and Carolina followed her in a dash up that stairway on treads so wide that eight people could easily have ascended abreast.
The rooms were spacious and they reflected Letitia Lightfoot’s taste in their soft “Williamsburg” colors, the muted greens and calm blues. And the furniture, while much of it seemed too small for the vastness of their surroundings, was all of fine polished fruitwoods and cedar and walnut—for Letty had a great dislike for the pine furniture being produced in New England and shipped south. She would allow none of it in her new home.
“Mother has ordered Aubusson rugs
sent out from England, and ever so much new furniture,” Virgie told her. “She has commissioned Mr. Arbuthnot to buy it for her because she says he has such impeccable taste. Oh, doesn’t my old fourposter look splendid there by the windows?”
Carolina looked about her thoughtfully. Virgie’s room was indeed beautiful with its pale green painted walls and embroidered green and white coverlet and hangings. Her own room too was of a delightful simplicity, but elegant with walls of misty blue and dainty blue and white curtains and a white quilt with a large blue fleur de lis design worked into it.
Fleur de lis. . . . The very sight of a fleur de lis brought her painfully back to memories of Thomas, who wore them almost as a hallmark, embroidered on his cuffs.
“Mother is buying for your room a pale blue Aubusson carpet and a lovely pier glass,” confided Virgie. “And for me a cheval glass and a French dressing table and a splendid green Turkish carpet!”
Carolina could not help but compare the simple elegance of her parents’ new home to ancient Broadleigh—so old, so steeped in time and yet so marred by the ostentatious bad taste of its new owners. She was suddenly fiercely glad to be back in the fresh free air of Virginia. If only Lord Thomas could be here by her side . . .
She would have been astonished to learn that the letter she had penned last night and now waited to entrust to whichever servant went first to Yorktown, would never reach Lord Thomas. For even while she herself was aboard the Flying Falcon skimming across the blue Atlantic, Lord Thomas had run into trouble. He had seduced the daughter of Sir Perry Blaine and Sir Perry was, word reached him, quite wroth about it. Sir Perry would have him marry the girl, and was even now advancing upon London with a party of able gentlemen. Lord Thomas took this report seriously. He left word with his friends that he was off for Europe and promptly embarked on the first available vessel bound for the West Indies. He had distant cousins in Barbados and he was curious about the island girls. Reports had it that they were quick blooming and very willing—he would find out.
But Carolina, standing musing in the middle of her new bedroom, knew nothing of that.
“And we are to have excellent neighbors just above us across Carter’s Creek,” added Virgie triumphantly, as if to cap all she had said. “For Lewis and Abigail Burwell are constructing a manor house there called Fairfield. The brick arches and vault of the basement are already completed and the chimneys are to be tapering, like those of Bacon’s Castle. The house will be in the shape of a rectangle with two wings attached at right angles—and one wing is to compose a ballroom. Oh, we will be in the very thick of things here with balls and parties—Williamsburg across the peninsula will have nothing to rival us!” She added more soberly, “Mother says it is too bad that poor Mr. Bacon is not alive to see this house. He told her as a child that she was destined for great things and she seems to have achieved them!”
Carolina was reminded that Bacon’s Rebellion—with most of the planter aristocracy solidly behind him—had ended a little to the north, in Gloucester, at the house of a Mr. Pate—and many an aristocratic neck had been stretched by the hangman’s rope over that affair!
“In England they are apt to consider us traitors if we speak out against the King’s policies,” she said bitterly.
“Well!” Virgie’s affronted tone reflected the fact that Fielding Lightfoot had been one of the planters who, six years ago, when the government would offer no help, had taken to the roads by night, tearing up young tobacco plants in an effort at production control. Six of the “plant cutters” had been executed and the only result of the Tobacco Riots was that the rate of customs, already over 300 percent, was raised, as well as taxes in Virginia.
The girls, who were in sympathy not only with Bacon, who had stood bravely against outrages by the Indians when the government refused to do so, but with the Tobacco Rioters as well, frowned at each other— and then promptly forgot politics and paraded out to survey the rest of the house.
England and England’s King seemed very far away. . . .
But when night came in their strange new enormous home, Carolina could not sleep. She rose and looked out restlessly upon this unfamiliar Tidewater landscape with the river and not the bay glistening below. The moonlight outlined little clumps and hummocks here and there on the lawn below, where Letty Lightfoot had already begun setting out her rose gardens and her rows of boxwood. It was beautiful here, but Carolina had left her heart back in England. . . .
She leaned against the open window and felt the night wind ruffle her hair and looked down at the letter in which she had poured out her heart to her golden lover, back in England.
“You must come and get me, Thomas,” she had written. “I promise to stave off all other suitors until you get here no matter how Mother coerces me!
She meant every word. And it could well have changed her life had that letter been delivered. For it was a very winning letter, the ingenuous outpourings of a girl lost in a dream of love—and it could have persuaded Lord Thomas to take a later ship to Virginia’s Tidewater country instead of an earlier one bound for the West Indies.
But Fortune is a devious jade—and she had other things in mind for Carolina.
ROSEGILL ON THE YORK
TIDEWATER, VIRGINIA
Summer 1688
* * *
Chapter 21
On the wide lawns and sweeping gardens of Ralph Wormeley’s Rosegill plantation, its cluster of houses dominated by the eleven-room brick manor house his father had built in 1650, the second best attended party of the season was in full swing. The best attended party of the whole year would of course be the ball held last week at Level Green, for not a family in the Tidewater but had yearned to visit Fielding Light-foot’s new house, the largest in Virginia. The Eastern Shore had arrived almost in a body. Everybody who counted had come from the York and the James. Indeed people had journeyed from as far away as the Falls of the James and there had even been a spattering of guests from the Carolinas. Virginia had been ecstatic—Carolina less so, for she had noticed an ominous matchmaking light in her mother’s eyes of late.
Now, a week later, at Rosegill in the summer afternoon, ladies in wide-skirted pastel gowns, their faces shielded from the bright Virginia sun by broad-brimmed hats or ruffled parasols, were strolling alongside leisurely silk-clad gentlemen about the thirty acres of lawns that Rosegill, with its ten thousand-acre grant, could well afford to devote to pleasure. They laughed and chatted, they admired the myriad clumps of wild roses that had given the estate its name, and they wondered—the ladies behind their fans and the gentlemen in between pinches of snuff from enameled snuffboxes—whom Letitia Lightfoot’s daughter would marry—the gorgeous one, the one with hair like spun silver and the fashionable London education.
Most of those speculating agreed that Ned Shackleford and Dick Smithfield were the leading contenders. Both had vied with each other in dancing Mistress Carolina around the room at that first great ball held at Level Green, and today at Rosegill they were still vying for her favor. An impromptu “tourney” had been arranged and the antagonists, their ladies’ colors tied to their arms, were even now charging across the lawn on their mounts, lances fixed, spearing circlets that had been hung from the branches of trees that were saplings when a Virgin Queen ruled England. To ride the course of three and gamer a dangling circlet from each was the goal. And the two main contenders, Ned and Dick, both of them peerless horsemen, had so far a perfect score apiece.
A ladies’ finger ring had now been called for to break the tie, and from a window in Ralph Wormeley’s famous library Carolina, who had gone there at her mother’s request to collect her sister (both of them knowing well Virginia’s love of books), was watching the show.
“Look at those two fools,” she said to Virgie. “Now they’re down to finger rings. They’ll both spear the ring and what then? A duel through the rose bushes?”
“They only want to shine in your sight,” laughed Virgie, closing one of the lovely leathe
r-bound volumes with a sigh. “I had so hoped Mother would forget about me and I could spend the afternoon reading!”
“Nonsense, she didn’t drag you out of mourning and into that blue gown to have you hide here among a lot of musty old volumes—indeed she just said so for ail the world to hear!”
Virgie joined Carolina at the window and her sky blue skirts mingled with Carolina’s petal pink ones as they watched Ned Shackleford thunder down the grassy course, daintily catching the ladies’ gold finger ring on the point of his spear. There was laughter and applause.
“Is that your scarf he’s wearing on his sleeve?” Virgie asked.
“They’re both wearing my colors,” Carolina said with a sigh. “Ned has my scarf, and Dick has tied my white lace kerchief to his sleeve!”
“It must be fun to be a reigning belle,” said Virgie seriously, “and have two men desperate to win you!” “Well, it isn’t,” said Carolina in exasperation. “It’s very confining. Both of them chase me into every corner, they interrupt my conversations—it’s a very great bore to have them hovering over me all the time!”
“Ned styles himself Knight of Gloucester and Dick styles himself Knight of Accomack,” murmured Virgie. “They’ve beaten all the other knights on the course.”
“They aren’t knights,” scoffed Carolina. “They’re only playacting! I do wish they’d stop.”
“I rather like Ned,” said Virgie with a sigh.
“Well, if you do you’re welcome to him.” Carolina was watching her champions take a second try at the ladies’ finger ring. For the course must be ridden by both contestants until one of them lost out and a winner could be declared to crown a Queen of Love and Beauty. The whole thing was a relic of the great medieval tourneys, the memory of which these Virginia Colonists had brought with them to America—along with other bits of old England.
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