Charity forgot she was standing there in a torn dress. “You’ll warn Elyse what she’s walking into, won’t you?” she demanded.
Annjanette shook her head. “Do not disturb yourself about it,” she said in a colder voice. “I will take care of the matter.”
She turned and walked rapidly away. Charity called, “Annjanette!” and started to run after her, and then remembered that her dress was torn, and hurried off to change it.
When she came back downstairs, Charity looked around for Elyse to warn her, but she was nowhere to be seen. Annjanette looked very subdued and promptly moved away when Charity approached. After a time Pieter rejoined them. He avoided Charity’s eyes and retired early. No one noticed all this byplay in the general excitement of the gifts amid the dancing, shrieking children. Clothilde, looking very frail, watched the children, smiling sadly, and the patroon stood beside her, his face inscrutable.
When she went to bed that night, Charity paused by the attic stairs. She thought she heard someone sobbing. Elyse?
She was awakened by a scratching at her door. She padded to the door barefoot, checked the bolt, and whispered, “Who is it?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” Pieter’s voice sounded subdued.
“Go away,” she said harshly against the wood.
“Please,” he pleaded. “Charity, you won’t tell my father about this, will you? I—I got carried away.”
“You did indeed,” she said in a cold voice. “And whyever did you slap Annjanette? She had done nothing.”
He hesitated. “I told Annjanette I was sorry,” he said sulkily “She accepted my apology. Why can’t you?”
“I accept your apology,” she said coldly. “Now go away.”
She heard his dejected footsteps slink down the hall and asked herself why she was so very angry with him? Not because of Elyse surely—she did not even know what had happened there. Nor because of Annjanette. No, she admitted to herself soberly, it was because Pieter had sprung on her like a low woman, his for the taking. She resented that bitterly.
The next morning when Charity woke she found the delicate lace had been slipped underneath her door. She picked up the fragile stuff and studied it with troubled eyes. She felt she was fast approaching a crisis in her life at Daarkenwyck. But, like a leaf about to be swept over the brink of a roaring waterfall, she felt powerless to stay the irresistible tide that swept her along.
CHAPTER 15
Although Charity had last call on the resident seamstress, her length of dark gold velvet was made up into a gown in time for the great ball at Daarkenwyck. The ball was an annual event eagerly anticipated along the river.
Except for one prolonged cold spell, the weather had been unseasonably warm. Everyone blamed that unseasonable warmth for the colds that swept through the household, causing stuffed heads and runny noses. No matter, the late December ball would, she was told, be well attended. Two days before, the house began to fill up with guests, and soon they were overflowing. Others guests were staying at the estates that lay nearest Daarkenwyck. Guests had come upriver from New York and downriver from as far as Rensselaerwyck. For over a week the staff had been laboring with spices and picklings and cakes and other goodies. There would be dancing and all the ladies would wear their finest gowns.
Charity was delighted with hers. She had designed it herself from memory, recalling one of Stéphanie’s. It was full-skirted, with a tight V-bodice. Its great sleeves were full and layered and tied with black satin ribbons. From the cuffs a great froth of creamy lace erupted—Pieter’s gift. She had hesitated, but had decided, in view of his recent good behavior, to wear it after all.
On the night of the ball she was glad she had, for Pieter was confined to his room with a bad cold and under doctor’s orders not to stir. Passing her in the hall, the patroon had murmured to Charity that her presence at the ball was required, which pleased her because she had had some fear that she would be expected to spend the evening discoursing with Pieter, who lay in his room coughing. He was a very bad patient, and plagued all the servants.
Dressed in the new gown, Charity whirled before the small mirror in her room, her eyes challenging her reflection. Around her neck, since she possessed no jewelry, she tied another black satin ribbon, and stuck a small patch of black court plaster low on her cheek where it contrasted coquettishly with the silky texture of her fair skin. She had done her pale gold hair up in great sweeps of curls. Even though she had had to eat dinner on a tray in her room, the dining room being so crowded with guests who had come from a distance that she could not have hoped to eat before the “third table” was served, she felt a wave of excitement sweep over her. Downstairs, the music struck up, and she drifted toward the wide staircase feeling as if she were to have, at last, the “London season” of which she had dreamed at Stéphanie’s. Her lips twisted a little wryly. Not a London season perhaps, but a mid-Hudson season in the Colonies. . . . Below her in the hall, Ryn van der Doonck’s upturned face and dancing eyes met hers and she did not care. What did it matter, the Hudson or London? There was music, the men were handsomely dressed, the women swirled about in beautiful clothes, she herself was wearing a lovely new gown. Why should she not believe for a little while that life would always treat her so kindly?
“You’re late,” Ryn said.
She smiled at him.
“But worth waiting for,” he added, his eyes kindling, and led her through the lower hall toward the largest living room. Both front rooms had been cleared of major furniture for dancing. Only a few straight chairs had been left around the walls.
As they moved into the room they passed Pieter’s grandmother, seated on a thronelike chair, observing the merriment. It was the first time Charity had seen her downstairs and she noticed that the old lady’s clothes were hopelessly out of date, but must have represented the latest style in her youth. Her long rich gown was of dark crimson silk, with ornate sleeves. A stiff white ruff edged in lace, starched and wired, encircled her massive neck and ran down into a fold of white lawn which was held in place by an enormous ruby brooch. Over all this she wore an overgarment of emerald colored wool, heavily trimmed in gold braid, fitted at the back and open in front to reveal her red dress, and held onto her shapeless figure by a gold satin ribbon. Its full open sleeves were tied at the elbow with other ribbons of the same bright gold. Her hair, which was quite sparse, was pulled into a knot at the back and was worn in short wavy locks in the front, with a little fringe of stiff curls marching across her forehead.
She looked formidable.
Charity heard Clothilde sigh to a friend. “I cannot dissuade her from dressing like that.” Her voice was fretful. “Killian should speak to her. After all, she is his mother.”
Charity’s gaze slid past Clothilde, who seemed a fashionable silken mass of ruffles, and she looked at the old woman more closely. She had somehow assumed this fat old woman to be the patroon’s mother-in-law, so little attention did he pay to her.
But now she observed the heavy look of strong peasant stock about her, noted the keen acquisitive little eyes hidden behind rolls of fat. So bulbous was her face that her expression had become a thing of the past, but those little eyes darting about were the same as the patroon’s. Charity was suddenly repelled by them as they passed over her with a kind of derision.
Charity stiffened, but she reminded herself that she must be civil, and made a brief curtsy in the woman’s direction.
The old woman pointedly ignored it.
Charity’s color grew a little higher. She’d have bet her handsome gold satin slippers that this woman had begun life no better than her own mother. Possibly, she had even struggled behind a plow. Or at a country loom. Or maybe scrubbing the floors of her betters at some inn.
Killian was a self-made man. He had bragged about it. And he had brought his mother up the social ladder with him. And now that old woman’s gaze—Charity searched for a word; it was ribald! Her gaze insinuated that Charity was less than a lady. U
pset, she turned away from the patroon’s mother and gave Ryn a winsome smile. He led her out to dance the minuet.
Ryn liked to dance and danced well. After Ryn, there was a constant flow of partners with whom she danced lightly about the floor, imagining herself an heiress for whose hand some aristocratic titled lord would soon be suing.
Through the front windows, during a pause in the dancing, she saw new sails arrive at the boat landing and wondered if the boat brought more guests from the manors that lined the river! Wherever would Clothilde put them?
As Charity went out into the hall, intending to go upstairs and look in on Pieter, the front door was swung open and a late entry swept into the hall.
Charity stopped still and stared at him. She would always remember him as she saw him then, striding in out of the late December night, standing tall and formidable as his keen light eyes swept the room.
Instantly, the patroon hurried over toward the man, and the patroon’s lady, looking confused, came to make him welcome as well.
Their broad-shouldered new guest, who seemed remarkably at his ease, was modishly dressed. His handsome coat was of the new cut that Charity had seen in England, collarless, shaped to fit the body, pleated and flaring toward the hem. It was of charcoal grey velvet and trimmed heavily with silver braid. The cuffs were enormous, perhaps eighteen inches deep, and handsomely decorated with silver braid. His tight-fitting knee breeches that hugged his lean muscular legs were of pale dove-gray satin, and his long waistcoat was of heavy white satin brocade. His strong calves were encased in white stockings, his feet in silver buckled square-toed shoes with red heels. Under one arm he carried a large plumed hat. His other hand rested negligently on a tall silver-headed cane. A jewel of size gleamed on the middle finger of the bronzed hand that rested on the cane.
But it was not his lordly demeanor, nor the striking figure he cut in his clothes that caused Charity to notice him. It was his face that arrested her. Dark and saturnine above the white froth of his neckpiece, that hawklike face held her attention. His eyes were strikingly light and keen and penetrating. They contrasted oddly with his great curled black periwig which spilled over his shoulders and gave him a massive leonine look as he gazed about him from his great height.
He looked a king, she thought whimsically. And from the wintry look in his hard gray eyes, he was a monarch with unruly subjects.
Every woman in the room had turned to look at him, Charity realized.
He seemed not to notice.
Staring at him like all the rest, she suddenly met his restless gaze. Cold and steely they were but there was a sudden humorous flicker in them, as if he appreciated the startling figure he cut.
She smiled back at him for a moment, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight, and then realized that glances were being cast at her. It was not considered maidenly to so forthrightly return a man’s glance. She looked hastily away. But she lingered there, a golden woman in the candlelight. She decided not to go upstairs just yet.
The music had begun when she turned and suddenly discovered the tall stranger bowing or “making a leg” to her.
“Would you do me the honor of dancing this dance with me?” he inquired gravely.
Charity curtsyed silently, her color rising slightly, and he led her out onto the floor.
They made a striking couple at which envious looks were cast—a study in gold and silver; the lithe girl whose shimmering pale gold hair was complemented by the dark gold of her velvet gown; the lean, arrogant silver-clad stranger with the watchful eyes and the handsome profile that lent itself to sinister imaginings.
Charity was well aware they were being watched. It heightened her color and made her feel reckless, as if the ball had been given expressly for her. She gave her partner a brilliant flirtatious smile—a smile that promised much, but which, like any coquette, she had no intention of fulfilling.
He was not an expert dancer—she had the feeling he seldom danced—but he moved with the light-footed step of natural grace.
“You are the center of all eyes, golden one,” he said, as they danced. There was something tantalizingly familiar about his voice, something that throbbed in her memory. “Are you not afraid these she-wolves will set upon you with their fans and drive you away, in fear you’ll turn their husbands’ heads?”
“I do not fear them,” she answered lightly.
“No?” he challenged. “But society is something to fear. Once the pack is baying at one’s heels, one . . . changes.”
There was a thoughtful look on his face when he said that, and she wondered suddenly if the pack had ever bayed at his heels.
“I believe you would be able to hold them off,” she said with sincerity.
He looked startled for a moment and then laughed. “Oh, assuredly now I would. At least for a time. Our armaments change with the seasons.”
“You are new to the Hudson?”
“I am new to nowhere,” he answered, with a shrug. “All places are old to me. Some men wander ceaselessly. I am such a man.”
“By . . . choice?” she asked, remembering Tom, that other wanderer.
He gave her an odd look. “Faith, ye’ve a penetrating mind,” he observed. “It enables ye to see through velvet coats and such like, I take it?” He had mocking eyes.
“I have eyes that see the man behind the mask,” she countered in a challenging voice.
“And what do you see behind my mask?” he asked smiling.
She looked into that dark sardonic face and decided the conversation had become too serious. “A man pursued by women,” she said airily. As one of his eyebrows quirked upward, she added recklessly, “Though whether worthy of their attention has yet to be proved!”
His eyes kindled. “Such proof is easy wrought,” he murmured. There was something in his voice that brought the color to her cheeks and made her miss a step. He seemed not to notice her slip. He was watching her, studying her intently as they danced, and seemed quite oblivious to all but the golden woman before him.
“We have a ball at this time every year,” she said glibly, for all the world as if she were a daughter of the house. “Are we to expect you at the next one?”
“A year is the devil’s own time away,” he mused, his gaze passing over her flushed face and sparkling eyes and resting for a moment on the soft curve of her throat, the white sweep of her bosom above the gold velvet. “But yes, if I live, I shall find you and dance a dance with you this time next year.”
“Of course—” she fluttered her lashes—“this time next year might find me married....”
“It is a chance we all must take,” he said.
She felt a little irritated by his light response.
“And is your suitor among this company?” he asked, looking about him with some curiosity.
“No. Unfortunately he lies abed upstairs with a deep cold. The doctors have forbidden him the pleasures of the evening.” Why should she not claim the patroon’s son as a suitor, she asked herself defiantly. Certainly he had pursued her.
“Upstairs?” His voice was questioning. “Then his malady came upon him suddenly?”
She shook her head. “The patroon’s son.”
“Ah, then you are not his daughter? The way you spoke, I thought—”
“No, I am his cousin.”
“But you will become his daughter, I take it?”
“Perhaps.”
His strange light eyes glinted in his dark face. “Then I envy the lad upstairs with the cold. He has a bright future to warm his heart.”
She smiled in return for the compliment, and sought to turn the conversation. She did not want to talk about Pieter. She wanted to talk about him.
“You said, ‘if you lived’ you would come back to us. Do you then seek death?” she challenged.
“Death seeks me,” he smiled. “But I am elusive.”
“And that is why you move about?”
His smile deepened. “A moving target is harder to hit.”
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br /> She looked up into those hard mocking eyes and felt somehow bested by him, even though his tone was courteous.
“I prefer men with secure futures,” she said, in an attempt to strike back.
He shrugged. “Most women do.”
She did not like being lumped with “most women.” “But only if the man is .. . outstanding,” she amended.
“Outstanding?”
“Yes, in some way. A scholar perhaps or ... a swordsman.”
He laughed. “Faith, you’ve allowed some leeway there. How about politicians—or as they prefer to call themselves, ‘statesmen’; do they also meet with your approval?”
She frowned, remembering suddenly the judge in Massachusetts who had sentenced her to death. “I do not like politicians,” she said severely. “They are evil men.”
He looked down at her with new interest. “You are indeed observant for one so young.”
She felt patronized and her voice sharpened. “You can’t be so terribly old yourself.”
“Sure, I’m a deal older than you,” he shrugged. “Several lifetimes, at least.”
She was about to give him a hot reply when it occurred to her that this evening she wanted to be considered young and untried; it was part of her game tonight to taunt and tantalize, to flirt outrageously. She had never before attended a ball and she meant it to be memorable, an unparalleled success.
He was to be her first conquest in her new role.
“I suppose I haven’t . . . lived,” she said pensively. He gave her a humorous look.
“Oh, there’s plenty of time for that,” he said. “The world will wait while you catch up with it.”
Her big topaz eyes shone up at him. “Oh, but I wouldn’t want the whole world to wait,” she said innocently. “Just a—particular person.”
“Indeed?” He seemed to be enjoying himself as he whirled her around. “It would be interesting to hear what you have in mind as a suitable choice.”
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