Go and see, said her imagined father. She rose to her feet and walked across the graveyard to the river path. No sign of Bridget. She must have walked fast indeed to have vanished in either direction. Mercy looked back at the grave under its Judas tree and then across to the family tomb where Francis had hidden. He had killed poor Pete at the disused wharf. And that wharf was reached by a concealed path behind the big magnolia at the corner of the dike. Impossible, surely, that Bridget could have found this, or ventured down it, through what she had called “Hart’s jungle,” in those soft slippers. But, already, Mercy was walking swiftly towards the place where the path branched off. Impossible or not, she was going to make sure.
Reaching the magnolia she stood for a few minutes in the hot sun, wondering what to do. Nobody who did not know could possibly tell that a path started here. And how should Bridget know? The answer came instantly. Through Francis or through her mother. Was this the reason for the visit? Was she down there, at the cold wharf now, keeping some treasonable assignation? She shivered in the hot sun, thinking of Pete’s death. If Bridget was meeting someone down at the wharf, they would not be alone. Madness to challenge them single-handed. But she must do something. Straining her ears, she could almost imagine she heard voices. It was not far down the path; the shrubbery was thick with a rich June growth of wild bay and myrtle; if she went, very quietly, a little way …
“Miss Mercy!” She turned to see Saul Gordan hurrying towards her along the dike. “I have found you at last! Mr Purchis is asking for you urgently.”
“Oh? Where?”
“By the sheep pens. I hate to ask you to hurry, in this heat, but just the same—”
What should she do? Take Saul Gordon into her confidence? Ask him to go down to the old wharf, see if Bridget was really talking to … to whom? Francis? It was possible. Francis had served at the unsuccessful British assault on Charleston the year before. That was all they knew. He could be anywhere. Here? Delivering a secret message to Bridget from her mother?
Saul Gordon stood there, innocuous in his black suit, sweating in the sun. She trusted him less even than Francis or Bridget. Danger was thick in the hot air. “Very well,” she made it casual, “I will go to Mr Purchis at once.”
It was a half-mile walk to the sheep field, and when she arrived, there was no one there. And the sheep looked contented enough, munching stolidly at the alfalfa Hart had had planted for them. Mercy gazed at them, puzzled, undecided, wondering whether she had imagined that moment of terror. Should she go back to the old wharf? No. Too late, useless. She must find Hart. She hurried back across the sheep field to the house.
Arriving, hot and flushed, she found Bridget there already, sitting on the porch, gently rocking in one of the big estate-made chairs. Her slippers, very evident as she pushed herself off the ground, shone white as they had this morning.
But were they the same slippers? “Did you enjoy your walk?” asked Mercy.
“Vastly.” She was gently waving a broad-brimmed chip hat to create her own breeze. “I went as far as that big magnolia on the river path and then cut through the orange grove to the house. I shall do it every day and become a perfect amazon. But you look hot, Miss Phillips. You must not court sunstroke running about in the heat of the day. You had best go indoors and rest a while. Look, here comes Mr Purchis. Shall I venture out into the sun to meet him? I really believe I will. Besides, it will give you time to make yourself a little presentable, my dear creature. You would hardly wish your employer to see you looking as you do now.” She rose, picked up a white, frilled parasol that lay on the porch floor beside her, and drifted out through the screen door and down the steps towards Hart’s approaching figure.
That parasol. Bridget had not had it when they started out to the family lot together. So, she had been up to her room to fetch it and might at the same time have changed a muddy pair of slippers for the spotless ones she was now wearing. Mercy fell into step beside her. “Mr Purchis was looking for me.”
“So that’s why you’ve been hurrying.” Bridget’s amused stare took in every detail of her hot face and crumpled dress. “You have the most devoted housekeeper, Hart,” she greeted him. “You send for her and she courts heatstroke seeking you out.”
“Sent for you?” Hart looked puzzled for a moment, and then, “Oh, the sheep. I am so sorry, I didn’t mean Gordon to send you to me. I merely wanted to ask—”
“Some dreadful question about pitch and shearing?” Bridget interrupted him. “If it’s not of the first urgency, I think vou should send Miss Phillips indoors for a while before you trouble her about anything. She looks quite exhausted with heat and hurry and should not be standing here in the sun.”
Bridget, on the other hand, had a glow about her. Standing on the porch, watching, frustrated, as she took Hart’s arm and strolled away, the frilled parasol shading both her dark head and his fair one, Mercy recognised it. It was the look Abigail had worn the day she met Giles down by the old wharf, Bridget had been meeting a lover. Not Hart. A sudden uncontrollable surge of happiness greeted this realisation. The glow had been there before Hart joined them. The lover was part of the conspiracy, part of the secret of the old wharf. And Saul Gordon must be in it too. This was baffling … frightening … but why else would he have turned Hart’s casual request into an urgent summons? He had wanted her away from the path to the old wharf, and he had known just how to achieve it. But why? What possible connection could there be between him and Bridget? A sinister one, that was certain. She did not think she had imagined that moment of terror on the river bank. If she had not obeyed Saul Gordon, what would have happened to her?
Every moment’s delay in telling Hart might be disastrous. But when he came back from his stroll with Bridget, Saul Gordon intercepted him in front of the house and they went straight to the study together. Too late now for any hope of catching Bridget’s secret lover. Besides, if it had by any extraordinary chance been Francis, would Hart want to catch him?
She tried to distract herself by taking down a dose of calomel to old Amy’s grand-daughter Delilah, and Jem found her in the alley between the servants’ houses. “Mr Hart wants to see you, Miss Mercy.”
“Oh good! Thanks, Jem.”
“I hope it’s good, miss. Something’s wrong, I reckon. Something’s badly wrong. You’d best be ready.”
“Why, thank you, Jem.” Over and over again, she was touched by these instances of the servants’ friendliness towards her. But what could be the matter? Mrs Purchis perhaps? She had been making a gallant attempt to appear normal, but there was no doubt that Hart’s plan of going north again had hit her hard.
Hart was in his study, and, most unusually, doing nothing. The frown thickened across his heavy brows. “Mercy!” No smile “Sit down, this may take some time and you have had a busy day.”
“No busier than usual.” She tried to make it light.
“No need to remind me of how indispensable you have made yourself.” He had never spoken to her like this before. “I know it all too well. That is why, dearly though I would like to, I cannot send you packing to Savannah … or farther … to the British, where you belong.”
“Hart! What are you saying?”
“That I know it all. God, when I think of the excuses I have made for you, I could put myself in the stocks for a fool, a gull. How you must have laughed at me!”
“I? Laugh at you? Hart, what are you talking about?”
“About your secret engagement to Francis, of course. Yes, well may you gape at me. You thought yourself so clever, didn’t you, pulling the wool over my eyes so finely. Did you ever stop to think what a discovery would do to us all? But he’s very charming, I can understand how.… When he wrote me about it, I … I think I was sorry for you. I waited for you to tell me. I was sure you would. I thought we trusted each other, you and I. And instead you go babbling of it to Bridget McCartney! No!” He was sitting, looming over her, on the edge of his desk, and put up a peremptory hand to stop
her as she made to speak. “Let me just get it over with Even that, I suppose I might have understood: woman to woman. It must have been lonely for you all this time with no news.” He laughed; at himself, she thought. “Come to think of it, no doubt Abigail knows too, thinks you a heroine out of one of those romances of hers, gossips with you about your Loyalist lovers when you are alone. Only I, who am responsible for you, for us all, must be kept in the dark.”
“But, Hart—”
“No!” In anger, his voice got lower and lower, yet more and more distinct. “If that had been all, if it had been merely the private treachery … but this of today. You look surprised? You didn’t know you and your lover were seen? Shameless … he told me … Saul Gordon … he described—You were too well occupied, no doubt, to notice him skulking in the bushes, watching, enjoying. So, what secrets of our defence plans were you letting Francis worm out of you, Mercy? Someone who’s capable of giving orders, as if from me, that the old wharf be left unguarded is capable of anything. Putting us all at risk! What do you care for the breach of trust, the danger to the family who’ve sheltered you? And now … now, for all our sakes, I must bribe Saul Gordon to silence. You see what depths you’ve brought me to! Oh, no need to look so anxious: he’s well and truly bribed; your secret is safe enough. But what am I going to do with you, Mercy? If only you’d gone with him, with Francis, when you had the chance … then I could mourn you as dead—forget you. But what am I to do?”
“You might let me speak.” And yet, what could she say? The fatal strand of truth was so interwoven in his whole furious indictment that it was hard to know where to begin. “Francis wrote to you?” she asked now, and knew it at once for a mistake.
“When the British sailed away last spring. At the same time as he wrote you. He said so. The same boy brought both letters. He asked me to protect you, to care for you as his affianced bride. I waited for you to tell me, Mercy. Can you imagine how I felt when you warned me about the letters that Abigail might be writing to Giles Habersham, when all the time I knew—”
“But, Hart, it wasn’t like that!” If only she had told him of her suspicions of Francis at the time. What hope had she of convincing him now?
“No? Then what was it like, this traitor’s romance of yours?” And then, furiously, as the study door opened, “I said I was not to be disturbed!”
“It’s your orders, Mr Hart. They’ve come. Marked urgent.” Jem handed them over and withdrew, with an anxious glance at Mercy.
Hart broke the seal, read quickly, and looked up, coldly considering now, at Mercy. “Well, there it is. I am to report to General Washington. At once. Pity you can’t let Francis know that, isn’t it? Or have you some arrangement? Some means of sending news after him? Very likely. So, what am I to do with you?” He looked at his watch as she strove in vain for a way to cut through the web of lies. “I must leave tonight. There’s no time. I’ll have to trust you, Mercy, this once more. It’s against my judgement, but I don’t think you’d wilfully hurt my mother. And it’s no use—she can’t manage without you. Will you promise me, on your word of honour—no, on the memory of your father—that you will not communicate with Francis again?”
“But I haven’t—” Useless. His face was closed against her. “Hart,” she tried once more. “It’s not true—any of it—I didn’t see him.”
“Not let him hug and kiss you, down there by the water, with Saul Gordon licking his lips in the bushes? No use, Mercy. He’s not got the imagination to make that up. You’re going to have trouble with him, and from that I can’t protect you. Keep close to Abigail. That’s the best advice I can give you, but try not to corrupt her, Mercy.”
“Hart!”
But he had opened the study door and there were Bridget and Claire, dressed for dinner. “At last,” said Bridget. “We were really beginning to feel we could be patient no longer. Is it news, Hart? Is it your orders?”
“Yes. I must speak to my mother.” He left Mercy without another glance, and left the house, much later that evening, without the chance of another word.
Chapter 17
Reaching the sanctuary of her room after Hart had gone, Mercy stopped on the threshold. There, lying on her worktable, were the shirts she had made for him. She moved stiffly across the room to pick one up and finger the carefully embroidered button-holes. What should she have done? What could she have done? It had been so cunning, the mixture of truth and falsehood, that even in retrospect she did not see what possible chance she would have had of convincing Hart. Not with so little time …
And that was frightening, too. Who could have known that Hart’s orders would arrive tonight? Someone with swift information from Savannah. Saul Gordon? It all began, horribly, and too late, to make a kind of sense. Saul Gordon and Bridget McCartney … Saul aware of Bridget’s secret assignation, perhaps even posted on the river bank to make sure she was not caught … getting rid of Mercy and hurrying down, to meet Bridget and—It had to be Francis. From the start, the whole thing had had the stamp of his devilish ingenuity. Francis thinking fast, thinking of the best way to discredit her with Hart.
But there was more to it than that. Francis had patiently, subtly laid the ground for today’s scene when he wrote to Hart about their “secret engagement.” Oh, God, if only she had told Hart about Francis’ letter. As she looked back, it seemed madness. At the time, had she still without knowing it, been to some extent under Francis’ spell? Hard to imagine that once those hot embraces of his could blind her to reason, to common sense. Now, she thought coldly, he is doing the same thing to Bridget McCartney. The scene Saul Gordon had described to Hart had been real enough, he had just switched heroines. It was the very ring of truth about it that had shocked Hart into those broken, horrified phrases, into instant belief.
Francis—so Winchelsea. He meant to be master here. He had as good as told her so, in the old days, when he was sure of her. When had he decided she was a threat to him? Begun to suspect she was not quite the enamoured slave she pretended? And taken a quick chance to weave his fatal web of lies around her. As for his accomplices, Bridget’s stake in the game was obvious. She must have been promised the position of mistress of Winchelsea. Whether she would achieve it was another question. Her mother, who had thrown reputation to the winds for Francis’ sake, might prove a formidable rival. Or would she die, conveniently, and leave the way clear for her daughter? With Francis, anything was possible.
Terrifying to feel herself alone against someone at once so ruthless and so clever. The bribe held out to Saul Gordon was obvious enough: herself. Discredited, turned away from Winchelsea, without character or prospects, what would she have done? Not turned to Saul Gordon. She knew that, but Francis could not, any more than he could have expected that characteristic generosity of Hart’s that had left her still in her place, still safe at Winchelsea.
Now she was crying. At the time she had been angry, desperate, unable to se how extraordinarily kind, granted what he believed against her, Hart had been. To his certain knowledge, she had deceived him twice, dreadfully: once when she concealed her engagemnt to Francis and, worst of all that letter of his, and again when she failed to tell him about Giles Habersham’s visit. No wonder that he had believed the worst of her. And yet, believing it, he had still not turned her away. It was cold comfort, but the best she had.
Work was comfort too. Hart had left orders that the household was to move into Savannah as soon as possible, and this kept her blessedly busy making arrangements for her spinners and weavers, giving orders for the autumn pickling, preserving, and smoking of food that was extra important in these days of increasing shortages, and helping Mrs Purchis decide which of the servants should go into town with them and which stay dangerously at Winchelsea.
That it was dangerous, there could be no doubt. Since Button Gwinnett’s abortive expedition that spring, things on the southern borders had gone from bad to worse. Bridget McCartney made the situation sufficiently clear when she sent for their
carriage the morning after Hart left. “You may wish to be scalped in your beds, or raped by British seamen, or simply carried off into God knows what kind of servitude by the Indians like that fourteen-year-old daughter of Joe McCrea’s, but now Hart has gone, I’m taking no more chances.” To do her justice, Bridget urged Martha Purchis to go with them, leaving Mercy to close the house, but it was Anne Mayfield who accepted, explaining that her nerves would not stand another night of Winchelsea’s whippoorwill-haunted silence.
“And good riddance, if you ask me.” Martha Purchis surprised Mercy by turning to her with this valediction as the carriage bowled away between the ilex trees. “Oh, not poor Anne, of course. But if I never see those McCartney girls again, it will be too soon. And quite spoiled our last days with poor Hart. Oh, Mercy, when do you think we will hear from him?”
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