Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  He handed the bag to Colin. "I'll leave the bargaining at the wharf to you. I'm going straight to the house. For God's sake, don't pay a cent more than you have to."

  Colin gave a short laugh. "Don't worry. I have no more desire to starve in the American wilderness than you do." He left the shed.

  As Patrick slammed the door of the empty strongbox and extinguished the oil lamps, he heard the sound of Colin's horse dwindle away down the road. Patrick stepped out into the darkness and untethered his own horse from a tree. The dramming high in the hills, swifter now, seemed to hold an elated note. Poor devils, he thought. Did they hope that they would fare better with English masters? Probably not More likely they celebrated the fact that soon this island would be filled with the din and smoke and cries of white men fighting white men. He swung into the saddle and turned his mount's head toward the road.

  When he strode up the walk behind the little white house, Elizabeth opened the kitchen door to him. He said, "We have to get off this island. You had better start packing. Take as little as possible."

  She nodded. "Jeanne and Jules were here half an hour ago. They told me what is happening. I have already started to pack."

  He looked at her appreciatively. What a woman she was. Aside from her pallor, she seemed quite calm.

  "I had best see what sort of bargain Colin has made." He turned and went back down the walk to his tethered horse.

  When he had ridden down the drive to the road, he reined in for a moment. Colin could be trusted to make the best bargain possible. And none of those American ships could sail for another two or three hours. They would have to remove loading gear from their decks, batten down hatches, hoist sail. And ships' officers would have to round up crewmen from Harbor Street grog shops and brothels, rousting out the ones too drunk to be even aware of the bombardment a few miles away.

  Yes, he would have time. Turning in the opposite direction from the harbor he rode at a gallop for almost a mile and then turned in at a graveled drive.

  CHAPTER 37

  The two-story house ahead looked white in the darkness, although he knew, from the many times he had looked up this drive as he passed along the road, that it was actually pale blue. Light shone from a ground-floor window.

  He dismounted, knocked on the door. After a moment Moira opened it. She wore a gown he remembered, a pale green silk one. And she was more than a little drunk.

  The leap of mingled pleasure and pain in her face gave way to a sardonic look. "Sir Patrick, after all these months! Enter, Sir Patrick. Enter without fear, for I am alone." Turning, she moved rather unsteadily toward an archway. Over her shoulder she added, "But then, you must have realized that my lieutenant would be at the fort."

  He followed her into a room large enough to be called a salon rather than a parlor. He gained a swift impression of thick rugs and gilt furniture, perhaps shipped from Port-au-Prince or even France, and a few small objects—a clock ornamented with gilt cupids, an ivory-framed mirror—that he remembered from Wetherly. She stood at a small rosewood table, the bottle in her hand poised over a glass.

  "Wine, Sir Patrick?"

  "No," he said harshly, "and you had best not take any more. Did you know that the English will soon invade this island?"

  She filled the glass, sipped from it. "Of course. Why else should Victor leave me so abruptly to return to the fort?"

  "My wife, brother, and I are sailing for America tonight."

  He saw fleeting pain in her almost indigo eyes, but when she spoke, her tone was light. "Right through the English fleet?"

  "Of course not." He knew that the American ships would slip around to the Atlantic side of the island, and then under full sail make a run straight north through the darkness. They would not turn west until they were at least a hundred miles from St.-Denis.

  "There may be hard fighting here. I thought you might want to come with us."

  Again she drank. "Why should I care? No one will fight me. And what is it to me if the English take this island? I have always been a loyal subject of King George."

  Hearing her slight emphasis on the word "loyal," he wondered again if it was she who had denounced him to the English. Well, now he would have less chance than ever of finding out.

  "Besides," she went on. "I have heard that Admiral Jameson is with the Caribbean fleet. I met him in London five years ago. He is rich, handsome, and a widower. And he liked me. Who knows? St.-Denis's bad fortune may be the making of mine."

  "Very well. But I felt that I..." He broke off.

  "That you owed me a chance to escape? Owed it to me for all those nights, not to mention mornings and afternoons?"

  "If you care to phrase it that way." How beautiful she still was, even with that faintly blurred look intoxication had brought to her face.

  "I wonder if once I might have gone with you. I know your wife believes..."

  She stopped, eyes brooding over some memory. Then her face cleared. "But perhaps I am no longer what she said I was. Or perhaps it is the red Indians. I'll concede that I might go with you—yes, with the three of you—if that ship were sailing for Europe. But not even for you will I go to a wilderness and get scalped by savages. So bon voyage, Patrick. You owe me nothing."

  More than an hour later Elizabeth and Patrick set out for the ship, where Colin already awaited them. In the gig, with their baggage piled behind them, they drove down the dark road and into the square, where men and women had gathered on the sidewalks in excited little groups. On the long slope of Harbor Street they saw only women. Their customers were back at the fort now, or aboard ships in the harbor.

  As the gig's wheels rattled over the wharf, Elizabeth said, "You went to see Moira Ashley, didn't you? Did you offer to take her with us?"

  He threw her a startled look. How the devil had she guessed he might do that? "Yes. She refused. But I had to make the offer. She's a countrywoman, and for years she was my friend and neighbor."

  Had those been his only reasons? Elizabeth did not know. But what mattered was that however wild or dangerous their destination might prove to be, at least Moira Ashley was unlikely to appear there.

  CHAPTER 38

  From where she stood at one of the inn's third-floor windows, Elizabeth looked down into the wide Philadelphia street. During the week she had been here she had never tired of looking out the window. She loved the street-corner orators, standing on wooden crates as they quoted Paine and Rousseau and Franklin to knots of cheering listeners. She loved the often ragged-looking American soldiers who still drilled up and down the cobblestoned street behind their drummer boys, because no one knew but what their services still might be needed, what with the English hanging on in New York. She loved the red brick row houses opposite, with their scrubbed white steps. They reminded her of houses in parts of London. And she loved the voices that floated up to her, voices that spoke English, and yet, already with an accent she had never heard in the land of her birth.

  In short, she loved the vitality and excitement of this new young nation. She wished that she could stay here in this city where it all began, a city where men had penned bold words—about the rights of all men, about governments having no just rights without "the consent of the governed"—that must have sent a wave of alarm through every court in Europe.

  But they could not stay here. There were no distilleries for sale in Philadelphia, even if Patrick and Colin had had the price. And the Stanford brothers had no profession, nor even sufficient manual skills to offer an employer. The solution, one that Patrick was determined upon, was to acquire land. But already the prices of land around Philadelphia were soaring. Each day he and Colin had ridden out, on hired mounts, to inspect farmland, and each day they had found the price beyond them. Well, they would just have to keep looking.

  Suddenly she smiled and leaned a little farther out the window. Two men in stocking caps, arms about each other's shoulders, reeled down the opposite sidewalk, bawling out a sea chantey about a fair young mermaid. Behind
them, imitating their unsteady gait, trouped a number of small boys. Elizabeth knew the men must be sailors from some ship in the harbor. They reminded her of the boatswain who, on the long voyage from St.-Denis, had helped relieve the monotony for crew and passengers by singing chanteys, most of them severely expurgated to make them suitable for Elizabeth's ears.

  On the whole, the voyage had not been too unpleasant True, the first forty-eight hours while they sailed northward, with no lights showing at night, lest they encounter an English ship, had been tense. But after that the voyage had been uneventful. The captain, evidently well pleased with the money Colin had paid him, had turned over his cabin to Patrick and Elizabeth and moved in with the first mate. Colin had shared the second mate's cabin. Several times Elizabeth had felt seasick, but remembering her first pregnancy, she realized she might have experienced nausea even on dry land.

  Now, hearing familiar footsteps along the hall, she turned away from the window. Patrick came in, his dark face triumphant. "We have it A hundred acres for us, and a hundred for Colin."

  "Where?"

  He looked uncomfortable. "I bought up some scrip." At her puzzled look, he added, "Perhaps you haven't heard. The new government here has paid off some of its soldiers in scrip redeemable for land."

  "I see. But where is this land you've bought?"

  "A little more than two hundred miles from here, on the other side of the Alleghenies."

  Dismay held Elizabeth silent. Western Pennsylvania was still a wilderness, chiefly because the English government afraid that it could not protect its colonial subjects against the French and their Indian allies, had forbidden anyone to settle "beyond the mountains." In fact, the Americans' desire to expand westward had been one of the reasons for their rebellion.

  He said, "Where we are going is not as wild as you might think. There is already a road, not just a trail, across the mountains to New Canterbury and beyond. New Canterbury is the name of the settlement where we are going."

  Elizabeth found her voice. "But the child..

  "I will bring you back to Philadelphia in ample time for your lying-in. Now, I've already bought two horses," he went on swiftly, "and a wagon. It has a sailcloth top, like the gypsy caravans back in Ireland. I've also bought axes and a plow and seed. But you must select what you will need to set up housekeeping—bedding and cooking utensils and so on. Buy only what is necessary. The horses will have trouble, as it is, drawing us over the mountains."

  As she listened, Elizabeth had a feeling that had become familiar to her since her path had first crossed Patrick Stanford's, a sense of being in the grip of a whirlwind that might set her down anyplace, and then snatch her up again. And yet, beneath her apprehension, she was aware of that same stirring of the blood, that same eager curiosity about the future, which she had felt as the French merchantman slipped through the black water toward the West Indies.

  ***

  She lay on her pallet in the heavily laden wagon, listening to the sounds of the forest night. The sough of wind through pine branches, the melancholy hoot of an owl, the liquid voice of the brook in which, three hours before, she had washed the cooking pot and the pewter plates she and the Stanford men had used for their supper of hare boiled with onions and carrots.

  On the ground beside the wagon, Colin muttered something in his sleep. Ever since, ten days ago, they had left the last of the towns near Philadelphia behind them, the men had slept on the ground—beside the wagon on clear nights, beneath it on rainy ones—lest some marauding Indian or French trapper steal the horses.

  Not that they had encountered hostile men of any race or nationality during their journey. Twice they had been welcome overnight guests at settlements along the way. Their hosts, some of English descent, some of Scotch-Irish, had used their arrival as an excuse for outdoor suppers, with food spread on rough-hewn tables, and two campfires blazing in the cool June twilight.

  At both settlements, French trappers and Algonquian Indians were also among the guests. The trappers were deeply sunburned, wiry men, wearing fur hats and buckskin shirts and trousers. Used to slipping silently through forests and along riverbanks in search of game, they moved quietly and spoke softly even here in these outposts of civilization. Elizabeth found it almost incredible that they were of the same stock as the mincing French aristocrats she had sometimes met in London ballrooms, or the snobbish French bourgeoisie of St.-Denis. But then, these Frenchmen seemed to feel that little except their language bound them to their mother country. King Louis's quarrels with the English, obviously, were not their quarrels. Even before the colonies had revolted, the French voyageurs had brought their furs to such outposts as these and traded for salt, whiskey, tobacco, and other supplies.

  The Algonquians, too, although they never smiled, seemed friendly enough. Perhaps it was because they felt a lingering goodwill from the days of William Penn, one colonial founder who had treated the Indians within his borders fairly. Elizabeth saw that these naked-to-the-waist savages, with their deerskin trousers and braided, feather-trimmed hair, seemed to feel an instant rapport with Patrick, even though it was manifested only as a fleeting expression across their bronze faces. One night as she looked across at the other campfire, and saw her husband sitting between Colin and a silent, pipe-smoking brave, she thought: He looks like an Indian himself!

  The owl had stopped hooting. The wind had died. Nothing but silence. Silence, and her own sense of a vast wilderness stretching westward to a broad river called the Mississippi. Someday Americans might build settlements that far west. Not beyond it, of course. The regions beyond the Mississippi, stretching to a fabled land called California, belonged to the French and Spanish. Still, she felt almost dizzy with awe at the thought of the huge landmass stretching from ocean to ocean.

  She must sleep. There was still hilly land ahead, the western foothills of the Alleghenies. Perhaps tomorrow, as they had several times before in their journey across the mountains, she and the two men would have to go forward on foot, so that the struggling horses could draw the wagon up a steep ascent.

  But no matter. Tonight at supper Patrick had said that New Canterbury lay not more than five days' travel ahead. She turned over on the narrow pallet and drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 39

  Late in the afternoon five days later, Patrick reined in the horses on the crest of a low line of hills. Below them lay a gentle valley, heavily wooded, with the silver gleam of a river showing here and there among the pines and broad-leaved trees. In a clearing not far from the river stood a cluster of log houses, the smoke from their chimneys rising straight up in the still air.

  Elizabeth, seated between the two men on the wagon's plank seat, felt her heart quicken with mingled hope and trepidation. She said, "New Canterbury?"

  Patrick answered, "It has to be."

  "But it is so small!" She could see only four houses and their outbuildings scattered along three sides of the clearing.

  "It will grow," Patrick said confidently.

  "Bound to," Colin agreed, and Elizabeth noted with amusement that his speech had already acquired a few Americanisms, just as hers and Patrick's had. He went on, "That is all bottomland down there, fine for farming."

  With the whip handle, Patrick pointed down the valley to where broad fields—some still bare, others already green with growing crops—had been carved out of the woodland. "Our farmland must be down there someplace." He slapped the reins across the horses' backs.

  Trotting briskly now, the horses drew the wagon down the rutted road and into the clearing. A half-dozen young children broke off a game of tag to stare solemnly at the newcomers for a few seconds, and then, with excited shouts, race toward the houses to tell the grown-ups. Sunset light lay over everything, the hard-packed earth, the house fronts of unpeeled pine logs, and the faces of the men and women who came out to surround the wagon.

  Colin got down, and then Patrick. He turned to help Elizabeth from the high seat. Already the settlers, faces beamin
g a welcome, were introducing themselves. Tired after the long day in the creaking wagon, Elizabeth absorbed only one of the names, Thompson. A middle-aged couple, the Thompsons appeared to be the eldest in the tiny community. The husband, a gaunt, craggy-faced man, told Colin and Patrick that their horses could be stabled in his shed. Mrs. Thompson, plump and motherly-looking, with gray-streaked brown hair, kissed Elizabeth.

  "It's so good to have new neighbors. You see, Joe and I were the first to come here, more than six years ago. We named the place after Canterbury, because we were both born there."

  Elizabeth had guessed that. Their voices still held the accents of southeastern England.

  Smiling, Mrs. Thompson glanced down Elizabeth's figure. "You'll be glad to know that I'm a midwife. I delivered all but the three oldest of that lot over there." She nodded toward the group of children, who stood silent now, drinking in every word. "And five months ago I delivered Sally Jessup's baby here."

  Again she nodded, this time toward a blond girl of about nineteen who held a fat infant on her hip. Sally smiled shyly and ducked her head.

  The children looked in robust health. So did Sally Jessup's baby. Elizabeth felt relief. So there would be no need for her to go back to Philadelphia for her lying-in. All the way here over the rough road, she had dreaded the return journey.

  Mrs. Thompson put her arm around Elizabeth. "Come, dearie. You'll stay with us until your own place is built."

  That night the entire settlement gathered at the Thompson's for a feast of welcome. Men carried an extra table, roughly constructed of pine, into the big room that, together with a lean-to and a sleeping loft, comprised the entire house. Soon both tables were laden, not only with the Thompsons' roast venison but also with contributions from the other households. Warm cornmeal bread from young Sally Jessup and her almost equally shy young husband, John. Snap beans and creamed onions from the Wentworths, a couple in their mid-thirties who, like the Jessups, were native-born Americans from Providence, Rhode Island. Elizabeth learned that the four youngest of the children, gathered in a noisy group at one end of the joined-together tables, belonged to the Wentworths. The remaining couple, who had contributed two apple pies to the feast, were named MacPherson. About the Wentworths' age, they were both from Scotland, and both red-haired. So were their eleven-year-old twin sons, the eldest and noisiest of the group of children.