Windsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  ‘When he returns? Where is he?’

  ‘In Barbados visiting his mother.’

  Which meant that Sandy Randolph would have no chance to use his influence with the governor until he returned. And Rye would have to wait to receive his pardon, for who knew about lieutenant governors? They might have their open palms out for gold and with a general amnesty declared, Carolina doubted that Rye would stand for that.

  ‘How long will the governor be gone?’ Carolina asked cautiously.

  Letitia shrugged. ‘He should be returning any day now.’

  But travel this time of year was uncertain. Carolina wished fervently that Sandy had not gone away up the James. Perhaps he would know how to proceed with the governor gone!

  As if she had read her daughter’s thoughts, Letitia said, ‘Carolina, come with me.’ She left the serving girls still sorting the snowy linens and led Carolina down the corridor to a handsome bedchamber next to that occupied by herself and Fielding. ‘Did you happen to see Sandy Randolph in your travels?’ she asked in an offhand way.

  Carolina started. She had not expected to be asked that.

  ‘We returned to Virginia on the same ship,’ she admitted cautiously. From England, she meant to add, for that was what she and Rye and Sandy had all agreed upon. But she did not say it, for suddenly the lie stuck in her throat.

  A wistful smile passed over her mother’s face. ‘So Sandy found you,’ she murmured. ‘He said he would.’ She paused, waiting, but Carolina did not choose to elaborate. Letitia’s dark blue eyes glinted. ‘Sandy will find more than he bargained for when he returns home,’ she muttered. And in answer to Carolina’s puzzled look, she added, ‘His wife, Estelle, threw a gravy boat at one of the servants and followed up by attacking him with the gravy ladle. She near put out his eye - to say nothing of ruining the best French wallpaper at Tower Oaks!’ She shook her head. ‘That woman will be the death of him.’

  ‘Poor Sandy,’ murmured Carolina, heartily sorry for this new trouble to beset the master of Tower Oaks. ‘I suppose she has no relatives to whom he could send her for a while to - to have a rest from her?’

  ‘Estelle has no living relatives. No, I am afraid Sandy must bear the burden alone.’ Letitia gave her daughter a jaded look and threw open the door. ‘I had not yet got around to this bedchamber before you - left us. How do you like the way I have decorated it?’

  Carolina took in the rusty rose ‘Vase carpet’ from Persia, the mellow old gold coverlet and window hangings that turned to shades of lemon where the sun struck them, the soft muted tones of the fine English needlework upholstery on the mahogany chairs.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, thinking as she so often had that her mother had the best taste in all the Tidewater.

  ‘Good,’ said Letitia briskly. ‘I am glad you like it, Carolina, for I have decided to move your betrothed to this room. It is nicer and has a better view of the river.’

  ‘Oh, but I am sure Rye is perfectly well satisfied where he is,’ protested Carolina in distress. For if Rye were moved to this room next door to the room where Letitia and Fielding slept, her mother could hear any creak of the door, any creak of the bed, any murmured voices - she would be afraid to visit Rye in the night!

  ‘I am sure he is well satisfied where he is,’ said her mother smoothly, but with finality. Letitia Lightfoot was nobody’s fool. She had noted her daughter’s sleepy-eyed pleased demeanour at breakfast this morning and had instantly decided that Rye Evistock’s sleeping quarters were too conveniently close to Carolina’s. ‘Nevertheless we must do our best by him now that he is about to marry into the family. I will have his things moved this morning.’

  Carolina gave her a mutinous look which was serenely returned.

  ‘You might go and tell Rye he is to be moved,’ suggested her mother gently. And watched thoughtfully as Carolina’s slate-blue skirts moved away from her.

  Carolina found Rye in one of the turret rooms where a wan-looking but smiling Virginia was showing him around. He was turning about, studying with interest the windows which were on all sides of the small room. ‘An excellent lookout spot, Mistress Virginia,’ he approved.

  ‘And we have two of them,’ said Carolina, who had come up silently behind him.

  ‘I heard you coming up the stairs.’ Rye turned to smile at her and Carolina was reminded once again how keen was his hearing - indeed all his senses. Sharpened by the dangerous life he’d led, no doubt.

  Virginia was staring out of the window at the wide expanse of river below. ‘Oh, you must excuse me,’ she said. ‘For I think I see the Rosegill barge approaching and I must make sure it stops so that I can return the books Mr Wormeley so kindly lent me from his library.’ With a swish, she brushed her black silk skirts by Carolina’s slate-blue broadcloth ones and made her almost weightless descent down the turret stairs, leaving the lovers these moments alone together.

  Carolina gave her sister’s departing form a grateful look, then turned to tell Rye first about the governor’s absence, which provoked no comment, and then about the relocation of his sleeping quarters.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ she said in a worried voice. ‘I don’t know if I’ll dare to come to your room!’

  ‘Then perhaps I’ll visit yours,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘Oh, that’s dangerous,’ fretted Carolina. ‘For Virginia is nearby - she wouldn’t say anything, but Flo and Della are always running in and out of her room. And in and out of mine as well. If they find the door locked, they’ll pound until they’re let in!’ She began to pace about. ‘Oh, why couldn’t Mother let well enough alone?’

  Rye quirked an eyebrow at her. ‘Your mother is determined to avoid scandal. She prefers not to have a pregnant bride.’ And at Carolina’s disdainful sniff he turned to study the advancing barge on the river below. The snow had stopped falling last night but the sky was still leaden. It looked as if it might snow again.

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Carolina was fuming as she joined him at the window. ‘Why should she put stones in our path? After all, I came home to be married just to please her!’

  ‘Twill not be for long,’ Rye told her restlessly. He was watching the panorama as the barge pulled up at the wooden wharf and Virginia, waving and without a cloak, burst from the house carrying an armful of leather-bound volumes and ran down the snowy lawn towards the barge. ‘We’ll get this wedding over with and then we can respectably move into the same bedchamber while we wait for the governor to return so I can secure my pardon.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know my mother!’ warned Carolina. ‘Virgie says she’ll want a lot of time to plan this - and she’s probably right. The guest list alone will take forever!’

  Rye shot her an uneasy look - and then an exclamation passed his lips.

  Below them on the slippery lawn with its dusting of snow, Virginia’s running, black-clad figure wavered for a moment, then plunged to the snowy grass with her wide skirts spread out. Books flew in every direction.

  ‘Oh, dear, Virgie’s slipped and fallen!’ cried Carolina in dismay. She and Rye turned as one to race downstairs and out of the house to pick up the fallen girl.

  But Virginia had not just fallen. She had fainted, collapsed on to the thin shimmer of snow that whitened the ground from last night’s light fall.

  It was Rye who carried her inside.

  ‘She weighs nothing,’ he remarked as Letitia appeared and took over, her indigo skirts leading the way to Virginia’s green and white bedroom, her brisk voice ordering up brandy and smelling salts and hot soup and a bed warmer.

  ‘She will eat or else!’ Letitia told Carolina grimly. ‘I cannot have her collapsing like this - why, she could fall down the stairs at the wedding!’ And when she shooed them all away to ‘go down and entertain Ralph Wormeley’.

  But Carolina, seeing the thinness of Virginia’s gaunt features against her pillow, the blue shadows beneath her eyes, thought it might not much matter if Virginia ate that particular bowl of soup, for s
he seemed bent on starving herself. Virginia - so changed - was slipping away from them.

  ‘Ralph Wormeley is already being entertained,’ objected Carolina, for she had seen Fielding heading for the barge from another direction as they carried Virginia into the house.

  ‘Then show Rye about the house.’ Her mother’s voice was crisp. ‘For you are not needed here. Virginia is already stirring.’

  The door closed firmly in their faces.

  ‘I am glad you brought me home,’ Carolina whispered to Rye. ‘It may be the last time I ever see her.’ Tears trembled on her lashes and Rye led her away in sympathetic silence. ‘Everything is - is breaking up,’ she told him when they made their way downstairs and into the unoccupied library. ‘Penny’s gone and Virgie soon will be.’

  ‘Not everything,’ he said firmly. He took her slender hand in his big warm one and stroked it. ‘For you and me life is just beginning.’

  She smiled at him blurrily and then dashed away her tears and showed him the finely engraved Sheffield brass box which held writing implements. ‘Virgie’s favourite spot,’ she said wistfully, indicating the little slanted writing desk that reposed upon the heavy oaken table.

  But Rye was more interested in the fine twenty-inch pistol made by R. Silke in London. ‘I have one very like this,’ he told her, turning the handsome pistol around with practised ease, balancing it and sighting down the long barrel.

  God grant he would never have to use another one of those, Carolina thought, brushing a hand across her still-damp cheeks.

  It was there in the warm library before a roaring fire that Ralph Wormeley and Fielding Lightfoot found them. Ralph Wormeley’s cheeks and nose were red with cold. He was wearing a suit of spice-coloured taffeta with gold-worked buttonholes and a profusion of gold buttons beneath a warm brown woollen cloak which he doffed with a sigh at the sight of the fire. Beside him a frowning Fielding (frowning at the sight of her, thought Carolina, glad that it no longer hurt so much to have him despise her) was splendid in a rich tan damask coat with wide velvet cuffs.

  By contrast Rye was very simply dressed in his plain grey broadcloth, but Carolina thought him a commanding figure nonetheless. She stood beside him proudly as Fielding made the introductions and curtsied with a dimpling smile to Wormeley, whom she had always liked.

  After enquiring whether Mistress Virginia had been injured in her fall on the lawn, which he had observed from his barge, and being told she had not, Ralph Wormeley promptly informed them that he had only stopped by to deliver a message from Lewis Burwell. Lewis Burwell was giving a ball at Fairfield a fortnight hence and he hoped all the Lightfoots would attend.

  ‘And especially Mistress Carolina and Mistress Virginia,’ Ralph Wormeley added gallantly - ignoring the fact that Lewis Burwell could hardly have been expected to know that Carolina was back - for both girls had always been great favourites of his.

  Fielding Lightfoot, at that moment occupied in pouring glasses of port wine, responded warmly that they would be there. Carolina did not demur. Yesterday she would have felt obliged to say that she and Rye would probably be gone by then, on their way back to England - but it had come to her since with some force that such would probably not be the case.

  Carolina left the men talking by the hearth and drinking port and went up to see how Virginia was getting along. She found her sister tucked into the linen sheets, lying back exhausted against the long bolster, with a hot brick wrapped in a piece of blanket at her feet, and almost smothered by a wealth of coverlets despite the roaring fire on the hearth. Letitia had gone but her orders to build up the fire had been obeyed. The pleasant room with its soft green walls, dominated by a great bed with a green and white petticoat valance lined with green silk, was almost too warm.

  ‘You should not have run over the lawn when it had a skiff of snow on it,’ scolded Carolina. ‘It’s slick as glass -no wonder you fell.’

  Virginia nodded meekly. ‘I agree I should not have run,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I feared the barge might not stop unless I flagged it down, and I had promised to return those books to Mr Wormeley when last we were at Rosegill. He is so nice to let me use his wonderful library. And now’ - she looked about to cry - ‘I am afraid I have ruined his books, letting them fall into the snow like that!’

  ‘Ralph Wormeley said you were not to worry about the books. They have all been gathered up and dried off and no serious harm was done to them. He was more worried that you might have been hurt when he saw you fall to the lawn and lie still.’ She nodded towards the bowl of soup that lay scarcely touched on the table beside her. ‘Virgie,’ she said abruptly, ‘why don’t you eat?’

  Virginia realized that the question had to do with more than this particular meal and returned a frank answer. ‘At first I didn’t eat because I thought I was too fat and that was why nobody loved me. And then I just somehow lost the taste for food, and then I caught a deep cold, and now food chokes me.’

  ‘Oh, Virgie,’ said Carolina. ‘Don’t you know we all love you?’

  Virginia’s sigh came from deep in her soul. ‘I don’t mean you. I mean - a man. Hugh didn’t really love me. I ran away with him, but when we were caught he turned to someone else and forgot all about me.’ And stole your gold to boot! thought Carolina, hot with anger for her sister. ‘And then Mother pushed me into marriage with Algernon,’ went on Virginia, ‘and he didn’t love me either. And then he died and I had a miscarriage. And -and while you were gone I met someone I thought really did love me.’ Her voice trembled and Carolina saw that her fingers were clenched white in the lace of the top coverlet. ‘He gave me a posy ring, Carolina.’

  Posy rings were not valuable; they were usually of silver and were often given for friendship. But a posy ring could be the start of some richer, deeper relationship with a man.

  ‘I don’t see you wearing it,’ said Carolina, studying her sister’s thin ringless fingers.

  ‘I - I’m wearing it around my neck,’ admitted Virginia. She touched a thin golden chain that disappeared down into her bodice. ‘I don’t want Mother to know I’m still wearing it. Not after what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’ Carolina was almost afraid to ask. ‘Mother didn’t approve of Damien. She said he was a rake and a wastrel but’ - Virginia’s voice grew muffled, almost disappeared - ‘I loved him.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Carolina in alarm.

  ‘He offered for me,’ said Virginia sadly and Carolina held her breath. Surely her forceful mother hadn’t deliberately frightened the fellow away, surely even Letitia - wrapped up in other things - must have seen how much Virginia needed someone!

  ‘She made you refuse him?’ ventured Carolina.

  ‘Oh, no. She said since I wanted Damien so much she would not stand in my way.’

  ‘Then - ’ Carolina was bewildered because Fielding would never have disputed the match had Letitia been for it. ‘Are you saying you didn’t accept Damien?’

  ‘Of course I accepted him!' Virginia’s voice that had been so weak now took on power and with it a quivering sense of pain. ‘I loved him!’

  ‘Then - then what went wrong?’ Carolina said, alarmed at the terrible intensity of her sister’s blue eyes, darkening with remembered grief.

  ‘It was only my dowry he was after,’ Virginia told her with a terrible simplicity. ‘When Damien learned there wasn’t going to be any dowry, when he learned how deep in debt Father was, he went away without saying goodbye. He just disappeared, Carol. And he’s never even written to me.’

  Carolina felt her eyes smarting. ‘Take that posy ring from around your neck, Virgie,’ she choked. ‘And throw it in the fire!’ Her grey eyes were stormy. ‘Don’t wear it another minute!’

  ‘It isn’t the ring that’s at fault.’ Virginia wasn’t looking at her now. Her gaze was on some distant remembered hell. ‘It is me.’ Her voice took on a kind of sing-song litany. ‘I wasn’t pretty enough for him, you see. Damien liked pretty women.’ She gave a sof
t discordant laugh with no mirth at all in it. ‘He’d have loved you,’ she said bitterly. ‘He wouldn’t even have asked for a dowry for you. But plump little me - !’

  ‘You’re not plump!’

  ‘I was then,’ said Virginia sadly. ‘And so I thought - I thought if only I were thinner, more like you and Mother and Penny, that maybe someone would fall in love with me. For myself, I mean.’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper. ‘But it didn’t happen,’ she added wistfully, and her head bent like a fallen flower. ‘And now I know it’s never going to happen. Ever.’

  Carolina couldn’t speak. Her throat had closed up.

  So Virginia was starving herself to death because some fortune hunter had betrayed her!

  Now Carolina understood why her mother had acted so strangely this morning when Carolina had questioned her about Virginia. Letitia wouldn’t face the fact that she had a daughter starving herself to death because if she’d been thin she might have been able to hold on to the fellow! The man wasn’t good enough for Virginia and Letitia knew that, but Virginia loved him and so she had reluctantly given her consent - and then he had abandoned Virginia because of Fielding Lightfoot’s inability to provide a dowry! It had been too much for a proud woman like Letitia. She would not admit even to herself that her daughter’s health was failing, indeed she might never see another winter.

  ‘You see,’ explained Virginia gently, as if she were speaking to a child, ‘it wasn’t just one man who didn’t love me - it was all three of them: Hugh, who ran away with me to the Marriage Trees but when we were caught, turned to someone else. Algernon, who married me because his mother wanted him to. And now Damien, who was only after the money I didn’t have . . .’

  She sounded so forlorn it caught at Carolina’s heart. ‘If it will make you feel any better,’ she said steadily, ‘you’re not the only one who was jilted. You remember Lord Thomas?’