‘He’d never do that!’
‘Oh, no?’ Sally gave her a derisive look. ‘Suppose he turned to somebody else?’
Suppose he did, came a sudden shivery thought. Suppose he did ... It was almost possible to imagine it happening under Sally’s hard penetrating gaze. She shook her head to clear it. Rye loved her, she was certain of that.
‘It shook you, didn’t it, just thinking about it?’ Sally’s voice had that new hard edge to it.
‘Yes, it did,’ said Carolina soberly. ‘And I’m very sorry for you, Sally, because I think you’re going to ruin your life!’
‘And then people will say how clever Brent was to escape me,’ said Sally flippantly. ‘Since I was so obviously “after” him! And they’ll sigh and say “Poor Sally, she never was much good!” But before that day comes, I’m going to cause so much trouble that the men in the Tidewater will never forget me! And the best way to do that is to make them fall in love with me! Then I’ll have the power to hurt them!’
Carolina sighed. There was no use talking to this new Sally. She was going to have to work out her own problems. Maybe she’d meet some new man and everything would change for her. Carolina hoped so.
Meantime - her gaze flew to the bed where an exhausted Virginia was already asleep - there was her sister to be thought about, to be launched.
‘I’m going back downstairs,’ said Sally restlessly. She turned at the door. ‘I’ll take care of Rye for you,’ she said in a taunting voice.
Carolina shook her head as the door closed. Sally had certainly changed. But temptress or not, she would get nowhere with Rye, Carolina was certain of that. And then there were others coming into the room where several beds had been set up, and she was surrounded with light conversation.
She decided to follow Virginia’s example and take a nap herself. After all, she needed sleep as much as anyone - Rye had kept her up half the night before!
She would have lain sleepless if she had known what lay in store . . .
FAIRFIELD
THE YORK RIVER, VIRGINIA
Winter 1689
8
However Rye had spent his afternoon, at the ball he was giving Sally Montrose a rather wide berth. Looking over the banisters into the crowd below, Carolina was quick to notice that. Guests were still arriving, she saw, as she and Virginia reached the head of the stairs. The Pages of nearby Shelly were just coming in, and there was Ralph Wormeley of Rosegill and some of the Shirleys from upriver - they swept in on a cloud of laughter in a medley of blue and green and lavender satins, lit by the sparkle of gold buttons and silver braid and sparkling brilliants.
They came down the wide stairway together, Virginia and Carolina, for while Letitia was already downstairs mingling among the guests, her daughters had lingered, taking time in arranging their coiffures - for Carolina was determined that tonight Virginia should sweep all before her.
For her first ball since her return to the Tidewater, Carolina had chosen the gown she had worn the night she first met Rye in Essex. She had taken it lovingly out of the big clothes press in her bedchamber at Level Green and held it against her face and sighed, for it brought back precious memories of a snowy Christmastide in England. She had had one of the maids press it carefully with one of the heavy irons before she had stowed it in a large box to be carried to Fairfield on the family barge. She was even wearing the same delicate stockings she had worn that night - of grey silk with embroidered clocks that seemed to flash silver, like her grey satin dancing slippers with their high red heels! Her daringly cut gown was of rippling dove-grey velvet, so thin it was almost sheer. It shimmered over her beautifully moulded young breasts, caressed her tiny waist and formed a perfect setting for the burst of brilliants at each shoulder. Its tight, pointed bodice swept out smoothly into a dramatically wide skirt with an impressive train. And now that skirt was swept into wide panniers at each hip, the better to display her gleaming gunmetal satin petticoat latticed with rich silver embroidery. She was even carrying in one slim gloved hand the same sculptured ivory fan trimmed in silver lace and set with brilliants - for she meant to wake memories this night in Rye as well.
Teardrop pearl earrings dangled from her ears, but now - as it had not been in Essex - the white column of her neck was circled with Rye’s magnificent emerald necklace, and Rye’s big square-cut emerald betrothal ring gleamed atop the glove on her finger. It had taken some urging to get it there but the gloves were of such delicate grey kidskin and so tight that she had finally managed it!
Beside her, trailing down the long staircase, was Virginia. A completely new Virginia. She was wearing her best bronze cut-velvet gown and it still supported above its gleaming amber silk petticoat acres of copper lace - but now the neckline had been daringly lowered, so daringly that the pale creamy tops of Virginia’s young breasts were displayed for the first time in mixed company.
Everyone had seen the gown before but it looked different tonight in other ways too. The onlookers would not realize it, but the bodice had been taken in so that it now gave Virginia a wasp-waisted willowy slenderness. Her too-pale face had been artfully rouged, her soft mouth touched with Spanish paper, and a tiny diamond of black court plaster - placed just like Carolina’s - set off her fair complexion near her mouth. Her abundant red-gold hair had been brushed and pomaded and swept up, save for several fat curls which lay along her shoulder - the same coiffure her sister was wearing. And she was wearing her mother’s glowing topaz necklace and brooch as well as gold and topaz eardrops.
‘I feel strange,’ muttered Virginia, clutching her skirts with one creamy gloved hand and hoping she wouldn’t trip on her train and disgrace herself - she had never been any hand with trains although Carolina seemed to kick her own train aside with arrogant delight. ‘And I feel undressed,’ she added reproachfully.
‘You look better than you ever have in your life, Virgie,’ murmured Carolina, smiling down on the company below. ‘Remember that and don’t act grateful if someone asks you to dance. Just lift your head and smile full into his face and then glance quickly over his shoulder and bat your eyes - make him think you’re arranging a rendezvous with someone else or shrugging off a dancing partner who arrived just a shade too late.’
‘I realize that I am studying at the feet of a master -excuse me, mistress of flirtation, but how am I to do all this, pray tell, if nobody asks me to dance?’ asked Virginia ironically, remembering what usually happened.
‘They will. Oh, Virgie, hush, we’re almost downstairs. Turn to me and laugh and say something and I’ll laugh as if you’ve just said something extremely witty and people will look up and see how beautiful you look!’
‘I expect to break my neck with this train,’ said Virginia - with a wild laugh that shook her red-gold curls.
‘How wonderful!' exclaimed Carolina in a carrying voice and joined Virginia in a cascade of laughter that caused heads to turn. ‘And here we are!’
And here they were. From the colourful crowd, Rye stepped forward to receive them and they strolled to the ballroom, one on each side, each clasping one of his arms. Across the hall, heading for the ballroom on the arm of a flushed-faced young buck, Sally Montrose regarded Carolina cynically.
‘Rye, would you mind leading off with Virginia for the first dance?’ murmured Carolina when they reached the big mirrored ballroom where the dancers were already whirling.
Virginia’s sharp ears heard that. ‘Oh, no!' she protested in an agony of embarrassment. ‘It will look strange if your betrothed doesn’t lead you out on the floor first. And besides, there are so few people dancing just now, I’d feel conspicuous!’ She shivered.
‘All right,’ Carolina said resignedly, for she had hoped to show Virginia off to one and all right away - and what better way to display one’s new self than on the dance floor? ‘The next dance, then, unless you’re already claimed. Lead me out, Rye!’
Tall and commanding - and smiling down on her with a glint in his grey eyes - her lover
led her out upon the polished floor and they swirled lightheartedly among the dancers.
Embarrassed by her changed appearance - and indeed feeling quite naked in her low-cut dress - Virginia shrank back against the wall.
Carolina loved dancing. And she loved her surroundings tonight. About her the row of tall pier glasses set into marble and gilt on either side of the room reflected a glittering assembly and amplified many-fold the candle power of the chandeliers and mirrored wall sconces. Sally Montrose danced by with one of the Carnaby boys. Her colour was high, her hair so alight with orange brilliants that for a moment Carolina thought she was afire, and the pumpkin satin gown she wore over a gold embroidered velvet petticoat was trimmed in wide swaths of heavy black lace. Carolina privately thought that Sally had overdone it, with four patches of black court plaster on her face, but she was laughing as she swept by - indeed, she seemed to be almost hysterically enjoying herself - and half the young bucks in the room were pursuing her.
‘Did you do it, Rye?’ Arrange to bribe someone?’ Carolina asked pertly as Rye whirled her about, giving her gleaming skirts a chance to billow out.
‘I did.’ He was smiling down at her, a confident lover. ‘A little gold did the trick neatly.’
So tonight would bring the added excitement of trying to find her way through the dark corridors of a strange house to keep a clandestine tryst with her lover! She gave him a shadowed look through lashes gilded by candlelight. ‘What if I can’t get away?’ It was fun to tease him.
‘You will,’ he predicted, his grin growing even more wicked.
She knew she would too! Nothing could stop her . . .
‘Have you - been talking to Sally Montrose?’ she asked him suddenly, for she could not help wondering if he had spent the afternoon with Sally - this new predatory Sally, out after every man in sight.
‘She showed me the gardens,’ he said, and Carolina felt a twinge of jealousy. She cast a swift look at Sally, sparkling and vivacious, just then whirling by among the dancers.
Suddenly Sally’s laughter took on a higher pitch, her smile flashed brilliantly, her glittering eyes were almost fever bright. Carolina turned her head swiftly to survey the room.
Ah, that was it: Brent Chase and his bride Agnes had just entered the ballroom. Brent, handsomely got up in buff and orange, was trying desperately not to look at Sally, whose dancing partner had now whirled her quite near him - indeed, Brent’s hazel eyes were looking almost everywhere else. Beside him little Agnes rustled in her peach and plum gown almost smothered with a profusion of ecru lace. Carolina looked at that small pointy face with its black birdlike eyes with some distaste. Sally was right to say Agnes had a pinched face, she thought - and she simpered too much.
She’s caught Sally’s eye at that moment and repressed a shiver. Sally looked wild enough to do anything - even to attack the bride. Carolina remembered suddenly a phrase about hell having no fury like a woman scorned - that certainly described Sally tonight.
The dance ended, someone else claimed Carolina, and Rye danced once with Virginia, then drifted away into the crowd. And then there was another dancing partner and another. All her old beaux seemed to be here tonight, Carolina noted with satisfaction. After all, it was pleasant to have Rye see for himself how popular she had been back home. Watching her with speculative eyes were Ned Shackleford and Dick Smithfield, both of whom had once ridden, wearing her colours, in an impromptu ‘tourney’ on the wide lawns of Rosegill. And Ned, who had styled himself ‘Knight of Gloucester’ for the tourney, had crowned her Queen of Love and Beauty beneath one of the big branching trees on Rosegill’s lawn. That was the day she had learnt that Sandy Randolph was her real father. The day that Opened Her Eyes, she thought wryly. The day she had borrowed passage money from Sandy Randolph and run away, lest her mother and Fielding force her into marriage with one of their ‘good catches’.
And thinking of Sandy made her look about to see if the Bramways were in evidence. They were not. But there was Sandy across the room. Clad in a deep-cuffed pale amethyst brocade coat and supple plum velvet trousers, he was just then lifting a glass to someone. She caught the ruby gleam of port, followed his gaze and saw her mother’s slender figure, slim as a girl's in amethyst satin over a rustling purple silk petticoat laced with silver. Letitia had a glass in her hand too. Almost imperceptibly she lifted that glass to Sandy - and then turned quickly, talking with great animation to the group she was with. Tonight, thought Carolina with a pang, Sandy was deliberately wearing her mother's colours. Old loves died hard . . .
Carolina glimpsed Virginia once again on the sidelines but she could not reach her before Ned Shackleford claimed her for the next dance. Ned's brown eyes were glowing. He seemed to have grown bulkier since she had seen him last, to have lost his wiriness.
‘I heard you were back, Mistress Carolina,' he said, and there was a glow in his voice too. ‘And I said “'Tis good news!” when I heard it, for all of us here in the Tidewater missed you solely when you left.'
‘I came back to be married, Ned.'
‘Aye, so they told me.’ He sighed. ‘Do I see him here?’
‘Yes.’ Carolina’s silver-grey gaze scanned the crowd, spotted Rye dancing with Virginia again. Virginia looked quite flustered but her excitement had served to heighten her colour - Carolina thought proudly that Virginia looked awfully well. ‘Over there, dancing with my sister, the tall man in grey.’ That description hardly did Rye justice, she thought. His broad shoulders imparted style to his charcoal velvet coat, his wide cuffs edged with silver braid supported a burst of white mechlin that drifted over fine hands, and his long lean legs were encased in gun-metal satin breeches. He moved as lightly as a dancing master - or a fencer - as he guided a blushing Virginia across the floor. ‘That’s Rye,' she said, and could not keep the pride out of her voice.
‘I see he is wearing a long sword,’ observed Ned.
Carolina sighed. That was one thing Rye had been adamant about. She had not been able to persuade him to wear one of the short dress swords most of the other men were sporting - for the terrible Indian massacres of 1622 and 1644 were still remembered in the Tidewater, as well as the slaughter of settlers which had brought on Bacon's Rebellion and thus had led to the burning of Jamestown. It behooved a prudent gentleman of the Tidewater to wear a sword. But Rye’s sword was long, as a fighting man’s should be, and it had a very serviceable basket hilt which Ned had glimpsed through the side slash of Rye’s skirted charcoal coat as it swung out when he guided Virginia through a difficult measure.
‘Yes,’ Carolina told him ruefully. ‘Rye is very fond of that sword.’
‘And has used it a deal, I’ll wager,’ said Ned, studying the man narrowly.
There was something formidable about Rye, Carolina thought unhappily, something that even Ned had noticed. You felt it, even when he was dancing. Something about the square set of his jaw, something cold and challenging in his grey eyes, in the hawklike set of his saturnine features.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed, for she considered that a dangerous subject. She sought for another one. ‘I half expected to return and find you married, Ned. Have you not found yourself a lady?’
‘I found one,’ he said, and his young voice was suddenly unhappy as he looked deep into Carolina’s eyes, willing her to love him. ‘But I lost her somehow . . .’
This too was dangerous ground. Carolina did not wish to incite Rye to jealousy. She remembered too well how he had ‘defended’ her on Tortuga. ‘And Dick Smithfield?’ she asked hastily, glancing in Dick's direction.
‘Dick?’ Ned snorted. ‘Aye, Dick married not three months after you left.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘A girl from upriver, near the Falls, very pretty. She’s home now, finds it inconvenient to travel.’
Which meant in all likelihood that she was pregnant with her first child - ‘pregnant’ was what they usually meant when they said a woman ‘found it inconvenient to travel’.
‘Oh, she isn’t alone. They’ve moved in with her family until Dick can get his house built.’
‘Nevertheless!’ Carolina arched her slim neck haughtily. ‘I shall snub him for treating her so!’
Ned chuckled. Those were words that would have done his heart good in the days when he had hung on her lightest breath. ‘Is it true you’re to be married very soon?’ he asked abruptly.
‘That’s right. Here at Level Green.’
‘Your parents will like that,’ he said hollowly. ‘And what then?’
‘And then to England, Ned.’ He looked so forlorn at hearing that she was leaving that she felt called upon to point out that there were other girls in the room. ‘I always thought you liked Sally Montrose, Ned.’
He shook his head. ‘Not the way she is now.’
‘And how is she now?’ demanded Carolina with asperity.
'Mean,' averred Ned. ‘She accepted a betrothal ring from Keith Avery a fortnight ago - let him propose on bended knee, ask her father for her, all that - and then strolled into the dining room and before company tossed it back at him and said she'd changed her mind. I wonder that her parents let her back out of it!’
Sally was headed for grief, all right. Word was getting around . . .
‘Doesn't Virginia look lovely tonight?’ she said, hoping to channel his interest towards this newer, more stylish Virgie.
‘Virginia?’ said Ned blankly. ‘Where?’
Annoyance sharpened Carolina’s voice as she answered, ‘Dancing with Rye,’ for surely Ned could hardly have escaped noticing Rye’s dancing partner, especially after his attention had been called to her!
‘Oh - Mistress Virginia? Oh, yes, she does indeed look fine,’ was Ned’s tepid response. ‘Lost some weight, hasn’t she?’ he added vaguely.
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