The Mistress of Tall Acre

by Laura Frantz

  She gave him a half smile as he came nearer the fire, suddenly chilled. They stood an arm’s length apart in the flickering amber light, her silhouette soft—and uncommonly dressy. “Did I miss something?” He felt a bit foolish, out of step. “You’re in your lovely gown . . .”

  “’Tis your birthday, Seamus.”

  So she’d dressed up . . . for him? Astonishment rushed in as the mantel clock struck midnight. “It was my birthday, aye.” Such things meant little to him, but they obviously meant something to her.

  Her eyes turned searching. “I don’t even know how old you are.”

  “Older than you, I’ll wager, at one and thirty.”

  “Only by a wee bit.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Suddenly he felt the need to know.

  “Why should I?” She was regarding him in that warmly candid way she had. “Ladies don’t usually reveal their age.”

  “But . . .” He held her blue gaze. “You’re my bride.”

  Her expression changed. Softened. She liked that he’d called her his. He could sense it, feel it, in the very air between them. What’s more, he liked saying it. Yet the words held an untested intimacy that made him want to retreat. “As your husband I would know your age, Sophie.”

  She sat back down, skirts rustling faintly. “Eight and twenty.”

  He took the chair opposite. “I would have a good deal more.” At her inquiring look he continued, “We’ve only touched the surface.”

  “You sound as if we’re playing parlor games, Seamus.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . .” She glanced at the clock. “’Tis late. You need your rest. Sleep is obviously more appealing than sitting here questioning me.”

  “According to whom?” When she hesitated, he said with more conviction than he felt, “Ask me anything.”

  Surprise lit her eyes. “Anything? A question for a question?” At his nod, she folded her hands in her lap, thoughtful. “Why do I see a scar there below your jawline?”

  His hand rose to meet it. “You’d best ask my sister, Cosima. Suffice it to say she threw a rock at me when we were small. When you meet her, you’ll understand.”

  She let out a chuckle. “Your turn.”

  He studied her, memory catching fire. “Your brother never called you Sophie. When he talked about you he used a nickname, but I cannot recall it.” For a moment he regretted mentioning it, but she gave him a pensive smile.

  “When we were wee, Curtis could never pronounce Sophie, so he took to calling me Posie instead. ’Tis something I miss.” Breaking their gaze, her eyes roamed the shadows. “Why have you never made any changes here at Tall Acre?”

  “The staff told you that, I suppose.” Suddenly he was all too aware of the portraits above the mantel, and his parents’ contentment with Tall Acre and each other. “This has always seemed more my father’s home than mine. I still don’t feel it belongs to me.” He might as well admit the rest. “Anne never liked it here, so no alterations were ever made.”

  “’Tis a beautiful place, even more so than Three Chimneys.” A new intensity shone in her eyes. “I don’t understand why anyone would spurn it.”

  His gaze traveled to the fire. “Do you remember Anne?”

  She paused. “I only remember coming here soon after you wed and then when Lily Cate was born. Perhaps Anne and I might have been friends had I come more often.”

  “I wonder.” Doubt clouded his voice. “The two of you . . .” He left it unsaid, sorry the moment had turned melancholy. Sometimes Anne’s unhappy spirit seemed to linger. He prayed Sophie’s presence would drive the bitter memories out.

  Her silky voice pulled him back from the brink. “Why is your horse called Vulcan?”

  The soreness inside him ebbed. “Vulcan is the god of fire. My stallion was so named because he was less skittish than any other mount under fire, even cannon fire.” His gaze rested on her throat. “Where did you get that cameo you’re wearing?”

  Her hand went to the beloved jewelry. “’Twas my grandmother’s and is made of Scottish agates. I’ve always liked the color pink.”

  Did she? He made a mental note of it.

  She was looking at him again, at his mangled hand half hidden in his coat sleeve, a bad habit he’d gotten into on account of Lily Cate. Her face showed a telling empathy. “How did you come by your injury?”

  Their questions were becoming more personal, the hour late, but neither he nor she showed any inclination to stop. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time behind enemy lines. Some Hessians ambushed me—” The wound was aching again, driving home that very dangerous moment. “They tried to—um, dispatch me, but one simply ruined my hand.” He couldn’t tell her all the rest. His blinding fury. The boy soldier who’d died. The moment his prayers stopped.

  She looked to her lap as if giving him privacy—or mayhap his injury repulsed her too. He said, “Does it bother you, being wed to a maimed man?”

  The protest in her eyes quelled all doubt. “Nay, Seamus. ’Tis the man beneath that matters most. Do you question that?”

  With a shrug of his shoulders, he fixed his gaze on the fire. Another far riskier query pulled at his conscience. Unasked, it was burning a hole inside him. “Why did you agree to marry me, Sophie?” He held still, giving her room to answer or not as all the obvious reasons resounded in his head.

  Because I was about to lose Three Chimneys. Because Curtis isn’t coming back. Because I am estranged from my father and had nowhere else to go . . .

  “Because I love Lily Cate and I want you both to be happy.” She spoke without reservation. “I want to be a part of that, have a family.”

  He warmed to the truth of it. There was no doubt she loved his daughter. But he’d had no inkling his happiness mattered to her. Emboldened, he met her eyes, fighting a sudden breathlessness. “What I really want to know is if you’re still in love with the man you told me about.”

  She looked away, but not before he saw alarm flood her eyes. “’Tis my turn, Seamus, not yours, remember.”

  “Sophie, I—”

  “What does it matter, truly?”

  The tables were turned. He fisted his good hand.

  Because the thought of another man, another man’s memory, is driving me mad.

  She stood in a swish of skirts and excused herself, moving toward the hall and her bedchamber. The door between them closed with a forbidding click.

  A sick regret gripped him. He’d gone too far. Tried to scale too high a wall and burned a bridge instead. He knew better than to try to gain some ground between them. He’d violated his own personal vow to keep his distance, and this was his punishment.

  Theirs was a marriage in name only. Nothing more. ’Twas folly to wish otherwise.

  25

  So who do you think will arrive first?” Sophie broached the question the next morning over breakfast. “Your aunt Cosima or the dancing master?”

  “Aunt Cosima!” Lily Cate said with relish, finishing her porridge.

  “You may be right. We just received word she’s on her way.”

  Lily Cate licked a smidgen of jam off her thumb. “Is a new governess coming too?”

  “Your father has decided on a Scottish tutor like he had as a boy. But I’ll teach you till he comes.”

  “Did Papa show you the schoolhouse?”

  Sophie searched her memory and came up short. “Why don’t you take me there after breakfast?”

  In minutes they stood on the threshold of the sole dependency Sophie hadn’t seen. Nearly obscured by the garden’s boxwood hedge, the schoolhouse went largely unnoticed. Inside, the knotty pine floors and streaked windows bespoke age and disuse. Little more than a playroom with a few desks and a small hearth, it boasted several south-facing windows. Sophie was charmed outright.

  “Perhaps we’ll have school right here once I see if the chimney’s in working order. Do you think Jenny would like to learn to read and write like you?”
/>
  “Oh aye!” Lily Cate mimicked. “I can teach Jenny her letters like you taught me!”

  Sophie laughed, Lily Cate’s joy contagious. Together they took stock of the peeling walls, chipped wainscoting, and scuffed floor. “I’ll see about having it painted, inside and out. For now we’ll hold lessons in the small parlor till everything is ready.”

  She was fairly confident of Seamus’s support of her endeavor. Since Anne hadn’t taken the initiative to do much at Tall Acre, she suspected he welcomed change, however small. Or might he be in a less than gracious mood given their midnight stalemate?

  As she thought it, a roll of thunder resounded, making Lily Cate cover her ears. Lately one spring storm ran into the next. Taking her hand, Sophie led her down a shell walk into the heart of the garden beneath a fickle play of sun and clouds, the scent of rain clinging to the air.

  “My favorites, the daylilies and old roses, will return soon,” Sophie told her, pointing out various plantings.

  Crocuses and early violets peeked from newly weeded beds while blooming cherry and pear trees branched over low brick walls, creating a lacy canopy overhead. But Lily Cate was intent on something else entirely.

  “Are you looking for something?” Sophie asked her.

  She expelled a little breath. “I no longer see that bearded man on the lawn. Not since Papa chased him away. Now I see a light.”

  “A light?”

  “Sometimes I wake up in the night and see a light shining at that house across the river.” Sophie followed Lily Cate’s pointing finger. Like an enticing toy just beyond a child’s reach, Early Hall was fixed squarely in their vision on its crest of sloping, overgrown lawn. “The light is bright like a star, but it’s always gone by morning.”

  Sophie felt a chill. “Do you see it often?”

  Lily Cate looked up at her, so much of Seamus in her face. “Sometimes it’s shining. Sometimes not.”

  Sophie squeezed her hand. “Next time you see the light, I want you to wake me or your father so we can see it too.”

  Though she tried to bury the entire matter as she made her rounds that morning, Lily Cate’s revelation threaded through Sophie’s thoughts, needling as a thorn.

  Some vagabond might be trespassing, seeking shelter beneath Early Hall’s sagging roof. Even a runaway slave might take temporary refuge. So many roamed about the countryside, displaced by the war. The trespasser at Tall Acre might be nothing more than that.

  But she would need to tell Seamus just in case.

  Seamus noticed his field hands before he noticed her. They stood at attention as Sophie rode into view, coming at a half gallop across the pasture. There was no denying she was a fine figure on a horse. She sat on her mount confidently, the new sidesaddle he’d ordered from Biddle in Philadelphia beneath her. There was a sense of purpose, an aliveness in her stride that made him proud. And then apprehension rode in.

  She rarely came looking for him. He feared it involved Lily Cate. While he went about estate business, Sophie usually stayed close to the house, managing things as best she could. Sometimes a day or more would pass and he wouldn’t see her. If he rose early and came in late, he missed her altogether. But he couldn’t dodge the guilt he felt doing so. Or his quiet delight at first sight of her today.

  She’d timed her visit well. Now almost noon, the hands would be after their dinner, leaving the two of them alone. At the sound of the bell clanging across the pasture, they dispersed, bent on Tall Acre.

  He was suddenly conscious that he looked like a field hand, stripped of his coat, shirtsleeves rolled up. He’d been demonstrating how he wanted the sunken ditches built, those quaintly named ha-has that hemmed in the livestock without impairing the view. Raising a sleeve, he swiped at his brow and spied his queue ribbon near his boot. He snatched it up and soon had his hair hastily tied, at least.

  Perhaps now was the time to move past the unsettling question he’d put to her recently and apologize. In the privacy of the small parlor, he’d simply wanted to know if the man she loved still had a hold on her heart. But given her reaction, he’d been wrong to ask.

  She flashed him a disarming smile, no hint of tension about her, and slid to the ground in one graceful motion beneath the growl of thunder and a sprinkle of rain.

  “You’ve not come to tell me my sister is here, have you?”

  “Indeed,” she replied, seeming a bit remote beneath her riding hat and veil. “Cosima has just stormed Tall Acre.”

  He rubbed his jaw and cast a look at the house. “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Lily Cate and I served tea and showed her to her room. She’ll join us later for supper, provided it isn’t mutton and includes cherry bounce.”

  He chuckled. Coming nearer, he wanted to brush aside the veil of her riding hat to better see her face. “Is that all you’ve come to tell me? No more bearded trespassers or strange lights?”

  Her smile dimmed. She reached into her pocket and withdrew a letter. “Just this. From Williamsburg.”

  He took it grudgingly. “’Tis the second post from the Fitzhughs. They’ve obtained a court order that Lily Cate is to visit them.”

  “Oh?” Concern creased her face. “When? How long?”

  “Soon. For a week.”

  “Perhaps if you go along with it this once, the strain will ease.”

  He didn’t share her optimism, but he wouldn’t naysay it either. “Mayhap.”

  “There’s no way to stop her going?”

  “Not unless I want to defy the Virginia court.”

  “Perhaps her visit will be a bridge. Mend matters with Anne’s kin.”

  “Then why do I feel such dread at her going?” He tucked the post away, giving vent to his unease. “’Twas the same before certain battles, that sure sense we were about to lose something huge and unalterable. We always did. I never felt that way before a fight we won. Call it uncanny, but I never erred. Not once.”

  “Then we’ll continue to pray our way through.” Her calm was enviable. “Entrust her to the One who loves her most.”

  “I’m hardly doing that,” he admitted. “Not properly.”

  She spread her hands entreatingly. “Since when do prayers have to be proper? The Lord hears our prayers, Seamus, fitly spoken or not.” She studied him a long, dissecting moment. “What else is troubling you? Something beyond Lily Cate, I think.”

  “I simply want to move forward, cut ties with the past, including Anne’s relatives. I want my daughter to be my daughter, not farmed out to kin I question. I want you to be my wife, with no thought of the woman who came before you.”

  Or no thought of the man who came before me.

  She looked suddenly troubled. He felt a nagging remorse for such plain speaking. He wanted to make the whole unsavory matter go away, but there was no fixing this. “We’ll tell Lily Cate about Williamsburg once Cosima leaves. I don’t want anything spoiling her visit.”

  “Does your sister know about the trouble in Williamsburg?”

  “Nay.” Knowing Cosima, she’d ride right up to Fitzhugh’s chambers and argue him into changing the court order. “’Tis probably better left unsaid. My sister is a bit of a firebrand.”

  “I’d already gathered that.” She fingered her veil as it blew in the wind, finally lifting it so he could better see her. “She is delightfully different. Lily Cate adores her. She’s brought her parrot along, by the way.”

  He rolled his eyes. Cosima’s eccentricities had long aggravated and amused him. No telling what was in store this visit. They’d not have a moment’s peace—a moment alone—for some time. Emboldened by the thought, he began, “About the other night . . .”

  She looked up at him, her clear gaze sending an undeniable melting through his belly.

  “’Twas a rude question I asked you. I know better, and I apologize.”

  “I owe you an answer.”

  “You owe me nothing, Sophie.”

  A hawk swooped low, its raucous cry making her startle. He swa
llowed, nervous as a schoolboy, his next words broken by a sharp hallooing from the east. Turning, he saw his sister coming their way atop his prized thoroughbred, the horse barely broken, and astride to boot.

  The visit had begun.

  “Look, Papa! I can play the drums that Aunt Cosima brought me!” Lily Cate was beaming at him from across the small parlor, devilry in her expression. She began a rat-a-tat that rivaled the Continental Army’s finest drummer boy. For a moment Seamus was cast back to long marches and transmitting orders by fife and drum on war-torn battlefields.

  Glancing at his sister, who sat beside him, he asked mockingly, “What instrument didn’t you bring my daughter?”

  “I only brought the very noisy ones,” Cosima replied with an impish smile that rivaled Lily Cate’s.

  His gaze returned to the tin trumpet and a child’s fiddle strewn atop the rug, waiting to be played. Sophie was sitting near Lily Cate, admiring a whistle on a long silver chain. Seamus hoped she wouldn’t blow it. “I’d rather you have hauled down a harp from Philadelphia. Fiddles and trumpets are male instruments, remember.”

  “Posh! Times are changing, Seamus. You, an officer of the Revolution, should know that better than anyone. Besides, you mustn’t mind my spoiling her. I haven’t seen her for years, not with the Fitzhughs denying me a wartime visit. She’s my only niece, after all. Though I do hope you’re going to rectify that in time.”

  “In time,” he replied noncommittally, eyes on Sophie.

  “You’ve done well with your new bride, Seamus. I never cared for Anne, God rest her. But Sophie . . .” She smiled as a maid brought round a tea tray. “Sophie has heart.”

  His throat tightened. He’d never thought to hear Cosima praise her so soon. He’d always admired this new wife of his, but now, when she was near at hand, when he could study her in small, unguarded moments, his admiration—and his frustration—grew. Sophie had a curious effect on him, sitting there like a tray of treacle he couldn’t have.