Mood Indigo

by Parris Afton Bonds

  He grinned then. “As I said, it would be difficult to replace thee.”

  Her fist slammed down on the chair’s arm. “You are cruel!”

  He rose and stretched, displaying a muscle-roped body that needed no padding as did the courtiers of Buckingham House. “Thou doesn’t know the cruelty men are capable of, mistress.”

  “Lady! Lady Jane! Now release me from my servitude, or—or I shall—”

  “Run away?” he asked, reaching for the walnuts in the basket on the side table. “I’ve warned thee of the penalty—a whipping, which I think thee heartily needs.”

  Her chin tilted in a characteristically stubborn gesture. “If you can find me.”

  “If thee can survive the wilderness. Listen—hear the cry of the lynx? His jaws will tear thy soft flesh and crush thy bones as easily as this.” The man’s powerful knuckles effortlessly cracked a nut’s hard shell. “And then there are the Indians. Not all of the tribes are friendly, mistress.”

  She sprang from her chair. “You do not frighten me!” But she knew he was right. Still, she did not give up. Instead she shifted her tactic, as a general would a military maneuver. Sophistry and charm would yet win the day over this backwoodsman!

  Hands clasped demurely before her, she crossed to stand before him. From beneath the tangle of lashes her eyes beseeched his unyielding gaze. “You are in love with your neighbor’s wife, yet you cannot have Susan. Do you deny it?”

  If black-flecked eyes could darken, his did. “How does thee come by this knowledge?”

  “Oh, Ethan,” she said softly, “you cannot hide such a strong feeling as love.” She could not bring herself to touch that scarred portion of his face and, instead, laid a helpless hand against his cambric shirt. “No more than I can.”

  One auburn brow arched over the outer corner of his eye. “No more than thee can—what?”

  “Why, help loving you, master.” Her lids lowered, as surely Susan’s must when she was flustered. “It is torture for me to remain here—to see you every day, watch you climb the stairs to your bedroom every night—and yet know you love Susan. That is why I must leave. I am promised to another man, and—”

  “And what?”

  “And since you love Susan”—her words faltered beneath his dark gaze—“and since there can never be anything between us . . .”

  A slow grin crooked his mouth. “My love for Susan is no reason to hold back the desire I and thee may feel for each other.”

  “But ... but you’re a Quaker. They—”

  “I am a man, first, mistress.” His fingers caught the tapered hand she laid on his chest, and his lips planted a warm kiss in her callused palm.

  She jerked it away. “I am betrothed, sir!”

  “Thee is my servant, mistress, and I thy master.” He grinned openly now. His gaze perused the hollow of her throat, laid bare by the open collar. “And I wish for thee to warm my bed.”

  Her hand came up, but his was quicker, halting her intended slap in mid-arc. “You swine!”

  “Careful, or I shall be tempted to use the hickory stick on thy lovely back.”

  “I will never warm your bed!”

  “You will—now.”

  Something about the eyes, the laughter she saw lurking in their depths, eased her fears. “You would not make me?”

  “Nay, mistress.” He released her hand. “It is but the warming pan I speak of. The nights grow cold.”

  Despite her recent anger, dimples creased the unhealthy hollows beneath her cheekbones. “My virtue has been spared,” she said wryly, “but I think my pride has been dented.”

  “Thee has too much pride, mistress.”

  She turned away from his woodsman’s scrutiny. “Not enough. Or else I should not have lowered myself to the status of a servant.”

  “A servant’s position is not without pride.”

  “How would you know?” she asked bitterly.

  The walnut he cracked made the only noise in the room. Then, “Because I was an indentured servant when I came to the colonies.”

  She heard her bitterness echoed in his voice. She looked over her shoulder. “You jest.”

  “Scarcely. I came to the colonies on a convict ship.” Her breath whooshed down her throat. She faced him fully. “You were a convict?”

  “Aye, mistress.” He passed by her. “Now, about warming my bed . . .”

  A convict! Dazed, she followed him as he took a candle from the stand and walked to the pitch-black well behind the stairs. No longer did she feel so safe. When he retrieved the long-handled pan and passed it to her, she almost jumped.

  Above the tallow’s light, she saw his sober expression. “I would not harm thee, mistress.”

  “But you will not let me go, will you?”

  “Nay, that I will not.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The two men shared the same hair color, though the twenty-nine-year-old Ethan’s was a deeper, darker red and the other man, at thirty-eight, was graying at the temples. They were both backwoodsmen and former riflemen with the elite Virginia Militia. And they also shared the same political viewpoint. At that moment the raw-boned Patrick Henry sat before Ethan’s desk, writing furiously.

  Ethan hitched his leg up on the casement of his bedroom window, where he could watch Jane as she hung the freshly washed linen on the hemp stretched between two live oaks. When the delegate for Hanover County had appeared on his doorstep, Ethan introduced him to Jane as a merchant interested in the indigo crop.

  Ethan did not fully trust his maidservant. He had no doubt that she was a Tory. But was she also a spy? Her father could have chosen to plant her here as an intelligence mole for the Tory agents in Virginia. But what father would subject his daughter to such hardship? Lord Wychwood, possibly.

  Ethan recalled the grains of sand he found on his desk top two days earlier. To whom had she been writing? A Tory agent? A frown furrowed Ethan’s broken nose. Would she have reported Bram as a zealous rebel who needed watching? And how would she have smuggled her letter out? With an unsuspecting Susan? A reason, perhaps, for him to ride over and question Susan. No, an excuse to see her, to enjoy the comfort of her quiet laughter and gentle companionship.

  His lids narrowed as an afternoon breeze buffeted Jane Lennox’s skirts, silhouetting her body’s deep indentations and delightful curves. Perhaps he was wrong about the pampered young woman who was now his bondswoman. Perhaps the letter was bound for this Terence she had spoken of during her illness.

  “Ethan!”

  Ethan looked back at the self-taught lawyer who, though he spoke with a Piedmont twang, was known as the Son of Thunder for his electrifying orations in the House of Burgesses. “I’m sorry—did thee say something, Patrick?”

  “Twice now.” The delegate laid the quill down. “I’ve finished. I think everything of import that took place at the Continental Congress is on those pages. Congress has voted to support Massachusetts if Britain tries to use force. It’s best you warn the Committees of Correspondence across Virginia to start preparing for war in case of British attack on other Massachusetts towns.”

  Ethan grunted. “War is already here, Patrick. Last week in Williamsburg a Negro was tarred and feathered for expressing Tory sentiments—some of Uriah Wainwright’s vigilante work.”

  “Fanatics like him only hurt our cause.” Henry stretched his lanky arms above his head. Observing his friend’s preoccupation, he said gravely, “The Sons of Liberty in Boston report another spy out of Gage’s nest, Ethan. Goes by the code name of Ahmad. Your dispatch carriers operating between the Northern and Southern colonies should be made aware of this spy.”

  Ethan grinned. “I’m beginning to think that serving with the Virginia Militia is easier than this drawing-room diplomacy of yours.”

  “But not as valuable. What you did in London—learning the names of the Tories entrenched in the colonies’ governmental assemblies—proved your worth to the Committee of Correspondence.”

  Henry ro
se, clanging on the desk the tip of the scabbard beneath his coat’s skirt, and crossed to stand next to Ethan at the window. He laid a companionable hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “In Williamsburg, Ethan, there is a welter of skullduggery, rancor, and gossip. Would you think about finding a reason to go to the capital more often?”

  Ethan’s black eyes turned to the window again, seeking the feminine figure below. Come General Assembly and Public Times, dare he leave her here to create her own political intrigue? Dare he take her with him? Despite her present state of unattractiveness, he could imagine the scandal that would arise in Williamsburg at the idea of a man with so young a maidservant living in the same house. Immorality would be charged from the Wren college building at one end of Duke of Gloucester all the way to the capitol at the other; hardly conducive to his Quaker’s image or the low profile he needed to keep.

  Jane Lennox was going to be nothing but trouble for him.

  “That is the Tory maid you bought?” Henry asked, following the direction of his friend’s gaze.

  “Aye.”

  “Can she be trusted, Ethan? There’s Dickey Lee and Daniel Franks and the others you are in contact with to think about.”

  Ethan fixed a sardonical eye on the lawyer. “Should I tar and feather her as the more conservative Whigs would do? Or brand her with a T, as the rabid Uriah Wainwrights of the colonies prefer?”

  “You could marry her,” Patrick said, following Ethan’s gaze. “That would solve any problems.”

  He laughed ruefully. “That would only be the start of my problems, Patrick.”

  No, his wife would be sweet-tempered like Susan. Small and soft, instead of tall, taut, and slender; obliging instead of distracting and unpredictable; submissive where Jane Lennox challenged. Fragile and loving and gentle. Not a contentious shrew.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Posing as an ordinary surveyor in brown clothes and a red handkerchief about his neck, the spy Ahmad left Boston on foot. He went by way of Charlestown and passed through Cambridge, a nice town, it seemed, with a college built of brick. The weather was cold but dry for October, and he made good time.

  With his surveyor’s instruments as a ruse, badly rusted though they were, he made a pretense at charting when he was actually drawing road maps and terrain sketches. And all the while he watched and listened. In the course of five days he counted twenty wagonloads of flour that passed from Marblehead to Worcester. The rebels were laying in supplies of food and munitions. Tools were being made at Menotomy and pickaxes at Mystic. Obviously the skilled American axeman was a colonial product, not a European import.

  Gage wanted roads and distances from town to town, as well as the situation and nature of the country—the streams, woods, hills, defensible places in towns, and local supplies of food, forage, straw, and extra horses.

  And most of all, he wanted the mood of the people reported.

  Ahmad reached Watertown without being suspected and, before making the last leg of his trip, paused for dinner at the crowded tavern of Jonathan Brewer. The agent quietly took a seat at the board in the taproom and mentally reviewed his report while he waited for the young Negro servantwoman to see to him.

  Gage was not going to be happy. Plymouth, Marblehead, Worcester—the towns could easily turn out fifteen thousand minutemen. The rebels already had thirty-eight field guns, most of them at Salem and Concord, along with twelve brass cannon.

  The spy’s attention was drawn back to the dark-paneled, smoke-congested tavern room. The owner, Brewer, and a dozen or so men, mostly farmers, were gathered about the kegs at the bar, whose rear wall shelved pewter tankards, salt-glazed pitchers, and long-stemmed glassware. The lowered voices, deep in conversation that mixed with laughter, aroused Ahmad’s suspicion, for he was quickly learning that innkeepers were often retired militia officers.

  The sentence fragment, “ . . . adequate supply of tar and feathers laid in for anyone suspected of harboring lobsterbacks,” brought a tightening to his lean lips. Whigs. He had walked into a rebel nest.

  The neglect of Gage! The general had developed no spy system at all. There should be some way for Tory sympathizers to identify themselves. And there should be a dossier on the location of Tory homes when the need to go underground arose. There was neither a code nor cipher, and no one other than himself who knew how to make them.

  When the young Negress, large of hip but with a gazelle-like grace, came to his table, he ignored the wide white grin she flashed. “Good cheer to yuh, massa,” she purred, eyeing his tawny locks. “What’s yo’ want?”

  He perused the bill of fare. “Planked shad—and grog to drink.” No patriot ever ordered tea.

  “Yo’ shor that’s all,” she persisted. Here obviously was a man who would know how to handle her . . . who understood the ways of a woman . . . who wouldn’t bide by that “unnatural stuff” the white folks’ Bible frowned on.

  “I’m—” He broke off as he saw the chocolate-brown eyes flare. His gaze followed hers to his set of maps. Most people would expect them to be surveyor’s maps. But the uneducated woman, in that atmosphere of general suspicion and with all the talk of spies and tar and feathering, she had jumped to the right conclusion—that he was a spy. He could see it in the way her eyes suddenly narrowed. “Yassuh, massa, I’ll see to yo’ order.”

  Unobtrusively he rose and followed her sashaying hips as she hurried outside to the kitchen in back of the tavern. In the dark his silent footsteps on the marl path gave no warning until he caught up with her. By then it was too late. He gagged her mouth from behind with the red handkerchief. The edge of his left hand chopped the woman’s windpipe. He let her slip gently down on all fours. With a gurgled gasp, her hand reached for her throat.

  Terence straddled the woman. His left hand he placed against the back of the Negress’s head. He gave one short, brutal twist to the neck, backward, upward, and sideways. The crack of the cervical column was barely audible against the muted laughter from within the tavern.

  The dead woman’s face was twisted to the side, her tongue protruding slightly between her lips, her lids wide, her eyes staring sightlessly at the youpon holly just beyond the marl path. Brewer, the proprietor, did not find his servantwoman until dawn when the early gray light exposed her awkwardly positioned body within the concealing shrubbery.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A fire roared in the monstrous brick fireplace that almost girded one wall of the kitchen. The room was a good sixty degrees hotter than the outside temperature on that mildly warm October day. Jane left the roast turning on the spit and went to stand at the Dutch door, using the apron to wipe away the perspiration that trickled down her neck. The brilliant sunlight shimmered the inviting river beyond into a purple haze. Nearer, the cool shade of plum trees ladened with reddish brown leaves beckoned. Beyond the trees and the various outbuildings stretched fields of what looked like prairie grass, though the stalks were purple red—Ethan Gordon’s indigo fields.

  Her eyes easily picked his form out from among the three indentured men as they took the last cutting of indigo for the season. It wasn’t just his height that betrayed him, for Josiah was tall, but thin. Icabod was, of course, squat and adorably pudgy. One-eyed Peter was as strapped with muscles as Ethan, but much shorter of stature. And Ethan, who had a good spread to his shoulders, moved with a litheness, swung his sickle with a grace that the others lacked.

  King George raced over her shoes and streaked into the kitchen. She sighed and turned back inside. The midday respite the colonists called nooning was past, but there was still the butter to finish churning before she began the late-afternoon meal. She cleared the table while King George sniffed about its legs, his black nose wrinkling. At last he found a few morsels of grits. Burned as usual.

  “I cook and I bake, King George, and I get nothing for it!”

  “I get indigestion.”

  Jane spun about. Ethan lounged in the doorway, his deep-red hair illuminated by the fire’s light that
fortunately shadowed the ravaged cheek. He had a habit of surprising her, walking as silently as the few Indians whom she occasionally spotted from afar cutting across the plantation. Like those nearly naked savages, he possessed an erect, straight-stepping carriage.

  “I warned you I couldn’t cook.”

  “So thee did. But then I judged thee would get tired of eating thine own food, mistress.”

  He straightened and stepped inside. As he drew closer she could see that his coarse homespun shirt was damp with sweat and that his fringed buckskin britches were grass-stained—and tight-fitting. Before she knew what he was about, his forefinger reached out to the small scar that now clefted her square chin. “Thou has been marked as myself, mistress.”

  She shivered, recalling the old Hindu again. Now both she and Ethan were marked. “And it’s your fault— you—”

  “Master,” he supplied, unruffled. He smiled, an engaging smile that transformed the sun-weathered face. “And now, if thee has water, mistress ...”

  She was hot and sweaty and tired. And she had never worked so hard nor such long hours in her life. She had never worked! “Do not call me mistress. My father was at one time Lord Mayor of London and now is Lord—”

  “And my father is Lord knows who,” he said with irresistible, good-natured self-mockery.

  She swung away and flounced over to sit on the stool before the churn. Furiously she plied the dasher up and down. It had been One-eyed Peter who patiently demonstrated how the chum and dasher were used. The Quaker never offered to help; rather, it seemed he found in her incompetence substantiation of his poor opinion of her.

  She slid a glance in his direction as she lifted the churn’s lid to peak at her progress. How far could she push this mild-mannered colonial? “There is no water for you. I haven’t had time to draw any more.”

  “Who is Terence?”