Halestorm

by Becky Akers

  To be fair, Nathan wasn’t the only one chuckling at Guy’s dress. But he must wear a wig until his hair grew and had borrowed a plain one from his uncle, with few of the curls and puffs of his own.

  He wrapped some linen strips around his calves, then drew his stockings over them. He admired the contour of his legs, smiling, until Nathan Hale again invaded his head. He remembered how muscular Hale was, how perfectly formed without any subterfuge, and scowled.

  Migrating birds darkened the sky as Guy drove his chaise toward the Hales’ place an hour later. The Deacon himself answered his knock, and Guy hid his satisfaction. The wig borrowed from his uncle had once belonged to George Daggett, and even without it, he looked much like his father. Hale was as staggered as if George had come back to taunt him, though Elizabeth was dead. Then the Deacon remembered himself. It was old news that Guy had returned, and he must have expected to meet him sometime. The wonder was that it had taken so long. But then, Guy was not a church-going man.

  The Deacon bowed and invited Guy to the parlor, where Abigail hastened to set out tea. “An honor to meet you, Mr. Daggett,” she said with a curtsey.

  Guy remembered his uncle’s praise of her and understood whence Alice took her beauty. The woman was a vision as she added, “Please, have something. Mrs. Huntington brought us the apple turnovers. She’s famous for them. I think you’ll like the pumpkin custard, too. I know you don’t have pumpkin in England, and truth to tell, we tire of it, but the custard’s good—”

  “Are you in earnest about living here, Mr. Daggett?” The Deacon’s curtness blasted her pleasantries like a cannonball hitting a haystack.

  Guy bit into a turnover. “I’m home for good. Half the Daggett land’s mine, and I want to make it into one of the leading farms of the province, though ’tis so overgrown. I’m looking for good milch cows and some chickens, too, you got any to sell. Even if I planned on a short stay,” his eyes flicked to Abigail, “I’d have to tarry after seeing the great charms of Connecticut’s ladies.”

  “You’re too kind, sir.” Abigail dimpled though her husband fidgeted at such flattery.

  “Not at all, madam. And you passed your beauty to your daughter, ’tis clear.”

  The Deacon cleared his throat. Before he could speak, Guy said, “I’d like to call on Alice. With your permission, of course.”

  Again, the Deacon opened his mouth, but his wife laid a hand on his arm and spoke first.

  “Why, Mr. Daggett, I’m sure she’ll be delighted. And it might help her forget, ah, I mean—” Her voice failed as she caught her husband’s eye. “Let me call her. I’ll just be a minute.” She floated from the room, leaving the men to sit in stifling animosity.

  They didn’t wait long. Quick, graceful steps sounded in the hall. Then mother and daughter appeared, a breathtaking duo. The girl was as comely as Guy remembered, and he gaped, salivating.

  He bowed. “I enjoyed our chat last week so much, I’m hoping you’ll favor me with your company.”

  She hesitated, but her mother said, “Go, Alice. You been working so hard with the harvest and all, you deserve a nice time. Now, Mr. Daggett, don’t keep her out too long. You be back by dinnertime, and plan to join us.”

  “I really don’t think—” Alice began, but her mother had scrambled for the door and was holding it open.

  Guy handed her into the buggy, then circled around to take his seat beside her. He threaded the reins through his fingers and rejoiced at the freedom of colonial girls. No parent in London would have allowed him to drive a daughter unchaperoned. He must discover whether the Americans still indulged in bundling, a naughty custom that dumbfounded his macaroni friends when he told them of it. “Oh, yes,” he said, for once the sophisticate in their eyes. “You climb into bed, all your clothes on, mind you, with your lady, and there’s supposed to be a board running down the middle, between you. But a man knows what he’s about can have clothes and board gone in no time. Cold there in New England, you see. That’s how they allow it.” He even implied that a girl in London had bundled with him, and until she shrieked the truth at them, he basked in their envy.

  The horse stamped as Guy settled into his seat. “Now, Miss Adams—may I call you Alice? There used to be a waterfall, though it’s not very high, at the corner of our farm. Thought you and I could take a look.”

  She nodded, but barely.

  He slapped the reins over the horse’s back. “I always think of the first Mrs. Hale on a fine autumn morning. She loved this time of year. Did you know her?”

  She didn’t answer, only stared out the side of the buggy away from him. Then she started. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I was wondering whether you knew the first Mrs. Hale.”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t live here before my mother married the Deacon.”

  “Well, she was very nearly my mother, you know.”

  “She was? I never heard that.”

  “Your father never told you that story? About how he stole Elizabeth Strong out from under my father’s nose?”

  “Pray tell me, Mr. Daggett.”

  “My father was born and raised here in Coventry, on the farm I inherited. He spent much of his childhood at the Strongs’, and ’twasn’t long before he fell in love with one of the daughters, Elizabeth. He spoke of marriage. But then,” Guy paused, “the Deacon came to town and that was that.”

  “Must have broken your father’s heart, didn’t it?”

  “He went to Newport and found another bride. My mother was…well, Dad used to say he wished she cared as much about us as she did her rum.” Even now, he couldn’t keep the wistfulness from his voice. He had tried hard, so very hard, as little boys do, to earn his mother’s love. But he’d received only curses and bruising slaps for his trouble. “Cruel seeing your brothers with the mother I should have had, all laughing and happy, and I had to scrounge at the neighbors’ for my meals.” He gave a crooked but heroic smile. It was a rare woman he couldn’t manipulate once he bared these old wounds. Alice might be the most beautiful one he’d seen, but she was as pitying as the rest, given the dewy look she had fastened on him. “Ah, here we are.”

  He took her arm to help her from the buggy. A linen sleeve ended in lace just below her elbow, an elbow he would wager was as dainty as it was sweet.

  “You could’ve posed for Watteau,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir.” For the first time, she smiled at him.

  They spent a delightful hour. Guy discerned powerful passions in Alice. Her eyes flashed, or her voice throbbed with urgency, an arousing huskiness, as did those of ladies in their most intimate moments, though she spoke of something as mundane as the weather. And her wit was as exquisite as her face. She laughed at his jokes and replied with some of her own, peeping from under her lashes, tossing her curls, until he was hopelessly smitten. In vain did he remind himself he wanted to use her, not fall in love with her.

  His obsession deepened with the reds and golds of autumn. Alice grew lovelier each day, and his praise made her blush as she smiled. He longed to make her happy—even if he must forget his vengeance against her family—and shower her with all good things. But she seemed to live under glass, allowing him to come just so close, flirting and jesting with him only to a point.

  One evening after dining with her family, he escorted her to the spring. He had made this their custom because the milk house beside it shielded them from the Deacon’s vigilance. Guy had swiped more kisses in its shadows than anywhere else.

  She was remote, her eyes guarded in the firelight as they dined and under the moon afterwards. She mentioned a letter her brother had sent from New Haven (“He says there’s over a hundred boys in the college. Must be awful crowded”) and fell silent.

  He turned to her, caught her hands in his. “Alice, do you love me?”

  Her gaze spun away from him. Slowly, she shook her head.

  He had expected as much. “But you love someone, don’t you?”

 
; Again, she said nothing, only nodding.

  “Then why do you waste your time with me? You using me to make this other lover jealous?”

  “No.”

  But her denial was too swift, and he saw that he had guessed well.

  He inclined his head as her lips moved. “My mother and her husband don’t—don’t approve of my—of our love.”

  “Why not? Who is it?”

  She hesitated. Then, shyly but proudly, she said, “Nathan.”

  Nathan? There were no Nathans in Coventry, other than—

  “Your brother?” Yet another triumph for Hale, and it should have infuriated Guy. Instead, he collapsed in laughter. Oh, these colonials! Stuck out here in the woods, debauched beyond reckoning, accepting such depravity as made civilized people blanch: the stories circulating in London were true. Who would have thought his innocent Alice had hatched an incestuous love? He guffawed again, and she stamped her foot.

  “It’s not funny. Why are you laughing?”

  “But he’s your brother, Alice. Didn’t anyone ever tell you brothers and sisters don’t marry?”

  “He’s my stepbrother. There’s no blood between us.”

  “Still, you’ve lived as brother and sister for how many years? Four? Five? And now you want to marry him? Well, at least you won’t have any in-law problems.”

  “I thought you of all people would understand, Mr. Daggett.” Her voice pulsed with the throatiness that so excited him. “The Deacon says we can’t get married. He’s stolen Nathan from me just as he stole Elizabeth Strong from your father.”

  “Oh, come now. Your brother’s not much of a man, he lets his father order him about. I wouldn’t let that sour old chap tell me what lady to marry.”

  She drew an outraged breath.

  “Listen, Alice, only way the Deacon can stop the two of you’s if you don’t really love each other. Now, if ’twas me, I’d—”

  “Nathan’s too honorable to disobey his father.”

  “Too honorable? Too cowardly’s more like it. Remember, I grew up here with your brother, and all his life, he’s talked pretty, but it ends there.” He cupped her chin and tilted her face upwards in the moonlight. “Alice, you’re a beautiful, desirable woman, and I want you—any man worth his salt would. Sooner or later, you’ll get tired of your brother and all his talk, and when you do....” He stared into her eyes, held her spellbound, felt the passion rise within her. Then, masterfully withdrawing, he gave her not even a kiss. “Believe me, neither honor nor father could keep me from claiming a woman I loved.”

  He released her and crossed the yard to his horse, his laughter floating back to mock her.

  She stared into the water as it bubbled in the shadows. Nathan’s rejection had left her too humiliated to write him when he first returned to school. But Guy’s attentions salved her pride, and she recovered enough to correspond. She had written four times since he left, and each page brimmed with as much love as she dared commit to paper. She mentioned Guy’s courtship and quoted his compliments, implying that he was a diversion until Nathan responded as he ought. But she had received only two answers, one more perfunctory than the last. Today’s letter proved the hopelessness of her devotion, for it contained nothing personal. Instead, Nathan listed facts about Yale and New Haven such as a traveler’s guide could have given.

  He would never marry her, not while the Deacon lived.

  Guy’s words echoed in her ears: “Neither honor nor father could keep me from claiming a woman I loved.” She cradled her chin, still warm from his hand.

  Nathan would never have touched her like that. He would have prattled half the night about the trust reposed in them and how they should die before abusing it, or fobbed her off with tales of birds reborn in fire, but he would not have caressed her face so urgently, nor let his ardor beat in his fingers.

  Guy stewed over Alice’s confession for a week, a tormented week during which his amusement faded while his hatred for the charming, handsome Nathan Hale threatened to choke him. That Alice loved such a prig instead of him was preposterous. He rehearsed every indignity his father had suffered from the Deacon, indignities that had continued to the next generation between Nathan and him.

  By week’s end, he was no longer enraged. Instead, he gloated as he saw that Nathan’s hold over Alice provided an excuse for a duel. Guy had fought several duels in London, and he had always made sure to win.

  He needed to go to Hartford, anyway, to settle his commission on the Connecticut River. From Hartford to New Haven was an easy ride down the famous Path. He would find Hale at school, insult him, jockey him into accepting his challenge. And then....

  Two days later, he dismounted at Yale and inquired of a group of students for his victim. A fresh-faced young man told him Hale was at the Sound. “I’m meeting him there now. You can come along if you want. We’re going out on the water, though ’tis so late in the season. But Secundus says ’twill be all right.”

  “Who?”

  The boy coughed as if Guy’s ignorance embarrassed him. “Secundus. You know, Hale. We call him Hale Secundus, and his older brother Enoch’s Hale Primus.”

  Guy hid his scorn for these pretentious college boys and followed Benjamin Tallmadge through streets lined with elms to New Haven’s harbor.

  A clutch of vessels bobbed at the wharf while seagulls cawed and stevedores unloaded cargo. They found Nathan hammering at a plank on the side of an old but sleekly painted sloop, with the captain of the neighboring schooner telling him that the Royal Navy offered good opportunities to likely lads. Nathan declined with a quip that set both captain and crew laughing. He did not notice their approach, and Guy observed him narrowly, despising his vigor and the gleam of his unpowdered hair in the sun. No wonder Alice and everyone else loved him. Suddenly, the decision to kill him was as natural as breathing, as justified as eating.

  “Secundus,” Tallmadge called. “Someone’s here to see you.”

  Nathan turned, a peg dangling from his lips. Though he could have hardly thought to meet Guy Daggett in New Haven, he was unruffled and bowed gracefully, despite pegs and hammer. “Mr. Daggett, pleasure to see someone from home.”

  “Thank you, sir, but the matter I’ve come on isn’t pleasant.”

  He expected consternation, but Nathan continued unflustered. “Sounds as if it’ll take a while. Well, come aboard, will you? We have to cast off now to be back by dark.”

  His friend pointed to the horizon. “Secundus, those clouds look black.”

  “We shan’t stay out long.”

  Worry had screwed Tallmadge’s face into a knot, but now he relaxed, as if his friend could calm a storm. Guy sneered. Hale was the same as ever, bewitching everyone and everything, as he had when they were children.

  Whatever Nathan’s opinion, Guy was leery of boarding a boat in October with a storm brewing. Then again, he would have a captive audience to manipulate and a witness in Benjamin Tallmadge. He scrambled aboard and tried for nonchalance as the boys ran the sloop out of the harbor toward the sea. Nathan invited him to take the tiller, but Guy shook his head. “Don’t know anything about sailing, but I do need to talk to you.”

  “Sure, just a minute.”

  The two boys danced about the deck at sailors’ arcane tasks, none of which made sense to Guy and interested him less. Yet he saw that Nathan was favoring his right leg. Such a limp would have ruined most seamen. But instead of crippling Hale, it lent charisma to his movement, a peculiar grace, accenting his muscles and sinews and their perfect harmony. It was as if a musician, playing one of Handel’s compositions, were to strike a sour note. Rather than destroying the music’s beauty, the mistake called attention with its contrast, made the audience notice what before it had taken for granted. Guy stared, so intrigued he forgot his envy.

  Tallmadge took the tiller, and Nathan squatted on his heels beside Guy with a glance at the clouds. The wind had filled their canvas to send them slicing through the waves.

  “Now, Mr
. Daggett, what was it you wanted?”

  “It’s about your sister, Alice Adams.”

  Nathan’s expression did not change, but his eyes shaded.

  Guy raised his voice to be sure Tallmadge would hear over the wind. “I want to marry her, sir, but seems my courting’s for naught because of you. She says you’ve asked for her hand, and she can’t marry me because of that.” He had baited his trap well. If Nathan called him on the lie, Guy could demand satisfaction for his offended honor. If not, he would propose a duel for the lady herself.

  But Nathan ran a hand through his hair, whipping in the breeze, and sidestepped the snare with half a smile. “What’s that got to do with me, sir? ’Tis up to you to persuade her.”

  “Sir, I challenge you to a contest for Miss Adams’ hand.”

  “A contest?”

  “A duel, sir. Name your weapon.”

  Nathan’s smile blossomed into a grin. “Hey, Tallmadge, you hear that?” He turned back to Guy and said solemnly, “He’s my second in all these matters.”

  The raillery was so courteous Guy could only fume rather than complain.

  “Second to Secundus!” Tallmadge chortled from his post at the tiller.

  Nathan continued, still so polite it was almost parody. “You give me great distinction, sir. I think this makes me the first in our class to be challenged.”

  “No, you’re not,” Tallmadge said. “Robinson got one last year.”

  Nathan shrugged. “Sic transit gloria.”

  Guy hunted a riposte, cursing the dullness that mired him when Nathan Hale was about. “What weapon, sir?” was all he could manage.

  Nathan pursed his lips and again consulted Tallmadge, who said, “Barrels.”