The Maidenhead
Page 22
The child, seldom noticed that the drawing was in reverse. The magic pebble was then sold to the child for a price that depended upon what the greedy swindler felt the child could part with.
Modesty was hoping that Itopatin was both childlike enough not to notice the reversed drawings and that he was willing to part with her greedy price—Mad Dog.
With painful regret, she watched as the stone defaced the lien’s printed text. Gone was her hope of silver candlesticks, servants, a life of comfort.
Her heart pounding, she peeled off the top parchment. She fought back the giddy laughter that bubbled inside her. Her trick had worked. Itopatin’s ruthless effigy stared out of the parchment at its living image.
Words of amazement were muttered around the fire pit.
Mad Dog rolled his eyes. At the moment Modesty wanted nothing more than to box his ears.
Itopatin grunted, then asked a question, which Arahathee translated. “The werowance wants to know what can keep him from robbing you of your magic stone?"
She shrugged. "I give it the power. I can take it away. Tell him I want my man. I am leaving." She stood up to reinforce her statement, holding out the worthless stone. She could only hope her bravado was convincing.
Itopatin listened to Arahathee's explanation, stared at the drawings on the parchment, then at the stone. Finally he grunted his acquiescence.
Without looking back, she strode from the lodge. Surely Mad Dog and Arahathee and his warriors would have enough sense to follow her out. The sunlight blinded her. She risked a glance back. Yes, Mad Dog and the others were emerging from the lodge. Arahathee paused long enough to slice through the hemp cord that bound Mad Dog’s wrists.
She didn’t pause at all. She kept walking on down the hill, her legs as wobbly as a newborn’s. Only when she and the men were deep within the surrounding forest within sight of Juana did she stop and round on her startled husband. “Yew foul-hearted swine! Yew scurvy, blood-sucking—"
And then like some lily-livered maiden, she fainted.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A ghostly image swirled in and out of Modesty’s vision. A dark angel? She felt as if she were floating. Had she died?
She last remembered sinking into oblivion, Mad Dog’s leonine head above her, his arms catching her. When the image coalesced into a solid form, her dark angel was her savage, her husband. "Where am I?"
"Sssh,” Mad Dog murmured, with a tenderness she had never heard in his voice. “You’re aboard the Maidenhead."
She grabbed his big hand with sudden anxiety. “The Indian massacre? The Reverend Dartmouth? Rose and the children? Walter? Jack? Clarissa?”
"They’re all aboard and safe. Except for Walter. And many more, including Radcliff. He burnt along with his estates. Apparently his business dealings with Opechancanough and Itopatin hadn’t guaranteed protection of his personal life and assets.”
She closed her eyes. “The others—they didn't stand a chance. It was so unexpected."
He had the grace to look ashamed. “I might have been one of them, but for you.”
“Ahhh, but ye never wanted me.”
His eyes burned with a feverish intent. “You see, my first wife had been weak, whining, a clinging vine. She took the easy way out and committed suicide. I judged all women by her. Your indomitable spirit and your noble determination all this time at Ant Hill proved to me how badly I had erred."
She turned her face to the wall. "Where was yewr nobility when yew wagered me at the gaming tables and lost to Radcliff?”
"I admit I was wrong to do so. I never claimed to be a saint. But I didn't lose at the gaming tables."
Her head swiveled back to him. "Nigel Jarvis was there. He said yew lost!"
"Jarvis heard me say I had lost. You see, I used what you taught me at cheating at cards. I managed to crimp the joker. When I realized that in winning Radcliff Manor, I was losing you . . . I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give up my fai— well, you know the word I am talking about. I don’t want you to go disappearing on me by my saying that word. But you are one of those wee people who is as impulsive and reckless and unpredictable as her mortal husband. A fai—fey-like wife whom I have come to love."
She put her hand to her head. ‘"Tis the fever! It must be boiling me brain. By me faith. I’d swear I heard yew profess love!”
He smiled down at her with a tenderness that choked her. "With bed rest you'll be all right. The last few days—the horror of the Indian massacre—they have taken their toll on your strength."
She knew her grin was cocky. "It ain’t them that’s done in me strength. Tis the wee one I carry. If he turns out as big as yew, 'twill be months afore I am able to leave me bed."
His eyes sparkled with a heat as pulsating as the southern stars on a summer night. He leaned over her, taking her face between his big hands. "If I have anything to say about it, you and I will spend very little time out of bed.”
She had never felt such bliss. To be loved. She, a common alehouse maid and felon at that. “Oh, Inigo!”
"Mad Dog to you, you wench."
“Me name’s Modesty, yew lout."
T H E E N D
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~ ~ ~ L A V E N D E R B L U E ~ ~ ~
CHAPTER ONE
“Help! Run! Help!”
“Oh, do shut up, Washington!”
In the bamboo cage suspended from the stand Washington, Aunt Hermione’s macaw, preened its scarlet and lime-green feathers at the unwarranted rebuke from its mistress’s niece. Scarcely aware of the bird’s ruffled feathers, the younger woman paced by her aunt’s rocker. Her hoop skirt snagged on the rocker’s foot, and she yanked it free.
Help. That was what she needed.
“Jeanette,” Aunt Hermione ventured tentatively, her horse face pinched with real anxiety, “won’t you consider returning to New Bedford as your father wants? With Armand dead it’s not only sensible but quite obvious that you can’t continue to keep Columbia going.”
Oh, Armand, why? Why us? With you I was content. And now . . .
Now the problem of keeping the plantation stared Jeanette St. John starkly in the face. The latest tax statement proved her inadequacy.
Her father believed a woman’s place was running a house—not ruling it. He enforced this dictum of submission as strictly as he had obedience aboard his ship. A Yankee sea captain, he had settled in Brownsville, Texas, after his marriage to invest in some of the steamboats that plied the Rio Grande River. The following year he sold the packets to buy the enormous cotton plantation Columbia.
But that turbulent month before South Carolina seceded from the United States her father, burdened by what he considered his patriotic duty, returned to New Bedford, Massachusetts. And in turn Jeanette dutifully submitted to Armand decisions about running her family’s plantation. Yet she knew she understood more than her husband could ever have hoped to about the South’s most precious resource, cotton. Further, she suspected that her beloved Armand had no real interest in such a mercantile venture. Armand should have been a lawyer, a politician, a minister. Anything but a planter.
Armand’s father, who had come to Brownsville as an agent for one of New Orleans’s French houses of commerce, had owned the plantation bordering one side of Columbia. But through lack of agricultural expertise, Monsieur St. John was forced to sell his plantation and return to New Orleans.
Armand had stayed on to marry her. But now he was gone, too. Oh, Armand, why? It was a litany that repeated itself over and over to fill the void in her life.
She circled Aunt Hermione’s rocker and went to stand before the window. Beyond, in the windows of the jacales, lamplights burned against the night. Those thatched-roof huts of cane sheltered the campesinos who worked the plantation’s cotton fields. But since the Rebel port of Clarksville at the mouth of the Rio Grande was blockaded by Federal sloops-of-war, the harvested cotton sat in Columbia’s sheds and carts. So old Trinidad, Columbia’s overseer, continued to fill the warehouse with cotton that lacked a market.
Unless . . . unless she could find a way to market the cotton herself. She crumpled the tax statement in her fist. There had to be a way.
* * *
Colonel Reuben Jones’s Ethiopian Minstrels began their finale with a resounding rendition of “Dixie.” Many of the elite in Judge Scharbauer’s large ballroom rose to their feet. The song, revered as an anthem of the Confederate States of America, brought glistening eyes and patriotic pride to the faces of the old men, the women, and the Confederate soldiers who were stationed at nearby Fort Brown. Even Aunt Hermione, Yankee-born and bred, seemed moved by the moment.
From the chair nearest the French doors Jeanette dispassionately waved a painted sandalwood fan. Its tea-rose color contrasted with the deep-black silk of her ball gown and the black-beaded net that bound her heavy dark hair into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Even her eyes, which were actually an uncommon shade of blue, had a black cast to them that evening.
Jeanette St. John possessed a singular beauty that could not be compared to the more blatant seductiveness of Annabel Goddard. Jeanette’s beauty transcended the superficial; it was an essence that as a child had taken the form of an antic sprite. She had been a candle’s dancing flame.
Her thoughts ebbed low at that moment. Raffles, buffet dinners, musical soirees, barbecues, and dances! Like the entertainers performing now, the various functions would raise proceeds for the glorious war effort. Accomplishing very little. At least not enough for Jeanette. Nothing would ever be enough for her. Nothing could restore Armand.
Armand. Her fan slowed its swishing flight. Above the pale freckles that bridged her short nose the vivid eyes imperceptibly softened to their normal shade. Gentle, idealistic, handsome Armand. Friend, husband, companion. A casualty of one of the Civil War’s first engagements. How implausible! Seven years of marriage erased like chalk from a blackboard. At twenty-five she had been made a widow. And now, almost a year later, the numbness at her loss still had not abated.
Oh, to feel again! To have sensations wash over her once more like the Gulf at high tide, to be inundated with the breath of life! Her fan picked up its tempo—half to alleviate the stifling air in the crowded room, half to alleviate the inactivity that chafed at her.
“Quite boring, is it not?” drawled the rather tall, foppishly dressed man who slid into the vacant seat on her left. An immaculate hand, rimmed with Mechlin lace at the wrist, smothered an indelicate yawn. “But then one feels obligated to attend these fund raisers.”
She could almost despise Cristobal Cavazos for his frivolous and flippant attitude toward the war were it not for the memory of shared childhood games and his droll humor. He laid the back of one large, swarthy hand against his lips with a gesture that was almost effeminate in its grace, and whispered in a pleasant though distinctly affected voice, “Do look at Annabel’s gown, Jen. The décolletage droops low enough to allow the entire Federal Army to bivouack on maneuvers!”
Unwillingly amused, Jeanette’s gaze swept along the aisles of chairs, moving past the toad-like profile of their hostess, Pauline Scharbauer, to find Annabel’s cameo head of hennaed ringlets. It was tilted in flirtatious conversation toward the golden one of Major Hampton. The banker’s daughter rapped her fan coquettishly on the young major’s wrist, and Jeanette sighed. Didn’t Annabel ever tire of playing the traditional role of the helpless, dependent female?
But then had not she played the role to some degree herself? To recapture Armand’s attention, which after his return from the Virginia Military Institute had strayed to issues of states’ rights and national sovereignty, she had relied on charm rather than use her innate wits. That was what was expected of the female. Certainly not intelligence; God forbid a bluestocking!
She must have sighed aloud, for Cristobal flicked a glance in her direction. His lids drooped lazily in his habitual expression of boredom, but the quirk in his lip portended another sally. “Why Annabel should be interested in Major Hamp
ton is beyond me,” he sotto-voced. “Dios, the foolish Hampton would charge Hell with a bucket of water!”
“Foolish he might be,” Jeanette snapped under her breath, completely out of patience now, “but at least Hampton is serving his country, which is more than I can say for you!”
Cristobal’s inane laugh filtered through the last chorus of “Dixie.” “La, Jen, I have no desire to be a pincushion for either army.”
“Ssssh!” Aunt Hermione reprimanded with a nervous glance from behind her osprey fan.
Jeanette sighed. Always the bantering; sometimes light, sometimes fierce. Even as children, it had been that way between her and Cristobal, with the just and fair Armand as arbitrator between his friends. When Cristobal’s father, an hidalgo of old Spain’s aristocracy and a Knight of the Order of St. James, moved away from the plantation that had shared Columbia’s other boundary, the gangling brown boy disappeared from her and Armand’s life.
The lanky boy of twelve had come back only the previous month, a massive man of thirty with an undeniably handsome face and a weak will for the pleasures of gambling. And women? Jeanette wondered. She slid a sideways glance at Cristobal’s face.
Beneath the slightly waving curtain of rich brown hair were features that could be called firm—a clear-cut jaw, the strong hawk-like nose. Only the sleepy brown eyes and the droll grin that disfigured the otherwise well-delineated mouth gave evidence of the spineless character within. At least Cristobal’s ready wit and skill at cards seemed to have brought him a modicum of success, for he had returned a fashionable though aimless gentleman.