Tender (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Time Travel Romance Book 1)

by Anne Meredith

  “You want to cornrow it?”

  They both giggled at the memory. When they were children, Camisha had played incessantly with Rachel’s hair. More than once she’d cornrowed it, and they would pretend she was Camisha’s long-lost octoroon cousin.

  One summer Max had arrived home from a business trip to find his eight-year-old daughter exploring her assumed black heritage. It was the only time she could remember words ever failing him, and the memory of his apoplectic gape still made her smile.

  But that night, Rachel heard Max’s angry voice in the kitchen. When she tiptoed halfway downstairs, she heard Helen promising it wouldn’t happen again, pleading with him.

  “She needs me, Mr. Sheppard. And she needs my little girl.”

  “What about your girl, Helen? You want her to grow up in the same slums where you did, sirens screaming, bullets flying?”

  Helen’s protests had fallen silent.

  The next morning Camisha and Helen were both gone, and Rachel had awakened to the cold, harsh hands of a strange woman in a starched gray uniform. Mrs. Frost, an austere, parched woman who might never have seen the sun, informed Rachel she was to be her caretaker for the summer—while the maid and her daughter visited relatives.

  It was the last time Rachel would ever braid her hair.

  But neither Max nor the cold housekeeper could keep her and Camisha from e-mailing and talking on the phone, and they’d even used the childhood alphabet code where every letter was transcribed into a number, where A = 1, B = 2, and so on.

  It wasn’t hard to crack – as any kid who’d ever passed notes in class well knew—but few who might’ve intercepted their letters would have had the time to count through the alphabet to decipher the letters.

  They’d gotten so used to some of the words that they became shorthand—Rachel had signed her name in notes to Camisha as “18.1.3.8.5.12” for years.

  It had been perfect for kids their age that summer, with endless amounts of time. And that summer their friendship grew even deeper. In the end, they’d both graduated from UT—Rachel as the privileged daughter of Texas billionaire Max Sheppard, with a marketing degree. Max had proven mysteriously generous through those years, sending Camisha all the way through law school. It was a mystery Rachel had never solved, considering his bigotry.

  Although it was heartwarming to remember when Helen had argued not for herself, but for Rachel, the stubborn memories of Max annoyed her. “Let’s get out of here and soak up some of that local color you’re so nuts about.”

  “I’m ready.”

  As they turned the corner in the lobby and headed toward the door, they were intercepted by an older woman and man she recognized from the crowd. But he smiled as he held out his hand. “I’m Malcolm Henderson, and this is Mary van Kirk.”

  They exchanged introductions, and Rachel said, “If you’ll excuse us, we were about to tour the historic area.”

  “Yes, we know.” A peculiar sort, this man. His hair was an abundant froth of creamy silver-white, but cornflower blue eyes were alert, peering at her over wire-rimmed glasses. “We hoped to escort you.”

  “Escort us?” Rachel asked. “Are you employees here?”

  “Oh, heavens, no.” Mary van Kirk was as hard to peg as her companion. Her silver bun and wrinkled skin spoke of her advanced age, but there was a queer energy to her, and lively blue eyes challenged Rachel. “We’re caretakers of the past, and all those who hold an affection for it. I’m afraid we have to apologize for the rude welcome you received. As you said, it was unbecoming of Virginia hospitality.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rachel said. “I understand their resistance completely.”

  “We insist. You deserve to see Williamsburg through the eyes of those who love her.”

  “Thank you,” Camisha said. “We accept.”

  And Rachel had no choice but to entertain the enemy.

  Chapter Two

  A family of wrens were singing their hearts out from an oak tree that grew near the circular drive. It was a spectacular April day—during the past year in Los Angeles, Rachel had forgotten the four seasons.

  Malcolm spoke to Camisha as they crossed Francis Street. “Have you been here before?”

  “My grandmother first brought me here when I was six—the summer before my mother went to work for Rachel’s father in Dallas. But I’ve visited many times, whenever I come back to visit my grandmother.”

  They strolled down a path, and a round, squat brick building stood on their left. A man in a dusty tricorn hat, homespun shirt, and short breeches leaned lazily on a long, antique firearm as he glanced at the people filing into the building. They stopped at a wide, dusty boulevard.

  The sun was high and bright over the Virginia tidewater. In the distance, a cannon boomed. Nearby, vendors hawked refreshments from rustic stalls. A horse-drawn carriage stood in the shade of an oak tree, attended by a woman in elegant livery, her hair stuffed under her tricorn hat.

  A crowd congregated on the steps of another old building. Beyond it lay a green, where half a dozen military tents were populated with colonial types; a woman tending sheep there spoke to a group of schoolchildren. Directly across from them, parents were snapping photographs of their children in the stocks.

  But what she noticed most of all was the air; hot, humid, and heady, redolent with myriad smells—pine and pine tar, earth and woodsmoke, and others she couldn’t begin to name. Odd, how the strangest, most distinctive aromas somehow seemed the most familiar to her. But it seemed pointless to ask her tour guides to identify an odor, so she asked an easier question instead.

  “Where’s the gate?”

  “What gate?” Camisha asked.

  “To get in.”

  Camisha exchanged a look of stunned hilarity with Malcolm and Mary, and the three broke out in laughter. Rachel frowned.

  “Honey, we’ve been in for five minutes.”

  “I don’t get it. Isn’t there a museum or something?”

  Camisha gestured dumbfoundedly. “Look around you, for Pete’s sake! It’s a whole eighteenth-century town. Nothing within 300 acres isn’t colonial. There are hundreds of buildings. Eighty-eight are original, the rest have been restored or recreated the way they were in the 1700s.”

  “Recreated?” Rachel asked slyly. “Sounds a whole lot like a theme park, without the excitement.”

  “Oh, you can’t begin to compare—” Camisha began.

  Mary raised her hand. “The difference, Miss Sheppard, is that these same streets were trod by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and countless other figures throughout America’s history. And Colonial Williamsburg is but one of many such historical sites throughout Virginia.”

  Camisha smiled. Score one for the preservationists.

  “Does everyone wear costumes?” Rachel asked, changing the subject.

  She noticed a woman who strolled by wearing a wide-brimmed, beribboned straw sunbonnet. Charcoal-gray skirts, covered with a white apron, brushed the dusty street, and she smiled at them.

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “Some are interpreters—they explain colonial life to visitors, while maintaining the persona of someone who lived in the eighteenth century.”

  “Governor Francis Nicholson designed Duke of Gloucester Street to be one mile long from end to end,” Mary went on as they strolled along the dusty, graveled road. “Do you work with Kingsley, Miss Carlyle?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “Oh, no, she’s above that,” Rachel said. “She’s a lawyer.”

  Camisha’s mouth quirked. “I’m a junior partner at one of the criminal firms in Dallas, and I do some work as a public defender.”

  She left out that the PD work was pro bono, and that she also volunteered with a gang rehab program. Rachel had long envied Camisha her sense of purpose in life, but never more so than in the last year, when her own life echoed with emptiness. When her father seemed single-minded in his goal of watching her fail. A sudden suspicion struck her.
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br />   “Tell me. Did my father put you up to this?”

  Mary and Malcolm exchanged glances. “I can’t say that we know your father, dear.”

  “Oh, really? He’s heading your whole group.”

  “Group?” Malcolm said. “We aren’t part of any group.”

  He seemed just bewildered enough to be believable. These two were on their own peculiar mission.

  They arrived at the edge of the green before the governor’s palace. Ancient trees lined Palace Green, their leafy boughs stretching far into the cloudless sky.

  On either side of the tree-lined mall, a row of impressive colonial homes stood. And a nagging awareness plagued her. She knew this place; she knew these streets. She recognized the sounds, the sights, the smells. But it was impossible; she’d never set foot in Virginia.

  “What kind of trees are these?” Rachel asked.

  “My granny called them Indian cigar trees. There were forty-five of them when I was a kid—I counted. Oh, I remember. They’re catalpa trees.”

  And then, the homes that flanked the wide, grassy green seemed to blur as Rachel’s gaze was drawn to a house on the right. There was no spectacular grandeur to it; two stories high, built of red brick. Yet she couldn’t tear her gaze away.

  “Rachel,” Camisha asked, “what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. It just all seems familiar. I must have seen pictures of it somewhere.”

  While most of the houses were surrounded by tourists snapping photographs or waiting to get in, this house was deserted, forgotten, its windows shuttered from the inside. Its desolation was haunting, the reminder of a forgotten past.

  A forgotten past.

  And she understood her kinship with the old brick house. The restlessness, the dissatisfaction, the absolute emptiness that had begun to haunt her now solidified within her, and she succumbed to the questions that had no answer.

  Who was she? Who were her parents—the man and woman who had given her life, abused her, and abandoned her? She had just one tie to them: the crescent-moon scar at the corner of her eye—carved by her drug-crazed father, Max had told her, when she complained of her hunger. She couldn’t remember even that.

  But the last of it was the worst. Why, despite the evidence convicting her parents, couldn’t she stop wondering about them?

  “Thomas Jefferson was educated in that college.” Mary gestured toward William & Mary at the west end. Then she pointed due east. “The notion of American history was born in that Capitol, where Patrick Henry delivered to the House of Burgesses the treasonous speeches that inspired a new nation. And here,” she said, nodding toward the old church a hundred feet away, “is Bruton Parish Church, built in 1715.”

  Rachel stifled a yawn.

  “In 1926 the rector of that church, W.A.R. Goodwin, persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr. to save Williamsburg. The rector’s vision was brought to life by Mr. Rockefeller’s funding. If Dr. Goodwin hadn’t found a benefactor in Mr. Rockefeller, Williamsburg would’ve been lost in the mists of time, existing only as a dusty college town with asphalt running over its archeological riches.

  “The most familiar landmarks remind us that faith in God, education, and government were the cornerstones of eighteenth-century life in the British colony of Virginia. Now, Miss Sheppard, do you begin to see the importance of leaving history in the hands of those who love it?”

  She should’ve been paying closer attention. What was the point Mary thought she’d just made?

  “Miss van Kirk, we don’t mean to offend the historians. But I personally don’t see what all the uproar is about.”

  “Rachel.” Camisha pointed in frustration to an interpreter standing on the corner, drinking from an earthenware tankard. “You see that mug?”

  She nodded, suspicious.

  “That’s the same design popular in Williamsburg in the eighteenth century. Guess how they figured that out?”

  “The library?”

  Camisha almost choked. “Colonial Williamsburg is the damned library! Is Kingsley going to have a staff of archeologists sifting through dirt and broken pottery to get every detail of your theme park accurate to the time?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “What difference? You’re the one with the soundbites about educating kids.” Her voice fell to a near-whisper; her closing arguments voice. She never screamed to make a point; her soft-spoken murmur was far more persuasive.

  “Everything you’ll see today has a point. If you see a deck of cards on a table in one of these houses, then you can bet it’s the kind they used back then. If you see tourist children toting firewood, it’s because they want them to know most children had to do it for their families to survive.”

  Her gaze was sober. “And if you see a black man being taken away from the steps of a tavern where he’s just been sold, while his pregnant wife is screaming, it’s because in the year 1770, the phrase politically correct hadn’t been invented.”

  In that moment, something within Rachel flickered to life. Reverence for this place? No; she saw little good in reminding anyone of the degradation of slavery. Little value in lecturing young children who would never remember it. Perhaps she just envied Camisha her passion for Williamsburg.

  “How can you look around at this place and feel any warmth for it? Every house we’re looking at was owned by some fine family who enslaved your ancestors.”

  Camisha’s dark gaze lingered at one house after another with brooding wistfulness. “Yes. But that doesn’t make my ancestors any less important a part of it than those fine families. There are those who say that slave labor in Virginia was what made the colonies such a commodity that England took notice. Without it, America never would’ve been worth fighting over. Now tell me where that puts my ancestors in American history? I can be angry about that, or I can be proud, but I want you to know this, Rachel. When you see elaborate staircase carvings and intricate carpentry and tapestries today, I’ll be reflecting that those carvings and construction and tapestries, many of them, anyway, were done by my ancestors—all artifacts that have lasted for centuries, by the way. And I know that the artisans who created those items did so out of love and pride. Rachel, I choose to be proud of our contribution.”

  Rachel shouldn’t have been amazed, but she still wanted to shout an amen. Camisha neither romanticized nor demonized her roots; she relished them. She herself, on the other hand, had long ago learned that almost everything was illusion. And there was no glamour in the past.

  “And that’s George Wythe’s house,” Camisha said. “First law professor in the U.S. – and he taught at William and Mary. And he signed the Declaration of Independence.”

  Camisha gazed fondly at the home. “He hated slavery. He freed all his slaves before he died, and back then, it just about took an act of Parliament to free a slave. His house was occupied by General Rochambeau when French troops were quartered in Williamsburg, after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown.”

  She gestured toward the other end of the green. “Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were both governors of the colony. Soldiers were housed there during the battle of Yorktown.”

  “I’m afraid I have to ask, Miss Sheppard,” Malcolm said. “Why Virginia?”

  She brightened at the question. Perhaps he could see reason. “This will be a fabulous benefit for Virginia tourism. The piedmont, where we’re building, is within a day’s drive of half a dozen major U.S. cities.”

  “And twice that many historic sites, including the hallowed grounds of battles. Why Virginia?”

  “Americana will bring visitors from around the world, Mr. Henderson.”

  “Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, Mount Vernon—all of these already do that.” He asked for a third time: “Why Virginia?”

  He spoke as if Virginia were the luckless target of a blight. Why indeed? Because there’s too much money to be made not to, she wanted to say. But she had been raised by Max Sheppard, marketing genius of the twenty-first centu
ry.

  It’s all truth versus beauty, Rachel, and nobody gives a damn about the truth. We buy the beauty.

  Max’s PR motto had served her well.

  “The fact is, we have a great appreciation for Virginia’s greatest treasure—her scenic beauty, and our environmental policies—”

  “Real history, Miss Sheppard, is Virginia’s greatest treasure,” Malcolm snapped. “Indifference to history isn’t just stupid. It’s rude.”

  Camisha gave a crooked smile.

  But Rachel was no longer fighting this man. She was fighting a far more arrogant adversary—her racist father, a man whose attitudes would’ve fit right in with the slave-owners.

  “Mr. Henderson, have you even looked at our plans? Americana has been unfairly condemned by a handful of very vocal, manipulative outsiders who happen to own land in Virginia.”

  Malcolm and Mary hooted. “My dear,” he said with a grin, “Kingsley isn’t exactly an old Virginia family.”

  Rachel heard Camisha’s contagious laughter, and she sent her a withering glare. “Nevertheless—”

  Abruptly, all humor left him. “Now you can stand on a mountain and look out at the land where the most bitter battles of our country were fought. On a cool morning, with the fog rising over the valley, you can almost see the generals calling their troops to arms. If Kingsley has it their way, we’ll have the vista of roller coasters, hotel high-rises, and billboards.”

  “Mr. Henderson—”

  “What about twenty years from now?” he pressed. “What if the project goes broke? It wouldn’t be the first time. When those wild panoramic vistas are gone…” He focused a sober stare on her. “They’re gone forever.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Many of those battles Virginia reveres were fought to preserve slavery.”

  Camisha laughed. “Are you joking? You think Johnny Reb was out there shooting squirrels? Sherman isn’t remembered for his march through Omaha, Rae. The battles aren’t remembered because they were fought to preserve slavery, but because they destroyed it.”

  The older couple looked at Camisha for a long time. Finally, Mary spoke. “Miss Sheppard, each hand we touch is forever left with the imprint of our own fingertips, each word we speak, forever irretrievable. Your influence will be ever felt if you put an end to this project. You can be that person who changes the face of history, if you choose to.”