Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  But there was no use protesting. Plainly her mother’s mind was made up. She was to be removed from the scene. She would undoubtedly be watched every minute until she left, a purse of gold would be plumped into her hand along with a goodbye kiss and she would be put aboard the Bristol Maid willy-nilly.

  Virginia found her a few minutes later seated on a stone bench in the garden. “Is it true?” she gasped. “I was listening outside the door but I couldn’t hear very well. Are you really going to school in London?”

  Carolina, who had been lost in thought, studying the grass blades beneath her feet, nodded without looking up. “Oh, it’s true, all right—I’m going. Mother has made up her mind.”

  And suddenly she didn’t mind at all.

  It had just occurred to her that there would be an ocean between her and all the problems of “Bedlam”— no more being bossed by her mother! And whatever the school was like, it would all be new and different. And exciting, for there would be a great city pulsing around her, day and night. A city teeming with men of all shapes and sizes—dukes and merchant princes and country gentlemen, they would all be there!

  Thinking about it, she hardly heard Virginia’s heartfelt groan. In distant London adventure waited for her, romance waited for her. In distant London there would be a man for her—not a dishwater-dull clerk such as Penny had chosen, not a cheerful bumbling dolt such as Virginia was pining for, and certainly not that unknown faceless fellow with whom her mother would shortly try to plummet her into an arranged marriage—but a man of her own choosing.

  In London, she would meet at last The Golden Stranger of her dream! She shivered slightly, imagining what it would be like to hold him, to love him.

  “Carol, you aren’t listening,” complained Virginia.

  That little-girl squeak that was so like Aunt Pet’s had crept into her voice. “I said I’m so sorry Mother’s sending you away—I know you’ll hate it.”

  Carolina lifted her head and her gray eyes held a wicked gleam for she had just thought of a way to ensure that dowdy Mistress Chesterton didn’t choose for her a sober-sided wardrobe—and do something for her sister at the same time.

  “Virgie.” She turned to Virginia with a resolute look. “Do you still want to run away with Hugh?”

  “Oh, Carolina, you know I do! But Hugh has no money and neither have I. How would we live until he could find a position?”

  “Send word to Hugh,” said Carolina ruthlessly. “Tell him you’re pleading a toothache and will not accompany the family into Williamsburg to see me off, that you will wait for him here. Tell him to come to the ship to see me off. Tell him to throw his arms around me at the last minute just before I board and kiss me goodbye.” Virginia gaped at her. “But why would Hugh—?”

  “And while he is kissing me, I will slip him a purse of gold. This is your chance, Virgie. You can take the gold and run off together to the Marriage Trees!”

  PART TWO

  The Winning Wench

  * * *

  Reckless she is and always was, reckless she'll always be,

  Her silken body will respond to some wild destiny,

  And even though she may repent, deep in her heart she'll know

  That dangerous loves are heaven sent—and shiver that it's so!

  * * *

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  1687

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Carolina was to think of The Golden Stranger of her dream quite often in the months that followed, but when she met him at last it was quite by chance and she did not recognize him. Not at first.

  Her first year at school had been an unhappy one from the beginning, when she had been forced to trudge up to Mistress Chesterton’s school from the ship—she had no money to pay for a hackney coach— and forlornly tell the scandalized headmistress that her baggage was still on shipboard waiting to be called for. Never before had Carolina realized how much money counted in this world.

  The headmistress had pursed her lips and given Carolina’s plain clothing a scathing look, but the baggage had been duly sent for.

  The girls were another matter. Led by Vanessa Snipes, they had stared her down scornfully that first night at supper, and all that first week she had heard them giggling over “the rag-tag Colonial” as they chose to call her. Homesick and unused to the fogs of London, Carolina had come down with a deep cold and coughed away all through Christmas. While the city glittered with holly and Yule logs blazed and carolers roamed the streets, those other luckier girls went home for the holidays—home to Christmas goose and parties and presents. Carolina, thin and brooding, had lived for letters from home.

  All that first year she had not made a friend. Indeed, the gregarious girl from the Eastern Shore had reacted thornily to her schoolmates’ disdain, scorning back where she was scorned and walking a haughty path of her own. She hated London that first year, blaming in part for her unhappiness the big, sprawling, uncaring city with its choking sea-coal soot, so different from the clear air of Virginia. Her entire allowance from home had to go for desperate necessities such as woolen scarves and mittens to wear against the bitter cold, and this prevented her from attending plays and boat trips with the other girls, for Mistress Chesterton cannily insisted that the students pay their own way on all such outings.

  Holidays were the worst times, for during holidays the school was deserted save for herself, those teachers who had nowhere else to go, and the few servants who lived in. Even Mistress Chesterton was gone on holidays, visiting “friends,” she said vaguely. And Christmas, which the girl from the Eastern Shore loved with all her heart, was the worst time of all.

  Carolina’s second Christmas in London was almost as lonely as her first, even though by now gifts of money from home had enabled her to buy at least a few items of clothing so that she did not look quite so downtrodden among the elegant company she was forced to keep. Like her first, that second Christmas away from home left scars, and Carolina would never forget looking out the window from an empty school on Christmas morning and seeing a sleighing party, with sleigh bells ringing and girls laughing and merry young men squiring them, glide by in the snowy street below.

  She had felt so hopeless, so ground down, that she had almost run away.

  But with the spring everything had changed. Vanessa Snipes, who hated her, went back to Lincoln, and a new student had arrived, a wealthy merchant’s daughter from Essex, Reba Tarbell.

  The lonely girl from the Colonies at last had found a friend.

  And with that friendship she rediscovered London. In the freshening air of spring the old city—so newly reconstructed since the Great Fire, some twenty years ago, had leveled the quaint medieval town—seemed to open its heart to her. Now she had enough money to accompany the girls on their outings. Her young heart was light as she rode across the cobbles in hackney coaches or prowled the little shops. With the other girls she munched hot roasted chestnuts bought from street hawkers and viewed the city from London Bridge while the White Tower gleamed in the sun. All the pageantry and pomp, the great gray buildings of commerce, the scarlet coats of “Chelsea Pensioners,” the colorful processions that wound through the crowded streets or floated down the Thames on barges, seemed to reach out to her so that afterward, she would always hold London in affection. When Big Ben chimed she would look up from some tiresome lesson and smile, and on Sundays, when all the world seemed to peal, she would find herself humming, like any English schoolgirl:

  “Oranges and lemons,

  Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

  You owe me five farthings,

  Say the bells of St. Martin’s.

  When will you pay me?

  Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  When I grow rich,

  Say the bells of Shoreditch.

  When will that be?

  Say the bells of Stepney.

  I do not know,

  Says the great bell of Bow.’’

  And Carolina, lighthearted and
laughing at last as she strolled with the other girls through the green vistas of Hyde Park, watching the rich and the royal ride by on glossy horses beneath ancient trees, did not care if she ever grew rich. With the other girls, she watched the changing of the guard before Whitehall or St. James, and was breathless at the sight of white-plumed helmets and scarlet coats and flashing steel breastplates or blue coats and red plumes, so vivid against a backdrop of silver-gray stone and what seemed to her enchanted archways. She roamed teeming markets, jumped out of the way of gilded coaches, and stared at passing chimney sweeps in their black clothes and tall hats, at masked ladies and soberly dressed bankers with gold chains. Young and far from home, she sprang past aged flower sellers into doorways to escape the sudden drenching of London’s ever changeable weather—and was happy.

  Summer had sped by and early autumn, with banks of fog rolling in from the Thames.

  Now it was late fall. All week the city had been shrouded by fog. At least one wag had muttered that the fogs misting up from the Thames this past week were thick enough to cut with a knife. But that was yesterday. This morning a clean crisp wind from the west had blown the fog away, and all London seemed to be outside, celebrating this welcome change in the weather.

  The students of Mistress Chesterton’s School for Young Ladies, out for the first time since the fog had closed in the city, were filing two by two behind majestic Mistress Cardiff, one of the school’s instructors—and walking eagerly for today, as a great treat, they were to attend a play at Drury Lane.

  “I’m told the last headmistress would never have allowed it,” whispered Reba Tarbell behind her hand to Carolina. They were roommates and trailing last in the trim line of girls that had just turned a corner into the Strand and found it jammed with hackney coaches, carriages, horsemen and—darting between them at their peril—pedestrians. “We’re lucky we weren’t here during her reign!”

  For it was old Mistress Chesterton of whom Sally Montrose from up the James had complained so much. The new headmistress, young Mistress Chesterton, had inherited the school from her aunt. Indeed, had she known what young Mistress Chesterton was like, Carolina rather wondered if she would have thrust the entire purse of gold her father had given her into Hugh’s eager bumbling hands that morning when he saw her off aboard the Bristol Maid and—to her mother’s vexation—broke through the little knot of people around her and threw his arms about her and gave her such a resounding kiss that she was nearly toppled from her high red heels. For young Mistress Chesterton, who had taken possession of the school while Carolina was on the high seas, was a far cry from her farthingale-wearing aunt: for one thing she was slender and fashionable, she did not wear somber black, but peacock blue and scarlet and other vivid colors. For another, she had a lover.

  “I wish I’d known about the change,” said Carolina wryly, looking down at the rather worn sprigged calico which she had brought from home and which looked considerably less smart than the clothes of the other girls, who were wealthy merchants’ daughters.

  At that precise moment a roguish wind—one of the capricious winds which had been buffeting the city all morning—whipped down the street and carried Carolina’s calico skirts and light chemise up around her thighs.

  The sight of those dainty silk-stockinged legs emerging from a froth of delicate ruffles was too much for two hackney drivers who, their minds momentarily not upon the traffic, locked their wheels together and were promptly beset by a third driver who managed to get his reins entangled with a passing carriage whose horse, more used to country lanes than to crowded town thoroughfares, had zigged when he should have zagged.

  Overcome with blushes as she frantically fought her flying skirts back down to her ankles, Carolina raised her head and found herself looking directly into the face of a gentleman in a tricorne hat whose hackney driver had been the initial cause of the accident. The gentleman watching her from the hackney window had a handsome face and a florid complexion beneath his sand-colored curls. He was dressed in tawny orange satin. And now he looked her appraisingly up and down and then, to her fury, he winked at her.

  What, did he think her some passing trollop or serving girl that he could be so familiar? Carolina’s aristocratic head went up and she whirled on her high red heels and refused to look at him. With her cheeks very red she passed on down the street beside a giggling Reba, who was wearing heavy damask skirts and thought the whole incident very funny.

  Carolina felt that London had changed her. Actually her changing looks this past year had made a different impact on the world about her. She had blossomed suddenly from a coltish young girl into a young lady of blazing beauty—and the incident in which the sight of her had distracted the hackney drivers for an unwary moment was mute testimony to the effect she had on men.

  She was too young yet to know her power or how to wield it, but she knew that the people around her were suddenly different. Her schoolmates sometimes gave her envious glances; young Mistress Chesterton frowned at her thoughtfully; apprentices—of whom there were thousands in London—sometimes stopped in the street to stare; cook’s helper dropped his pots and pans and blushed and stammered when she appeared—it was a whole new world that had opened up to her there in the sheltered confines of Mistress Chesterton’s fashionable school and she did not know how to deal with it yet.

  Now Reba leaned her luxuriant red curls closer and murmured with a throaty chuckle, “You were the cause of that accident—you and your legs! Tell me, when you get home will you use them to run for the Marriage Trees?” For Reba knew all about her sisters’ elopements.

  “I may never go home,” said Carolina with a toss of her head.

  “I’m surprised they haven’t already dragged you back!”

  Carolina was surprised too, and at first, hurt that in her rare letters her mother never mentioned her return. But she was adaptable and beginning to feel at home in London.

  “I won’t go!” she told Reba blithely.

  Indeed, the Eastern Shore had faded from her mind as the intrigues of life at Mistress Chesterton’s school captured her attention. The girls whispered excitedly about Mistress Chesterton’s clandestine affair, Madge Wentworth had invented a lover and some wild tales that had kept them agog for a fortnight, Binnie Chase had come briefly into the limelight when her brother had been accused of murder but that had died down when a suicide note had been found, and Lina Delford was so homesick that she enlisted the aid of all the girls in detailing imagined horrors of the school to her parents in endless letters which were all ignored.

  Carolina’s closest friend was still red-haired Reba. She had taken one look at Carolina in her worn and none too fashionable clothes and promptly proffered her friendship, which had helped Carolina’s status at the school enormously, for Reba’s father was a very rich merchant with a handsome estate in Essex.

  It had never occurred to Carolina to wonder why stylish Reba, who mostly kept to herself, evading the childish pillow fights and other rowdy behavior of girls still children at heart, should have chosen to bestow her friendship on a Colonial whose wardrobe was easily the worst in the school. It had never occurred to her that Reba, who had inherited her father’s keen bargaining sense along with his copper hair, might have a use for her. . . .

  But the months had passed by and Reba had been nothing but charming. She had urged Carolina to borrow her clothes, she had shared with her a staggering array of pomades and scents, she had helped Carolina arrange a more fashionable hairstyle. Reba sat beside Carolina at table, making low-voiced comments that kept Carolina gasping with suppressed laughter. When young Mistress Chesterton had responded vaguely to Alice Lapham’s question, “Did you spend a pleasant day?” Reba had muttered, “A marvelous day. Entirely spent in Lord Ormsby’s arms. Her maid confirms it.” When Tessa Grimes had reported innocuously that her sister Clothilde was coming down to London to visit her but would not be staying at the school, Reba had murmured, “One could hardly expect it—she’ll be staying
with her married lover while his wife’s away in Bath!”

  Close friend and confidante, Reba had learned all there was to know of Carolina’s life back home in Virginia. She even knew that Farview was derisively called Bedlam by the gossips of Williamsburg. Open-hearted Carolina knew far less about Reba than Reba knew about her. She knew more about Reba’s wardrobe than she did about Reba’s innermost thoughts. She suspected there was a lover somewhere that Reba had not told her about—at least someone for whom she yearned. But she would wait for Reba to tell her about him.

  The girls had left the Strand now and reached Drury Lane. But in the milling crowd about the theatre entrance massive Mistress Cardiff had discovered an old friend from Sussex. They greeted each other joyously and the line of girls fidgeted as their chaperone enthusiastically discussed old times.

  It gave Carolina time to think. So much had changed since she had left the Eastern Shore and Reba’s chance remark had brought it all back to her. She had been so homesick at first, and had felt so strange in this large bustling uncaring city. She had missed her sisters and her madcap friend Sally Montrose, whom she had frequently visited at her plantation up the James and from whom she had borrowed so many exciting novels, she had missed vivacious Ramona Valdez with her snapping black eyes and lustrous black hair—Ramona who had been for a while her closest friend, but from whom she never heard after that first letter telling her she was betrothed to the new Governor of Havana. Ramona had drifted away into another life, it seemed, just as she herself had drifted away.