“Bess, ye’ve changed,” grinned Stephen. “I’ve not heard that note of command in your voice before.”
Bess flushed a little at the flicker of admiration in his green gaze. “At home I let my brothers bully me. But I’m a woman of property now and responsible for an entire plantation full of people. ’Tis a responsibility, I can promise you.”
“I can see ye’re up to it.” With relief Stephen let them ease him into a sitting position and make him comfortable by the roadside.
“Yes, I’m up to it,” said Bess quietly, looking down on that copper head she had thought never to see again. “What are you doing in this part of the world, Stephen?”
That brought him abruptly back to his duty. “I’m the new factor at Mill Oak,” he said ruefully. “Off to a bad start, I’m afraid.” He turned to the wagon drivers. “Take the wagons on to Mill Oak, and tell them what’s happened. They can send for me, Bess. There’s no need to trouble you.”
“ ‘Trouble’?” she chided him, waving her coachman and footman on their way. “Why, ’tis no trouble at all. I can go into Bridgetown this afternoon and check out this inventory. Or tomorrow, for that matter. I am sure the captain will wait. ’Tis you we must see to, for the leg must be properly set—I will assist the doctor with that, for my brothers were a wild lot and always breaking their bones. And then you’ll need rest and a soft bed and hot food if you’re not to take a chill and perhaps the fever—and we have all those things at Idlewild.”
Stephen thought of the narrow, uncomfortable bed from which he had been routed before daybreak, of the semihot tasteless gruel he had forced down before mounting the fractious mare.
“I see you’re riding Haygirl,” added Bess disapprovingly. “I’m surprised that Robert Milliken would let his factor ride that shackling mare. She’s thrown everyone at Mill Oak.”
“Add me to the list,” sighed Stephen. “Hooked up as your coach rounded the bend and the next moment she’d reared up like a mad thing and tossed me.”
“Ah, well, you’re more used to sailing than riding, I don’t doubt,” said Bess airily. She spread out a kerchief and sat down beside him now that the men and lumbering wagons had gone. “And I remember what a sailor you were!”
“For I sailed away from the Scillies in your brother Hal’s boat without his leave, didn’t I?” His face was grim.
“But you sent it back,” pointed out Bess mildly. “And the circumstances were unusual. I never believed you and Imogene murdered Giles—although there were some who did.”
He flashed her a grateful look. “ ’Twas an accident, Bess. And Imogene had no part in it. We were together when Giles found us. He leaped upon me unaware. I managed to dodge his blade and drag out my own—and he tripped and fell on it. ’Tis a story no one would believe.”
“I would.”
His voice softened. “But you aren’t the law, Bess. Twas the law I fled.”
“Why didn’t you take Imogene with you?”
‘‘She wanted to go,” he admitted. “But I realized it would never work, Bess, that it couldn’t work, that I’d only be dragging Imogene down with me—perhaps to her death. She’s all right, isn’t she?” he asked anxiously.
‘Yes,” said Bess slowly. “She’s all right. But how came we to hear you were dead, cut down in some duel in Cornwall?” He could not meet her candid gray eyes. “I—realize that must have been hard on her,” he mumbled.
Hard on her? Bess gazed at him in wonder. She had died a little herself the night she heard it.
“When the law got too close, I got some trusted friends to put out word I was dead and my body ‘committed to the deep’ as was my last wish.”
“But you never let us know.” She sounded wounded. “You let us think—”
His voice roughened. “It was better that way, better for us all, better that I go out of your lives.”
Bess shook her head and looked away where a bright-colored bird flitted through the branches of an oak. A golden bird, the color of Imogene’s hair. . . . Her face clouded. Imogene’s golden shadow still lay between them.
“Imogene’s uncle sent her away to Amsterdam lest she be taken and questioned in Giles’s death.”
Stephen's shoulders gave a slight start. “But she’d naught to do with it!” he protested.
“Giles’s family was very vengeful.” Bess studied that loved face. She had to tell him, and already her soft heart ached for him. “Imogene is married, Stephen. She met a Dutch patroon in Amsterdam and married him and went to live in America.”
Her heart hurt at the sudden tightening of his jaw muscles, at the shutters that went down over his turquoise eyes leaving his face for the moment devoid of all expression. “I hope she’s happy,” he said huskily.
“I believe she is,” Bess told him. “She wrote me from Holland and I have not heard from her since—but the mail is so uncertain. She told me that her husband’s patroonship is on the North River and that he has a very handsome home there. She said he was filling a ship with his treasures to bring home to America.” She stopped, realizing it must hurt him to contrast his poverty with the patroon’s wealth, a wealth they both believed had won Imogene.
“I am glad for her.” The words were wrenched from Stephen. Something inside—something he thought he had forgotten—hurt far worse than his broken leg.
Gently as a feather, Bess’s hand brushed his arm. He started at the touch, for he had been lost in thought—lost in memories of silken skin and shining hair that smelled faintly of perfume, lost in delft blue eyes deeper than all the oceans. He was remembering Imogene, and the thought that another man was holding her in his arms, that another man was taking her to his bed—of course he had known it would happen eventually. Still it seared him. He gave Bess a miserable look. “I think you know how I feel,” he said.
“Yes. I know.” She was silent for a while, letting the pain of this fresh raw wound subside.
After a moment he shook his head as if to clear it. “But how came ye here, Bess? Did ye marry?”
She shook her head and began to laugh. It was a happy, triumphant laugh, for in whatever shape and wherever his heart had flown, Stephen Linnington had been restored to her and with a broken leg he could hardly take himself off.
“My uncle arranged a marriage for me, Stephen. I came to this island to marry your employer, Robert Milliken—who wed his housekeeper the night before I arrived!”
“The devil he did!” Stephen felt honest indignation rise in him. Bess deserved no such foul trick.
“I can’t tell you how delighted I was,” said Bess demurely. “For Robert Milliken—pleasant neighbor that he is—takes snuff and is addicted to wormwood wine, neither of which I can tolerate. Besides, he tells interminably long stories that have no point at all—oh, I should have been miserable married to him and I wish poor Bonnie joy of him.”
Stephen remembered Milliken’s overdressed wife who had gazed at the new factor with more than the usual interest. “So ye married somebody else, then?” he asked, bewildered, suddenly noting her black garb, which he took to be widow’s weeds.
Again she shook her head. “No. Oh, my uncle offered to trot out all the eligible men on the island but I simply refused. It had been such a long, tedious voyage and all the time I worried about this stranger to whom I should be chained for life—it was a real relief to find out he had married someone else! My uncle was in failing health and asked me to stay with him. I did and I do believe I was some comfort to him these last months. He left me everything—Idlewild, the furniture, the indentured servants, the slaves, the livestock—everything.”
Stephen’s mouth formed itself into a grin. ‘‘So now ye’re a grand lady, Bess, with minions to do your bidding?”
“Oh, yes,” Bess laughed. “We are very grand at Idlewild—too grand. When I looked over the books, I found there was not enough set by for bad years, crop failures, the storms that visit these islands. I have no intention that Idlewild shall go under as so many of o
ur neighbors have. I have lived on islands all my life and I know that their economy is uncertain. So I am setting out to improve things—not in the way my uncle did, by adding mantels and paneling and liveries and plate—but in commercial ways. I have learned that three of my bondswomen are accomplished weavers—they but need the flax, which I am importing for them. Two are lacemakers—I rescued them from our kitchen! And two others are excellent seamstresses—and how were they spending their time? Bending over laundry tubs and hanging up clothes! And I myself have a flair for fashion!”
“Indeed I noticed how modish you look, for all your black weeds,” Stephen said gallantly.
She gave him a reproving look. “Not for myself—I do not need them to make clothes for me; I have all the clothes I can wear. But fabrics are cheap in the markets of Tortuga—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I met one of the buccaneer captains who supplies them!”
“—and I have commissioned a captain who was a close friend of my uncle’s to bring me back from Tortuga a whole list of fabrics so these women can work, not as scullery maids or chambermaids, but at their highest skills. Do you know the price a handsome gown will command in the Carolinas or Virginia? Or for that matter, right here in Barbados? So I will have a whole new industry for my plantation to help keep us going in the lean years—for there must be lean years. And I am training my footmen to do useful things as well as merely running errands and the like about the house. Simon is learning to make cheese and, for Wilbur, who claims he was brought up in the trade, I have even bought a potter’s wheel!”
“Bess, Bess,” laughed Stephen. “I see you will soon have a thriving city at Idlewild. And at Ennor Castle you seemed so meek and self-effacing!”
“Do not mock me, Stephen,” said Bess gravely.
“I’d no thought to mock you, I assure you!”
“I know I seem more optimistic than the situation warrants. I know it will take years to realize my dreams but—at least I have made a start and it will all grow day by day.”
“We did not know your potential on the Scillies,” he teased her.
She gave him a level look. “No, you did not. At Ennor Castle, my parents ruled—and I could do nothing with my brothers; they were all dedicated fishermen and would not listen to me. But here at Idlewild all must listen to me. And together we are going to make the plantation a great success. Did you know, I plan to give every bondswoman who marries a bridal gown stitched here on the plantation and a dowry?”
“I could hardly hear about it, Bess. I’ve been on the island only since yesterday.”
“I thought you might have heard of it anyway,” said Bess ruefully. “Robert Milliken has heard of my plans and is furious—he says I will spoil all the servants on the island, that next they will all demand beaver hats!”
“You have grown up,” he said soberly. “You are not the shy little girl I knew.”
“Ah, well, I suppose I have changed since the Scillies.”
Bess’s laughing gray eyes met his. “There’s responsibility here, Stephen, and someone must shoulder it. I am responsible for all the people on my plantation, Stephen, and for the house and livestock and all the lovely things my uncle left me. I must not let any of them suffer.”
Stephen smiled back into those candid gray eyes. He felt she never would.
‘‘And now,” she added in a tone that had in it a touch of imperiousness. “I see the doctor coming in the distance. We’ll soon have you to Idlewild, where I—having downed you—will personally nurse you back to health. And as for your job as factor at Mill Oak, mine has left me because he refuses to work for a woman and you shall take his place. I will send a note over to Robert Milliken and tell him that you are leaving—and scold him as well for giving you that witless mare to ride!”
Stephen’s eyes kindled. This new Bess had a spirit and tone he liked. She was not Imogene, of course, but she intrigued him. “Bess, I’d be happy to be your factor,” he said, adding honestly, “but you must remember this plantation life is new to me and I won’t be the assistance an experienced man would be. At Mill Oak there’s Robert Milliken to train me but—”
“Not another word!” Bess touched soft fingers to his lips to silence him, and at the contact a swift quiver went through her and her cheeks grew pink. “You shall be my factor only after you have recovered—until then you shall be my honored guest. And as to learning the job, I have already learned it—at least well enough that I can impart it to you. ’Tis none so difficult, if one sets oneself to learn it.”
Stephen caught her hand, pressed it to his lips. “I will do my best,” he promised huskily.
She smiled on him fondly. “You always have—done your best,” she said in a soft voice, and Stephen was shamed by the glowing light in those steady gray eyes. “I knew,” she added, “why you left the Scillies. ’Twas to save Imogene from the consequences of her folly. No—” when he would have spoken—“we’ll talk no more about it, for ’tis good to see you again and there’s so much here to interest you. Oh, Stephen, you’re going to love Barbados once you get to know it!”
Her soft glance promised much and for the first time there was a hint of steel in it, a sparkle of humor. For Bess had always known Stephen Linnington was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. But now, she told herself gaily, that was all over. With her to guide him, with her steady good sense and her newfound fortune, Stephen Linnington would become the man Bess had always known he could be—a man respected in the islands, a man to depend upon. A man to come home to...
Stephen would have been astonished had he known the wild thoughts that teemed through Bess’s dark head as she smiled at him. He took her sudden show of interest to be only a reflection of her kindly nature—but it was so much more. Bess, in her busy heart, was spinning out a whole life for him—happy, proud, successful.
And so, for the second time in his life, a Duveen determinedly hauled a wounded Stephen Linnington back home to the family manor. But this Duveen had soft hands and a smiling way with her. And Stephen knew, as his leg mended and the days passed in this scented land of summer, that he was falling in love with her and that he would never leave this enchanted isle of Barbados.
Wey Gat,
New Netherland, 1658
CHAPTER 22
A soft south wind was blowing, fragrant perhaps with the scent of the Carolinas, far to the south. Gently it stirred the wide rye and wheat fields of Wey Gat, making them ripple like silk. Far above, frolicking swallows swooped and skimmed against a blue dome of sky so clear it seemed to extend forever. Out in the meadows fat woodchucks waddled through heavy red clover and bumbled through great swatches of white and yellow daisies, ahum with bees. The air was rich with the scent of honey locusts and wild grapes and the promise of a rich harvest to come.
A kind of uneasy peace, somnolent as the summer, hung over Wey Gat, as the patroon and his dashing lady moved like checkers across a board of his devising. For managing not to “displease” Verhulst van Rappard was no easy task, Imogene had soon learned.
Always eager to separate her from her child, of whom he had become almost insanely jealous, Verhulst ordered Imogene to take lessons on the new virginal he had imported. But forcing his rebellious lady to take lessons was one thing—making her proficient on the virginal was something else. Imogene might have enjoyed playing such a lovely instrument, now installed in gilt and rosewood grandeur in a corner of the drawing room, but now that she had been ordered to do so, she stubbornly refused to learn. Dutifully she would run her slender hands across the scales—and then come to a full stop at the cry of a hawk or some other wild creature and pause to envy its freedom in the vast outdoors, a freedom that with Verhulst for a husband she was not likely to know. Indifferently, under her elderly Dutch teacher’s careful tutelage, she even learned a piece or two. But play for Verhulst she would not. When he ordered her tersely to play for him after dinner that he might note her progress, she merely dragged her hands listlessly over the keys, stri
king at random as many sour notes as sweet ones.
Listening, Verhulst winced. “It would seem ye have no talent for music, Imogene,” he taunted her.
“Perhaps not.” Seated at the virginal, Imogene gave him a tight little wisp of a smile. “Prisoners are seldom at their best, Verhulst.”
“‘Prisoners’?” He was taken aback. “But ye’re my wife!”
Imogene ended the piece with a discordant chord and swung around to face him. “It amounts to the same thing.”
Baffled—for Verhulst had been sure the gift of the virginal would please her—the young patroon now attempted to learn to play himself and asked Imogene to sing an accompaniment to his efforts, but she refused to do it; she told him woodenly she did not feel like singing. She looked so sad as she said it that for a moment he felt guilty—but irritation soon swept that softer emotion away.
To his regret—and he did not understand it, for he could not know the crushing weight his overbearing personality had put upon his wife—Imogene no longer sang for joy in the mornings as she had after the baby was born. How often he had paused to listen to those sweet caroling notes drifting to him softly as she rocked little Georgiana’s cradle. In showy outward ways she pleased him, but her heart was not in it. Passively she wore the yellow dresses he loved, but her golden feathers drooped, he thought, and sometimes he wondered why. After all, he had not sent the child away—he had only threatened.
To make amends, he gave Imogene a pearl and ruby necklace, telling himself that would surely cheer any woman. But even its flashing splendor brought only a momentary sparkle to her sad blue eyes.
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