Freedom to Love

by Susanna Fraser

  “What’s wrong?” Jeannette muttered. “You really are a dreadful actress, you know.”

  Thérèse sighed. “Come up to my room, and I’ll tell you.” And as soon as they were safely in private, she reported all she had heard, along with her earlier conversation with Lady Farlow in which she’d revealed the Choctaw half of her nonwhite ancestry.

  “I’m not surprised,” Jeannette said.

  “But you and Felicity are such friends!”

  “Because she’s been acting especially kind to make up for her mother and brother. But I think they’ll come around with time.”

  “I’m not going to give them time. We can’t stay here. I won’t. I’d have to lie for the rest of my life to people I know would despise me if they ever learned the truth, and live with them knowing they despised you.”

  Jeannette shrugged. “Your own mother would’ve despised me.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “That was jealousy, because our father had another mistress. And that was before I knew you, before you were my only family.”

  “But I’m not your only family anymore. You’re married. You’re pregnant. What choice do you have but to stay?”

  “I still have the emeralds and pearls. If I walk away—if we walk away, we won’t starve. We can go to France. I’ll claim I’m a widow. Then there will be no shame in bearing a child. I can work as a dressmaker, and you—well, you wouldn’t want to be my apprentice, but I’ll support you, and we’ll find someone to train you in work you would like. An apothecary or a midwife, perhaps.”

  Jeannette shook her head. “Have you gone mad?”

  “We can’t stay here with people who think so little of us!”

  “I thought you wanted me to be practical. You can pass for white. If Henry knows, what do the rest matter?”

  “They could find out. They already suspect. And if this is what his abolitionist family really thinks, who’s to say how the rest of the society would react? I could ruin Henry—ruin Felicity’s chances—”

  “And you won’t do that by abandoning him?”

  “We’ve hardly met anyone, so most people will never know. We’re not truly married, so when he meets some nice, white English girl, he can marry her and make her his baroness.”

  “He won’t want that.”

  “He’ll forget me, in time.”

  “Hmph. Do you mean to forget him?”

  Thérèse tried to blink back tears, with limited success. “I don’t want to leave him. I love him. But I cannot stay here and live a lie.”

  Jeannette heaved a great sigh. “You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

  “No.” She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “In that case—when I visited Elijah Cameron’s family last week, he introduced me to his sister and brother-in-law. The man runs a pawnshop, and I remember how to get there. I can contrive to ask Felicity about how one travels to France without it seeming too suspicious. I think.”

  Thérèse gave her sister an impulsive hug. “Thank you.”

  “I still think you’ll regret this.”

  “I know I will. No matter which way I chose, I’d have something to regret. This way at least I won’t be living a lie.”

  “Except the part about being a widow,” Jeannette pointed out.

  Thérèse ground her teeth. “There are lies and then there are lies. Now, go and see what you can learn from Felicity.”

  With a parting frown, Jeannette left her alone. Thérèse took out paper, pen and ink and began to write a letter for the Farlows—not just Henry, but all of them—to find after she was gone. Before Henry returned from his day’s business, she’d carefully secreted it within her wardrobe. She took delivery of her new dresses and determined to keep at least the simplest of them. She needed something better than her two shabby old gowns if she was to present a credible appearance in a Parisian dressmaker’s establishment.

  She didn’t think she could face the family calmly after what she’d heard, so she feigned illness at dinnertime. But she made sure to stay awake, and when Henry came to bed and tried to give her a chaste kiss good-night, she made it more, pulling him into her arms and darting her tongue out to lick his lips.

  “Mmm.” He drew back a little and rested his forehead against hers. “I thought you said you were indisposed.”

  “That was hours ago.” She wanted one more night of passion with him before she fled into her lonely future. It wasn’t as though he could make her more pregnant, after all.

  “As long as you aren’t too tired.”

  “I am.” She twitched her hips against him and found him hard. “Tired of talking.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case...” He kissed her again, properly this time, and soon his hands stole down to find the hem of her nightdress and pull it over her head.

  Thérèse undressed him, too, and arched her bare body against his. She was sleepy, but she’d also found that when her pregnancy wasn’t making her ill, her heightened senses were maddeningly delightful. This was one of those times, here in the wide comfortable bed with soft clean sheets against her back, and Henry’s lips and tongue on her nipple almost enough to drive her over the brink all by itself.

  Ah, she would miss this. She would miss him. When he surged into her, so hard and strong, she raked her fingernails down his back and breathed in his clean man-smell and listened to his gasping breaths until she was too caught in her own pleasures to notice anything else.

  When they lay together afterward, drifting toward sleep, Henry murmured, “And tomorrow we’ll be married. Completely and finally.”

  And Thérèse feigned sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  On the morning of his final wedding, Henry awoke to an empty bed. He patted Thérèse’s place beside him on the mattress. It was cool. What the devil? She slept so much now. If she got out of bed early in the morning, it was only the use the chamber pot and come crawling back under the blankets for another few hours’ sleep.

  Was she ill? Had something gone wrong with the baby? He got out of bed, quickly pulling a banyan over his nightshirt. Every instinct told him something was amiss. He stepped out into the corridor only to find his mother and Felicity, similarly attired. Mama clutched a letter.

  “They’re gone!” Felicity cried.

  “What?” Henry said.

  “Thérèse and Jeannette. I thought I heard something in the corridor, but I went back to sleep. That was half an hour ago. Then I woke up again and went to see if Jeannette was awake, too. Her room was empty.”

  “They might be downstairs. One of them might be ill.”

  Edward’s door creaked open, and he peered out blearily.

  “I heard the commotion and got up too,” Mama said. “Then I noticed this letter under my door. Shall I read it to you?”

  “Please,” Henry said tightly. His wife had run away and left a note for his mother instead of him. He’d never been so humiliated before by his failure to read well.

  “‘Dear Lady Farlow,’” Mama began. “‘When you receive this letter, my sister and I will be gone. I am sorry to create further upheaval and possibly scandal in the family, but I know now what I must do.’”

  “What?” Henry cried. “No!”

  “Listen,” Mama snapped and continued. “‘Yesterday morning I overheard you and your youngest son speaking of my sister and me—how Jeannette does not deserve the education Henry wishes to give her and how I am a provincial American whose skin is too dark to keep people from suspecting that I, too, have African blood in my veins.’”

  Felicity and Edward tried to speak at once, but Mama held up an imperious hand. “Will all of you be silent?” When they swallowed and nodded, she continued to read.

  “‘
Anyone with such suspicions is correct. I told you of my Choctaw great-grandfather. What I did not reveal is that he was not a free warrior but a slave, a captive, and that my great-grandmother was an African-born slave on the same plantation. Their daughter, my grandmother, was a beauty who caught the eye of the master, who made her his concubine and ultimately freed her and her daughter—my mother. My mother started out as a seamstress, but by the time she was twenty-five she was the best and most sought-after dressmaker in New Orleans. From the time she was seventeen she was my father’s mistress. He never married, though nor was he entirely faithful to her, since he also took a slave mistress, Jeannette’s mother.

  So that is who I am. I am a bastard of mixed race, though I was born free. I am utterly unsuitable to be Lady Farlow.

  And so Jeannette and I are leaving. Henry is free to marry another woman, for our wedding was interrupted, and the minister never pronounced us man and wife.’”

  Felicity and Edward gasped, but Mama kept reading. “‘Do not attempt to follow us. We can take care of ourselves and each other. I know where we will go, and it is a safe, respectable future for us both. Tell Henry I am sorry and I will always love him, but I believe I am doing what is best for everyone. Farewell.’”

  Mama folded the letter and regarded him silently. Henry fought for composure, torn between rage at Mama and Edward and a frantic desire to charge out of the house after Thérèse and Jeannette.

  Edward breached the silence. “Is it true?”

  “Yes,” Henry said baldly.

  His brother snorted. “Then you’ve had a lucky escape.”

  Without even thinking Henry made a fist, swung his arm back and punched Edward squarely in the face.

  Felicity squealed, and Edward roared, raising his own fists. “Enfants!” Mama shouted. “I will not have my sons brawling before the servants.”

  “I will not have my wife insulted,” Henry retorted.

  Edward glared at him out of his good eye, though he held a hand cupped over the side of his face Henry had struck. He hoped his brother would have a fine black eye. “I thought you just said she wasn’t your wife.”

  “I said all my vows and meant every word. We were going to be married quietly by special license this very day to ensure our children’s legitimacy.”

  “What do you mean to do now?” Mama asked.

  She seemed oddly calm, given the gravity of the situation and the revelations Thérèse’s letter had contained. Henry had no idea what she hoped he would say. He also didn’t care.

  He took a step back toward his open bedroom door. “Find her, finish our wedding and bring her home. She is my wife. While I live, I’ll have no other. Our firstborn son will be the next Baron Farlow if he’s born as black as her African great-grandmother. And if the rest of you cannot accept her, and her sister, and our children when they come, then you will not be welcome at Farlow Hall. None of us asked for this, but I am the master there now. I love you all, but my wife comes first.”

  Mama blinked at him as if she’d never gotten a good look at him before. “I see,” she said. “Then hurry and find her. When you do...I will apologize.”

  “I will not.” Edward turned his back on them all and slammed his door.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. Now all he needed to do was work out where she might be bound. She said she had a destination in mind, and that they’d be safe there. She’d been in England for less than a fortnight. Whom could she possibly know?

  “Wait,” Felicity said, “I think I know where they’re going.”

  “Truly?” Mama asked. “How?”

  And through all his franticness to be gone, Henry saw that he wasn’t the only child his mother doubted.

  “Yesterday Jeannette kept asking me about France, and how Cousin Julien had returned there and whether we meant to visit someday. She said she supposed it was easy to get there, now that the nations were at peace, and I mentioned the packet boats.”

  “The devil you did!” Henry cried.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It isn’t the first time she’s asked about how everyday things are done in England. And—I think she may have wanted me to understand.”

  That didn’t quite sound like Jeannette. If she’d been opposed to her sister’s plan, she could’ve told him about it directly. On the other hand, if she’d been of two minds and wanted to give him a chance to prove himself... “Thank you, Felicity. Now I know where to begin.”

  “But what would she do in France?” Mama asked.

  “Go to Paris and get a place with a modiste,” Henry said, taking another step back into his doorway. “Her mother trained her.”

  “And how can she get there? She hasn’t any money, and I can’t imagine she’d steal.”

  The emeralds and pearls. “She still has certain valuables her father left her. I’ll wager they’ve gone to pawn them.” Good God. Thérèse and Jeannette, a young, beautiful woman and a younger, very pretty girl roaming the less savory reaches of London all on their own, looking for a pawnshop. “Question the servants while I dress,” he said. “See if either of them asked any of the footmen or maids about a pawnshop, or had them summon a hackney, or—or anything.”

  “I know where they’d go for a pawnshop, too,” Felicity said.

  “What? How?” Surely his baby sister wasn’t frequenting such establishments.

  “Remember when Jeannette visited your soldier friend Elijah Cameron and his wife? They took her to meet some other black London people, and they went to his brother-in-law’s pawnshop.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Not exactly. Somewhere in Shoreditch. His name is Kendall.”

  Henry let out his breath. It could’ve been far worse. “Have Matthew saddle the new gray gelding. I’ll be down directly.”

  Within ten minutes he was dressed and running down the front stairs two at a time. He charged through the door just as Matthew was leading the gray around. He sprang into the saddle and set off for Shoreditch at a brisk canter. Galloping was impossible with all the carts, carriages and pedestrians in the streets, but at least the early hour made traffic light.

  He’d been away from London for years, but after two wrong turnings he reached Shoreditch. He slowed the gelding to a walk and tipped a carter a shilling for giving him directions to the Kendall pawnshop. When he reached the street in question, as he looked about for someone to hold the horse, he spotted two familiar figures emerging from a shop at the far end.

  “Thérèse!” he shouted, urging the gray into a canter again.

  She and Jeannette both wheeled to face him and stood arrested, as he reined to a halt just a yard away. He sprang down and handed the reins to Jeannette, who took them wordlessly, though her eyebrows were raised in eloquence.

  “How did you find us?” she asked.

  “Felicity has a very good memory.”

  Jeannette’s lips twitched in a smile. “She does if you’re obvious enough.”

  “What?” Thérèse said, turning to her sister. “How could you?”

  “I wanted to give him a chance.”

  “That’s my decision, not yours.”

  “Isn’t it mine, too?” Henry seized her hands and drew her to face him. “You’re my wife. Soon you’ll be the mother of my child. You can’t leave.”

  Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Do you think I want to?”

  “Then, why?”

  “Your mother found the letter, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. And I’m sorry she and Edward said such dreadful things. But if anyone is going away, I mean for it to be them, not you.”

  “I can’t separate you from your family!”

  He shook his head. “My family is here.” He kissed her and she responded as if despite herself, her lips trembling beneath his.
“And here.” He laid a hand on her abdomen, still so flat beneath her light corset. “And here, too.” He extended his other hand toward Jeannette, who after a moment’s hesitation took it, keeping a firm grip on the gray’s bridle with her other hand.

  “You’re the one who taught me not to apologize for what I am, to believe I can be a good baron. I love my mother, but she never gave me that. Never. She still doesn’t believe I can do it. You do. So if it comes to a choice, I can be Lord Farlow without her. But I cannot do it without you. I love you. I need you.”

  Thérèse watched him for a moment, her eyes wide and bright in the gray morning light. “What if—”

  “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. We’ll face it together, and the rest can go hang.”

  She bit her lip and blinked hard. “Oh.” She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him hard.

  He broke it because there was still one thing more he must say. “Marry me. Then come home with me.”

  Wonder of wonders, she smiled at last. “I will.”

  Epilogue

  London, May 1816

  “What are you going to name him?” Lady Farlow asked, peering at the unformed features of her first grandson, just two hours old.

  Thérèse, exhausted but happy, leaned against Henry’s shoulder where he sat beside her in bed. He met her eyes and gave her a tiny nod. “Charles Jean,” she said. “If he’d been a girl, it would’ve been Caroline Jeannette.” She suspected naming their next child would be more difficult. In this case there had been no doubt that they would name their firstborn for his late brother and father, and that the Bondurants would be represented by the only member of her family she cared to honor.

  “Very suitable,” Lady Farlow pronounced.

  Thérèse exchanged smiles with Jeannette, who’d been present for the birth, watching with a critical eye as an eminent accoucheur oversaw what they assured her had been a perfectly normal labor. It had seemed painful and long to her, but now she had a beautiful boy she thought looked a little like Henry already, despite a thick head of black hair that could only have come from her. At least, she was quite sure little Charles was going to have the Farlow ears, with their endearing way of sticking out just a little too much for perfection.