Susanna Fraser

by A Dream Defiant

  Evidently it wasn’t. “Give them time,” he’d said. “I’m sure it would be hard for them to see you with anyone other than Sam, and to bring home someone so different...”

  The next day had been Sunday, so Elijah, Rose and both children walked to church in their best clothes. Elijah met so many old friends and distant cousins of Rose’s, it was all he could do to remember their names. But the Merrifields had only stared at them gravely and not spoken, and the next day Jenny had come to the inn only to say that it was best if Rose, Elijah and the baby stayed away for the present, but Jake’s grandparents very much wanted to see him.

  Jake hadn’t wanted to go. “I don’t see why I should be kind to them when they’re cruel to you,” he’d said with unassailable five-year-old logic.

  “They’re your grandparents,” Rose had said. “Even if it isn’t easy, you should be kind to them because they’re family.”

  Jake had frowned mulishly. “I like my Cameron grandparents better.”

  Elijah’s parents had indeed been welcoming to their blond step-grandson. During the year they’d lived in London with the elder Camerons, Elijah’s gentle, scholarly father had found in Jake a kindred spirit and begun teaching him to read and work sums, as young as he was. No wonder Jake liked them better. “You’re very lucky to have two sets of grandparents,” Elijah had said. “I never knew any of mine. Now, if you go to see them from time to time and show yourself a good boy, they’ll be quicker to forgive us. And if you don’t go, they’ll say we’ve been preventing you.”

  So Jake, obedient and dutiful child that he was, had twice gone to see his grandparents. But today he’d come home in tears, saying they’d talked of what a pity it was his father hadn’t lived, for by now he might have a beautiful white sister.

  Something needed to be done, Elijah reflected as he sat at the table in his little office, busy with his accounts. They had no right to try to use Jake as a weapon against his parents, and the insult against Mary, brown-skinned, gray-eyed and so lovely strangers stopped to praise her, made his father’s heart burn with anger. But what could he do? The Merrifields would always be Jake’s family, so it wouldn’t do to antagonize them if it could be avoided.

  As he mused, a soft knock sounded on his half-open door, and he looked up to see Rose, looking even graver than what had lately become her norm. She still wore her apron and cap from the kitchen, and a pleasant, savory aroma of meat, onions and herbs wafted into the room.

  He smiled because he knew it would make her smile back, at least a little, and beckoned her to come in. She did so, shutting the door behind her. “Is anything wrong?” he asked as he slid his arm around her waist. “It’s not like you to step away from the fire this close to the dinner hour.”

  She waved off this concern. “I’ve already finished the hard bits. Ellen is perfectly capable of watching to make sure it doesn’t burn. But...I did want to ask you...” She swallowed hard and stared over his shoulder.

  He captured her hand and raised it to his lips. “You can ask me anything at any time. You know that.”

  She nodded once and met his eyes. “If you aren’t happy here, we can leave. We can find a buyer for the inn, I’m sure of it, and go back to London.”

  He hadn’t realized it was as bad as this. “But—your dream.”

  “My dream isn’t worth making you unhappy.”

  “But what if I’m not unhappy? What if I’m glad we came? What if your dream is my dream too, now?”

  She searched his face. “But—I thought you’d seemed rather somber, these past few days.”

  “Mostly that’s because of Colonel Dryhurst’s letter. I can’t stop thinking of poor Captain Farlow.” Shortly after Elijah had been invalided out of the Forty-Third, Bonaparte had abdicated for the first time, and the regiment had been one of the ones sent to America in hopes of turning the tide in that war. They’d been at New Orleans, fighting a battle after the war was over but before news of the peace treaty had had time to cross the Atlantic. The Forty-Third had been fortunate in that their casualties had been fairly light, but one of them had been Henry Farlow.

  At least, the men had seen him fall. When the burial detail passed through the killing ground, they did not find his body, and his mother persisted in hope that he was living still. Colonel Dryhurst had written feelingly of his pity for the grieving mother, but said the idea of Farlow’s survival was nonsense. The British wounded had been taken in by the Americans and given courteous treatment and the best medical care the victors could offer. If Farlow had been among them, they would know, for the Americans could have no conceivable reason to conceal him. No, the burial detail must have missed identifying him, or he might have crawled some little distance away and died in the swamp.

  “Yes,” Rose said, shaking her head. “His poor mother... I hope I’m never obliged to send any son of mine away to war.”

  “So do I. We’ve earned a good long peace.”

  She laid a hand on his cheek. “But are you truly happy about being here? It can’t be easy for you.”

  “Not all of it, but I never expected it to be. But you were right about this village. There are good people here, and I like to think of making the inn bigger and finer and having something to pass on to our children, should any of them want to follow in our footsteps. Truly, I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my life, to be here with you, building our life together.”

  “But those servants who wouldn’t even stay to give you a chance...”

  “Have already been replaced by ones who are eager to have the work. I don’t expect to have any trouble keeping the inn staffed.”

  “No, but...I’d hoped for better from my home. And, truly, if you aren’t happy here, I’m sure we could find a buyer who’d pay us as much as we paid, or almost, and we could set up at another inn somewhere else. Perhaps even in London. We could see so much more of your family, and the children would have their grandparents around every day.”

  Elijah shook his head. “I like London, and I’m glad we’re close enough to visit my family, or have them here, but I don’t want to live there. I think the country air will better agree with Jake, just for a start.” Jake wasn’t precisely a sickly child, but nor was he a strong, robust one, either, and he’d had a cough last winter that had lingered into May. Elijah swore the boy already had a better color after only a month away from the city’s dirty air.

  “That’s very true,” Rose allowed.

  “Are you not happy here?” he asked. Maybe she was at last ready to voice what he’d suspected for days.

  She bit her lip. “What would you say if I wasn’t?”

  “The same thing you said to me, more or less. If you’re truly miserable, it wouldn’t matter how content I am. We can find a place where both of us are happy. But I wouldn’t want you to give up too soon. This is your home, and it’s been your dream almost all your life. You shouldn’t abandon it on a whim.”

  “It’s not a whim,” she protested, stepping out of his encircling arm. “It’s not. Only, I never imagined coming back home and having Jenny, of all people, not even willing to speak to me, and Sam’s own parents wanting me to stay away. They’re family, you see. Even before I married Sam, they were like my second parents. They took me in when I had no place to go. And growing up, I hardly have any happy memories that I don’t share with Jenny. I thought when I came back she’d be as glad to see me as I was her, and that we’d visit each other whenever we had a spare moment, and that our children would play together. I—I am glad to have the inn, and a great kitchen all of my own at last, but Aspwell Heath doesn’t truly seem like home if the Merrifields cast me aside.”

  “I see.” Abruptly Elijah came to a decision. “I believe I’m going to go have a talk with your Jenny.”

  Rose’s eyes widened. “She’ll refuse to see you.”

  “I think I can persuad
e her to listen long enough.” Sometimes the best way to gain a victory was a head-on assault, and he meant to try it—in the most gentle, courteous manner he could manage.

  Now her brows narrowed dubiously. “Well...good luck.”

  He kissed her. “Trust me.”

  * * *

  He waited until after dinner and welcomed three parties of travelers who would stay the night at the inn before striding out into the long sunlight of the summer evening to Jenny’s cottage. As he’d hoped, he found her alone with just her two children, as her husband was about his evening’s farm chores.

  She frowned when she opened the door to him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to talk about Rose and Jake,” he said calmly. He adopted his least threatening posture, slouching slightly with his arms behind his back, and made no move to step inside before he was invited.

  “What of them?”

  “Rose misses you. She cannot understand why you won’t speak to her, when you were like a sister before. And Jake doesn’t know what to think of his grandparents. He’s frightened of them, a little. Surely that’s not what they wanted.”

  Jenny blinked and shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so. I realize I’m not what you expected as a husband for Rose, but am I really so dreadful to be worth making your best friend, your sister-in-law, this unhappy over?”

  “She’s not my sister-in-law anymore.” Her voice was low, pained and angry. “You’re not Sam.”

  “No, I’m not.” He shrugged. “That I can’t remedy. But surely you wouldn’t have expected Rose to mourn him for the rest of her life. Would you have minded her marrying again, if she’d brought home a white husband?”

  “I don’t know.” She stepped back and waved her arm in invitation. “Oh, do come in. I don’t like to think what these two will get into if I leave them alone too long.”

  Her two children, a girl a little younger than Jake and a toddling son a little older than Mary, stood in the center of the cottage and stared at him, round-eyed. Elijah smiled at them. The girl shrank back a little, but the baby pointed at him and laughed.

  It broke the tension. Elijah chuckled, and Jenny smiled. “I’m sorry. He’s too young to have any manners.”

  “It’s quite all right. I’m sure he’s never seen anything like me before.”

  “No, none of us have.” She led him to a table, offered him a chair and sat opposite him. “That—that’s the trouble, you see. I suppose it would’ve been easier if you’d looked more like Sam. But it’s not just your skin. You’re nothing like Sam in any way—and I knew from the moment I laid eyes on the two of you together that Rose is besotted with you. She wasn’t like that with Sam, when they were first married. She didn’t smile at him like she had a secret or sit as close to him as decency allows in church. The way she looks at you is hard for his family to see.”

  Elijah considered this. He’d achieved what he hoped—shocking Jenny into facing him and owning up to what her coldness was doing to Rose—but he wasn’t sure what to make of this much honesty. “She loved Sam, too,” he said after a moment. “Truly. I knew them from the time they arrived on the Peninsula, and anyone could see they were devoted to each other. If she was quieter about it when they first married, maybe it was because she was still grieving for her parents, or she was just more bashful about showing it then. As for me—well, she told me once that if a woman is to have two loves in her life, it’s well that they’re not too much the same, so she can hold both the loves in her heart. Both strong, but nothing alike.”

  Jenny seemed to weigh this, her head turned to one side. “I suppose. But, it’s so hard. Rose always talked of having the Red Lion someday, from the time her mother started teaching her to cook. It was a byword for dreadful food, you see, and she wanted to make it famous for just the opposite cause. But we all had dreams, in those days. I was going to have my own dressmaker’s shop and sew all of Lady Bassett’s gowns. And look at me now.” She waved a hand to indicate the rather shabby little cottage. “You’ve given Rose her dream. Sam talked of it, when he asked her to marry him, but he never could’ve managed it, any more than I could’ve managed to set up my own shop. You’ve done more than my brother ever could’ve done for my friend, and there is the sting of it all. I can’t bear it, and my parents cannot either.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said softly.

  She shook her head. “No. I know my brother. He—he wasn’t you. I’ve heard all the talk about you, how clever the vicar says you are, how everyone sees already how good you are at managing the inn. Sam couldn’t have done that, and he never would’ve made such an impression on his colonel that he set him up with such a place, either.”

  That was the story Elijah and Rose had let get abroad, without either confirming or denying it—that his colonel or some other rich officer patron had lent them the money to buy the Red Lion. They’d got into such a habit of keeping the rubies a secret that they didn’t want the source of their good fortune much talked of even now that it had been sold and converted into ownership of an inn, with a little left over and set aside against future necessity. But he’d give Jenny and her parents the truth. They deserved to know what Sam had done.

  “And I tell you you’re wrong,” he repeated. “I don’t know what kind of innkeeper Sam would’ve been. But I do know he’s the reason we were able to buy it at all.” He went on to tell her the story of the rubies, briefly. “The inn was his dream for Rose, as much as it was hers, as much as it became mine. We’re here because of him. I’m sure he’s happy for her, and he’d want all his family to be happy, too.”

  Now slow tears trickled down Jenny’s cheeks. “Oh. Oh. I suppose—I suppose I had a better brother than I thought.”

  Elijah smiled. “He truly was.”

  “Tell Rose...tell her I’ll come to see her tomorrow, and I’ll try to get my parents to come, too.”

  “She’ll be so glad to see you. And thank you for hearing me out.”

  * * *

  The next morning Jenny and the Merrifields came to the inn and engaged in a tearful reunion with Rose. Elijah kept away at first, but when Rose called for him he shook hands all around and accepted apologies for how cold their first reception of him had been. He was prepared to give them a second chance, since their coldness had sprung from grief and their love for their son. And for Rose and Jake they were family, and always would be. Forgiveness was worth it for their sakes, too.

  Just before midnight Elijah went through what was already becoming a nightly ritual. He could not seek his own rest until he was sure all was well with the inn, so he started in the stables, listening to the rustlings of the horses and murmuring a greeting to a wakeful groom.

  He entered the inn through the kitchen, keeping his steps quiet and cautious to avoid waking the scullery maid. The guard dog thumped his tail at Elijah’s familiar tread, and the sleek-coated, fat kitchen cat rubbed against his legs, purring and doing her best to make him stumble.

  After he was sure all was well on the ground level, he made his way up the creaky stairs and down the passage where their overnight customers slept. All was still, though someone in Room Three snored so loudly Elijah could hear him through the thick oaken door.

  At last he climbed another flight of stairs to his family’s rooms. First he stepped into the children’s room—somehow he couldn’t sleep until he knew they were safely slumbering. Tonight, all was peaceful. Jake slept in his low bed, clutching the same blanket he’d carried all the way through Spain and France. And there in the cradle lay little Mary, the apple of Elijah’s eye. Carefully, for if nothing else, Rose had taught him that one must never wake a sleeping baby, he stroked her soft curls. Her hair, though as black as his, fell in soft ringlets like her mother’s, and she had, all unexpectedly, Rose’s gray eyes set in skin nearly as dark a brown as his own
. His father had already warned him to be prepared for the day in sixteen years or so when Mary decided to try the effect of those eyes in that face on susceptible youths. Elijah reflected it was a good thing he’d had so much early practice at being terrifying.

  But tonight all that was far away. He left the children for his own room. Though he tried to undress quietly, since Rose had had such a long day of it between the kitchen and her reunion with the Merrifields, she awoke as he slid into bed beside her and she drew him into her arms for a sleepy kiss.

  “Is it your dream now?” he asked.

  She settled deeper into the embrace. “Our dream.”

  * * * * *

  Historical Note

  Writing the story of a black soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular War army required a certain amount of extrapolation on my part. England had a free black community in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and many of its men were sailors and at least some of them soldiers. While I haven’t yet run across an account of a black soldier in the Peninsular campaign, nor have I found anything to suggest it couldn’t have happened, I decided that was license enough for the story I wanted to tell.

  The Forty-Third was a real regiment that fought throughout the American Revolution and, a few decades later and rather more victoriously, in the Peninsular War. They then went on to serve at the end of the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans. However, all of its officers and men in this story are my own inventions.

  For Elijah’s parents’ background as slaves from a Virginia plantation who escaped to freedom under the auspices of the British army during the American Revolution, I’m indebted to Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama. My other sources included Colour, Class and the Victorians, by Douglas A. Lorimer, which includes enough information on the decades preceding Victoria’s reign to be of use in constructing my Regency-era story, and Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1830, by Norma Myers.