“How can I compete with Grady?”
Groaning, Cay pulled away from him. “You aren’t going to start that again, are you?”
“How can I not?” Alex said. “All day on the boat it’s ‘Mr. Grady this’ and ‘Mr. Grady that.’ You never stop. And the way you look at him! I swear, lass, that today I nearly shoved the man overboard.”
“Did you?” She was smiling. “There’s no reason to be jealous. He’s my boss, and I have to please him.”
“Please him?”
“With my drawings. He likes what I do, don’t you think?”
“I think he likes too much about you,” Alex muttered.
“If he likes me but thinks I’m a boy, that doesn’t say much for his manliness, now does it?”
“As for that, I’m not so sure they do.”
“Do what?”
Alex stood up to finish dressing. “Think you’re a boy.”
“You couldn’t think they know I’m . . .”
“I’m not sure. They certainly don’t seem to mind when you and I slip away for hours each evening when I do my best to satisfy your insatiable lust.”
She started to defend herself but instead laughed and stretched her bare legs out in front of her. “As for that, I think you need to work much harder. And more often. Yes, lots more often.”
“I don’t think I can,” Alex said, looking at her legs. “In fact, lass, you’ve worn me out. What with the wee, silent ones in the mornings, the quick noisy ones when we slip away during the day, and the long, lazy ones in the evenings, I’m sure I can do no more than that.”
“Can you not?” She ran her hand up his leg, curving her fingers around his calf, and going up to caress his thigh muscle that was hard and firm from a lifetime of riding horses.
When she got to the top of his thighs and eased her hand between his legs, he dropped to his knees and kissed her.
“I thought you couldn’t do any more.”
“Maybe just this once,” he said, and Cay giggled.
Three weeks, Cay thought as she looked up at Alex from the drawing she was working on. He was at the helm of their little boat, and to her mind, he ran it. At least he was all that she could see.
In the past three weeks, they’d done many things, and a great deal had changed. For one thing, Cay’s body had hardened. Mr. Grady nor Alex, or even Eli let up on her physically. At the beginning, she’d had difficulty carrying the cases, but now she practically ran with them as they made their camp. Even the heaviest of the crates was easy for her to lift. At night, when she and Alex lay together in their tent, he’d hold her arms up and admire the muscles she was developing. “Won’t be long before you really will be a boy.”
“I’ll show you who’s a boy,” she said as she rolled on top of him.
With the noise of the alligators, the birds, and the frogs all around them, they didn’t bother to hide the sounds they made. A few times Alex had put his lips over hers to keep her quiet, but for the most part, they talked and laughed without fear of being heard.
At the end of the second week, they’d stopped at a plantation, and she and Alex had slipped away to explore. The big house stood on a hill overlooking the river, and it had been Mr. Grady’s duty to spend time with the owner.
“Think his father owns this land?” Alex asked.
“Probably.” She gave Alex a sideways look. “When my mother hears that I had time alone with an Armitage and didn’t take advantage of it, she’s going to skin me alive.”
“Oh?” Alex asked. “Do you mean this skin? This skin that you’re wearing now?”
She pushed his hand out of her shirt, but her eyes told him that later she’d be more than willing to do whatever he had in mind.
The plantation owner had cleared a wild orange grove of weeds and brush, leaving hundreds of trees behind. There was a big kitchen garden that was flourishing even though it was winter. “The heat and the bugs get everything in the summer,” the head gardener told them. “Gardening is backwards here.”
All around them were great fields of indigo plants, all tended by slave labor.
“My father agrees with President Adams,” Cay said. “There should be no slavery in our new country.”
Alex looked out over the fields. “I think that here it’s a matter of economics rather than humanity.”
After a hearty breakfast the next morning, they left early, and Cay was glad to get back to their boat. She’d come to like their small group—except for Tim. The boy continued to do what he could to make Cay miserable. Every time Mr. Grady praised one of her drawings, she knew she’d bear the brunt of Tim’s jealousy. For the first week, she’d had to check her bedding every night to make sure the boy hadn’t put something nasty in it. She’d found three plants guaranteed to give her a rash, two snakes (nonpoisonous), and six different kinds of disgusting-looking bugs.
Cay had wanted Alex to step in and make the boy stop, but he’d just shrugged. “It’s what boys do to each other.”
“Then I think it’s time you males stopped it. Here and now. If one man makes the effort to stop boys from torturing one another, then, eventually, it will spread to all of you.”
Alex looked at her as though she were crazy. “And girls are better? When girls get angry, they don’t hit, they just stop speaking to one another.”
“Yes, well . . .” Cay’s head came up. “That’s better than putting bugs in a person’s bed.”
“Is it?”
Cay didn’t want to argue with him. She just wanted horrible Tim to stop doing mean things to her. She decided to talk to Mr. Grady about it, but he refused to listen.
“I can’t get involved in spats between boys,” he’d said as he walked away.
Frustrated, Cay decided to take matters into her own hands. She was going to treat Tim like one of her brothers, specifically as she did Tally.
The first time Cay had seen a snake slithering its way into their tent, she’d had to put her fist into her mouth to hold back her scream—and Alex had taken care of the matter. He put his foot on the snake, grabbed it just behind its head, and threw it down the hill away from them. The second time she’d seen a snake making its way into the tent, Alex had also captured it and thrown it out. But the third time, Cay didn’t bother him. She just did what he did, held it with her boot, grabbed its head, and carried it down to the river, where she threw it in. It was only when she got back to the camp that she saw that the three men were staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“That was a cottonmouth,” Mr. Grady said.
Even she knew they were extremely poisonous.
Mr. Grady said, “Next time, call one of us.”
But Cay didn’t call anyone for her next snake, nor the next. But she did consult the books T.C. had in his trunk, and she made drawings of the most poisonous snakes and memorized them.
At the end of the second week, she borrowed a big jar from Eli and filled it with little, nonpoisonous snakes, and one night she dumped them all at the foot of Tim’s blanket bed. He wasn’t used to Cay retaliating, so he didn’t find them until they were crawling up his legs. When she heard his shouts as she lay in the tent beside Alex, she smiled, and he asked her what she’d done to “poor Tim.” “Played his own game,” she said and began kissing Alex before he could ask more questions.
After that, it was as if a war had been declared. When she saw an alligator head in the water, its body missing, she lugged it up the hill, hid it in the bushes, and the next morning before daylight, she slipped it partially under the tent Tim shared with Eli. When Alex awoke to screams from Tim, he looked at Cay lying peacefully beside him. “What have you done to that poor boy now?”
She just smiled.
Tim started to be more cautious in the tricks he played on her. He’d learned that there would be retribution for whatever he did to her.
For Cay, what balanced her dislike of Tim was her growing affection for Eli. They were days into the trip before she realized that she’d unjustl
y made some assumptions about him that were far from true. She’d thought he was a man who’d spent his life cooking for people, but no, as a young man he’d studied to be a lawyer.
“When I was an attorney, I had to deal with too much hatred,” he told Cay one evening. “Everybody was screaming and full of hate, so when a client of mine, young Mr. Grady here, said he wanted to go exploring, I shut up my law office and went with him. I’ve never looked back.”
Cay knew that if Eli had worked for the Armitage family he must have been a very good attorney. “So you didn’t want a home and family, then?” She saw the light leave his eyes before he looked away and said nothing more.
Later, Cay asked Mr. Grady what that was about.
“He wouldn’t like to know I’d told you, but he had a wife and child, but they died of smallpox. He never remarried.”
After that, Cay looked at Eli differently, and when she saw him reading a copy of Cicero, she smiled broadly. She knew someone who wanted a husband.
In the third week, they pulled the flatboat half out of the water and began a trek inland to see some ruins that Mr. Grady had heard about. He and Alex carried survey equipment, and Cay put drawing paper and pencils into a bag, while Tim and Eli carried the cooking pots. Alex always kept up with his duty of providing food, so Tim had to carry the big turkey Alex had shot.
Cay couldn’t resist telling Tim that the feathers would make a good hat for him. Her hint was that it would be a woman’s hat.
When they got to the old fort that Mr. Grady wanted to map, Cay sat down to one side and began to sketch. The fortress had been built by the Spanish, and even though it was now in ruins, one tower still had thirty-foot-tall walls. After Cay had made several drawings, she and Alex walked around and looked at the old fort.
“I’d like to make love to you here and now,” he whispered. But as he bent to kiss her, a big rock fell from the top of the old wall and landed just inches away from Cay. Alex looked up just in time to see a flash of white, which he knew was Tim’s shirt. He took off running, and minutes later, the forest echoed with Alex’s shouting. “It’s one thing to play tricks and another to try to kill someone,” they heard him tell the boy.
Cay, back at her drawing pad, glanced at Mr. Grady, but he wouldn’t look at her. It was his responsibility to bawl out Tim for doing something so dangerous, but Grady was leaving it all to Alex.
For three days after that, Tim was set to cleaning pots and gathering firewood.
In the evenings, over dinner, Eli, who’d been down into Florida many times, would tell them stories from his other visits and ones that he’d heard. One story was about a tribe of Indians that had extremely beautiful women. “Better than anyone has ever seen,” he said. “Their hair, their eyes, their bodies were all the most beautiful ever put on this earth. And the women were as kind and as nice as they were heavenly to look at.”
He went on to tell about the first explorers who’d stumbled on them. The men had been hunting, got lost, and were on the point of perishing when they saw the women, whom they called the Daughters of the Sun. The women gave the hunters provisions and let them rest, but at sundown, they said the men had to leave. The women said their husbands were fierce warriors and would kill them if they were found. But the men didn’t want to leave, so they followed the women back toward their village, which they could see in the distance. But try as they might, the hunters couldn’t reach the village. As soon as they thought they were near it, it would reappear in the distance. At long last, the hunters left and went back to their own trading post and told their story.
“Over the years,” Eli said, “many men have tried to find the village of the Daughters of the Sun, but no one has.”
When Eli finished his story, Cay handed him a drawing of an incredibly beautiful woman. “Do you think the women looked like this?”
Eli puzzled at the drawing with wide eyes. “I would think that they did. Is this anyone you know, or did you make her up?”
“She’s my mother,” Cay said and there was longing in her voice. She liked where she was, but she missed her home and her family.
The next day they stopped early and Mr. Grady led them to a small Indian village. Cay didn’t know what she’d expected, but the clean, orderly little settlement was not it. The children ran to them, and Cay wished she had some candy to give them. There was a big house at one end where the chief and his family lived and where they held meetings. Alex, Mr. Grady, and Eli were welcome inside, but Tim and she were told to stay outside.
The first thing Cay realized was that the Indians knew she was a girl. They had no preconceived ideas based on the clothing rituals of the white man, so they weren’t prejudiced by Cay’s male apparel. Laughing, the woman pulled her inside a small house with them, but they wouldn’t let Tim in. They fed her corn cakes and a bowl of fresh milk. One old woman who could speak a bit of English asked her who her husband was. Cay said, “Alex,” without even thinking about it. They nodded approval, but one woman said something and made a motion that imitated Alex’s beard.
The first woman said, “She thinks he’s a very ugly man and that you’d be better off with the other one. Much more handsome.”
Cay couldn’t contain her laughter as she nodded in agreement, and told the woman that Alex’s hair smelled very good and that’s why she liked him. This made the women laugh, and when they left the Indian village, the women followed Alex and kept sniffing his hair.
Alex put up with it with good humor, but he shot Cay looks, as though he was going to murder her. Eli and Mr. Grady said nothing, but when they got back to the boat, they exploded with laughter.
“What’s going on?” Tim asked, looking at Cay. “Are they laughing because the women took you in to their house? I thought that was pretty funny, too. They must have seen that you don’t even shave.” He rubbed his own sparse chin hair with pride.
That statement made Eli and Mr. Grady laugh harder and Alex frown more.
That night when they were alone in their tent, Cay tried to coax Alex out of his bad humor, but she couldn’t. “What bothered you so much?” she asked in frustration. “That they were teasing you? Is your pride so inflexible that you can’t laugh at yourself? The women liked the smell of your hair. What’s so wrong with that?”
“I would never get angry about women liking whatever part of me they care to, it’s just that . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence because he didn’t want to alarm her, but every day he was growing more sure that Eli and Grady knew that Cay was female. Even more, he felt that Grady knew who Cay was. There were small things that Cay didn’t see, but Alex did. On the surface, Grady treated Cay just as he did that idiot boy, Tim, but there were little things that Alex noticed. Whereas Tim would drop his spoon into the mud and barely wipe it off before eating with it, Grady always made sure that Cay’s plate and utensils were clean. Several times, Alex had seen both Eli and Grady intercept some insect or crawling creature from climbing on Cay while she sat engrossed in her drawings. One time Grady reached out over Cay’s head and grabbed a single strand of web that a spider was spinning as it made its way down to the top of Cay’s head.
There were other things less physical that Alex noticed. Grady talked to Cay in a way that he didn’t use with the others. It was a matter of tone and even vocabulary. What Alex knew from having dealt with the rich plantation boys in Charleston was that Grady treated Cay as one of his own class. Alex had seen that you couldn’t enter that class; you had to have been born into it. For all that Americans liked to brag that the new country was a classless one, Alex had seen that it wasn’t so.
What Alex wondered was how much Grady knew. To Alex, it wouldn’t have been difficult for Grady to guess that Cay was female. She walked, talked, even reacted as a woman would. Even the pranks she pulled on young Tim were done in a female way. Had she been male, by now she would have punched Tim in the face.
What Alex feared was that Grady hadn’t so much as guessed the truth about Cay as that he
’d been told. He seemed to not only know she was female, but also to know she was of his same class, and that made Alex wonder if Grady had received a letter from her family or T.C. telling him of the circumstances. And if Grady had been told about Cay, that meant he knew Alex was an escaped fugitive.
After their visit to the Indian village, Alex became more cautious, and he watched Grady and Eli more closely. As far as Alex could tell, Eli knew only that Cay was a girl, but Grady seemed to know much more. On the personal side, what was worse—to Alex’s mind anyway—was that Grady seemed to be making a play for Cay. Alex knew better than to tell his concerns to Cay. She’d laugh and tell him he was jealous, but Alex saw things that bothered him. At night, Eli’s stories became longer, so there was less time for him and Cay to slip away. Four times now, Grady had told Alex to go ashore and bring back game and any unusual plants that Cay might draw. That Cay would be alone on the boat with them while Alex was trapped onshore was not something he could protest without telling the truth. It had been extremely difficult to travel on foot through the wilds of Florida, bring down a deer, carry it across his shoulders, and get back to them.
“We thought you weren’t going to make it,” Eli said the first time Alex came into the camp late at night.
Alex dropped the deer carcass and looked at Grady, but the man wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Alex wondered what Grady wanted from Cay. It seemed obvious that he wanted to break the alliance between Alex and Cay, meaning that he wanted to stop their lovemaking. But why? Because Grady knew her family and therefore felt responsible for her? Or was he as interested in an alliance with her family as she was in his?
“You look like you ate something sour,” Cay whispered as they went into their little tent together. “Did something happen between you and Mr. Grady?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you’ve been frowning at him for two days now, and every time he so much as speaks to me I think you’re going to hit him with an oar. It’s flattering that you’re so jealous, but I think that what you and I do together proves that you don’t have a right to dislike him.”
The Scent of Jasmine Page 21