Days of Gold (38 page)

It all made sense, but Edilean still hated the idea of spending any time with Angus. They’d have to rehearse their story before going to the judge to make sure they said the same things, so that meant hours together.

After Malcolm finished telling what they wanted of her, Edilean mumbled that she needed time to think about it all. But she couldn’t bear thinking about it. That evening, she tossed a few clothes into a case, called for the big green carriage with the crest on the door and Cuddy as her driver, and headed south to the colony of Connecticut. She’d heard of a farm for sale there that had acres in fruit, and she wanted to look at it. Originally, she’d decided that it was too far away from Boston to be of interest to her, but after seeing Angus, after trying to kill him, she wanted to get away.

Harriet, who so loved overseeing every aspect of Edilean’s life, hadn’t protested her leaving. Harriet had, in an instant, turned all her motherly affections to Malcolm. She hovered over him in the kitchen and had four girls running up and down the stairs as she had a room prepared for him.

Harriet’s quick desertion of Edilean was yet another blow to her on a day that reeked with them. In fact, Harriet hardly noticed when Edilean left.

When Edilean returned yesterday, she saw that her house had become “theirs.” Malcolm and Harriet were a couple in everything but legality and bedding. There was new furniture in the parlor, new linens on the beds—and Harriet was sleeping in Edilean’s room. She’d given Malcolm her room with the excuse that she had no idea when or even if Edilean was going to return.

“Why wouldn’t I return to my own house?” Edilean snapped. “Where else was I going to live?”

“Now, girls,” Malcolm said, “we can solve this all if the lads and I move out.”

“No!” Harriet half screamed, and glared at Edilean.

“No, of course you can’t leave,” Edilean said and had to bite her tongue from making a sarcastic reply about guests who stayed for three whole weeks.

At dinner she felt like the outsider as Tam, Shamus, Malcolm, and Harriet had become great friends and talked as though they’d known one another all their lives. Harriet played the hostess with perfection.

Edilean sat at the end of the table and watched it all with feelings of jealousy, but also with a sense of being an unneeded and unwanted visitor. She had become the one who didn’t belong in her own house.

The truth was that she’d felt more at home in the three weeks
she’d spent in Connecticut. Right away, she’d seen that the farm was a place she wanted to buy. It had been well kept, and the fruit was going to be abundant. The man who owned it had died unexpectedly and left behind a wife and two young daughters. Edilean made an excuse by saying she wanted to stay with the woman while she readied herself to leave the farm, but the truth was that Edilean wanted to do anything rather than return to the house where she’d last seen Angus. She still hadn’t recovered from the violence of her emotions when she first saw him. Every moment they’d spent together, both private and public, had run through her mind. But the prominent memory was of how he’d just walked away from her. Left her there in his bed. He didn’t even stay long enough to tell her to her face that he’d had what he wanted from her and was done with her. No, he’d told that to Cuddy.

It had taken nearly two days to get Cuddy to tell the full truth of what Angus had said, but she’d done it. Calmly, the young man had said, “Would you like me to kill him for you?” Edilean had been tempted to say yes, but she didn’t. But as a result of Cuddy’s loyalty he was one of only three men she’d kept in her employ when she started Bound Girl. The other two men were too old to discharge.

After Angus had so coldly left her, Edilean had borne her heart ache without a tear, and she’d never told Harriet what had happened. To compensate, Edilean had started Bound Girl and buried herself in as much work as she could humanly manage.

It had all gone well until she walked into her own parlor and there he was. He sat there looking at her as though he’d just seen her last week and now he wanted to put his arms around her. And then what? Take her to bed, have a night of ecstasy, then leave her for another four years? Is that what he thought of her?

Just as had happened before, Edilean’s mind left her. She ran from the room and told the girls who were in the back loading boxes
of fruit that she needed them. She knew that they were so grateful to her for saving them that they’d do anything she wanted. If she’d told them to take the guns and shoot Angus, they would have done it and damn the consequences!

But Edilean had wanted the pleasure of seeing him suffer. She wanted to see him lying dead at her feet—or that’s what she told herself.

After it was over, after the weapons had been taken from her, she couldn’t bear to stay in that house. She didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see the three Scotsmen, who reminded her of Angus, didn’t want to see Harriet simpering over Malcolm. She didn’t even want to see the girls, who reminded her of the company she’d started because of what Angus had done to her.

When she got into the carriage she wasn’t sure where she was going. It wasn’t until she was an hour away that she remembered the handbill Harriet had shown her about the farm for sale in Connecticut. It took days to get there, but when she’d arrived, the widow, Abigail Prentiss, had welcomed her, and by the next evening they’d formed a friendship. Abigail was her age, and she’d been born in England into the same class. They even knew some of the same people.

When she was just seventeen, Abby had fallen in love with an older man who owned a farm in America. Her family protested that she couldn’t go that far away, but Abby had made up her mind. They married three months after they met, and Abby was expecting a baby a week later. Now, with two daughters, aged four and three, to support, she didn’t know how she was going to do it alone.

“I can help you with that,” Edilean said, and gave a great sigh.

From there it went to Abigail listening to Edilean’s problems; she told her about Angus. While it was true that Abby had been in love with John Prentiss when she married him, she admitted to Edilean that it had not been a match made in Heaven.

“I think I wanted to get away from my mother as much as I wanted anything else, and there was John, such a very nice man, who owned a big farm in America, and I saw a way to leave my mother. He was a lovely man.”

“But not one you’d want to kill if he betrayed you.”

Abby laughed. “I don’t think I could feel that way about any man.”

“Good,” Edilean said. “It’s awful. I can’t decide if I love him or hate him.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

They were in her orchard, many of the trees were in bloom, and the bees were buzzing all around them. Her little girls, blonde and beautiful, were chasing butterflies. Edilean knew that she envied Abby. She’d had a “correct” life, marrying a man, then having children. Edilean felt that her own life had been topsy-turvy, everything always backward to what it should be. She’d had no parents to speak of and no marriage—but she’d had a wedding night.

“What will you do now?” Abby asked.

“Go back to Boston and...” She gave another sigh. “I guess I’ll run Bound Girl, although I think Tabitha and Harriet could manage quite well without me. I was needed to make them believe they could start such a company, but now they do all the work. I...” She trailed off. While it was true that she worked all day long and ran everything, it seemed that lately her heart wasn’t in it. She was to turn twenty-two this year, and she wasn’t married or even being courted by a man. There were still many men trying for her hand, but they seemed to get older every year. A woman who was extremely successful in a business was not something a younger man wanted to take on. Whereas they loved the idea of marrying a rich heiress, a woman who was taking over the produce market through intelligence and shrewd decisions was not their idea of a good wife.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Edilean said, and she had a vision of herself looking like Harriet, of being forty-plus, with no husband, no family. If she owned all the orchards in all thirteen colonies she’d still be alone. “What about you?” Edilean asked. “After I buy your farm, where will you go?”

“Williamsburg,” Abby said firmly. “I went there once with John and I loved the place. It’s a city, but it has the atmosphere of an English village. And Virginia is beautiful.”

“With a lot of eligible bachelors?” Edilean asked, and they looked at each other and laughed.

Edilean meant to stay in Connecticut for only a few days, but she ended up staying at Abby’s farm for three weeks. She left because she feared that Bound Girl might need her. If Harriet was still enamored of Malcolm she wouldn’t be paying attention to the business, and if Tabitha wasn’t constantly supervised, who knew what she’d do? Reluctantly, Edilean left the farm and her new friend, and went back to Boston.

But no one paid much attention to her arrival. There were no crises that only she could handle. In just a few weeks, her household had changed so much that she felt she didn’t know it. Harriet’s every sentence seemed to start with, “Malcolm says—”

As for Tabitha, she’d taken the opportunity to buy some new wagons and have the company’s Bound Girl symbol painted on them. Edilean thought they were hideously garish and said so. “But they sell more,” was Tabitha’s reply.

Now, Edilean was watching Harriet dither about as she set the table as though the king were coming when it was just Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus. As far as Edilean knew, Shamus still ate all his food with a spoon.

She left the table, unable to sit there and—She hated to think that she was such a shallow person, but it was difficult not to feel
jealous and envious of the happiness that everyone in her household seemed to have found.

She went to the big warehouse where the produce from the farms came in. Usually, she was so busy that she could think of nothing else, but today she was distracted. She kept remembering Abigail and her beautiful young daughters.

When Tabitha said something to Edilean, she just stared at her.

“You comin’ down with somethin’?” Tabitha asked her.

“Yes. No,” Edilean said as she looked at two young women who were bent over boxes of cherries and saw that they were watching her and laughing. No doubt all of Boston knew about her shooting at some man. And they could easily guess why.

Edilean grabbed her skirts and fled the warehouse. All in all, she thought, it would have been better to have killed Angus and now be sitting in a jail cell.

She wandered about Boston for a while, looking at what the stores had to offer, and listening to men complain about England. Edilean didn’t understand what the problem was. If the men thought King George was bad, they should read the history books and look at past kings. What did the Americans think they were going to do? Start a new country without a king? Really! Sometimes she didn’t understand Americans at all.

It was dusk by the time she got back to the house, and she hadn’t eaten all day. She asked to have a tray taken to her room. She ate little of the food, then undressed down to her chemise and went to bed. She fell asleep instantly.

She was awakened by a shot and angry shouts coming from downstairs. “Now what?” Edilean muttered as she slipped her arms into a dressing gown and went out her door. She had to wait her turn to go down the stairs as the three men and Harriet were ahead of her.

When Edilean got to the parlor, the others were blocking her view. They were standing there and staring, transfixed into immobility by whatever they were seeing. “Would you mind!” she said angrily as she pushed through them. When she got to the front, she also stood still and stared. Two candles were lit in the room, and her good silver candlesticks were sticking out of a bag on the floor. Beside the bag was the body of James Harcourt, and he had a bullet hole smack in the middle of his forehead. He was staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

Over him stood a large woman with her back to them, but they could see the pistol in her hand. “That’s what you get for stealing my life from me,” the woman said. “You bastard. I hope you’re already in hell. I wish you were alive so I could kill you again.”

The woman drew back her foot and proceeded to kick James’s inert body. Suddenly, in a fury, she began to kick him over and over, her feet moving so fast they were a whirl of motion. “I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you. Hate you!”

Shamus pushed past the others, went to the woman, and grabbed her arm, but she fought him off. She turned her anger onto Shamus and began to hit him with her fists and kick at his shins with her hard-soled shoes.

“There now,” Shamus said, pulling her close so her arms were pinned between his body and hers. She was a large, strong woman, and Shamus was the only one who could have held her still. When he got her arms to stop pounding him, he pushed her head down to his shoulder and turned her face to the others, who were still standing in the doorway.

It took all Edilean’s self-discipline to keep from gasping, for the woman was extraordinarily ugly. Her nose was huge and curved down so it overshadowed her sharp chin.

Harriet said, “Prudence.”

Edilean didn’t know the name, but she knew who had the most reason to kill James Harcourt, and she’d heard about his wife’s unfortunate looks. “James’s wife,” she said.

Edilean came out of her lackluster mood. “Harriet!” she said sharply, then had to repeat herself. “Harriet! Listen to me! I want you to get her upstairs and give her some of that laudanum your brother loves... loved so much. Are you listening to me?” When Harriet didn’t respond, just kept staring at her brother’s body on the floor, Edilean looked at Malcolm for help.

“It’s over,” he said softly, and took Harriet into his arms. “It’s all over now. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”

“When has James bothered her?” Edilean asked.

“He’s been blackmailing Harriet for years.”

“You knew?” Harriet asked as she raised her head from his shoulder to look at him.

“Yes, we knew, and we’ve been waiting for him to return. Come now, and we’ll get you back to bed. Shamus! Take Miss Prudence upstairs. We’ll put the women in the same bed and give them that...” He looked at Edilean.