JoAnn Wendt (32 page)

In annoyance, he downed his wine and rid himself of his goblet. He watched Annette as she wove her way toward him. Once, she became trapped by three garrulous old gentlemen. With the easy grace born of her station in life, she endured their hand-kissing and their compliments, granting each a dazzling smile as she swished out of their circle. She wore the bright formal smile until her eyes caught his. The smile softened. A girlish glow lit her middle-aged face. Where had he seen that look before? Maryann . . . going into Raven’s arms. Damn.

“Dance with me, Garth?” The perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears and in her bosom floated up to him.

He deliberately put her in her place, leering into her cleavage, like a tar at a chippy. He wanted her to realize that she was only a mistress. It would be easier that way, in the long run.

“Dance? I would rather—”

Hurt flashed in her eyes for an instant. Then she banished it and stabbed him in the rib with her folded fan.

“Jackanapes! Why do I bother with you, McNeil!”

* * * *

Angry with Raven and fearing a freeze in the Chester River, McNeil decided not to stay for the entire week of wedding festivities. He made his apologies to the Tates and took a stiff farewell of Raven.

“My mouth shot off like a twelve-pounder,” Raven said, fishing for an apology.

Garth shrugged, unwilling to forgive but wanting, at least, to reach neutral ground.

“Forget it. Spilt milk.”

Raven released a sigh of relief. Even as a child, Raven had never been able to bear being on the outs with him.

“That, er, delicate—matter I spoke of. Garth. Er, ah, Jane? You’ll help?” Raven tendered the request gingerly, stiffly.

Garth’s temper began to rise. But something in Raven’s face—a young hopefulness, a vulnerability—quashed his temper. Had twenty-two always been so young? So passionately vibrant, so easy a target for anyone who chose to sling hurts?

He’d forgot. God, twenty-two seemed a century ago.

He sighed softly, tension and irritation draining away. Reaching out, he tousled Raven’s dark hair as he used to do when Raven was a hero-worshipping puppy of ten. In those days, Raven had dogged Garth’s tracks, and Garth had hardly been able to turn around without trodding on the boy. Garth felt a surge of tenderness as an easy grin sprang to Raven’s face.

“I’ve a confession, Raven. I called you a fool schoolboy. But you are a venerable old sage compared to what I was at twenty-two.”

Raven’s brow lifted quizzically.

“When I was your age,” Garth continued, “I was ‘head over heels’ for Mrs. Daws.”

Raven’s expression opened with incredulity. His shoulders hunched, as laughter built. His laughter burst out in erratic spouts, like a whale.

“No, Garth!”

“Absolutely. Mrs. Daws had been my first ‘lady,’ and I was confusing a good bounce in bed with this mysterious thing called ‘love.’ I went so far as to take it upon myself to defend the lady’s honor.”

More whale spouting. Raven wiped tears of laughter. “Some task! Mrs. Daws has a gentleman caller almost every night. She must’ve been mightily annoyed with you, beating up her callers and decimating her income.”

Garth laughed.

“She was.”

“Then what happened?”

“The good lady developed a yen for a bolt of brocade from the Orient. Nothing would do except that I should sail and get it for her. By the time I returned eight months later, I’d come to my senses. I was cured of Mrs. Daws.”

Raven laughed and clapped a hand to Garth’s shoulder.

“Ah, our Mrs. Daws. Still a divine bounce in bed.”

Garth smiled wryly.

“As you discovered at sixteen.”

Raven’s mouth went slack.

“You knew?”

“How could I not? For days before you got up the courage to knock on her door, you were jittery as a cat. And the house reeked of the French scent you were slapping on yourself.”

Raven’s face grew thoughtful.

“So that’s why Mrs. Daws didn’t send me packing, as she did to youngsters who knocked on her door. You intervened, Garth.”

“Not really. I sent her a tobacco voucher for twenty pounds. I enclosed it in a note:
If Mr. Raven McNeil should come to call, please treat him as you’d want your own son treated when he comes of age
.”

Raven laughed sheepishly. “I don’t know whether to thank you or punch you in the nose.”

“Let’s make it a handshake.”

Raven thrust out his hand.

“A handshake, then.”

They shook hands, then embraced awkwardly in farewell.

“About Jane Brown,” Raven began as they strolled to the door.

“I’ll consider the matter.”

“You promise?”

“Yes. I suppose a mistress is not altogether out of the question.”

He did not add, however, that Jane Brown as mistress was indeed out of the question. Jane Brown was known in Chestertown, known by the Tates, If word slipped out—and word
would
slip out—the Tates would be scandalized, Maryann would be devastated and McNeil & McNeil would lose a lot of Maryland shipping customers. No, he must dispose of this Jane Brown and find Raven a mistress in some distant port, such as Norfolk. He gave Raven’s shoulder a fatherly pat and left.

On the last day of December, Garth and Annette arrived back in Williamsburg. The year 1754 was a hair’s breadth from becoming 1755, and Garth worried what the new year would bring to the colonies.

If the fat wasn’t already in the fire on the frontier, it would be by summer. The humiliating clash of untrained militiamen and French regulars had signaled that certainty at Fort Necessity. Garth doubted that the members of the Privy Council, sitting on their fat, brocaded asses in London, would succeed in preventing all-out war with the French. And King George turned a deaf ear to colonists’ demands for British troops. The king preferred to listen to his minister, the duke of Newcastle, who advised: “Let Americans fight Americans.”

But on this eve of 1755, Williamsburg pretended trouble was not imminent. The capital bubbled with holiday merriment: balls, galas, horse races, theatricals. All business halted as Williamsburg played, playing well into the new year. With shipping temporarily forestalled, Garth plunged into the gaiety.

On the fourth of January he crossed the bounds of gaiety; he got irresponsibly drunk. The fourth was a date he habitually found hard to tolerate. It was the anniversary of his first encounter with his beloved Flavia.

He arose on the fifth, paying dearly for his sins. His head hurt like the devil. Slouching at his writing table in the study, a fire snapping on the hearth and a pot of strong coffee at his elbow, he made a stab at sobriety by attacking business matters. He tried to map out new shipping routes for McNeil & McNeil, in the event of war. War would mean privateers, and he didn’t intend to lose a ship to any buccaneering Frenchman.

When the maps and charts proved to be a jumble to his aching head, he slung them aside and turned to another matter. Raven’s nonsense. He wrote out a draft on his bank for fifty pounds, a second draft for one hundred pounds and a third for two hundred. Irritably, he scrawled a legal paper, releasing one “Jane Brown” from indenture to Captain Garth McNeil of Williamsburg. Then he sent for his business agent.

The pounding in his head lent precise brutality to his instructions; as soon as the weather eased, the agent was to make tracks for Chestertown. There he was to locate the Byng household and purchase Jane Brown’s indenture. If the agent could get her for the generous fee of one hundred pounds, good. If not, offer two hundred. Only a lunatic could refuse.

Then the agent was to take the girl directly to Philadelphia, buy her passage to England, and see her securely aboard the ship. He was to give the chit three things: her freedom papers, fifty pounds in sterling, and a severe warning. The chit would be skinned alive if she ever again set foot in the colonies.

It was arbitrary, and Raven would thunder when he got wind of it. But so be it. Garth could weather that storm, and Raven would recover. The lad’s past love affairs had had all the longevity of a sudden summer squall.

Jane Brown disposed of, he attended to the January shipping schedule. Finally, reluctantly, he turned to a touchy personal matter. Annette. In his silent drunken brooding over Flavia, he’d spurned what Annette had tried to offer. She’d left in a huff, deeply offended.

He rose cautiously, babying the devils that danced in his skull. As careful as a ninety-year-old, he maneuvered the stairs, entered his bedchamber, washed himself from head to toe, splashed on a scent Annette had given him and then got dressed.

He sent round for the landau and was about to plunge out into the January wind when a thought surfaced: only an idiot strides defenseless into the den of a wounded lioness. He shut the door against the stinging wind and stood in the foyer, considering. As his mother’s handsome old case clock chimed the hour, he moved thoughtfully toward the kitchen.      

The kitchen was cozy, a moist spicy smell filling the air as cook stirred the pumpkin mush that simmered in an iron pot over the fire. At the far end of the trencher table, Trent and Mab had their heads together. They were picking seeds from pumpkin pulp, dropping the seeds into a roasting pan.

“One, two, five,” Trent counted.

“One, two,
three,”
Mab corrected.

At the sound of Garth’s step, Trent’s head popped up, then his whole body. Garth went to the boy, scooped him up and stood him upon the table.

“Trent, old man, I’m going to hide behind your coattails. How would you like to pay a visit to Lady Annette?”

The child’s sweet Flavia-eyes worked earnestly. A grin began to build.

“Lady Annette! Presents! Toy ship—” Trent clapped his hands in glee, and McNeil found himself wiping a dollop of airborne pumpkin pulp from his jaw.

“Trent’s
not
going out in this weather,” Mab snapped from the end of the table.

Garth turned and sent her a baleful look. The pounding in his brandy-soaked skull left him in no mood to be crossed. The look was effective. About to say more, Mab shut her mouth and jumped up to get Trent’s coat and hat.

    * * * *

“Beg pardon, sir, Captain McNeil, sir,” Annette’s elderly footman stammered, pausing often to clear his throat. “My lady, she—Lady Annette has left word that Captain McNeil is not—ah— not to be admitted?” The footman’s voice lifted in question, as though to sugarcoat his message.

McNeil stepped in anyway, closing the door and setting Trent down in the foyer. Outside, the winter wind howled.

“Announce Master Trent.”

The footman blinked in fresh alarm.

“Please, sir? My lady, she’s in foul mood.”

“So,”
warned McNeil,
“am I.”

The footman jumped at that. Turning, he shuffled across the foyer and pumped up the wide stairway in woebegone slow motion. At the top of the stairs he applied a reluctant knuckle to the boudoir door, sidling in when so bidden.

When the door opened again, it opened with a bang that rattled the mansion from top to bottom. Annette stalked out to the landing, wearing a dressing gown of burgundy velvet. She jammed her fists onto her hips.

“Are you out of your mind! Taking a child out in sleet and ice!”

Then she stooped, her arms going out toward Trent, her voice softening.

“Come here, darling. Quickly. There’s a fire in my boudoir. We’ll have you warm in a trice.”

Trent toddled up the stairs. McNeil followed, feeling foolish. Annette swept the boy into her room, but when McNeil tried to follow, she slammed the door in his face. The bang stirred up his hangover anew. He stood there, considering what to do, when the door jerked open. Ignoring him as though he had no more substance than a ghost, Annette shouted through him at the footman descending the stairs.

“Hot chocolate, Paddington! A pot, of it for Master Trent.”

The door slammed again. McNeil steadied his thudding head. A green humor stirred sickly in him. Well, if she wanted her revenge, she was getting it. At the expense of his hurting head.

He stood staring into the carved paneling of the door, feeling victim of a disease to which he’d hitherto been immune: unsureness. He supposed an apology was due, but the thought rankled. One didn’t apologize to one’s own mistress.

Behind the door, Trent’s chatter rose, punctuated by the occasional ring of Annette’s laughter. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the door latch and let himself into the familiar room with its turquoise bed hangings and floor splashes of bright Persian rugs. He shut the door behind him, gesturing at the fire that crackled a warm invitation from the fireplace.

“I’m cold, too,” he tried, grinning.

It was cold mackerel. She ignored him, stripping off Trent’s bundlings.

He tried again.

“You’re angry, Annette.”

Her head swung toward him.

“Brilliant, McNeil!”

He floundered for something to say, something to turn the trick. Not an outright apology, of course, though something close. But she gave him no chance.

“I’m finished with you, McNeil. So you can well march yourself out of here. I’ve written Lord Dunwood. I intend to wed him at the soonest.”

A false threat. But her willfulness was as irritating as the headache that had set up housekeeping in his skull. Almost, his good intentions flew out the window. Almost, he snapped:
May you and your parrot be very happy!
Only a kind Providence held his tongue. And an interruption from Trent.

Trent tugged at Annette’s hand.

“Toy ship?” The blatant little beggar turned an appealing smile on Annette. She tore angry eyes from McNeil and looked down at Trent, softening.

“Darling, I haven’t—” Her eyes swept the room. “Come, Trent, we’ll make a pretend ship.”

She stalked to the small round cherry-wood table where Garth kept his things. Seizing his teak and ivory pipe box, she banged the contents out on the table. Garth winced at the unmistakable sound of his favorite pipes cracking. She seized an enameled tin box of tobacco, wrenched off the lid, strode with it to the fire and shook the tobacco into the flames. She strode back to the table.