Mood Indigo (10 page)

Terence straddled the woman. His left hand he placed against the back of the Negress’s head. He gave one short, brutal twist to the neck, backward, upward, and sideways. The crack of the cervical column was barely audible against the muted laughter from within the tavern.

The dead woman’s face was twisted to the side, her tongue protruding slightly between her lips, her lids wide, her eyes staring sightlessly at the youpon holly just beyond the marl path. Brewer, the proprietor, did not find his servantwoman until dawn when the early gray light exposed her awkwardly positioned body within the concealing shrubbery.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A
fire roared in the monstrous brick fireplace that almost girded one wall of the kitchen. The room was a good sixty degrees hotter than the outside temperature on that mildly warm October day. Jane left the roast turning on the spit and went to stand at the Dutch door, using the apron to wipe away the perspiration that trickled down her neck. The brilliant sunlight shimmered the inviting river beyond into a purple haze. Nearer, the cool shade of plum trees ladened with reddish brown leaves beckoned. Beyond the trees and the various outbuildings stretched fields of what looked like prairie grass, though the stalks were purple red—Ethan Gordon’s indigo fields.

Her eyes easily picked his form out from among the three indentured men as they took the last cutting of indigo for the season. It wasn’t just his height that betrayed him, for Josiah was tall, but thin. Icabod was, of course, squat and adorably pudgy. One-eyed Peter was as strapped with muscles as Ethan, but much shorter of stature. And Ethan, who had a good spread to his shoulders, moved with a litheness, swung his sickle with a grace that the others lacked.

King George raced over her shoes and streaked into the kitchen. She sighed and turned back inside. The midday respite the colonists called nooning was past, but there was still the butter to finish churning before she began the late-afternoon meal. She cleared the table while King George sniffed about its legs, his black nose wrinkling. At last he found a few morsels of grits. Burned as usual.

“I cook and I bake, King George, and I get nothing for it!”

“I get indigestion.”

Jane spun about. Ethan lounged in the doorway, his deep-red hair illuminated by the fire’s light that fortunately shadowed the ravaged cheek. He had a habit of surprising her, walking as silently
as the few Indians whom she occasionally spotted from afar cutting across the plantation. Like those nearly naked savages, he possessed an erect, straight-stepping carriage.

“I warned you I couldn’t cook.”

“So thee did. But then I judged thee would get tired of eating thine own food, mistress.”

He straightened and stepped inside. As he drew closer she could see that his coarse homespun shirt was damp with sweat and that his fringed buckskin britches were grass-stained—and tight-fitting. Before she knew what he was about, his forefinger reached out to the small scar that now clefted her square chin. “Thou has been marked as myself, mistress.”

She shivered, recalling the old Hindu again. Now both she and Ethan were marked. “And it’s your fault— you—”

“Master,” he suppli
ed, unruffled. He smiled, an engaging smile that transformed the sun-weathered face. “And now, if thee has water, mistress ...”

She was hot and sweaty and tired. And she had never worked so hard nor such long hours in her life. She had never worked! “Do not call me mistress. My father was at one time Lord Mayor of London and now is Lord—”

“And my father is Lord knows who,” he said with irresistible, good-natured self-mockery.

She swung away and flounced over to sit on the stool before the chu
rn. Furiously she plied the dasher up and down. It had been One-eyed Peter who patiently demonstrated how the chum and dasher were used. The Quaker never offered to help; rather, it seemed he found in her incompetence substantiation of his poor opinion of her.

She slid a glance in his direction as she lifted the chu
rn’s lid to peak at her progress. How far could she push this mild-mannered colonial? “There is no water for you. I haven’t had time to draw any more.”

“Who is Terence?”

The dasher and lid slipped from her hands, sloshing the golden globs of butter that had risen to the top. Plucking the wooden stick from the buttermilk, he restored it to her numbed fingers. He hunched down before her, his black eyes on a level with hers. “Who is Terence, mistress?”

“Why would you know?”

King George took the opportunity to scale Ethan’s knee and perch on the man’s shoulder, the coon’s favorite place. “His name trembled on thine lips when thee was ill with the pox.”

She set the chum from
her and rose, nervously smoothing her apron over her skirt. “I’ll draw your water.”

She swished aside her dress, and he obligingly stood to follow her. As she made her way along the path to the well behind the kitchen, she knew he was behind her though his moccasined fee
t made not a sound on the pine-needled trail. He was a simple man, she reflected; a man of the earth rather than of the intellect like Walpole, Dr. Johnson, or the American colonist Franklin. And because he was a Quaker, she had no fear of him. Still, as she leaned over the flagstoned well to haul on the pulley, she felt his presence as a powerful force.

“You know, mistress,” he said, lazing against the Well’s cedar post, “Abraham’s servant prayed for God to help him find a wife for Isaac.”

He paused, stroking the coarse, gray-brown fur of the coon who still clung precariously to his shoulder. “When at the well the maiden Rebecca offered both the thirsty servant and his camel water, he knew that his prayer had been answered. He had found the wife he sought for his master.”

The gall of the man! A religious dissenter and a scarred backwoodsman to boot! Pity the poor woman who became his wife. She shoved the oaken bucket at his broad chest. “But I am offering water to neither your camel nor your coon!”

“And I am not seeking a wife,” Ethan replied, his dark eyes dancing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Over the days that followed she pondered the hopeless situation she had contrived for herself. She could run away, but if she were caught without her indenture papers she would be thrown in the stocks at the very least. Even should she find where Ethan had put the papers, she would have to forge his signature to set herself free.

Supposing she decided to risk running away without the papers, she did not even know where to run. To Boston, where more and more British troops were arriving every week, if what Icabod tol
d her was true? And then to Quebec? And if Terence were not there? Would she return to England?

Her fingers paused in plucking the wild raspberries, and she lifted her head, looking about her for what was really the first time. Overhead a flock of geese winged southward in their V formation. About her the scent of the raspberries and pine needles freshened the air. A short distance away the Chickahominy lazily swished its indigo swath of water against the sloping bank
s. Would she leave this for London’s soot and smoke and fog, for an arranged marriage with a man of Lord Sandwich’s ilk?

Perhaps she and Terence could start a life here. There was something about the
wilderness simplicity that rendered dreams incorruptible.

The beauty of the unseasonably warm October day beckoned her from her task of berry-picking. The sky shimmered a bright blue with a soft autumn haze lingering on the horizon. The leaves
of the live oaks and black walnuts and sycamores had already changed to a brilliant red and were beginning to fall.

“ ’Tis a late Indian summer,” Icabod said, startling her. He laid his sickle against a live oak and squatted next to her. “If ye peer through narrowed eyes, lass, the co
rn shucks will turn into tepees.”

She laughed and did as he said.

“And if ye listen, ye can hear the falling leaves rustle as Indians dance about their campfires. ’Tis the Indians’ war paint that has rubbed off on the leaves and colored them red,” he finished with his hearty laughter.

“Methinks your imagination has become unhinged in this wilderness,” she teased.

He rose to go, clapping his hat on his balding head against the sun’s glare, and looked down at her with sympathy in his drooping eyes. “The colonies are a good place, lass, if ye give them half a chance. And the master—give him a chance, also.”

The master! Up until the night she broached the subject of leaving to Ethan Gordon, she had seen very little of him. He had seldom entered the main house during the day when she swept and dusted and cooked and changed the bed linen at the due times. Only in the early mornings and late afternoons when she served breakfast and dinner did their paths cross.

But now—now that she must return each evening and climb the stairs to his bedroom to place the warming pan, filled with hot coals, between the muslin sheets—her relationship with the man had taken on an intimacy that bothered her. He spoke no untoward words; he spoke rarely. Yet she felt his dark gaze following her up the stairs each evening.

Once, though she had not found him below, she had proceeded to his bedroom with the p
an. But as she absently ran the pan over the sheets, concentrating on not scorching them, he appeared in the doorway. Both of them started, surprised at the other’s presence. He was barechested, his shirt slung over his shoulder, and she stared, fascinated by the springy black hair that etched an inverted triangle across his swarthy chest.

His bare chest had recal
led the black slaves’ naked bodies, and a sinful thrill had rippled up her spine. The hair that raced across his flesh made the smooth, sleek statues of Greek gods seem effeminate. Collecting herself, she had drawn the warmed sheets over the feather mattress and slipped past him. But that moment the two of them had shared in his bedroom lingered uncomfortably in her mind.

Irritated with her wandering thoughts, Jane returned to berry-picking. Then, as if Icabod’s story had rubbed off on her, three dusky I
ndians—joined by five more—materialized at the far edge of a fallow squash field. The Indians did not walk single file across the land, as she had seen others do a few times in the past; rather they seemed to stalk toward her, keeping to the shadows of the trees that encroached on the field.

Where was Ethan? Of course—he had ridden over to the Fairmonts’. To feast his eyes, no doubt, on soft, sweet Susan. And Peter—Josiah
—Icabod? In the far fields, bundling the threshed wheat. Panic-stricken, she dropped the basket of berries and, clutching her long skirts above her ankles, sprinted for the house. She might just make it to the house before the Indians caught up with her.

By the time she reached the front door, her windpipe was sealed like a tomb and her breath was labored. Barely had she plucked Ethan’s long rifle from its mount above the mantel when shadows darkened the front doorway. She whirled, the rifle cradled in her arms, the barrel leveled at the half-naked forms that blotted out the sunlight. She didn’t even know how to load the bloody weapon. But she hoped the Indians couldn’t know of her ignorance.

“Don’t.” It was all her tongue could manage. The barrel trembled between her sweaty palms.

The Indians, their faces a dark blur in the dim room, looked at each other, gestured at her, and muttered among themselves in what seemed to Jane like threatening grunts. One in the forefront, who wore a lady’s plumed hat with a blanket draped about his lower torso, stepped forward. A short knife glittered in his hand.

She jerked the rifle up to her chest and squinched her eyes closed. Her lungs heaved and collapsed like a bellows. She silently prayed that the rifle was primed.

“No!”

Her lids snapped open. Ethan shouldered past the Indians gathered in the doorway. Numb, she watched him advance on her and gently pry the rifle from her hands and set it against the fireplace. “They’ve come to help bundle the wheat—in exchange for some of it.”

He spoke something she did not understand to the one nearest her, and the Indians faded from the doorway as silently as they had come.

She started to tremble. Belatedly. When her knees sagged, he caught her waist and pressed her against his length in support. “Thee is much thinner, mistress,” he drawled, his warm breath stirring the orange-tipped tendrils that lay damply against her neck.

“I hate it here!” she wept. “Danger . . . always danger . . . always work . . . alwa
ys alone.” Hating her weakness, she still cried copiously, uncontrollably. Susan would have known better. She wouldn’t have trembled and cried at the sight of the Indians.

Ethan bent and scooped his arms beneath the backs of her legs and cradled her against the breadth of his massive chest. “I know .
. . I know,” he whispered against her temple as he carried her across the room. “I felt the same way myself once a long time ago.”

He settled in the rocking chair with her slanted across his lap. She didn’t know which surprised her more—that the rocking chair held the considerable weight of the two of them or that she experi
enced an inexplicable peace settling over her soul. To be held, comforted—it was a feeling of security, that basic nurturance every child needs, that she could not remember experiencing. Her father preoccupied with politics, her mother—Jane wasn’t sure. She suspected a lack of emotional stability in her mother. But then she couldn’t remember clearly the time before her mother’s death.