Mood Indigo (3 page)

And as for the provincial’s reaction, she could see flickering behind the dark eyes first surprise and then doubt, which was followed once more by mild impatience. His marred countenance was an easy one to read. “I don’t have time to waste with bored, spoiled noblewomen who indulge in pranks, Lady Jane. Tell thy companions, whomever they are, that thee has lost thy wager.”

“Spoiled!” she sputtered. The strain of the past few days broke her cool reserve. She had lowered herself to petition this simpleton for help, and he had castigated her! She glared up at him, hands on hips. “And a yokel such as you deem yourself capable of judging character? You insensitive swine, you haven’t the slightest knowledge of me or what forces me to come—”

The fine weather lines about his black-flecked eyes gathered to narrow the deep, thick-lashed lids, and the brows lowered over a nose that most certainly had been broken. “Thee needs to be humbled, mistress, and I would take great delight in the task, had I the time.”

He pivoted from her. “Follow me, Betsy—Jonah,” he said to the slight, shabbily dressed woman and rail-thin boy whom Jane had failed to notice standing next to him. Only then did Jane spy the indenture papers the Quaker held rolled in his hamhock hands. He strolled off with the middle-aged woman and child dutifully trailing him.

Jane, her spirits drooping, watched the crowd swallow up the three. She had let her pride get the best of her. She turned back to the guildhall’s open doorway. Before a board the people who could read pressed to study the public notices posted.

“A Pennsylvanian colonist desires a tutor,” someone near the front called out.

Jane’s eyes swept over the list:

Men:
tanners, coopers, shipwrights, sawyers, ropemakers, carpenters, wigmakers, millers, iron workers, bricklayers, ship chandlers, binders, bookkeepers, cardswainers
.

Women:
seamstresses, cooks, domestics.

The paucity of occ
upations on the women’s list explained why so many men were gathered at the guildhall. Apparently few in the colonies wanted maids. They wanted craftsmen to build the New World.

“You be needing help,” a haggle-toothed woman said to Jane.

“No—no, I don’t,” she murmured, backing away from the men and women who suddenly encircled her with hope- filled faces. She hurried away to the comparative safety of the coffee shop.

Yet the dawn of the next day found her slipping through London’s fog-shrouded
streets. No one would have recognized Lady Jane Lennox as the frowzy wench who took her place in the line that formed before the guildhall’s as yet unopened doors.

Her heart pounded erratically against her rib cage. What ever was she about? She could still change her mind. Yet when the double doors were thrown open and business began, she willed her feet to cross to the caged counter along with the other men, women, and even children— most of them looking as if they had recently come from the countryside in the hope of finding employment in the already overcrowded metropolis. The burgeoning malt shops and gin joints that flourished in the slums and now jostled for elbow room in t
he middle-class districts testified to the hopelessness of gaining employment in London.

When she neared her turn at the cage, the freckle-faced boy ahead of her hunched himself down, much as she used to do as a young girl, and piped, “Ye got chimney sweep work here in the city?”

“Nothing,” the old clerk muttered, not even bothering to look up from the paper he wrote on. “Only in the colonies. Ship sailing next week. Mark an X on the line, boy. Then take the paper over to the magistrate in the next room and swear you have not been coerced into signing.”

Parliament had passed a
law requiring the signature before a magistrate the year after the Earl of Anglesey’s son had mistakenly been kidnaped for indentured service in the Barbados. But men were still gang-pressed into service; women abducted, never to see their families again; children and infants often indentured to serve until their twenty-first year.

Jane took the boy’s place, and the clerk, busy again writing, asked without
looking up, “Well—what qualifications?”

She hesitated. With her education, she could tutor. But that was a man’s job. And her father’s wealth had made it unnecessary to learn a vocation like cooking or sewing. Maids had done everything for her. She naturally knew needlepoint, but how many positions were open for that fine craft? “I am afraid I have none,” she finally got out.

The clerk’s head snapped up, and she knew her refined voice had given her away. Now what? The man’s wrinkled lids narrowed. “It’s employment in the colonies you be wanting?” he asked dubiously.

Canada would be better, but beggars could not be choosers. Virginia was the nearest she could manage. “Aye.”

After a moment his head bobbed, as if he had been suddenly enlightened. One thin eyelid closed in a sly wink. “Ran afoul of the law, did you? All right. Just sign your name. You know ’ow to do that, don’t you?”

She nodded, unable to speak.

“Let’s see . . .” His ink-stained finger jabbed at a name on another list. “Your ship—the
Cornwall
— is bound for Virginia.” He passed her the paper. “Your indentured papers, they are. They will be auctioned off in the colonies. Take them along now to the magistrate.”

Jane stared blindly
at the parchment for several moments before the words came into focus.

THIS INDENTURE made the twelfth day of August in the Year of our Lord one thousand, seven h
undred and seventy-four between on the one part and of the other part do hereby promise to serve in such employment as is the custom of the country for a period of years, of which the said shall pay the passage and allow meat, drink, apparel, and lodging during the said term; and at the end of the said term to pay the usual allowance according to the custom of the country. IN WITNESS whereof the parties above-mentioned to these Indentures have interchangeably put their Hands and Seals.

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered in the Presence of:

Below was the one sentence:
I hereby acknowledge that I have not been coerced into service
.  Jane took up the quill, dipped it in the inkwell and beneath the sentence wrote the name Meg O’Reilly.

CHAPTER THREE

E
than lit the pewter lamp on the escritoire and set to writing. Penmanship came laboriously to the backwoodsman, but his quill scratched hastily over the parchment, for his ship was due to sail with the tide.

My dear Franklin,

I learned today that our illustrious King George, as Prince of Hesse-Kassel and Hanau, has called for the troops of that German ministate to relieve those English soldiers stationed in the Mediterranean—so that the royal troops can reinforce those already stationed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Also discovered that a certain member of the cabinet has put forth the idea of appealing to Catherine of Russia for troops to conquer those “rebellious Boston provincials.”  This from my voluble dinner partner, the Duchess.

He paused, the quil
l twirling absently between fingers the size of piano keys. His other dinner partner . . . aloof, distant, witty, sparkling. In a way she reminded him of Susan. But Susan warmed and soothed like wine and did not go to the head like champagne. The Lady Jane—brilliant and brittle.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
he lean, bronzed body slipped lower past the woman’s flesh-padded rib cage. The Canadian cabinet member’s wife gasped, “
Mon Dieu
!” as the tawny head buried itself between her ample thighs. The British officer was doing something her husband had never attempted to. “
Mon Dieu
!” the Frenchwoman cried out again, and clutched the sun-streaked head to her.

Afterward, she lay spent on the rumpled sheets, her soft, voluptuous body exposed. The officer, supporting himself on one elbow, plucked with teasing fingers at the thick tufts of hair beneath her outstretched arm. Yet she sensed with some disquiet that he was no more aware of her now than he had been during the hours he had made love to her. She knew the officer no better now than she had three weeks earlier.
Assigned to the governor’s retinue, he had been in her husband’s office with Governor Carleton one afternoon when she called upon her husband.

She could not honestly say the officer seduced her. He had offered no flowery blandishments, as did the other British soldiers garrisoned in the Province of Quebec. At another chance meeting in the Chateau Frontenac he had simply told her he wanted her.

She had been shocked, angered, shamed—and intrigued by those pale-blue eyes whose depths, were openly candid yet as distant and unreachable as the night’s stars. She watched as he uncoiled his long body and rose to pull on his knee breeches. “Terence?” she called softly.

But either he did not hear her or he ignored her.
Bare-chested, his skin baked by the hot sun of India, he crossed to the French doors and threw them open to the pale September sunlight. Out on the balcony he braced his hands on the black wrought-iron grillwork and looked out upon the walled citadel. As the English General Wolf had breached that citadel, claiming the French province as England’s own, so would Terence breach London society to claim again the Manor House as his own—but not from a backwoods province like Quebec.

Once more Robert Lennox of Wychwood had bested him. But Terence knew his own assets. His patience—and shrewdness—would bring about that for which he had been striving since he was sixteen. He was in no hurry.

His transfer to Quebec that Lennox had effected—he might make it work for him, under the right circumstances. He considered the chaos erupting in the American colonies. Were he there, the opportunity could present itself for the object he sought—the total devastation of the House of Lennox.

The Frenchwoman murmured his name again, and a patient, unruffled smile creased lines at either side of his mouth. He was already weary of her avaricious hands, yet she, too, would serve his purpose.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
n early-winter gale chased the brig on its voyage across the Atlantic, so the hatches were battened down most of the journey. Mercifully, Jane was too ill to recall fully the five-week nightmare: the narrow slats that slept two or three people; the paltry food, if food it could be called; the lack of ventilation; and always, the vomiting. Every indentured servant had been ill with the bloody flux and ague, and some—like the five-year-old in the cramped bunk across from hers—had died.

For Jane, who had been served tea and crumpets in bed every morning of her life, who had Meg to light the fire each morning before she arose, the cold and aching in her bones was a new and almost unbearable hardship. Yet the captain had been humane. He provided the passengers with lemon juice against the scurvy and periodically ordered the ship scoured with vinegar.

As the brig put into Chesapeake Bay, the indentured servants were brought on deck to wash up and restore their clothing. The captain, who was to be paid for transporting the servants according to the price each was auctioned for, desired the haggled lot to look their best. A clean list was made of the names and accomplishments of the surviving passengers. Jane noticed that sometimes a little fraud was practiced—adorning convicts with wigs to increase their respectability and crediting fictitious abilities to some of the men.

As for her own appearance, it was much altered from that of the tall, lovely Lady Jane Lennox. She had brutally shorn her ebony, hip-length hair with a butcher’s knife from the Lennox kitchen. The cropped hair now capped her head in oil-matted locks that had been hastily and spottily hennaed by her inexpert hand.

Her brown cotton dress, buttoned to the neck, had sweat rings beneath her armpits. Five weeks at sea had left her creamy complexion a pasty yellow, and her seasickness had sunken her cheeks. Her father would find it difficult to trace his daughter if he described her as she had once been. Despite the unappealing woman she now appeared, there was still a certain sensualness in the set of the mobile lips, a husky quality in the assumed brogue of the voice. And the shapeless dress could not conceal the high, rounded breasts that taunted the thin cotton. And, of course, there was her unconscious queenly carriage that betrayed her station in life.

When she stepped through the hatch, the early-morning sunlight blinded her. Dazed, she held her forearm across her eyes. Around her the ot
her servants, like flowers’ petals unfurling, slowly stretched, lifting their hands to the sun, celebrating the miracle of life. Yet overhead the wind droned in the rigging like a mournful bagpipe, and she repressed a shiver at the uncertain fate that awaited her.

It was one of the few times the men and women had been allowed to mingle. But Jane, as before, turned a frosty, shrewish glare at any swain who had the courage to seek her out. So did Polly, a stout country maid with butternut curls and street-wise Dresden-blue eyes. The buxom young woman had indentured herself in hopes of finding a land-owning husband. Over the five weeks she had recounted to Jane all that she had learned of the New World before making the decision to indenture herself.