The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) (21 page)

Now I understood: Mr. Leslie was to help establish just how destitute I was.

As I studied his ruddy complexion, his protruding belly, the powdered white wig with an obnoxious scent of talc and body odor, and his soft doughy hands, I knew I hated him. Should I pound my knuckles into his dour, fleshy face?

“Cheer?” Mathew erupted into a slight purplish color around his cheeks and neck. “Good Lord, man, do you hear yourself? Have you gone mad? Violet—Miss Buccleuch has just lost her family, her entire family.”

“And I grieve for the poor dear. I do. I’ve just met the pretty miss, and already I have such a strong attachment to her and her welfare. Such a pretty, sad thing, she is. But I still must perform my duties. Miss Buccleuch owes money. As a woman with very little means, this farm must sell in order to preserve order. As I said, I will sell the farm with her debt calculated—”

“Consider it sold then, Mr. Leslie.” Mathew’s flushed face paled into a light red.

Mr. Leslie puffed out a gasp of laughter. “By whom, Mr. Adams? You? You wish to buy this farm?”

“Yes, I’ll buy it. I’ll buy it for my soon to-be wife.” 

Mr. Leslie shook his head, as if talking to a toddler who stole confections. “I’ve heard about you, you know? All your family I’ve heard about. Your infamous cousin, Mr. Samuel Adams, is quite a mob provoker. You’re other cousin, a Mr. John Adams, was thought to be a loyalist because he defended those brave soldiers who fought off that mob in Boston, now called a massacre. I’ve heard that even the title of that disaster was created by your Mr. Samuel Adams. But now your Mr. John Adams is a criminal like Mr. Samuel Adams by meeting in your so-called Provincial Congress. Oh, yes, I’ve heard much about you and how many of the Adams men have no money.” Mr. Leslie patted his distended stomach, then cocked his eyes at me. “I’ve also heard that you’ve been engaged to this pretty lass for two years, and she’s never set the date. Now, I speak to you as a sort of uncle with clarity that your other relations do not possess in their madness for this supposed liberty. But do you really think that if you buy this land for her that she’ll finally set the date and marry you? Is that the plan, young man?”

Mathew’s face had resumed a faint purplish glow, and he made tight fists. He was calculating a blow to Mr. Leslie’s pompous nose, I thought, but hitting a crown paid barrister would have gotten Mathew some jail time as well as heavy fines.

I watched Mathew’s bright blue eyes set against his angry face . . . his bright blue eyes, eyes the same hue as my sisters.

He had been in my life since my earliest of memories, but I’d ignored him until I was fifteen. Or was it sixteen? That was when Daganaweda was forced far from me. I had turned to Mathew for consoling. I never told him why I needed his comfort, but he gave it earnestly.

After the solace, he gave me compliments, then shared his intelligence and humor with me. Shortly after that he’d asked if I would accept his gift of giving me his life in marriage. I’d selfishly accepted. I’d only thought of how he had offered to assist me with the farm and taking care of my mother and sister and Jonah. And I also had thought of how the sharp tongued women of Concord would have to shut up after I was settled with a husband.

Mathew was nothing but kindness and sweet, quite handsome too and educated. But in all this time I’d never thought of him in such terms.

It was while I watched him size up Mr. Leslie for a blow that I realized how much he’d already given me. He had fought so hard for my sister, to confine and convict her rapist. He had fought so hard for me, to just pay him heed when he’d already fed my family many a time, and had been such a strong shoulder to lean on after my da died. It was at that moment that I knew I not just loved Mathew as I had all along, as my childhood companion, but at that precise second I knew I had fallen in love with him. What a beautiful man he was.

I’d betrayed him over and over again by being selfish and for falling in love with Jacque, and there he was willing to get arrested for me, to protect me, to give to me, to love me.

“I’ll marry you, Mathew. In a couple days time?” I croaked.

Both men looked at me as if I were an apparition that had suddenly solidified before their very eyes.

Mathew blinked.

Mr. Leslie snorted. “Of course, she’ll marry you now. Now that you’re promising her land.” Then Mr. Leslie whispered, “Little vixen.”

Mathew’s eyes bulged and he lunged at Mr. Leslie. I stopped him by standing in his way.

It
would
appear that I was finally setting the date because Mathew was indeed buying my family farm. I worried that he would think the same.

Mathew smacked against me with his chest meeting mine, breathing fire on my face. I gently placed my hands on his cheeks, noticing the dried tear streaks. He’d cried for my family, had loved them too. My God, but I loved him. I tried to soften my reedy voice. “Mathew, you don’t have to buy the farm for me.”

His burning blue eyes searched my own. “But you love this house, this farm. Don’t you want it?”

It was all I had left of my sister, mother, and father, and there was enough of their spirits permeating throughout the rooms that I didn’t want to leave. Selfishly, I nodded.

Mathew’s firm face broke into a noble smile. “I’ll buy it for you then.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. I’d give you anything you want, if only I had the means. And I’ve saved up for awhile, and with suddenly having a rather wealthy friend who complains to me about his neglecting fiancée, I’ve come into even more money. I can buy you this farm. I’d love to buy this farm for you.”

“For us,” I whispered.

He surrounded my waist with his hands, smiling. “This farm could be our future.”

“I’d like that . . . very much, Mathew.”

He embraced me and swept me off my feet, and feeling his steel-like arms around me, his body pressing into mine, and his surrounding heat, I realized I could live for him, for the farm. I could find a reason to keep living.

Mr. Leslie cleared his throat, and Mathew placed me back down on the ground. We both turned to the barrister.

He sniffed and managed a cursory look at my chest before he swept his eyes to the floor. “I’m a proud man, and don’t do this very often, but I must apologize for my outburst. It’s obvious you truly do love each other.

“Miss Buccleuch, I am sincerely sorrowful for you and your loss, but, if I might be so bold, I’d like to be the first to congratulate the two of you. I will draw the papers immediately for the sale.” He turned with a fury of black and red from his cape, then said at the door, “Good afternoon.”

“Good, he’s gone,” Mathew said through gritted his teeth after Mr. Leslie left. “I thought I might kill him if he looked at your breasts one more time.”

Shocked, I peered up at Mathew.

He shrugged. “I’ve tried all my life to act as gentlemanlike as possible, but when it comes to you . . . I’ve come to realize lately, I’m most appallingly barbaric. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry.” I let my hand wander to his chest, feeling the vibrations of his racing heart in my palm. “I rather like your barbarity.”

He softly chuckled and placed his hand over mine. “You don’t have to marry me soon, Violet. We can take our time; as you wish—”

“Tomorrow? Could we marry tomorrow? I’m sorry for interrupting.”

He swallowed, the smile gone from his face. “That’s all right. We don’t have to marry tomorrow—”

“I should get a dress. Or make one. Or something. Maybe we should marry in two days time. Would that be all right with you? To get married in two days? I’m sorry; I interrupted again.”

He stuttered, coughed, and finally whispered, “I don’t want you to marry me if you feel obligated.”

I shook my head. His kindness poured through my skin. It felt golden and wholesome. “I–Mathew, did you know that your eyes and my sister’s are–were very similar? They are. I’ve often thought that with you as my husband, I’d have children that looked like my sister. And I’d like that very much. I want to live here in this house with you as my husband.”

He wrapped his fingers around mine in a more firm embrace, but I started to shiver.

“Mathew, I’m cold.” He moved as if he was going to try to briskly rub my arms, but I stopped him. “No, please . . . I’m so cold on the inside. Will you kiss me? Like you did that one night, when I sat on your lap in the wicker chair outside? Will you kiss me like that again, please?”

He lowered his head but stopped on a heavy sigh. His hands gripped my waist; his eyes already looked glassy and drunk. “I—I had to stop myself then, and I should warn you that I will probably have to stop again. I—”

“Don’t stop. I don’t want you to. I feel so cold. I want to feel warm again.”

His breath stopped, and he hammered his lips onto mine. I grabbed his waistcoat lapel and pulled while his lips urged mine open. Our bodies collided and pushed even more into each other’s with every escalating second. He pushed me toward the kitchen’s table, where I felt the lip of the oak’s wood bash into my backside.

Then, a knock sounded on my kitchen’s door.

Mathew pulled away from me whispering, “Damn it.”

I smiled up at him, his curse, his swollen lips, his bloodshot blue eyes, and his handsome face. He was heaving for air but trying to hide that fact when I reached for the door.

I opened the kitchen’s entrance to a crowd of well-doers. Although most of the town and some people from the surrounding villages came to my sister and mother’s funerals, I hadn’t thought of a wake. I was alone, and didn’t remember proper social protocols. But the people who filed into my small kitchen remembered. Many of the men were from the Massachusetts’s congress. Mr. Adams, Samuel, and Mr. Hancock attended, who each kissed my hand and mumbled their sincere sympathies to me.

Bread and beer and even rum was being passed around. Some well-planned and good-intended soul or souls brought dishes of meat pies and even a couple fruit pies. More food was brought, but already my pantry was overflowing, and I instructed some women to Mrs. Jones’s house for more storage. With that most of the women were gone, and left milling about my kitchen were all men, dressed in bleak black with somber faces and stiff smiles for me.

I swayed in the sea of male mourners, and had to find a seat at my kitchen’s table–no, Mathew’s table, but soon to be ours.

Was I seeing correctly? There, standing amongst the suddenly quiet grievers was a redcoat?

I blinked as I saw the grey haired man swoop his hat off in a polished fashion. He then lowered until one of his knees was on the floor, the other mere inches from my leg from where I sat.

“Miss Violet Buccleuch, I presume?”

I nodded. His voice was deep, authoritative.

“I am Colonel Richard Devlin. I have come to extend my deepest sympathies to you.”

“Thank you.” My voice still cracked with every strained word.

“I have come to listen to you, if you would like.”

“About what?” I asked bluntly.

He blinked, but then smiled. “Your complaints, if any. Anything you’d like, actually.”

I stared at him. I had no clue as how to guess his age. He had eyes that had squinted into the sun for some years. His skin was wrinkled, but in a way that conveyed brutal determination, not how old he was. He wore no wig, no powder for his dark hair that did have a few patches of gray. And when he smiled at me, it wasn’t a rigid, grimace-grin, like what most of the men around me wore. Colonel Devlin exuded confidence, but something else too. Something I didn’t understand at that minute. Just then I realized too that he smelled like leather, gunpowder, and Jacque.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Where was he? Where was my Jacque? Even with knowing that I loved Mathew deeply, I missed Jacque so much.

Mathew placed a possessive hand on my shoulder, and stiffly I turned to see his face so severe I almost didn’t recognize it. Mathew whispered, “Colonel Devlin is the regimental officer in charge of Lieutenant Kimball’s incarceration.”

I turned back to Colonel Devlin quickly. He nodded affirmation.

Instead of perhaps screaming at him my outrage, I looked into his eyes. In his warm brown eyes I saw, unlike the men who were in my kitchen giving me their sympathy, I saw something more in Colonel Devlin’s: empathy. The kind of pain I was in, the way my body and soul was numb one minute, the next frozen, he knew too. It was reflected in his eyes.

I leaned into the colonel’s ear and whispered so no one could hear. “He killed her, you know?” He nodded, so I continued, “My mother too.” He nodded again, then I searched his eyes. “Yes, you do know.”

Colonel Devlin blinked a few times. He swallowed and when he spoke, his voice sounded choked. “What can I do for you?”

A man from the crowd shouted, “For a start you can give us Lieutenant Kimball. Damn the Coercive Laws! That man needs to be tried by Provincials.” 

I quit listening. They were only talking about politics from there on out. I heard Mathew yell a few times. All of them yelled, except for Colonel Devlin who gave his ear attentively. He was constantly polite. Colonel Devlin listened and listened. The men’s yells dimmed. Some left, but not angry. The men had vented their frustration, and could go back home to their families. I had no family any more. In two days time I would have Mathew. But for that moment, in my kitchen with the crowd of mourners, I knew I was utterly alone.