The Shadow of Albion (4 page)

„The drink will consume all the hours left to you and distill them into this brief

span. When it is over, there will be nothing left.“

Lady Roxbury got to her feet, and the half-expected dizziness did not come. So

this much, at least, of Dame Alecto’s promise was true. She wondered if all the rest

was. She glanced out the window and measured the progress of the sun.

If it is true, you will never know.

Lady Roxbury’s lips curved in a reckless smile. To bring that other Sarah to

Mooncoign, she must reach the Sarcen Stones by sunset. If this was her fate, so be

it – and she wished Dame Alecto much joy of her successor.

„Knoyle!“ she shouted, jerking vigorously at the bellpull.

In an instant the abigail appeared, fear and astonishment vying for pride of place

upon her face.

„I wish to go out,“ the Marchioness of Roxbury said to her maid. „Lay out my

driving dressy – and tell Risolm to harness the match bays to my phaeton and bring

it around. Well?“ she added, as Knoyle stood there goggling.

The abigail dropped a stupefied curtsy and fled. Lady Roxbury shrugged off the

now-too-warm chamber robe and let it fall to the floor in a puddle of fur and velvet

She turned back to the fire, and for a moment she seemed to see that other Sarah’s

face within the flames: plain and young, unadorned by paint and jewel….

„Milk-toast-miss!“ Lady Roxbury jeered, turning away.

Chapter 2

Between the Salt Water and the Sea Sand

(The Frigate Lady Bright,

Bristol Channel, April 1805)

Miss Sarah Cunningham, late of Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of

America, stood at the rail on the foredeck of the good ship Lady Bright, gazing

miserably out to sea. The dawn wind coming over the ocean was a biting coldness

on her face, its constant pressure threatening to unseat the demure dark grey

bombazine narrow-poke bonnet whose strings were knotted firmly beneath her chin.

Tomorrow or the next day, depending on the luck of wind and tide, the ship would

arrive at Bristol Harbor.

Mrs. Kennet had told her that Bristol was a great city, second only to London;

from there Sarah could surely find transport to the metropolis. What reception

awaited her in London – even assuming she could manage to gain an interview with

the Duke of Wessex – Sarah did not know. Why should such a grand man as he

listen to an American interloper with the wildest of tales and the flimsiest of proof? If

only Mrs. Kennet…

The tears dried on her cheeks as fast as they were shed, and her gloved hands

worried a fine cambric handkerchief into a crumpled ball. She looked around blindly,

hoping to distract herself from her bleak thoughts.

Behind and to her left lay the great green bulk of Ireland, and ahead, an indefinite

blur in the early morning light, lay what Captain Challoner assured her was the Welsh

headland: St. David’s, and the Lady Brights first sight of home.

But if England was Captain Challoner’s home, it was not Sarah Cunningham’s. In

the short space of six months her fortunes had tumbled end over end so many times

that she had become quite philosophical about disaster, but this latest bereavement

left Sarah even more forsaken than had the deaths of her parents only a few months

before. Now Sarah Cunningham stood entirely alone in the uncaring world.

In a way, the shattering tragedy of her parents’ deaths had been a dark blessing,

as it left Sarah too numb to care about the blows that followed. The sale of the

house and its furnishings had barely served to pay the bills left by nursing and burial,

and shortly Sarah had found herself resident in the home of a distant cousin of her

mother’s, coming slowly to realize that she served there as the most menial of unpaid

laborers. Not that any brighter prospect had presented itself – not to Alisdair

Cunningham’s daughter….

Sarah Cunningham had been born twenty-five years before, almost simultaneously

with the new Republic, to parents who’d had the best of all reasons to wish an end

to kings and crowns in this new land. She had grown up between two worlds:

bustling, forward-looking, Republican Baltimore, and the timeless woodland peace

of the Maryland hills and forests, where Sarah had learned to hunt and fish, shoot

and track, as well as any of her Indian playfellows. Even as a child she had always

known that someday she would have to give up that Arcadian freedom, but as she

grew older, Sarah saw what the eyes of childhood had not: that two wars had taken

their toll on her father’s health, so that she, not he, must work to keep their family

fed.

And so, at a time when other girls dressed their hair high and lengthened their

skirts, and cast their eyes upon the masculine companions of their childhood with a

new interest, Sarah Cunningham wore beaded buckskin and carried not a delicate fan

but her father’s hunting rifle. The skins and meat she brought home bought other

necessities, and if anyone knew that it was not Alasdair Cunningham, but his

daughter, who provided the furs and skins her father brought for trade, they had kept

that knowledge to themselves.

A husband for Sarah would have solved much, but such luck was hardly to be

expected. Sarah, after all, was plain, and well she knew it. Though her eyes (quite her

best feature) were speaking and grey, her mother’s young students assured her the

fashion was all for eyes of pansy-brown. Worse, her hair was straight rather than

fashionably curled, and light brown rather than guinea-gold or raven-black or any of

the other unlikely hues so beloved of the romancers. Dowry would have

compensated for lack of beauty, but there was no dowry.

Even so, an outgoing charm of manner might have taken its place in this new

young land – but Sarah was quiet and shy, and rather better acquainted with powder

and shot and the best way of dressing a hare for the pot than with dancing-school

graces. There was very little likelihood that the matrimonial offers Sarah Cunningham

would receive were the .sort that Alasdair Cunningham would allow her to accept.

And so the years passed. Sixteen became twenty-one, then twenty-five.

Then disaster. Cholera, and death. And, just when she thought her fortunes had

changed, death again.

A change in the wind lashed her with chilly brine, and Sarah was jerked rudely

back to reality. The pain of past and present tragedy blended into one miserable

ache, and she scrubbed ruthlessly at her eyes with the mangled handkerchief.

„Miss Cunningham?“ The voice at her elbow was low, in deference to her loss.

„The Captain sends his respects, and says they are ready to read out the service

now.“

„The Lord have mercy on this His servant, Missus Alecto Kennet of London,

who sleeps now in expectation of the Glorious Resurrection to come – “ Captain

Challoner’s deep voice intoned the rote words of comfort and promise.

Sarah Cunningham stood in the forefront of the small company of mourners

gathered around the slender, sailcloth-wrapped bundle awaiting its final disposition

and tried not to feel terror at the thought of her future. At last the brief service was

over and the chain-weighted bundle was tipped over the side, to vanish in the Lady

Brights wake. Mrs. Kennet had been the agency by whose aid Sarah had come this

far; to lose her to a sudden fatal fever only days before reaching her goal was a cruel

blow. Now Sarah was alone once more, this time thousands of miles from the only

home she had ever known.

„Miss Cunningham? Are you all right?“ Once again Sarah was summoned back to

the present, this time by Captain Challoner.

She smiled sadly, hoping her face showed the appropriate emotion for the

occasion. Among the Cree, it was considered the height of rudeness to wear your

feelings plainly upon your face, forcing everyone you passed to share them. Joy and

sorrow alike were private things.

But the Cree and her freedom were both long-lost to her, and she must make the

best of her fate.

„The loss of your companion grieves us all deeply,“ Captain Challoner told Sarah

dutifully. „Mrs. Kennet was a gallant lady and her passing is a sad thing.“

„You have been very kind, Captain Challoner,“ Sarah said, wondering where this

conversation might be leading.

„I should not like to think you any more bereft than you must now be, and so I

hope you will forgive my inquisitiveness, Miss Cunningham, if I ask you what

provision has been made for you once we dock?“

„Provision?“ Sarah echoed blankly, while a carefully tutored part of her reminded

her that she sailed to England, the Old World, where even what circumspect mobility

she had been permitted in the last few months of her residence in Baltimore was

considered wanton freedom. In England no young lady of gentle breeding went

anywhere alone; constantly accompanied by maid, chaperone, or family member,

she was watched every moment until the time came to award her in marriage to some

privileged scion of entitlement and perquisite, when matronhood would confer upon

her very little more freedom than she had enjoyed as an unmarried girl.

„You were traveling with Mrs. Kennet, were you not? Who will accompany you

now?“ the Captain pursued, a note of worried concern in his voice.

„I shall – I am being met; pray excuse me,“ Sarah said quickly. Before Captain

Challoner could stop her, she pulled her cloak tightly around her and fled to the

solitude of her tiny cabin.

* * *

Fool – lackwit – cloudhead – Sarah berated herself in the strongest language she

knew, standing trembling in the center of the tiny accommodation she had shared

with her benefactress. Captain Challoner was honesdy concerned for her welfare –

there was no cause to flee him as if he were an entire English press-gang in himself!

Only his concern would mew her up with companions and chaperones, and in

providing so much help he would certainly be entithed to the whole of her story –

and Sarah, who now faced the sickening certainty that she had crossed the ocean

with no more incentive than a bag of moonshine, could not bear the thought of

making the Captain a present of her foolishness.

Calming herself by degrees, Sarah sat down on the hard narrow bunk and pulled

her traveling-case to her. Lining out the topmost tray, she withdrew the stiff packet

of folded vellum sheets and opened them to read them again. As she did so, the faint

sunny odor of orange blossom that still clung to the pages wafted up from them, and

Sarah was borne back through the weeks to the first time she had smelled that

particular fragrance.

The early-morning sun warmed Sarah’s back through the thin calico muslin of her

dress as she stepped carefully across the cobbled Baltimore street, avoiding the

inevitable refuse. The large willow marketing-basket she carried was empty save for a

lengthy list in Cousin Masham’s spidery scrawl of items Sarah was to procure in the

shops. Tedious as the task was, Sarah welcomed it, as the alternative was more of

the endless round of drudgery that had fallen to her lot since she had become – as

she was frequently told – a pensioner upon her cousin Masham’s charity. She had

come to realize that me Mashams held their blood relationship at naught and looked

upon her as just another servant – one whom, due to that same blood tie of kinship,

they fortunately did not have to pay. Sarah was quite without talent for sewing or

spinning, and thus her days were an endless round of kitchen and laundry. There

was little prospect of anything better, the only possible alternative was to hire herself

out as servant in truth. And marriage was even less of a possible escape than it had

been eight years before, for now that her parents’ estate had been settled Sarah’s

entire fortune consisted of a single small trunk of clothes and the few dollars she had

been able to save from the sale of her father’s property.

And the ring.

The ring had belonged to her father, but even when it had come to him it was not

new. Stopping in the doorway of a not-yet-open shop, Sarah had pulled upon the

blue ribbon that held the ring concealed safely beneath her bodice and inspected her

dearest treasure.

It was of massy gold, set with a smooth rectangular black stone, but it was more

as well With practiced fingers, Sarah rotated the stone with the ball of her thumb.

The black stone rose up and out on an armature that had seemed, moments before,

to be the rim of the bezel, and, under Sarah’s control, spun to reveal its obverse. In

precise, exquisite enamerwork, an oak tree in summer foliage glowed against a