Bride of Thunder (35 page)

“That is Alison.” Eric sent his fingers across the harp strings, eliciting a sound like a cry of pain. “My half-sister.”

“She's in England?”

“In the family vault. Holy ground—even though she was a suicide.”

Mercy gave a cry, full of pity and a kind of eerie dread, as she stared at the grave, sweet countenance. “Why? Why would she do that?”

“She was going to have my baby.” Eric gripped Mercy's wrists and made her face him. “Don't look like that! How can you know? Our mother died when Alison was five and I was three. My father—her stepfather—left us to nannies and servants who generally ignored us when they weren't actually abusive. Father drank to excess, and females of propriety couldn't stay long in his employ. So Alison both sistered and mothered me. Each was all the other had to love, to huddle against on lonely nights, or seek comfort from when Father buffeted us about. I was sent off to school, of course, but Alison had a governess, some improvement over the slattern nannies, and music was her joy and deliverance. Even Father would often ask her to play.

“When I was sixteen, I came home at Whitsuntide to find that Father had betrothed her to a man of his own age. Alison was distraught. I held her and promised to think of something. We were innocent till then, but as God may judge me, if there is a God, our loving was as natural and sweet and inevitable as the opening of a flower. Father caught us one day in the attic, where we'd used to play as children. He stunned me with his walking stick and beat me senseless. When I came to, I was gagged, tied hand and foot, and Father's estate manager and a groom were taking me to Southampton.

“There they paid the captain well to keep me locked in a cabin till the ship reached the West Indies. The captain, honest in his way, delivered a letter from my father that disinherited me in the best sanctimonious style while bemoaning that a poor widower who'd devoted himself to his motherless children should be so disgraced. He enclosed one hundred pounds, adjured me to try to drag myself from the morass of heinous crime, and said if I cared at all for Alison's peace I would never come again to England, or even try to communicate with her—that she would be married to the worthy Christian gentleman selected for her before I could read the letter.”

In spite of her need to hate Eric utterly, a picture of a battered, despairing boy separated from the only person he loved and dropped into a strange country came so powerfully to Mercy that she almost touched his hand. “Did you ever see her again?”

He shook his head. “It was a month before I got back to the Midlands. My father was so drunk he didn't even know me. I had to get the story out of the governess who had stayed to take care of him, and share his bed, I would reckon, when he was capable. Alison had told the worthy gentleman about me. That, quite predictably, shocked him into bleating like a sheep, and he hastily retreated. Alison, the governess said, had hoped my father would exile her, too, and that somehow she could find me. But he found another man, this one debt-ridden, ailing, and as old as the first, who, for a sum, would marry her and acknowledge the child. It was to escape him that Alison took arsenic that was kept to poison vermin. My sister, to die that way! But it was my fault, my piggish, selfish fault! She was goodness to me all my life, and that was how I repaid her.”

“You … were very young.”

“So was she—and much more innocent. I had heard talk at school, had been to a few public women.” His gaze turned inward. “I took Alison's portrait and harp and worked my passage to Sisal, for I remembered hearing that one of my mother's many brothers was a merchant in Mérida. He gave me a position, and after that I seemed fortune's darling. But nothing really mattered.”

“Did your uncle and Doña Elena know?”

“My uncle was something of a family skeleton himself for going into trade, and he simply assumed I was a kindred spirit, which was true enough. I'd have smothered in England. We've Viking blood in my mother's line, and it surfaces in every generation. I've distant cousins scattered from Canada to Texas and from the Transvaal to New Zealand.”

“I suppose you can't all stay in England.”

“If everybody had, we'd be standing on each other's shoulders,” said Eric. “Meanwhile, Belize is a fairly unusual place. Though it's been claimed by the British since the time of Elizabeth, they've always been a tiny minority here. The first to arrive were mainly British Navy men who traveled up the rivers cutting dyewood. Do you know of it?”

Mercy shook her head.

“It's very valuable wood, the price for which has risen steadily since its discovery by the Dutch in the 1600s. They found it produced a superior, non-running dye. Later, when the settlers came, they were prevented from growing more than subsistence crops of dyewood or anything else, in accord with a treaty with Spain. But all that has changed since Mexican independence and since Yucatecan refugees started bringing in sugarcane cuttings in the late Forties. I have two hundred acres in cane, and McNulty advises that I plant more as soon as the mahogany is cut.”

“Can't you leave the trees?”

“When they command such a price?” Eric turned abruptly from the harp and led Mercy across the hall to a sitting room furnished with what she thought was Regency with some Chippendale: two striped Grecian couches; plush chairs; a teapoy with brass inlay; a variety of drum, pillar, and claw tables and stands. “Useless room,” said Eric, though he regarded it with a certain contemptuous pride. “The only time it's used is when the governor visits or when an Englishman accompanied by his wife comes this way, which is damned seldom.”

A large dining room with tapestry-upholstered chairs, a massive oak refectory table, sideboard, and several oak china cabinets took up the remainder of the bottom floor, except for a small room with French doors opening onto the terrace. Two plain comfortable chairs were pulled up to a small round table with a bowl of fruit in the middle of its sparkling white cloth. There were books, pipes, and metal containers, which Eric said contained biscuits, candied ginger, nuts, and other tidbits in case she got hungry between meals. He added, unnecessarily, that he spent most of his waking time here or in his office or library. A walkway led from this room to the kitchen house, a separate structure.

Upstairs was a huge room used for storage, repairs, and sewing. The room was equipped with two Singer sewing machines. Mercy had seen the hand-cranked machine designed by Howe, a Boston watchmaker's apprentice, which could make two hundred fifty stitches a minute, out-doing what a good seamstress could accomplish in five or six times that length of time, but Eric assured her that these Singers were far superior and that sewing for the whole household was done on them. On their floor, there were two guest bedrooms besides Mercy's.

“And this is where I sleep,” said Eric, drawing her inside yet another room.

He took her slowly, almost contemplatively, in the canopied four-poster bed, watching her face, with a gentleness more unnerving than his violence. Dear God! Did he try to imagine she was Alison? That story had made it impossible for her to hate him with clean, undiluted purity, but it made her angry with him, too. Instead of making him compassionate, tragedy had turned him into a conscienceless exploiter of people and land. Instead of his love making him respect hers for Zane, it made him pitiless in grasping for a husk of what he'd lost.

As if sensing her rebellious thoughts, Eric again, with his probing, skillful tongue, won from her that involuntary tribute of cresting, blind, shuddering release before he entered her, drivingly this time, and reached a convulsively trembling climax, after which he seemed to doze for a few minutes, one gold-haired bronzed arm flung over her.

“Will you rest?” he asked, his eyes still closed. “Or will you visit Pierre?”

“I'll see him,” she decided.

They washed and dressed and went downstairs. She wondered if she'd ever understand this man who was her captor.

The kitchen was the most surprising room in the house. Herbs grew in long boxes set on every windowsill. Amidst rows, shelves, and cupboards of enamel, copper, and cast-iron cooking vessels and utensils, bins and barrels and containers of foodstuffs, was a long, heavy table centered with shelves of seasonings, measuring cups, bowls, spoons, and knives. A fireplace situated in a small side room was equipped with spits and grills, but the pride of the cook's heart was a fearsomely impressive system of fast oven, slow oven, pastry oven, steam closet, hot closet, and bath boiler all in one imposing stove fired in the center.

“The first of this marvelous invention was shown at the great exhibition in Hyde Park in … yes, 1851, I am sure,
madame!
It cost Monsieur Kensington a small fortune to have it shipped here, but he's often told me it was worth it, yes!”

The pantry was almost the size of the kitchen and resembled a grocery. All of the tinned delicacies were imported, and there were bins of flour, rice, beans, and sugar. Crocks of butter, cream, and milk were stored in the coolest corner. Next to the pantry was a tile-topped counter for cleaning and dressing game and fowl, with a large basin equipped with a drain.

“You could cook for the queen of England,” said Mercy.

“I could!” Pierre wasn't one for false modesty. “But this is better. Monsieur Kensington leaves the kitchen to me.” He gestured at the half-dozen helpers who were going about various tasks. There were two boys of perhaps fourteen or fifteen, two young men, and two middle-aged women. “They do what I say, but none can argue over the correct way to prepare
faisan à la flamande
or
galantine de poulard
.”

“Neither will I!” Mercy laughed.

Pierre couldn't quite cover his look of relief. “But
madame
must be pleased!”

“I'm sure I will be. I like fruit and vegetables, I am very fond of cheese and eggs, and I've come to like tortillas.”

“I don't serve those, not me!” When Mercy glanced at the woman making the flat cakes, Pierre said, “Those are for the servants.”

“Well, maybe I can have one now and then,” Mercy said. “Please make whatever you judge best, Pierre, but remember that I can't eat as much as Mr. Kensington.”

“When
madame
has had time to sample my creations, perhaps she will tell me her favorites?”

Time. Mercy thought again of the food of Persephone. But she must endure, and for that she must eat. Of course I will,” she told Pierre. “Thank you for showing me your wonderful kitchen.”

He bowed her out and began calling orders for what Mercy feared was the start of the noon meal. Going back to the house, she stood on the terrace, reluctant either to go to her room or wander about.

What was she going to do here? She wasn't the mistress of the house and hadn't the slightest wish to meddle in what was obviously a smooth-running arrangement. She enjoyed cooking, but Pierre was lord of the kitchen, and, anyway, she was determined not to seem in any way to be assuming a permanent and contented place in the mansion.

She could spend some time daily in keeping a journal and recording all she had learned about Yucatán and Belize. Here, as at Zane's, there was the incredible luck of a good library. She could continue learning Mayan and Spanish, for there were both Mayas and mestizos among the house servants. But these pursuits, interesting as part of a routine, couldn't be enough.

Since she was a child, Mercy had felt needed and important, keeping house for her father and then, during the war, filling in for him as best she could. Continuing to help the sick while keeping a garden and trying to manage a house and cook meals as Philip liked them had been more than she could sometimes manage. She'd never get in
that
position again—trying to satisfy an emotionally infantile man who could only demand but never give. At La Quinta, she'd taught the children and learned medicine from Chepa. She'd been useful there, a part of things.

Now the need to work, even if she could find something that didn't intrude in someone else's sphere, was frustrated by a resolve
not
to fit in here,
not
to become part of Eric's establishment.

Had she been a painter or writer, she could have been busy without supporting Eric's ménage, but those weren't her talents. If she had a gift, at all, a prime concern, it was healing.

She frowned, suddenly arrested. With all that sugar and logging and the people required to maintain the House of Quetzals, there
would
be sick and injured.

Even if there was a doctor, she could be helpful while learning what he knew. Her father had never had time to follow up on home care, diet, and such things. There'd surely be something she could do. She'd ask Celeste. It wasn't the kind of thing Eric seemed likely to approve of, but once she learned his routine she could pretty much know what hours would be her own. Those hours could help her remain herself, linking the present with her father and Chepa. But at the moment she was driven to walk down to the river and look away toward La Quinta.

Where was Zane? Was he safe? Would he believe that letter? Even if he didn't quite, how could he guess what had happened to her? It hurt to be thought faithless, not only by Zane, but by Jolie, Chepa, Salvador, and Mayel.

Strong arms fitted around her, hands cupping her breasts. “So here you are, sweetheart!” Eric turned her around for his kiss. “Let's see what Pierre has for luncheon. After our siesta, I'll show you some of the plantation.”

He swept her along with him, but she looked back over her shoulder at the sunlit water and in the direction she hoped to travel again toward the man who was the center of her loving.

The mare brought around to the terrace for Mercy was a pale tan color, so beautiful that in spite of Mercy's determination not to be blandished by any of Eric's gifts, she couldn't restrain a cry of admiration as she stroked the velvety muzzle and touched a mane that would have suited Pegasus, the winged horse of the Muses.