Embrace the Day (39 page)

Ivy swiveled around, eyes wide. "Really? That's all there was to it?"

"Of course."

"But when I asked Hance about it he—he made no attempt to deny it!"

"The way I remember it, you didn't give him much of a chance, Miss Attwater."

"Oh, my God," Ivy murmured. "I didn't, did I? I'd been talking to the Beasley twins and I—" Suddenly she flung her arms around Nell. "Thank you, Miss Wingfield!"

Nell looked nonplussed for a moment, then her face broke into a grin. "I hope the two of you can patch things up. Hance and I have had our differences but I've always admired the man. Reverend Rankin says it's never too late." Nell laughed. "If he thinks
my
soul is salvageable, then anything is possible!" She stood up, looking as if she'd relieved herself of a great burden. "I've got to go, Miss Attwater," she declared. "I mean to spend all this month training my girls to cook and make beds and draw baths. The Liquor Vault is about to be converted to a proper boarding house!" She went away humming to herself, leaving Ivy staring after her.

It was as if the sun had reappeared after days of darkness. Ivy sprang up, running into the house. "Sanford," she called to the houseboy, "have the chaise brought around. I'm going out immediately."

She went to her parents, who were still in the dining room. "I've made a terrible mistake," she said hurriedly. "Hance was wrongly accused of—Oh, I was so damned stupid to listen to the Beasley twins! He didn't lie to me after all!"

"Ivy, what are you saying?" Dr. Attwater asked. "You're not making any sense."

"Of course it makes sense," she said jubilantly. "I still love Hance. Oh, God, I never even gave him a chance to explain—"

Dr. Attwater landed his fist on the walnut table with a clatter, silencing Ivy. "Now listen to me. You can't just go running back to Hance Adair, or whatever his name is. Nothing can change what he is."

Ivy's eyes widened. "Whatever are you talking about?"

Mrs. Attwater's face crumpled. "Oh, Lord, George,
she doesn't know
…" She stared at Ivy with pity in her eyes. "Darling, we found out that Hance was born illegitimate.
That
is why you can't marry him."

Ivy drew a deep breath, stunned. So that was what Nell Wingfield had been trying to tell her. "Can't I? Can't I?" she asked. "Sweet, merciful God, Mother, do you think I'd let a thing like that stand in my way? I rejected Hance because I thought he'd lied to me about something that
mattered
."

She grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table as she ran from the room. Her appetite had suddenly returned.

The sound of Mariah's screams made Luke run even faster, leaving Gideon far behind. He had no doubt it was Hance; Gideon had described a yellow-haired man with a black horse.

Luke knew why Hance had chosen to vent his rage on Mariah. The gossip was all around town, repeated with relish by those who'd witnessed the scene at the church last Sunday. Luke had reacted with shock to the idea that Hance wasn't Roarke's son. He'd even felt a measure of compassion that Ivy Attwater had broken their betrothal.

But all Luke felt as he pounded through the forest was rage. And cold, abject terror. Mariah was in the early stages of pregnancy and in no condition to fend off Hance.

Luke rushed headlong onto the scene. The daisy he'd given her earlier lay trampled beneath scuffling feet. Hance had torn Mariah's bodice and was groping savagely at the shift beneath.

The towering fury that roiled within Luke gave him more strength than he'd ever possessed. He grabbed Hance by the collar and ripped him away from Mariah. With one swift movement, Luke spun him around and drove his fist into his face, laying open the flesh above his cheekbone.

Hance tried to elude Luke's rain of blows, putting up his arms. Uttering disjointed curses of loathing, Luke penetrated the defense and slammed his fists at Hance again and again. A thunderous kick to the midsection sent Hance sprawling to the forest floor, and Luke immediately dropped to his knees, preventing Hance from rolling away. Again and again he beat that face, hearing the sickening crunch of his own blows with dark satisfaction. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered another fight. A fight that had ended in the death of Black Bear, his enemy. Luke found himself craving that result once more.

Finally, Mariah's voice penetrated the red fog of rage that engulfed Luke.

"Stop, oh, God, Luke, please stop! He's not fighting back!" Luke felt her hands on his shoulder. "You'll kill him!"

"Exactly," Luke snarled, not letting up.

"You'll never forgive yourself, Luke."

At last he stopped and straightened slowly, feeling drained and somehow unclean, as if soiled by his own dark desire to kill. Shuddering, he pulled Mariah to him.

"Are you all right?"

She nodded. "He—he's been drinking. He was half out of his mind, I think."

Together they stared down at Hance's inert form. His face ran with blood, cut raw by Luke's fists. His nose was shattered, and one eye had swollen shut.

Wordlessly, Mariah plucked Luke's handkerchief from his pocket and daubed at the wounds. Hance moaned and stirred, then opened his good eye. He put his tongue out tentatively, touching a deep split in his lip.

"Get up," Luke ordered roughly.

Hance gave a slight nod and complied, staggering a little. Gideon appeared, wide-eyed, the black horse in tow.

"When you ride out of here," Luke gritted, "I want it to be for the last time. If you ever come near me or my family again, you're a dead man."

Again Hance nodded, giving Luke a hard look. "I should have appreciated you more when we were growing up, little brother. Seems you were the only one who knew better than to put up with me." He lurched toward his horse. "I've taken a lot of thrashings in my life, Luke. But no one's ever dealt it out like you." He struggled onto his mount, and Mariah gave him his hat. Their gazes locked for a moment.

"Sorry is too weak a word to apologize for what I just did to you," Hance said.

She nodded and then, unexpectedly, took his hand. "I've always been good at forgiving, Hance. But I'll need time to understand how you could be hurting so badly to want to attack me like that."

Hance set the hat on his head and touched the brim in an unsteady salute.

"So long, little brother."

"He may need doctoring," Mariah whispered as they watched him ride away.

"He'll find one in the next county if he knows what's good for him."

Hance saw his
reflection in the oval glass of the front door of number 36 Bedford Row. With a satisfied nod, he adjusted his stock and smoothed the front of his superfine morning coat. His tall boots gleamed as richly as the polished beaver hat on his head. His face still bore the scars of Luke's attack and various other scuffles, but time had faded them. There was a small crescent-shaped depression above his left cheekbone and another on his chin; his nose bore only the slightest irregular bump.

Hance didn't mind the scars. At one time his vanity would have been mortified, but now he looked upon them as badges of lessons learned hard. And learned too late.

As he stood waiting for his knock to be answered, Hance reviewed the events that had brought him here, to the house of the man who had fathered him. He had never gone back to Lexington after that day with Luke. For three years he'd wandered the length of the Mississippi and the Natchez Trace, sliding effortlessly into the life he'd led before. Before Ivy. The dreadful wrenching that twisted his gut when he thought of her faded to a dull ache, which he battled in vain with whiskey and women.

With some vague notion of restoring his sense of self-worth Hance had finally become a passenger on one of his ocean-going vessels from Shippingport. He gave in to the curiosity that niggled at him incessantly.

He sailed to London to see the man who was his father.

A stern-faced butler led him into a grand, overheated salon. Hance waited in front of a marble fireplace, taking in the dainty blue Grisson harpsichord, the gilt-edged books that lined the walls, a collection of Sevres vases in colored porcelain. He could imagine Ivy in such a room, surrounded by luxury and learning and breeding.
Breeding
. A word Hance had come to hate, for the accident of his birth had driven Ivy away from him.

"Hance Adair?"

He swung around to see the source of the voice. Edmund Brimsby arrived in a rolling wicker chair pushed by a footman. The man's feet, too swollen by gout to be fitted with shoes, were wrapped in bandages. He had a ruddy, florid face that might have been distinctive at one time; now its features were slack and timeworn.

"You are Hance Adair?" Brimsby asked again.

Hance gave him his most charming smile. "That's the name I was given."

At that moment a woman swept into the room. Stiffly gowned and grandly coiffed, she had hard, glittering eyes and a look that hinted disapproval of the world in general— and of Hance in particular.

"You must be my cousin Roarke's son," she said, touching her coiffure with a disdainful but trembling hand.

With sudden clarity, Hance realized why he'd come. He wanted to show these overly comfortable, self-satisfied Londoners that he would not be forgotten as his mother had been.

"Roarke Adair raised me," he conceded. "I was born November 14, 1774, in Dancer's Meadow, Virginia, to a woman named Prudence Moon."

The mention of that name caused different reactions in his hosts. Angela Brimsby's eyes hardened to twin gem-stones of loathing. In contrast, Edmund grew pensive, look-ing like a man who had lost some part of himself and had no idea where it had gone.

"She died bearing me," Hance added coldly.

Edmund's shoulders sagged, and the sadness that came over him was as genuine as any emotion Hance had ever seen.

"Why have you come here?" he asked raggedly.

"I think you know," Hance replied.

"We owe you nothing!" Angela declared.

"Relax, Mrs. Brimsby. I want nothing from you. Only to see the man who used my mother and abdicated his responsibilities to her." Coldly, he eyed Edmund Brimsby and strolled around the wheelchair. "You're not such an old man, are you, Mr. Brimsby? Yet you've a dissipated air about you. Perhaps your life of ease and privilege hasn't brought you the contentment you crave."

He was neither surprised nor disappointed by Brimsby. Hance refused to admit a certain underlying admiration of this grand, comfortable, eminently proper life. A life that, had the circumstances of his birth been different, might have been his.

He expected to be asked to leave. Instead, Edmund Brimsby, shaken and pale, begged Hance to stay for tea.

Hance was taken aback. His curiosity piqued, he handed his hat to the butler.

As tea was served in an overdecorated, stuffy room, Angela impaled him with her hard stare and was clearly trying her best to find fault with his manners.

But his deportment was excellent. Horace Rathford had taught him well in his youth, in Richmond, where English ways had hung on well after the war. He wielded his utensils and teacup with an expert hand.

His host asked him questions, not hard, probing ones intended to make Hance squirm but questions of genuine interest. He wanted to know about America, the people who had fought so desperately to free themselves from England, the seemingly limitless possibilities the land in the New World offered.

"The Americans are a singular lot," Hance explained, "so diverse as to resemble patchwork, yet somehow united, all of the same fabric. The things they value are different from what I've observed in London. Faith, individual liberty. A child is raised to rely on no one beyond himself for his own destiny."

Brimsby was smiling at him. "You talk like an American. I can't think why you'd leave that life."

"There are some things even Americans can't forgive," Hance said. The hard edge to his voice left no doubt as to what he meant.

Brimsby looked wistful again. And curiously eager. "May I call you Hance?"

"Of course."

"I'm an old man, Hance, despite what you said earlier. I've done nothing in my life but improve my family's fortune in a modest way. Aside from Angela, I have no one to share that fortune with. My only son, Andrew, was killed fighting against Bonaparte. My daughter died giving birth to a stillborn boy, and her husband succumbed to consumption soon after."

Angela took a gulp of tea. Her cup quivered as she set it down on its saucer.

"Edmund, really, don't you think we should keep such matters private?"

Hance sent her a charming smile. "I've already told you, ma'am, I make no claim to anything you have."

"But that's the point," Edmund persisted. "That is exactly what I want you to do."

Angela gasped, and Hance felt his hand tighten around the cup he was holding. A keen feeling of resentment gripped him. Edmund Brimsby had ignored his existence for years. Now, old, broken, and lonely, he wanted to absolve himself of the wrong he'd done by tossing Hance this double-edged opportunity.

To agree to this would be to deny everything Roarke Adair had been to him. Roarke Adair, the man he'd called father. The man who had loved him, had forgiven him everything.

"No," Hance said quietly. "No, it's not what I want."

"Perhaps this is too abrupt. But give me a chance. I have a distinct feeling about this. Stay with us, Hance, as a guest in our home. I'd welcome the opportunity to know you better. Not as your father, of course. Roarke Adair is the only man deserving of that title. But as a friend. Please."

Hance took a snifter of brandy from a silver tray proffered by a footman and swirled the amber liquid thoughtfully. He looked around the room with its gilded cornices and painted doors, at the chandelier sparkling over the table, the rich Gobelins tapestry that graced the mantel. Hance found that he was comfortable in these surroundings. Very comfortable indeed.

He didn't bother looking at Angela; he knew what her completely justifiable reaction would be. She was reluctant to open her home to her husband's bastard. But Angela's opinion meant nothing.

Only this gouty earnest old man with his wistful watery eyes and nervous hands mattered. It had been a long time since anyone had wanted to know Hance, to be his friend.

"I'd be obliged," Hance said, flashing a grin. Then he raised his glass to Brimsby.

A filthy finger with a wax-hardened nail curled around the brass trigger of a new rifle. The clearing just south of Lexington buzzed with the music of summer crickets and bird song.

"Now listen to your Uncle Micajah, boys," the man said. "Guns ain't worth the wood they're made of unless you learn to shoot properly. And you can't learn to shoot unless you aim at something."

"Aw, I know that," Caleb Harper said.

"Me, too," added his younger brother, Spruce, wiping a sleeve across his nose.

"We'll see about that, boys," Micajah said. He hunkered down and shouldered the rifle. "Takes practice, y'hear? I ain't held a gun in seven years, ever since Billy Wolf hauled me and Wylie in…" Micajah's protruding brow darkened. "Damn, I'd like to put this bullet through Hance Adair; pay him back good for running out with our share and leaving us to take the blame."

"We won't find Adair in Lexington," Wylie Harper reported, ambling toward Micajah and the boys. "I done some checking around; 'pears he lit out five years ago."

"Ah, well, let's give these youngsters a shootin' lesson anyway," Micajah said. "Now." He laughed wickedly as, in the distance, a child appeared. "Say we want to plug that little half-breed yonder. Here's what you do…" Micajah made a great show of sighting down the barrel at the dark-haired boy in the clearing.

"
No
!" screamed a female voice. A flurry of gingham and shiny black hair descended on Micajah, knocking him to his backside.

"Aw, see here, lady," Micajah laughed, "we was just makin' a little joke." His eyes roved appreciatively over her. "Didn't mean no harm, did we, boys? The Harpers don't go around pluggin' kids, even 'breeds. Say… you're one yourself, ain't you, lady?"

Mariah stumbled back. She'd gone completely cold at the mention of the Harper name. There was no doubt in her mind that these were Elk's sons and grandsons, cruel and crude in the tradition of the man she'd killed at the Licking River seven years earlier.

"Gideon," she said quickly over her shoulder. "Take Hattie up to Trotter's store and wait for me there. I'll go fetch Benjamin." Sensing Mariah's alarm, Gideon snatched hold of Hattie's hand, and they ran up Main Street into town. Mariah was about to run across the clearing to her son when one of the younger Harpers stepped in her way.

She brushed past him toward Benjamin, but not before recognition had dawned in the youth's small, cruel eyes.

She'd seen the same look on the same face at the Licking River. This boy had watched her kill Elk Harper.

Mariah forced the encounter with the Harpers from her mind as she and Benjamin went to find the others. The outlaws couldn't harm her, she told herself, not here in Lexington. But when she heard from Myra Trotter that the Harpers had staked a claim a few miles down the Kentucky River, she vowed to stay well out of their way. She scolded her four-year-old son for wandering off, then squeezed his hand with a bright, reassuring smile.

Trotter's mercantile was jammed with women. Lexington suffered both from war shortages and the lack of a good river port, so a delivery the size of this one was a rare thing indeed. Mariah seldom ventured into town, relying instead on Luke's foreman, a man called Jake Hopkins, to do the shopping. But Gideon, Benjamin, and his sister, the three-year-old Hattie, were badly in need of new clothing. The children were growing faster and taller than tulip poplars.