Mood Indigo (14 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
he figures on the ledger blurred before Ethan’s weary eyes. He knew well enough the standing of the accounts that March without looking at the numbers. With the Non¬exportation Act against England, there was little hope of finding foreign buyers for this year’s indigo crop. He could not blame the impending war for Mood Hill’s financial woes. He hoped that the indigo warehouses he was estab¬ishing along with the Scottish merchant Angus MacAbee in the ports of Hampton Roads, Alexandria, and Norfolk would be new sources of income—and consolidate his nonpartisan image since MacAbee was of Tory leanings, as were most Scottish merchants.

Only that week at the Virginia Convention in Richmond Patrick Henry committed himself to liberty or death in a great speech that would mark him as an arch
-rebel. The balance of political power in Virginia was slowly shifting from the Tidewater planters to the Piedmont farmers.

Ethan thought about his own part in the revolution—the probability of disgrace, most likely a dishonorable death. Hardly the kind of prospects that would entice a woman to marriage, particularly considering the abysmal state of Mood Hill’s finances.

He had known when he cleared his acreage, his back protesting with each swing of the axe, that it would be difficult to make ends meet for those first few years. He had known that he would need help, and that it would be costly. But none of the indentures he had purchased had been as costly as Lady Jane Lennox. Fifty pounds! He must have been out of his head to bid that sum. And why he had done so, he still did not know.

Ethan’s Folly it was called in Williamsburg, as Bram reluctantly divulged. Fifty pounds for a titled lady who knew not the first thing about labor!

And why did he go after her that day she fled Mood Hill? Could he be falling in love with her? No. He would attribute it more to his possessive nature. The hulking horror of the gray granite Kilmainham Jail had taught the child he had been to guard his few possessions—the scraps of food to ward off starvation, the lice-infested blanket to keep out the cold, the bartered clothing to hide nakedness. What was his, was his—and for that reason he had gone to reclaim his maidservant.

It was her damnable regal beauty shining through that disreputable maidservant’s masquerade that tempted him far past his limits of restraint. The brutal way he had forced his kisses on her the afternoon she came upon
him translating coded messages out of the Bible—they were not the gentle kisses he dreamed of giving to a wife.

Ezra and Miriam had rescued a guttersnipe, a boy of the streets who was wise in the way of stealing, of using a knife deftly when set upon. With patience they had taught him trust and kindness and love. With their love they had changed him. Yet where was that man now?

And to consider taking her to Williamsburg—aye, he was daft. He would have to rent a house, for he could not afford two separate rooms in an ordinary for what may be a month or more. Finding a home to rent would not be difficult with so many Tory families sailing for England. But at what expense a rented house? Mentally he tallied the cost it would run him to rent a house for a couple of months against taking a room at the tavern. Expensive. And money was dear.

And how would he fi
nd a wife to court, with a maidservant like Lady Jane Lennox on his hands? He did not doubt that she secretly laughed at his rustic simplicity, which remained despite the education old Eliza had afforded him.

Ethan’s fingers gripped the quill. The mere view of her trim ankle encased in woolen stockings tantalized him. If he thought to turn her tart a
sperity into sweet, loving kindness . . . Ethan’s Folly, indeed!

Lady Jane Lennox, thy cooked peas are like gun pellets
.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

O
n April 19th, the day before Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, seized the kegs of powder from the Williamsburg magazine, General Gage marched on Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, to confiscate the arms and ammunition cached there. The war materiel’s location, along with Massachusetts Militia records—the principal officers, the number and location of units, including the “minute companies” and the general scheme of mobilization and planned resistance, was provided by the spy operating under the code name Ahmad.

However, word of Gage’s planned march on Concord was inadvertently leaked
—by, among others, the very servants of the British officers. These scurrying batmen, preparing their officers’ gear for field service, dropped unguarded hints in billets. Something big was up.

Not only was the Massac
husetts Militia alerted, but Revere himself rode to warn Hancock and Adams of their arrest orders, and the leaders of the American intelligence ring escaped just ahead of Gage’s troops.

The battle that followed
between the rebel colonial minutemen and the British soldiers resulted in a nightmare for the redcoats. They lost 273 men—more than twice the number of lost colonists, who, rather than fight in drilled formal formation, had chosen not only hit-and-run tactics but also had taken aim when they had fired.

For Ahmad, the battle meant his spying operations would be that much more perilous; for as a result of that skirmish England’s Whitehall declared the colonies in a state of rebellion against Great Britain and the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia that May voted to use that military confrontation in Massachusetts to put all the colonies on a war footing.

The Continental Congress picked a forty-three-year-old delegate from Virginia who had fought in the French and Indian War some fifteen years earlier as the commander of all the continental forces. And Ahmad’s more primitive instincts sensed that his hope for the total abasement of the house of Lennox depended in some way upon this tall, rawboned man who carried himself with such great dignity, a man by the name of George Washington.

The spy lay on the tester bed of the small third-floor room he rented at 114 Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia and absently perused the gilt curlicues that writhed across the ceiling. The city was the largest and most modem in the colonies, with finely cobbled streets paved with Belgian blocks. It was also the seat of the recently formed colonial government’s congress.

And it was this Philadelphian society he would infiltrate, posing still as a tutor, this time fleeing British-held Boston. The limp he affected would prevent the indelicate question later of why he had not volunteered for the newly raised Continental Army.

He reached for the missive on the nightstand. His lids narrowed over pale-blue irises as he carefully reread the messages that were several months old. Jane’s letter had only just reached him from Gage’s headquarters in Boston by way of his own Philadelphian contact—the German baker Ludwig, who specialized in fancy gingerbread and intelligence notes.

Jane. Jane represented a supreme challenge for a bastard aspiring to possess a titled lady. And she represented revenge.

Now she was in the colonies. In Virginia. He wanted her as he wanted no other woman, not even her mother. For her mother had been beautiful—but very accessible in her loneliness. And he, an inexperienced youth of sixteen, had merely been infatuated with Lord Wychwood’s wife.

Lord Wychwood, Robert Lennox, whose infidelities were legend, never expected to return home to find his own wife dallying—and with a sheer youth at that. Lady Lennox took her life with poison the next day.

Lennox took his reve
nge immediately. With the influence he wielded through King George, he was able to persuade the monarch to withdraw both the title and the Manor House estate from Lady MacKenzie. These had been reluctantly granted to Terence’s mother by Lord MacKenzie upon their divorce—with the condition she would make no scandal by flaunting her illegitimate son in society. Manor House, awarded then to Lennox, was boarded up, and Terence’s mother returned to live with friends in Scotland.

Next Lennox struck directly at Terence. At the time Terence was studying Bri
tish constitutional and international law at the Inns of Court. Suddenly, Terence found that his application at the Inn’s Temple was not renewed.

Terence joined Her Majesty’s Dragoons. Lennox, too busy in London with both political and amorous affairs, did not suspect that over those next six years Terence was busy also at Wychwood
whenever he could get leave, befriending the daughter who suffered the same neglect and loneliness as her mother had. He insidiously capitalized on the homely child’s lack of affection, so that she willingly kept secret his visits to Wychwood.

But somehow Lennox
must have discovered those clandestine visits, for Terence at last found himself posted to the worst hellhole in India.

Jane was no longer a child but a woman. And seduction was not enough. Aft
er his ultimate mission was completed, Terence would claim his rewards. He would take Lennox’s daughter from him—and Manor House, and the Wychwood estates as well. Jane was not as tractable nor weak-willed as her mother. But he would yet bend her— and break her.

H
e held Jane’s letter to the candle. Revenge was slow in coming, but it was nearing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
he Tidewater plantation society of Virginia was for the most part a wealthy, semi-leisure class, a planter aristocracy that was able to devote time to pleasure: to reading, study, philosophy, the arts and writing, as well as to gambling, the fox chase, dancing, drinking, hunting, and social gaiety. And Williamsburg was the political and social metropolis of this plantation gentry.

Still, for most of the year Williamsburg was a small college town and marketplace. But twice annually, during “public times” when the legislature met and the courts were in session, the planters’ capital sprang to life. The population of two thousand doubled or even trebled. The innkeepers often roused one customer from sleep so that another could take his place. Everyone met everyone.

Yet that spring session of ’75 held little promise of excitement—or opportunity—for Jane. The first day, a warm May afternoon, she could only think of the handsome red brick house that Ethan had rented from the Tory, John Paradise, as Paradise Lost.

From the drawing-room window she watched the gilded carriages with their teams of four horses, a trademark of a prosperous planter, rattle along the wide, mile-long Duke of Gloucester Street. With longing for a society denied her, she gazed from behind the wooden Venetian slats upon the planters’ wives. Dressed in fashionable satins and carrying lacy parasols, they sat talking on the stone benches randomly placed along the avenue or strolled with their Negro maidservants under the arching live oaks that bordered the wide esplanade.

An open carriage drawn by a pair of superb bays rolled to a stop before the house, and Ethan got out. Dressed once more in sober black broadcloth and black yam stockings, he reminded her of the Dark Angel. His height and flaming red hair set him apart from all others on the street.

In mild surprise she watched as, tricorn tucked beneath his arm, he bent over the hand of the woman still inside the carriage. The woman’s powdered hair was adorned with rose silk ribbons that
were repeated on the wide paniered dress of pale-gray jaconet. But it was the woman’s face that captured the attention—one of undoubted beauty with lips that formed a petulantly flirtatious moue.

Hastily Jane let the Venetian blinds slip into place. She had not yet dusted the house that had been closed up for several months, and Ethan
was returning to catch her spying from the window!

She hurried from the parlor, mentally ticking off her chores that day. The plaid dust covers still needed to be changed, and the heavy brocaded curtain needed to be replaced with light silk gauze against the summer heat. T
oo, she must not forget the woolen bed curtains that needed to be exchanged for mosquito netting. She just reached the stairs when Ethan opened the door.

Hand on the dust-filmed black oak bannister, she slowly turned. His black eyes raked over her. Her butternut-dyed dress, bare of paniers and hoops, hung limply on her, her unpowdered hair straggl
ed in wisps from beneath the unbecoming mobcap. What a drab comparison she must make with the anonymous lady in the carriage. Still, Ethan’s expression reflected something other than disgust. Displeasure that she had accomplished so little in setting the house to rights?

No, that couldn’t be
the reason, because they had arrived too late in Williamsburg the night before to do much more than unpack his razor strap, shaving mug, and other personal belongings before retiring. But his mouth had flattened just as it was now when he had passed the horn lamp to her before her bedroom door.

Later that night, lying on the linenless bed in her thin shift, she had heard him in the opposite bedroom, pacing the floor. Was it the evening heat that had kept him awake? Had his thoughts been w
rapped up in the mercantile venture he mentioned he was embarking on? Or had he been dwelling on Susan, who would be coming to Williamsburg with Bram for the Burgesses’ spring session?