Mood Indigo (6 page)

The brig was still anchored in the James River, and she knew the ungovernable urge to flee up the gangplank and return to the safety of England. But she would lose all hope of finding Terence. And there was the galling fact that she had no freedom, no rights. She could no longer react on a moment’s whim. That part of her impulsive, frivolous nature could not be indulged.

And what of her maidenhood? Was she shortly to find an end to her innocence also? Oh, God, that she could have been so headstrong, so foolish!

The Quaker whistled a sprightly air as he stationed her in the bow of the picturesque gundalow that already contained her trunk. “Mood Hill—my farm—is over forty miles by land from Williamsburg but only twenty-seven by water,” he explained cheerfully while he raised the lateen sail. “The journey will not take overly long, mistress.”

She turned a deaf ear.
Infinitely old red oaks and willows and black locusts arched a brilliant green canopy over clear blue waters that were pleasantly cool to her trailing fingers. A blue heron balanced on one spindly leg in the shallow waters near the shore where a mud turtle and muskrat sunbathed. A thousand birds, it seemed, screamed raucously, as if in a futile effort to harmonize with the Quaker’s soft whistling.

Rather than risk a glan
ce at the man, who expertly handled the gundalow’s sail, she kept her gaze trained on the occasional small farms that they sailed past. The plots of land were demarcated by the zigzag split-rail worm fences that required no expensive nails or laborious postholes.

“Thee regrets leaving England, its befouled streets and water?” the Quaker asked with a quiet sarcasm.

“I regret everything . . . but would change nothing,” she murmured, keeping her haughty profile turned to him. “The mother country is—”

“It’s not the mother country,” he drawled. “At least not here in the colonies
. More people come from the Continent—Germany, France, Sweden, Holland—than England.”

She whirled on him. The leafy branches cast dappled shadows on the gundalow and obscured his marred visage. “England is still the mightiest nation in the world! And you still owe your alle
giance—nay, more, your very protection in this savage world—to her!”

“Ah
hh, then you harbor deep Tory sentiments, mistress?” She shrugged her shoulders, repenting of her outburst. “I care not for the feud between the Crown and her colonies. My allegiance ... is elsewhere.”

After that she saw none of the primitive beauty in the journey by water first up the immensely wide and slow moving James, then the arcadian Chickahominy. Though the trip was only a matter of an hour or so, it seemed to last forever as she felt a tightening in her chest with each league the gundalow c
arried her from the brig and England. The heavily leafed trees seemed to close in around her, obliterating the bright blue sky.

At last the woods ceded to a clearing on her left. By the time the gundalow drew abreast of the private dock, she was feeling feverish—and keenly disappointed in the farm she viewed by the light of the setting sun. Raw was the only word that came to mind. The Quaker had pushed the forest back to the fields’ margins, but the untended edges still grew with the grapevines and wild raspberries that choked the woods. Only the fruit trees, plum and apple, and the smaller fields of co
rn, beans, and squash were fenced to keep out the roaming cows and other livestock.

On a rise between the fields ringed by a scattering of crude, smaller outbuildings and tall beech and gum, a tw
o-story split-log house shimmered before her eyes. The great stone and clay chimneys at either end and the cypress shingles saved it from being totally primitive.

The Quaker was saying something about raising indigo on the four hundred acres that stretched in a purplish-blue haze beyond the farmhouse as far as the eye could see, but his voice seemed a great distance away. Yet when her knees buckled and the sandy earth wavered before her gaze, he was there, catching her, holding her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“
T
erence . . .”

The word was a litany through that night as Lady Jane Lennox’s mind wandered. Ethan smoothed back from the high forehead the lifeless hennaed tendrils that were damp with sweat. Who was Terence? Her fiance? But why then would she have run away from England? Perhaps her trip was not the prank he had thought. An enigma, this Lady Jane Lennox.

He sat there at the edge of the rope-slung bed that was to be hers, holding her hand when she murmured distractedly. The mother and son he had purchased to see to the domestic chores had died within hours of each other the very day the vessel put into the James River. It happened often enough—from ship fever, if not other maladies. Most people were unused to the hardship of the voyage, unused to the Virginia heat, unused to the sun’s brightness that seemed to burn the very eyes.

He had lost other ser
vants who had withstood the voyage but had been unable to survive in the colonial clime, so he had sworn to purchase only those hardy ones already living there. But somehow the spinning and mending and washing had mounted up before he found any to his liking, and he had resorted to purchasing the mother and son. They had seemed strong enough in body and spirit, and certainly eager to come to the New World. But they had not even survived the voyage to have their mettle tested on the virgin shores.

Would he lose this w
oman also? That night he was indifferent to his own weariness and the various problems that had arisen in his absence—as indifferent as he should be of the tall, taut body who slept in restless delirium before him.

But to be indifferen
t to Lady Jane Lennox was impossible, as he had known from that first meeting. Brilliant and without substance and most definitely spoiled, he had thought then. His opinion had not changed. But another dimension was added. Stubborn, persevering—and brave, despite the stark fear he had seen in those beguiling eyes. The sharp words that had readily played on her tongue were softened by the strange vulnerability he perceived in the set of her lips.

He leaned forward with elbows braced on knees spread wide, his hands claspe
d lightly in between. With her deeply asleep now, there was no longer the need to hold back the fingers that unconsciously rubbed at the pasty skin. It would be a shame to mar her face with pox pits, though little was left of the loveliness he had glimpsed in London. Her skin was ravaged, her hair damaged by the henna. Only her refined bone structure saved her from looking truly haggard.

Were Meg O’Reilly and Lady Jane Lennox indeed one and the same woman? And what was he to do with her?

He was a fool to have made the purchase, and he did not doubt that he would rue the day he had done so.

Toward morning her almost inaudible ravings stopped, and he felt it safe to leave for a few
hours. Sleep he desperately needed, but the Indian runner, Mattaponi, had entered on silent feet with the message of the clandestine meeting for which he had been waiting. Only a few words were grunted in the Powhatan language—“Committee of Correspondence . . . in the morning . . . the Great Dismal Swamp.”

The young woman might awaken while he was absent, might attempt to run away. He sighed, rose, and tucked about her shoulders the quilt she had tossed off. Better for him if she did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

U
nder the sullen stares of Boston’s unemployed, the British officer made his way among the soldiers’ tents pegged out in lines on the Boston Common. That June, the Boston Port Bill had closed the harbor to all commerce until the city paid for the tea the supposed Mohawk Indians had dumped into the water the previous December. Thusly were nearly twenty thousand Bostonians “paying the fiddler’ ’ for their tea party, as was predicted by the admiral of one of the British ships in port that fateful December night.

At the British headquarters in the Provincial House the officer was immediately ushered into General Gage’s office by the ruddy-faced secret
ary. The officer entered and saluted Gage, which was becoming the proper form of military greeting now that the high wigs made the wearing and doffing of a hat impossible.

The stout general indicated the Queen Anne armchair in front of the desk he o
ccupied as the new military governor of Massachusetts. Over the pyramid of his fingertips he studied the officer. What he saw augured well. The man stood an inch or so short of six feet, with a trim, sinewy build. The age was more difficult to judge, but he was most likely in his early thirties. The officer wore no powder on his sunstreaked hair, which pleased the general. Against the hair’s blond color, the face seemed dark and was faintly lined by the elements. The features might be deemed handsome in an arrogant sort of way. No doubt, Gage thought morosely, his American wife would find the man bloody attractive.

To Gage, the man appeared to be one of those few who maintained a command of himself, of his emotions. But the eyes bothered him. No indication of the man’s thoughts could be detected in those pale blue orbs. Gage felt a pinprick of unease. Were there any emotions? Like all soldiers trained by order and policy, he disliked anything that smacked of the unmanageable.

“You come highly recommended from the command at Quebec, MacKenzie.” He leaned back against his chair and folded his hands across his paunch.

“Thank you, sir.”

Gage shifted in his chair. “Your record indicates that you performed a number of delicate missions against the Punjabi tribes . . .”

“I went among the Punjabi as one of them.”

“Well, yes. And I have a, er, a mission of similar delicacy I would like to discuss with you.”

“You want the Boston
countryside reconnoitered to locate storehouses of weapons and powder. ’ ’

Gage managed to control his surprise. “Exactly. You had access to my report?”

“No. I used my eyes and my ears.”

Gage did not fail to no
tice MacKenzie’s lack of formality in omitting the respectful “sir” from his reply. He leaned forward, interlocking his fleshy fingers. “Tell me more, MacKenzie.”

“In the three weeks I have been stationed in Boston, I have observed that certain of you
r soldiers are selling uniforms and arms to the colonists. Moreover, despite the curfew you have imposed, pairs of colonists still amble about the waterfront, where your military strength is obviously displayed by the number of British vessels arriving and departing. Talk runs high against the Crown in the ordinaries.”

The man paused and s
hrugged nonchalantly before continuing. “There are other signs. The Massachusetts colonists are riled by this closing of their port, which is an important source of livelihood. They do not intend to accept passively your total British rule.”

Silence settled over the oak-paneled room. Then Gage spoke. “MacKenzie, you said ‘your’ British rule. Not ‘our.’ ”

A lean, feral smile curved the officer’s lips. “You are observant. Do not mistake me, General Gage, I am British. But you are motivated by patriotism and idealism, and I—”

“Yes?”

“Another goal motivates me.”

Gage had served in th
e colonies during the French Indian War, more than fifteen years earlier. He was a formidable soldier, and he understood enough about violent men to recognize that the man before him would suit his purpose very well. “Your mission will mean traveling incognito. You will need to go by a code name.”

“I expected as much.”

“You realize that I cannot command you to accept the mission? If you are caught—without your uniform—well, while we are not officially at war, it could mean a very untidy mess should your identity be discovered.”

“I won’t be caught.”

“No one can be sure of—”

“I can.”

The words were spoken with such conviction that Gage blinked in surprise. “Just why are you so certain?”

Terence MacKenzie rested his hands calmly on the chair’s arms. He could tell the general he had learned in India everything there was to know about destruction; that he had trained himself to be an expert in fighting with all weapons—the saber, the rifle, the stiletto, the claymore— as well as in unarmed combat; that he had acquired the art of subtle torture as well as silent assassination.

Instead he replied, “Because patriotism can be misplaced under the right persuasion, idealism can sometimes flag under materialistic conditions. I don’t profess a nobility of spirit. Should the necessity of killing a man arise, I will do so as automatically as I would step on a cockroach.”

CHAPTER NINE

E
than Gordon—a commonplace, ordinary, bumptious backwoodsman, she told herself as she dressed for the first time in the week since she had become ill after arriving at Mood Hill.

Her scorn for the indi
go farm—for it could not be compared to the grand tobacco plantations she had seen—vied with her reluctant gratitude for the care he had shown her since that night when she became ill with the smallpox. She remembered little of those first few days . . . only the coolness of his hand on her forehead and the gentle drawl of his deep voice. But then the fever, the pustules that scabbed her flesh—and the resulting pox scar at the tip of her chin—had been his fault to begin with!