The Randolph Legacy (15 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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“You didn’t ask, sir.”
Ethan pulled the lap desk toward him, dipped the pen and hastily scribbled a note, and handed it to his servant. “Get out! Get out!”
“That be good, master. Much better!”
“Better?
Mon dieu
, I’m growling like my father!”
“Your daddy don’t cuss near so pretty, sir.” Aaron turned as he reached the paneled doors of the library. “Be back at first light for to see to your needs. Martha and me—we thank you, sir.”
Ethan watched the bondsman jaunt past the window, envying his muscled calves, the power of his stride. Had he followed those strides as a child?
He rested his head against the cool glass before he went back to his correspondence. After a while he realized his handwriting was easing out of the cramped, tiny letters necessary when he was Fayette’s student. Here there was an endless supply of cream-colored paper, an endless supply of everything, even human beings who thought it natural to sleep in cold fireplaces.
Ethan sprinkled sand on the script of the seventh letter, then rewarded himself for his diligence. His fingers slid through the pages of the small volume of sonnets.
He heard the whisper of silk.
“Mr. Washington?”
He raised his eyes to Anne Randolph’s form in the doorway. Her voice was more delicate coming through the darkness. Her tunic shimmered over the linen chemise. “Is no one with you here, sir?”
“No one.”
She entered the room farther, but kept searching the shadows. “And where’s Aaron?”
His jaw set. “He’s one of the no ones,
madame
. I gave him a pass to go home to his own bed. This meets with your approval?”
“Of course. It’s just that—what if you need him?”
“I won’t need him before daylight, Mrs. Randolph.”
“You must go to bed.”
“I can sleep here. I can sleep anywhere—a sailor’s habit.”
“Are you not fatigued?”
“No. I kept night hours on the
Standard
. Another habit. Working on the Midwatch.”
She walked closer. “You write to your friends?”
“Your friends, who were good enough to call on me in Norfolk.” He offered her the unsealed missives. “I have signed none. I am not ashamed of the name you call me. But it occurs to me that they would not know Henry Washington. Still, I will sign them as you wish.”
“As I wish?”
“Of course.”
She scanned the letters’ headings. Stopped. “You have written to Jordan Foster. Did he visit you?”
“We stayed at his home for three days. Didn’t Sal—Didn’t Mrs. Gibson tell you?”
“No.”
Secrets, Ethan thought. So many secrets, but he did not guess at this one, between daughter and mother. Anne Randolph sat beside him. “Mr. Washington, have I distressed you?”
“I have betrayed her. I have betrayed the only one of you who believes I belong here,” he whispered.
She touched his hand. “You have not, be assured. I’m glad Sally had you brought to Jordan. He’s a very fine doctor, and a very fine man. Did he examine your leg?”
“Yes.”
“He offers you hope, I trust?”
“He offers me everything but hope.”
“Sir?”
“He’ll need to break the bones, reset them, if I’m to have any chance of walking, of …” He lost himself in her eyes, wondering again if she was one of the dancers.
“Of what, sir?”
He looked away. “Making my way in the world, without any pity.”
He felt her move closer.
“Shall I invite Dr. Foster to Windover? Would you like that?”
More veils gone. The ice was melting, the spring coming by way of the doctor from Norfolk. “Yes, Mrs. Randolph,” he said softly. “I would like that very much.”
She stood, swept past him, looking out at the ancient oak beyond the library’s windows. Her hands were trembling. “He’ll be interested in your general health, of course, so you must make us all appear good nurses and eat well. We’ll leave you plenty of time together when he comes. Time to talk.” She turned abruptly. “Does Jordan think you’re my son, sir?”
“I believe so.”
“Then he will deem me very guarded, as Sally does. He will chide me for listening to Winthrop and Clayton.” A veil returned. “My sons have advised that I not meet alone with you,” she said.
“Do you trust their judgment?”
“Yes.”
“I will go back to Mr. Shakespeare’s sonnets, then, and you will be out of danger.”
He found his place in the book, but the words would not enter his understanding. The woman had not moved. Yet he felt her anger.
“Your presence here is most disruptive.”
He raised his head. “I will depart upon your wish.”
“Windover is not run in accordance with my wishes.”
“I will depart upon your wish,” he repeated, his eyes watching hers, his heart aching for another veil to lift.
It did. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice breaking.
“Not this,” he whispered, driving the anger away. “Dear lady, not to be the cause of any pain.”
She came closer, touching her pale fingers to his callused sailor’s hands.
“There, there,” she whispered. “I am not as fragile as I look. Write, Mr. Washington. We will decide how to sign the letters later.”
When he nodded, the long fingers touched his face.
“A beard?” she said, her voice a wisp on the night air as she felt the day’s stubble on his cheek. “My boy, my bright boy, your age. With a man’s beard. Such a long time it’s been.”
“I thought the sea was supposed to give you an appetite!” the old
man boomed across the table.
“Sir?”
“Look at your brothers! Look at the portrait of me in my prime—a hearty twenty-stone weight of muscle and vitality. Even your sister restores herself after childbirth. Meat does that, child, meat! Don’t turn your nose up at it the way you do my tobacco!”
Ethan engrossed himself in cutting the deep-red liver. Sally frowned. Sharp-eyed Clara signaled a servant to bring him more. She dominated Hester, Clayton’s wife, just as his brother Winthrop dominated Clayton.
Hester’s face made him think of a porcelain doll’s. When she nodded, the red curls at her cheeks bobbed to life. “My, Mr. Washington’s transgressions have had a restorative, blood-warming effect on you, Father dear!” she observed.
“Washington? Who’s Washington, you silly woman? I’m talking to Ethan!” He looked around the table. “Sally calls him Ethan.” His eyes narrowed. “And you use the name, don’t you, Quakeress?”
“I do,” Judith agreed.
“Lying is against the Quaker religion. That’s why your woman can’t fawn on me like your brothers’ bookend deceivers, Ethan. Also why she’s free to deliver her lectures about impoverishing ourselves by freeing our blacks. It’s what their religion bade them do. That’s why the Quakers no longer run Pennsylvania, isn’t that right, Clayton?”
“I think that theory is original with you, Father,” the black-clad man said primly. His clergyman son seemed to have perfected the method of making his father lose interest in him, Ethan thought, as the old man’s eyes again found him.
“Now, Prodigal, what’s this I hear from young Ruffin about you siding with him in disapproving of my tobacco?”
Ethan cast a glance at the oldest Randolph son and knew the source of the information. Winthrop’s eyes challenged him to deny it. “Mr. Ruffin’s ideas on crop rotation made sense to me, and I said as much, sir,” he began. “I am not trying to interfere with any of your practices—”
“Time-honored practices.”
“Honored by time, but not success. Your records show yields descending in both quantity and quality.”
The patriarch rubbed a gnarled finger against his chin. “A few early frosts, or inadequate rainfalls, perhaps.”
“It’s more consistent than that, sir. There’s a pattern of—”
“Who gave you permission to study this household’s records?” the younger Winthrop Randolph challenged, half rising to his feet.
“I did,” his father answered for Ethan, “in that room you are going to have your people paint the original color, usurper.” He dismissed his eldest son with a wave of his hand. Clara pursed her lips in tight resignation. It had been her idea, then, the changes in the study.
Aaron had been right; the rafters shook with the old man’s anger when he’d found out. Now his eyes danced with a mischievous glee as he focused on Ethan. “You know he’s eaten with envy, don’t you?”
“Who is, sir?”
“Young Ruffin. Those blackguards in Washington reached a peace just as he was ready to jump into the war. Itching to fight, he always was, remember?”
“No.”
“Of course you do! Even when you were boys, he was envious of you in uniform! How he sulked when you were made midshipman on the
Ida Lee
! At the Harrison barbecue. Remember? It’s like yesterday to me, and I’m eighty-five! You must remember!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Father,” Sally demanded, “isn’t it enough we have him back?”
“No, it is not enough! I am not going to leave him to be smothered by the rest of you! No legs to stand on, talking like a Frenchman, and with an addled mind besides! Where is that damned doctor? He must help. Didn’t I buy him the best education before he traipsed off to the territories to waste it on heathen Indians?”
“Dr. Foster, among Indians?” Ethan asked.
Winthrop Randolph frowned at Sally. “There, again! Listen to what catches his fancy! We’ve got to get this child on his feet so he stops these peculiar bends of the mind.
“Ethan!” he summoned. “Eat, while I explain Ruffin’s envy. To wit: He lives on after we thought you were lost, missing every opportunity to make war. Then you come home to us, doted on by presidents past and present, hero of no less than the Battle of Trafalgar, slayer of your own mad English captain—”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Ethan whispered, reaching for Judith’s hand under the table’s linen. He felt what the old man accused. Addle-brained. Confused. But he hadn’t killed anyone, had he?
“That hardly matters!” Winthrop Randolph insisted. “It is what’s believed, what’s driving Ruffin to distraction.”
“Mr. Ruffin has been kind, and patient, and—”
“He wants to see you fail, Ethan. That’s why he’s giving out such cockeyed advice.”
“He only gave it after I asked him about Elwood.”
“Elwood?”
“Aaron’s youngest son, sir. He gets the tobacco sickness. I was concerned, and—”
“What? Are you interfering with Windover’s people?” Winthrop the younger boomed, rising all the way to his feet this time. The silver plate of cheeses and fruit dropped from the serving girl’s hands. Aaron’s daughter, Elwood’s sister—Phoebe. All of Aaron and Martha’s children were house servants or craftsmen, except for Elwood. The tray’s contents crashed to the floor.
“There!” Winthrop crowed, as if the action had underlined his point. “That’s the only sickness any of your people suffer from, Father! Clumsiness, laziness! And the cure for that is the strap. Send this one to our place, Mother. Clara will return her to you with more grace about her person.”
Ethan watched the young slavewoman’s eyes fill with fear. How had his simple mention of the health of her brother led to this?
Anne Randolph stood, turned Phoebe toward the doorway, and dismissed her. She faced her eldest son. “I am still able to manage my own household, Winthrop.” The veiled eyes of the mistress of Windover challenged both him and her daughters-in-law.
Clara nodded coldly. Hester waved her handkerchief in frilly surrender.
 
 
M
rs. Randolph entered in the way that was becoming her habit, after a quiet knock at the bedroom door. He was finishing a letter to Jordan Foster with yet another request to visit Windover. He could sign himself “Washington” to those letters. And the ones to Eli Mercer. Judith’s father and Jordan Foster understood his predicament.
“The roast calf’s-liver was not to your liking tonight, was it?”
He smiled uneasily, a twinge of pain at his middle. “It was more that I was not to its liking.”
“Still, you finished the portion, at my husband’s prompting. You must not do that. He will only find something else to be displeased about. It is not his age or illness that causes this disagreeableness. It is a lifetime trait. You have seen it in ample evidence, so has Miss Mercer. You attempted to please him at supper, and caused yourself distress. Here.” She placed a small cake at his side. “The ginger will soothe your indisposition. Eat it slowly.”
“Yes,
madame
.”
She glazed her forehead with her middle finger. Gracefully. Everything this woman did was graceful. “I’m being insufferable.”
He grinned wider. “Not at all. Will you sit?”
“If I can be good company.”
“You always are.”
“There. Now I know you don’t have a lifetime of memories of me.”
His laughter startled her. He stifled it, breaking off a piece of the confection. He placed the cake on his tongue, let it flavor his mouth before chewing slowly, an old habit, checking for weevils, mold. There. He felt better already, distracted by the sweetness of molasses, the tang of the spice.
“You are quite correct about Elwood,” she said quietly. “He is plagued with the tobacco sickness.”
“All his life?” he asked quietly.
“No, only since working in the fields. He was his brother Micah’s apprentice at the forge. Until he tried to run away.”
“I see.”
“Perhaps our joint concern might prove beneficial, if we both tread lightly.”
He smiled. “I am used to treading lightly around giants.”
“Good. If you will work to free a few acres for—What would you have us plant?”
“Corn, beans, squash. Food.”
“Then I will see if I can persuade our giant that Elwood’s time of punishment might better be spent in those fields.”
Ethan listened closely. For what? Related tones? Remembrances of other times they schemed like this around the old man’s temper? “You are fond of Aaron and Martha’s family,” he observed.
“They are as much Windover’s heirs as you or I.”
He didn’t know what was more shocking—her statement, or including him within it, as if she believed he was her son. She had shocked herself. The veils were down; she was standing, leaving him. He took her hand.
“Help me to understand this, Mrs. Randolph. Tell me about the time of the measles.” he asked her quietly. “How you saved all the children.”
“Who told you that?”
“Aaron and Martha. Any of the black people would put his hand in the fire for you since then, they say.”
“Don’t say ‘black people,’” she reprimanded gently.
“No? ‘Slaves,’ then?”
“Gracious, no. ‘Servants.’ There are slaves, of course. Ones with wicked, greedy masters. But not here, not at Windover. Not even in the fields. Here the Negroes are our people, part of our family. Our servants.”
She’s been looking through that veil a long time
, he decided. Perhaps she’d come to believe it as her naked sight. There was no use mentioning Elwood’s flight. He stayed the course of their conversation instead. “When Aaron and Martha tell about the measles, I get to bask in your reflected glow.”
“Mr. Washington, you do have odd notions!”
“You looked a little like Sally just then.”
She touched her cheek. “Did I?”
“I mean, the other way around, of course.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps it is only that you both have chosen ‘odd’ as my most descriptive trait.”
“Nonsense. Sally adores you.”
“She adores her little brother. The one born after all the sickness.”
There. That smile appeared, that rare smile he would stand on his head to see. “Tell it,” he urged. “Tell about the epidemic.”
She leaned her back against the chair’s green cushion. “My husband was abroad in England that winter. Winthrop was eighteen; Clayton, fifteen. It struck them first. Sally was only twelve. She had a mild case, a blessing for me, because once she recovered, her brothers had the worst of their fevers.”
Her eyes fired with remembrance. “All of the overseers, hired tutors, dancing masters, even the tinkermen were running off, avoiding our part of the Tidewater in fear. But not Jordan Foster. He prevented my sons from destroying themselves in their pain, I think. It was rampant throughout the servants’ quarters, too. So I helped Aaron and Martha in the cabins as they helped Jordan and myself in the big house. We were the only plantation to come through the epidemic without deaths.”
“You were running the place?”
“Yes. With my husband gone, my sons so ill, and our neighbors in the same throes, how could I have done less with all of them assisting me with every drop of their own sweat? Windover survived.”
“It thrived, as it never did before or since.”
“You must not add to already exaggerated accounts.”
“You found something good, didn’t you,
madame?
You found your own strength, within that terrible time?”
“I … haven’t thought of it that way.”
“And Dr. Foster found his calling.”
Her eyes went wistful. “Martha and Aaron were right. He had the healing in his hands.”
“Do you still think of Dr. Foster fondly? As in days gone by?”
She looked startled by the question, then peered at him more closely. “What are you up to?” she charged. Already this woman knew him too well, he feared.
“Why will he not come? I thought once you invited him, he would.”
“Dr. Foster has obligations. Be patient.”
“It’s not his obligations keeping him away. What is it?” He sounded like a willful, petulant child. Is that who he’d been?
“He’s never come back to Windover,” she said quietly.
“Never? Why?”
Her mouth formed that impenetrable line. “You think it such a curse, such a hardship, to be without memory? Think on his memories! Think of being able to help save us all, and then watch his own die.”
“The lady with the dulcimer, the children,” he remembered.
“He spoke to you of them? Of his family?”
Her eyes were so sparked with gold he was afraid to tell her his visit was not with Dr. Foster, but with his dead. He nodded.

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