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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

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BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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“Well, you’ve made this room your own. The library suits you, Ethan. You will not grow cramped when it’s your classroom, I trust.”
“Classroom?”
“Betsy and Alice must keep up their studies.”
“You’re leaving your girls here at Windover?”
“Until Christmas. While Barton and I settle the baby in. If you agree to teach them.”
He looked down at the iron bracing that made his right leg immobile. No walks, no sun, no riding. It was not a life to share with healthy children. “Sally, I cannot—”
“Nonsense. You had me. Now they have you. And all the books I used with you. Aaron’s brought them down from the nursery.” She frowned. “You do remember our lessons, don’t you?”
“I never forgot them.”
She leaned back on his pillows as if the library ceiling was the sky of their childhood. “Even the constellations.”
“The constellations were simple. I saw them nightly aboard ship,” he maintained, to vex her, to keep her and her gurgling baby there for as long as he could. He was still a spoiled child when it came to his sister’s affections, he realized.
She rolled to her side and leaned up on her elbow. “So teaching my daughters should be perfectly simple,” she admonished.
His face sobered. “My own education did not far exceed theirs.”
“You believe yourself deficient? After climbing on my lap with your
Mother Goose
before you could walk? After all of my work with that insatiable little head over the years that followed?”
“You were the best teacher any child could hope for.”
“I had the best teacher myself. Father only allowed me to sit in on Jordan’s lessons because I would probably marry some blockheaded planter, and would need to tutor his sons myself.”
“I’m glad you have not fulfilled his expectations on either count. And I’m fortunate you were such a good student.”
“My teacher will guide you, perhaps.”
“I’m too old now, Sally. Even for a man more patient that your Dr. Foster.”
“He’s not my Dr. Foster.”
“No? Who finally charmed him into going to Pennsylvania?”
“You slander me! It’s Mama had to ask him.”
“And he wouldn’t have budged without her leave.”
“Ah. You saw that, did you?”
“I’d have to be blind as well as crippled not to see that.”
She squeezed his hand. “Don’t. Self-pity does not become you.”
She had him. “I ask your pardon,” he whispered.
She smoothed down the spiraling crown of his hair. “Ethan, schooling didn’t make Jordan Foster a good physician. His own suffering allowed him to care so well for others. Yours may do the same for you.”
“I? A physician?”
“Why not? Under Jordan’s—”
“He would never consider it. He can barely stand my company.”
His sister gave out an exasperated sound as she stood, then walked to the windows. “Must I always be the go-between?” she demanded of the clear early autumn Tidewater sky.
“What do you mean, Sally?” Ethan asked her, baffled.
She looked to the river. Did her daughter sense this tension between them? Ethan wondered as he stroked her fussing baby’s cheek. Charlotte pulled his smallest finger into her mouth and suckled.
“They are packing up the boat. I need your answer,” Sally said from the windows. “Will you dishonor me as your teacher and insult your time with Monsieur Maupin as well? You owe us both, brother!”
He stared at her defiant stance, her fired eyes. He shook his head and laughed, enjoying his defeat.
She returned and sat beside him on the bed, taking his face in her hands. “Oh, Ethan, it is so good to hear that sound again. I was beginning to think your laughter died with Washington.”
The smile left his face. “Washington’s not dead, Sally.”
She patted his cheek lightly. “Then ask your charming Mr. Washington to add French to the subjects I taught you, and that will go far toward repayment of keeping your memory alive all these years.”
“Oh, now I must pay for lighthouse-keeper duty?”
She sat higher, fisted a hand at her hip. “You will sour my milk, Ethan Blair.”
“I will?” he whispered, stunned.
She swooped, kissing Charlotte’s forehead. “No. I’m teasing you, brother dear.”
The sweet smell from her bodice rose between them. “You see?” he challenged. “You see how ignorant I am?”
The baby whimpered, no longer content with his finger. Sally had her on her breast before the sound could turn into a cry. Ethan watched, fascinated.
“Oh, bother me not with your ignorance,” she said. But her annoyance was decreasing in ferocity with every suck her daughter pulled on her breast. His sister was growing as languid and contented as a cat in the sun. Was her baby’s suckling doing that?
“You have such bounty about you, Sally,” he observed.
She smiled at him fondly. “I glory in my nursing. But it is temporary, this bounty. Betsy, then Alice, taught me that. Temporary, just as this brace’s hold on you is. Patience, brother. Your flowering is yet ahead of you.”
“Do you think so? Dr. Foster only frowns.”
“Do you doubt me yet? Perhaps you’re right. I should renew my search. Perhaps Betsy and Alice deserve a more clever tutor.”
His sister traced the side of his face fondly.
“Only you tolerate me in this house, Sally.” He let his fear slip out. “Only you ever did.”
Her fine brows slanted in sympathy. “Perhaps I can stay a few more days. Until your first letter from Judith comes? All these desertions—”
“No.”
He was behaving badly toward his sister after all her gifts. He covered his shame in a laugh. “My long-suffering brother-in-law has done without you long enough. As it is I will send home his daughters sounding like tiny French revolutionaries. Thank you, Sally,” he whispered, pressing her hand to his cheek. “Now show the little gull her home, and stop worrying about me.”
Ethan heard the soft sounds of a dulcimer. How had the doctor’s
wife found him here in the library of Windover? Her children took hold of his hands, pulled. “I can’t,” he told them. “I must stay still. I promised your—” He was plunging into the salt marsh again. “Father!” he called, clutching at the air.
Ethan saw the strong fingers entwined with his own. “You wants me to fetch your daddy, master?”
“Aaron. I didn’t fall?”
“No, sir. Still harnessed in fine. You’s dreaming is all.”
“Dreaming, yes.” He released the massive hand.
The servant wore his heavy apron, and smelled of leather. Ethan breathed it in, remembering that smell at this time of year. “How is your work progressing?” he asked.
Aaron smiled as he plumped the pillows and shifted Ethan to his side. “Your healing naps be workin’ out real fine for me gettin’ everybody in shoes for the winter.”
“I can sew, Aaron. I used to mend the sails on my ship.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ethan looked at his hands. The calluses were fading, the summer color leaving them. They were becoming useless gentleman’s hands. “If any shoes need mending, if a strap breaks or some stitching bursts … Children grow out of shoes, don’t they? You might use my help, then, when I don’t sleep so damned much?”
“If’n you offered help, sir.”
“I do. If you please, Aaron.”
The servant shook his head. “There’s no
‘If you please
–ing’ me, sir. Don’t you be talking that way in front of your folk or they be sending you on back to the Frenchies, your remembers returned or not.”
“What am I to do?” Ethan heard himself shout. “Order you to make this terror of my own uselessness go away?”
“Easy, child. I was only just funnin’—”
“I am not a child! I am a man of twenty-two years. A man with a skill. I have a skill, God damn it!” What was he doing? Ethan wondered. Aaron, who could break him in two between those powerful hands, was cowering. Ethan lowered his voice. “I have an ungovernable temper as well. Forgive me.”
“Yes sir,” the servant said, as if he’d been given an order. Had he given one? Ethan took in a breath, and tried again. “There are all these new people inside me, Aaron. Son, brother, uncle, teacher.”
“But not cripple. That one you’ll be growing out of, sir. That’s what I been thinking on, whilst I work at my bench.”
Aaron pointed with his chin to the table piled with books and the Gibson sisters’ bright watercolor drawings. Beside them stood a pair of gleaming brown leather boots. Pride in his work shone from their craftsman’s dark eyes. “Bet you never seen the like!”
“They’re mine?”
Aaron laughed. “Won’t fit nobody else in this world around, sir! I
took especial care, on account of you ain’t had a decent pair since the last I made you, back in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and five. I done followed what Dr. Foster said before he left to tend Miss Judith’s daddy, too.”
“What did Dr. Foster say?”
“Oh, not nothing ‘bout boots, you can be sure! No, he mostly talk about that cage holding your leg steady, and how to keep you clean and still. ‘I expect Master Ethan knows plenty about still from bein’ on that slaver so many years,’ I told him, sure enough!
“Well, he talk about your hurt leg, sir. In that mournful way of his. Muscles ain’t been used, cramped space, bad food—all that I knows already from my grandmammy’s stories ’bout the slavers. Then our Mr. Jordan, he says something new. That bad leg, it’s rebroke, mending again, maybe straight and strong enough to hold you. But it be shorter than the other now, he says. Sets me to thinking. About after your bones mend. How I might help your legs hold you good and steady.”
Ethan looked at the right boot’s construction. Both heel and sole were about an inch thick, with an extra layer.
“I’ll work down the leather of that one,” Aaron continued, “to get you balanced, so’s you can walk, see?”
“Yes.”
“It’s for your bad leg only, sir. Don’t go mixing them boots up or you’ll get yourself one mean limp!”
“I’m a long way, even from limping,” Ethan said quietly.
He felt Aaron’s powerful hand at his shoulder. “I knows that, sir. But you ain’t havin’ them fever fits no more, are you?”
“No.”
“Dizziness left your head, didn’t it?”
“Yes. Just now—I was dreaming, not dizzy.”
“And dreams be good things. Favors from God.”
“Are they?”
“I believe so, sir. You always been a good dreamer.” His hand hovered around Ethan’s head scar, but he seemed to think better of touching it. He straightened the bedcovers instead. “And you done shed off your disrememberin’! You knows us all again. Next, I expect the cage comes off Dr. Foster’s work. So these here boots—they’ll sit here, ’minding you what all the mending time is for. I figure you needs something real, waiting.”
Ethan admired the clever craftsmanship. He saw himself pulling the boots on, and standing. His imagination was not sufficient for walking. But he did see himself stepping into a stirrup, and mounting a horse. He
could do that, without a blasted leg. “How does Cavalier fare, Aaron?” he asked. “Who rides him now?”
The servant was silent so long that Ethan wasn’t sure he’d heard. “Didn’t no one tell you about Cavalier?” Aaron finally whispered.
“Tell me what?” He refused to believe what was in the man’s eyes. “Aaron, you promised you’d take care of him.”
“I was helping the doctor with you.”
“What happened to Cavalier?” he whispered.
“Your brother shot him, sir.”
“No. No one shot him.”
“Master—”
“No one shot him, do you hear me!”
“Sayin’ that will not make it so, young master! You says you ain’t a child no more. Sure, you used to think I could move the stars through the sky for you, back when. Well, I can’t change what done happened. If I’m lookin’ at a man, he knows that.”
Ethan’s eyes steadied themselves on the fine tatted lace of his pillowcase as he clenched his jaw.
“Was it Winthrop?” he finally whispered.
“No, sir, the other. Master Clayton, sir.”
“Clayton. He smelled of gunpowder,” Ethan remembered.
“Said the horse was lame—”
“He wasn’t lame. Under his saddle—something was hurting him. A thistle, a thorn.”
“Maybe Master Clayton needed to blame the animal.”
“Pas mal! Merde!”
Ethan ground his teeth.
“You laying down a curse on your brother, sir?” Aaron whispered against Ethan’s rapid-fire French.
“No. I’m cussing.”
“Them ain’t pretty, like the ones you lay on your daddy, sir.”
“God’s blood. Cavalier. That’s why. My brothers, their wives,” Ethan realized, feeling equal parts of rage and fear, “they’re trying to kill me.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“But you think it.”
“I don’t think that, sir, no, sir!”
Ethan’s mind raced on. “You won’t leave my side when they’re here,” he accused. “And I caught you sniffing, tasting my food the one time Hester brought the tray. Liar!”
Ethan sensed a fire burning through the servant’s fear of him. A fire of indignation. “Miss Hester, she ground out too much pepper. Didn’t
want my Martha blamed when your daddy see you don’t touch your meat!”
This was a more worthy man than his two brothers put together, Ethan thought. “Who was your mother?” he demanded suddenly.
Aaron looked caught off-balance. The resonant timbre of the slave’s voice lost none of its power as its volume reduced to a whisper. “Hagar was, sir.”
Ethan closed his eyes in his effort to concentrate. “She wore black, always black, except for a cardinal’s feather, here.” He pressed two fingertips to the hair beside his own temple.
“My ma done passed over ’fore you weaned yourself from Miss Anne, Master Ethan. How is it you remember that?”
“And your father? Who was he?”
“Never said. Hagar raised me by her own self, sir.”
“And you are formed straight and tall and powerful—like my father in the dining-room portrait, my father in his prime. And despite your strength, your build, he kept you out of the fields, he allowed you a trade. Aubrey was following you in it. Now Micah is a fine smith. Your daughters are house servants. My father trusts you as no other. We’re brothers, aren’t we, Aaron?”
“Can’t rightly say, sir.”
“You were born before any of us. You’re the eldest.”
“I’m Hagar’s child, Master Ethan. Only hers.”
“No wonder you understand Winthrop and Clayton when I falter.” Ethan looked down at the hands that had ministered to his needs so gently. They were his father’s hands, on a finer man than his father would ever be. Ethan felt like a child beside him. A blustering, helpless child in a crippled man’s body. Not fit for anything, least of all Judith’s love. He never felt like this onboard the
Ida Lee
, or even the
Standard.
“Master Ethan. You have a right to your anger, it be righteous anger, if’n—” Aaron stopped abruptly, wiped his powerful hand across his mouth. “Lord Almighty, I ain’t ought be talking like this, I knows my place. You don’t, but I does!”
“Help me, Aaron.”
“I can’t. Black can’t testify against white, it ain’t lawful.”
“I don’t mean in court. I’ve had enough with courts, trials, laws. I need to stay alive. I need to get to Judith.”
“Listen, master—”
“Don’t call me that!” Ethan shouted, then ground his teeth together, cursing his temper, and that he was again using it against this man. “Not when we’re like this—alone,” he amended quietly.
“Young Ethan,” the slave said with difficulty, but pride in his eyes.
“Your brothers—it was maybe a stumble, a spill, they wanted, is what I’m thinking. Not the hurt you got. Master Clayton, he’s sorry. You see yourself how sorry—”
“For Betsy, perhaps. He almost had an innocent child’s blood on his hands. Not for me. He killed a fine horse. How does that make him sorry for anything?”
“It don’t. But it makes him a’feared maybe, sir.”
“Of what?”
“Of being found out. Master Clayton, he knows now he done wrong, not by some stranger trying to take your place here, no, sir. He caused harm to his own brother returned.”
“Brother! They never cared a whit for me, no matter what I did to please them. I’ve got to get out. I don’t belong. I never did.”
“Now, master, don’t be forgetting your poor mama, your sister, her little ones in your teachin’ care. They’s all your blood kin.”
“And you, Aaron. Aaron. Double A-R-O-N,” he said and saw his small hand guiding the servant’s mammoth one, teaching him to write in the dirt floor of the old first house of Windover Plantation. “You and your family are my kin.” Ethan’s expression grew wistful, remembering the quick minds of all his secret students. “Aubrey,” he realized suddenly, “Aubrey was my nephew, then, wasn’t he? My elder nephew. I wish I’d known.”
“Would not have changed anything between you, I don’t believe. You an’ our Aubrey, you’s were peas in a pod.” The black man looked away and spoke to the empty fireplace grate. “Ethan. Martha and me, we’s proud of the way you turning out by way of that French gentleman. Proud, like you was our own.”
“I am your own. And I’ll see you free. I swear on our common blood I’ll see you and yours free.”
Aaron reached out his powerful arm and bridged it to Ethan’s shoulder. “Them words, they got to stay in secret places. Like the place you taught us our letters, and numbers. In days which we have all forgot, ain’t we?”
“You didn’t—”
Aaron cast his big hand skyward, the way he used to, rarely, when Ethan was a child, to get his undivided attention. “We have all forgot,” he repeated. “On account of the late slave risings, and the law against us reading or writing, or any teachin’ us such like, we forgot. For all our sakes. You knows what I be sayin’, sir?”
“Oh. Yes.” Ethan shrugged sheepishly.
“That be a good thing.” Aaron squeezed Ethan’s shoulder. “Now,
when the doctor come back, and we work with your leg through the winter? The first of some changes comin’ after that, I do believe. A joinin’, maybe? With a powerful force to the North?”
Ethan felt himself color like a boy. “If I can win her.”
“You see I made these boots handsome, don’t you, sir? And no mournful color, neither. Them Quakers, they don’t wear no mournful colors, Miss Judith says. Them boots will help you find your way to Pennsylvania, I expect, sir, in the fullness of time.”
 
 
D
r. Foster joined Judith near the well. The scent of a Northern harvest was still in the air.
BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
2.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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