Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

The Randolph Legacy (26 page)

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy

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Judith tried to send him her vision of him, to make him understand the danger, to bring him back. But he only walked out more boldly. His shirt flared. She saw his initials embroidered on the hem.

Ethan swung her lantern in a graceful arc, adding it to the ones that shone from neighboring Quaker farms, pointing north. He was doing exactly what she’d been asked to do at the appointed hour. But he was not looking at the guiding pattern below, but at other lights. The ones that studded the blue-black sky.

“Fayette!” he called, laughing, into the night full of stars.
“Regardez!
Now I am master of the mizzenmast!”

He will fall now
, Judith thought, through the new green branches, past the old limbs, to the cold ground. The way Fayette had fallen.

The lantern slipped from his hand. She heard the tin facing crushed to the ground below, its light extinguished.

Ethan turned, stared at her, the mirth in his eyes weighted with sorrow. “I miss him, Judith,” he said, as if admitting a terrible secret.

“So do I,” she whispered, offering her hand.

He took it. His was cool, dry, with a faint tingle about it. She pressed it to her cheek, her neck, then lower, against her heart. It warmed there, at last. He kissed her temple.

“Would you care to tell me who we were signaling and for what purpose, Judith Mercer?”

Judith’s mouth closed in a firm line. “No.”

He would not know everything, this bright-minded man-child with too much pride, she decided.

He shrugged indifferently. Judith followed him down from the tree, though less nimbly, so that when she reached the soft moss around the tree’s roots, he was gone. She called out his name, whipped by her anger.

She heard his walking stick sifting over the spring ground to locate her lantern. Beside her again, he put the battered tin into her hands. She stared at it.

“It’s not so bad. I can hammer it back,” he offered, “first thing, at morning’s light.”

“This was not the cause of my distress.”

“No?” His voice was curious, teasing.

“No. I only direct it at the lantern, at you and your acrobatics. My distress is with myself tonight. I am caught in a cleft place, Ethan. Friends are not supposed to engage in subterfuge—anything that could not bear the light of day.”

“Well, it’s a good thing the fall of night is upon us, yes?”

“I ask thy forgiveness, Ethan Randolph.”

“Forgiveness? Did we do something wrong?”

“No! Not wrong! I—apologize for my anger.”

Another of his sweet, perplexed looks.

“And my ungovernable temper!”

He grinned. “I don’t think it’s yet spent itself,
ma chère.”

He was no Quaker convert. The adventurer, Prescott Lyman had called him. The third son of aristocratic Virginia planters is often the adventurer. His family was indulging him in his Quaker adventure. She
must have been mad to entertain the notion of telling him what he’d done from the top of the tree. He’d help form the string of guiding lights of an exodus of runaway slaves, perhaps from one of his insufferable brothers’ plantations. What would he have thought of that?

Judith tucked the lantern under her arm and walked blindly in the direction of the house. She heard his strong, three-step gait stumble. By the time she’d turned, he was directly behind her.

“Thee is so different now, Ethan,” slipped out.

His laughing countenance disappeared. “Why? Because I can walk? Because I can keep up with you? Almost,” he amended.

“No.”

“Did you like me better helpless, Judith?”

Before she could answer, Judith felt the child’s scream send a wave of shock through them both.

Throwing his walking stick beside the kitchen’s back stairs, Ethan
grabbed the rafters, propelling himself to the loft. Judith followed, praying the child had had a nightmare, but knowing he had not.

Blood spurted from Hugh’s nose and chin as his arms swung out wildly. A scurrying, there in the dark, shifting shadow. “Ethan!” the boy cried out. “Don’t let it at Judith!”

The rat was poised beside Judith’s skirts. It leaped. Ethan reached to his boot top, threw. His knife entered the rat’s belly in midair. The creature thudded against the buckwheat barrel, then fell lifeless to the floorboards.

She stared at it in stunned silence.

“Did thee see, Judith?” Hugh proclaimed. “Did thee see that?”

The rat’s death throes had been so brief that it was already still, under the straight-blade dagger. She felt the cold sweat run down her back. Ethan’s knife became the weapon that had lodged in her mother twenty years ago. Judith fought the purple spots bursting before her eyes.

Ethan caught her arm, pulled her close. “It’s over,” he told her.

“Yes,” she answered, sounding vague, even to herself.

“We must help Hugh now, Judith.”

She nodded.

He pressed his warm lips against her cold ones. Better. He drew out a folded handkerchief from his waistcoat, the one now buttoned up over her nightgown. Warm. Would she die without his warmth? Judith wondered, still caught in the horror of that night. His eyes were steady, vigilant. She needed them. He took her shaking hand and led her to the boy in the bed.

“Head back, Hugh,” he instructed gently, staunching the blood flowing from the boy’s nose.

“Is the rat all dead?” Hugh asked.

“All dead.”

“Could I see him all dead? With thy fine knife stuck in him?”

“Later.” Ethan turned to Judith. “I’ll help him downstairs. Fetch your father,” he instructed.

Judith reached the stairs as Ethan’s strong arms lifted the boy from his blood-spattered sheets.

“Why did you kiss our Judith, Ethan?” she heard Hugh ask.

“Because she needed kissing. Head back.”

The night air finally cleared Judith’s mind.
Duty
. Not these thoughts of her mother’s wounds, testimony to Esther Mercer’s efforts to save the little ones.
Duty
. To Hugh, not the little ones, so still, asking no questions about kissing. Judith’s lungs were bursting when she returned, her father close behind.

H
ugh sat on the kitchen table by a bright lamp, regaling his sister and stepfather with the story of his rescue. Prescott, his hands caught behind his back in a white-knuckled grip, watched as Ruth daubed Ethan’s water-soaked handkerchief on the boy’s wounds.

Judith realized that neither Ethan nor she had thought to call Prescott Lyman; only Eli and his remedies. As if they were Hugh’s family, not he. It was a vanity. It was presumptuous, prideful. Where was Ethan?

She smiled at the little boy. “Well, my valiant protector looks sprightly,” she observed.

“Keeping still has been his greatest trial,” Ruth said, peeved.

Ethan descended the back stairs with the bloodied sheets and a brown paper package, his eyes focused on its contents with a grim, set look. Prescott Lyman had shoved him away from Hugh’s care, Judith thought, had given him cleaning duty.

“Ethan says Monsieur Fayette taught him how to throw a knife when he was on the high seas!” Hugh announced. “But he says ship rats were not so big!”

Eli smiled. “Indeed?” He handed a small medicinal envelope to his attending sister. “If thou will place a mustard plaster, Ruth, Judith and I must visit with our rat catcher and the remains.”

Judith followed her father to the hearth. Ethan opened the paper wider to reveal the brown rat. It had small ears and coarse fur. Ethan turned the animal with the blade of his gleaming knife, then, without a word of warning, neatly eviscerated it from its neck, through the wound in its belly, to the base of its tail. He used the knife’s blade to spread the skin aside.

“Healthy?” he asked her father.

Eli inspected. “Appears so, son.”

A smile relieved some of the worry from Ethan’s features. “But why would a fat, healthy rat attack Hugh like that, Eli?”

“He could smell, but not get into the stored provisions, perhaps.”

Behind them, Hugh cleared his throat. “Stay still,” his sister insisted.

“I cannot.” He pushed her hand away. “I must tell you all. Help me, Judith.”

Judith approached. For the first time since his ordeal began, the boy was crying. She took his hand. “What is it, Hugh?”

He stared at their clasped hands. “I found the molasses candy which Ruth and I were forbidden to eat. In thy saddlebags, under our bed, Ethan,” he said in a small, repentant voice. “I ate two pieces while thee was gone out tonight. The rat smelled it on me, I’m sure. Do not worry. He was not rabid. I am heartily sorry, Ethan, Father.”

Ethan laughed out his relief. “The candy. Yes, drawn to the candy. He must have thought he’d found a great molasses swamp in you!” He caught up Judith’s free hand and pressed it to his cheek. She opened her fingers, glided them down the plane of his face.

Prescott Lyman frowned. “There are ladies present,” he said. “Perhaps thee would clothe thyself now, Friend?”

Ethan looked down at his flowing shirt, opened nearly to his breastbone. His relieved elation turn into chagrin. He released her, turned, and mounted the stairs.

“He tries so hard to honor us, Prescott.” Eli voiced the words in Judith’s angry heart in a kinder tone than she could have used.

Their host lifted Ethan’s bloodied knife from the hearth. “Friends, this is not for hunting or butchering. This is a weapon.”

“Used with care, I’m sure,” her father countered.

Prescott Lyman’s eyes returned to the rat. “And precision. How
well do you know this man, Judith Mercer?” he demanded. “Must I be concerned about placing him in the same sleeping space as my son?”

Judith felt her anger. “The very notion of thy concern is unwarranted.”

Her father placed his hand on her arm. “I am grateful our young Washington intervened between that sweet-loving rodent and the possibility of more suffering for Hugh.”

Their host granted them a smile that reminded Judith of many he’d bestowed on Ethan.
He thinks my father indulges me,
she realized.
In what—my Virginia adventure?

“Eli, thou calls Ethan Randolph by a name he used aboard ship a year ago. That man must bear little resemblance to this one.”

“His essence remains. Fired by his suffering, informed by his past, now that his veil of memory has lifted.”

Judith watched the hostility in Prescott Lyman. He had been kind to them. Perhaps too kind, between the cabin he’d had built for Eli and his solicitude in following her every household suggestion. It had pleased her, this home and its lovely children, in her own country. But it had put her in mind of her own farm, before that night. She had accepted too much, she realized.

Ethan descended the back stairs, dressed in a coat she hadn’t seen before, of dark blue wool. Plain, but not Quaker-like. A double cravat and a vest of silk-brocaded silver stripes covered every trace of linens underneath, though the scent of starch told her he’d changed his shirt also. He was hatless, his long hair combed back from the peak at his brow. He said nothing, but wrapped the rat’s body in its brown paper and headed for the door.

Hugh left his sister’s side and tugged at his arm. “Ethan? Where does thee go?”

“To bury the rat, Hugh.”

“Will others come to our bed, to the loft?”

The dark petulance left Ethan’s face as he crouched beside the boy. “Not if Grayneck beds down with us. She’ll keep the rats away.”

“But Grayneck likes the kitchen.”

“Then we must convince her that our quarters are better.”

“How?”

The shared-secret smile. For Hugh, this time, Judith thought, with a stab of envy. “How?” Ethan echoed the boy. “Why, with the benefits that come with changing her mind.”

“What are they? When shall we do this?”

Ethan touched the cheek beside the plastered chin.

“Tomorrow,” he promised.

“After school?”

“Yes.”

Ethan stood. Ruth Lyman stopped him again before he reached the door. “I fear thy fine handkerchief may be ruined, Friend Ethan.”

Judith heard Hugh’s exasperated sigh. But Ethan remained patient, though the brown paper sagged under its bloody burden. “I have many more,” he assured the girl. “My mother thinks a proper gentleman must always have three or four on his person. So she packed a dozen for me.” Ethan rolled his eyes in Hugh’s direction.

Hugh laughed. “Is thy mother kind and beautiful, Ethan? Like Judith?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I wish our Judith was my mother.”

“I know, Hugh,” Ethan whispered, before hastening through the doorway and into the night.

Judith felt misery descend on her shoulders. Ethan, her Ethan, after ten years on the open sea, had understood what she, on her own home ground, had not. God surely had a sense of humor akin to Fayette’s. Her father took her hand, held it in his comforting warmth. Why did she not see the growing expectations of these dear children? Judith understood burdens. How could a family that had offered to relieve so many succeed in making her feel so weighted?

“Judith, Eli,” Prescott Lyman proclaimed suddenly, pulling her out of her thoughts. “I have the answer!”

“Answer, Friend Prescott?”

Prescott Lyman shook as if palsied. “I am being called upon by these children that God put under my care. I am humbled by their wisdom. It brings no anger, no resentment. Praise God, it makes me as happy as a child!” A chortled giggle escaped him. “Blessed moment!”

Judith linked arms with her father before he offered the farmer a hand.

“Speak thy heart, Friend,” Eli said quietly.

“I have not welcomed this man who has brought joy and protection to my household and family!” he proclaimed, looking at the door. “Should I do it now? Eli, Judith?”

Judith stepped back, she was so startled by the change in Prescott’s usual slow and deliberate demeanor. Even Hugh and Ruth clung to each other.

Prescott Lyman broke from her father’s grasp, then turned. He took Judith’s hands, the way Ethan had done, when first he came. The energy she’d felt then now reversed itself. She was so weakened she could barely stand.

“Judith, will thee place my poor nipped chick back under his covers?”

“Yes, of course,” she breathed out.

He released her. “I shall do as I am bid by my Inner Light. I shall return his weapon, and help our new chick recover his wounded dignity this night! I shall follow my heart!”

“T
he ground is hard still.”

Ethan recognized the voice. He kept his eyes on his task. “Yes.”

“Not like in Virginia.”

Ethan grunted, hoping that would pass as a response. He wished Prescott Lyman would leave him to complete the task alone.

“Thee has chosen the wrong instrument, Friend. I’ll break the earth with my spade. Then thy work will not be so difficult.”

Ethan looked up, saw the spade at the ready in the man’s hands. He threw Eli’s gardening tool down. “I can’t even dig a hole properly?” he muttered.

“Ethan, Ethan, where could thee have learned how? The Atlantic? On a plantation where a gentleman never soils his hands with labor?”

Prescott Lyman’s tone was patient, as Eli’s was when they worked with the plants and seedlings. Still, he did not trust it. Ethan picked up his shovel. “I’m sorry, sir. No, not ‘sir,’ but Friend.”

“I have not thanked thee for bringing thy youth and life to my too-sober household.”

“Life?”

“I’ve had a revelation, a vision. Has Judith instructed thee in this? Does thee know the nature of revelations?”

“Yes.”

“I must follow mine. I’ve let my own distrust interfere with welcoming thee with the full measure of my heart. I’ve poisoned myself to thee, Ethan, because of the love I hold for her.”

Ethan put his back into his task of hauling away the dirt Prescott Lyman was breaking into clumps. He didn’t want to speak to the Quaker farmer about Judith. Not while in his best suit of clothes, the Virginia planter’s spoiled third son, digging a grave for a dead rat.

Prescott Lyman went on. “Tonight I finally saw in her eyes what I had feared. She has chosen thee.”

Hole. Deep enough? Rat, get the rat in the hole. Ethan did so without ceremony. Blood smeared his palm. Wary. Be wary of this man.

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy

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