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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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“Papa, what is thy source of such amusement?” she demanded.
He sighed elaborately, for a Quaker. “Whenever I think about settling these old bones on a small farm, events intervene to tell me it’s not our will but the Creator’s that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.”
“That’s prettily said, Papa!”
“Shakespeare said a version of it before me, sweetling.”
“Thou is not reading that English … playwright!” she said with mock menace in her voice.
Eli laughed. “Not since my Fighting Quaker days. Not since I was welcomed back, repentant, at Meeting. But some turns of phrase have lasted, here.” He tapped the side of his head as his eyes went wistful. Judith cherished this look that recalled her father before she was born, before the horror that had changed both their lives forever.
His wistful expression transformed itself back to familiar Quaker purpose. He smiled. “I feel a mission, Judith. I will, as ever, be standing by in wonder, thy humble assistant.”
“But, Papa, between this dream and these strange men, what am I being called upon to do?”
“I don’t feel that is the source of thy agitation, daughter. Consider this—Traveling Friend Judith Mercer is piqued.”
“Piqued?”
“The tables have been turned. Thou, who has astounded people everywhere with thy ability to see into the darkest corners of their hearts, are now being called upon to take guidance from a young man who is comforted by the same vision that frightens thee. Whoever says the Creator has no humor, eh, Judith?”
“Wake up,
petit general.
Your
toilette
awaits you.”
Washington shifted in his hammock. He counted the five bells of the night watch. “Too early. Leave me alone, Fayette,” he grumbled.
“
Allons! Allons!
You must finish mending that sail for your ancient papa.”
Washington opened his eyes. The familiar, child’s fear—do not leave me!—stung him. “You are not old, Fayette,” he told his friend.
“Best to hope not, while I have the razor at your throat.”
Washington focused on the steaming rags, the worn strop, and gleaming metal. “
Non. Allons donc!
No shave,” he declared firmly.
“What? You proclaim undying love for a woman you will not so much as shave for?”
Washington placed his lame leg over the edge of his hammock.
“I talked with the black people, Fayette,” he said. “They promised not to disturb Judith Mercer’s sleep anymore.”
“Leaving room for thoughts of you.”
Washington frowned. “She will sleep now, in the night, I think. She is not an owl, like me.”
“Come, before all the heat is gone from these towels.” Fayette eased him out of the hammock, carried him into the candle’s light.
Washington sensed his friend’s strained back. Was he too great a burden? How could that be? He was more than twenty years old, Fayette said. Surely he had stopped growing by now. He must eat less.
Fayette lowered him to the damp floorboards, propping him against an overturned shot box. Washington felt his face being swaddled in steaming rags.
“Why don’t ladies like beards, Fayette?” he asked, enjoying the muffled, dreamlike tone the rags gave his voice.
The Frenchman removed their warmth and brushed the lathered soap along his jaw. The friction against his stubbly beard made foam. “Why not ask our beautiful Quakeress tonight?”
“Do you truly think she will come again?”
“Do you want to look like an unkempt scarecrow if she does?”
Washington grunted as the razor slid under his ear.
“She is beautiful, is she not, Fayette?” he asked.
“Mais oui.”
“Why does she not know this?”
“She knows it. Religious women are obliged to pretend they do not.”
“Was Clarisse religious?”
“Clarisse?” Fayette laughed. “Hardly. Why?”
“She used to call out names of her angels and saints when we loved each other. Why do you stop? Am I finished, then, Fayette?”
His friend’s voice was tired. “You are so far from finished that I sometimes despair,” he said. Washington felt the blade sweep up his throat. “Now listen to me,” Fayette demanded. “You must not talk of Clarisse before Judith Mercer.”
“Why not? Clarisse said women do not see the world as men do. They do not always assume a crippled mind or heart when a body is so. A woman values a man who is good and gentle and has hands that can do those things she showed me, to cause us both delight.”
“Washington, Clarisse’s favors were bought for the purpose of initiating you into your manhood. You were only with her three hours, for the love of God!”
“And I could not even speak at first, I was so afraid of her. But by the end—”
“This is not the same. You must keep your hands off Judith Mercer.”
“It was she tending me when you came upon us, I tell you! Because of the blood, the small wound. And she was brave, like Clarisse, when she hid me under her cloak, no? I did not touch her, not in that way, Fayette, though my fingers ached there, so close against her shirt.”
“
Gown
. Women wear gowns.”
“Gown. Skin, just beneath. Soft, fragrant, how could I not notice? But I did not touch her, I swear it to you.”
“Do not swear.”
“Why not?”
“Judith Mercer’s religion forbids swearing.”
Washington laughed. “But between ourselves, may we not—?”
“Enough. Enough with your infernal questions!”
“Fayette, you are as nervous as a cat. Perhaps I should stay below tonight. I can finish mending the sail by candlelight.”
“After my barber’s skill has produced such good results without so much as a cut?
Zut alors!
I should have left you looking like the ungrateful
American barbarian you are. Put a drop of this at your neck and wrists.”
“What is—” Washington drew back with a start when Fayette pulled the cork from the small bottle. “Clove oil? I must smell like I have a toothache to win this woman?”
“No, like you don’t live in the bowels of a leaking frigate. And pull this through that mane before I shave your head as well.”
Washington looked down at the wide-toothed whalebone comb that Fayette had slapped into his hand. “It’s for nothing. She will sleep dreamless. She will forget us.”
“Have you become some visionary seer now? You must add that title to ‘friend of slave
revenants
and dolphins and lover of all the women of the wide world around’! Soon you will not desire mere mortals such as I about your grand personage.”
The silence crackled between the two men. Finally, the quiet voice, the one akin to Washington’s as a child, spoke.
Do you love her, too
? it asked.
Is that why you are acting so strangely
?
Washington watched the older man walk out of the single candle’s circle of light. He sat on the mahogany chair with the gold filigree that was their only piece of furniture besides the rough shelves. The shelves held Washington’s ships and their books. They’d both preferred books to any other luxuries, even tobacco, until five years ago, on Fayette’s shore leave in Lima.
Washington remembered laughing when he saw the French revolutionary drag his throne into their cramped quarters. Since that time the chair had become the place where Fayette sat when he needed privacy. Washington had learned not to violate his elder’s time in the chair.
Now Fayette looked stunned and defeated there. His fine head of sun-bleached hair was buried between gnarled and scar-riddled fingers that could no longer climb the mast, but ministered tenderly to the new mast-men’s injuries. Washington could not see his friend’s green eyes. As a boy he used to fancy Fayette’s eyes belonged to the great, wild cat he became in the dark. When the cat was there, Washington could sleep well, protected.
The man that the frightened boy had become pulled himself quietly toward the leg of Fayette’s gold-leaf chair. He combed his hair out of his eyes, then wiped the trickle of sweat that slid down his clean-shaven face.
“C’est vrai, mais oui.”
No response. He tried English. “You are right, of course. I am a worthy subject of your despair. My time with one woman has made me a crowing cock, a donkey braying.
Clémence
?”
The older man sat back, staring out into the small space that had confined them both for a decade.
“I will not talk so much, but listen to your good counsel, and follow your precepts. Do not be angry with me.”
The spines of their books, the bleached-bone gleam of Washington’s miniature ships, pulsed through the darkness. The seventh bell of the night watch sounded dimly from above. Finally, Fayette let his hand rest lightly on the thicket of dark hair hovering contritely at his knee.
“I am not angry with you,
petit général
,” he said.
“Bon. Très bien. Tu es un—”
“English—speak English only! Have you forgotten your own language? Your contractions?”
“Contract—?”
“Don’t! Won’t! Di’n’t!”
“Di’n’t?”
“You think in French, I see it!”
“What harm is there in that?”
“Your own people will take you for a foreigner.”
“You are my people, Fayette,” Washington said softly, “only you.”
“What? You birthed yourself from my head, then?”
Washington grinned. “Like Athena?”
“Athena, there! You knew of the goddess Athena before me.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know!”
“But you do, addlebrain.”
The name stung at Washington like a whipping northwest wind. He folded his arms. “Keep your insults to yourself,” he grunted.
Fayette smiled, looking smugly satisfied. “There. That part of you should remain French.”
“What part?”
“Your pride,
mon général
.”
 
 
T
he leather thimbles absorbed another assault. Why was he jabbing himself so much? The lantern’s light was good. There was no need for anticipation, for nervousness. She was not going to come.
Washington worked more quickly, hoping to finish within an hour. He’d lose himself in his shipbuilding then. A ketch. That would be next. He had sketched designs for it, a miniature of the one he’d seen merrily rocking fore and aft in the harbor at Galway Bay. Where were those drawings? What would he use to represent the stout chain of the ketch’s mainstay?
The soft, pearly gray of Judith Mercer’s cloak touched his arm.
“I have brought mending. May I work with thee?”
He lifted his head, but couldn’t find his voice in either language. He only managed to touch the place beside him on the bench. She sat there, and opened her deep-scarlet cloth bag.
Its color reminded him of Clarisse’s final petticoat, the one that swept by his face as she danced for him. She had promised to come again, but she had not come. Instead, she had married a merchant who could give her a fine life. He must not think of Clarisse, Fayette said, because she was happy, and did not think of him. Still, she had promised. Were her other words lies, too?
Promises and swearing offended this woman sitting close enough for him to smell the salt sea air mingling with her scent. Her scent was more tart tonight, from something she liked to eat. Lemons, he thought. It was offset by what she pressed into her moist places—dried roses. The thought of those moist places was making him hard.
Merde!
His body held such dominion over him. Washington returned to his work with a will.
After an eternity of minutes, he glanced not at Judith Mercer but at the white shirt—or was it a gown?—in her lap. “Good seam,” he said, feeling every inch the idiot.
“That is high praise.”
Her cape’s hood fell back. Her wondrous hair was hidden inside a plain white cap tonight. It reminded Washington of the kind the women wore selling their tulips along the dock of Amsterdam. He wished he could find this woman one of those flowers, a red one that would send the reflection of its color to her lips. Moving lips.
“ … Am I, Washington?”
“Are you?” he echoed, confused.
“Distracting thee? From thy work?”
“No, no. I am—I’m finished. Fayette will help me fold the sail later, at the end of the watch.”
“Where is Fayette?”
“Below. He often sleeps now. He works very hard all day, and says I snore. I don’t believe it. He likes to be rid of me for a little while, I think. Did your dream return?”
“No. Did thou speak to thy—friends?”
He grinned. “They told me you had opened your heart to them and listened. They would have allowed you to sleep from now on anyway.”
“My thanks, just the same.”
“You’re welcome. May I see your needle?”
She handed it to him. He held it close to his eyes.
“So fine and sharp,” he marveled.
“These needles have quite spoiled me, I’m afraid. I grew so accustomed to their delicacy, their ease and precision, I indulged myself in a lifetime supply before leaving London. Not very patriotic, my father scolds. He has succumbed to no English finery, but I—” She frowned. Her lower lip was more full than the upper one. Washington imagined the feel of those lips on his own.
“Forgive me, I do not usually prattle on so about frivolous things,” she was saying now.
“Art is not frivolous.”
“My mending is art?”
“Yes.”
She laughed a full, musical laugh then. Soprano. No, deeper. Alto soprano. Washington lost himself in its sound. He wanted it all for himself, not for those on the outskirts of their lantern’s circle of light—the masters of the Midwatch, the seamen throwing dice in the shadows, the ones aloft among the rigging. “May I finish the seam, Judith?” he asked. “My hands are clean, see?” He removed the leather thimbles from his left fingers to demonstrate.
Curiosity joined the mirth in her ever-changing gray eyes. “So they are. Not a trace of tar tonight, Friend Washington. And thou are scented somehow—savory?”

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