Dawnlands, page 31
She gave him her impudent smile. “The best thing you can do for her is leave me with her,” she said. “No one else makes her happy.”
“I am glad she can find any happiness,” he said, still not rising to the bait of her teasing. “And you may stay with her. I don’t want you at my home, not even at my end.”
He took her gloved hand and raised it. He barely touched the perfumed leather with his lips. “Good-bye,” he said formally. “I doubt we will meet again.”
“Not in this world,” she said, as if his death meant nothing to her.
“I will be with her in the next,” he said with certainty.
She laughed in his face. “Allora! You are very sure. But anyway… your will is unchanged? I have my dower as agreed? If you do… if you happen to…”
He laughed as he turned and climbed the steps into the carriage. “My dear, you never disappoint me!” he told her. “It is as we agreed. If I should die this summer, you will have my name, the Dower House for life, and your dower.”
She flushed. “The entail?”
“The estate goes to my cousin. Matteo gets nothing.”
“This house?” She gestured to the grand London house.
“Goes to my cousin. I assume—as I have always assumed—that Matteo’s father will provide for him, or you will.”
“Oh! His father?” she said smiling, as if it were a private joke. “Would you like to know his name? To take to your grave?”
“Whoever he is does not matter to me anymore.”
The footman folded the steps into the carriage and closed the door. She stepped forward, and James lowered the glass of the window so that she could whisper.
“You have no jealousy?” she asked. “Is that why you won’t leave your own stepson a bequest—what about the house? Avery House? You could leave it to him and prove to me that you are not jealous?”
He shook his head, leaning back against the silk squabs of the carriage. “I have only loved one woman, and that was never you. I feel nothing—no jealousy, nothing. And I won’t leave Avery House to Matteo, for—whoever he is—he is not an Avery, and I respect my name.”
Pale with irritation, she stepped back, and James raised the window at once. The footman swung up behind, and the coach moved away.
HATTON GARDEN, LONDON, SPRING 1686
The two girls, Mia and Gabrielle, escorted by their cousin Matthew, arrived at Rob’s front door, as the waiting footman threw it open.
Mia turned on the step to Matthew. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked.
Hester appeared in the hall behind her. “Oh yes, do come in, Cousin Matthew.”
Matthew hovered, torn between wanting to stay with his cousins and fear of intruding.
“I don’t—”
“She never comes down in the mornings,” Gabrielle told him. “It’s only Hester and her governess in the mornings. And he’s always out.”
Matthew grinned at her quickness in understanding him, pulled off his hat, and stepped into the hall.
“Come into the library,” Hester invited them.
The three visitors followed Hester down the hall to the large paneled room at the back of the house where tall windows overlooked the gardens. Matthew looked around, seeing the walls of books, the bright fire in the grate, the jug of lemon water, the biscuits, and the glasses. “This is nice,” he said.
“Better than your little crow’s nest?” Mia teased him. Turning to Hester, she said: “Matthew has a bedroom where he is supposed to study at the top of a winding stair at Lincoln’s Inn. He’s something between a clerk and a kestrel.”
“I wasn’t allowed in here at all till you two came,” Hester said.
“Why not?” Gabrielle asked.
Hester opened her mouth but could not embark on the lengthy explanation of why her mama did not want her educated beyond the limits of genteel ignorance. “There’s no point,” was all she said.
Matthew understood, but the Venice-born girls did not. “You need to be able to calculate at least,” said Gabrielle, the Venice trader’s daughter.
“And to read a map, and speak languages,” said Mia. “At least Italian and French.”
Hester flushed. “Mama says that elegant manners are more important than books,” she said. “And Miss Prynne teaches them in the parlor.”
“Oh stuff!” Mia said.
Matthew frowned at her. “That’s not elegant speech for a young lady.”
She gave him a cheeky smile. “I don’t want to be elegant; I want to be well read.”
He gestured to the heavy grandeur of the room. “But here, Mia… and with…” His gesture took in Hester. “…you have to…”
“Are you going to finish any of those sentences?” she challenged him.
“He means to say that you may not corrupt me with your careless speech when in my father’s library,” Hester said solemnly, causing them all to collapse into giggles, Mia clapping her hand over her mouth and Matthew waving his hands at them: “Hush! Hush!”
“Not corrupt!” Gabrielle hissed, catching her breath. “Not corrupt, Hester. That’s much worse. We’re just”—she looked for the words—“making you more commonplace,” she finished.
“Less ladylike and more sensible,” Mia added.
Matthew nodded. “And you shouldn’t,” he told the two older girls. “Hester here has been raised very carefully, as her father wants. You shouldn’t come in here and laugh at that.”
Hester flushed, looking up at him. “I’m not dull.”
She caught his attention. “I didn’t mean that! You’re not dull, Cousin Hester. Actually, you’re rather exquisite.”
She flushed a rosy red, and Gabrielle and Mia looked at her with new attention.
“Anyway, we don’t come in and laugh at ridiculous things, truly we don’t,” Mia assured Matthew. “We just do our lessons, and she likes that—don’t you, Hester? She was lonely in this big house with nobody but her governess to talk to—anybody would be—only seeing her ma in the afternoons, and her pa out with his patients all day. We’re company. And anyway, we’re family.”
Hester swallowed a rush of emotion. “I like them very much,” she assured Matthew. “And of course we’re all family. I’m going to ask my papa if I can visit the wharf. Would you take me to visit, sometimes?”
“I shouldn’t even be here,” Matthew said, more and more uncomfortable at these challenges to the silent authority of the house. “I’m only supposed to bring them to the door.”
“Are you going on to Lincoln’s Inn?” Gabrielle asked him. “Staying there tonight?”
“Yes, but I’ll meet you at the Holborn Stairs to walk you here on Thursday,” he told her, and saw a little color rise in her cheek. “Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“All right,” she said.
“Please come in, on Thursday morning too,” Hester told him.
“Thank you,” Matthew said awkwardly. “But perhaps I…”
“Why ever not?” Mia challenged him. “We’re all cousins, aren’t we?”
He looked from one young face to another. “Not really,” he said. “You three are cousins, but I’m only your foster cousin. So I shouldn’t visit Hester unless her father invites me. And not without a chaperone.”
Hester’s face cleared at once. “Oh, I’ll ask Papa to invite you,” she said simply.
“What’s wrong with that?” Mia demanded, seeing he was not reassured.
“I don’t know what he’ll say,” he confessed. “It’s not as if I was really a member of the family.”
Gabrielle gently touched his shoulder, as if she could not stop herself. “Doesn’t matter to us,” she told him. “You can still walk us here. If we have to say good-bye on the doorstep, then at least we’ve seen you.”
“But if he only walks you, then when will I see him?” Hester asked plaintively.
Mia looked from one to the other. “You’re in demand,” she said to Matthew with a knowing smile. “A seller’s market.”
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SPRING 1686
Johnnie’s trade goods for Barbados were packed and ready for shipping at Reekie Wharf. Sarah had sent a new consignment of silk and china from Venice and a collection of small furniture pieces, writing boxes, potpourri boxes, trinket boxes, and sandalwood chests for hats and gloves.
“They’re hard to pack safely,” Alys said, going through the cargo manifest. “She’s put them inside one another wherever she could and sewed them into oilcloth. But you’ll have to keep them dry, or they’ll warp on the way.”
Johnnie nodded.
“And your grandmother has made up a stock of tisane bags, and put up some seeds of herbs for you to sell. She’s sent cases of bottles from the stillroom at Foulmire.”
“Do we have any of my uncle Ned’s herbs left? The sassafras?”
“Yes. I’ve given you a barrel. But I don’t know what they grow themselves.”
“They’ve turned over the whole island to sugar,” Johnnie told her. “That’s what one of the sugar merchants told me. They grow nothing but sugar on every field. It pays so well that they neither make nor grow anything for themselves. That’s why it’s so profitable for us to trade there.”
“Until the crop fails on them,” she said sourly. “Like the coffee did. Like the tobacco did.”
“Sugar won’t fail,” Johnnie promised. “Everyone wants it, and only the Sugar Islands can grow it. Only slaves can brew it. The wealth of the planters has to be seen to be believed, he was telling me.”
“The great men are wealthy, but what about the others?”
Johnnie checked. “You’re not becoming a Leveller like your uncle, are you, Ma? If there weren’t rich and poor, how would any of us make a profit?”
“There’s such a thing as usury profit,” she said. “Grievous profit.”
“I’m going to put my profit to good use,” he protested. “I’ll buy Rowan out of her service, and she can manage my warehouse for me, the profit will set her free and make us a living.”
“You won’t stay there till her time is up,” she said flatly. “Not for ten years. Say you won’t. I didn’t raise you to see you go overseas to a fever coast for half your life.”
“No, no,” he assured her. “I’ll come home as soon as I’ve found her. Then I’ll go out again when it’s time to fetch her. We’re traders!” Johnnie told her. “We’re bound to go where the market goes. And there’s nowhere in the world richer than Barbados.”
ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1686
The court was in a solemn mood, attending the opening of yet another new chapel near the palace, this one commissioned and sanctified by the papal nuncio, Ferdinand d’Adda. A long procession of clerics and priests preceded the king and queen down the aisle. The choristers took their places in the beautifully carved wooden choir stalls, the priests behind the gilt rood screen, the king and queen in thrones on the chancel steps, the court in strict order of precedence in the pews: ladies before the lady chapel where a statue of Mary smiled down at them, gentlemen behind the king on the west side.
Only a few members of court were brave enough to refuse. Lord Middleton prided himself on his ignorance; Lord Peterborough, ostentatiously crossing himself, would keep his pew in his parish Protestant church, St. Margaret’s Westminster, so that he could return to the fold at any time. Anyone who wanted royal favor or even a place at court rushed to be baptized into the faith. Even Nell Gwynne, who had called herself the “Protestant whore,” now attended the royal chapel, knowing very well that a woman has to work to keep the favor of a king; on her back or on her knees alike.
Livia—doubly blessed in being born Roman Catholic and being the queen’s most intimate friend—knelt behind her royal mistress, the picture of devotion, her gaze raking the congregation but her attention always returning, anxiously, to the queen at her prie-dieu. She was proudly upright, her eyes on the monstrance; but Livia knew that it was only determination that held Mary Beatrice up through long ceremonial occasions like this one.
Livia thought that the royal observers who predicted that the queen would die and that James would marry the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany were probably right. And then, thought Livia grimly, if my own husband dies and leaves me as the Dowager Lady Avery, with nothing but a miserable dower house in Yorkshire—what future is there for me? My walk behind her coffin will be the last time I am close to the Queen of England. A new one from Tuscany is not going to need me to hold her in bed at night while she cries for loneliness. I will have nothing for myself, and nothing to give Matteo. Can it be that I have done all that I have done, to win nothing more than Foulmire Priory for him? For the woman my husband loved instead of me? Have I been through all this, to end up as a respectable widow, scraping a living on my dower, in a damp manor house on the edge of a bottomless mire?
REEKIE WHARF, LONDON, SUMMER 1686
The whole family turned out to see Johnnie off on his great adventure. The young man, who had said that he would never stray from his desk at the East India Company, was leaving his country for the first time. His ship, the Bonaventure, stopped at Reekie quay to load his goods. Alinor with Ned, seated in a chair from the parlor, were already on the quayside to say their farewells; Alys, Matthew, Gabrielle, and Mia were lined up beside them. Even Rob took a wherry downriver from his patients to shake Johnnie’s hand and give him a bottle of laudanum for pain and fever.
Matthew glanced at Mia. “I should like to travel,” he said. “Maybe go to Italy, maybe see your home?”
She shrugged. “It takes forever and you have only a cramped cabin and when there’s a storm, you are thrown around like a pea in a rattle.”
“But to see the world!”
“I swear all you see are waves.”
Matthew stepped up to Johnnie. “Good luck, Uncle Johnnie,” he said, slapping him on the back. “Good luck.”
Johnnie laughed, hugged Matthew, kissed his nieces, and paused before his mother, Alys.
“Now here’s the manifest,” she said, businesslike, handing over the list of his cargo. “All safely stowed.”
“Ma.” He hesitated.
“Godspeed,” she said tightly. “Send us a message as soon as you’re safe into Bridge.”
“I will, I will.”
Her face was set firm against emotion, her jaw clamped so that she did not cry out to him not to go.
“I love you, Ma,” he said simply. “I’ll come home again.”
“God bless,” she said shortly, hugged him, and stepped back.
Ned could stretch out a hand but could not frame words. His dark eyes stared up at Johnnie as if there was much that he would say.
“I’ll find her,” Johnnie promised. “I’ll find her, and I’ll make sure that she’s safe. When she’s served her time, if she wants it, I’ll marry her and bring her home. If she wants something else, she can say. She’ll be free.”
Ned nodded, his hand tried to grip.
“You can trust me.”
Johnnie kissed his grandmother. “Grandmother…”
“I’ve packed you a case of herbs for the journey,” she said. “Don’t drink the water anywhere that the air smells rank. And boil all the water that you use.”
“I know.”
She looked at him, as if she would see past the quayside and the waiting ship to his future. “Good-bye, my dearest boy,” she said solemnly. “We won’t meet again.”
He checked. “Grandmother!”
She smiled at him, quite unafraid. “I think not, Johnnie. But you remember this—great wealth or position is not a right, and you don’t deserve it however hard you work. It is chance, and the labor of others, that brings a man wealth. Don’t forget that others have earned your fortune for you. Never imagine you deserve it.”
“I will! I promise! I’ll remember this. And I’ll make a fortune and bring it home to you!” He bent down so that Ned could hear his promise. “I’m going as a trader, not a planter. I’m going to free her, not to enslave anyone. Don’t fear for me.”
Alinor nodded and held Ned’s hand as Johnnie ran up the gangplank and they loaded it behind him; the girls and Matthew waved. Johnnie stood at the rail and waved to them until the barges drew the ship into mid-river, and then he threw a triumphant salute to the shore and went down to his cabin.
FOULMIRE PRIORY, SUSSEX, SUMMER 1686
As soon as she had seen Johnnie set sail, Alinor was anxious to take Ned to Foulmire—their childhood home.
“On your own?” Matthew asked.
Alinor smiled at him. “There’s a house full of servants.”
“Of course.” He hesitated. “Does Ma say it’s all right for you and Uncle Ned to go?”
“You know full well she doesn’t!” Alinor told him with a twinkle in her eye. “But I’m going if you say I may—it’s your house, Matthew, I’m not going to take squatters’ rights.”
“No! No! Of course you can go. I’ll hire a carriage to take you. But what if Uncle Ned gets worse while you’re down there?”
“He won’t get worse,” Alinor said confidently. “He’s going to get better.”
The carriage journey was hard for Ned, jolting on the poor roads. Alinor had told him where they were going; but he made no sign of understanding, and lay across the seat, his eyes closed against the bright light and the pain.
Only when the carriage stopped at the causeway did he open his eyes when the briny air flooded into the carriage and the wide sky arched over them. He heard the crying of the gulls and the twitter of the little terns over the bright water of the harbor. Incredulously, he turned his head to Alinor and met her radiant smile.
“I’ve brought you home,” she told him.
* * *
Every night as she put him to bed, she prayed for Rowan’s safety, naming her clearly in the prayers, and Ned said “Amen,” the word more distinct and his voice stronger every night. Every day, she walked beside his wheeled chair, showing him the lush growth of summer in the tidelands, the scramble of dog roses through the hedges, the thickness of the grass in the meadow and the lambs prancing in the fields like little dancers. Huge flocks of seabirds came and went with the tides and the little terns hovered over the blue waters of the harbor and nested, laying eggs like speckled pebbles on the shingle banks, so that Alinor stopped walking there until the tiny birds were fledged and flying, skimming the water like silver-winged swallows. She talked to Ned all the time of the little changes in the garden and on the land and at sea, until slowly, over the summer, he learned, like a child, to walk and speak again.
