Rash Reckless Love, page 47
"You should have done the searching, Anna.”
“Well, I wasn’t allowed to,” said Anna grimly. “She turned me out and told me to go riding or walking or whatever I chose, so long as I stayed out from underfoot while they searched for the will.”
“Do you notice anything?” Sue waved her finger.
“Sue! A betrothal ring! You and Lance?”
Sue nodded, her eyes sparkling as she merrily waved the plain gold ring. “Father was against it and Chloe threw up, but Mamma said I’d probably do no better and Lance was, after all, one of only three sons and should inherit something!" Her voice bubbled with laughter.
“But your dowry? You said you were afraid that after Mattie’s dowry was taken care of—?”
“Ah, that’s the trouble. Father’s not been able to raise Mattie’s dowry yet and of course mine will have to wait till after that, so the wedding is some time off—no date is set. Which is perhaps why Mamma gave her consent, she thinks we’ll quarrel and then she’ll find somebody else for me. But if a date isn’t set soon—” Sue leaned forward and her voice cropped to a happy whisper—“we’re going to elope!”
So Sue was likely to have no portion at all, and Lance, with two grasping married brothers already bleeding his father white, would like as not end up with a horse and saddle. Anna looked down at the basket of bulbs, imported from England and moldy-looking from their long damp trip across the sea.
“Have you heard from Grenfell?” Sue asked.
“A long letter. Bernice paid the post for it by mistake and cook smuggled it to me. Most of it was in verse. He raved on and on about Oxford and the tall spires and the Great Tom Bell. He loves everything about it, says he plans never to return, and urges me to don cap and gown and join him there his ‘brother’!”
Sue’s laughter pealed. “As if you could! Well, at least you can be sure of one man, Anna—you’ll always be first with Grenfell!”
Anna shook her head ruefully and nudged the basket with her toe. “Not any longer. I’ve been replaced in Grenfell’s life. He’s discovered Learning. I think he’ll go to school for the rest of his life if the money holds out.”
Sue gave her an uncertain look. “And Ross?” she asked more quietly. “Do you ever see him?”
“No. Not since Papa Jamison took ill.”
“I heard he was squiring a girl on Sandys,” muttered Sue. “Before he left for Turks Islands, of course. He’ll be gone for months. Does it upset you—about the girl?”
“Not in the least,” shrugged Anna. “There are plenty of other men.”
“That’s good. Alma is furious about it. She always wanted him for herself, you know. I think she’d have gone with him to Turks if he’d asked her!”
“Is Mattie happy with Arthur?”
Sue bent to pick up two moldy bulbs that had spilled from the basket to the ground. “I—don’t know,” she said diffidently. "Oh, I may as well tell you.” She straightened up and her words came out in a rush. “I think he beats her! She had a bruise just under her eye last week and she said she’d run into the cupboard door. And yesterday I brushed by her and she cried out—she had a terrible bruise on her shoulder that looked like fingers had pressed down on it.”
Anna’s lips tightened. “Mattie shouldn’t go to Boston. She should stay here.”
“Anna.” Sue’s sweet face grew earnest and troubled. “I think Mamma would send Mattie to Boston with Arthur if he half killed her. She’s so determined to ‘launch’ us, she forgets that even well-launched ships sometimes sink!”
“But not yours,” smiled Anna. “Have you thought about where you’ll live after you’re married?”
“With whichever family will have us, I suppose,” said Sue frankly. “And I’m sure mine won’t so I guess ’twill have to be his—although his mother cares not a pin for me and his father little more.”
“When she gets to know you. Sue,” said Anna affectionately, “she’s bound to see what a treasure Lance has in you.”
“Ha! She doesn’t think so!”
“Where is everyone? I’d expected the house to be full of people.”
“Chloe is visiting friends in Smith’s Parish, and Alma is visiting on Sandys—hoping to find out what that girl has that interested Ross! And Mattie and Arthur rode out somewhere—oh, there’s Mattie now.” Sue started to wave at her sister, who was running across the lawn from the stables, but she stopped when she saw that Mattie had a kerchief pressed to her face and was sobbing. “What’s the matter?” she cried, sprinting toward her.
“Oh—nothing. Nothing at all.” Stocky Mattie came to a dignified halt and turned her head away so that they might not see the red welt across her cheek. “I got something in my eye, that’s all. Hello, Anna, it’s nice to see you.”
“Mattie,” counseled Anna. “Leave him. He isn’t worth it.”
Mattie’s quick indrawn breath gave her away.
“Would you like me to have a word with him?” Anna asked quietly.
“It wouldn't help.”
“It might.”
“Nothing will help!” Mattie’s courage left her and she dissolved in tears. “Arthur doesn’t love me, he was forced to marry me, and he never lets me forget it!”
Anna turned on her heel and strode toward the stables, where Arthur was doubtless abusing the groom. She felt responsible for this marriage. It had not been made in heaven—it had been made through a series of blunders. And some of those blunders were her own.
Arthur whirled as she entered the stable, coming in out of the light into the dimness. She couldn’t know how the sun haloed her hair, her whole body, so that she seemed radiant.
“Anna,” he whispered, and the stableboy took that opportunity to slink away with the horses.
Anna stood with one hand resting on her hip. “I came to ask you, Arthur, if you knew that Mattie’s father once horsewhipped a man who kicked his hound?”
“And what has that to do with me?” scowled Arthur.
“Only that if someone were to tell him that you were cuffing Mattie, he’d most likely break both your legs.”
Arthur sprang forward out of the gloom. His face was savagely close and his strong hand closed down over her wrist with punishing pressure. “You got me into this!” he rasped. "I don’t doubt you planned it between you! First you led me on and then, by God, you tricked me into marriage with that foul wench!”
“Hush,” said Anna through her teeth, unwilling to let him know he was hurting her. “If you call Mattie that again. I’ll strike you down myself!”
What might have happened then was anybody’s guess, but Sue appeared in the doorway with a bright, “Oh, there you are, Anna. What, still out here, Arthur? Mattie’s gone back to the house.”
Arthur flung down Anna’s wrist with a strangled sound and walked away, his purple satins blazing in the sun.
“Do you think your little talk did any good?” murmured Sue. “When I heard him yelp like that, I thought I’d best interrupt before he blacked your eye!”
“I don’t know. I told him your father once horsewhipped a man for mistreating his dog.”
“Why, so he did, I’d forgotten that. He was fond of that dog. Father aroused is not a man to tamper with!”
“Perhaps if you can manage to impress that on Arthur, Mattie may have some portions of her body still left unbruised when Arthur sails away to Boston.”
“It’s a terrible world, isn’t it?” sighed Sue. “Arthur buffeting Mattie, Chloe so miserable she can’t hold her food down, Alma dangling after a man who doesn’t want her, father unable to get a dowry together, Bernice doing terrible things at Mirabelle and practically turning you out—honestly, Anna, I feel so guilty at being so terribly happy!”
Anna gave an indulgent laugh and hugged her friend. A fool’s paradise Sue might be living in but looking at that happy face, Anna prayed that it might last.
That night after supper Bernice called Anna into the long dining room. She did not suggest Anna sit down, but let her stand before her. They were alone in the room and Bernice drummed her fingers on the long dining table as she studied Anna.
“ ’Tis obvious no will is going to be found,” she told the girl. “For none has turned up here and—”
“But what about Papa Tobias’s London solicitor? I heard Ralph Kilhenny say he’d written to Christopher Marks and there’s not been time to hear from him.”
Bernice frowned. “I’ve read all his correspondence and there’s nothing about a will. So I’ll assume there isn’t one. There’ll be a search for kinsmen, no doubt, but that will not concern you. And since he never considered you a daughter at all—”
“You wouldn’t know what he considered me!”
In the thronelike chair at the head of the table, Bernice stiffened. “I will overlook that,” she announced with a look calculated to freeze the girl in gray homespun who stood so defiantly before her. “Tomorrow I will decide what’s to be done with you. You may go now, Anna.” She waved her jeweled hand. “I will let you know tomorrow.”
With all the hauteur she could muster, Anna turned on her run-down heel and left.
All evening she planned feverishly what she must do. Bernice, now that her reign was firmly established, rarely stirred from her bed till noon. That gave Anna some time.
But tomorrow’s noon must not find her at Mirabelle—for only God knew what Bernice planned for her.
The Annalee had been sighted some distance from shore by a fast sloop that had come in harbor this morning. That meant the Annalee, barring bad weather, should make harbor tomorrow morning. The Annalee was one of Tobias Jamison’s ships that had, under Bernice’s orders, been doing a bit of interisland trading. Anna felt that Captain Withers, out of compassion, would let her hide on board and carry her away with him when he sailed to some other island where, whatever became of her, she would at least be beyond Bernice’s reach.
It was late but she was still tense and keyed up when she went into cook’s tiny airless sleeping closet. It was hot and stuffy and cook’s loud snoring abraded her already raw nerves.
Restless, she got up and stole outside, walked aimlessly about the moonlit grounds. Her feet eventually carried her toward the overseer’s cottage, a long distance from the house, for it was considered that he had best sleep near the slaves’ quarters, to put down night disturbances.
“The overseers had changed twice since Bernice’s arrival. She was always dissatisfied that Tobias’s easy-going slaves could not be driven to greater efforts. The last overseer was a New Englander named Silas Mather who spoke with a twang and whose gaze had followed Doubloon lasciviously as she swayed in from the fields, carrying a basket on her head, and walking with that seductive loose-hipped walk that was characteristic of her.
Anna, troubled, had noted that gaze. She had seen the look of raw animal hunger and unbridled passion in the overseer’s pale eyes and been afraid for Doubloon, but days had passed and nothing had happened and she had forgotten about it. Now before her in the moonlight she could see the overseer’s small stone cottage with its pyramidal peaked stone roof. It was almost hidden in the trees but, like the slave quarters just to her right, she could almost feel its presence. A dim light reached her through the slats of Silas’s window—she was surprised that he should still be up.
She would have approached no closer for she did not like Silas Mather and had never spoken more than two words to him, but as she turned to go back she was startled by a wild cry from the cottage—a woman’s scream, sharply choked off.
Without thought, Anna followed her automatic reaction—for, after all, this plantation and everybody on it had been her sole responsibility for months on end when Tobias was away. She ran silently toward the cottage and stood on tiptoe, trying to peer in through the shutters. But a curtain had been drawn and she could see nothing save the flickering glow that came from a candle within.
That voice, she was certain, had been Doubloon’s, and now from inside she heard a woman’s soft crying—and something else, the flick of a whip.
Indignation welled up in Anna. That terrible Silas Mather was whipping Doubloon!
Anger drove her. She ran to the front door and wrenched it open, plunged inside. The wind had come up and the draft from the open doorway promptly extinguished the room’s sole candle. Abruptly a man’s hand shot out and swept the curtains back from the window she had tried to peer into. Moonlight came pouring in and that moonlight gleamed on the golden figure of a woman crouched naked on the floor and above her the threatening figure of a bony man with a short thonged whip in his hand.
Now the man turned toward her, a half-seen intimidating visage. Sweat gleamed on his naked chest and shoulders. He was wearing only the thin cotton breeches the slaves wore, with the legs hacked off for coolness. His heavily muscled legs stood planted as he glared at this intrusion.
“We don’t allow whips around here!” cried Anna. “Papa Jamison threw the last overseer who used one off the place.”
Silas Mather took a hulking step toward her. His gleaming chest muscles seemed to expand. “ ’Tweren’t Tobias who hired me,” he jeered. “And his rules don’t hold round here no more, little missy. That grand lady in the big house, she don't care what I do with this yaller wench—nor any of the rest of ’em, for that matter.”
“She does care! She wouldn’t let you do this to Doubloon if she knew,” Anna insisted bravely, knowing it was a lie.
Silas’s nasty laugh was cut into by Doubloon’s low cry. "Go back, Anna. Go back afore he hurts you.”
Silas’s laugh cut off as if a knife had ripped through it. “She gives good advice, this slave girl,” he told Anna menacingly. He spat and Anna jumped back, for the spittle nearly landed on the toes of her soft slippers. “Pity the wench doesn’t take good advice. It’s for that I’m whippin’ her, case you care to know. For lyin’ with a black buck in the fields somewheres.”
“Who she lies with is none of your affair!” Anna threw caution to the winds. “Bernice sent her down here to cook and keep house for you—she didn’t give her to you!”
“The slut is here to comfort me,” roared Silas. “And it don't comfort me none to find she’s just been rollin’ in the dirt with some sweaty field hand!” He raised his whip.
“Give me that!” cried Anna, leaping forward to take it from him.
Doubloon’s scream echoed in her head as his big hand lashed out and caught Anna along the side of the head. For a crazy instant the world spun and darkened. Her body seemed to blow away from him, carried on a strong whirring wind. Sightless from the blow, Anna staggered backward through the open door and fell upon the grass outside, striking her head as she did so against the hitching post near the door.
A velvet blackness descended upon her, carrying her down, down, deep down....
PART FOUR
The Bound Girl
The fiery loves of yesterday
That seemed to burn so bright,
Have smoldered through another day
And flickered out at night.
CHAPTER 35
It was hot. Sunlight was beating down on her. Anna opened her eyes into a kind of fog and, out of a dizzy haze, a face swam toward her: Sue’s face.
“Ah, you’re awake, Anna!” Sue cried joyfully.
The fog lifted and Anna could see that she was in a small room. At first she did not recognize it; then she realized that it was the bedchamber occupied by Sue and her sister Mattie—before Mattie had married Arthur and moved into the Waites’ guest bedroom.
How did I get here?” Anna asked in a weak voice, what am I doing at Waite Hall?”
Sue went over and closed the door. “Lance found you,” she told Anna. “He was taking an early morning ride—well, it was still night, actually.” Her pretty blush told Anna that Lance had slipped into this bedroom by night and departed before dawn by the window; to avoid questions he had circled around, cutting through Mirabelle Plantation, in order to approach his home from a different angle. “And he found you lying on the ground outside the overseer’s cottage. He put you across his saddle and rode back here with you.”
“Thank God he didn’t leave me with Bernice.”
“Yes.” Sue frowned. “He knew what kind of trouble you were having and he was afraid—he was afraid that Bernice might have turned you over to the overseer and you’d been hurt trying to escape him.”
“As well she might,” said Anna, trying to rise. “Only she didn’t. I was out walking and I heard Doubloon scream and I burst through the cottage door and saw Silas Mather whipping Doubloon. When I tried to stop him, he attacked me. He must have knocked me senseless if Lance found me lying on the grass!”
Sue’s eyes were big and dark. “That’s what Lance thought—that he’d attacked you. He brought you back here and tapped on my window and I slipped out and opened the door and we brought you inside and I put you to bed. The next morning I told Mamma you had signed Articles of Indenture to me, and those Articles would represent my dowry, so Lance and I could be married sooner.”
“Did she believe you?” Anna was astonished.
“Yes. You’d better lie back, you’ll probably have an awful headache. The doctor said your head had taken one slight blow and one harder one. Anyway, my story about the Articles of Indenture kept Bernice from coming to get you, for I insisted you were now legally bound to me—so for heaven’s sake, back me up on it.”
“I will. Of course I will. How long have I been here?”
“Almost a week.”
Then the Annalee was already in harbor—indeed she might have sailed again! This time Anna did sit up although the world spun around for a moment.
“I’m surprised Silas Mather didn’t dispute Lance taking me away,” she said.
“He couldn’t dispute with anybody,” said Sue quietly. “He was dead. Lance said the candle inside had guttered out and was smoking, but there was enough light for him to see Mather’s body lying on the floor. At first he thought the man was drunk and that he had knocked you out, and he went over and stirred him with his foot—it was then he realized the overseer was dead.”
