Calhoun Chronicles Bundle (61 page)

“It’s getting light,” he observed, nodding at the unglazed window. A silvery thread appeared on the horizon, very low, just touching the waterline. A rooster crowed, a piercing lonely sound in the misty dark before dawn.

“We’ve got a busy day ahead.” Reluctantly he pulled her heavy hair out of the neckline of her gown. “And,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her, “plans to make.”

“Plans?”

He laughed quietly and kissed her again. “Something about a bed of softest down—”

“Hunter.” She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed back, solemnly studying his face.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t seem to understand…why I came looking for you tonight.”

He grinned. “Sure I understand, honey.”

Her eyes glittered in the coming light. Tears? He panicked. He never knew what to do when a woman wept.

“I’ve made a mess of this,” she said softly. “It was stupid of me to go looking for you in my nightgown, but I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

She took a long, shuddering breath. “Telling you that I’m leaving.”

Something inside him turned to stone. And then he laughed. “You’re joking.”

“You know it’s the right thing to do. You’re the one who brought Mr. Vega here, with the invitation from Don Roberto.”

“But that was before—”

“Before what?”

“Marry me,” he said, the command rushing from him in a single breath.

She blinked, and all trace of her tears went away. “What?”

“I said, marry me. And you’ll note I didn’t ask it.” He grabbed both of her wrists, his big hands swallowing hers. The impulsive idea surprised him as much as it did her. “I can’t let you walk out of my life.”

Her face shone with elation. But just as quickly, the light in her eyes dimmed. “I don’t fit in here, Hunter. We’ve spoken of this before.”

“We’ll build our own world to fit us, Eliza. We can do it. I know we can.” He lifted her hands to his lips and covered them with kisses. “Marry me. The hell with what anyone says. Marry me.”

She shut her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m feeling,” she whispered. “I don’t know whether it’s terror or excitement.” Then she opened her eyes and laughed with a pure, clear joy that filled his heart. “Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, Hunter Calhoun.”

H
unter wanted everything to be perfect when he and Eliza told the children, but more than that, he wanted everything to happen fast. He wished all the guests would depart, but many of them lingered, talking over their horse trades and the racing season to come. Only in the darkest moments, when even whiskey wouldn’t give him amnesia, did he admit that the need for haste stemmed from his gut-level worry that something might go wrong.

His friends and neighbors would be mortified by his choice of a wife. They expected him to choose an heiress, a polished gem from finishing school, not a barefoot island girl with no pedigree. But he meant what he’d promised Eliza about making the world fit them, not the other way around.

All day long, events had conspired to keep them apart. There had been meetings with horse buyers, shippers, speculators. Several of the foreigners stayed on, including Montgomery’s man Vega, and the Englishman and his daughter. After supper, perhaps there would be time for them to steal up to the nursery and tell Blue and Belinda their news.

He dressed with special care in a black silk frock coat with split tails, a dark green waistcoat, a snowy white shirt and onyx studs. He could think of only one reason for his unusual fit of vanity. He wanted to be the suitor Eliza read about in all the novels she loved so well.

Except that he knew he’d be a very nervous suitor. He refilled his whiskey flask, sliding the flat silver vessel into an inner pocket of his frock coat. He could hear the children giggling upstairs, and the sound of their voices calmed his nerves a little. How excited they would be when they learned Eliza was going to be their mother.

A gift, he thought. That was what Eliza needed. He planned to order a wedding band from the jeweler in Norfolk, yet he suddenly wanted something to give her today. But what?

A piece that had belonged to his mother, he decided, striding out of the master bedroom. He’d given Lacey all his mother’s jewels years ago. They’d had to sell off the more costly items, but there was one piece Lacey had always refused to wear. A brooch. Lacey had declared it vulgar and gaudy.

Eliza would think it was perfect, because the brooch was in the shape of a seashell. Hunter remembered it from his boyhood. It had a shell of hammered gold and an emerald in the center.

He hurried into Lacey’s old suite of rooms where she’d spent so many hours doing some mysterious ritual called her “toilette.” Long muslin dust cloths draped the furniture, creating a haunted, neglected air. He hadn’t seen the inside of the armoire in years, and the door creaked as he swung it open. There, on the shelf, rested the familiar jewel case of bird’s-eye maple, coated in finger-smeared dust.

It sat atop a rosewood box. Hunter wouldn’t have noticed the rosewood box at all, except that it was curiously dust-free, as if someone had placed it there only recently. He set aside the jewel case and took out the box.

Lacey’s lap desk. He had given it to her for their first Christmas. He set it on the draped bed and flipped it open. There were her initials, embossed in gold on the tooled leather surface. Almost idly, he folded back the leather writing surface, and was surprised to see letters there. A good-size stack of them. It was a little eerie finding this, like hearing a ghost whisper in his ear. Frowning, Hunter picked up a random letter and started to read.

At first the content of the letters, penned in a bold and disconcertingly familiar hand, confused him. What was this about, these words of illicit love and constant yearning, these frantic, furtive plans, his name rendered as a mysterious
H?
As he read on, the confusion gave way to something worse. Betrayal swept through him like a forest fire. Holy Christ, how could he not have known? How could he have been so stupid?

Hunter Calhoun did the only thing he knew how to do well. He took out his flask and started drinking.

“You look exactly like a princess,” Belinda declared, admiring Eliza’s dress. “Is there going to be another party tonight?”

“Not exactly. Some of the guests have stayed over, but—” She broke off. Best to wait for Hunter to give them the news together. “We just want everyone to have a wonderful time.” She twirled in front of the mirror. Willa had made over one of Lacey’s gowns with fitted sleeves, seed pearls on the bodice and a scalloped hem. “Do you think this is too fancy for supper, or just right?”

“Just right.” The little girl stood on the bed to straighten the tortoiseshell comb in Eliza’s hair.

“Where is your brother?”

“He was reading, and he fell asleep,” Belinda said. “He thinks all these grown-ups are purely boring. So do I.”

Eliza laughed, but a wave of nervousness rippled through her. After supper, if the hour wasn’t too late, she and Hunter would tell the children what they planned. It was frustrating, having to maneuver around houseguests, but she would not allow herself to complain. Once she married Hunter, such things would be expected of her.

“I’m hungry,” Belinda said, lying back on the bed.

Eliza gave her part of a biscuit left over from the afternoon tea she’d been too tense to eat. Belinda ate the biscuit, and the next time Eliza looked at her, the child was sound asleep. She smiled. It was just as well, she supposed. The children would be wakeful enough once they heard the news.

Eliza took one last look at herself in the mirror. She didn’t appear any different, but everything had changed. Just for a moment, she let herself think about the night before. It might have been a dream, making love with Hunter in the barn office, except that her body stung with delicious aches everywhere he had touched and loved her. She wondered if the secret joy she felt showed on her face. She wondered if people would notice.

Her last task before she went down to supper was to put on a pair of shoes. After the dancing last night, she had sworn she would never wear them again, but now that she was to become a proper wife, she must submit to them. The shoes with spool heels, which Willa had salvaged from Lacey’s old things, were even more uncomfortable than dancing slippers.

Eliza forced herself to walk smoothly to the top of the stairs. Garlands of flowers had been woven through the banisters, and the entryway smelled heavily of roses. Yet in the wake of the party, a curiously solemn air pervaded the house. She looked out the window at the landing. Across the bay, the lighthouse beam flickered in the twilight.

A sense of foreboding scuttled over her. Lifting her skirts so she could walk faster, she hurried to the dining room.

Like the entryway, it was festooned with flowers and haunted by the shadows of the fast-falling night.

And empty—or nearly so. Lord Alistair Stewart and his daughter Margaret were engaged in what appeared to be a heated conversation, which ceased abruptly when they saw her.

“Pardon me,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean to distur—”

“Nonsense, my dear girl, come in.” The English nobleman waved his hand impatiently. “We were having a glass of sherry before supper.”

Eliza declined with a shake of her head. Lady Margaret, who was as pretty as a long-stemmed rose, held a pair of gloves knotted in front of her. “Father and I were just commenting on your remarkable gift with horses.”

“If patience is a gift. That’s all it is, really.” Eliza thought about the way Lord Alistair had reacted to her questions about her father the day before. Recognition had flashed in his eyes, she was sure of it. “Sir,” she said hesitantly, “I do wish you could tell me something of my father’s career in England. Please, it would mean so much to me.”

“I knew
of
him,” he said carefully. “There was a time when every horse fancier in England knew of Henry Flyte.” He finished his sherry. “He was a most remarkable trainer and a gifted jockey.”

“And my mother?” she asked with her heart in her throat. “Did you know her as well?”

His glass wobbled as he set it on the sideboard and exchanged a glance with Lady Margaret. “Miss Flyte, perhaps you’d do me the favor of giving our regrets to our host. My daughter and I must make ready to leave on the morning packet. I’ve appointments in Richmond tomorrow.”

Eliza couldn’t help herself. She pursued the gentleman and his daughter to the door. “If you can recall anything,” she said, “anything at all, it would mean the world to me. You see, I never knew my mother.”

Lady Margaret, who had been white-faced and silent, stopped in the doorway. “Father, don’t you think—”

“No,” he said.

Eliza sent Lady Margaret a pleading look. “You must know how important this is to me. It’s as if half of me has been missing all my life.”

Lady Margaret turned to her father. “She has a right to know.”

His face reddened, and he cleared his throat. Moving as if his bones hurt, he held open a French door. “We must go where we can speak in private,” he said.

Burning with curiosity, Eliza accompanied the Englishman and his daughter to the garden gazebo. The iron filigree dome atop the gazebo created twisted shadows on the lawn. Lord Alistair leaned on one of the columns as if in need of support. “Henry Flyte had a rare gift with racehorses, but off the mile oval he had a reputation for being…impulsive.”

Eliza discovered that she couldn’t breathe as this man spoke of her father. She listened with her whole being, fascinated by this part of her father’s life that had been a mystery to her for so long.

“He was known to be a womanizer, I fear,” Lord Alistair went on. “And then he lost his heart to one particular woman—or so went the gossip in the Haymarket.”

“My mother?”

He nodded.

“Then you
did
know her—”

“Certainly not.” He spoke sharply, then seemed to catch himself. “You see, she was a woman who—she worked, er—” He seemed truly at a loss.

Lady Margaret went to her father’s side. “Just tell her, Father.”

He stiffened his spine. “It was said that she was extremely beautiful. She came from Jamaica, and she worked in a brothel.”

Eliza absorbed the words like a blow. They didn’t hurt so much as numb her. A brothel was a place where women entertained men for money. Beyond that, she knew nothing else.

But the Englishman wasn’t finished. “She was a quadroon, Miss Flyte. That means she was one-quarter African. She had been a slave in Jamaica, and had escaped to London.”

A slave.
Her mother had been a slave. The idea was so extraordinary that Eliza reeled in shock. All her life, she had thought of her mother in the vaguest of terms—a woman with a gentle face, a soft voice, dark hair and eyes like Eliza’s own. The word
slave
changed the picture entirely. She imagined a captive woman, forced to work to the brink of desperation, then compelled to run for her life. Had her mother been like the man Eliza had helped on Flyte Island? Had she been frightened, abused, wounded by a mantrap? The idea of her mother’s suffering was unbearable.

“Her name,” Eliza said. “Do you know what her name was?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. The last anyone in racing circles heard, she had died in childbirth, and Henry Flyte had disappeared.”

So much of her father became clear to her in that moment. At last she understood why he had been so protective of her and so circumspect about her mother. She now knew why he had secretly devoted himself to the cause of abolition. He
was
Prospero, she realized. He had built a world of his own creation where his word was law. But like the wizard’s spells, it was all an illusion.

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Flyte,” said Lord Alistair.

She studied him and then his daughter. “Sorry for what?” she asked. “I wanted to know the truth. You told me, and for that I thank you. I am the same person I was just moments ago when you offered me a glass of sherry.”

“In the eyes of any thinking person, that is true. You won’t find me spreading gossip,” he vowed, “but this is Virginia, where people like your mother are held in bondage.”

A chill streaked up Eliza’s spine. She was a free person of color, as Noah was. Which meant that marrying Hunter was against the law. And despite the assurances of Lord Alistair and Lady Margaret, Eliza had long known of a force faster than light. And that was gossip in the Tidewater region.

Eliza thought it strange that Hunter was not in the dining room with his guests. Stranger still that she felt so utterly calm. The very air around her seemed a thick substance, muffled by shock. She checked on the children, finding Blue asleep in his bed, an open book face-down on his chest. She took away the book and covered him up, then carried Belinda to bed. The little girl protested sleepily when Eliza took off her dress. “Is it over, Eliza?” she mumbled. “Did I miss supper?”

“It’s over, sweet thing,” Eliza whispered, and Belinda tucked her fist under her chin and went back to sleep. What a blessing that she and Hunter had not announced their plans to the children. Because now, of course, those plans had changed.

Night had fallen, and she could hear a low murmur of conversation from downstairs. She fetched a lamp, holding it steady in front of her, watching the golden glow waver over her bell-shaped gown. She found herself thinking of the Spanish bride who had died so young, never having found her bridegroom.

Swept by a strange melancholy, Eliza noticed the door to Lacey’s room was ajar. No one went in there. She herself had only ever gone there once, and that had been to—