Mood Indigo (2 page)

“Terence has left?” she breathed.

He snapped open the opal-inlaid lid of his snuff box. “Sailed three days ago.”

Her shoulders straightened. “You can’t stop me from joining him, Father.”

Her father lifted a heavy brow. “With what funds?” Her hand went to the topaz necklace inset with rose diamonds that graced the long column of her throat, and he chuckled as he sniffed a pinch of snuff up one nostril. “I took the precaution of warning every ship’s captain between here and Bristol against giving you passage. Do you think any would dare flaunt Lord North’s command?”

“You went to the Prime Minister?”

“I’ll go to King George himself if I have to.” He pocketed the snuff box. “ ’Tis time you made an advantageous marriage, Jane.”

“With whom?” she sne
ered, gesturing with her fan toward Lord Sandwich. “The Mad Monk of Medmenham?”

If someone could be both pampered and neglected, Lord Wychwood reflected, his daughter most definitely was. At times, when he thought ab
out it, he regretted his ineptitude as a father. “You could do worse than Lord Sandwich,” he tempered. “Jane, for all that you are of the female sex, you have inherited my stubbornness. An unfortunate and abominable trait in a woman. Do not try my hand this time.” With that pronouncement, he left her to join a group of tittering ladies with flashing fans.

Pleading an early-morning stag hunt at Windsor Park, the stolid George III and his wife chose to retire early, as usual, before dinner was served, which would not be until near midnight. During those intervening hours, Jane’s mind whirled, sorting out
all possible recourse to her dilemma. And none presented itself. Should she manage to sell her jewelry, there were few vessels, other than army transports, bound for the American colonies and Canada, and none whose captains would dare defy an edict from the Prime Minister.

The dinner table, brightened by hundreds of candles burning in the crystal-prismed candelabra overhead, groaned with roast duck and veal pies and gooseberry sauce; with plum puddings, fruit tarts, and syllabubs; with brandy, Madeira, and Bordeaux. Liveried servants faded tactfully into the background. Jane was relieved to find herself seated at the far end of the table from her father. Mr. Franklin, peering through his spectacles, held sway over the guests at that end of the table, where French, the court language, could be heard.

Tales of the colonial agent ran rampant. It was whispered that he played chess with a high-born French lady— she in her bathtub; it was rumored that he salubriously left his windows open at night and rose for half an hour each morning to sit stark naked in the boarding house’s chilly room, which he rented from the Widow Stevenson.

Jane was seated to the left of an MP, a country squire who proved to possess a dependable lack of imagination and a passion for meticulous gardening. On her left sat a massively built man whose sober clothing was only spared total drabness by his deep red hair, tied in a queue and unpowdered.

“One of those American provincials,” whispered the squire maliciously.

A little later when the squire paused in his monologue on the value of the boxwood hedge in maze gardens, she escaped his droning by turning her attention to the colonist and the Duchess of Marborough across from him. The American’s profile was
devilishly handsome in an unpolished sort of way; as if God had reached the seventh day and left his chiseling unfinished. The sharply squared jaw jutted, the prominent cheekbone angled almost defiantly, and the nose, from Jane’s view, appeared slightly crooked.

The big man so far had
remained silent before the voluble speech of the duchess. Obviously of no social brilliance, he watched and listened and sometimes smiled.

“And you, sir,” Jane asked perfunctorily when the duchess paused. “How do you find England?” She only wished the evening would end.

For the first time the big man looked her full in the face. The left hollow of his cheek was marred by a bad bum. She smothered her gasp with a quick sip of the Bordeaux, but above the crystal rim of her glass she caught the amused glimmer in his black-flecked eyes and knew he had noted her start.

He had a big man’s lack of assurance, and his words came clumsily. “Pardon me, mistress—what did milady say?”

She set down the long-stemmed glass and said gently, “I asked how you find your mother country.”

“I find her quite”—he
paused and she heard the beginnings of amusement in his voice, a curious mixture of Irish brogue and colonial dialect that was difficult to understand—“quite revealing.”

She saw the way his gaze offhandedly assessed her blue- powdered hair, her beauty patch placed strategically on her cheekbone, her naked shoulders above the peach satin gown. All empathy with
the man dissolved. “Are you enjoying your tour of her, sir?” she snapped.

He grinned, his irregular teeth white against his weather- tanned skin, and for a moment she forgot the disfiguring bu
rn. “That would be difficult to say, milady, until I have seen everything of her.”

The insolence of the man! She flashed an artificial smile. “Do I sense a tone of disrespect to the mother country?”

The rise of his thick, dark-auburn brows acknowledged her thrust. “That I did not say, Mistress—?”

“Lady,” she said frostily. “Lady Jane Lennox. And you are Lord—?”

“Mister,” he drawled with an impertinent and humorous tone. The bumpkin was quite obviously enjoying himself. “Mr. Ethan Gordon.”

“And I suppose you ar
e here with Mr. Franklin to protest the closing of the Boston port? No, don’t tell me,” she interrupted with a disparaging smile. “You, no doubt, are one of those colonial oafs who threw East India’s tea chests into the Boston Harbor last December.”

He held his large palms up in a gesture of mock defense. “Please, Lady Jane. I do
n’t believe in violence—nor disloyalty to the mother country. I am a member of the Society of Friends.”

A Quaker as a dinner par
tner! Her father’s doing, doubtless. No wonder she had sensed contempt in the curl of the provincial’s cleanly defined lips. “You don’t look like a Quaker,” she murmured, and at his wry grimace that somehow passed for a smile, she hastily added, “The red hair—and all.”

“And pray tell, what do I look like, Lady Jane?”

She chewed on a bite of the roast duck, while her face took on a pensive air. With the sun-and-wind pleats about his mouth and the squint lines fanning eyes that were somewhere between brown and black, she judged the big man to be in his late twenties or maybe Terence’s age, though Terence eclipsed him in every other way. “Oh, perhaps a pirate.”

“Thy jest misses the mark.”

Mark! She felt as if she had suddenly ridden to the brink of a precipice that yawned before her. The stranger shall be marked. The fine hairs at the back of her neck prickled.

Her gaze swerved to the shriveled patch of burned skin. No, she refused to believe in the sham and chicanery of gypsies’ cards and swamis’ tea leaves. But the colonist was a marked man. Faith, but she was not a marked woman. So much for the old Hindu’s hoax.

“Since you are neither a pirate nor a rebel Yankee, what does bring you to London, Mr. Gordon—other than the grand tour?”

“I am but a simple planter come to purchase supplies and indentured servants, milady.”

This time she almost choked on the veal pie. “Indentured servants?”

“Of course,” he said casually. “Quakers don’t hold to slavery, Lady Jane.”

Jane barely managed to control her excitement. “And where does one go in the city of London to purchase indentures, Mr. Gordon?”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A heavy swinging sign suspended from an ornamental bracket portrayed a silvered half circle, which announced the address of the Half Moon Coffee House near Ratliff Crossing. Inside, Jane sat at a tiny table, dawdling over a cup of tea. That morning, with her maid in tow, she had made the perfunctory calls. Afterward, she visited Charing Cross and the Strand to browse among the shops, which was becoming a national pastime. People journeyed from as far as France and Germany to visit London, the City of Shopkeepers.

After a drapier
had patiently unfolded a hundred bolts of material, regaled her with a glass of wine, and bowed and scraped as he handed her into her coach, she had deemed it safe enough to set out on her primary mission.

In the Half Moon Coffee House she and her personal maid, who sat stiffly opposite her, were the only women customers. The men exch
anged stocks and shares and discussed politics, philosophy, the “American” problem, and life’s vicissitudes in general.

Female customers were not unknown at the Half Moon, though few came dressed as elegantly as she. True, she wore her singularly black hair not powdered but covered by a large, concealing Lunardi hat that dipped charmingly over her classical brow.
And true, her satins were decorously hidden by a summer pelisse of the finest broadcloth. Yet the quality of the lady was clearly evident. Then again, it was impossible not to notice her, if only because of her unusual height.

Ignoring the rowdy conversations of the gentlemen at the rear of the coffeehouse, she slowly sipped the tea in her Wedgwood cup. Through the leaded casement window she watched the people enter and leave the establishment diagonally opposite the coffeehouse, the guildhall.

“Ma’am, are ’oo certain that ’oor father would be approving ’oo being ’ere.”

Jane drew her gaze away from the guildhall to fasten on Meg O’Reilly. The Irish
woman shifted uncomfortably, unaccustomed to sitting at the same board as her mistress. The reddish brown hair that peeked out from her high starched mob cap reminded Jane of the Quaker and her purpose for being at Ratliff Crossing. “Of course, I’m certain, Meg.” She set down the cup with a resolute motion. “Now wait for me, and I shall return shortly.”

Oblivious to her maid’s protests, she gathered up her parasol, her reticule, and h
er long gloves with the fashionable open fingers. She left the coffeehouse to wend her way through the maze of post chaises and chariots to the far side of the narrow, littered street. Here at the guildhall, people desperate for employment after the Panic of ’72 were lined up to indenture themselves before the Board of Trade’s magistrate.

Others who came t
o indenture themselves were husbands who had forsaken their wives, wives who wished to abandon their husbands, children who were running away from parents, and, quite often, criminals escaping from prosecution. In addition, there were the maids who despaired of ever having husbands in England and sought to indenture themselves to employers in the New World where members of the female sex were at a premium.

Indenturing herself was Jane’s one hope. The mighty political arm of her father reached far. Even if she could sell her jewelry and persuade some unsuspecting captain to give her passage to the American continent, her father could still track her down before she found Terence.

But, she hoped, her father would never think to look for her disguised as an indentured servant.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to enter the open doors of the guildhall. Studying the people over her cup of tea, she had seen the misery, the poverty, the hunger etched on each of their faces. But was she that desperate—to sign away anywhere from two to seven years of her life, merely in exchange for passage to the American continent—and to Terence?

And then, high above the stream of people coming and going like ants, she saw the deep red hair of the Quaker. “Mr. Gordon,” she called out impulsively. He stopped and looked at her with a puzzled frown, and she hastened to identify herself, feeling suddenly quite foolish. “Lady Jane Lennox—your dinner partner at Buckingham House last night.”

He crossed to her, and she noted then that he had not the honed, lean length of Terence but rather was more solidly built and measured a full six inches taller than she. With him, certainly, she need never resort to that old childish ploy of hunching her shoulders to minimize her height. She drew herself up tall and said calmly, “I am hoping that you can perhaps help me.”

“Ahh, yes . . . mother country. ” His big hand engulfed hers as he made a deep, mocking bow, and she could feel the calluses on his blunt farmer’s hands. “I am at your service, Lady Jane.”

She ignored his barb. “No.” She put out a restraining gloved hand. “That’s just it, Mr. Gordon. I wish to be at your service.”

His black eyes quizzed hers politely, but she could see him curb the impatience at the corners of his mouth. “How so, Lady Jane?”

She nodded toward the doors of the guildhall. “I wish to indenture myself to you.”

Amidst the cacophony of the city, an abrupt strained silence held between the two people. Jane knew full well what she meant to do. She was securing passage to the American continent in order to join Terence. And after her three years of international intrigue at St. James’s Court she felt she was a good enough judge of character.

This Yankee planter seemed of a kindly nature, if his membership in the Quaker sect was any indication. But for the most part, she was counting on her sophistry and charm to handle the plodding colonial. Surely, after but a few months of dutiful servitude, she could convince him to release her from her bondage.