Mood Indigo (7 page)

Her anger was excee
ded only by her acute embarrassment at whatever intimate services he had performed for her during her illness. Her first memory was awakening to find herself clad in Meg’s muslin nightrail, so different from the brilliantly colored, soft silk banyans to which she was accustomed. Then the horror slowly dawned on her— Ethan Gordon had seen her nude!

Lacing the bodice strings of her dress, she groaned at the thought. As it was, whenever he entered her small, windowless room, consuming it with his solid breadth and height, it was difficult to meet those steady black eyes without flinching with shame.

She had to admit that the soups and porridges he brought her were tasty. Better than she could do—which worried her somewhat. How was she to earn her keep? From the kitchen she could hear Ethan’s baritone voice along with those of the field hands as they left the breakfast table for work. Soon she would be expected to prepare the meals herself. If she could only stay in bed . . . yet she chafed to be about after the week of inactivity.

When the voices faded
away, she deemed it safe to venture from her cubicle. The tantalizing smell of fried ham drew her to the kitchen, which adjoined her maid’s quarters. Wooden tumblers and trenches were scattered over a long, roughly hewn trestle table. Her gaze swept dismally over the rest of the rustic kitchen, which was apparently to be her domain.

Copper and brass sauce pots, looking as if they had never been used, hung from heavy oaken rafters blackened by smoke. Three white-washed, limestone walls were less smudged. Red brick, the same as the floor, spanned the fourth wall and housed a small oval-shaped oven and an arched fireplace large enough for a dozen people to sit within.

Below the table, a raccoon lapped at a plate of left-over fried tomatoes, morsels of grits, and charred ham fat. Jane dimly recalled the bizarre sight of the raccoon perched on Ethan Gordon’s shoulder one of the times she awoke during those first feverish hours. In her delirium she had attributed the furry gray creature to an hallucination.

She crossed to the table and stooped to run her hand along the docile animal’s back. The raccoon’s sharp little black nose wrinkled. “One of us is going to have to learn how to wash dishes, my fine pet.”

“I doubt that it’s going to be King George, mistress.”

Startled, Jane straightened, only to bump her head on the table’s edge. “Damnation!” she muttered.

“Tsk-tsk,” a tongue clicked. “Swearing—from such a fine lady.”

Ethan leaned through the upper half of the kitchen’s Dutch door. The brilliant morning sunlight streaming in behind him cast his face in shadow. But she could make out the way he eyed the frazzled mop that was her hair. She had forgotten the mobcap. Frustrated, her hands went to her hips, and she def
lected his amusement with an imperious glare. “And you think you’re a titled gentleman, sir?”

“I think ’tis time thee baked bread before
the morning grows any later.”

“Bake bread? I don’t know how to bake bread!”

He pushed open the door’s lower half and strode over to her, walking around her slowly, eyeing her length. She flushed under his penetrating regard, but did not deign to look at him. Rather she stood as haughtily as a princess until he came around to face her again. “ ’Tis a shame, then, because I don’t think thee will fetch a goodly price on the market,” he said blandly.

Too quickly she recalled the fox-faced Wainwright, and she knew she could be much worse off. “You wouldn’t dare sell me!”

“I would.”

The glint in his eye told her he would only be too happy to rid himself of his misbegotten purchase. “Then you’ll have to instruct me.”

“Done!” Crossing to the flour bin, he pushed up the full, gathered sleeves of his linsey-woolsey shirt. He dug out a gourd of stone-ground brown flour, saying, “I’ve had to make do with my own cooking, mistress, and for that reason, among others, purchased thee.”

Her mind would have questioned what other reasons, but her attention was d
iverted as she watched in amazement while he adeptly filled a large wooden bowl with flour, honey, salt, and warm water. The sight was so ludicrous—a man of his massive build making bread—that she began to chuckle.

He flicked her a disgusted look. “ ’Tis thy turn.” He shoved the bowl across the table toward her. “Knead the dough.”

She smiled sweetly. “I don’t know how.” The two of them were battling wills, but with a little Machiavellian finesse she would win out over this oaf.

He braced his hands on the table and studied her for a long moment. “Thee needs to be humbled,” he said slowly.

Her eyes widened in wariness. “I’ll try to knead the dough.”

He straightened. “Good.”

She wanted to hurl the bowl at his departing back, but when he forgot to duck his head and banged it on the door’s lintel, a small smile of satisfaction curled her lips. The smile faded as the morning progressed. The dough was pasted all the way up her forearms, and flour ringed her eyes the same way black fur ringed King George’s.

By the time she plopped the sticky globs of dough in the black iron kettle and set it to rise on the hearth next to the ash-covered coals, she resolved that she was not staying a day longer than necessary.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Jane wiped the dust from one cheek with the back of her arm and went back to drawing the hackle’s teeth through the flax. It was dirt
y work, and, despite the early-morning hour of the mild October day, it was stifling in the airless ell of the house’s main room, reserved for the hand loom and spinning wheel.

After all the hackling it constantly surprised her to see how little good filament was left from such a large mass of fiber. But then it was equally surprising to see how much linen thread could be made from the small amount of fine flax. Unfortunately, she often had more tow, the short broken residue of the fiber, than the long, fi
ne filaments that would be converted into spinning thread.

From the kitchen Josiah, the scarecrow-thin deaf mute, spied her predicament and crossed the parlor to squat next to her. She thought the field hand’s kindly eyes beneath the thatch of straw-colored hair were almost eloquent, as if God had given his eyes the gift of communicating that his tongue lacked. She saw in their hazel depths a wry humor at her inferior product.

He picked up the thick, poorly hackled linen thread she had combed and rolled it between his callused fingers. His head shook in a sad commentary on her work. Holding up a forefinger to catch her attention, he took up the hackle and a handful of damp flax, then deftly drew the fibers through the hackle. Little tow was left, and the resulting thread he passed her was fine and silky to the touch. His eyes caught hers to see if she understood the way he had done it.

She nodded and touched his shoulder in gratitude. “Thank you, Josiah. But I don’t think I shall eve
r make an adequate spinster.”

After he left, she rose and stretched, rubbing her hands along the back of her narrow waist. Holding her hands out before her critical eyes, she reflected that not even her maid Meg’s were so chapped and red. But then Meg had not washed linen in burning lye soap.

This much deterioration in the space of a fortnight! She alone was doing the tasks Wychwood’s numerous servants performed: Betty the cook, Becky the scullion, Jenny the washwoman, Mimia who ironed, Sally the seamstress. Jane’s life had been one of unbroken elegance, of rustling silks, of feather boas and belt knots, of tuckers and lace flounces, of French perfumes and rose-scented soap. And now all she knew was drudgery from dawn to long past dusk.

And then there was her complexion. Her hand went to the fresh red scar that pitted her chin. A glimpse in the looking glass Ethan Gordon used for shaving revealed that her hair, tufting from b
elow the mobcap, resembled frizzled, carrot-red flax tow. What would she look like after a year in this God-forsaken land?

Longingly
her gaze went to the delicately beautiful harpsicord in the parlor’s corner. It, like the elegantly furnished bedroom opposite that of Ethan Gordon’s, was so out of keeping with the rest of the rooms, which bore a distinctly sparse, masculine stamp. The back-country house had been constructed from heavy timbers, with thick doors meant to withstand Indian attack.

He had built the house
with tall door lintels to accommodate his enormous height; yet both the kitchen and the bedroom across from his had shorter door frames, so that if Jane forgot to stoop, as she often did, she, too, bumped her head. And what of the gleaming new copper sauce pots? Why were they unused?

When Ethan Gordon built the house, he evidently had a wife in mind. Whom?

Her fingers itched to run along the harpsicord’s ivory keys rather than rub themselves raw on the spinning wheel. But she had no choice. Ethan had set before her the task that morning—with some impatience at her ineptitude for keeping house. If she failed at this, as she did more often than not at cooking, he might just sell her, as he had threatened.

Ethan Gordon did not yell at her, nor did he whip her. No doubt most masters would have done so immediately upon discovering their maid’s lack of domestic skills.

Most important, he made no untoward advances. But then, could she expect a lusty eye from him, or any male, when she presented such a bedraggled spectacle? He seemed totally unaware of her presence, except when she broke a dish or burned the bread or tore his shirt while trying to wash it.

Her lips flattened with frustration at her predicament. She was no nearer joining Iterance than the day she signed her indenture papers almost two months before. She began to pace, her feet taking her from the ell into the parlor with its hearth, then back again to sta
nd before the spinning wheel. She had to start laying plans.

Ethan, she knew, was working at the smokehouse, hanging from the rafters t
he last of the ham he had butchered. She gathered her skirts and hurried up the roughly planed staircase. Her petticoat snagged on a splinter, but she yanked it free and sped on up to his bedroom on the second floor.

Opposite the fireplace
was the gigantic bedstead, obviously built specially to accommodate his great frame. But it was the high scrolled desk she sought. Only God knew what he used it for. She had doubted the lout could even read, but evidence to the contrary was found on the shelf above the desk. Her gaze scanned some of the titles—
The Treatise of Agriculture, A New Agriculture
, and, of course, a Bible whose edges were charred.

With little time to waste, she pulled out the top drawer and began to rifle throug
h the contents—bills of sale, unsharpened quills, an account ledger. Another drawer produced fresh vellum. After locating an ink bottle, she grabbed up a quill, dipped it in the brown ink, and hastily began to scribble.

Terence
—

You last asked if a certain party’s disapproval would stop me. It has not. I can be found at the indigo plantation of the Quaker, Ethan Gordon, on the Chickahominy River below the Piedmont fall section of Virginia.

Could Terence find her in such a wilderness area with no convenient street address such as those in London to go by? He would. She dashed off her name—Jane Lennox of Wychwood
– and with the perforated wooden sander quickly sprinkled fine sand across the page before folding the missive. There was not enough time to search for a wax wafer with which to seal the letter. On the outside she penned Terence’s name and regiment and the only address she knew—that of General Carle-ton in Quebec, though there were many other posts in Canada, most of them mere forts, where he could have been sent.

She could only hope the letter would be forwarded to him. But how to get the
letter to the post rider in Williamsburg without alerting the Quaker? Absently she tapped the edge of the folded vellum on the desk top. Somehow she would have to inveigle her way to Williamsburg when the colonial made his next trip. Dear God, that might be another six months!

The opportunity to post the letter came more quickly than Jane could have hoped—that same afternoon—in the form of Susan Fairmont and her husband, Bram, a pleasantly handsome man dressed in nankeen knee breeches and a peagreen frock coat.

Jane had returned to the spinning wheel, its hypnotic hum almost putting her to sleep, when the couple entered with Ethan between them, dwarfing them. His dark eyes were alight as Jane had never seen them. Her foot released the wheel’s pedal as she watched Ethan offer his guests seats on the leather-covered bench and take up the maple rocking chair opposite them.

In the shadows of the ell she was able to catch the expressions of the three as they talked. Since none were aware of her presence,
she quite clearly was eavesdropping. She was about to clear her throat audibly, when something in Ethan’s face stopped her—some undefinable expression. And then she knew. As Susan spoke in a singularly sweet voice, Ethan’s eyes held a tenderness that was—why, yes, Ethan was in love with the man’s wife!

Jane turned her gaze on Susan, curious as to the type of woman Ethan would love. With eyes gray as a hoary morning mist and brown corkscrew curls that peaked demurely from bene
ath her calash bonnet, Susan reminded Jane of a lovely china doll with a face as sweet as a madonna’s.