Rebel Enchantress (3 page)

Stop this! What honorable interest can a man of his station have in the likes of you, a yeoman farmer’s daughter?
If he was interested, it had to be only physically, without regard for her as a person.

And he was an Englishman. That alone ought to make her dislike him, make her hate being his servant. She had been only eight when that famous declaration was written in Philadelphia, but she remembered the fighting, the men who never came home; she remembered her father dying of his wounds. She couldn’t forget. She wouldn’t forgive.

Chapter Two

With a muttered oath, Nathan pushed away the papers he had been studying. He rested his elbows on the desk, head in his hands, his slim fingers digging into thick, blond-brown hair. With a second muttered oath, he lurched up from the high-backed armchair and walked over to the window, his lower lip wedged between his teem.

He barely noticed the beauty of the manicured lawn as it fell away to the water’s edge or the luxuriant foliage of maples, elms, and willows that shaded the grass or leaned out over the slow-moving waters of the Connecticut River. He was only vaguely aware of the lavish display of color in the formal rose garden, the carefully tended beds of dahlias, canna, and tuberoses, or the less controlled growth of morning glory and trumpet vines. Even though the open window let in the soft, late summer breeze, on it the fragrance of freshly scythed grass, he was aware primarily of the unfolding disaster on his uncle’s desk.

The door behind him opened. He turned. Serena Noyes, a tall, thin, faded woman with bad skin and a penchant for choosing colors accentuating her pallor, stood squarely in the doorway. Her long, bony fingers clutched the handkerchief with which she habitually dabbed at angry eyes, eyes Nathan had never seen produce a single tear. Skin cobwebbed with fine wrinkles, wisps of escaping dull-brown hair streaked with gray, and a surfeit of lace in her cap, around her bosom, and at her cuffs made her appear fragile. Her sharp, penetrating voice gave a different impression.

“Have you finished going over the accounts?” Not even her tone could hide her fear.

Nathan nodded.

“Well, are we ruined?”

“We have very little cash,” Nathan replied with a weary sigh, “but Uncle Ezra is wealthy enough to support a dozen people.”

“God be praised,” Serena cried and collapsed onto a high-backed settle liberally furnished with gold brocade cushions. “Ever since I found the cash box empty, I’ve suffered the most awful nightmares. Ezra never tells me anything.”

“You can relax now.”

“Relax?” Serena responded, the anxiety in her voice replaced by bitterness. “You’re the one who’s rich.”

“You’ll always have a home here.”

Serena sat forward and glared at him without any trace of family affection or liking. “But I don’t want to live here.”

“I’m sure if you spoke to Uncle Ezra, he would provide you with a sufficient allowance to—”

“How? Him lying like the dead!”

“The doctor says he could recover his wits any day.”

“That doctor wouldn’t know weak lungs from loose bowels,” Serena mapped angrily. “I think Ezra’s brains are addled. If he ever does wake up, he’ll be a complete idiot. We’ll be ruined.

“You
don’t know anything about making money. He should have left Maple Hill to me,” she continued when Nathan remained silent. “I’m his sister. I’m the one who’s lived with him, taken care of him. What are you but a Redcoat? It’s a shame you never joined the army. Someone might have shot you.”

A hot flood of anger jolted Nathan. “Why don’t you shoot me, Aunt Serena? You could tell the sheriff I was a burglar come all the way from London to steal the cash box. I’m sure these patriotic,
law-abiding
colonials wouldn’t disbelieve you.”

“Don’t mock me, Nathan Trent,” she hissed angrily. “There’re times when I’m angry enough to shoot you both. I could run this place better than either of you.”

“I can learn.”

“What’s there to learn? Those people owe us thousands of pounds. Make them pay or take everything you can.”

Nathan started to tell his aunt about Delilah, about how there might be another way, but changed his mind. He didn’t want to share Delilah with her. Up until now his only identity in Springfield was as an extension of Ezra and Serena. But with Delilah, Serena and Ezra were
his
aunt and uncle.

He was surprised to find he didn’t want to share anything else about Delilah either. He pointed to the papers scattered on his uncle’s desk. “Uncle Ezra’s done that rather often already. It can’t make him very well liked around here.”

“Liked?” Serena repeated, incredulous. “Ezra never cared whether anybody liked him or not. Why should he? People only came around when they needed money.”

“But what’s the point of taking more cows and wagons and bedsteads? Do you know we have a dozen butter churns?”

“If they can’t pay, Ezra takes what they have. If they don’t have anything, he puts them in jail.”

They’d come closer to settling up if they could earn a living. We have no use for those churns. I can’t even sell what we have without a court order.”

“I suppose you’d let those shiftless farmers keep owing money?”

“No,” Nathan said, thinking of what had happened to his family, “but they need their livestock and farm equipment. We need cash. As things stand, nobody is getting what he wants.”

“You sound like Sam Adams,” Serena said with a derisive laugh. “That kind of talk was all right before the war, but it won’t do now.”

Nathan bit his tongue. There was no point in trying to explain anything to his aunt. She wouldn’t understand because she didn’t want to. He walked over to the window.

“I’m going to fight you for Maple Hill,” Serena said after a slight hesitation, “Ezra couldn’t have been in his right mind when he made that will. I’m sure I’ll win if I take it to the General Session. They’d never decide in favor of a Tory.”

Nathan’s anger boiled over. He was tired of being treated as an outcast. He swept his fingers through his hair before turning on his heel to face his aunt. “If you so much as speak to a living soul about challenging the will, you’ll leave the house with no more than the clothes on your back.”

Serena blanched. “You wouldn’t dare. I have my rights … You can’t threaten me. This isn’t England where you precious lords can do anything you please.”

“I’m not a lord, and I have no more freedom than you, but I will not be robbed.”

This should be mine,” Serena said, flinging out her arm. Her gesture took in the whole library, its oak-paneled walls, its shelves filled with leather-covered books, its furniture crafted with skill and tended with care. “You have no right to it.”

“As long as Uncle Ezra is alive, it’s neither mine nor yours,” Nathan said. “We would make better use of our time if we turned our minds to solving this tangle.”

“There’s nothing to solve. They borrowed money from your uncle. When the time is up, they pay it back or we take something of theirs in exchange. Can you do that?”

Nathan thought of the hundreds of colonists whose unpaid debts had ruined his father and caused him to commit suicide. He also thought of his mother, broken in spirit and frail of mind, living out her last years with a hired companion. He tried to stamp down his thirst for revenge; he attempted to choke down the feeling of satisfaction at knowing these people now suffered as he had suffered; he endeavored to remember he didn’t want to be like Uncle Ezra or Aunt Serena.

He tried, but he failed.

“Yes,” he said, feeling ashamed of the tremor of satisfaction that skittered along his spine.

“Good. Still, it’s a good idea to send the sheriff. They’ll try to talk you out of it. That awful bully Reuben Stowbridge might even threaten you.”

Nathan remembered the shame of hearing his own father beg the sheriff to spare their home, to leave his wife a few of her favorite possessions. He remembered even more clearly the cold refusal, the methodical carting away of everything that could be moved, dismantled, or ripped up.

I’ll go,” Nathan said, his eyes as cold as his aunt’s.

“Don’t be so thick headed,” Delilah snapped. “Do you think I want to work for Nathan Trent?”

Ezra Buel had died three days after she’d visited Maple Hill. Reuben was furious that she would even have considered working for the old man, but he was adamantly opposed to her working for Nathan Trent.

Delilah faced her brother and sister-in-law across the table, her hands on her hips, an expression of fierce determination molding her features into the look of a woman much older than her nineteen years—she hoped.

“I won’t let you be a servant to anybody, especially not to a damned Englishman,” Reuben shouted.

There’s no use kicking against what can’t be helped,” Jane told her husband philosophically. “The young man can’t be worse than his uncle.”

“I won’t have it,” Reuben repeated mulishly.

“You didn’t object when I helped Mary Nunn,” Delilah interjected.

“Mary is a God-fearing woman, even if I can’t say as much for Bradley Nunn,” Reuben said. “But I wouldn’t trust any female in the same house as a damned Redcoat.”

“Serena Noyes and her daughter live with him,” Delilah pointed out. “That should be sufficient protection.”

“No!” Reuben shouted.

“Then tell the how you plan to run this farm without a yoke of oxen?” Delilah demanded, her patience growing thin. Didn’t Reuben see she couldn’t stand around and watch him lose everything he had because of his stubborn pride?

“The sheriff is going to be here first thing in the morning. What are you going to do when it comes time for spring planting—put Jane in harness?”

Reuben tried to protest, but Delilah swept on.

“And what are you going to do when you lose everything you’ve got? Tell me that, Reuben Stowbridge, because you will lose it if you can’t carry flax to market or haul lumber or plant spring crops. It won’t do your boys a particle of good to starve just so I can avoid the shame of working as a servant. And what about the baby?”

Backed into a corner, Reuben reacted as he often did. “Tom Nutting won’t take my oxen,” he shouted. “I’ll break his head first. Maybe I’ll shoot him. I should have shot Ezra Buel.”

Delilah wanted to scream with frustration. Would Reuben ever forget he had been a war hero? Once he had charged a redoubt of British soldiers and single-handedly killed every one of them. Now he thought shooting somebody was the answer to everything.

“What good will that do?” Delilah demanded. “They’ll only send more men the next day.”

“Dammit, Delilah, I can’t let my sister pay my debts. I couldn’t hold up my head if I did.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Well, I do!” he thundered. His shouts woke the boys and they started to whimper.

“You go to them, Reuben” Jane said.

Reuben disappeared up the ladder to the small loft where the two lads slept.

It’s unaccountable,” Jane shook her head. “He’s ready to break the sheriff’s head and shoot Nathan Trent, but he’s as gentle as a woman with those boys.”

She paused and looked away. “Reuben isn’t the only one who feels shamed that you should have to do for us what we can’t do ourselves.” She turned her gaze back to Delilah. “But I’ll not tell you to go or stay. You must decide for yourself.”

Delilah knew what she had to do, and she knew Jane would somehow bring Reuben to accept it. She slipped outside.

The sky was unusually bright for this late in the evening. A bank of low-lying clouds deflected the last rays of the sun to the earth, immersing everything in a rosy glow. She loved being outside at dusk. She enjoyed feeling the bite of the cool, invigorating air after a hot day, the spring of the earth beneath her feet; and she liked hearing the birds in the treetops squabble over roosting places.

The evening air was heavy with the musty odor of ripe grapes fallen to the ground under the arbor next to the house. Even the rank odor of the animal yards was not wholly unpleasant. There was a comfort in familiar sounds and smells.

It really wasn’t much of a farm—at less man fifty acres it was too small to support a family of five-about-to-be-come-six—but Delilah only had to think of the hours of solitary backbreaking labor Reuben had put in to know how much he loved it. Except for a cow lot and pig pen at the edge of the woods, a vegetable garden behind the arbor, and a barnyard and chicken coop beyond that, nearly every foot of cleared land was under cultivation.

Unlike most of the yeomen, who farmed only enough land for their own needs, Reuben had cleared extra land to grow crops to sell. But prices had fallen so low it was all he could do to buy a few necessities for his family. She
had
to work for Nathan Trent.

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she say his name without feeling a twinge of excitement. He had probably taken her into that fancy drawing room just to show her how far below him she was. Okay, so she didn’t hobnob with members of London society and she didn’t drink tea every afternoon from bone china, but that didn’t make her a social outcast. She was just as good as he was. A war had been fought to prove it.

It galled her to have to reenter his house as a servant. She had made the choice to sacrifice her pride, not her family, but she didn’t have to like it.

Anyway, it was a waste of time thinking about Nathan Trent. She’d probably never see him again once Reuben’s debt was paid. Still, even if she did not, she wouldn’t forget him. No woman could forget a man like Trent.

Daniel Shays, captain of the local militia, stopped by later that afternoon. Shays was one of the most famous people in Massachusetts. He had fought at Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and Stony Point. Because of his bravery, General Lafayette had given him a fancy sword. But brave as he was, Daniel Shays was just a poor farmer, and he’d had to sell the Lafayette sword to pay his taxes.

Reuben told him what Delilah wanted to do.

“Ought to have it paid up before Christmas,” Shays said.

“I won’t let her put one foot inside that house,” Reuben exploded. “I’ll find some other way to pay.”