For Her Love (10 page)

Sail away on a ship he was not entirely sure he had ever wanted to lie in the arms of a stranger.

Or stay, and salvage a diamond from the shards of splintered glass that seemed to slice into everyone who brushed against Welbourne Plantation. After all that he had seen tonight, both from Grace and her parents, he was more convinced than ever that Grace Welbourne was an extraordinary woman. She had fire and courage and a keen mind, all miraculously intact despite Iolanthe and Edmund’s bitter selfishness. He had spent far too much of his life dealing in treasure not to know a true prize when he saw one, and he had to admit that he was enough of a pirate to seize it.

Giles ran a hand through his already tousled hair, and scratching his head, contemplated the hamper on the table. For the first time, he realized that the succulent smells of seared fish and fresh rum cake emanated from it, and he wondered if he could keep any of it down.

Keyah had just finished cleaning the kitchen and was about to extinguish the last lamp before she picked up her lantern to leave. Dying embers emitted a dim glow from the big, round hearth and added heat to the already warm night air. When Keyah saw Grace and Matu, she stopped. “Been a long time since me see you two come in de kitchen an’ talk.” She left the lamp lit and moved her slight frame reluctantly toward the door, her round face curious.

Ignoring the cook, Matu led Grace into the lamplight. She drew the edge of her hand sharply against her nose, then tapped her finger against her ivory teeth.

Grace sighed. ‘Twas rather pathetic really. She did it so often that Matu actually had a standard sign to communicate when she thought that Grace was cutting off her own nose to spite Iolanthe. “It is not merely Iolanthe,” Grace insisted.

Matu snorted and crossed her arms.

“Nothing’s changed, Matu. All the old reasons still exist. I will not marry.”

Matu held both hands out, side by side, one open, palm side up, the other in a fist. Another standard gesture.

“This is different? How so?” Grace demanded. “Do you really think that your sainted captain looks at you and sees not the color of your skin, just because he owns no slaves? He thinks the less of you for your dark hide, trust me.”

Matu gave her head a frustrated shake. She gestured for a potbelly, the sign for Edward, then followed with the gesture for different.

“Father is different?” Grace asked.

Matu pointed to Grace, then mimed putting a ring on her left ring finger. Reversing the gestures, she pointed out of the still open kitchen door.

“What?” Grace asked.

Keyah moved forward, the light from her lantern preceding her. She had not yet left. “Me hear de maas and his ‘ooman talkin’ ova dem suppa. De maas sey if you don’ marry dis mon, him a-go put you in de fields a mont an’ see if dat don’ clear you head.”

Grace’s eyes narrowed and glistened with tears that she refused to shed. Her father had promised never to sell her. He had said nothing about not making her a field hand. “Fine!” she shouted. “At least I will finally know where I stand!”

One moment Grace was standing there, full of defiance; the next, her face was on fire and she was seeing stars. Matu choked on a sob and stared at her open hand, obviously just as shocked at having slapped Grace as Grace was at having been slapped. One hand on her cheek, Grace stared at her lifelong nurse. In all the time they had known each other, Matu had never raised a hand to her.

In a small voice, reminiscent of the child she had once been, Grace whispered, “You hurt me.”

“You tink dat hurt, Missy?” Keyah said, her voice hard and unforgiving. “Try de lash on you pretty back. Her don’ know nutten, Matu.” With a disgusted “humph!” she trudged out the door, slamming it behind her.

Her head swimming, Grace watched her go. “Do you think that she knows?” A bitter laugh slipped through her lips. “Of course she knows. Father and his big secret. He thinks the slaves so stupid that, as long as he does not say it outright, they won’t figure it out. A planter would not put his white daughter in the fields.”

Matu reached out and gently touched Grace’s flaming cheek, a sad look in her dark eyes.

“What if I have a baby?” Grace asked. “What if ‘tis too dark?”

Matu looked away and shrugged.

“He will kill me.”

Matu shook her head. She made the boat on the sea gesture, followed by the sign for different.

“He is no different,” Grace repeated, but she knew it was a lie. Captain Courtney had been horrified by the treatment of the Negroes. He had been moved by the suffering of an insignificant slave child. But that did not mean that he would willingly be married to a woman whose blood he knew to be tainted. A tear finally fell over her stinging cheek. “He would not kill me,” she conceded, “but he would hate me.”

Matu shrugged again. She mimed rocking a baby, then ran a finger over the light skin on Grace’s arm.

Grace nodded. “Father says the same. He is sure that my babies will be light.” But she put her head in her hands anyway.

She was such a coward! Other women endured it. They endured it over and over again, as evidenced by repeated pregnancies. Surely she could endure it, too. The thought made her shudder. How could she explain to Matu? Mayhap Matu knew better than she the pain of the lash, but as far as Grace knew, Matu had never had a man’s hands on her. She did not know the shame, the horror of having her body violated in the dark of night. A whipping could be avoided, or if not, it ended soon and did not occur again for a long time. Maybe not at all, if one kept one’s head down and did all that one must.

Then again, had she not just learned that slaves were not spared this indignity? Of course, her father would never use her thus. But shared blood had not stopped her uncle. She sank onto the dirt floor and wept, but Matu did not come to comfort her. Instead, Grace heard the kitchen door open and close, and then she was alone.

*

The front lawn was dark. Tiny points of light floated in and out among the foliage of the gardens and drifted toward the treetops, fireflies competing with stars that shone above with a quarter moon. Before Iolanthe and Edward, the starry heavens descended to the horizon, where they disappeared into a vast void that whispered seductively with the voice of the sea. Tree frogs sang in relentless chirps, nearly drowning out the tense, fervent, hushed tones of the master and mistress who stood facing one another on the grass.

“Damn you Iolanthe,” Edmund was saying, his voice quietly enraged. “I am botching this whole affair badly enough without your assistance.”

“You are evil,” Iolanthe hissed back, “evil to ply this deception!”

“Oh, have you suddenly found a conscience, Iolanthe?”

Anger surged through Iolanthe’s veins. How dare he? What had she ever done wrong? He was the one who had elevated the fruit of his sins to an unnatural place! And now, if Edmund had his way, Grace would marry a sea captain. She would travel the world, see places that Iolanthe had only dreamed of. It was so grossly unfair!

“God is working against you on this, Edmund. It is an abomination!”

Edmund shook his head. “Nay, God is on Grace’s side here, if only she were not too stubborn to see. The man is already half in love with her.”

Bile rose in Iolanthe’s throat. “He does not know! If he knew, he would be repulsed.”

Grabbing her arm, Edmund pulled his wife to him. “At least a black wench does not lie like a block of wood under a man. At least if
she
can’t give a man a good fucking she’ll have the decency to fight and make it interesting!”

“I will
not
allow you to speak this way to me! I will not allow it!” Iolanthe stamped her foot in outrage. “You disgusting pig! You will be hoist by your own petard, Edmund. One way or another, that bitch will be of no use to you except as the laborer God meant her to be, and you will be left with nothing but your stinking little farm!”

His fingers bit even more cruelly into the arm he held. There would surely be marks in the morning, he thought with satisfaction. “If I am left with no heirs, Iolanthe, I swear that I will…” He spluttered a moment.

“What?” Iolanthe scoffed. “You may own the land, but my father owns everyone on it. Including you.”

Edmund’s voice became dangerously soft and smooth. “What a shame it would be if I had to write a sorrowful letter to your father. ‘Dear
Monsieur
Renault, I regret to inform you that our dear Iolanthe has succumbed to yellow fever. Alas, it struck so very quickly that we were unable even to call for the doctor.’ Of course, no one would fault my seeking a young bride after a year of mourning. Your last gift to me, the freedom to produce a dozen lily-white children with some fresh faced girl with a bit of real fire in her.”

Iolanthe turned to glare at him. “You had better make sure that she has money or slaves, because my father will take all of his back.”

“It might very well be worth it.”

“She will never marry him, Edmund. Grace will be your undoing, not I.”

*

The food had smelled inviting enough, but Giles had only taken one bite. He thought of the child, of the poverty and despair to which he had been witness, and the perfectly seasoned fish seemed to turn to ashes in his mouth.

Exhaustion hit with a vengeance. He wanted to sleep, and then he wanted to wake and discover that the whole incident had just been a horrible nightmare. For the first time, he understood why Geoff’s wife, Faith, could hardly stand the taste of sugar. She had spent months on a sugar plantation, one with a master and mistress far kinder than these two, but slavery was unavoidably brutal. He was coming to understand that as he had never understood it before.

Another glance in the hamper revealed a bottle of wine. Giles uncorked it and poured a glass. Lethe, he hoped, or at least something to take the edge off his pain. He heard the back door open, and Matu slipped inside, skirting the wall and clearly trying to avoid looking at him.

“Is there any hope?” he asked her.

Matu stopped. She stood just outside of the halo of light cast by the candles on the dining and tea tables, so he couldn’t read her expression, but he did see her shrug.

“I would treat her well,” Giles continued. “This place isn’t good for her. I don’t think ‘tis good for anyone.”

The woman shook her head, then continued on her way up the stairs to the second floor.

They would take her with them, Giles thought. Grace would have her maid, and her maid would have a taste of freedom. Maybe, in time, he would learn to communicate with Matu, and she would help him to understand the nature of the woman he had somehow determined to marry.

And why was that? Why was he so hell-bent on such a hastily set course? He shook his head and sipped his wine. Was he in love? Was this what it was like? Well, if it was, it was nothing like it had been between Geoff and Faith. ‘Twould be a lie to say that he had not thought of Grace’s smooth, golden skin beneath his hands, but neither was his desire to make her his own driven by lust. Conquest was not generally important to him, nor was he particularly drawn by her innocence. He had no doubt of her virtue, but she seemed worldly in a most disturbing way. Not sexually, but mayhap more like she knew better than he the nature of greed and evil.

More like, that was it. She had the face of an angel, but the look in her eyes was piercing, and the smile on her young, beautiful mouth too cynical for a woman of her age and station in life.

She would wed someone, someday. She was a woman, and such was the natural order. It just seemed to him that she must not stay on a plantation, any plantation. He wanted to take her on the ocean, let it rock her, let the endless blue swallow up her pain as it so often had his. Mayhap he did not love the sea as deeply as many a sailor did, but it soothed ones hurts and put life into perspective. He closed his eyes and imagined her face relaxed, in awe of a fair day at sea, nothing in her eyes or smile but delight. He envisioned what she might look like if ever she gazed at him as Faith did Geoff. It would be his undoing. At the mere thought, he felt his mouth go dry and form a ridiculous grin.

The rear door clicked softly open again, and he turned to see her as she stepped into the light. There was nothing of his daydream in her. Her dress was rumpled and dirty, her face swollen and tear stained, her eyes haunted, hunted, and there was no smile at all. She only stared at him as though she half expected him to murder her where she stood.

“Grace? Are—are you all right?”

She shook her head.

Giles set his wine down and swallowed hard. “God, it’s been a hell of a day,” he said.
Damn!
That wasn’t what he meant to say. He meant to apologize for how the whole subject of marriage had come up. He should have asked what he could do to help her. He should have said just about anything else.

One side of her mouth quirked in a ghost of her skeptical grin. “Aye,” she agreed softly, “it has.”

“I am sorry. I am sorry that I didn’t have a chance to court you and propose to you properly. I am sorry that you are being placed under so much pressure. And I am sorry about your—sister.”

Grace eyed his glass of wine, sitting on the table. It would feel good, just now, to have its pleasant warmth in her veins, but she was fairly certain that if she were to swallow anything it would come right back up in a matter of seconds. “Me, too,” she said.

“Can we start again?” he asked.

Grace regarded him for a moment. He looked like he’d been through hell. He was a disheveled mess, and there was little of the confident commander in him. His shoulders were slumped, and there were faint shadows under his eyes. Again, she felt the need to touch him, to ease the lines of stress that creased his face with her fingertips. She actually clasped her hands before her to keep from doing it. How had this poor man been drawn into the vortex of her life? It would be as much for his benefit as hers if she sent him packing. And yet, when again might she ever have such an opportunity? Captain Courtney was a gentle man, one filled with compassion. He didn’t lash out and hurt people, although God knew, the Welbourne family had caught him in their crossfire. He would have been within his rights to fire back.