JoAnn Wendt (19 page)

Flavia nodded, leaning back in the cool grass. The smell of wild onion rose faintly from the grass, and a white cabbage moth fluttered up.

“The voyage was a hell for bondslaves, as well you know, Jane. By the second month, decent folk were behaving like a pack of wolves. Only one man took up the cause of justice. He defended the weak and the old. He pled the widows’ case. He stood up to the Newgate convicts in their thievery. For this, he received harsh treatment from captain and crew, beatings from others.”

Dennis raised his eyes to hers. Grave, steady eyes.

“I thought him a fool, Jane.”

There was silence, silence so deep that Flavia could almost hear the beat of Dennis’s heart. Moved, she reached out and touched his shoulder for a moment.

“The voyage was too much for him. When he died, I learned he’d been a Friend. His Bible came into my hands. Only one verse was underlined. Micah, chapter six, verse eight:
He hath showed thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Dennis’s eyes held hers.

“I became a Friend that day. I received Jesus.”

Flavia drew a deep, shaky breath. The admiration she felt for Finny’s quest was swallowed up by her own sense of defeat.

“If you fight for justice, you fight windmills,” she whispered bitterly. “Justice doesn’t exist.”

He looked at her evenly.

“Then we must make it exist.”

The sudden, imperious click of heels on the wooden veranda warned that Mrs. Byng’s nap had ended. Dennis Finny lunged to his feet and offered Flavia a hand. She got up, too, but slowly. Every muscle ached. She was just gaining her feet when Mrs. Byng swooped off the veranda and into the yard. From the expression on the woman’s face, Flavia could see that Mrs. Byng was torn between the urge to scold for laziness and the stronger urge to grill Dennis Finny for gossip of the wealthy Tates. Indecision hovered in her sharp eyes, and Flavia took advantage of it, leaping in.

“Mr. Finny is just leaving, ma’am. He has brought you a gazette, and then he tarried to help me with the pickles.”

Mrs. Byng’s peevish look faded. The woman always counted herself ahead when she got something for nothing. A free gazette
and
free labor amounted to a coup. Mrs. Byng granted Dennis a smile.

“Ah,
Mr. Finny.”

“Mistress Byng.” He bowed slightly. But in the Quaker manner, he didn’t remove his hat in deference to a superior. Mrs. Byng’s smile chilled. Flavia knew Mrs. Byng found Quaker habits irritating. But the woman recovered herself and began to probe.

“How is dear Mrs. Tate? No doubt the dear lady is quite exhausted, always entertaining guests, as she is, always called upon, poor dear, to give dancing assemblies for her daughters. But then, if one has daughters as plain as Maryann and Deborah Tate, one must do
something
to attract suitors, mustn’t one?”

She waited for an acquiescing nod or murmur of agreement from Dennis Finny, but he refused to accommodate her, and Flavia’s respect for the dignified young bond- servant soared.

Mrs. Byng trilled on. “But then, the Tates are Roman Catholics, and papists do love dancing assemblies and all manner of revelry. It is the pagan in them, Mr. Finny. The Reverend Mr. Byng says so.”

She nodded excitedly. “Papists are only a stone’s throw from their pagan roots, and there is not a one of them that would not rise up and murder us True Believers in our beds at night, if the wicked pope in Rome so directed. Oh, indeed, Mr. Finny!”

She stopped to catch her breath, and Flavia stole a glance at Dennis Finny. His intelligent eyes glinted with irritation.

“Thy opinion of dancing assemblies could not have come at a more opportune time, ma’am. Mistress Tate is currently preparing invitations for her October assembly. Thee and the Reverend Mr. Byng were to have been invited. With thy permission, I shall endeavor to explain to Mrs. Tate that thee would not welcome such an invitation.”

Flavia choked back a laugh. She knew Mrs. Byng would give her eyeteeth to be invited to one of the lavish, three-day dancing assemblies at the Tate plantation.

Mrs. Byng gulped, stumbled verbally for a bit, then sputtered her way to firmer ground.

“Thank you, Mr. Finny, but the Reverend Mr. Byng and I should consider it our sacred
duty
to attend the dancing assembly. If we refuse to mingle with papists, then how shall we convert them?”

She launched into additional prying questions about the Tates, and Dennis Finny politely tried to take his leave without discrediting Mrs. Byng, the Tates, the pope, the Anglican or the Catholic churches. It was a large order, and he managed it adroitly, to Flavia’s admiration.

At last he managed to break away, and Mrs. Byng frowned after him in vague disappointment. She’d gotten no juicy tidbits. To Flavia’s irritation, the woman made one more try.

“Oh, Mr. Finny,” she called, arresting his escape. “Shall you hunt grouse in the fall? After corn harvest?”

Dennis turned patiently and rested his hand upon the low stone wall that fronted the yard.

“Yes, ma’am. That I shall.”

“Well, then, good luck in the shoot, Mr. Finny. Grouse are fine-tasting birds. Oh, indeed, Mr. Finny, the Reverend Mr. Byng always says there is nothing better to be brought to table than a fine fat grouse, roasted to perfection.”

Dennis Finny paused. Flavia was amused to note that his pause was not long enough to be interpreted as impolite, but just long enough to be unsettling for the greedy Mrs. Byng.

“May I prevail upon thee, ma’am, to accept a brace of grouse if my shoot goes well?”

Mrs. Byng’s feigned wide-eyed surprise disgusted Flavia.

“Dear me! What a generous thought! No, I could not accept such a gift. No, indeed. Oh—oh, well. I daresay you will persuade me into it, Mr. Finny.” She laughed lightly. “You are a very persuasive young man, and I am
quite
at the disadvantage.”

“Not at all, ma’am,” Dennis said solemnly. “It is who am at the disadvantage.”

Flavia ducked her head to hide the smile of amusement that leaped to her lips. When she looked up again, Dennis Finny had gone out the gate, had jumped the ditch full of honeysuckle and was loping toward the Tate plantation at a sure, steady pace.

She watched him go.

“I like you, Dennis Finny,” she thought. “I respect you. And that is precisely why I shall never marry you. You deserve better than a wife who would lie in your arms each night grieving for another man.”

Chapter 12

   “Lud, Jane. I could speak the lines plainer than that. I could play Lady Macbeth better than she, and with a basket over my head.”

   Flavia burst into a giggle, then suppressed it. “Shssh, Betsy. Everyone will hear.”

   “Let ‘em. I say, that as an actress, Mrs. Hamilton-St. James makes a very fine cow.”

   Flavia giggled again. Betsy Simm’s evaluation of the leading lady of the Hamilton-St. James Players was irreverent, but accurate. Anyone who’d frequented London’s Drury Lane theaters must agree. And Flavia had loved theater and had gone often. So had Elizabeth Simm, before her father, the earl, banished her to the colonies under indenture, as punishment for promiscuous behavior.

   Flavia and Elizabeth were sitting in the halfpence section, which meant they were sitting upon heaps of hay in the Tate warehouse, along with the other bond- servants and poor. The warehouse had been loaned as a makeshift theater for the traveling troupe. Chestertown’s theater had been damaged by fire.

Flavia scratched her ankle. The hay itched. Stiff spears of it poked through her stockings. The hay was new-mown. Its strong pungent smell conjured up sneezes, and when anyone shifted haunch or leg, the actors’ lines were lost in the loud rustling of hay.

The loft ran along the south end of the warehouse, the stage at the north end. Between were rows of rough trestle benches, the pit. The ordinary citizens of Chestertown sat there. A few bewigged heads bobbed in the pit and a matching number of modest corded silk gowns. But most of the jackets that stirred in the pit were plain serge, and the gowns were Virginia-cloth with collars of homemade lace and white starched caps completing the gown.

Hastily constructed boxes flanked the stage. Here sat the gentry and anyone else able to pay dear. The Tates occupied the largest box, nearest the stage. Expensively bewigged and garbed in English silks, the family was dressed well but not showily. To the rear of the box, behind Maryann and Deborah Tate, sat Dennis Finny. Flavia was surprised. She’d thought all Quakers objected to theater. Dennis was flanked by two young Tate boys. A large book lay open across their knees, and Flavia guessed they were following the text of the Shakespeare play.

The question of “pit” or “box” seats had been a touchy issue in the Byng household. From the first posting of the Hamilton-St. James playbill on the boards at the White Swan and at the Rose and Crown, Mr. Byng had declared himself for the pit. He could not, he vowed, part with an additional six shillings to sit three nights in a box. The pit would do for them.

The pit would
not do
for them, Mrs. Byng had countered, setting off an explosive charge. Should all of Chestertown think the Byngs cheap and common, she’d argued, as Flavia and Neddy tried to stay out of range of the flaring tempers.

The argument went on for two days.
Mrs. Byng won, as Flavia had expected. Immediately Mrs. Byng packed her powdered wig into a rush-weave box and sent Neddy to town with it, to have it dressed at the wigmaker’s. Unfortunately, Neddy wandered home from his mission by way of the creek. When he presented the box to Mrs. Byng, muddy water trickled from the rushing.

There’d been the devil to pay: a switching for Neddy and a hard slap in the face for Flavia when she’d tried to soothe the situation. Mrs. Byng’s temper didn’t cool until Flavia diverted her by offering to embroider red roses upon her calamanco dancing pumps, in preparation for the Tates’ dancing assembly.

Mrs. Byng now sat proudly in her box. But the stiff set of her shoulders told Flavia she wasn’t happy. And small wonder. Two things must grate on her, Flavia thought with amusement. First, Dennis Finny—a Quaker and a bondslave—sat in the Tate box. Second, the town rogue Jimmy Barlow and his gang of ne’er-do-wells occupied the box behind hers.

With the handsome arrogance of a scamp who cares not a whit what the town thinks of him, Jimmy Barlow lounged low in his chair, feet propped against the box boards, a sly grin on his face. Bored with the play, he’d turned his chair to face the loft and was making a public show of flirting with Betsy Simm.

Catching his suggestive gestures, Betsy giggled admiringly.

“Jimmy Barlow is drunk!” she whispered.

“Drunk and out of his mind,” returned Flavia with a smile. “Why does he irritate the gentry by hiring box seats?”

Mischief sparkled in Betsy’s dark eyes.

“Because I dared him to.”

“Betsy!”

“Oh, you’re thinking he has no money, Jane. But this week he has. Five men from Annapolis rode all the way to Chestertown to challenge Jimmy in Indian wrestling. The wager was ten pounds. Jimmy won.” She sighed admiringly. “I guess Jimmy Barlow must be the champion Indian wrestler of all America. Maybe of all the world.”

Below, the object of Betsy’s admiration loudly kissed the palm of his hand and blew the kiss to Betsy.

Betsy giggled. “Oh, he
is
three sheets to the wind!”

At the commotion in Jimmy Barlow’s box, Mrs. Byng turned and gave him a scathing look. Mr. Byng did not. Cowardly, Mr. Byng pretended not to notice. Mrs. Byng pointedly shifted her chair, so that Jimmy Barlow should have the full of her corsetted, disapproving back.

With a wiggle of his finger, Jimmy Barlow alerted the loft and pointed toward Mrs. Byng. Elaborately he leaned toward the stiff, disapproving back and made his finger hover just inches from Mrs. Byng’s wig. He pretended to follow the leaping itinerary of a louse in the wig. He snatched at the nonexistent louse, dashed it to the floor and ground it beneath the heel of his boot.

Betsy Simm giggled. The loft tittered, and from the stage the actors glared loftward. Even young Mary Wooster laughed happily for a moment, her fair, freckled face losing its downcast expression. And for this alone, Flavia silently blessed the outrageous Jimmy Barlow. Mary Wooster had never been the same since her public whipping in May. And the child’s waist was thickened with still another pregnancy. Flavia’s heart went out to her. She wished she could do something. But, what? She would do well if she simply managed to keep herself safe. But still . . .

“Mary,” she whispered, “come sit with us.”

Quickly, the girl complied, scrambling through the hay.

Encouraged by titters from loft and pit, Jimmy Barlow descended to additional buffoonery. His shining moment came at the expense of Mrs. Hamilton-St. James. The actress had just reached Lady Macbeth’s most famous scene. Wringing and rubbing her blood-guilty hands, she moaned with great emotion.

“Out
damned spot,” she groaned loudly.
“Out,
I say!”

Jimmy Barlow stood up, swaying drunkenly.

“Ay, out with it. Out with the whole damned play! Give us comedy, m’girl. Give us
“A Hob in the Well.”

Immediately one of Jimmy’s drunken cronies woke from his stupor and said, “Lesh go t’ the Rose ‘n’ Crown.”

As Flavia watched, wide-eyed, Jimmy Barlow evidently found the suggestion an excellent one. Or else the canny rogue realized he was about to be thrown out. For he bowed elaborately to the fiercely glaring Mrs. Hamilton-St. James, then strode out, laughing. His cronies trailed drunkenly behind.

Sighs of relief echoed from pit to highest box as the play resumed. The only sigh that was not one of relief was Betsy’s. She sighed with deep admiration.

She whispered, “Too bad, Jane, that Jimmy Barlow isn’t rich and well born. I shall have to wed dull old Mr. Gresham. And a poor second choice he is.”

Flavia’s glance flew to the box where the rich planter sat with his grown children. Mr. Gresham’s expression was severe, and the look that followed Jimmy Barlow out the door was a black one.