Judas Flowering (2 page)

“Madam Purchis is here.” The clear voice drew all eyes around to a newly opened side door. “What's made you so late, Hart? Sister and I have waited supper this hour.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am. It's trouble, as I said, the mob's out. Poor Miss Phillips here has just lost her father.” He had her firmly by the arm and led her towards the open doorway.

“Lost?” And then, “Phillips? I don't seem to recall the name.”

“You wouldn't.” Mercy Phillips withdrew her arm from Hart's and moved forward into the light from the doorway, a thin, almost childlike figure, who nevertheless held herself with a kind of tense dignity despite damply clinging skirts and tear-marks down her smoke-blackened face. She looked for a moment at Martha Purchis, plump and prosperous in her evening velvet, then, surprisingly, swept a handsome curtsey. “Forgive the intrusion, madam. Your son would bring me. If you'll give me a corner for the night, I'll go back to my father in the morning.”

“I don't understand.” Martha Purchis turned irritably to her son. “Anything.”

No more did he. What was this girl with the face of a starved boy and the voice that was sometimes a guttersnipe's, sometimes a duchess'? “I'm afraid the mob have killed Miss Phillip's father,” he began, saw that she was swaying on her feet, and took her arm, gently this time, to help her indoors.

“The Whig rebels?” Martha Purchis was angry now. “And you've led them here! Idiot boy. We'll all be burned in our beds, most like.”

“Nothing of the kind.” Unwonted anger rose in him to match hers. “We got clean away, thanks to Thunder. They'd come by boat. They're doubtless still looking for Miss Phillips in the woods, if they haven't slunk home, ashamed of what they have done.” But it reminded him of something. He turned to raise a hand and silence the tumult in
the servants' yard. “Listen, all of you. Nothing's happened out of the way tonight. We've got no guest. Understood?” And then, recognising that few did, he turned to his own servant, Jem. “You, Jem, make them understand?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Hart. We don't want none of those rebs stravaging round here tonight. Or any night. I'll get it through their thick heads, don't worry.”

“Thanks, Jem.” He turned and led the girl into the lighted doorway, only to be stopped by a shriek from his mother.

“Hart! You're wounded!”

He felt the girl stiffen beside him, “It's nothing, Mother.” He put up a hand to the dried blood on his face. “Just a tree branch as we rode back.” A small, grateful squeeze of his arm made him look down and take in the full extent of his protégée's dishevelment and despair. “Mother, Miss Phillips has had all she can stand. Do you think Abigail—”

“Abigail!” Mrs Purchis bridled. “Old Amy shall look out for her.” She had still not spoken a word directly to her unexpected guest.

“No, Mother.” For the second, extraordinary time he found himself contradicting her. “Abigail would be better.” And turned with a quick breath of relief at the sound of a voice from halfway up the stairs.

“What would Abigail be better for, Cousin Hart?” Abigail Purchis came round the corner of the stair, ready dressed for supper, golden ringlets glowing against the white shoulders exposed by her low-cut dress. Then, seeing Mercy Phillips, “Oh, the poor thing!” She picked up blue silk skirts and came hurrying down to join them. “What happened? No, don't tell me. Not now.” She held out both hands to the girl. “Come with me, dear. Tomorrow will be time enough to talk. Hart, send me Sally with some hot milk and a dash of rum. And tell them to start heating the water for a bath. Or”—with Mercy Phillips' arm in hers, she recognised her exhaustion—” “perhaps you had better help us upstairs first.

“No need.” The girl's neat chin went up. “If you don't mind touching me, I can manage.”

“Mind? Nonsense!” Hart had never been so near to loving his cousin. “Come, dear. Aunt Martha, will you excuse me from supper?”

“Well!” Mrs Purchis watched angrily as the two girls climbed the stairs slowly, arm supporting arm, one a Dresden
lady, the other a figure to scare crows. “I hope you know what you are doing, Hart!”

“Indeed I do. I'm going to tell Sally about the rum and milk, and that hot bath. And will you excuse me from supper too? I will be sadly late, I'm afraid, by the time I've made myself fit to be seen.”

“No matter for that, child. It's a poor world if Winchelsea can't wait for Purchis. I'll explain to your Aunt Anne.”

“Do, Mamma.” He was at once grateful and aware that something basic had changed between them. She might call him “child” as she had always done, but she was treating him, now, as the man he felt himself. “And Francis?”

“Dines out. I quite forget where. I know your aunt was not best pleased. Low company, she said.”

“Oh? Francis gaming again?”

“If that's the worst of it. Which we must hope. Dear Hart, what a comfort you are to me.”

“No credit to me that cards bore me to death. Now, do you make my peace with Aunt Anne, while I do Cousin Abigail's commissions and make myself presentable. Ten minutes?”

“As many as you need, dear boy.” Something had indeed changed between them.

In the servants' quarters, Hart found that Abigail's orders were already being obeyed, milk and water both heating on the great outdoor range. It was a reminder, as if any were needed, of how complete was their lack of privacy in a house full of servants. Lucky they are our friends, he thought, hurrying upstairs to his own room, where Jem awaited him with his evening dress laid out on the bed and hot water in the basin.

“Must I?” He looked with distaste at black knee breeches and silk stockings.

“You know you must, Mr Hart.” Jem and Hart had grown up together and he spoke with the ease of long friendship. “Missus Mayfield, she's in a pretty tearer already, long of Master Frank's being off again. You'll never turn her up sweet in day clothes. She's wearing her black tonight.” He pulled an expressive face.

“Oh, is she?” Hart sighed and laughed, and let Jem help him out of coat and bloodstained shirt. Everybody in the house knew that when Aunt Anne Mayfield put on her mourning black, there was trouble coming. Everybody in the
house knew everything, he thought, dabbing carefully at dried blood.

“That was some branch you ran into,” said Jem, confirming this. “Basilicum powder, I think, and a plaster to hide the worst. And I'll tell Sally to cut the young lady's nails for her.”

“Thanks!” Impossible not to laugh, but then, on a grimmer note, “Her father had just been killed, Jem. The less anyone knows …”

“No one knows nothing. ‘Cept we got a guest, and you're going to be late for dinner, and the poor madam's having a bad time with her sister. Talk of Charleston again, I do hear.” He helped pull on the fine silk stockings Cousin Frank had brought back from England, and handed over the detested knee breeches.

“Damn Charleston,” said Hart. “Savannah customs are good enough for me.”

“And us,” said Jem succinctly. “Home ain't been precisely home since the Mayfields came to stay.”

“That's enough, Jem.” Hart adjusted the ruffles at his wrists with a quick, angry flick. “Yes, my face looks much better. Thanks. Tell them to dish up in ten minutes, will you? And the French champagne.”

“But madam said—”

“French champagne, Jem.” He left the man gazing after him with a mixture of surprise and delight.

“Well, I'll be darned.” Jem gathered up the bloodstained shirt. “If it ain't old Master Hyde come to life again, and that I never did hope to see.”

In the elegant drawing room, with its gilt-backed, uncomfortable chairs, expensively imported from France, the Hart sisters were making a similar discovery. Given his mother's maiden name at his christening, Hart Purchis had lost both his father and his younger Uncle Purchis in the last year of the French and Indian War. Inevitably, it had meant petticoat government for a boy left fatherless at five years old. His mother, one of the two rich Misses Hart of Charleston, South Carolina, had run the Winchelsea estates to a marvel, everybody said, and when her ailing sister-in-law died of grief, had merely added Abigail Purchis, two years Hart's senior, to her family, Hart had been delighted when the debts his cousin Francis had run up in Europe had forced
Aunt Anne Mayfield to let her Charleston house and bring him to stay in what she found the barbarous solitudes of Winchelsea. Cousin Francis was a great gun, if ever there was one, with his stories of Oxford capers and his brief experience of Europe. But Aunt Anne was something else again.

Tonight she was in a very bad temper indeed. Used to being the centre of attention in Charleston, she had never quite settled down to her position in her younger sister's house. An illness that Martha Purchis had recently suffered had been the last straw. Mrs Purchis' heart trouble, brought on by overwork, had been the signal for serious spasms of nerves on her sister's part. Any breach of household routine would be the signal for one of these, and Hart was not surprised to find her fanning herself angrily and talking of her “poor nerves.”

“Madeira, Aunt?” He saw that her glass was full, gave his mother her favourite cordial, and poured himself a brimming glass. Then, aware of a bristling silence, “I trust my mother has made my apologies to you, Aunt.

“It is an explanation that I want,” said Mrs Mayfield in her most quelling tones. “What's this about some guttersnipe you've brought home—and set your Cousin Abigail to wait on? Miss Purchis! And turning the house upside down with demands for this and demands for that, so that, no doubt, we are to wait all night for our supper. And you know what that does to my nerves.”

Hart looked at his father's big gold watch, the only ornament he wore. “In fact,” he said, “I told them to serve up in five minutes. I am sorry if you've been inconvenienced, Aunt, but we do not turn away those in distress from Winchelsea.”

It went closer to the bone than he had intended. Seeing his aunt go first white, then red with rage around the rouge she used so freely, he had the answer to a question that had only recently occurred to him. Clearly, Anne Mayfield was not paying anything towards her lodging at Winchelsea, or her expensive son's. No affair of his. It was his mother who had made Winchelsea rich, first with her fortune and then with her good management. It was not for him to question what she did with her own. Besides, he loved having Francis, and his mother seemed to enjoy her sister's company. But he rose with relief at sight of the majordomo beaming at the door
to announce dinner. “Let me give you my arm, Aunt.”

She had made a quick recovery and smiled up at him with an attempt at archness. “So gallant, dear boy. And so elegant! We owe a great debt to Francis, do we not, Sister? What a hobbledehoy it was when we first came, remember?”

“I was thirteen.” Hart gritted his teeth and felt the blood start under the plaster on his face.

“And such a big boy, too. All bones, and muscle, and exercise. I wonder you have not joined the army. Dear Francis would have given anything for a commission—in England, of course—could he but have afforded it. And you have such a tradition in your family, dear boy.”

“Don't speak of it!” Martha Purchis did not often use such a tone to her older sister. “How can you?” she went on now. “After two such losses as I have suffered! A husband—such a husband—and a brother-in-law, all in one year. No, no, Sister, my dear Hart is going to stay at home, take the burden of the estate off my shoulders, and be a comfort to his mamma, are you not, my dear?

“Well.” He found himself, suddenly, at an expected hurdle, and took it fast. “Not precisely, Mother. I have been meaning for some time to tell you that I rather think of going to Harvard College in the fall.”

“To Harvard!” said his mother.

“To New England!” His aunt was appalled. “Where all the trouble started!”

“Ridiculous,” said his mother.

“They won't take you,” said his aunt.

“As a matter of fact”—he smiled at them both—“they have. Ah, here's our champagne at last. Will you drink to my success as a scholar, ladies?”

“Champagne?” said Aunt Anne.

“I ordered it. You'll forgive me, Mother? I thought we might need it.”

“We do.” Suddenly, with tears in her eyes, she smiled at him. “Dear Hart. I drink to your great success.”

Mercy Phillips woke to broad daylight and an extraordinary mixture of sensations. Memory first. Horrible. Her father, that howling mob, the boy who had been so sure her father was dead. How should he know death, a sheltered child like him? She had watched her mother die, in the garret behind Drury Lane, and many others, too, on the crowded, stinking ship that brought them to America. But always there had been Father, with his wonderful confidence in the future. “In America all men are equal.”

Equal! She was lying on a bed of unbelievable comfort, in the most luxurious room she had ever even dreamed of. She was wearing a nightgown of material softer and finer than the shirts she and her mother used to stitch, hour after hour, to eke out the meagre livelihood her father made by his writing. And she was clean. Really clean for the first time, it seemed to her, since the three of them had left their Sussex home and gone to London, following that will-o'-the-wisp hope of her father's. If the great Dr Johnson could make a fortune with his unaided pen, could not others? Could not a grammar-school scholar who had carried every prize of his day?

He had been wrong, of course, disastrously wrong. It would have been better for all of them if he had gone on running the little country school that had made such a successful start, but he had felt he had something to say to the world, and a duty to say it. And when Father got an idea of that kind fixed in his head, there was nothing to be done. Mother had cried all the time, while they were packing up, and Father had been gentle, loving—and obdurate. Well, he had been like that. It had been the same over here. Tears began to trickle slowly down her face. Father would never learn … Father would never have the chance to learn.…