The Light in the Darkness (16 page)

She learned, for example, that no tobacco was produced at Greyhaven, although the other properties, known as quarters, that Grey had along the James River did plant and sell tobacco. Instead, the crops included corn and wheat, and cider from the apples in the orchards was produced and sold as well. Grey also sent slaves to Williamsburg once a week to sell firewood and fodder to the town residents on the market green. Many residents of the town also ground grain at the plantation mill, located on a mill pond that had been created by damming a small creek.

Despite her studies, and her duties as mistress of this
plantation, her life was remarkably pleasant and easy whenever she compared it to her long years as a tavern wench. Grey and Catherine, born as they had been to the planter class, seemed to be completely unaware of how fortunate they were. This land gave abundantly of its riches, such as wild turkey, duck, and venison, and the river produced delicacies such as oysters in the winter, crabs in the summer, and delicious varieties of fish all year round. Jennifer had never eaten so well in her life. And although she had to supervise the cooking and the other work done on the plantation, she no longer had to do the work herself.

Whenever she had free time from her studies, Jennifer spent her spare time rifling through the letters stored in the walnut desk in her chamber. She found herself moved by the romance she had uncovered—a romance long dead, yet still vividly alive on the parchment stored in the desk’s pigeonholes. She managed to suppress her vague feelings of guilt, telling herself that if reading the letters could teach her something about her enigmatic, distant husband, it was well worth it.

Some of the letters were written in a graceful, sloping feminine hand—letters Diana had written to Grey that had not been completed or sent for some reason. These letters, though affectionate, seemed slightly distant and cool when compared with the violently passionate sentiments expressed in Grey’s letters. Had Diana not returned Grey’s love in full, or had she simply been reserved, as befitted a lady? Jennifer was unable to decide.

At last she had sorted laboriously through nearly all the letters. Apparently Grey had wooed Diana mostly through letters, since Diana had lived in Williamsburg, nine miles away. This seemed rather romantic in Jennifer’s eyes. She certainly would have preferred it to being sold in exchange for a horse!

Perhaps it was not surprising that Jennifer, who had known no love since the death of her family long years before, found herself strangely moved by the love exposed so
plainly by Grey’s letters. Coupled with the normal human desire for love, her immense imagination made it easy to fantasize that the letters had been written to herself, rather than to a woman who had been dead for years. The letters were so passionate, so alive, it was hard to believe the sentiments they described belonged in the past. It was all too easy to imagine that those sentiments were directed at herself.

And consequently, starved for love and affection as she was, Jennifer fell headfirst into love with her husband.

She was not aware of it at first, of course. In the beginning, she was only aware of admiration for his passion for life, so evident in the letters, so different from her own passive resignation to the realities of existence. As the weeks passed, however, she found that she began to feel more than admiration.

When at last she recognized her sentiment for what it was, she also recognized the futility of her love. She was not in love with the surly, embittered man who was her husband, but rather with the man who, so many years ago, had been capable of passion and intense joy. The Edward who had existed nine years before was so different from the man she had married that they might as well have been two different people. Only rarely did she catch glimpses of Edward beneath Grey’s sullen demeanor, when Grey laughed, or when his memories brought out a shadow of the passion that had once been his nature. Grey, she realized bleakly, was all that was left. Edward was dead.

Ironically enough, she had fallen into the same trap as her husband. She was in love with someone who no longer existed.

“Me beloved …”

It was the last letter Grey had ever written to Diana, and Jennifer began reading it as reverently as if it were holy writ. She had read all the letters; she had imagined herself
in Diana’s place; and now her vicarious romance was coming to an end. She read on.

“I can scarcely bear to wait a fortnight,” Grey had written in his scrawling hand, “to make you mine. After two long years of designing and building Greyhaven, it is all but impossible for me to imagine that you will soon join me here. I certainly hope you find our house to your liking.…”

A black carriage drawn by matched chestnuts came up the curving drive, its iron-rimmed wheels rolling smoothly over the road. Edward Greyson was bringing his new wife home from Williamsburg. Diana sat on the leather-upholstered cushions, her skirts spread gracefully around her, as she stared eagerly out the window.

“Oh, Edward,” she sighed as she caught sight of the vast building. “It’s so beautiful. I love it!”

Grey smiled, pleased that his wife liked the building he’d worked on for so long. The house itself had cost him very little, since the bricks had been made on the property from the Virginia clay and the timber had been cut from the forest. Only the windows had been shipped from England. He had paid the building supervisor a mere one hundred and fifty pounds, and the actual construction of the dwelling, which had taken a full two years, had of course been carried out by slaves. The interior of the house had cost him far more, filled as it was with excellent furniture made by Williamsburg artisans, and with fine silver imported from England at great expense.

He cared nothing for the expense, however. It was more than worth it to see the expression of delight on his wife’s face. “I’m pleased that you like it,” he said. It occurred to him that she had never told him she loved him. But at least, he thought with satisfaction, she freely admitted to loving the house.

She was always the reserved and proper lady.

The carriage pulled up in front of the massive stone-pedimented doorway, and Grey swept his wife out of the
carriage and carried her across the threshold of their house. Their life together was beginning.

Jennifer placed the letter back into the pigeonhole. Just as Grey had once told her, he had designed this entire mansion for Diana. Once again, she felt a twinge of sorrow for the young man who had learned from his parents during his lonely childhood that love had to be bought. Surely, she thought, Diana would have been content with a lesser dwelling. Surely Diana must have loved him. How could she not?

As she sat there, staring vacantly at the letters stacked neatly in their pigeonholes, her eyes fell upon the prospect door, a small, keyholed door of burled walnut in the center of the desk. Idly she wondered what was behind the door. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, there were more letters from Grey hidden there. Perhaps her vicarious romance did not have to end yet. She attempted to pry the door open with her fingernails, but found that it was locked. The attempt won her nothing but a broken thumbnail.

Recalling that she had found a key on her twilight, she stood up and crossed to the dressing table. She brought the key across to the desk and tried it in the keyhole. It fit.

Behind the prospect door was a small cache of letters, written in an unfamiliar masculine hand. Jennifer began to glance through them idly, then stiffened in sudden shock. Hastily she shoved the letters back into the desk, slamming and locking the prospect door. Grey, she thought with horror, must never see those letters.

They would destroy him.

T
hat summer was even more blazingly hot and humid than Virginia summers usually were. The colonists’ clothes were modeled on the fashions from England, a much cooler climate. Jennifer had to suffer the oppressive heat in silk and linsey-woolsey gowns that would have been far more appropriate in England, and the tight stays and undergarments that held her skirts out over her hoops only added to her misery. More than once she wished for her old homespun gowns back.

However, now that she was a member of the aristocracy, she had no choice but to suffer. The front and back doors of Greyhaven were thrown open at all times, to encourage the cool breezes from the James to circulate through the wide central passage. All the windows were wide open as well, allowing air into the great house, and mosquitoes as well. On the worst days of July there was no breeze at all, and Jennifer and Catherine did very little all day except sit in the parlor, perspiring and praying for a stray breeze from the river.

Grey, of course, being male, suffered less, for around the house and grounds he had no need to wear anything but a linen shirt, carelessly open at the neck and with ruffled sleeves pushed up over his elbows, and knee breeches and stockings. Jennifer concluded cynically that men must have designed women’s clothing, while reserving the comfortable
clothing for themselves. Certainly no sensible woman could have designed the gowns she had to wear!

The nights in July were only barely more tolerable. The heat of the day abated somewhat when the sun went down, but the humidity continued. No rain came to cool the parched land. One particularly brutal night Jennifer lay sweltering in her feather bed with her perspiring skin pressed uncomfortably against the linen sheets for what seemed like hours. Far away she could hear the faint rumblings of thunder, but she knew there would be no rain. It seemed sometimes as if it would never rain again. Finally, realizing that sleep was going to elude her, she got up, laced herself into the simplest of her gowns, and walked barefoot down the stairs and out into the night.

Owing to the heat, Grey had also found himself unable to sleep that night. He sat in the green-paneled study, reading Ecclesiastes and brooding. He had been busy looking over his tobacco crop on another quarter some miles from Greyhaven today, and had just arrived home an hour or two before. As a consequence, for once in his life he had had very little to drink. As he sat in the gloom, he heard the faint creak of a stair. Moments later, someone padded barefoot past the study toward the door that faced the James.

Jennifer, he deduced quickly. Jennifer did not walk with Catherine’s halting gait, and moreover, Catherine was a proper lady who never would have stepped outside her chamber without wearing shoes, no matter how scorching the weather. At any rate, he knew that Jennifer liked to wander out at night. He had heard her walk quietly past his study a number of times. Ordinarily he was far too wrapped up in his private grief to care where she was going. Tonight, in his unusually sober state, he wondered just what she was up to.

Rising from his chair in front of the walnut secretary, he strode after her with the silent tread of an Indian.

Unaware that she was being followed, Jennifer made her way through the oyster-shell-strewn paths of the formal
garden, across the wide brown lawn discolored by the heat and lack of rain, and toward the James River. The sounds of the night seemed to be calling to her—the river quietly lapping against the reeds and the sand, the frogs singing in a vast chorus. As she drew nearer the river, the air grew cooler, and a faint breeze seemed to caress her cheeks. She paused at the water’s edge, looking at the beauty of the river in the moonlight, enjoying the feel of the sand shifting under her feet as she wiggled her toes.

If one did not turn around and see the vast bulk of Greyhaven, stretching two hundred feet from end to end, with its formal gardens spreading out in front of it with geometric precision, it was easy to imagine that Virginia was still a wild land, untouched by Englishmen. The James River, she thought, was too beautiful to be used for fishing and shipping and the other purposes men put it to. It was an entity in itself, calm and wide, proud and beautiful.

Her eyes on the river, Jennifer began to step out of her gown.

Behind her, Grey stiffened in shock. He had stood behind her quietly for some time, wondering exactly what was going through her mind as she stared fixedly at the water. Now he knew what had drawn her to the water’s edge. It
was
bloody hot, he acknowledged to himself, and he admired her intelligence and ingenuity in thinking of a way to fend off the Virginia heat.

Jennifer might look like a lady on the surface, he thought with a grin, but despite her silk gowns and her vastly improved accent, her actions tonight proved all too clearly that she hadn’t taken Catherine’s lessons to heart. He guessed that she had been in the habit of cooling off in the Lynnhaven River at her home. No
lady
would walk down to the river in the dark and go swimming, but apparently tavern wenches did.

His grin faded rapidly as she peeled off her shift and stood naked in the moonlight.

All amusement fled, to be replaced by pure masculine hunger. He stared at her slender, softly rounded body,
illuminated by the moonlight. She was turned partly toward him, and he could discern the elegant shape of a breast, high and round, the womanly curve of her hips, and the long slim columns of her legs. She reached up and unpinned her hair, and it tumbled down around her shoulders, a long dark golden mass gilded by the moonlight, hanging nearly to her waist.

Grey stood transfixed. He was vaguely aware he should turn away, but he could not have taken his eyes off her if his life depended on it. His gaze was riveted to her as she stepped into the gentle waves, like Venus returning to her shell. His eyes widened as she walked into the water, only to disappear under the surface of the river.

A moment later she reemerged and paddled about the water for some time, her hair floating around her. At last she stood up, waist-deep in the water, and glanced in the direction of the house. She gave a little shriek of surprise as she finally noticed Grey.

She could not see his face, but she knew from his rigidly alert posture that he was avidly watching her. Even though she could not see his eyes in the moonlit darkness, she could feel them devouring her body. He took a reluctant step forward, as though unwilling to come to her but dragged to her by forces beyond his control. Jennifer wanted to dive back under the water and swim to safety, yet her legs would not move. She stared at him, compelled to look as he had moments earlier, as he deliberately stripped off his clothes and stood naked on the beach. His state of arousal was obvious, yet even that sight, which should have frightened her, could not make her eyes waver from him. He was beautiful, beautiful and incredibly masculine.