Rebel Enchantress (29 page)

“But I don’t want any of my arrangements changed
under any circumstances,”
Nathan stressed. “Now if you and Lucius will leave me alone with Miss Stowbridge, I’ll be with you shortly.”

“What can you have to say to a servant your own aunt can’t hear?”

“I’m not prepared to tell you that.”

Serena, feeling she had Nathan over a barrel, proceeded to go too far. “I won’t move from this spot.”

Nathan gave her a look which indicated he understood what she was doing and would not be bullied. “Do you wish me to leave Delilah in charge during my absence?”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“If you’re not outside that door in half a minute, you’ll find out exactly how much I will dare.”

“We’ll wait for you in the drawing room,” Lucius said, and tactfully withdrew. Serena waited a moment longer, but she’d already seen too many examples of Nathan’s determination to believe he’d let himself be thwarted this time.

“I consider your conduct unseemly,” she announced, then spun on her heel and left. Observing that the door was not entirely closed, Nathan kicked it shut with his foot.

“Officious shrew,” he said, half hoping Serena had her ear to the keyhole.

“What are you going to do?” Delilah asked the minute he turned back to her.

“I don’t know, but there has to be somebody there to counter these hotheads.”

“You’re not going to ask for all those things Lucius wants?”

Nathan looked a little surprised. “Of course not. I wish I had time to talk to Shays myself, to find out what he’s really after, but I don’t suppose that’s possible, not with all this talk of guns and imprisonment and public whippings. Do you suppose Reuben could arrange it?”

“Jane told me they don’t trust you. She said neither side trusts you.”

“Just shows what you get for trying to look for a different solution,” Nathan said bitterly.

“Don’t give up,” Delilah begged. “I don’t know what will happen to Reuben if Lucius and Noah get their way.”

Nathan felt a stab of anger. He was jealous of Delilah’s never-flagging loyalty to Reuben. No matter what happened, no matter who was concerned, Reuben came to Delilah’s mind before all else. He had thought he was making headway, but only in times of crisis is it clear how people really feel, and it was evident that Delilah’s deepest feelings were still reserved for the people she had known all her life.

But Nathan did not despair. Instead he became doubly determined to prove he was as worthy of her affections as Reuben or anyone else. He took her in his arms, held her tight, and kissed her firmly.

“I’ll do my best for Reuben and your friends, but I keep wishing it could be my name that sprang first to your mind and made your heart beat faster. I know he’s family and he took you in when your mother died,” Nathan said when she started to protest, “but I want to be family as well. I don’t want to ever let you go. I know that brings up another set of problems, but I do want you to know how I feel. I love you, Delilah Stowbridge, more than ever. And I don’t intend to stop trying to prove it to you.”

Reuben did come first, but how could she reassure Nathan that she thought of him even more often than Reuben?

“I think I love you, too.”

But not enough to put me first in your heart.”

There he was again, asking her to do the impossible.

“I …”

“I know, Reuben comes first. I’m giving you dear warning. I intend to change that. Now, give me a kiss.’

Delilah couldn’t have been given an order she was more happy to obey.

She was no longer shocked when his tongue delved into her mouth. It had taken her only a short time to realize it was terribly exciting. Even now, as she opened her mouth to accept his tongue, her body tensed with expectation. This was a kind of intimacy she had never shared with anyone else, had never wanted to share, and it bound her even more closely to Nathan.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked when he deserted her lips for the side of her throat.

I don’t know,” he replied without interrupting the nest of kisses he was planting in the crook of her neck. “It will depend on whether we have any success”

“Don’t stay too long. I might forget all I’ve learned from you.”

“Then I would have the pleasure of teaching you all over again”

Delilah took Nathan’s face in her hands and drew his lips down to her own. This time it was her tongue which darted eagerly into his mouth. After a tiny pause of surprise, Nathan responded with a growl of desire. His tongue probed even more deeply. Then it wrapped itself around Delilah’s with a sinuousness that destroyed her last reluctance to match his boldness.

Nathan’s kiss was hungry, insistent. His lips moved with urgent haste as though they were trying to taste all of her at once, asking, demanding, pleading that she share her innermost self with him. He seemed to be asking her lips for the promise her heart could not give him.

Delilah knew she could make no such promise, but she could give him hope. She wanted very much for him to keep on hoping.

It had been the longest seven days in Delilah’s life. Serena received two letters from Nathan, the first on his reaching Northampton, the second on his departure from Northampton for Worcester. He didn’t know how long he would be gone, but he wrote that he would let Serena know his plans as soon as they were made.

Delilah cared about only one plan, his plan to come back to her. After seven days of not seeing him, of aching for his touch, for the taste of his lips, the sound of his voice, she felt starved, cut off from everything that made her life more than drudgery. Nathan couldn’t have done anything more calculated to prove to her that she was in love with him.

Delilah went to the wash house to supervise Hepsa Pobodie’s work. Hepsa was a good laundress, but she was inclined to take an extraordinarily long time about her work. With all the ironing and mending Delilah had to do, this threw her behind in her work. Serena had decided that was unacceptable, so Delilah had been assigned the job of supervising Hepsa.

It was just one of the new duties Delilah had acquired since Nathan’s departure.

“There’s no use your standing about watching me,” Hepsa said. “I can’t do me work no faster than I’m doing it already”

“That’s not what Mrs. Noyes thinks,” Delilah said. But honesty prompted her to add, “At least that’s what she says. Maybe she’s more inclined to want me out of the house than to hurry you along.”

“Don’t make no difference to me what she wants,” Hepsa replied. “I does my work and that’s all that matters”

“Perhaps you’d like to explain that to Mrs. Noyes”

“I don’t want to explain nothing to her. She don’t listen to anything except what she wants to hear.”

“A common enough problem,” Delilah said, wondering how to fill the next few hours. There was only so much entertainment value to be gained from talking to Hepsa.

“Mrs. Stebbens tells me you’re handy with a needle.”

“Better than most”

“Why don’t you busy yourself sewing up them tears in Mr. Trent’s shirts. It shames me to see what he does to ’em.”

“Nathan sews his own shirts?”

“I don’t know nothing about no Nathan,” Hepsa said, her tone and expression a severe reprimand, “but Mr. Trent doesn’t have a shirt that doesn’t need mending. That man’s clothes were mighty fine once, but he seems to have fallen on hard times since then. I suppose those as live in the big house knows all about that.”

You suppose no such thing you nosy old bird.
Delilah was not going to let Hepsa know that she herself was equally ignorant.

“Are they in the work basket?”

“I told you Mr. Trent darned them himself. Why would I put them in the work basket?”

“If they’re already darned, what am I supposed to do?”

“Pick out the mess he made and fix it so the females on this place won’t be ashamed to have him take off his coat.”

“I don’t suppose he left many shirts when he went to Northampton.”

“You won’t never know until you look, will you?”

Irrefutable logic.
Delilah longed to say something rude, but she bit her tongue as she made her way to the house.
If you ever do marry Nathan, you’d better learn how to manage people like Hepsa Pobodie. You can’t beat everybody the way Serena does.

So now she was thinking of marrying him. It was more than a hastily conceived idea. She had considered it so much it had popped into her head without warning. And until Shays’s letter there had been no reason she shouldn’t consider it. The trouble had been settling down. She had hoped Nathan’s helping so many farmers would cause Reuben to accept him as a brother-in-law.

Of course there had been other problems, but if Reuben and Jane accepted Nathan, the other ones wouldn’t have mattered much.

Then Shays’s letter had appeared and thrown everything into a tangle.

There was nobody in the hall when Delilah entered. Nor was there anyone on the stairs when she came back from her room with her sewing basket.

She paused a moment at Nathan’s door, uneasy about going into his room. It wasn’t that she had been forbidden to go in or that no other servants entered it. Mrs. Pobodie went in every time there was laundry to be changed or clothes to be put away. And, of course, Mrs. Anderson went in when she came to sweep. But Delilah had never been in his room; Nathan never lighted a fire in the grate.

Fearing Serena would see her if she waited any longer, Delilah turned the knob and slipped quickly inside, closing the door behind her.

The room, decorated in blue and white, was dominated by a large, canopied Hepplewhite bed flanked on either side by piecrust candle stands. A stenciled walnut chest rested at the foot of the bed. A magnificent cherry cheston-chest shared the far wall with an even larger walnut wardrobe. A marble-topped walnut stand bearing a pewter basin and ewer stood next to the fireplace, which was faced with Dutch tiles. A large portrait of Ezra Buel hung above the carved mantel. The walls were papered in a blue and white Chinese pattern, and hooked rugs covered most of the wide-planked floor.

As with the rest of the house, nothing about the room reflected Nathan’s personality. It was almost as though he had never occupied this space. Odd that a man who affected the people around him so powerfully should have so little interest in his surroundings. One could easily get the impression he didn’t plan to stay.

Delilah shrugged off an uneasy feeling.

It wasn’t difficult to find the shirts. There were a half dozen in the chest, and every one had been darned. It made Delilah’s heart swell with tenderness to see Nathan’s efforts. The poor man knew nothing about using a needle. He had just bunched the cloth up and sewn the rent together. This resulted in a bump in the shirt and a slight pull when the fabric couldn’t lie flat. Delilah settled herself in the chair and began picking out the repairs. It shouldn’t take long to fix them. Then she’d take the shirts down, have Mrs. Pobodie launder them again, and Nathan would never know.

An hour and a half later Delilah had finished her work. As she stood up, she noticed a door on the wall toward the front of the house. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d entered, but now that she thought about it, the bedchamber was too small to take up all the space in this corner of the house. There must be another room, a private office or maybe a dressing room.

She opened the door. This room contained no furniture, and the carpet had been rolled up and set against one wall. An easel stood in the middle of the room. It held a canvas which faced the light pouring in from three windows. Tubes of paint, rags, and brushes in jars were everywhere. Nathan had been painting, and he had done it in this room so no one would know.

She walked around to look at his work and suffered a severe shock. The painting was of her, and it was utterly beautiful. A work of excellent quality, it proved to her as nothing else had that Nathan had spent much time thinking of her.

As she looked at the painting, she realized it wasn’t just a faithful rendering of his impression of a beautiful woman. He had painted a woman of character and integrity, a woman who expected more of herself than she expected of others.

This was what Nathan thought of her? Maybe he did love her. Maybe he was ready to face all the responsibilities and difficulties of making her his wife. He might be ready to put her above everything else in his life. He had told her he was, but she hadn’t quite believed him.

Now she did.

But what about herself? She couldn’t ask a man to do what she had asked of Nathan without knowing he was more important to her than anybody else in the world. If she married him, she had to be willing to heed the Biblical injunction to leave her family and cleave only unto him. Could she?

The answer came with surprising quickness.

Yes
.

“Do you know the whereabouts of a Queen Anne cream server?” Delilah asked Mrs. Stebbens.

“I can’t tell one cream pot from another, lass,” Mrs. Stebbens said without taking her attention off the bread dough she kneaded. “Is Mrs. Noyes calling for that dratted thing again?”

“You’d think it was the only cream server in the house instead of one of a dozen, Delilah complained. “I don’t know where it could have gotten to”

“Maybe the same place as those little biscuit plates she asked about the other day. Lost in her imagination. She wouldn’t be needing any such fa-la’s if she wasn’t trying to impress everybody with her importance. Ever since that letter came, she’s taken to parading herself about as some kind of fortuneteller. You’d think she’d be afraid of being taken for a witch.”

“All the same, she ought to be able to remember the silver in the house. She was Mr. Buel’s housekeeper for all those years”

“Ask Lester.”

“He said much the same as you.”

“There you have it. Now don’t worry me anymore. If I don’t get this bread to rise proper, I’ll be fit to bust”

“If you want me to help …”

“You’ve been a blessing, child, teaching me to cook a dozen things I didn’t know nothing about. Don’t know what I would have done without you, but I got to learn to do it myself. If I can’t do all the dishes you been helping me with, when Christmas comes Mr. Trent’s going to know it was you all along. I may complain about Mrs. Noyes, but this is the best situation I ever had. I can’t afford to give it up to anybody else.”