“The overseer?”
“He come by now and then,” Sara said. “First he try to get his job back. Mister Eric tell him to be gone. Now he jes’ come to look.”
“But Sara, I don’t understand! You mean he just comes by and stands there, looking at the house? What does he want? If Mister Eric won’t rehire him, what’s he after?” Sara opened her mouth, clamped it shut again. She took Cass’s waist and pulled her back from the window and to the bed before Cass could protest. “You got to take your rest now, child. I got to tell Mister Eric.” But she would not move until Cass, glowering impotently, had eased herself back under the bedclothes. Then the old woman moistened her fingers and, one by one, snuffed out the candles. The moonlight silvered the room and turned to a shambling black ghost Sara’s figure as she hurried to the door. She stopped only once, her hand on the latch, and looked back at Cass. “Sleep,” she ordered. “You got to walk tomorrow.”
Then she was gone, and Cass was left alone in the dark, waiting, listening to a rising wind sound through the trees.
She lay still despite a screaming temptation to cast aside the blankets and return to the window. Her hands clenched tightly. Curiosity was like a gag in her throat, yet she dared not risk the chance of new injury to her leg, not now, not when she was so close to being able to walk again. She decided, reluctantly, that she would do better to wait until morning when she could ask Eric about his former manager and why he insisted on coming around Rivrrun even though he had been fired. The best she could do, then, was to try to stay awake long enough to eavesdrop on whatever conversation or argument might ensue once Sara had gotten hold of Martingale. She listened again to the rising wind that soon lulled her into a dreamless sleep.
T
he following morning the air was electric-bright as Cass woke to Sara’s gentle humming. She rubbed at her eyes, stretched, and fell to eating before the tray had settled on her legs. And while she ate, she tried to elicit information about the confrontation the evening before. Sara, however, would say nothing.
“But Sara, they must have said something!”
“I don’t know nothin’,” the old woman said. “You eat. Then I got somethin’ for you to put on yourse’f. Mister Eric, he said you got to come downstairs today.” She grinned and patted Cass’s leg. “You got to walk soon, child. No spendin’ your days abed like some riff-raff from the river bottom.”
But Cass knew that her grin was hollow, could not avoid seeing the worry in the old woman’s eyes.
By the time she had finished eating, Sara had returned with a bundle of clothes and, with a laughing flourish, took the wrappings from her leg. Cass had expected it to be ugly, even horrible, but she had to swallow a gasp when she saw the pale, dried skin, and the angry bruise that still marked the area where her shin had collided with the boulder. Gingerly, she touched a finger to it, and it was hard, slightly swollen, but far less tender than she expected.
“You don’t need these no more,” Sara said, tossing the wrapping aside. “Jes’ a little more careful from now on. Like I tol’ you, child, more the fever than this little thing was what kept you lyin’ there.”
“Little thing? My God, Sara, it’s a miracle the bone didn’t smash into sawdust. Look at it!”
“I lookin’, and what I see is a leg you can walk on.”
The clothes were not much better, she thought. With one woman on the plantation, she had to work her way into a pair of Eric’s dark trousers, one of his fluffed white shirts, threadbare at the elbows, and a pair of battered but sturdy riding boots. After brushing her hair and setting it into a loose bun at her neck, she looked into the mirror Sara held out for her. At first she wanted to cry, then laugh, at the incongruous sight the mirror reflected.
“Oh my God, if Aggie were here … Lord, I don’t know what she’d say. Lord, will you look at that!”
“Well, if you ask me, child, you look a sight better’n Mister Eric when he wear ’em.”
The swell of her breasts against the soft white ruffles, the flare of her hips, prominent even in the loose-fitting trousers—it was, she admitted, rather provocative, and certainly more so than the farm clothes she was used to. But provocation was the furthest thing from her mind now. She smiled bravely, reached out her hands, and allowed Sara to guide her firmly through the door and down a long, deserted corridor to the landing that overlooked the front hail.
Sunlight flooded from two huge windows on either side of the entrance, and the staircase itself was a half-circle of sweeping magnificence down which she could easily imagine ladies in brilliant gowns and shimmering jewels descending on a warm summer evening. As she gripped the highly polished banister, she could hear in her mind’s ear the soft strains of violins and laughter, the courtly mutterings of elegantly bedecked gentlemen leading their ladies for a stroll in the garden or around in a dancing, wide circle as the orchestra banished all memories of war.
Sara muttered as they struggled down the steps, grunted as she flung open the huge double doors and brought them out onto the front porch. Cass immediately and gratefully sank into a thickly cushioned wrought-iron chair painted a blinding white, whose back was scalloped like a rare seashell. Beside her was a small round table upon which lay a tray holding a sweating pitcher of water and lemon, and a plate heaped with tiny cakes. While Sara bustled to pour her a glass, she squinted until her eyes adjusted to the daylight and took in her first real view of the plantation that had saved her.
The porch was exceedingly broad and wide, predictably white, and marked by a series of squared columns supporting a half-moon roof running the length of the house. Beyond a delicately carved railing was a narrow lawn, now overgrown with weeds, and split by an arrow-straight path that widened abruptly as it reached the porch steps, to provide a turning area for approaching big carriages. Encroaching on the lawn and path was an army of thick shrubs huddled at the bases of trees towering above the house and splitting the sky into blue fragments edged with green. The air was scented a faint mint beneath the canopy, and the rays of sunlight that plunged to the earth reminded Cass of nothing less than the effects of stained glass she had seen in one of Philadelphia’s marble cathedrals. It was peaceful, pleasantly warm, and the lazy thrumming of a colony of bees made a harmonious counterpoint to the calls of invisible birds darting through the branches.
It was, in fact, too much for her to absorb all at once, and she kept lowering her eyes to her hands clasped in her lap, much as a child in the presence of something awesomely wonderful and painfully incomprehensible. Riverrun was indeed an enchantment, she thought, and she finally began to understand Eric’s reluctance to abandon it to the unknown. It was the greatest of shames, and surely had to be something of a sin that a jewel as delightful as this had to be lost.
“Sara,” she said to the woman still standing beside her, “why can’t Mr. Martingale sell this to someone? Someone who can take care of it like it deserves?”
Sara tugged at the scarf wrapped about her head. “He tried, child, I don’t know how many times. We had more folks runnin’ through here some weeks back than I ever did see. But they ain’t got the money up here no more. The war done take everythin’. All them fine houses what you see along hereabouts, they ain’t got nothin’ inside ’em no more. If you take my meanin’.” And she thumped her chest with a nod.
“Well, if I had the money, Sara,” Cass proclaimed loudly, “I would buy it in an instant! I wouldn’t let anyone ruin this beautiful place. I’d … I’d.…” She stopped and looked sheepishly up at Sara.
“I know, child,” Sara said gently. “I know what you feelin’.”
The moment was both a poignant and a puzzling one. Cass could not fully understand the sudden rush of sentiment she felt toward a place that not only had she never seen before, but was also in what her family would have called enemy territory—that same enemy that had brutally wrenched her from a world she had once called safe. Much of it, she admitted with a certain confused reluctance, had to do with the curious pull she felt toward Eric Martingale, who was just as much a stranger here as she, when all was said and done. But the rest— perhaps it was a part of the peaceful, almost idyllic setting in which she found herself. Here on the porch, with Sara standing patiently beside her, there was no war, no killing, and the nightmare of her arrival seemed less than real whenever she allowed herself to think about it. Which was, she realized with a surge of relief, far less often than she would have imagined. But then, she told herself, Father had always called her the one with the practicality. And dwelling on nightmares, no matter how real, was hardly practical, especially when her future was still distressingly unmapped.
She drank deeply from the glass and nibbled constantly on the cakes, losing herself in thought, in speculation, until the distant sound of a rider brought her upright.
Sara had gone to her chores. She was alone.
Moving up the path back among the trees, the rider was blurred by the shafts of sunlight piercing the foliage overhead, a ghostlike figure on a large black stallion. She smiled and started to rise, wanting to surprise Eric with her walking; but her arms became rigid and the smile vanished as the rider pulled up in front of the porch and swept off his wide-brimmed hat. He was dressed in close-fitting black from shirt to boots, and a bullwhip lay casually across his saddle. He wore bone-handled pistols on either hip, and his left hand rested lightly on one while the right replaced his hat. His skin was sunburnt and leathery, his long hair a flat black, and from the corner of his right eye to his right ear lay a jagged scar, an ugly white against his complexion. He was handsome, she noted, in a faintly distastefully cruel manner, and when his thick lips curled back into a smile, she could see that he had lost several teeth that had not been replaced by either silver or gold.
He bowed again, and she answered him silently with a brisk nod of her head.
“So,” he said, his smile not fading, “you be the new mistress of Riverrun?”
“I am not the mistress of anything,” she said coldly. “I am a visitor, nothing more.”
“If you say so, ma’am,” he said, resting his hands on the pommel and leaning slightly forward over his mount’s sleek neck. “But now I’m forgetting my own manners, ain’t I? I’m Lambert, Vern Lambert. Used to be the man in charge of this fine place before Mister Martingale came over here from that other place. Now, I’m just a visitor. Like yourself.”
“And what are you visiting, Mister Lambert?” she asked.
“Please,” he said, his face pained. “Since we both be visitors, you can call me Vern, if you like.”
“Are you looking for Mister Martingale, Mister Lambert?”
He stiffened at her emphasized use of his surname, and the smile became a formality. “As a matter of fact, I was kinda hopin’ to find him here, now that you mention it. Him bein’ your … host and all, I wouldn’ta thought he’d leave you alone like this.”
She stiffened at the insolent hesitation before the word “host”, but said nothing. Her leg began to throb.
She sat back, her hands gripping the armrests tightly, while her eyes raked him without bothering to disguise her distaste.
“But,” Lambert said after a careful look around, “I don’t see him nowhere about. Pity. Woulda liked to have a word with him.”
“I can give him your message,” Cass said.
“Thank you kindly, ma’am, but not this one, you can’t. I’ll just have to come back another time, I suppose. Perhaps this evening. I expect he’ll be around about that time.”
Without waiting for a reply, he touched his fingers to his hat, wheeled, and rode back the way he had come. Slowly, as though, she thought, he owned everything he could see from his saddle.
She waited until she could no longer hear him, until the cloud of dust raised by his stallion had settled back to the earth; then she rose as quickly as she could and made her way to the door. She would have to find Sara and get her to tell her where Eric was. At once. He had to be warned, though she was not exactly sure why. A racing chill darted along her spine then as she remembered the scar, and the smile, and the hard look that had darkened his face when he mentioned Eric. Stumbling down the hall that passed by the staircase toward the rear of the house, she suddenly knew without proof that no battle or wartime skirmish had been the cause of Lambert’s injury. And she wondered if the scar and Eric’s right hand were connected somehow.
She had a feeling they were.
And she had another, more frightening notion that Lambert’s visit to Riverrun when Eric was away was no coincidence.
She stopped, looking back to the door, just as a cloud passed overhead and cut off the sun.
Chapter Seven
A
fter flinging open several doors to empty, dust-filled rooms, Cass finally reached the kitchen at the back of the house. It was a huge kitchen, obviously intended to be worked by several people, but now it was deserted. On the right-hand wall a great iron stove held a rotund pot bubbling noisily, and the heads and roots of a number of vegetables lay scattered over a long plank table. The left-hand wall was primarily a massive fireplace filled with kindling. A bewildering array of skillets and pots hung from pegs over the cluttered mantle. Cass called out once, twice, then limped across the floor to the back door and yanked it open. The sun struck her full in the face, and she threw up an arm as though she had been slapped, shading her eyes as she leaned heavily against the frame. There was a surge of panic as the outside fell slowly into focus—a panic that insisted the plantation was deserted and she was alone now to face Lambert and his barely concealed threats. She forced herself to take several deep and calming breaths, stifling the panic into a more manageable tremor of apprehension. There was plenty of time, she told herself as she moved down off the narrow stoop into the yard; Lambert would not be back until nightfall.
The backyard was deep, bounded by the ever-present trees and, like the front, badly in need of careful tending. Though there seemed to have been an apparent attempt to keep nature in check, weeds poked tall through the rough grass and a few wildflowers had taken root here and there along the foundation of the house. A hundred yards back on the left was a collection of motley shacks, their walls canted and roofs gaping with holes: slave quarters, she imagined, but looking so disused that she did not bother to check them. There was only Sara left, anyway, and she did not think Eric would allow the old woman to live in such squalor. Directly ahead of her, then, lay a long, low stable, and she made her anxious way toward it, cursing her leg violently when it protested the unaccustomed exercise, thumping it hard with an angry fist whenever it threatened to collapse beneath her. To one side of the stable she noted a buckboard huddling in the weeds, probably the one she had been carried back in by Eric, accompanied by Sara’s runaway husband. She hesitated, then heard a snuffling from within and pushed on, shoving open the half-door and finding a weary, ancient roan nudging at the walls of its stall.