Alice clucked and shook her head, knelt on the floor and fussed with a hanging hem. Cass watched her in the mirror.
“Alice, I—I wish you could be out there.”
Alice shrugged as if unconcerned. “Makes no difference to me. I got plenty of work. Damn Judah makin’ a pest of himself in the kitchen.”
“You be sure they all get some of the dinner before it’s all gone.”
“Don’t worry, it’s already done.”
“And Alice—if David comes back there, throw him out.”
There was no hesitation at all as the black woman reset a pin she’d pulled from her own dress, but Cass saw the slight stiffening of her spine before she rose. They stared at each other, then; no smiles, no frowns. She wished now she hadn’t mentioned it, but the words had come unbidden and there was nothing she could do to take them back.
Someone rapped on the door.
Alice nodded once, swept around the bed to answer, and young Rachel, her hair in braids and face glowing excitedly, rushed in.
“Mrs. Roe,” she said, clapping her hands. “Mrs. Roe, you ain’t never gone guess who jes’ come in.”
Cass laughed quickly. “The way things are going today, it’s probably President Johnson hiding from his cabinet.”
The girl frowned and looked to Alice. “I don’ know no Johnson, but Mr. Oliver he come in with his missus and you should see what he done to his whiskers!” She grabbed at a braid and tugged. “Jes’ like mine!”
“My God,” she said, “that’s all I need—a dandy for a mayor.” She glanced one more time at her reflection, sighed and adjusted the sleeves of her gown. Then she took a deep breath, brushed a hand down over her chest to her waist and hurried out. Alice said nothing. The door closed quietly.
Calm, my dear, she cautioned herself as she moved to the head of the staircase. They’re only people. They don’t bite at all.
David was waiting for her halfway down the stairs, and she smiled broadly at him. He was wearing Northern velvet of a deep, shimmering green that set off his blazing white shirt and tight black trousers to his well-proportioned advantage. His ebony hair was brushed straight back from his forehead, so deep-black it almost glowed blue; and his matching eyes had a gleam that seemed to wink playfully at her. When he lifted his hand to take hers, she felt strength, saw the confidence in his gaze. You look beautiful, he mouthed silently, with a grin, set her hand on his arm, and led her slowly down.
The dining room on the left was already filled with guests, the front room and its adjoining dance floor exploding with laughter and the rising buzz of voices. Judah, despite Alice’s complaints, was standing at the front entrance, looking comically uncomfortable in the black livery she had had Alice make for him. Amos, too, hovered nearby in similar garb, but since his task was merely to take what coats and shawls, cloaks and capes there were, he was frequently gone from the hall and thus spared the sharp-eyed scrutiny of many of the women.
“I think I’m going to faint,” Cass whispered as they reached the floor.
“Don’t you dare,” David said. “I admit that I was probably wrong, but you’re definitely not going to leave me alone with all of them.”
“Melissa?”
He nodded his head toward the dining room. “Captured half the young men already. You know, Cass, I think this makes up for everything now. It’s just what she needed.”
She would have answered with a warning just for him, but at that moment Graham Oliver and his wife strolled out of the opposite room and presented themselves. Oliver was huge, massive from shoulder to waist, and his beard—as Rachel had described—had been set into a series of gray-tinged red braids that flopped onto his chest. His wife, though a head shorter than he, was just as large, and she immediately latched onto David’s free arm.
“My dear Mrs. Roe,” she said, her voice extraordinarily high, “you can’t imagine how pleased we all are to see Riverrun so blessedly alive again. Why, it’s just been ages, hasn’t it, Ollie, since anyone’s been out here. Not since … why, not since that foreigner was here, just before the troubles.”
“Mr. Martingale,” Cassandra said dryly.
“Oh, was that his name?”
Cass smiled bravely and allowed herself to be taken into the room by the mayor. Immediately, she was surrounded, not by people, but by faces. Grinning, laughing, smirking, leering, sweating, whispering, shouting. A glass was pressed into her hand. She drank. The glass was replaced. The small orchestra played “Dixie,” and she fought back the expectant stares with a smile and a laugh while under her breath she hummed what she knew of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” David, who had somehow managed to stay at her back, vanished with Mrs. Oliver and Cass was beset by many of the wives she had not met before. They were polite, some were friendly, though all of them poked gingerly into the corners of her life. A few she satisfied with a few small lies, the rest she dazzled with the progress she had made.
By the end of the first hour, she was exhausted and retreated to the kitchen for a ladle of cold water.
By the end of the second, there was no one left to meet and she was left alone to wander, to pick her company and the stories they told.
The windows were opened and October was let in but exuberance was high and the temperature climbed. More and more, now, couples and groups drifted out to the porch and to the new extension that swept around the side opposite the gardens; and in the garden itself there were lovers and married people, and a few desperate gentlemen who sought honeysuckle and roses for the women they’d met. A carriage arrived, a carriage left. Judah, circumspect, carried a judge to a back room to sleep off his wine. The moon rose, full bright and golden. The wind rose, hinting of winter. The orchestra—seven black men with magic fiddle-bows—eased in the witching hour with a medley of waltzes that escaped from the house to whisper among the leaves.
“M
rs. Vessler, where have you been keepin’ yourself? It’s just like your husband to have an ace up his sleeve.”
Melissa giggled, slapped Sheriff Garvey softly on the chest, and let him lead her into the ballroom and onto the floor. She knew she had drunk far too much, felt her face flushed and red, her breasts rising with the breaths she had to take … but she didn’t care, not now. She was having too much fun, and there was so much wine.
“A
ll right, Vessler,” Henshaw said, his grin and twinkle false, “two more months, but that’s all I can give. I’m not an oil man, y’know. I only run a forge.”
David tried not to clench his fists, failed, and shoved them fast behind his back. “This is hardly the place, Henshaw. The least you could have done was wait until morning.”
“I got a family to feed, lawyer.”
“And I’ve got a job. Just don’t bother Mrs. Roe, or you’ll be hearing from me.”
“T
hat white man touch you one more time, and I break his arm,” Judah said.
Alice spat dryly on the floor, and when Judah reached angrily for her arm she spun away and snatched up a knife.
“I
’ll tell you, Mrs. Roe, we used to have such lovely parties before the troubles. Why, there wasn’t a night went by when we weren’t gaddin’ about somewhere, to some place or other. ’Course that all changed when Robert E. was on the trail—and we had such high hopes for him, too. Ah well, as my daddy used to say, you take the good with the bad and pray for the spring. You been to Richmond lately? Lord, I hope not. Hardly anthin’ left these days, those damned Yankee—oh, pardon me, Mrs. Roe. Really, I’m sorry. You fit in here just so well, we hardly even know you’re not one of us. But it’s a beautiful party, Mrs. Roe, and I sure hope it gets some of the others to thinkin’ that just because we’re down don’t mean we’re not livin’. You know what I mean, Mrs. Roe? An absolutely beautiful party.”
D
avid and three other men wandered onto the porch to share the privacy of a slow-burning cigar. They were owners of the neighboring farms, and though their crops were somewhat different, their problems were the same.
“Chased ’em off with a gun,” muttered Horace McRae, a grizzled old man who’d lost an arm in Atlanta. “Once is all it took.”
“It’s that damned Tom Jones and Kennedy what’s doin’ all this,” Jenkins declared. “Upstarts from Tennessee think they can run the whole damn thing. ’Course they do got a point, keepin’ the niggers in line, but just the same, they ain’t got no right tryin’ to stop me from workin’.”
“I thought it was soldiers who didn’t have any jobs,” David said, to no one in particular.
“Oh, it is, it is,” McRae said hastily. “But these others, these Klanners, they takin’ a dim view of coons what don’t live in trees.”
Three of the men laughed; David only drew on his cigar and watched the amber glow push back the night.
All their complaints about minor harassments from the ex-reb troops hiding in the hills contained nothing at all about murders and burning. A few thefts of grain, mostly likely for mash, were about the most serious crimes they could muster. None of them mentioned Chet.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” Simon Brown said from behind a cloud of blue smoke, “I ain’t above laying the whip around now and again, but these monkeys, they’re gettin’ uppity, you know what I mean? You do ’em wrong and they like as not pack up and leave.”
“Rights!” Jenkins said with a sneering laugh. “Next thing y’know, why, David, if you ain’t careful that Judah of your’n gonna run for President!”
Laughter again, choking to silence.
“Look here, Vessler,” McRae said in a whisper, “you have any trouble with those boys again, you let us know. We’ll send you some men to chase them off prop—”
“I appreciate that, gentlemen,” he said. “And Mrs. Roe will be awfully grateful. It hasn’t been easy for her, you know, and anything that will keep Riverrun on its feet will be repaid tenfold.”
There was a muttering of thanks as the group slowly broke up, but David remained outside to move down the steps and walk slowly toward the gardens. The offer of assistance was, he knew, only a pretense. Neither Jenkins, McRae nor Brown had anything really to worry about, and they certainly weren’t going to waste valuable manpower helping Cassandra free herself from trouble. In fact, he very much suspected that they were harboring some of the outlaws themselves. It was an open secret that the three of them had been bitterly disappointed when Cass had showed up and bought the plantation with cash and the loans; the bottomland Riverrun contained was coveted by them all, and they’d only been waiting for a decent-sized crop and a lower price before they moved in themselves and divided the land as equally as their money would allow.
He wondered, then, if these were the men who were putting the pressure on Cass’s creditors. If she had to default, the land would once again fall to auction, and they would get what they wanted for less than they would have before. It was a possibility, something he should look into; though, on second thought, he had doubts that any of the three had enough clout to exert that kind of economic leverage.
Damn them, he thought. He ground the cigar under his heel, walked back to the front and into the hall. The music was softer now, slower, and Amos had been busily moving about the front rooms dimming many of the lamps. The light took on a glow that reminded him of the sunsets that accompanied the harvest. He searched briefly for Cass before heading back toward the kitchen.
Music. Cass wished she could somehow have music all the time—when she was working, when she was sleeping, when she only walked about the grounds and dreamed of the future. She closed her eyes then and leaned slightly closer to Bill Henshaw’s younger son, feeling the strength of his hand on her waist as he led her through the maze of the dance floor. Nearly everyone was on their feet now, the evening slowly drawing to a close. At any moment there would be calls for Judah and Amos to fetch the carriages from the back, and she would have to stand at the door and accept the farewells.
A slight hesitation, a murmur, and she knew that someone had cut in. A game; she would not open her eyes, she would guess which of the unattached men had latched onto her this time.
You’re a shameless flirt, Cass Roe, she told herself with a smile, and ignored the harmless chiding as she tried to place her partner.
She stiffened at the slight, cold brush of steel across her bare back.
“I think,” a voice said in her ear, “it would be nice to see the moon on the grass, don’t you think, Mrs. Roe?”
She opened her eyes but would not look. Her limbs had lost their volition, and the smile on her lips was taut and mirthless. She nodded to several of the guests, who nodded back and were puzzled, but she would not look into Geoffrey Hawkins’s face until he door had closed behind them and they were alone outside.
“What in hell are you doing here?” she said, spitting each word at him like droplets of acid.
“The end of a long search,” Geoffrey said. He was dressed in black, his long hair flowing straight back from his forehead. And there was no doubt about it, she thought as she watched him; despite the hooked hand and the patch, he was still rather handsome, though evilly so. And arrogant. And foolish, if he thought that by unearthing her he could drop her into fits of hysteria. It had been, after all, part of her plan. She had known he would come, had known he would cause trouble … but this was the open country, not the confining city.
“Tell me what you want,” she said, stepping away from the house and walking slowly toward the stables. “Tell me, and then get off my land.”
“I admire you, Cassandra,” he said, following close behind her. “I assure you, Mr. Forrester was strongly chastised for letting you go. His pride is hurt, Cassandra. But I admire your courage for what you did. And this …” She sensed the sweep of his hand encompassing the plantation. “Amazing. You’re a better woman than I thought. Unfortunately, all of this won’t do you any good.”
She stopped several yards from the stable. There was a low fence around a shallow corral to keep the horses from wandering into the gardens Rachel and Melody were growing for herbs and greens. The animals were in the stalls; all the blacks were up at the house either assisting Judah or working with Alice. She turned and leaned back against the fence’s top rail.