Chapter One
New York Frontier, 1779.
Lady Juliet Faulkner finished chopping and stacking the wood on the porch, her breath crystallizing in white puffs. Feathery flakes scattered widely through the air and hovered downward with uncertain flight. New snow piled on the mountains, bathing the land and, for a moment, in its silent beauty cleansed the horror that had brought her from England to this place.America.On a far-flung farmstead, the frontier…a murky, misty wild land of savages…had left an indefinable impression in Juliet’s mind.
Lady?She was far from that title now as it had been stripped from her at the time of her seizure. No one had come to her aid. No one, not even the judge who turned a blind eye to her pleadings, transporting them directly to a ship riding anchor in the Thames, and then dispatching them across the stormy Atlantic. Sold into indenture, Juliet had no rights. No freedom. Seven years of bondage. Seven years of hell.
The door opened and closed and Mary, her best friend, joined her smelling faintly of warm bread the girls had kneaded before the break of dawn. “Mistress Orpha is in a fury. She will beat you raw and turn you out into the snow to freeze if you don’t answer her summons.”
Juliet dove her hands in the layers of her tattered skirts. “Oh, come Mary. Surely, a little rest won’t be a problem.”
“You know better,” said Mary. “Remember how the mistress doused Eldon with water, then thrust him outside when temperatures were so cold rocks exploded? She shrieked the same punishment for anyone who dared to help him. He would have frozen if you’d not risked letting him in when everyone was asleep.”
Wolves howled in the distance, looking for food, closer now with the long cold winter upon them.
“I fear Indians attacking us.” Mary shuddered and not from the freezing temperatures.
“They never leave their longhouses in the winter,” Juliet said to allay her friend’s fears, her neck prickling in anticipation of the sting of a razor-edged knife. Since they had come to this new land they had seen few Indians. Unusual for the staggering population and number of villages purported to be near, according to their Master, Horace Hayes.
Mary clutched her shawl. “They will tear the skin from our face and head and disembowel us while we are still alive.”
Mary, like her vicar father, was given to the dramatic. In England, he had sermonized about the savages, where civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan. Too many nights Juliet had to calm Mary’s night terrors, sprung from the vicar’s graphic descriptions of horns and hooves and devouring creatures. Oh, how he preached his fear with fire and damnation, ending amid a flourish of redemption and forgiveness.
Except he had showed no mercy to his only child, expunging the record of her existence for a single lapse.
Juliet’s throat tightened. She met Mary’s suffering with soul-shattering sorrow. For Mary’s pain mirrored a wound in Juliet, buried so deep…all those years pretending her father, Baron John Faulkner’s scorn didn’t exist.
Her father had loved her mother deeply. She’d died bringing Juliet into the world, an unforgiveable act that precipitated his hateful condemnation of the child. To be blamed for the death of her mother? Juliet’s survival had served as a constant reminder of the sin of her birth.
Four small crosses shadowed the white-cloaked yard, grim reminders of the frailties of life on the frontier. The Hayes’ children had all succumbed to disease before any reached four years.
Mary followed her gaze. “Mistress Orpha’s evil is rewarded with their deaths. They are the lucky ones. At least they will be spared of an attack.”
“Quick, change your thoughts and you’ll change our future.” She had to keep Mary’s hope alive, her own hope alive. Most indentured servants did not last a year. “We have survived a terrible ocean crossing when I thought the ship would sink and we’d all perish. We will survive this.” Her voice startled a bird hiding in the treetops. Panicked, it flew to another tree in a flurry of frantic wings.
Were they being watched? Indians? She peered through the veil of snow. Nonsense. “Mary, go in before you catch your death of cold. I’ll collect the eggs for you after I attend Orpha.” Mary had been so ill aboard the ship and had been slow to recover. If anything happened to her dear friend…
Juliet followed Mary inside, and moved through the house, no less surprised at the size of the mansion in the middle of the wilderness. Wood paneled walls, Chippendale furniture, silver, crystal, china, wines, the finest of linens rivaled the best of middle-class homes in England and stood testament to Master Hayes’ success as a prominent trader.
In the dining room, she paused at a tapestry dominating a wall and the one ornamentation that fascinated her. In the fine weaving, a story unfolded of a splendid half-clothed warrior on his chariot pulled by two white horses, his spear pitched high and victorious over the melee.
She tapped her lip. Achilles, wasn’t he?
What touched her was the swarming endlessness of colors, the tangle of textures that went into each strand of that infinite, complex tapestry…each one vibrated under the crush of battle, pulsating and sending echoes of courage, or bloodlust, or fear, or flash of swords. The theater of death filled up with keening and caterwauling as the sodden earth became oily with gore.
The creativeness of a weft of doves carried the powerful hero across a celestial vault where the air scattered hues of brilliant blue sun rays and deposited him to a peaceful firmament. There he basked in the light of a half-clad beauty who bestowed him her hand, and linked to the heavy, sultry strand was the glow of the hero’s adoration. Toward the bottom, the fibers stretched taut and bonded themselves solidly, its silk made from the slants of playful stags, a unicorn, and squirrels, embedded in a magical forest.
Her breath hitched. How she loved the hero and imagined his heroic feats.
Without beginning or end, the tapestry existed as a work of such great beauty, her soul wept, and her mind numb to—
“Juliet!” Orpha’s shriek rang throughout the house.
Almost everything.Juliet hurried upstairs, knocked, and entered Mistress Hayes’ lair.
“You’re late,” Orpha snapped. Perched at her dressing table, she primped her velvet night robe over folds of ponderous girth. “I hate to be kept waiting. I paid a fortune for you lazy, blasphemous, and treacherous girls.”
“Yes, Mistress.” Juliet grabbed the silver brush before Orpha struck her. Too often, she had endured the beatings and accepted the indignities the same way she abided the stench of the privy.
