He’d nearly forgotten it was December. His parents, like many Scots, refused to celebrate Christmas or Yule.
When a knock sounded on his bedchamber door, a masculine voice invited him below. The footman? The last thing he wanted was to be sung to. He wasn’t dressed for company. His hair hung lank and damp about his shoulders, and he was in a long sark, no breeches, feet bare.
“Nae,” he half shouted to still the footman’s knocking, then felt a sudden chiding. Why had he not simply ignored him instead?
The revelers were as exuberant as he was reluctant, their outright joy somewhat nettling. When had he felt that same sense of freedom? Of unguarded release?
To his dismay, they began another song. Yet he couldn’t move from the window despite the chill reminding him to return to the fire’s warmth.
“God rest ye merry, gentlemen,
let nothing you dismay ...
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy.”
Comfort and joy? He ken neither. His body felt cold and his soul colder still. It had been cold for a long time. Before Havilah’s passing even. That coldness seemed akin to the shadow that encased him. A flat, joyless, comfortless cocoon he couldn’t break free of.
The singing faded on a final note. Still he didn’t move. The carolers were silent now, backtracking down the steps, all but one. A face turned up to him, framed by an odd mix of dusk and weather.Snow light.The white plume of her indigo bonnet danced in the wind. Juliet Catesby held his gaze in a way that reached down inside him and stirred something lost.
He couldn’t give up that gaze. He returned it with a fervor that felt feverish. After several exquisite seconds, she was the one who turned away, hastening down the slick brick steps to catch up with the other carolers. Half wishing he’d gone below, he watched her cloaked figure disappear in faster-falling snow.
The tick of the mantel clock in the unfamiliar chintz bedchamber was overloud. Juliet turned over in the canopied bed, facing away from the window, as charred logs settled in the grate. In this borrowed room on England Street she could hear all sorts of noises. The night watch. A dog barking. The clatter of coach wheels and horse hooves. The snow seemed to cushion yet magnify the world all at once. This, she told herself, was what now drew her to the window. Not the house across the street and slightly to the left, its handsome lines dark save a light in a single window. The very window she’d spied Leith Buchanan looking down from as they’d been caroling.
Could he not sleep?
She’d heard he was traveling. Had it been a fortnight since he’d shared their Sabbath table? She and Loveday had been in Williamsburg nearly a sennight because of weather. In that time, Hosea had relayed the message that the runaway mother and daughter were improving but needed further refuge. Meanwhile, Father had secured a marriage license, and the wedding day was set for two days hence. The Ravenals were to return from Forrest Bend in time to celebrate the nuptials in Zipporah’s parlor.
Juliet wished they were Loveday’s instead.
With the house asleep, Leith had free roam of Ravenal’s residence. In his smallclothes, he ignored the possibility of causing tittle-tattle if found by a maidservant and went downstairs. Mayhap he needed something to read. Ravenal had a library adjoining the first-floor parlor. Snow light illuminated the windows and allowed him to kindle a candelabra from the hearth’s dwindling fire.
Holding it high, he perused shelves that wrapped the room on all sides. A treasure trove of books was tidily grouped by subject. All the agricultural tomes, predominantly tobacco, bespoke Nathaniel Ravenal’s former life. Once he’d been Virginia’s most prolific planter. For years the Buchanan-Ravenal liaison was legendary on both sides of the Atlantic. Ravenal had enriched the Buchanans as much as they had enriched the Ravenals, dominating the market that some scathingly called a monopoly.
And then, all at once, Ravenal had a change of heart. It began simply enough. He declared himself done with tobacco trading. His depleted tobacco fields lay fallow, and he began to farm grains instead, selling vast amounts of acreage to settle his debts, both in Virginia and Maryland and in the Caribbean. He’d even talked lately of leaving the Anglican Church and becoming a dissenter instead.
Most shocking of all, he’d freed his Africans. Though some chose to remain as paid domestic staff, he’d contracted indentures instead. Ever since, boatloads of British immigrants had clamored to work for him because of his generous terms. Leith knew firsthand because they sailed on Buchanan ships.
But not once had Ravenal explained his extraordinary reversal.Let my actions speak for themselves, was his succinct explanation to Leith’s father by letter. Leith had expected not only an end to their complex, lucrative businessassociation but an end to their long-standing friendship as well. How many men—and there were few—who’d forsaken slaveholding and the tobacco trade and all that came with it would continue to befriend a man who’d forsaken none of it? Not only that, he’d even extended that hand of fellowship to Leith and his brothers.
Leith had accepted Ravenal’s invitation to Virginia only because he’d wanted to avoid the scandal at home. He’d expected questioning about Havilah and his failed marriage, some form of judgment and condemnation. But there’d been no haranguing or lectures from Ravenal. No cleverly disguised counsel. Just a steady, thoughtful presence that didn’t preach.
Leith left the agricultural shelves and moved toward novels and poetry.Gulliver’s Travels. The Vicar of Wakefield. The Castle of Otranto. Robinson Crusoe.Those he’d read. He’d been traveling with Jonathan Swift’s satireA Tale of a Tub, which he’d gotten from an Annapolis bookseller.An irreligious, profane work.
Much like himself.
As he moved toward the door, his candelabra cast light on a table. There lay a Bible, open to Proverbs. Proverbs 31, to be exact.
Who can find a virtuous woman?
21
Love does not dominate, it cultivates.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Tomorrow this townhouse will be full of guests and Father will wed.” Loveday sounded both glad and sorrowful as she and Juliet sewed in the parlor. “Though I wish him every happiness, I am still sad that Mama is not with us and he’s moved on without her.”
