58
LORD JOHN RETURNS
River Run, March 1770
Phaedre had brought a dress, one of Jocasta’s, yellow silk, very full in the skirt.
“We got better company tonight than ol’ Mr. Cooper or Lawyer Forbes,” Phaedre said with satisfaction. “We got us a real live lord, how ’bout that?”
She let down a huge armload of fabric on the bed and began to pull bits and pieces from the frothing billows, issuing instructions like a drill sergeant.
“Here, you strip off and put on these yere stays. You need somethin’ strong, keep that belly pushed down. Ain’t nobody but backcountry trash goes ’thout stays. Your auntie wasn’t blind as a bat, she’d ’a had you fitted out proper long since—long since. Then put on the stockins and garters—ain’t those pretty? I always did like that pair with the little bitty leaves on ’em—then we’ll tie on the petticoats, and then—”
“What lord?” Brianna took the proferred stays and frowned at them. “My God, what’s this made of, whalebones?”
“Uh-huh. Ain’t no cheap tin or iron for Miss Jo, surely not.” Phaedre burrowed like a terrier, frowning and muttering to herself. “Where that garter gone to?”
“I don’t need these. And what lord is it that’s coming?”
Phaedre straightened up, staring at Brianna over the folds of yellow silk.
“Don’t need ’em?” she said censoriously. “And you with a six-month belly? What you thinking of, girl, come into dinner all pooched out, and a lordship sittin’ by the soup a-gogglin’ at you through his eyeglass?”
Brianna couldn’t help smiling at this description, but replied with considerable dryness nonetheless.
“What difference would it make? The whole county knows by now that I’m having a baby. I wouldn’t be surprised if that circuit rider—Mr. Urmstone, is it? didn’t preach a sermon about me up on the Buttes.”
Phaedre uttered a short laugh.
“He did,” she said. “Two Sundays back. Mickey and Drusus was there—they thought it was right funny, but your auntie didn’t. She set Lawyer Forbes on to law him for the slander, but ol’ Reverend Urmstone, he said ’twasn’t slander if it was the truth.”
Brianna stared back at the maid.
“And just what did he say about me?”
Phaedre shook her head and resumed her rummaging.
“You don’ want to know,” she said darkly. “But be that as it might, whether the county knows ain’t the same thing as you flauntin’ your belly through the dining room and leavin’ his lordship in no doubt, so you put on them stays.”
Her authoritative tone left no room for argument. Brianna struggled resentfully into the stiff garment, and suffered Phaedre to lace it tight. Her waist was still slender, and the remaining bulge in front would be easily disguised by the full skirt and petticoats.
She stared at herself in the mirror, Phaedre’s dark head bobbing near her thighs as the maid adjusted the green silk stockings to her own satisfaction. She couldn’t breathe, and being squeezed like that couldn’t be good for the baby. The stays laced in front; as soon as Phaedre left, she’d undo them. The hell with his Lordship, whoever he was.
“And who is this lord we’re having for dinner?” she asked for the third time, stepping obediently into the billow of starched white linen the maid held for her.
“This be Lord John William Grey, of Mount Josiah plantation in Virginia.” Phaedre rolled out the syllables with great ceremony, though seeming rather disappointed by the unfortunately brief and simple names of the lord. She would, Brianna knew, have preferred a Lord FitzGerald Vanlandingham Walthamstead if she could have got one.
“He a friend of your daddy’s, or so Miss Jo says,” the maid added, more prosaically. “There, that’s good. Lucky you got nice bosoms, this dress is made for ’em.”
Brianna hoped this didn’t mean the dress wasn’t going to cover her breasts; the stays ended just beneath, pushing them up so that they swelled startlingly high, like something bubbling over the rim of a pot. Her nipples stared at her in the mirror, gone a rich dark color, like raspberry wine.
It wasn’t worry over which bulges she was exposing that made her oblivious to the rest of Phaedre’s brisk ministrations, though; it was the maid’s casual He a friend of your daddy’s.
* * *
It was not a crowd; Jocasta seldom had crowds. Dependent on her ears for the nuances of social byplay, she would not risk commotion. Still, there were more people here in the drawing room than was usual; Lawyer Forbes, of course, with his spinster sister; Mr. MacNeill and his son, Judge Alderdyce and his mother, a couple of Farquard Campbell’s unmarried sons. No one, though, resembling Phaedre’s lordship.
Brianna smiled sourly to herself. “Let ’em look, then,” she murmured, straightening her back so that her bulge swelled proudly before her, glistening under the silk. She gave it an encouraging pat. “Come on, Osbert, let’s be social.”
Her entrance was greeted by a general outcry of cordiality that made her mildly ashamed of her cynicism. They were kind men and women, including Jocasta; and the situation, after all, was none of their doing.
Still, she did enjoy the expression of mild shock that the Judge tried to hide, and the too-sweet smile on his mother’s face, as her beady little parrot eyes registered the blatant fact of Osbert’s unbound presence. Jocasta might propose, but the Judge’s mother would dispose, no doubt of that. Brianna met Mrs. Alderdyce’s eye with a sweet smile of her own.
Mr. MacNeill’s weatherbeaten face twitched slightly with amusement, but he bowed gravely and asked after her health with no sign of embarrassment. As for Lawyer Forbes, if he noticed anything amiss in her appearance, he drew the veil of his professional discretion over it and greeted her with his customary suavity.
“Ah, Miss Fraser!” he said. “Precisely whom we were wanting. Mrs. Alderdyce and myself have just been engaged in amiable dispute concerning a question of aesthetics. You, with your instinct for loveliness, would have a most valuable opinion, should you be willing to oblige me by giving it.” Taking her arm, he drew her smoothly to his side—away from MacNeill, who twitched a bushy brow at her but made no move to interfere.
He led her to the hearthside, where four small wooden boxes sat on the table. Ceremoniously removing the lids of these, the lawyer displayed in turn four jewels, each the size of a marrow-fat pea, each nestled in a pad of dark blue velvet, the better to set off its brilliance.
“I think of purchasing one of these stones,” Forbes explained. “To have made into a ring. I had them sent from Boston.” He smirked at Brianna, plainly feeling that he had stolen a march on the competition—and judging from the faint glower on MacNeill’s face, he had.
“Tell me, my dear—which do you prefer? The sapphire, the emerald, the topaz or the diamond?” He rocked back on his heels, waistcoat swelling with his own cleverness.
For the first time in her pregnancy, Brianna felt a sudden qualm of nausea. Her head felt light and giddy, and her fingertips tingled with numbness.
Sapphire, emerald, topaz, diamond. And her father’s ring held a ruby. Five stones of power, the points of a traveler’s pentagram, the guarantors of safe passage. For how many? Without thinking, she spread a hand protectively over her belly.
She realized the trap Forbes thought he was luring her toward. Let her make a choice and he would present her with the unmounted stone on the spot, a public proposal that would—he thought—force her either to accept him at once, or cause an unpleasant scene by rejecting him outright. Gerald Forbes really knew nothing about women, she thought.
“I—ah—I should not like to venture my own opinion without first hearing Mrs. Alderdyce’s choice,” she said, forcing a cordial smile and a nod toward the Judge’s mother, who looked both surprised and gratified by being so deferred to.
Brianna’s stomach clenched, and she surreptitiously wiped sweaty hands on her skirt. There they were, all together and in one place—the four stones she had thought it would take a lifetime to find.
Mrs. Alderdyce was jabbing an arthritic finger at the emerald, explaining the virtues of her choice, but Brianna paid no attention to what the woman said. She glanced at Lawyer Forbes, his round face still reflecting smugness. A sudden wild impulse filled her.
If she said yes, now, tonight, while he still had all four stones…could she bring herself to that? Inveigle him, kiss him, lull him into complacency—and then steal the stones?
Yes, she could—and then what? Run off into the mountains with them? Leave Jocasta disgraced and the county in an uproar, run and hide like a common thief? And how would she get to the Indies before the baby came? She counted in her head, knowing it was insanity, but still—it could be done.
The stones glittered and winked, temptation and salvation. Everyone had come to look, heads bent over the table, murmuring their admiration, herself temporarily overlooked.
She could hide, she thought, the steps of the plan unfolding inevitably before her mind’s eye, quite without her willing it. Steal a horse, head up the Yadkin valley into the backcountry. Despite the nearness of the fire, she shivered, feeling cold at the thought of flight through the winter snows. But her mind ran on.
She could hide in the mountains, at her parents’ cabin, and wait for them to come back with Roger. If they came back. If Roger was with them. Yes, and what if the baby came first, and she was there on the mountain, all alone with no one at hand, and nothing to help but a handful of stolen brightness?
Or should she ride at once for Wilmington and find a ship to the Indies? If Jocasta was right, Roger was never coming back. Was she sacrificing her only chance at return to wait for a man who was dead—or who, if not dead, might reject her and her child?
“Miss Fraser?”
Lawyer Forbes was waiting, swollen with expectation.
She took a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down between her breasts, beneath the loosened stays.
“They’re all very lovely,” she said, surprised at how coolly she was able to speak. “I could not possibly choose among them—but then, I have no particular liking for gems. I have very simple tastes, I’m afraid.”
She caught the flicker of a smile on Mr. MacNeill’s face, and the deep flush of Forbes’s round cheeks, but turned her back on the stones with a polite word.
“I think we will not wait dinner,” Jocasta murmured in her ear. “If his Lordship should be delayed…”
On cue, Ulysses appeared in the doorway, elegant in full livery, to announce dinner. Instead, in a mellifluous voice that carried easily over the chatter, he said, “Lord John Grey, ma’am,” and stepped aside.
Jocasta breathed a sigh of satisfaction, and urged Brianna forward, toward the slight figure that stood in the doorway.
“Good. You shall be his partner at dinner, my dear.”
Brianna glanced back at the table by the hearth, but the stones were gone.