37

And fare thee weel, my only love, and fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my love, though it were ten thousand mile.

Robert Burns

Christmas was the farthest thing from Lark’s mind. The next meeting with the churchwarden was foremost. But being a guest of the Ramsays came first. They bundled up and took the coach to Williamsburg—she, Larkin, and Mistress Flowerdew. A voluminous letter to Magnus was now sealed and tucked in her baggage, to be handed to the Jamaica-bound friend Trevor had mentioned. She prayed it would reach its destination. Or that some word was forthcoming from Jamaica.

As they pulled past Royal Hundred’s scrolled wrought-iron gates, she looked back, chilled once more by the sight of Granger on his horse, watching them depart. A return of gout had kept him abed of late. His wife had gone to the apothecary in town this time instead of darkening Lark’s door for a remedy. It must have helped, for today Granger was back on his feet, making the rounds on the plantation.

Had the runaways been caught? She rarely thought of Rory. Apart from Scotland, minus the Merry Lass, he had simply faded from her thoughts. Back then she’d been a naïve girl, enamored of the sea and the danger and a braw sea captain. But Isla’s untimely death, the long ocean voyage and indenture, and Magnus’s fate had turned her into a wary woman. She longed to recapture a bit of the childish spirit she found in Larkin. ’Twould make her a better mother. A better wife, if it came to that.

For the time being, she was ensconced in a bedchamber that resembled a silken garden with its fine floral fabrics and wallpaper and costly furnishings. Who would have imagined she’d sit to the right of Prentice at supper, arguably the most important man in Virginia Colony, second only to the royal governor himself? Who would have dreamed she’d walk about Williamsburg caroling, chilled to the bone? And quite pink-cheeked, throat tingling from singing, on the arm of Virginia’s rising star, as the Gazette called him—the honorable Trevor Ramsay?

She mustn’t let it go to her head.

Here on Palace Green they were amid a great many carolers, their breaths pluming in the crystalline winter air. Mulled cider was being passed about, merry faces illuminated by the leaping flames as the singers circled the bonfire. Trevor’s fair features were ruddy from the cold, a woolen scarf wrapped round his neck. Lark’s own fur muff was put to good use, and more than one lady remarked on her lovely matching cape and bonnet. Of pale mint silk trimmed with Canadian fox fur, it seemed fit for Queen Anne. Glad she was to be clad in the early Christmas gift Mistress Flowerdew had given her. Trevor said it went remarkably well with her bright hair. Truly, he’d not stopped looking at her all evening.

She peered down the street toward Ramsay House as people began to disperse. The big dwelling seemed to slumber. Somewhere within were a great many servants and Larkin. The truth was she missed him. Missed his damp, pearl-toothed grin. His sweet, lavender scent after a bath. The curls that wisped like red silk through her fingers. His sleepy weight as he lay in her lap. His gurgling laugh.

“You missed a note, Lark,” Trevor teased as the caroling ended, obviously sensing her distraction.

“I’m wondering where wee Larkin is.”

He smiled, extending ungloved hands toward the fire’s heat. “He’s tucked upstairs in your bedchamber, a servant watching over him. I warned Theodosia not to take him any farther.”

She cast a glance about and found they were alone, the rest of the carolers slipping away to their homes. Silence reigned save for the crackle and snap of the now dwindling bonfire.

“Have ye any word from the churchwarden?” she asked tentatively, hating to spoil the festive evening with worrisome matters.

“Shush, Lark.” He softened the rebuke with a smile. “We shall hear from him soon enough. What do your Scriptures say? ‘Take no thought for tomorrow’?”

“My Scriptures, Trevor? Are they not yers too?”

He shrugged lightly in that familiar way she was coming to know. “I save Scripture for the Sabbath. For church, mostly. I’ve found the Bible to have little bearing on practical life.”

“Oh?” Lark watched a burst of sparks swirl away into the night. “Because ye keep it so confined, mayhap.”

“Confined? The Bible? I suppose so. Do you challenge me, Lark?”

“Do I?” She turned back to him. “As a native Scot, I would try to better understand ye native Virginians.”

Again he gave that maddening shrug. “As my cousin Thomas Jefferson once said, question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, He must approve more the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

“Yet I do fear Him. He is holy and I am not. I am a sinner saved by grace. And I believe in Him with all my heart.”

“As Creator of the universe, perhaps. Not as a personal, intimate being, surely.”

“If He isna personal, He is worth very little to me,” she said with more vehemence than the late hour called for. “Would a God give up His own beloved Son if He was impersonal and indifferent?”

“A pretty speech, to be sure.” He turned toward her. “Let’s not waste time with futile arguments and that which matters little. Not with the night on the wane.”

Their little disagreement rolled past, his indifference unsettling. What he spoke of was beyond her ken. A highly trained mind he had, far beyond the reach of a stillroom maid, however well educated at Kerrera Castle. He was, after all, Anglican and American. She was Scots-Presbyterian born and bred. Matters of faith had always been heartfelt. The great Reformation had seen to that. Should she expect Trevor, raised in the faith of the Church of England, to be like her? Did his aloof faith truly matter?

He reached out a hand and touched a wisp of her hair that had slipped free of its pins. After a night of wind and caroling, she must look a fright. “I would speak of more important things.”

What could possibly be more important than one’s faith? She kept the thought close, wishing for a different sort of evening with a different sort of suitor.

“I’m preoccupied with the New Year. What it will bring.”

For him, all seemed pleasantries.

“Yer thinking of the completion of Ramsay Manor. Planting yer gardens and orchards. Perhaps another appointment by the royal governor.”

“All well and good, but not foremost in my mind nor my heart.” He offered her an arm and they began a slow walk down Nicholson Street. “I want to be about the business of courting you, Lark. I would ask your father . . .”

“My father was lost at sea long ago.”

“So Mistress Flowerdew told me. I have written to Osbourne instead, asking for his permission not only to court you but to wed you, if you are willing.”

She turned her face toward him, the darkness denying her a look into his eyes. She regarded him, her thoughts and emotions in such a tangle she could not summon a single coherent word.

“I hope this means you are speechless with delight,” he said, teasing in his tone.

“I . . .” She paused, not wanting to offend him. “I am—”

He silenced her with a kiss and slid a cold hand around her neck so that her face was tilted up to his. She tasted cider. Smoke. Safety. Security. All at once she was cast back to her first kiss in a sea cave and a captain who’d tried to claim her. She’d not responded then, nor did she now. Neither did she draw back, so stunned was she by Trevor’s unexpected move. But he didn’t seem to mind, nor even notice so passionless a kiss.

“Consider it, Lark. I shall court you. And if we wed, all your worries about Granger and his schemes, the babe, and the onerous contract you hold with Osbourne will blow away like chaff in the wind.”

Kwasi sat on his horse like a prince, the sun shining off his composed, deeply etched features glistening with sweat, his regal bearing stoking Magnus’s curiosity.

“Tell me of yer former life. In Africa,” Magnus said by way of Rojay as the three of them looked out on sugarcane thrusting green shoots above the soil of hundreds of acres.

If the Ashanti seemed surprised by Magnus’s query, he did not show it. “You are the first white man to ask that of me,” he replied in his melodic cadence, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

Thoughtful seconds passed. The emotion the question wrought was felt in the silence, broken by a raucous parrot from a near palm.

“It was like this,” Kwasi finally said. “I was a boy, out planting yams with my father not far from our village. I had seen white men seeking gold on our shores and had been warned to stay away from them. That final day, slave traders with dogs came upon us and seized us. They tied our hands with willow twigs and took us aboard a ship. We sailed to a place where men are sold. But first we were cleaned and rubbed with palm oil. The captain of a ship bought me, but my father was deemed unfit because he had a limp. More of my people were taken and we set sail.”

“How long have ye been in captivity?” Magnus asked.

“I have lived longer here than in Africa. But it does not lessen my desire to return there.”

“I wish that I could give ye yer freedom. The most I can do is make ye a manager of yer people here. But one day I believe ye will be free.”

Kwasi’s smile was bittersweet. “Ebi Akyi wɔ bi. Success follows patience.”

Magnus repeated the Ashanti Twi slowly, capturing the pronunciation. He was learning the language rather quickly but not quickly enough to carry a conversation and dismiss a translator.

From their vantage point atop the hill where the largest mill was situated, the cane harvest had begun. Cutting and bundling in the fields was first, and then the cane was carted to the mill to be crushed, the work done by field gangs of both men and women. Each gang had a name, the youngest children and the sick and elderly given the lighter tasks of weeding and caring for livestock.

“More work is being done now. You should see a better harvest than ever before, now that the people are better fed,” Kwasi said. “There is not so much sickness, not so much running away to join the maroons in the mountains.”

“The poor yield of before was due mainly to slave exhaustion, not soil exhaustion,” Magnus replied. “That and the overseers’ refusal to rely on yer and other workers’ judgment and knowledge in cane cultivation, always insisting on their own ineffective methods. Now we must find a better way to transport the hogsheads of sugar to the ships. And earlier too. The first sugar fetches the best prices.”

The droghers, small boats used to carry the sugar, were haphazard at best. Recently a large quantity of cane had been lost when a boat capsized and two men drowned. But these were but a drop in the ongoing onslaught of sugarcane preoccupations and troubles. What with the weather, the pests, the diseases to the crops, the quality and quantity of sugar, the state of the sugar-making equipment, the fluctuating sugar market, and Osbourne’s debts to merchants who sold their sugar, any profit was hard-won and oftentimes impossible to come by.

Was growing tobacco at Royal Hundred half as onerous?

Magnus’s aim was to return to Virginia. Osbourne’s recent letter had asked that of him, if only temporarily. Magnus was to leave Jamaica for the colony in spring, to give a report to Osbourne on the state of Trelawny Hall and sugar production so that Osbourne would not have to venture down to the plantation himself.

Spring was months away. In Magnus’s absence, Kwasi would be in charge, a risk both to Trelawny Hall and to Kwasi himself. Magnus had sent the other overseers to manage outlying fields of cocoa and coffee.

For now, he parted with Kwasi and Rojay and went on to the nearest village of wattle huts with their wood rafters, each surrounded by colorful, sweet-smelling gardens. There he met with a surgeon to examine the bairns. Of late, the dreaded kissing bugs were a bane, as were yaws and worms. If they were caught early, the prognosis was good. But someone akin to Lark was needed to distill and dispense the required tonics, always in short shrift here.

Gently, working alongside the physic, he sat each child upon his lap, all tugging his heart back to the time when Larkin had reached out his arms before Magnus had ridden away.

Little carried the ache of that fore or since.