Chapter 6
Alexandra stretched, dreaming of her room in Deconshire. Overhead, bound reed thatching lay on dark wooden beams, securing the house against the winds and cold. Giving the delicacy of Wedgewood pottery, the white stucco walls were decorated with Molly’s pictures of pressed violets. Even Samuel’s touches were present with an oak chair and carved headboard hewn from his hands.
The rasp of metal filled her ears as Molly moved kettles below in the kitchen. Soon bacon would crackle and Alexandra would rise and have honeyed tea, scones with jam and clotted cream while Samuel filled his pipe and spun a yarn.
She sighed, cuddling into her pillow. Familiar waves beat upon the shore and the ever-present wind rushed through the trees. She frowned in her dream. Trees clacked together, a wholly different sound.
Her eyes flew open. Palm trees. Not the sound that swept through the willows, yellow dunes and marram grasses or green hills of her beloved Deconshire. She sat up, bit down on her knuckles, smothering a sob.
She was not home. God only knew when she would be…if ever.
Poor Samuel. He must be sick with worry and grief, believing she was dead. She clenched her fingers into fists, rendering half-moon marks in her palms. If there was God, she’d bring Ursula and Willean to justice.
The grinding sound quit. Nicholas sat on the threshold, sanding the musket, rust dustings and sand peppered the floor. She clutched the quilt to her neck, concealing her naked state beneath. Had she kicked the covers off during the night? Heat rose to her cheeks.
“Good morning,” Nicholas greeted, and commenced polishing the barrel to a blue-black patina as if nothing was untoward.
Her shift lay across the chair. Not that the dratted garment concealed much.
“Something the matter?”
The soft tone in his voice startled her. Had she said something in her sleep? Oh, to tell him the truth of her past. She couldn’t. Her grief and childish rebellion against Molly and Samuel released a heavy anchor of shame. She shook off the thought. She couldn’t think about that now. Not when they had to survive long enough to be rescued.
So much work lay ahead of them. Gardens to clear and plant. Hauling water, a constant chore. Shutters had to be fixed before another storm hit the island. Her breath hitched. No. She could not talk about home.
“I thought you were going to get your coat,” she said.
“I’ll do some hunting.” Gun in hand, Nicholas rose, towering over her. With the tip of the barrel he lifted her shift off the chair, only to dangle the garment over her.
She snatched at it.
“When you want to talk, Alexandra, I’m here for you.” His deep baritone voice was quiet. Infinitely patient.
In the pearly morning light, Alexandra swallowed the lump in her throat and whispered through parched lips, “I-I can’t.”
He angled his head toward a bunch of bananas on the table. “I went out early and acquired breakfast.”
He took the powder horn off the wall, stuck the knife in his belt. He had his shirt back on with his sleeves rolled up. “I’d prefer a rare sirloin, coddled eggs, bacon, with warm cinnamon bread and butter, but that is not on the menu. I’m good at hunting.” He bowed and strode out the door, his lithe muscled form moving with perfect grace.
He vanished like vapor before the sun, the forest swallowing him up. Alexandra missed him the minute he left. To take up the time, she swept the cottage, and then getting on her hands and knees, scrubbed the floor until it gleamed like beaten moonbeams. She made two trips to the river to get water, the heat of the day rising with the sun. On the last trip, she dipped in the river, enjoying a midmorning bath.
Carrying the buckets back to the house, she picked two mauve orchids, and then placed them in a flagon on the table. Savoring a sweet banana, she prided herself on her hard work in transforming the fresh condition of the house.
Her shoulders slumped as she scrutinized the massive job of clearing the garden. Tugging at bristly vines, her hands grew raw, piling a large heap to burn later. She sat back on her heels, observing the rich surrounding greenness, the bright and solitary loveliness of a new world emerging, quieting all her qualms. Kneeling, she stuck her hands into the deep rich loam, awed by her connection to the earth, the soil so much better than in Deconshire. Everything would grow here.
A shot rang out. Close. She cupped her hands and shouted up the mountainside. “Nicholas, are you all right?” No answer. She bit her lip, how he wanted to prove to her he could hunt—that he was useful. Had he shot himself? She started up the slope.
Between two palmettos, a gigantic boar charged.
“Nicholas!”
Sharp tusks protruded from the beast. She picked up a rock and threw, the missile sailing over its bristled back. Run. Move! Now! Spinning around, she leapt through the pineapple plants mindless of the razor-sharp leaves, cutting her legs. She looked over her shoulder, the beast’s eyes bulged, grunting, thrashing through the vegetation, head lowered ready to pierce her with its sharp tusks. She tripped on a root and sprawled in the dirt, her hands skidding through briars.
She jumped to her feet. An impossible wall of undergrowth trapped her. A tree loomed three feet away, and she leapt, reaching high to grab the lower branch. Her sweat-slicked palms slipped off and she crumpled to the ground. The boar stopped, clawed the ground with his pointed hooves, bloodlust in its eyes. “Nicholas!”
Where was Nicholas? She scuttled farther, pressing into the bush. The boar charged. She screamed, thrusting her hands up in front of her.
A shot exploded. The boar dropped. Nicholas appeared, smoke curling from his musket. Alexandra pressed her hands to her face and cried. He pulled her up and put his arm around her.
She pushed him away. “That pig nearly killed me. What took you so long?”
“I thought you’d be congratulating me on my excellent marksmanship,” he said, his smile jubilant. “We have dinner, breakfast and supper for the next several days.”
Breathing hard, she pushed her toe into the beast to make sure it was dead. “Is that all you can think of is your stomach?”
He dropped the carcass under the shade of a lignum vitae, the blue flowers so beautiful and at odds with the macabre process below. His forehead furrowed when she rolled a crock from the lean to, filling it with water and mixing in a measure of salt.
“To make a brine, we shall soak most of the meat before smoking to preserve.” She took a chunk of meat and submerged it in the brine, still waiting for her racing pulse to slow.
Alexandra gathered wood and started a fire in the lower berth of the beehive oven. After procuring a rib section, she placed it on a spit to roast. Nicholas finished his task, filling the crock to the brim and burying the remains.
Her mind still reeling from her near death, she said, “Thank you for saving my life.”
“I’ll keep you safe,” he said over his shoulder as if it was no great feat, and then joined her by the oven with two fresh buckets of water.
“Hauling water is an onerous task. I wish there was a well closer to the house.”
“Let me worry about the water. I don’t want you lifting buckets.” He had bathed in the river, his shirt spread out over a croton bush to dry, and she marveled at how she was becoming accustomed to his half-naked splendor. He brushed back his sinfully thick black hair and a damp strand still stuck to his forehead. She itched to smooth it back.
“You have provided us with worthy sustenance. I don’t think that there is a thing you cannot do.” She sprinkled salt and patted rosemary leaves onto the roasting meat.
Nicholas plunked down in the grass, stretching his long legs in front of him. “There’s plenty I can’t do.” His laughter had an edge.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Ask my father. My greatest critic.”
Perhaps the relationship with his father caused his anger. She turned the spit, keeping her eyes on the meat. “He is disapproving?”
“There are many things I want to do to develop the estate. But my father won’t listen. He is stuck with the old ways and won’t listen to any of my ideas.” He plucked the grass and chewed it. “It doesn’t matter now. Despite the fact, that I haven’t given up hope that my father is yet alive, I remain at the edge of the world and unable to implement any of my concepts anyway.”
She smiled at him. He did not fit the prescription of an ordinary aristocrat. His awareness, and confidence belied undertones of a man who cut his teeth by rolling up his sleeves and working with the peasantry. Hadn’t he said he worked with his tenants, helping them to rebuild their homes after fire swept through the village? With his arms behind his head, studying the golden coconuts bunched in the tree above, she felt he was a man who had the ability to command everyone’s attention, a man born to lead.
More commendable was his intense and admirable desire to succeed. “Tell me what you want to do. I’d love to hear your plans.”
“Alternating pastures with planting grains. At the minimum, plant clover in place of fallow.”
She paused to wipe her hands. “It would increase arable land but digging up established pastures is hard work.”
He sat up, his arm bent over his knee. “My father called my ideas folly. He’s not forward thinking enough. The grain yields would be fantastic.”
“How?” She wanted him to defend his beliefs his father had disregarded.
“Clover enriches the soil, works as a fertilizer. The clover can support livestock, turning out more milk, cheese, meat. The manure left behind maintains soil fertility.”
To her eye, Nicholas seemed fiercely independent and demonstrated excessive pride in his ideas. To grow up with an equally independent and dominating father? She blew out a breath. The relationship between father and son was an explosive formula. “Brilliant. What other ideas do you have?”
He stood, paced a few steps and came back again, his expression thoughtful. “Land conversions, land drains and reclamation, irrigation, four crop rotation.”
Heavens, the man was something to look at, so enthused was she by his vision. “What is four crop rotation?”
“Growing a series of crops in the same area in sequenced seasons.”
“For instance?”
He threw up his hands, gesturing like an orator. “It is not a new idea, been practiced by Mid-eastern farmers for six thousand years, yet timeless in its applicability. Crops of wheat, turnips, barley and clover are alternated each year. The soil will not be robbed of one kind of nutrient, reducing pathogens and pests that occur in the lands when planted with the same crop.”
His deep baritone held excitement and promise. “With the increase in produce, the tenants could sell their surplus for their own profit to distant localities that were experiencing shortages. Thus, improving the lives of the tenants on the estates.”
Her little village in southern England raised corn, wheat, cows and other crops. His ideas were revolutionary and could help Deconshire. “How could it work? There is price fixing and tariffs from town to town. And—I doubt the Lords would allow such power in the hands of the tenants.”
“Once I am duke and take my place in the House of Lords, I’ll use my political influence to develop a national market, free of tariffs, tolls and custom barriers. The point I’ll drive home is the farmers will be more effective land managers by becoming low cost producers, and enrich everyone. It is a win, win. What do you think?”
Alexandra stared at him, completely absorbed, trying to grasp the significance of his groundbreaking ingenuity. “The quiet cough of a rich man is louder than the braying of six paupers. If anyone can do it, it would be you, Nicholas.” She drew her finger across the meat and sucked the juice off. “I can’t understand why your father would reject your ideas.”
“I’m the oldest, the heir and he demanded the best from me. When my mother died, our family was irrevocably broken. Without her calming presence, he ramped up his demands on his children through his expectations of education and marrying well. He became silent, distant, a kind of shadow presence, hiding in his office behind closed doors.”
“He was in mourning.”
“But the mourning has lasted for years.” Disgust lined his voice. “Not that I was a perfect son. I embarrassed my father with my brawling.
Fortunately, my Uncle Cornelius stepped in, becoming my surrogate father. Unusual, because he’s not really my uncle but a close friend of the family. When I was snagged into trouble at Eton, Uncle Cornelius intervened and made sure I wasn’t thrown out. When I was taken advantage of by a card shark, he rescued me from a gambling debt. And after I graduated from college, he took me on a European tour.”
“You were lucky to have your Uncle Cornelius.” Alexandra now understood how horrible that time must have been for Nicholas, provided with every luxury and advantage, yet absent, were the needs of the heart—the necessary connection between father and son. She pulled the roast off the skewer and placed it on a pewter platter. “Let’s eat.”
Nicholas ogled the succulent meat, dripping with juices, and placed the platter on the table. Alexandra lit one of the precious beeswax candles. He sliced the meat, while she peeled and sliced orange papaya. The pewter plates she had washed were heaped with yams and carrots and their tankards filled with water. He seated her, and then sat at the head of the table.
“Excellent,” said Nicholas, sampling a sweet honeyed yam, and then savoring the fruit.
She smiled and they ate in silence. Outside, palms swayed in the breeze, the soft sound like whispering secrets. Over the brim of her tankard, she studied him, a glimmer of the man whose journey she shared had come to light. Unfair discipline and rigid rules left Nicholas without the ability to display vulnerability. When life was tough, negative feelings were to be suffered and internalized. His stubbornness, sometimes unsympathetic and definitely—dominating flaws became exaggerated. His darkness was held within. He hid behind his hurt.
Nicholas’s mind reeled like a hunting dog backtracking through the country, turning back and turning back, tracing out the way it had come. To block the dog, who wanted to lurk in all those dark places, he could remember his mother and her sweet face and matching disposition. How she would stroke his head when he was ill and tell him everything would be fine. How she had been the softening touch to his father’s sternness.
How she died in her husband’s arms. How they loved one another. To have a love like that was once in infinity.
The loss of his mother had been monumental for the whole family. His father’s grief magnified the severity of her passing. He refused to listen to Nicholas’s ideas on improvements on the estate. With all his children, he bully-whipped them to marry spouses that enriched the Rutland legacy. His father had thrust upon him the beautiful and most sought after, Lady Susannah Tomkins. She possessed impeccable breeding and would bring added social, political and financial power to the Rutland family.
Lady Susannah was—too perfect. Like a prize mare, she had been coifed and coddled from birth. Stuffy, of little learning and spirit, she was far from the spectrum of Nicholas’s interest.
The dread that was inescapable rose, the explosion. His father. Nicholas swallowed a knotted lump in his throat. He didn’t want to think of the possibility his father might be dead. He forced the cruel notion down. So much left unsaid. So much to undo.
A fonder memory drifted into Nicholas’s mind…of his father’s natural inclination toward his first-born son as a source of pride. The Duke, sitting at the table after a meal with a roomful of guests or at his desk with his solicitors and secretary about. He would pull Nicholas up into his lap to pat and hug him. Sometimes they would ride around the estate to visit the tenants. His father lifting him up on the saddle in front of him, the high-headed bay cantering to the duke’s instruction. He could still feel his father’s hand and forearm crooked around his waist. While his father conducted business, Nicholas played with the tenant children. At those times, he was always aware his father kept a kind of vigil over him. He would look up from his play to see his father gazing at him. His father would smile and nod, or he would raise his hand in a kind of salute. The wonderful companionship he had with his father during his youth was a tender kindness that he would remember with pleasure and with regret.
Nicholas cut his meat in exact pieces. “I had a terrible fight with my father before my abduction. I have many regrets.”
“What happened?”
“What I had built up inside for a long time exploded. I told him how he was destroying the family.”
“Go on.”
“Due to my father’s unbending and stubborn nature, my sister, Abigail rebelled, becoming a bit of a hoyden. Nothing bad, but the threat of scandal existed. My father was adamant on all of us marrying to gain privilege, esteem, and lands to enhance the Rutland name.”
Nicholas stabbed meat from the platter and put it on his plate. “To correct the problem, my father insisted Abigail marry right away, giving her two months to select from many of the swains who camped on the doorstep. If she didn’t choose a spouse during the allotted time, he’d make the decision for her.”
“Abigail begged him to relent. She did not want to marry, at least not yet. Stubborn by nature, and driven to extraordinary measures, she faked an engagement to a man she didn’t love. I confronted my father, insisting he was handling Abigail all wrong. Told him he was being premature and unfair.”
“How did he take that?”
“Not well. The argument burst into a shouting match. I threw out all my pent-up animosity. Absent father…my brother, Joshua disappearing in the wilderness of the Colonies to get away from him…my brother, Anthony pressed to marry a selfish immature shrew who spent troves of his money and, who I suspected, had cuckolded him. I said everything I could to hurt my father. Felt good, lashing out at him. The real reason was that I loathed the dukedom under his reign. I was born to command, felt my abilities in my blood.”
She looked out the window, silent in her circumspection. His good mood from hours before fell away devolving into a morose brooding as another, morbid memory rose that included killing a man in self-defense. Not a part of him he was proud of, nor a part of him he’d reveal to her. A breeze rattled palm fronds together. Hands fisted, he waited. Her opinion meant more than he’d realized…or cared to admit.
“We all do things we wish desperately we could undo. Those regrets become a lodestone around our neck. To waste time, trying to change that, is like chasing the moon.”
Her voice was quiet, reflective. Was she was speaking from experience?
She turned her gaze on him, her face playing a million emotions in the wavering candlelight. Hurt? Guilt? Remorse? What?
Nicholas bit out, “But you didn’t see my father’s tortured face. And now, I’m not to know if he lived or died. That last moment with my father…I threw away in anger.”
“It is not a perfect world, Nicholas. It’s when you feel regret all the time and can’t do anything about it—” She looked down at her hands then looked at him again. “From what you’ve said, it’s obvious your father loves you. He probably grew distant because he didn’t want to risk losing you like he lost your mother.”
He rose and moved to the window overlooking the ocean. The sun set over the mountain behind them and splashed scorching oranges, pinks and reds, like a burnt poppy, across the sea.
“People react differently when they mourn.” He heard the scrape of her chair as she pushed it back, felt her come up next to him. “I’m sure your father is alive, Nicholas. Have faith in that.”
There was a long pause as the late moon climbed out of the sea in the perpetual mystery of the tropics. Along the house, a coconut palm dipped and the night grew heavy, bearing down on the world.
With his fingertips, he gently lifted her chin and gazed down into her turquoise eyes. Alexandra, with her hair braided and secured with twine and her thin shift dirty from the day’s work. She did not break like a porcelain doll. She was so unlike Lady Susannah.
He considered her seriously. This woman-child had a self-possession which went far beyond anything he had ever encountered before. In many ways, it was disturbing and impossible to think of her in a sisterly manner. “You are a very lovely girl, Miss Elwins. Don’t let anything or anyone change you, including me.”
The way the light caught her eyes, he imagined he could see into her, see her clarity, an openness that drew men. No. Couldn’t get close. Wouldn’t be fair to her. When rescued, he’d go back to England and resume his life.
Nicolas lowered his hand, regretted the confusion reflected in her face. Turning, he strode outside before he began something he couldn’t stop. He plopped into his hammock, the blackness of night creating a strange uncertainty, the sky seeming to go round, and round like a circle with no beginning and no end.