Free Riverbreeze: Part 1 by Ellen E. Johnson Page A

to live with their Uncle
Francis in Virginia. Actually Bernard didn’t have any other choice.
He hadn’t wanted them to become wards of the city and he had only
known of one very old aunt who lived in the far north of England.
And to his knowledge, their mother’s people in France had all
disappeared in one way or another.
    So that is how they came to find themselves
in this backwards, nowhere country, and that is how Elizabeth came
to find herself in this practically furnished room, with old velvet
curtains on the windows and an equally aged velvet comforter on the
tester bed, their father having committed suicide five months and
four days ago. The drink, the jealousy, the anger, and all the
debts had become too much for him to bear. Bernard Tyler had taken
his own life, rather than risk imprisonment, leaving his twin
seventeen-year-old daughters to his brother, Francis, and without a
copper penny to their names.
    It angered Elizabeth to know she and her
sister had never been told of their father’s difficulties, or of
the massive debts that he had accrued. She and her sister weren’t
so spoiled that they couldn’t have given up new gowns for each
party or that latest redecoration of their bedchambers. If they had
been sons, they might have been told, they probably would have been
brought into the business and might have saved it from ruin; but
no, they were female and therefore, left in the dark and
ultimately, left to a fate completely out of their control.
    Elizabeth remembered the day so clearly when
she and her sister had been told of their father’s suicide by his
solicitor. It had been raining—how appropriate—and she and her twin
and their governess, Louise, had just finished eating breakfast of
bread and cheese, cold meats and watered wine in the morning room
and were discussing their plans for the day as they did every
morning. The solicitor had come in with the butler, looking
ominously grave but sympathetic. He had delivered the news as
gently as he had been able, but gentleness hadn’t softened the
blow. Their father had been found on the floor in his shop, an
empty bottle of poison close to his hand. The twins had been
shocked, devastated and frightened. They hadn’t understood how this
could have happened. They had never realized their father had been
so unhappy and desperate.
    And then they had begun to worry about
themselves. What would happen to them now? Who would take care of
them? What would they do?
    Only a few minutes later they found out,
their solicitor informing them in a calm comforting voice that
there was no money left, and everything in the family home would be
seized and sold to settle as many debts as possible. All the
servants would be let go and given letters of recommendation by the
solicitor to help them find other positions. All but one servant
had left that day, the girls’ governess had stayed with them, she
having been with them since their birth and having her own money to
sustain her.
    And then the most horrible news of all had
been revealed, that they would be sent to live with their father’s
brother, a man they thought to be an unworthy good-for-naught, in
Virginia. In her mind was a picture painted by her father, of a
place overrun with bad men of all kinds, all of them grubbing in
the dirt, growing tobacco right alongside the savages. To be taken
away from their comfortable lifestyle of genteel pursuits, parties
and social events was a horror to Elizabeth.
    But now she had to admit it really wasn’t all
that bad. The land was certainly beautiful with lush forests and
pretty meadows; the numerous rivers were full of the most amazing
fish and fowl, the skies were full of varied and colorful birds.
Elizabeth smiled to herself as she remembered her sister’s face as
their ship had sailed up the James River, how Evelyn had tried to
look at everything all at once despite her weariness, pointing to
this tree and that bunch of cattails and that flock of swallows
overhead