Her hair had grown almost a full inch to curl in unmanageable clusters below her nape. Now only the ends, terribly split by the dye, were that hideous shade of orange. She would soon have to find a way to henna her hair again.
Facing Ethan’s unshakable calm was in a way worse than confronting her father’s cutting wrath. Postponing the encounter, she held her face up to the cooling evening wind that swept up off the dusky blue waters of the Chickahominy. And she thought of Terence’s eyes—sometimes that same smoky blue. At St. James’s Court she had seen the wavering eyes of the coward, the dull eyes of the jaded, and the watchful eyes of the politician. But always Terence’s eyes had stared back at her, except for the irises— a cool, impenetrable blue. She had been almost eleven before she ever realized that the eyes of her childhood idol had no expression at all. Whatever thoughts did go on behind them, nothing came through.
Whatever his thoughts, she knew she was part of them. There was a bond uniting the two of them; a bond that could not be broken; a bond that she herself could not adequately explain.
A cowbell jingled, startling her out of her reverie. The chill of nightfall crept over the land, and she took reluctant steps toward the front entrance. Already candlelight seeped from beneath the ivy-framed door to fan across the rounded cobblestones laid before it. All her valid reasoning vanished. She could match wits with the liveliest of minds at George Ill’s court; but how did one argue successfully with the simple, unyielding logic of a Quaker yeoman?
She pushed the door ajar to find him sitting on the stool before the hearth, which was cold with a banked fire. He did not look from the long jaeger rifle he cleaned. Next to him the betty lamp susp ended from the stand cast flickering shadows and eddied smoke upward to soot the ceiling.
She closed the door behind her but moved no farther into the room. At last Ethan looked up, and the tallow’s light flared over the puckered burn on his cheek, lending a frightening appearance to h is otherwise pleasing countenance. “You’ve been out walking?”
“I—” Her hand tightened on the door’s hasp behind her. Better to broach her request in the light of day. Not here, alone in the semidark with a man whom she still did not know despite having worked for him a full month. “It was hot . . . and I’ve finished all my work.”
She stepped past him, making for her cubicle. “Stay,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder to find his dark eyes fastened on her.
“Join me, mistress.” He flung out a hand, indicating the rocker opposite the hearth from him. “I grow lonely of my company.”
Warily she advanced further into the dimly lit room to take a seat in the proffered rush-bottomed chair. Sometimes she sensed that the man actually enjoyed baiting her. Too, she suspected the lout was not as slow-witted as he seemed.
Sitting stiffly, her spine never touching the chair’s back, as she had been taught, she folded her roughened hands. Uneasily she searched for something to say.
The Quaker bent his head over the firearm, and he did not seem so formidable now. In fact, that side of his profile was almost handsome. His legs were stretched out before the hearth, his jackboots nearly touching her skirts. She watched his hands deftly work the cleaning rod in and out of the flintlock’s grooved bore. “I thought you didn’t believe in the use of weapons?”
He never lifted his head. “I don’t believe in violence. But there is the necessity of game for food, is there not? And the necessity of protection from the snake that slithers across yonder floor?”
She twisted in the chair in time to see King George bound from a darkened corner to caper about the slender, serpentine form. Unheeding, the snake continued its slow, writhing progress across the plank flooring toward the small chink in the clay-mortared logs.
“A harmless creature, the grass
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