The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn Page 3

  Seated at a secluded table—within sight of Mr. Parrish, if not hearing—and served what Tamsen admitted was a respectable cup of tea, Mr. Kincaid had yet to look away from her. His Adam’s apple bobbed above a neat cravat as he swallowed. “Miss Littlejohn, forgive my boldness in declaring you more beautiful than your portrait promised. I did not think that possible.”

  It was a pretty thing to say, made prettier by his refined Virginia accent. No matter, she supposed, that it was utter nonsense.

  “Thank you kindly, Mr. Kincaid.” Tamsen thought better of saying she found his looks less displeasing than she’d feared. His hair was unfortunate—blazing red—but his eyes were a clear and pleasing blue. He wore a waistcoat fancifully embroidered with dragonflies but had paired it with a coat of sober green that complemented his coloring. He took some thought for his appearance, but not excessively so.

  Angling a glance across the taproom, she spared her stepfather a small but genuine smile—and almost laughed at the startlement on his face.

  Mr. Kincaid had begun telling her of his business in North Carolina, something to do with a parcel of mountain land on the Yadkin River, left to him by … She reined in her attention in time to realize he spoke of his father.

  “… buried him late this spring, at Long Meadows.”

  “Long Meadows?” she asked.

  “My plantation on the James River, near Lynch’s Ferry—Lynchburg, it’s now called.” He smiled then. “Truth be told, it belongs to Alexander Kincaid, my grandfather. It shall be mine, though I admit it already owns my heart.”

  “It certainly has a lovely name.” It was out of her mouth before she realized she ought first to have acknowledged his father’s passing, a recent and tragic loss, however well Mr. Kincaid concealed his grief. But his face lit at her praise of his plantation.

  “It is the most beautiful tract on God’s earth,” he said, and went on to speak at length of acreage, crops, river frontage. And slaves. “We’ve eleven Negroes to the house alone, counting those in the kitchen. It is a comfortable home, Miss Littlejohn.”

  Comfortable. It began to seem an abominable word. A comfortable cage was yet a cage. Tamsen schooled her face to pleasant interest. “Then you’ve no plans to homestead above the Yadkin?”

  Mr. Kincaid’s russet brows rose. “None at all. The land’s gone too long untended. What improvements my uncle once made are hardly to be distinguished from the wilderness encroaching upon it now.”

  “Your uncle? I thought your father …” Warmth crept into her cheeks, having revealed her earlier inattention.

  If he noticed, Mr. Kincaid overlooked her lapse. “Yes, my uncle, but I see I have failed to make the situation clear. My only excuse, Miss Littlejohn, is that your presence has me thoroughly rattled.”

  Or perhaps the scanty kerchief was working, she thought, as his gaze dipped below the level of her throat.

  Blushing now in earnest, Tamsen glanced around. Few of Mrs. Brophy’s patrons were within hearing. Mr. Kincaid had chosen a table secluded by the placement of a tall cupboard. Still she could see nearly the whole taproom. Her glance snagged on a man standing at the rear door, a young mulatto who was scanning the room. He caught her gaze, which she quickly returned to Mr. Kincaid, to whom she said what her stepfather would have wanted her to say at this pass.

  “Do forgive me. It was never my intent to rattle you so.”

  She smiled. Ambrose Kincaid’s jaw fell slack.

  Mr. Parrish would like the way this was progressing. How unfortunate for him that he must sit at a distance and wait—on her. She felt the sparkle that thought put in her eyes.

  “Let me attempt to clarify,” Mr. Kincaid said, back in possession of his jaw. “The homestead was originally my uncle’s. Bryan Kincaid was my father’s younger brother. I’m sorry to say there was bad blood between the two. Uncle Bryan and his wife, Fiona, left Long Meadows to homestead above the Yadkin in … ’63 or ’64, it was. Just after the French war.”

  Tamsen leaned forward, clasping the table’s fringed cloth. “What happened to him? Your uncle?”

  “He died. He and his wife. It fair broke my grandfather’s heart.”

  Tamsen sat back. “How very tragic. How did they die?” she asked, feigning neither sympathy nor interest. Mr. Kincaid seemed flattered by both.

  “That is still a mystery. Neighbors said it was raiding Indians, but we cannot be sure. Uncle Bryan took along one of my grandfather’s slaves when he left Virginia. Theo, his name was. My father particularly despised him—which wouldn’t of itself offer any proof of wrongdoing on Theo’s part. But it is true that after Bryan’s and Fiona’s deaths, Theo was never heard from again.” Mr. Kincaid paused, leaning across the table. “Miss Littlejohn, would your stepfather approve the lurid topic of our conversation, could he hear it?”

  The glint of conspiratorial humor in his eyes gave Tamsen a small thrill. “He most certainly wouldn’t, but never mind him. Is there more to your uncle’s story?”

  “Only that Uncle Bryan surprised everyone by leaving his land to my father, after having quarreled so bitterly in the past. My father had grand plans for it once upon a time, but of course he never followed through. I’m amazed he never sold the tract. But I shall. What need have I of it when there is Long Meadows to hold me to Virginia?” He paused again, holding her gaze. “I think you would like it there.”

  His eyes were telling her he wanted her to like it. She thought she liked the man. At least she didn’t loathe him as she’d feared. “Your father passed just this spring? I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “You needn’t be,” Mr. Kincaid replied abruptly. He must have seen her startlement. “I beg your pardon. That must sound a terrible thing to say, especially when clearly you once lost a father.”

  Surprised by the observation, she said, “When I was seven years old.”

  “And you admired him?”

  “He was the light of our lives, mine and Mama’s.”

  Mr. Kincaid reached across the table and took her hand with a boldness that stole her breath. His eyes were very blue and disconcertingly direct. “I envy you that, Miss Littlejohn. My father, in contrast, was a man to engender neither admiration nor respect. Collin Kincaid was a drunkard who brought grief to father, brother, and sons alike. I daresay most egregiously to my mother, God rest her soul. But this one good he did me—he left me land in Carolina, which in turn has brought me to you.”

  Tamsen saw the turning of his thoughts in his eyes, felt it in the pressure of his hand. Her stomach gave a lurch. This time her heart matched it. It was what her stepfather wanted, why she was here. She simply hadn’t expected it to come to the boil so swiftly.

  “Mr. Kincaid,” she began, but he was already speaking.

  “I cannot be anything but forthright with you, Miss Littlejohn. When I saw your portrait in Salem, I was certain you couldn’t be half so beautiful, and if you were, you were bound to know it. It would have made you haughty, cold, to think all men your devoted worshipers. Instead, I find you nothing of the sort, but tender-hearted and warm. So I warn you, I am about to throw caution to the wind and—”

  “Mast’ Ambrose. Sorry to trouble you now, sir.”

  Like a fraying thread, the tension between them snapped. Tamsen looked up to find the young mulatto she’d noticed earlier standing at their table, battered hat clenched between work-scarred fingers. She looked to Mr. Kincaid. High color flamed in his face as, scowling, he said, “I asked not to be disturbed while I met with Miss Littlejohn. I was very clear.”

  “I ain’t forgot, sir.” The slave’s hat was getting a thorough mangling. “But something—”

  “Let it wait, Toby.” Dismissing his slave with an abrupt shoulder, Mr. Kincaid reached for her hand again.

  But Toby hadn’t left, only taken a step behind his master, clearly too distressed to obey. Tamsen glanced across the taproom. Mr. Parrish had allowed himself to be engaged in conversation and wasn’t for the moment watching. “Please, Toby? T
ell us what’s wrong.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Mouth trembling, the slave stepped forward. “It be Tess, Mast’ Ambrose. She done them errands you sent her on, but some men catched her on the way back, drug her off to the woods, and took turns—”

  Mr. Kincaid lurched to his feet and backhanded Toby across the mouth. The slave cringed, eyes flaring with shock. His master’s face had gone chalk white. “How dare you speak such filth in front of Miss Littlejohn?”

  Nearby conversations faltered while Mr. Kincaid, low voiced, ordered Toby from the taproom and reclaimed his seat across from her. With a kerchief from his coat, he wiped his slave’s spittle off his hand.

  Witnessing a lap cat transform into a panther and proceed to attack an unsuspecting passerby could not have been more shocking. Voices around them rose again, but Tamsen’s ears rang as if she’d been the one struck. She looked toward her stepfather. Somehow he’d missed the entire episode. She forced herself to face Mr. Kincaid. Her voice shook.

  “You needn’t have done that. Didn’t you hear what he said? Your slave—”

  “Hasn’t anything to do with us,” Mr. Kincaid finished for her.

  “How can you say so? Of course she does.”

  The true cause of her distress seemed finally to register: not the interruption, but his reaction to it. “Miss Littlejohn … I only meant you needn’t be concerned.”

  “Yet I am—and you should be.” This wasn’t what she was meant to say now. She was meant to smile and nod and suppress whatever opinion she might hold on the matter. But she could not do it. “The people whose lives and bodies you own, those whose burden it is to see to your every need, they are your responsibility to protect.”

  These were her mother’s words, spoken often in years past in timid counter to Mr. Parrish’s callous dealings with his slaves, but she wasn’t saying them in any tone of voice her mother had ever used.

  “Yet you hear of such cruelty done to a woman you call your property and cannot be bothered to go to her aid? Because of me?” She stood so abruptly that her chair rocked back and would have hit the floor had she not caught it. “If I’m to be your excuse, Mr. Kincaid, then allow me to excuse myself from your presence. Please, go and see to her.”

  The faces in the taproom were a blur, all turning to gape at her flight. At the door she glanced back to see her stepfather—very much aware of her again—hurrying to where Ambrose Kincaid still sat, staring after her more stunned than when she’d entered.

  With the cattle down from the mountains, Cade and Jesse had parted with the drovers and now had only their mounts and the packhorses to manage. Or so Jesse had assumed. Turned out Cade was carrying around some peculiar notions in his head. Not till they’d reached Morganton, leading the horses, did he let on about them.

  “What would you say to us getting a milch cow this trip—and some extra seed corn, more’n last year? I talked with Tate before we left. He don’t mind us planting another acre or two.”

  “Milch cow?” Jesse halted between an oak-shaded frame house and the trade store, where the beaten path between met the town’s main street. “You take up courting some woman without telling me? She got you flirting with the notion of settling down?”

  A pace ahead, Cade stopped his horse and said something to that, but Jesse never heard his answer, since that was the moment he saw the girl in the blue gown.

  She was crossing the lane where they’d halted, moving fast and looking straight ahead, heedless of left or right—till her stride hitched like she’d put a fancy heel down wrong and she staggered smack into Cade. She’d have gone sprawling over those yards of silk petticoat had Cade not loosed his horse and snaked an arm around her slender waist to catch her.

  Jesse caught the horse as Cade released the girl—a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty, dressed finer than any female he’d ever set eyes on. Next to him and Cade, both topping six feet, she seemed as neat and tiny as a doll, and somehow not quite real.

  “I—I beg your pardon,” she said, not how Jesse expected such a girl would speak to a trail-begrimed stranger in buckskins who dared put his hands on her person. More like she meant it.

  She looked up at Cade, and her eyes rounded. Then she looked at Jesse, who promptly forgot everything else about the girl save what was staring from her eyes—fury, fear, resolve, all in a stunning flash as real and raw as the earth beneath his moccasins and the sun beating on his back.

  A shout rose from the direction she’d appeared. “Tamsen!”

  The girl flinched. Breaking their gaze, she swept up her skirts and was across the lane in a blink, making for the house next door. Jesse watched her mount the steps, fumble at the door, and vanish in a swirl of blue. He barely registered the glowering man that hurried past and followed her inside. Behind the door a shout rumbled through the walls of the house to worry the street like distant thunder.

  Jesse had dropped both horses’ reins to gape. “Did you …? Have you ever …?”

  Cade fetched the reins and looked down his long nose, taking full advantage of the inch of height he had on Jesse. “Did I? Have I? All that book learning I got you, and you can’t find a single word to describe a chit of a girl?”

  “A chit of a …? Did you see her?”

  “I saw a fancy gown, a pretty face. What’d you see?” Cade’s eyes danced with amusement. “Give me words, boy. Or did she knock ’em clean out of your head?”

  She doth teach the torches to burn bright.

  Not a chance he’d stitched such words together of his own wits. He must have read them somewhere. But if he spouted them now, Cade would think him addled, right enough. What, then, could he say? He’d read himself a heap of books, and the Good Book twice through, but heaven help him could he call to mind another phrase better fitting what he’d just seen. Or thought he’d seen. Could you glimpse a woman’s soul with one look into her eyes?

  “Never mind,” he said, still sounding pole-axed to his own ears. “Weren’t we talking ’bout cows … or corn?”

  While her stepfather raged and her mother pleaded, Tamsen huddled in the parlor bed with a door shut between, pouring out her misery and resentment into the muffling pillow. On a pallet by the fire, Dell prayed, calling on the Almighty and His angels to hold her stepfather in check.

  They’d never heard him quite this angry.

  It was near dark before the front door slammed. Mrs. Brophy’s house shuddered with the silence. Moments later her mother entered the parlor. Candlelight wavered, steadied. Tamsen feigned sleep, listening as Dell rose to the nightly ritual of removing her mother’s gown and stays and brushing out her thick black hair.

  “Law, Miss Sarah,” the maid hissed through her teeth. “Look what he done to—”

  “Hush, Dell.”

  “But he never—”

  “The gown tore when I tried to pull from his grasp. That is all.”

  “He sounded terrible worked up,” Dell ventured after a moment. “Ain’t laid a hand on you nowhere?”

  “Thank the Lord, no. Now hush.”

  Eventually the candle was snuffed and the bed tick sagged beneath her mother’s slender weight. Tamsen faced the wall, holding herself rigid. Her heart thumped ten slow beats before reaching fingers curled around her shoulder. A smell almost of cinnamon—her mother’s smell—filled her next breath. She knew what was coming.

  The sense of betrayal choked like bile.

  “Tamsen … please. Won’t you give Mr. Kincaid another chance? He was so taken with you.” Her mother stroked the tear-wet hair back from her face. “Mr. Parrish says he was set to propose when …”

  When he showed his true nature, Tamsen wanted to say. A nature as mercurial as her stepfather’s. Only difference being, Mr. Kincaid possessed a veneer of charm, something her stepfather lacked entirely. But charm was deceitful, and despite what the man said of her better nature, his reaction to her beauty had made her vain enough to be deceived. Nearly.

  “Mr. Parrish means to smooth things over,�
�� her mother said into the dampness of her hair. “Convince Mr. Kincaid to see you again.”

  Tamsen pictured her stepfather out in the night entreating the man, making excuses, promising all manner of reform to her behavior. She was young. She was malleable. Mr. Kincaid could make of her what he wished, once the union was legal. Hezekiah Parrish wouldn’t scruple to interfere with his methods, however stiffly they be meted.

  And here was her mother, cowed into persuading her it was something for which she ought to be glad. It was all Tamsen could do to bear her touch, her pleading breath.

  “Tamsen?

  Swallowing back the gorge of humiliation and fury, Tamsen said what she knew she must, though the words came out stiff as whale boning. “All right, Mama.”

  Sarah Parrish pressed a kiss behind her ear and retreated to her side of the bed. Tamsen heard the tiniest of shuddering sighs. Resentment cooled enough for concern to thread its way in. She turned in the bed. “Did he do more than shout at you, Mama?”

  The hesitation lasted a breath too long. “I’m fine, Tamsen. Don’t worry for me.”

  Tamsen rolled away and lay in darkness. Listening. Waiting. Begging the Almighty to forgive her for what she was about to do. Had to do. She could bear a lot of things, she’d decided, but ending up like her mother, crushed and caged in a life too miserable and loveless for words, wasn’t one of them.

  An hour passed, best she could judge. Mr. Parrish didn’t return. Nor did Mrs. Brophy, who kept her customers’ late hours. Not until she was certain her mother and Dell both slept did Tamsen begin the measured process of easing from the bed, taking up the bundle she’d hidden at its foot, and slipping out of the room, out of the house, out of the yard.

  If there was to prove a hitch in her plan, it would involve the horse. As had her stepfather, Tamsen had ridden to Morganton rather than endure the jouncing wagon ride with her mother, Dell, and Sim, but less than a mile from their destination, her mare had gone footsore. Not badly, and Sim would have seen to it in the days since. She hoped the mare had had time to heal. She also hoped wherever Sim slept, it wasn’t in the stall box.