Chapter 19
From the river, they headed due east towards Savannah.
Captain Crabbe took it upon himself to find them a suitable ship for the journey on from Savannah to Portsmouth, Virginia, for which Lochranza thanked him profusely.
‘The least I could do, get the betrothed to her intended.’
She pretended not to notice the expression in his eyes. He didn’t want to be parted from her. She herself would miss him. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You can ask me whatever you like.’
‘Did Ethan pay you to rescue me?’
‘Somebody did.’
His response was deliberately evasive. In her mind, she weighed up the possibilities. Ethan or her uncle. Ethan knew this country well and over the years had developed many connections. Her uncle, on the other hand, was like a spider sitting at the centre of a web that was the British Empire.
‘If ever you need my services again, Bent knows how to get hold of me.’
It left an ache to see him go, but also relief. Captain Crabbe represented a part of her life that was best forgotten. O’Neill too was no longer around, though being an old man that was no big surprise. All this travelling was too much wear and tear on old bones.
From the port of Savannah, Portsmouth Harbour was reached within three weeks. The weather had been good, the Atlantic swell a continuous upheaving of green water rising like mountains behind them, the wind in their favour.
Mrs Mackintosh had spent much of the voyage in her cabin, retching into a bucket and refusing to come up for air.
Portsmouth, with its thriving harbour and reasonably familiar-looking buildings, brought the Scotswoman up on deck, her clothes hanging on her diminished frame like laundry hung out to dry, her eyes deep set above prominent cheekbones.
‘Land at last. And civilised people, I think. Thank God!’ Her words were expressed with great feeling. It came as something of a surprise that she didn’t kiss the ground the moment they and their baggage was unloaded.
Once that was done they were taken to the best hotel in the city, where a rider was sent with a message to Ethan’s home, Glen Dirk, asking for a carriage to be sent. They could have hired one, but on this occasion Lochranza decided a week to get over their ordeal would do them good.
Every so often, the big man who had carried Moira over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes sauntered past, a knowing smile on his face. The fact seemed totally deliberate and very purposeful. Moira blushed each time it happened.
‘Moira, it seems you have your very own knight in shining armour.’
‘I would hardly call him that!’ she protested, but there was a pink flush in her cheeks.
‘No doubt you’ll be seeing him again.’
‘I suppose I will! He tells me he’s escorting us all the way to the Glen Dirk Plantation.’
‘Captain Crabbe didn’t tell me that.’
Moira smirked. ‘It was Clarence’s idea.’
‘Clarence,’ Lochranza stated in a sober manner.
‘Clarence Bent.’
Hearing the name applied to the haystack of a man, she’d wanted to laugh. The name Clarence suited gentlemen of a more delicate disposition. Still, how were his parents to know he’d turn out so huge?
She looked forward to the onward journey with a sense of relief. Never in her wildest dreams would she have countenanced such adventures as she’d already had.
The war was now over. If they’d waited a year, there would have been no need for subterfuge. The ship carrying her would have brought her straight here.
Beyond Portsmouth, Virginia spread to the far horizon, a sea of greenness, trees rising like stepping stones to an unending sky.
The journey was long, the land relatively empty. One night they stayed in an inn before travelling onwards into countryside more sparsely settled than the land they’d already travelled through.
Lochranza drew more pictorial messages of what she’d been through.
She drew them in little squares in rows along the paper and numbered them.
Then she inserted names where she knew them, faces where she did not.
First there was the skipper of the Dutch ship.
Then there was the Marquis and the Frenchman who had thought himself the man with the winning bid.
The previous notes and messages were already on their way to England thanks to Captain O’Neill, though would take a while to get there.
The setting of the sun was chorused adieu by the singing of crickets and the chattering of night birds.
A pair of ornamental iron gates that would have looked at home at the entrance of an English country estate loomed up in front of them, out of place in the wildness around them. They had arrived at Glen Dirk, the MacKinnon plantation.
Painted white fences lined the road approaching the house. Clarence was sitting up top with the coachman, singing at the top of his voice. He banged on the roof to draw their attention to the thoroughbred horses eyeing their approach.
Her stomach twisted with apprehension.
‘Will you look at the handsome stallion and pretty mares!’
Lochranza looked and had to agree with him.
Moira remarked that Clarence was very fond of horses. ‘When he was twelve, his father decided he wasn’t earning enough money looking after the coalman’s horse and got him a job at a knacker’s yard. Killing horses was something he couldn’t get used to, so he ran away to sea.’
Lochranza slid the carriage window down and poked out her head.
The house loomed up before a mantle of mature trees, maples and redwoods, like a brazen actress stepping out in front of the curtain.
‘A fine enough house,’ remarked Moira, echoing her own thoughts, though more disparaging. ‘Not a patch on Cleveland Court, mark you.’
Expression out of sight, head out of window, Lochranza stifled a giggle. Judging by Moira’s lofty tone, she’d been expecting something as grand as Buckingham Palace.
The house was constructed in the Georgian style with red-brick walls and white trim boards on a square foundation.
The coachman helped her alight from the carriage whilst Clarence helped Moira. It was noticeable that his hand stayed on hers longer than was strictly necessary and there was a boyish glint in his eyes.
‘It’s quite a grand house,’ she remarked to the coachman who she presumed was a slave. He seemed quite surprised that she’d spoken to him at all.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She turned in a circle, better to admire the broad expanse of parkland, the soughing trees and the approach road leading back down to the main gate and the virgin land beyond. Virgin land. Virginia was named after Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen.
The crisp surface of the drive crunched beneath her feet as she headed to where she’d expected a front door to be. There was none.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, slightly taken aback. ‘Does the house have a door?’
The coachman explained. ‘It does, madam. More than one in fact, though not on this side.’
‘How very strange. Still, there’s a nice view of the river. And where, may I ask, is my betrothed? I understood he spends most of his time here.’
‘Away on business, mistress. He will be very surprised when he comes back, I’m sure.’
‘I think we’ve taken everybody by surprise, including the household.’
‘You weren’t expected to get here quite so quickly, and it wasn’t as though I drove the horses hard.’ He paused. ‘You will tell Mr MacKinnon that, won’t you? He’s very keen that his animals aren’t driven hard or treated harshly.’
‘Rest assured, I will assure him on that point as soon as he gets here.’
The coachman was all apologies that nobody, not even the servants, had appeared.
‘It’s on account of having no door at the front. You can’t hear anyone coming.’
‘A very rum arrangement to my mind,’ grumbled Moira.
‘If you’d like to follow me around to the riverside entrance,’ offered the coachman. ‘I don’t rightly know when the master is expected, but I’m sure he won’t be too long once he knows that you are here.’
‘No matter.’
Tilting her head back, she eyed each storey of the house from the ground floor to the hipped roof, its expanse broken up by dormers and two towering brick chimneys.
A large carving in the centre of the roof proved to be a white pedestal supporting a statue of a man in doublet and hose; she presumed Sir Walter Raleigh who had contributed a lot to the founding of the colony.
Closer inspection confirmed that the house had no actual front door but entrances on the riverside and courtyard side, both sheltered beneath porticos with Doric columns supporting central pediments.
Undoubtedly in a bid to enjoy the verdant vista, large windows were ranged all along the front of the house. Moira could be right. Somebody must have observed them from those windows. So what would prevent them from coming out?
Her attention wandered to several low-level buildings standing at some distance yet within easy reach of the main house. She turned to ask the coachman what they were, to find he had delegated the unloading of their luggage to a glossy-skinned slave who had padded unheard on bare feet.
He was tall but kept his head bowed. His limbs were long, which made him look as though he could run like the wind, his body lean.
A tattered hem fluttered from each leg of the knee-length trousers he wore.
The trousers looked too small and the brown shirt fluttering around his torso looked too big.
The coachman answered her questions about the other buildings.
‘That one,’ he said, indicating a two-storey building, ‘is a kitchen with living quarters for slaves.’ He indicated a similar building next to it.
‘That’s the laundry, with living quarters up above.
Them over there,’ he said, his arm swinging in the opposite direction to the other side of the riverside portico, ‘is the smokehouse, next to that is the stable, then the icehouse. The other buildings are storerooms.’
Lochranza’s eyes alighted on a dovecote, essentially of similar design she’d seen in England. Like the house, it was built of red brick with white trimmings. A fluttering of wings heralded the exit of a bird from a small arched doorway.