Lord of the Wilderness
Lord of the Wilderness
Duke of Rutland Series IV
Elizabeth St. Michel
Table of Contents
LORD OF THE WILDERNESS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Dear Readers
Praise for Elizabeth St. Michel
Books by Elizabeth St. Michel
About the Author
Copyright
For Michael James
You make me laugh.
“Smiles the earth, and smile the waters,
Smile the cloudless skies above us,
But I lose the way of smiling
When thou art no longer near me!
~Song of Hiawatha: XI.
Hiawatha’s Wedding-Feast: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Chapter One
New York Frontier, 1779.
Lady Juliet Faulkner finished chopping and stacking the wood on the porch, her breath crystallizing in white puffs. Feathery flakes scattered widely through the air and hovered downward with uncertain flight. New snow piled on the mountains, bathing the land and, for a moment, in its silent beauty cleansed the horror that had brought her from England to this place. America. On a far-flung farmstead, the frontier…a murky, misty wild land of savages…had left an indefinable impression in Juliet’s mind.
Lady? She was far from that title now as it had been stripped from her at the time of her seizure. No one had come to her aid. No one, not even the judge who turned a blind eye to her pleadings, transporting them directly to a ship riding anchor in the Thames, and then dispatching them across the stormy Atlantic. Sold into indenture, Juliet had no rights. No freedom. Seven years of bondage. Seven years of hell.
The door opened and closed and Mary, her best friend, joined her smelling faintly of warm bread the girls had kneaded before the break of dawn. “Mistress Orpha is in a fury. She will beat you raw and turn you out into the snow to freeze if you don’t answer her summons.”
Juliet dove her hands in the layers of her tattered skirts. “Oh, come Mary. Surely, a little rest won’t be a problem.”
“You know better,” said Mary. “Remember how the mistress doused Eldon with water, then thrust him outside when temperatures were so cold rocks exploded? She shrieked the same punishment for anyone who dared to help him. He would have frozen if you’d not risked letting him in when everyone was asleep.”
Wolves howled in the distance, looking for food, closer now with the long cold winter upon them.
“I fear Indians attacking us.” Mary shuddered and not from the freezing temperatures.
“They never leave their longhouses in the winter,” Juliet said to allay her friend’s fears, her neck prickling in anticipation of the sting of a razor-edged knife. Since they had come to this new land they had seen few Indians. Unusual for the staggering population and number of villages purported to be near, according to their Master, Horace Hayes.
Mary clutched her shawl. “They will tear the skin from our face and head and disembowel us while we are still alive.”
Mary, like her vicar father, was given to the dramatic. In England, he had sermonized about the savages, where civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan. Too many nights Juliet had to calm Mary’s night terrors, sprung from the vicar’s graphic descriptions of horns and hooves and devouring creatures. Oh, how he preached his fear with fire and damnation, ending amid a flourish of redemption and forgiveness.
Except he had showed no mercy to his only child, expunging the record of her existence for a single lapse.
Juliet’s throat tightened. She met Mary’s suffering with soul-shattering sorrow. For Mary’s pain mirrored a wound in Juliet, buried so deep…all those years pretending her father, Baron John Faulkner’s scorn didn’t exist.
Her father had loved her mother deeply. She’d died bringing Juliet into the world, an unforgiveable act that precipitated his hateful condemnation of the child. To be blamed for the death of her mother? Juliet’s survival had served as a constant reminder of the sin of her birth.
Four small crosses shadowed the white-cloaked yard, grim reminders of the frailties of life on the frontier. The Hayes’ children had all succumbed to disease before any reached four years.
Mary followed her gaze. “Mistress Orpha’s evil is rewarded with their deaths. They are the lucky ones. At least they will be spared of an attack.”
“Quick, change your thoughts and you’ll change our future.” She had to keep Mary’s hope alive, her own hope alive. Most indentured servants did not last a year. “We have survived a terrible ocean crossing when I thought the ship would sink and we’d all perish. We will survive this.” Her voice startled a bird hiding in the treetops. Panicked, it flew to another tree in a flurry of frantic wings.
Were they being watched? Indians? She peered through the veil of snow. Nonsense. “Mary, go in before you catch your death of cold. I’ll collect the eggs for you after I attend Orpha.” Mary had been so ill aboard the ship and had been slow to recover. If anything happened to her dear friend…
Juliet followed Mary inside, and moved through the house, no less surprised at the size of the mansion in the middle of the wilderness. Wood paneled walls, Chippendale furniture, silver, crystal, china, wines, the finest of linens rivaled the best of middle-class homes in England and stood testament to Master Hayes’ success as a prominent trader.
In the dining room, she paused at a tapestry dominating a wall and the one ornamentation that fascinated her. In the fine weaving, a story unfolded of a splendid half-clothed warrior on his chariot pulled by two white horses, his spear pitched high and victorious over the melee.
She tapped her lip. Achilles, wasn’t he?
What touched her was the swarming endlessness of colors, the tangle of textures that went into each strand of that infinite, complex tapestry…each one vibrated under the crush of battle, pulsating and sending echoes of courage, or bloodlust, or fear, or flash of swords. The theater of death filled up with keening and caterwauling as the sodden earth became oily with gore.
The creativeness of a weft of doves carried the powerful hero across a celestial vault where the air scattered hues of brilliant blue sun rays and deposited him to a peaceful firmament. There he basked in the light of a half-clad beauty who bestowed him her hand, and linked to the heavy, sultry strand was the glow of the hero’s adoration. Toward the bottom, the fibers stretched taut and bonded themselves solidly, its silk made from the slants of playful stags, a unicorn, and squirrels, embedded in a magical forest.
Her breath hitched. How she loved the hero and imagined his heroic feats.
>
Without beginning or end, the tapestry existed as a work of such great beauty, her soul wept, and her mind numb to—
“Juliet!” Orpha’s shriek rang throughout the house.
Almost everything. Juliet hurried upstairs, knocked, and entered Mistress Hayes’ lair.
“You’re late,” Orpha snapped. Perched at her dressing table, she primped her velvet night robe over folds of ponderous girth. “I hate to be kept waiting. I paid a fortune for you lazy, blasphemous, and treacherous girls.”
“Yes, Mistress.” Juliet grabbed the silver brush before Orpha struck her. Too often, she had endured the beatings and accepted the indignities the same way she abided the stench of the privy.
She brushed the wispy strands of hair, at least what remained of it. Orpha leaned her head back, her lips parted in the beginnings of a smile and her watery eyes closed in ecstasy. Gaps showed where she had sacrificed a tooth for every child she had borne.
Due to her reigning vanity, Orpha allowed only Juliet and Mary to attend her. Bright, unforgiving light streamed in from the window, illuminating what scarlet fever had wrought, a receding hairline withdrawing to the last third of her scalp. How ironic—Orpha was Hebrew for skull.
Two years before, Juliet sat at her dressing table at her ancestral home, Faulkner Manor, her hair brushed by her nurse, Moira O’Neill.
Sometimes the bad things that happen to us in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.
Moira had pounded the thought into her young charge’s head. Moira, the closest substitute for a mother, yielded a love for a child desperate to be loved. Her heart squeezed at the thought. Moira had long since gone to Heaven.
After that, Juliet’s life had been a series of horrors. They had been herded off a ship in Philadelphia, scrubbed of lice in a freezing river, and then paraded on a platform for the sale of their indenture. She shivered at the thought.
While standing on the block, the captain had bowed to her, swinging his arm above the masses, and mocked her, saying, “Her Majesty here, has grandiose illusions. Thinks she’s nobility.” The men hooted and shouted, the women tittered.
He had bent close to her ear. “I have the power to make ye disappear if ye don’t keep yer mouth shut.” He was part of the prosperous business in white slavery where huge profits were gained. Juliet shuddered. The leering looks of men who checked her teeth and touched her in intimate places had her fearing for not only her future, but her life. Juliet’s heartbeat raced faster with each stroke of the brush.
Mary’s beauty attracted even worse behavior, men laughing and joking with crude innuendo, outbidding each other as they fondled her under her dress and pressed themselves against her. She and Mary were both sold on the auction block to a hideous woman and her husband, yet Juliet thanked providence for the miracle of being sold to the same master.
“What did you say?” Orpha narrowed her gaze at Juliet, hauling her from the ugly memories.
“Nothing, Mistress.” Best to work hard and keep her mouth shut.
Mary backed in, laden with a heavy tray of oatmeal, fresh baked bread, layers of smoked bacon, steak and eggs. Juliet’s stomach rumbled. She had not eaten since the morning before. Their master gave the servants barely enough food to exist, parceling out each morsel as if it were gold. While she’d gotten used to eating less, her boney body evidenced their cruelty.
“Master Hayes is due home today. I want the house cleaned top to bottom.”
“Yes, Madam.”
Horace had cut into the trade routes, carving out the middlemen by buying furs directly from the Indians, and then supplying traders with goods who traveled north. As a King’s man, he had learned the Mohawk language and combined his personal business with diplomacy, acquiring thousands of acres of Native land and becoming very wealthy.
He was gone most of the time, leaving the running of the farm to his wife, who lived to beat, starve and confuse her servants. Orpha relished telling tales of Indian atrocities in case any of the servants thought to escape—as if they required her divination. The whipping post in the front yard stood a grim reminder of the punishment those who had attempted escape received.
Carrying two heaping buckets of fireplace ash, Mary staggered to the door. Juliet nodded to her, a silent assent of the ordeal to come. Master Hayes had a taste for the serving girls and provided a constant struggle with his cat and mouse games.
Juliet placed a glosser cap over Orpha’s bald pate. “Will that be all, Mistress?”
Orpha watched her in the mirror, locking her gaze on Juliet, and then rose with a self-important swirling of her heavy robe. She lowered herself against the pillows on her bed, picked up a hunk of bread and lathered it with warm butter. She popped the whole thing in her mouth and smacked her lips. Juliet’s mouth watered and she turned to depart.
“I did not give you leave. Plump my pillows.” Orpha tucked a finger up under her cap and gave her bald head an idle scratch. How Orpha delighted in making Juliet stand and watch her eat.
While Juliet rearranged the pillows, Orpha took a hunk of bacon and chewed, grease trickling down her chins. “Stick that abominable red hair in your cap. You should be ashamed to have it seen.”
Juliet clenched her teeth. All her life she’d been ridiculed for the color of her hair. Her father’s sister possessed a rabid contempt for Juliet’s Gaelic ancestry and browbeat her into believing she was the devil’s agent and induced to criminality because of her red hair.
To counteract the hurt enacted by her cruel aunt, Moira had wiped Juliet’s tears. “Your Irish mother had the same color hair when she was young, and later it deepened into a beautiful shade of red.”
Juliet tidied the well-appointed room, Orpha’s fanciful frontier imitation of Versailles with blue-colored silk peacock wallpaper, cupids painted on the ceiling, and matching draperies.
“You may go. Don’t forget to heat the water for my bath.”
Juliet bobbed a curtsy and closed the door.
The blast of heat from the kitchen warmed her. Mary cut slices of bread and ham and shoved them across the table. “Hurry up, the cook has gone to the privy.”
The girls stuffed their mouths with warm bread and butter as Mary peered through the window. “A half-moon is carved in the top of the door for the witch to escape.”
How many times had Mary made the superstitious comment over the year of their indenture? “She will not slither through the crescent.” With her fingers, Juliet scooped up jam from the compote and closed her eyes over the rare feast.
Outside the cook stamped her feet on the porch to rid them of snow. Juliet wiped the crumbs off Mary’s face, and jammed slices of ham and bread into her pocket.
The cook swooped in, glanced at the table, her unblinking eyes focused on the girls. “You haven’t taken any of the Master’s food, have ye? The wolves are howling in the daytime. Wouldn’t take too long to find ye tied to the whipping post.”
Juliet tensed. Orpha’s round-bellied, lick-spittle cook kept a tight grip on the food supplies and reported if any were missing.
“The mistress wants you to warm water for her bath,” Juliet said to divert the cook’s attention from the missing fare.
Juliet patted her pocket with the food for Eldon. The poor boy’s ribs stuck out like slats on a corncrib. How long would he last from the hard work, lack of nourishment and Orpha’s floggings?
She lifted her chin, picked up the basket. “I’ll collect the eggs.”
Juliet cut a new path through deep snow. A rooster called out, lazy with the late morning light. She swung open the door to the coop. Her nose twitched with the dust motes flying through the air. The hens clucked and scolded as she reached beneath them to get their eggs, fanning their feathers out from the indignity.
Light filtered between the planks, giving a church-like glow and a momentary sanctuary to crawl into the despondency burrowing into her soul.
She felt like she’d swallowed yeast,
and whatever loneliness was festering inside had doubled in size. Oh, to be loved by someone without being judged and thought inferior. That would truly be heaven. Living in the middle of the wilderness prevented her from meeting anyone of worth. Spinsterhood loomed with the near decade she must serve for her indenture. She sighed, viewing the glory of the sun with a vacant eye.
“I don’t need someone perfect. I just need someone to make me feel I’m the only one,” Juliet whispered to the chickens, hoping her mother and Moira in Heaven had heard her plea. Her hand closed around the precious golden cross Moira had saved for her from her mother’s jewelry case. To be seen by someone and be loved, bordered on the miraculous.
A shadow crossed over her. Juliet swung around and dropped her basket. Eggs cracked. A tall, lean man stood shadowed in the doorway. Embarrassed, Juliet flinched, tearing her finger across a jagged wood shard. She pressed her hands to her cheeks.
He leaned a long thin rifle against the wall and took a step toward her. Juliet winced and examined her throbbing finger. The man muttered something and grabbed her hand. She tugged, a useless activity since he refused to release her.
He crouched and reached into his deer hide bag. Juliet stared down at her hand in his. A tiny rivulet of blood seeped out from the narrow slice, winding around her finger and onto his like a slender ribbon linking them together. Remarkable that such large, work-callused hands could feel so warm and gentle without losing their sense of strength. She gazed at his bent head, so near she could smell the scent of leather, wood smoke and winter air. So near her breath stirred his dark hair. So near she could press her lips to his brow without stirring much at all.