“Lord John is a … good man,” William said, feeling that he really ought to add something.
Cinnamon murmured something inarticulate, bobbing his head, and then reached hastily for a small fried trout, which in his agitation he crammed whole into his mouth, thereafter making only chewing noises, punctuated by small coughs.
Manoke, normally silent, continued to be silent, calmly eating his fried fish and corn fritters with complete disregard for the turmoil in the bosoms of his two companions.
William could barely look at Cinnamon and yet his eyes kept swiveling toward the man in morbid fascination, stealing quick glances before looking sharply away.
Cinnamon clearly bore the marks of mixed blood, though he was handsome enough. And that hair could have come only from a European parent. But those tight, exuberant curls bore no resemblance to Lord John’s thick blond thatch.
Cinnamon rose suddenly from the cracked porch where they’d perched to eat in the growing dusk.
“Where are you going, mon ami?” said Manoke, surprised.
“To tend the fire,” Cinnamon replied, with a jerk of the head toward the smoking pit under the big oak. The burlap covering it was getting too dry, beginning to char and smoke; the stink reached William an instant later.
Cinnamon’s mother was half French. He’d told William that before, when they spent the winter hunting in Quebec. Did Frenchmen often have curly hair?
There was a bucket and a large clay water jug under the tree—William recognized it; it was gray, badly chipped, and painted with two white bands. Lord John had bought it from a river trader when they first came to Mount Josiah. Cinnamon poured water into the palm of his hand, sprinkling it over the burlap, which quit smoking and resumed its quiet steaming, only allowing wisps of smoke from the fire below to seep out under its pegged sides.
Cinnamon squatted and thrust several small faggots into the fire under the rack of drying fish beside the firepit, then rose, his head turning toward the veranda. His face was nearly pale in the gloom. William looked down, crumbling a bit of fritter between his fingers, and felt hot blood rise in his cheeks, as though he’d been caught doing something shameful.
The eyes … perhaps there was something about the shape of the eyes that was reminiscent of Papa— He stopped cold, unable to finish a thought that had the word “Papa” in conjunction with … this …
The thought of it was a blow in the pit of the stomach, every time. Son. Lord John’s son. It was bloody impossible. But there it was, nonetheless.
Manoke never lied. Nor was he a man to be easily gulled. Neither would he ever do anything that might damage Lord John; William was sure of that. If Manoke said that Cinnamon’s story was true … then it was. But … there must be some mistake.
MANOKE’S PRESENCE, WHILE very welcome, had obliterated William’s romantic notion of solitary wandering about the plantation, alone with his thoughts for days on end. John Cinnamon’s revelation had put paid altogether to the notion of retreat. He could walk as far as he liked; he couldn’t escape the reality of the man, big and solid and Indian—and the thought: He’s Papa’s real son. And I’m not.
The fact that William had no blood relationship at all to John Grey had never seemed important to either of them. Until now.
Still, if Lord John had had a casual encounter with an Indian woman—or, God help him, an Indian mistress in Quebec—it was no one else’s business. Cinnamon said his mother had died when he was an infant; it would have been entirely in keeping with Lord John’s sense of honor to see that the boy was cared for.
And just what will Papa do when he sees this … this … fruit of his whoremongering loins?
That was too much. He stood up and walked away.
He’d just wanted a piss and a moment’s privacy to settle his mind, but it didn’t want to settle, and he kept walking, though darkness was falling.
He didn’t care where he was going. Turning his back on the fire, he headed toward the fields that lay behind the house. Mount Josiah had boasted only a score of acres in tobacco when he had known it years before; was the land even cultivated now?
Rather to his surprise, it was. It was too early to harvest the crop, but the sap-thick smell of uncured tobacco lay like incense on the night. The scent soothed him, and he made his way slowly across the field, toward the black shape of the tobacco barn. Was it still in use?
It was. Called a barn for courtesy’s sake, it was little more than a large shed, but the back of it was a large, airy space where the stalks were hung for stripping—there were only a few there now, dangling from the rafters, barely visible against the faint starlight that leaked through the wide-set boards. His entrance caused the few dried, stacked leaves on the broad curing platform at one side to stir and rustle, as though the shed took notice of him. It was an odd fancy, but not disturbing—he nodded to the dark, half conscious of welcome.
He bumped into something that shied away with a hollow sound—an empty barrel. Feeling about, he counted more than a score, waiting. Some old, a few new ones, judging by the smell of new wood that added its tang to the shed’s perfume.
Someone was working the plantation—and it wasn’t Manoke. The Indian enjoyed smoking tobacco now and then, but William had never seen him take any part in the raising or harvesting of any crop. Neither did he reek of it. It wasn’t possible to touch green tobacco without a black, sticky sort of tar adhering to your hands, and the smell in a ripe tobacco field was enough to make a grown man’s head swim.
When he had lived here with Lord John—the name caused a twinge, but he ignored it—his father had hired laborers from the adjoining property upriver, a large place called Bobwhite, who could easily tend Mount Josiah’s modest crop in addition to Bobwhite’s huge output. Perhaps the same arrangement was still in place?
The thought that the plantation was still working, even in this ghostly fashion, heartened him a little; he’d thought the place quite abandoned when he saw the ruined house.
Thought of the house made him glance back. The flicker of firelight shone through the empty front windows, giving the illusion that somebody still lived there. He sighed and began to walk slowly back.
He hadn’t found peace, but the effort his mind made to avoid thinking about his paternity, his title, his responsibilities, the goddamned shape of the rest of his life, and now Lord fucking John’s bloody fucking son had caused it instead to squirm off in the other direction, latching on to the problem of Ben.
Someone had put a stranger with no ears in the grave marked Benjamin Grey, and whomever it was almost certainly knew what had happened to Ben. He’d talked to—at latest count—twenty-three militiamen who’d been in the Watchung Mountains with Washington during the time when Ben had theoretically died. Four of them had heard of Ben and heard that he was dead, but none of them had seen the body or the grave, and he’d swear that none of them were lying.
But. Uncle Hal had received a letter telling him of Ben’s death. It had been passed to him by an aide to General Clinton, who had received the letter from some officer on the American side. Who had written that letter?
“Why the bloody hell didn’t you ask to see it?” he muttered to himself. Because you were too busy being on your high horse about your damned dignity, his mind replied.