Captain Rose’s Redemption. Georgie Lee

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       Chapter Three

      One month later

      ‘Milady, scrubbing floors is no task for a titled lady!’ Mrs Sween, the Belle View housekeeper, gasped from the dining-room door. She’d come up from the cellar and the underground passage leading to the kitchen building in the garden. The earthy scent of the lavender she’d hung in the cellar clung to her and it filled the dining room where Cassandra knelt on the floor with a bucket of warm water and a scrub brush. Cassandra’s arms burned from her effort to make the old floorboards shine again. Over the years, Uncle Walter had given little thought to the house, focusing instead on rents and the annual crops, neither of which had ever brought in enough money, as Giles had complained every quarter when her meagre payments had arrived.

      ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a titled lady.’ There were few young ladies who’d left Virginia as an impoverished orphan and returned a dowager baroness. At one time the achievement had seemed like the pinnacle of success, a finger in the eye of everyone in society who’d abandoned her after her parents died and her family’s fortune was lost. It hadn’t been the triumph she’d hoped for. ‘Mother would’ve been ashamed at the way I used to sit idle at Greyson Manor. Giles never let me do more than decide on the dinners.’ Even if she’d been able to work beside him, she doubted he could have taught her much. He’d driven the estate deeper into debt than when he’d inherited it, caring more for his mistress than the careful management of his income. ‘Mother always insisted I take a hand in the affairs of Belle View. I intend to teach Dinah to do the same thing.’

      Dinah played next to her with a small brush, a wide smile on her cherubic face, making more of a mess than a difference in the condition of the floors. Cassandra’s efforts hadn’t achieved much either. The scrubbed boards stood out against the surrounding dull ones, many of which were in need of repair. The carpenter was too busy fixing the barn to see to something as trivial as the unused dining room.

      She glanced about the room and sighed at the faded and dusty furnishings, the best pieces having been sold off years ago to pay debts. What was left would have made her mother cry to see it. It almost made Cassandra weep, too, when she recalled the many family dinners she’d enjoyed here. Some day, Dinah would enjoy them, too.

      If I can continue to make something of Belle View and to cultivate Williamsburg society. She thought of the money from Richard hidden upstairs and how much of it she’d already spent to purchase seed stock, hire labourers and pay for the carpenter’s work on the barn. She shouldn’t spend it, but hoarding it away didn’t free it from the taint of piracy or do anyone any good—not her, not Dinah, not the workers who relied on Belle View for their living. Not spending it would also make maintaining the illusion of wealth more difficult, especially if she had to go begging for loans to keep the plantation from sinking into debt.

      ‘Lady Shepherd, I don’t mean to trouble you...’ Mrs Sween’s brogue muddied by a Virginia twang interrupted Cassandra’s thoughts ‘...but I heard one of the field hands say Mr Marston quit this morning.’

      ‘He did.’ Cassandra snatched up the brush and started scrubbing again. ‘He insisted I evict the tenant farmers and commute the tenure of the indentured servants and replace them with slaves. I refused and, because I failed to “see the future”, he felt he could no longer remain as overseer.’

      ‘He was also being paid far less than most of the overseers around these parts.’

      ‘It did make his decision to leave a little easier.’ Cassandra sat on her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Belle View’s numerous windows and doors stood open, allowing the breeze coming off the James River to move through the rooms and the main hallway, but it did little to lessen the oppressive humidity.

      ‘What will you do without him?’ Mrs Sween tucked an escaping wisp of grey hair beneath her white cap. She was stout and shorter than Cassandra with a ruddy face like a farmer’s wife. She’d come to Virginia from Scotland as an indentured servant to Uncle Walter twenty years ago and had helped raise Cassandra after her parents’ deaths. Cassandra wished Mrs Sween had been with her in London. She would’ve seen through all of the Chathams’ lies and Cassandra’s ignorance.

       What about Richard’s lies?

      Cassandra studied the matronly woman standing before her, wondering if she knew the truth about Richard. She was desperate for someone to speak with about him, but if Mrs Sween was ignorant of the truth, then asking her meant inadvertently revealing what had happened on the Devil’s Rose.

      She СКАЧАТЬ