Noelle walked up the steps to the porch, which was bare except for an abandoned bird's nest piled with droppings and a rattan rockIng chair with a faded chintz cover.
The muscles in Quinn's jaw tightened. 'Welcome to Televea,' he muttered as he stepped into the deserted foyer. 'There aren't any servants. I'll have to hire some.' He lit a lamp that stood on a candlestand just inside the door. Elongated shadows flickered up the walls to the high ceiling and over a worn Persian rug, which was centered on what had once been a beautiful inlaid parquet floor. The coachman looked around curiously as he brought the trunks inside and followed Quinn upstairs with them. When the man was gone, Quinn lit a cheroot and began to wander from one room to the next, as if he had forgotten her. Curious to see the rest of his house, which had been so ill used, Noelle followed him.
In most of the rooms furniture had been pushed to the center and placed under dustcovers. The curtains in the drawing room were faded; the windows in the sitting room hung bare. Everywhere there was the smell of must. In the wing at the left of the house was an empty ballroom with a columned arch that opened into a conservatory where glass walls swept in a graceful semicircle. Although the panes were unbroken, they were so darkened by grime that they were opaque.
The right wing held a long, narrow dining room. An American eagle had been carved into the plasterwork of the once-white mantelpiece. Over the fireplace was a richly detailed painting of a pair of quail signed by the American naturalist John James Audubon.
Noelle could contain her curiosity no longer. 'On the ship you told me that Televea had been closed since you left, yet Simon was in Cape Crosse less than a year ago. Where did he stay?'
Quinn pushed aside a pile of rags with the toe of his boot. 'He owns a house near the shipyard.'
'But why did he let this beautiful house deteriorate so badly?'
'Because he hates it,' Quinn said impassively.
'Then why didn't he sell it?' she persisted.
'He did. I bought it from him before I left London.'
Noelle looked around the gracefully designed room, wishing, for the hundredth time, that she knew what had happened between Quinn and his father. 'How could anyone hate a house like this?' she said, almost to herself.
Planting the heel of one hand against the dusty mantelpiece, Quinn stared down into the cold cavity of the fireplace. 'You ask too many questions, Highness, about things that aren't any of your business.'
She left Quinn wandering about the house and went upstairs, where she found her trunks in a dusty but pleasant room that adjoined the master bedroom. A search of the wardrobe revealed a pile of sheets. While she made up the bed she thought how grateful she was that Quinn had not demanded she share his room. Still, as she was going through her trunks for a nightdress and robe, she realized she was unconsciously listening for the sound of footsteps. But there was only silence from the other room.
Below in the kitchen, Quinn sat with an open bottle of whiskey. The sight of Noelle walking through the rooms of Televea had disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. Why hadn't he left her in London as he had intended? His loins ached with the desire to possess her. Only his memory of those punishing nights on the ship when she had so stubbornly held herself apart from him kept him from claiming her now. If she weren't so damned beautiful…But then, it was more than her beauty. Everything about her seemed to affect him.
He took another swallow. He was goddamned if he would let it – go on this way any longer! When he decided he wanted to father a child, he'd bring her to his bed. Until then, he'd take his comforts elsewhere. Noelle would bear his children, run his household. That was all!
The next morning, as Noelle sat at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea, a knock sounded at the door, distracting her. She opened it to find a group of six women, three white and three black, assembled on the back stoop.
'Miz Copeland?'
'Yes?'
'I'm Dainty Jones, your new cook.'
It was a moment before Noelle found her voice. Dainty Jones was the tallest woman she had ever seen and certainly one of the thinnest. She had closely cropped ginger hair, its color the only reminder of her Scots-Irish ancestors, and ruddy skin stretched tight over angular bones. Her face was shaped much like an hourglass-broad at the top, sunken at the cheeks, broad again at the chin-and her accent spoke of the backlands.
'How do you do, Miss Jones,' Noelle finally managed.
'Call me Dainty.'
Shouldering her way into the kitchen, she continued her introductions. 'This here's Bessie Pugh. That's Grace Mahoney. She's good with a needle, so you better take her as your maid. Them two is Favor and Evangeline Patterson. They don't have no experience, but they're hard workers. That one bringin' up the rear is Earline Wilcox. She's shy of strangers, so I 'spect you better leave her stay in the kitchen and help me. Mr. Copeland said the men'd be over tomorrow to start work on the outside.'
Although Noelle did not know it at the time, it was not customary to have servants of both races in the same household. But in Cape Crosse, those who wanted Copeland wages had to be willing to work together.
She surveyed the group of women who stood assembled in the kitchen. From the towering Dainty Jones to the ebony-skinned Patterson sisters, they were a far cry from the proper English servants of her experience. But she couldn't allow herself the luxury of misgivings. Constance was not here to help her, and she certainly had no intention of running to Quinn. She had a household to manage, and she was going to have to do it by herself.
By the end of her first week at Televea, Noelle had absorbed herself in the challenge of restoring the beauty of the old house, taking time out only to write Constance a long letter describing her new household and her unorthodox servants. She did not mention Quinn at all. As the days passed, she flew from one place to the next- attic to storeroom, kitchen to bedroom, directing her servants at their tasks, sometimes stopping to sweep a floor or scrub out a corner herself.
She began with four rooms: the dining room, drawing room, and two front bedrooms. They were scoured from floor to ceiling, rugs were beaten, floors polished, windows washed. Years of accumulated grime were removed from the lovely parquet floor in the front hallway. The furniture was uncovered and rubbed with lemon oil and beeswax until it shone.
The servants proved to be good workers, and Dainty Jones's cooking contradicted her skeletal form. Soda biscuits and griddle cakes, pies and Indian puddings, a Brunswick stew full of butter beans and red pepper-all of them poured generously from her fragrant kitchen.
True to his word, Quinn sent a small crew of men to restore the exterior of the house, and it was soon festooned with ladders and scaffolding. On the days when the winter rains fell, Noelle pulled the workers inside to paint and do carpentry.
She rarely saw her husband during those first exhausting weeks, and he made no attempt to enter her bedroom. Other than approving her progress in the house and agreeing to take her to Savannah as soon as he could get away so she could make the purchases she needed to finish the job, he had little to say to her.
One day she overheard the maids gossiping about a woman named Kate Malloy who ran an illegal gambling house for the upper-class gentlemen of Cape Crosse and its environs. From their conversation, she gathered that a game of poker was not all that was available at Kate Malloy's. It had been difficult for her to imagine a man as virile as Quinn going for long without a woman, and now she suspected that all his late nights were not being spent at the shipyard. So much the better, she told herself. Let Quinn take his lust elsewhere. Nothing could make her happier!
Several weeks after her arrival, an incident occurred that left Noelle vaguely uneasy. She was behind the house, shaking out a small Oriental rug she had found on one of her forages to the attic when she looked up to see a strange man standing near the smokehouse, watching her. He had a barrel chest, thick, powerful limbs, and a head that was abnormally small for so large a man. She could not see the color of his hair, hidden beneath a battered felt hat, but she could see his eyes. Small and malevolent, they bored into her. For a moment neither of them moved, and then the stranger spat insolently into a pile of dead leaves at his feet and disappeared back into the trees.
That evening, she mentioned the incident to Quinn. He made inquiries among the men who had been working at the house that day, but no one else had seen the stranger. Within a few days, she had put the encounter out of her mind.
Noelle learned from Dainty that the women of the community and nearby plantations had agreed among
