years. His shirt and jacket and breeches were tight to bursting with his added bulk. The pale yellow of his hair seemed almost white against the dark mahogany of his tanned face. The Stafford nose, high and thin, and the Fairfax blue eyes and dimpled chin, which were an inheritance from his mother, mocked at his beating heart.
Will she be waiting? The words that came up from his very depths, in answer to each throbbing heartbeat, taunted him. He knew the pride that ran in Laura Lee. He had hurt that pride by running away. Now, in this November, 1780, he was coming home, to learn if her pride was still as fierce.
With steady hands he set the gold-laced tricorn more firmly on his head, then paused for one last glance about the little room that had been his since his sixteenth birthday. His father had paid a year’s rent on it, giving it to him for a birthday present, telling him a man needed to get off by himself once in a while, away from his troubles. He had sat on the edge of that big canopied bed, staring as he saw his first woman undress for him, remembering the bayberry candle hanging on a rung of the ladder-back chair where his foot was propped, casting shadows across her slender thighs. Beyond it, in a nook under the slanted ceiling, was the writing desk where he had sat for three hours the day his father died. It had been on that desk that he had first composed the letter he had slipped under Laura’s pillow, the night he ran away. Aye, he told himself bitterly, the room was filled with memories for him, but it was not those memories that held him here. It was the fear in his middle, the fear that made him linger.
He was afraid to face Laura Lee.
“What will she be like?” he whispered. “Will she welcome me back or turn me over to the Tories? Is the plantation a ruin? Did she go back to Charles Town, where I married her?”
A hand on the knob of the door, a wrench, and he was out in the hall, breathing harshly, feeling the lawn shirt cut into his shoulders from its tightness. “She’s my wife!” he told the heavy canvas floor cloth on the hall plankings.
Then the stair was underfoot and he was leaping downward, anxious now to see her, and to learn what was waiting for him at Stafford Hall.
He came into the taproom from the inner hall, not seeing the huge brick fireplace with its brass andirons and fireback gleaming from their years of polishing, the long fowling piece and carved powder horn on leather thongs and wooden pegs above it. A few fiddle-backed rockers stood between the hearth and a large trestle table in the middle of the room. In the west corner, taking up more than half the wall, was the planked bar, its slatted corner railing reaching upward to the beamed ceiling.
Stafford moved through the room and out onto the stone slabs that served as steps to the entry door. Early-afternoon sunlight showed him the road stretching off toward the Dan and Stafford Hall. Bermuda grass and low evergreens made a sea of green beyond the road, as far away as the Blue Ridge Mountains. The sound of trotting hoofs and the whinny of a horse made him turn and come down onto the graveled carriage drive.
Ben Leap, who ran the Black Thistle ordinary, came around the corner of the house, the reins of a big bay stallion in his large hand. A grin distorted his plump cheeks. His white head bobbed, but not before Stafford saw a fresh bruise on his lined cheek.
“A new horse every month,” he told Stafford. “Brought by Old Gem, who comes every week to curry him, and exercise him on the road yonder.”
Stafford smiled to cover the lump in his throat. Old Gem had been slave to his father and his grandfather before him, and had taught him to sit a saddle and handle a frisky mount. It would be like Old Gem to keep coming back, week after week and month after month for four years, certain that his master would return someday.
He was reaching for the black leather rein when a man shouted with laughter inside the tavern. There was something lewd in the manner of that laugh. It was followed by a sob and the sharp cry of an angry woman.
Ben Leap flushed. The bruise on his cheek stood out darker against the tide of blood. When he caught Stafford’s inquisitive glance, the old man grimaced. “A damned Yankee. Roaring drunk last night, sir. Put this mark on my phiz with a beer cup when I asked for manners.”
The woman screamed, and Stafford relaxed his grip on the rein. He said softly, staring at the door of the ordinary’s long room, “There’s teacher’s blood in me at the moment, Ben. I’ve a mind to show this Yankee how we behave to a woman this far south.”
The old man said, “He’s a mean one, sir. Big and heavy. With a slant to his eye that I mislike.”
Stafford nodded. “I’ve seen his kind before. First to join when the battle is won, first to go when the fighting gets rough.” His hands rose to his blue velvet frock coat. He removed it and put it across the saddle. As he walked toward the long-room door, his fingers worked busily, rolling up the sleeves of his lawn shirt.
He came into the long room, with its twin fireplaces and small trestle tables, ladder-back chairs and hanging Betty lamps. A blonde girl in a homespun dress of green wool that was ripped from a white shoulder and torn halfway up her leg was sprawled across the knee of a big man, whose fleshy face was thrust deep in her throat. His big hands were fondling the girl even as her fingers clawed at his shoulder. Her right hand left his arm and tangled its fingers in his thick black hair, tugging savagely. Her breathing was hoarse and frantic.
Whether it was her hand in his hair lifting his head or the sound of Stafford’s top boots on the floor that stayed the man, Stafford never knew. The big man raised his head and stared at him, and his loose mouth sneered. He was fleshy, with tangled black hair and pig eyes, and his teeth showed rotten when he sneered.
“A gentleman farmer come to save your virtue, girl! As if you’ve any left to salvage!”
He pushed the girl from him, thrust her rolling across the floor with a foot. With a curse for Stafford, he brought his big pewter beaker to his lips and swallowed noisily. Before he was finished drinking, he took the beaker from his mouth and hurled it in a movement curiously fluid for such a big man.
Stafford heard the girl scream as the beaker caught him at his cheek and gashed a bloody furrow. Then the big man was coming for him, rolling the table from his path with a big hand at its edge, his feet pounding dust from the floor boards as he came.
Stafford slid aside from the bullish rush, and his fists went out, left and right, slamming into the big man at jaw and belly, turning him around to face him. A fist brought blood from the wide nose and opened the corner of his lips. The fleshy man blinked a little stupidly. Slowly, the stupidity of surprise gave way to a rush of anger that mottled his cheeks. He roared and lowered his head and charged.
The Staffords were big of bone, with thick sinew on them, but this Northern giant outweighed Billy Joe by twenty pounds. He was fat, but the ease with which he had swung the table from him showed he was strong under his blubber. Stafford rode before his rush, fighting as he had fought in camp fights from Canada all the way to New Jersey. He used his fists as a duelist uses his point. He jabbed until blood trickled from an eye and gushed from a nose. He flailed at the man’s belly until he fought for breath, wetly, bent far over.
The big man was a knowing fighter. He gave out punishment too, so that Stafford felt on fire where a huge fist raked the side of his face, and where an iron poker tore a gash in his side as the man swung it wildly.
Vaguely Stafford was aware of the blonde girl, crouched on the floor and staring at them with wide eyes. Once he saw her rise to her knees, when two right-hand blows doubled up the big man. Her fingers fell from the torn green gown they held together over her bosom to ball into a fist, and he caught a flashing glimpse of a thin golden chain and the locket it suspended.
“Kill
