Days of Gold Read online

  It had taken nearly two days to get Cuddy to tell the full truth of what Angus had said, but she’d done it. Calmly, the young man had said, “Would you like me to kill him for you?” Edilean had been tempted to say yes, but she didn’t. But as a result of Cuddy’s loyalty he was one of only three men she’d kept in her employ when she started Bound Girl. The other two men were too old to discharge.

  After Angus had so coldly left her, Edilean had borne her heart ache without a tear, and she’d never told Harriet what had happened. To compensate, Edilean had started Bound Girl and buried herself in as much work as she could humanly manage.

  It had all gone well until she walked into her own parlor and there he was. He sat there looking at her as though he’d just seen her last week and now he wanted to put his arms around her. And then what? Take her to bed, have a night of ecstasy, then leave her for another four years? Is that what he thought of her?

  Just as had happened before, Edilean’s mind left her. She ran from the room and told the girls who were in the back loading boxes of fruit that she needed them. She knew that they were so grateful to her for saving them that they’d do anything she wanted. If she’d told them to take the guns and shoot Angus, they would have done it and damn the consequences!

  But Edilean had wanted the pleasure of seeing him suffer. She wanted to see him lying dead at her feet—or that’s what she told herself.

  After it was over, after the weapons had been taken from her, she couldn’t bear to stay in that house. She didn’t want to see any of them. She didn’t want to see the three Scotsmen, who reminded her of Angus, didn’t want to see Harriet simpering over Malcolm. She didn’t even want to see the girls, who reminded her of the company she’d started because of what Angus had done to her.

  When she got into the carriage she wasn’t sure where she was going. It wasn’t until she was an hour away that she remembered the handbill Harriet had shown her about the farm for sale in Connecticut. It took days to get there, but when she’d arrived, the widow, Abigail Prentiss, had welcomed her, and by the next evening they’d formed a friendship. Abigail was her age, and she’d been born in England into the same class. They even knew some of the same people.

  When she was just seventeen, Abby had fallen in love with an older man who owned a farm in America. Her family protested that she couldn’t go that far away, but Abby had made up her mind. They married three months after they met, and Abby was expecting a baby a week later. Now, with two daughters, aged four and three, to support, she didn’t know how she was going to do it alone.

  “I can help you with that,” Edilean said, and gave a great sigh.

  From there it went to Abigail listening to Edilean’s problems; she told her about Angus. While it was true that Abby had been in love with John Prentiss when she married him, she admitted to Edilean that it had not been a match made in Heaven.

  “I think I wanted to get away from my mother as much as I wanted anything else, and there was John, such a very nice man, who owned a big farm in America, and I saw a way to leave my mother. He was a lovely man.”

  “But not one you’d want to kill if he betrayed you.”

  Abby laughed. “I don’t think I could feel that way about any man.”

  “Good,” Edilean said. “It’s awful. I can’t decide if I love him or hate him.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  They were in her orchard, many of the trees were in bloom, and the bees were buzzing all around them. Her little girls, blonde and beautiful, were chasing butterflies. Edilean knew that she envied Abby. She’d had a “correct” life, marrying a man, then having children. Edilean felt that her own life had been topsy-turvy, everything always backward to what it should be. She’d had no parents to speak of and no marriage—but she’d had a wedding night.

  “What will you do now?” Abby asked.

  “Go back to Boston and...” She gave another sigh. “I guess I’ll run Bound Girl, although I think Tabitha and Harriet could manage quite well without me. I was needed to make them believe they could start such a company, but now they do all the work. I...” She trailed off. While it was true that she worked all day long and ran everything, it seemed that lately her heart wasn’t in it. She was to turn twenty-two this year, and she wasn’t married or even being courted by a man. There were still many men trying for her hand, but they seemed to get older every year. A woman who was extremely successful in a business was not something a younger man wanted to take on. Whereas they loved the idea of marrying a rich heiress, a woman who was taking over the produce market through intelligence and shrewd decisions was not their idea of a good wife.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Edilean said, and she had a vision of herself looking like Harriet, of being forty-plus, with no husband, no family. If she owned all the orchards in all thirteen colonies she’d still be alone. “What about you?” Edilean asked. “After I buy your farm, where will you go?”

  “Williamsburg,” Abby said firmly. “I went there once with John and I loved the place. It’s a city, but it has the atmosphere of an English village. And Virginia is beautiful.”

  “With a lot of eligible bachelors?” Edilean asked, and they looked at each other and laughed.

  Edilean meant to stay in Connecticut for only a few days, but she ended up staying at Abby’s farm for three weeks. She left because she feared that Bound Girl might need her. If Harriet was still enamored of Malcolm she wouldn’t be paying attention to the business, and if Tabitha wasn’t constantly supervised, who knew what she’d do? Reluctantly, Edilean left the farm and her new friend, and went back to Boston.

  But no one paid much attention to her arrival. There were no crises that only she could handle. In just a few weeks, her household had changed so much that she felt she didn’t know it. Harriet’s every sentence seemed to start with, “Malcolm says—”

  As for Tabitha, she’d taken the opportunity to buy some new wagons and have the company’s Bound Girl symbol painted on them. Edilean thought they were hideously garish and said so. “But they sell more,” was Tabitha’s reply.

  Now, Edilean was watching Harriet dither about as she set the table as though the king were coming when it was just Malcolm, Tam, and Shamus. As far as Edilean knew, Shamus still ate all his food with a spoon.

  She left the table, unable to sit there and—She hated to think that she was such a shallow person, but it was difficult not to feel jealous and envious of the happiness that everyone in her household seemed to have found.

  She went to the big warehouse where the produce from the farms came in. Usually, she was so busy that she could think of nothing else, but today she was distracted. She kept remembering Abigail and her beautiful young daughters.

  When Tabitha said something to Edilean, she just stared at her.

  “You comin’ down with somethin’?” Tabitha asked her.

  “Yes. No,” Edilean said as she looked at two young women who were bent over boxes of cherries and saw that they were watching her and laughing. No doubt all of Boston knew about her shooting at some man. And they could easily guess why.

  Edilean grabbed her skirts and fled the warehouse. All in all, she thought, it would have been better to have killed Angus and now be sitting in a jail cell.

  She wandered about Boston for a while, looking at what the stores had to offer, and listening to men complain about England. Edilean didn’t understand what the problem was. If the men thought King George was bad, they should read the history books and look at past kings. What did the Americans think they were going to do? Start a new country without a king? Really! Sometimes she didn’t understand Americans at all.

  It was dusk by the time she got back to the house, and she hadn’t eaten all day. She asked to have a tray taken to her room. She ate little of the food, then undressed down to her chemise and went to bed. She fell asleep instantly.

  She was awakened by a shot and angry shouts coming from downstairs. “Now what?” Edilean mut