The Colonel's Lady by Laura Frantz Read Free Book Online Page B

offered, hoping her straw hat was on straight.
    “I’ve just returned from Richmond on business. I apologize for being away for so long.”
    “How is . . . business?” As soon as she asked, she wished the words back, her mother’s latest rebuke ringing in her ears.
    ’Tis most unladylike to inquire about masculine pursuits.
    “Nothing to worry your pretty head about.” He smiled at her and patted her hand as it rested on his coat sleeve. “I am a bit discouraged, however. With the war on, things are not what they should be.” He hesitated, fixing his attention on a far fence that marked the border of Thistleton Hall. “I’ve lost a valuable account of late. A British one. Mr. Abernathy is returning to London. But even if he wasn’t, he says he can no longer do business with me, given the fact that I have . . . Patriot associations. He recently learned of our betrothal, you see.”
    “Oh?”
    “Of course, I assured him that your loyalties—and your mother’s—lie with England.”
    Her hand slipped from his sleeve. “But that’s not true—not on my part. I believe the colonists—the Patriots—have good reason to oppose England. At least based on what little I know. Granted, my mother, being British, is sympathetic to her native country—”
    “I don’t mean to upset you, Miss Rowan. Let’s leave these scurrilous politics to the men who make them. We must speak of other things.”
    She studied him, looking beyond his thinning, tobacco-colored hair to hazel eyes sharp in their censure. Not once had she ever heard him take a stand and declare his own opinion of anything, not even the war. His views depended on whom he was speaking to, whoever was in the room. Fickle as the copper weathervanes he sold in his Richmond shop, she thought, capable of turning in any direction.
    “No need to let business—or politics—interfere with more heartfelt matters,” he said stiffly. “Come, we’ll walk to the carriage. I’ve brought you and your mother a little something from the city.”
    She tried to be effusive about the lovely bonnet he gave her, but her mother was far more enthusiastic about her tin of sweetmeats. Later she learned he’d gotten the gifts after his dalliance with the woman who was now his wife . . .
    Roxanna shut the trunk with a bang as if doing so could shut away the memory, but felt she’d slammed her finger in the lid instead. Even the slightest reminder stung, though she’d tried her best to forget. Indeed, she’d come downriver four hundred miles to escape it, all the way to this frightening place. She should have pitched the hat in the Ohio River along the way, but as it was her favorite, she didn’t.
    Lying down on the freshly made bed, she smiled at the rustle of the corn-husk tick, thinking of the feather one she’d left behind. Truly, her new life here on the far frontier hardly held one reminder of her old one. At home, in their small stone house, she’d had a fine four-poster bed with plump pillows and a calico cat that slept at her feet, rag rugs on polished pine floors, a clothespress scented with rose sachet. All such amenities were missing here. Thinking it left her feeling a bit hollow.
    But, she decided, the wilderness was a fine antidote to all her regrets. Soon, very soon, she and Papa would leave this inhospitable place and be on their way to a new home. A new life. She needn’t think again of Ambrose or the future she might have had.

6
    Wrapping herself in her heavy woolen cloak, Roxanna wandered to the fort’s front gate and looked out a loophole to the wide Ohio River. In the twilight of late December, the water was more opal than emerald, the trees along its muddy banks shivering like skeletons in the wind. Try as she might, she couldn’t hear a sound. No crunch of marching boots over frozen ground, no shouted commands or chatter of drums, no thud of hoofbeats or clink of canteens.
    Just above her head, the garrison’s name was embedded in a huge