Jess knocked on the door. “Alex, it’s me, Jessica. Eleanor is worried about you. Unlock the door and let me in.” There was no answer. She looked at Nick. He was a big, thick, dark man who was now looking down his nose at her in a particularly haughty way.
“I want to see him,” Jess said, her jaw set.
“He is not receiving callers.”
Jessica started to say more but then smiled and shrugged. “Just make sure he eats well,” she said cheerfully, then turned and went back to the common room. Eleanor looked at her askance and Jess shook her head before leaving the house.
She had no intention of allowing that man to tell her what she couldn’t do. She skirted the house, through the weeds and bushes, making her way to Alex’s bedroom. She stopped short as she passed Sayer’s window. Very calmly, the elder Montgomery looked up from his book.
Jess swallowed hard, but as the older man merely kept looking at her, she gave him a weak, tentative smile and continued on. He was watching her intently when she passed the second window, but he didn’t call to her or question what she was doing skulking about his house.
When she reached Alex’s window, she was pleased to see the shutters were open. She put one foot inside before someone grabbed her belt and pulled her back out. She looked up at Nicholas Ivanovitch.
“Mistress Jessica,” he said in a shaming voice. “I wouldn’t have believed this of you. Now run along and don’t be sneaking into a gentleman’s bedchamber.”
Jess’s hands made fists at her sides, but she turned on her heel and left. What did she care what had happened to Alexander? All he did was give her trouble anyway. It was his fault she’d made the Raider so angry. If Alex hadn’t planted those nasty doubts in her head about the Raider’s usefulness, she’d never have questioned him.
She could feel tears gathering in her eyes, but she sniffed them back. Maybe the Raider had told her he loved her, and maybe he did hate her now, but she’d survive.
She sniffed some more and headed back to the cove. The Wentworths wanted fifty pounds of clams for dinner for the admiral and his officers. The thought of the last time she’d seen snobbish Mrs. Wentworth made Jess smile. The woman had had to take on some of the cooking for the English officers. The Wentworths were expected to feed and house the Englishmen and all their wealth was going into the men’s bellies.
“That’ll teach her,” Jess said, smiling and swinging her clam shovel.
That night Eleanor was tearful. The children were used to Jessica’s emotions and rages, but Eleanor was a different matter. Usually, she was their rock, someone who was steady and unshakable.
“Something is wrong with Alexander. I know it,” Eleanor said. She was sitting at the table, seeming to have completely forgotten her role of serving food. The children looked at their empty crockery plates, then up at Eleanor and they seemed to understand the depth of her concern.
Jess motioned to Nick and the two of them brought the stew and cornbread to the table, silently dishing it out while Eleanor voiced her worry about Alex.
“The food I send in to him is barely touched and never a sound comes from the room. The door is locked; the shutters are bolted over the windows. I think something is wrong.”
“What’s the worry?” Jess asked. “So the man has a cold. He’s so vain he probably doesn’t want anyone to see him with a red nose.”
Eleanor came out of her seat in fury, pointing her wooden spoon at Jessica’s face. “We owe our very lives to that man,” she yelled. “You’re so busy dreaming over your glamorous Raider that you don’t see how much that dear man has done for us. He saved our house from being burned. He kept you from being hanged. When Pitman destroyed everything we owned, Alex replaced it. When the Mary Catherine was burned—because of your Raider—Alex saved your neck by keeping you from making a fool of yourself. Alexander is the one who’s helped us. The clothes we’re wearing, the dishes, the furniture, the food—everything we owe to Alex. And you can’t even be so much as courteous to him. So help me, Jessica, if you ever again say one word against him again, I’ll…I’ll…”
Jess was aghast. Eleanor was always bossy, but she’d never dared yell at her sister before. “Make me wear a coat like his?” Jess said meekly, trying to lighten the moment.
One moment Eleanor was standing utterly still and the next, Jessica had a bowl of hot stew pouring down her face. The door slammed on Eleanor’s way out.
Jess threw the bowl aside and plunged her head into a bucket of drinking water. When she came up for air, all the children were standing around her, their eyes wide in fear.
“Will Eleanor die and leave us, too?” Phillip whispered.
“Not unless I kill her,” Jess muttered, then looked at the children’s faces and sighed. “No, she’s just angry. Just like I get sometimes.”
“All the time,” Nate said, making Jessica glare at him.
“You stay here and eat and I’ll go get Eleanor.”
It wasn’t easy making good her promise to the children. First, Jessica had to chase her sister for a quarter of a mile through the forest, but as Eleanor wasn’t used to moving about outdoors at night, Jess found her just as she became entangled in a blackberry bramble. Jess had to listen to more of Alexander Montgomery’s many virtues—and when Eleanor ran out of those, she started in on how the bondservant Nicholas was above himself.
Jess just worked at freeing her sister’s hair from the thorns and listened. She wasn’t about to comment on Eleanor’s belief that one man was a saint and the other a devil.
At home Jessica swore that she’d get in to see Alex the next day, no matter what she had to do, and that she’d be very kind to him and thank him for all his help and not make one comment about what he was wearing.
“Even if the light blinds me, I’ll not say a word,” Jess promised.
Eleanor woke her at four the next morning and told her to go then, while Nicholas was asleep. Jess grumbled but she obeyed. She didn’t want a repeat of Eleanor’s temper. Yawning, Jess left the house and went up the hill toward the sprawling Montgomery house.