Fleeing the squalor of the New York docks and the brutalities of her cruel stepfather, Amy Fitzgerald is adopted by a wealthy Maine shipowner and grows to womanhood haunted by the bitter past that threatens her future love.
Release date:
December 24, 2008
Publisher:
Delta
Print pages:
336
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“Contain yourself, Amy!” the comely mulatto woman's soft Jamaican accent was blurred with annoyance. “I cannot properly lace your stays while you flit about the room.”
Waltzing in the arms of an invisible partner, Amy paused, eyes glowing with happiness. “Oh, Celeste!” she cried. “I am beside myself with joy. The war is all but over, and Jared and Papa Paul are coming home at last. Life will be worth living again!”
“Meanwhile, Laura Lanier will make life miserable if you are late to church.” The servant gave Amy's corset strings a quick, impatient tug. “And remember, your foster mother does not like seeing happiness in those she considers beneath her. So draw a long face and go decorously in her wake, else your joy will be short-lived.”
The animation left Amy's innocently seductive body as the light fled her large green eyes. With drooping head she followed Celeste's lead to the massive bedstead.
“Hold fast while I cinch your ties,” the woman said, inwardly chiding herself for causing her beloved charge a moment's dejection.“I often note,” she went on brightly, “that your moods are as changeable now, at nearly nineteen years, as they were at nine when Jared and I found you stowed away in the hold of the Sea Wind.”
Amy ignored the teasing and obediently clutched the bedpost, sucking in her breath to accommodate the ever-tightening restraint on her midsection.
With a flourish Celeste fastened the laces and gave them a final pat of satisfaction.“Now go to the glass and I will dress your hair.”
Wielding the hairbrush, Celeste watched Amy's face in the mirror, aware that deep inside, the girl had not yet acknowledged her beauty. Invariably, as now, Amy's features reflected a faint glimmer of surprise upon confronting her image. Celeste had watched her grow from an underfed, frightened dock-waif, all shadowed green eyes and tangled black hair, into a stunningly beautiful young lady.
Amy's wide-set, soulful eyes with thick-fringed, black lashes had never lost their haunting tinge of sadness, not even when her full, sensuous lips parted in a smile to reveal perfectly aligned white teeth. Her hair, ebony with blue-black lights, was thick and wavy, and when unbound fell to her waist. A fair complexion, high cheekbones, and a small, tip-tilted nose made her the epitome of a true Irish colleen.
She was slightly taller than most women, with proportions as enviable as her features. Above a narrow waist and ribcage her bosom rose firm and full. Straight posture and a proudly held head gave her a regal bearing, while long, slender arms and legs added grace to her movements. There was an aura about her, an enigmatic air of mystery, intriguing to some, intimidating to others.
Amy broke the long silence.
“Celeste, why does Laura hate me so?”
“You know the answerto that, child! It is your beauty that feeds her jealousy.”
“Laura is beautiful!”
Celeste thought of Amy's foster mother, whose beauty was as brittle as her voice. Her eyes, green as Amy's own, were not in the least softened by womanly tenderness, and she had a hard mouth. Her face, though well featured, had an expression more than a little repelling at times, due to its harsh angles and planes, and as Laura grew older, her inner bitterness became more evident.“What Laura cannot forgive, Amy, is your youth! There is nothing more difficult for a beautiful woman to face than the specter of old age, and Laura is nearly twenty years your senior.”
Amy's discerning glance took in this gentle woman who had mothered her these many years. Celeste was tall, with the golden skin of a goddess. Her strange amber eyes could bewitch, entrance, or call forth illusions, for despite education at the best of English schools, Celeste was steeped in the voodoo-ism of her Jamaican background.
Hers was an exotic beauty. She was daughter of a Hausa princess who had departed this world at the birth of her only child. Her Caucasian father, a wealthy Jamaican landowner, was inconsolable at the death of his black mistress, and soon withdrew into the recesses of his grief. When Celeste was still very young, her father packed her off to school in England. At holiday time and during the long summers she came home again to roam the island accompanied by her charismatic nanny, a voodoo sorceress whose lover was the most powerful shaman on Jamaica. As a growing girl Celeste lived three seasons of each year in the sophisticated world of wealthy England; but summer catapulted her into sinister forests and the superstitious, often frightening, voodoo milieu of the Jamaican islands.
She was eighteen years old when Fate delivered a most devastating blow. It was a warm June evening when she sailed into Jamaica Bay after a European sojourn, to find that her father had been killed and his estates taken over by his half-brother, an evil, greedy man who saw only that Celeste was beautiful and would bring a pretty price at the slave market.
God was with me that terrible day when your Papa Paul saw me chained to the block above the crowd, Celeste had told Amy some years ago, when she was old enough to question and understand. He outbid all others then, gave me my freedom papers, telling me to go where I would. I chose to remain with him—and never regretted my decision, she had added with a smile….
“What are you thinking, child? And why do you stare so strangely at me?”
Returning to the moment, Amy met Celeste's puzzled eyes.“You are Laura's age, Celeste, and beautiful as well. Yet you do not hate.”
“Because I am fulfilled, Amy. I love… and I am beloved. That is the secret of eternal youth.”
“Laura hated me from the first, Celeste. At nine years old I was certainly not a beauty. She said terrible things when Papa Paul first brought me here from the Sea Wind.”
A dock waif! Laura had cried. You dare to bring a dock waif into our home as companion to my daughter Eliza? And expose my son Jared to street-wise, urchin ways?
I bring Amy into our home as my daughter, Paul had replied. If she becomes a friend to Eliza, then they will be companions, but that is not a condition under which she dwells here. As for Jared, it is his nature to see only the best in others.
Laura's cold eyes had raked the child's ill-fed frame contemptuously, and even now Amy shuddered, recollecting that first impact of Laura's blazing hatred.
Amy will bear my name and live as my own daughter! Paul Lanier had stated in a deadly, menacing tone.
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