Chapter 1
Annira Hayes listened to the wind howl outside the window and pushed aside the cut-velvet, wine-colored draperies. A white maelstrom swirled outside her warm rooms. They were in for a blizzard, and her husband not yet home.
With a sudden gesture of despair, her slender white fingers released the heavy fabric, shutting out the storm, if not her fear.
"I do wish Julian would come home soon." She spoke to her mother, Lavinia Polk, who sat ensconced in an ornately carved rosewood chair near the crackling applewood fire. Annira sighed as she watched the snapping showers of green and blue sparks against the cut-brass screen "The storm is so fierce."
"Julian will be fine." Lavinia turned in her chair so that her profile was illuminated from behind by a large oil lamp painted with soft mauve peonies. Lavinia's skin was softly white above the stark black of her mourning. Only the frosting of jet beading at her breast, black on black, reflected some of the room's light to give her animation. "Aren't you forever telling me he is one of the most resourceful men you've ever met?"
"And the most stubborn." Annira sighed and ran her had down the long, flat front of her gown. She had been was queasy for several mornings lately, and suspected she at last carried Julian's child and heir. In fact, she had meant to appraise him of the wonderful news that very night after dinner, when Mother had gone to bed and they were alone in the warmth and privacy of their room. "He will try to get home in this mess, even though it might have made ever so much more sense to have stayed in town tonight."
She walked to a large, gilt-framed looking glass that depended from an ornate hook near the ceiling on a rope of gold. Annira's face, like her mother's, was as pale as milk; the eyes, smudged by dark lashes, a brilliant blue-green that reflected her every emotion. Tonight they were clouded, as gray as the storm-tossed skies outside that grew darker with each passing hour. Her hair was a lovely auburn, looped and coiled away from her clear, unwrinkled brow and falling in a cascade of curls at the nape of her neck. Her dress was dove gray, a shimmering silk, embroidered with hummingbirds and trumpet vines across the skirt and sprinkled with iridescent beads. The gown flowed, caught up in the back to a fashionable bustle that accentuated her slender figure. A train, cleverly made so the back of the gored skirt was much longer than the front, gave Annira the illusion of gliding as she paced from window to fireplace.
A clock on the cluttered mantle above the fire, struck, the note rich with age and mellow with family history.
"--seven." Annira counted, pushing back the fear that had grown increasingly potent as the evening stretched toward eternity. How the wind did howl. She shivered, as if a goose had walked over her grave. "Oh, when will he ever come?"
"Perhaps dear Julian has learned caution and stayed in town after all," Lavinia offered. She sewed away the evening by the fire, embroidering the household's initials in flowing script on a set of pillow slips from a pattern she had noticed in Peterson's Magazine for Ladies.
"Oh, I dearly hope so," Annira looked doubtful. "But how will I ever know? I shall worry the whole livelong night."
"Then you shall worry, my dear. There is nothing to be done for it. The storm has arrived and if it keeps your darling Julian away from home for one night, perhaps you should be grateful he has enough sense to stay out of it."
"I suppose," Annira let the draperies fall. "But I shall worry all the same.
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