* * *
These were the first moments of their acquaintance. Not the best of beginnings, Elizabeth thought as she went upstairs, but a beginning nonetheless. After all, how many suitors had she knocking at her door? How many gentlemen?
Only Lord Launceston.
And Christian—or Launceston as everyone else called him—arrived the next night, hauteur already in place in preparation for their Irish guest. Elizabeth fairly cringed when she saw him. Trouble always came with Lord Launceston. How had he known of their gathering in the first place? For not only Killiney, but their friend Vancouver and his clerk, Mr Orchard, had come to dine, and Christian planted himself at Elizabeth’s side, stirring tempers with every subject arising.
“The Irish?” Christian frowned in disbelief at the comment Orchard had unwittingly made. “Do you seriously suggest our King release that rock to the keeping of such a doltish race?”
“Doltish?” Mr Orchard blinked. “My lord, my mother was Irish. And I believe, Sir, that the country would be better governed by its own people, doltish or otherwise.”
“I’ll wager the whole place would sink,” Christian muttered.
“Mr Orchard, why don’t you and I take a stroll?” Elizabeth rose from the table quickly, tossed Christian an angry glare. “I’m curious to hear of your adventures with Captain Cook,” she said, taking Orchard’s arm. “Would you mind if I asked you some questions about Indians?”
She did want to ask him about Indians, mind you. And Christian was being intolerably cross. Yet the actual reason for her withdrawal had more to do with Irish eyes, quietly watching from across the table. Blazing with some vestigial fire, Lord Killiney was shameless in his attention; it made Elizabeth more than uneasy, especially with everyone sitting around them.
So she led her charge—a meek, proper, mouse of a man—to the drawing room where she bade him sit.
“Sir, you’ve known many savages,” she said to Mr Orchard.
But as she explained her dream, described that native with his cedar-bark clothes, she found her thoughts wandering to the adjacent room. Lord Killiney’s eyes had sparkled wickedly; he’d laughed in response to her every jest, his attention following her every move, and when he’d smiled…who was he to flash her that grin? As if they’d shared a secret betwixt them, he’d imparted some sinful proposition, and had she accepted? There amongst the company, with nothing so much as an inadvertent glance, had she encouraged a man she knew nothing about?
She realized then Mr Orchard was staring. “Um,” she said sheepishly, “I was wondering if you’d met such savages.”
Mr Orchard nodded. “I knew such a boy.”
“Was he inclined to murder? Are the details such that you’d consider this an omen?” She clutched the folds of her dress in waiting. She knew Vancouver was on his way to America, would soon meet hundreds of coastal Indians in the course of his many-years voyage. “Because James and Killiney are going with you, Mr Orchard—to New Georgia, I mean, with you and Vancouver—and I fear I’ve dreamed some horrible prophecy. Mayhap Christian is merely a symbol.”
Orchard crossed his arms. “I don’t believe Indians are violent by nature.” He thought for a moment, then laughed to himself. “In many ways, they’re quite pleasant, really.”
“How so?” Elizabeth leaned forward in her seat, wondering if Killiney had ever seen an Indian.
The clerk smiled warmly. “They’re more inclined to be curious than violent. They like giving gifts.”
“And you’ve received gifts from coastal Indians?”
“Oh yes. Furs, wooden masks…and a strange, liquid substance meant to be sipped from a clam’s half shell.”
“What kind of liquid? An Indian wine?”
In the next room, she heard a chair pushed back. Dishes were clattered; the doors were thrown open, and she saw Clark, the footman, hurry past to help with the clearing up.
Orchard paused before he answered. “Not exactly a wine, although a taste will bring intoxication of a sort…or a trance.”
“So you’ve tasted this liquid?” Beyond their open door, she saw servants scurrying. “You fell into an Indian trance?”
“After my turn on deck, I did. And ‘twas the strangest dream I’ve had, for I found myself in a lady’s bedchamber the likes of which I’ve never seen.”
Elizabeth chewed on her lip. “Why is that?”
“Because it was filled with phenomenal things, wonders every bit as real as this room but against the laws of nature.”
Outside, Elizabeth’s father was laughing. In a casual saunter of Italian shoes, he was deep in conversation with Vancouver, and the whole party drew closer to the drawing room door until Elizabeth sat on the edge of her seat.
Still Orchard went on. “Instead of candles, this chamber was lit by the strangest lamp, and when I looked beneath its shade…there was no flame. Heat, yes, in a small white globe, but its light was as unflickering as the sun.”
Elizabeth peered into the corridor. “And this is why your dream was strange?”
“There was a box in this chamber—” Orchard looked, too, when Christian walked by, “—a black metal box, no bigger than a sailor’s sea-chest. It sat atop a commode by the bed, and it lit up the room as bright as daylight. Can you imagine that?”
James was framed by the doorway now, and at the sight of Killiney, strolling in a lumbering, peasantlike gait, Elizabeth glanced down. Don’t look, she thought. The last thing you need is to fire that man’s hopes, and who knows where such attentions will lead?
“It was with pictures, my lady, that it lit up the room.” Mr Orchard seemed quite willing to go on despite Elizabeth’s obvious distraction. “The prettiest, most perfectly executed art I’ve ever seen, and there were pictures of men, pictures of women and their little children, houses and gardens, even pet dogs, all of them so lifelike I’d swear they lived inside that box.”
She bothered then with looking up. “They lived in the box? All of them together?”
“You don’t believe me,” Orchard said, “but you see, they moved, these pictures did. Exactly as if children were in the box. What’s more, they spoke, and not with English voices, either, but with something closer to the American accent.”
With Killiney’s boot steps fading in the distance, Elizabeth sighed. “So Americans lived in this box of yours?”
“Drink it yourself. You’ll believe me then.”
“You still have this liquid? After ten years?”
“I do at that, in a dusty old drawer at home, I think. I’ll send it to you, next I’m there.”