Kisses and Scandal (A Survivors Series Anthology ) - Shana Galen Page 0,84

The conditions were difficult as the irons were hot and heavy and the room where the women labored often grew unbearably hot. But she would have her own money very soon and then all three of them could leave the church and be on their way to making their own place in the world.

“What do you do with George?” Raeni had asked Alice as they were walking to their prospective positions that morning. George was strapped to Alice’s back in much the way Raeni had seen slave women in the sugar cane fields carry their babies.

“I’m allowed to keep him on me back,” Alice said. “And if he falls asleep, there’s always a basket where I can tuck him in for a wee nap.”

Raeni was glad she did not have a child to look after. It was hard enough for Alice without the added burden of George, though certainly Alice did not see him as a burden.

Now Raeni stretched her back, then realizing she’d been sitting at the chair at Mr. Gaines’s desk for several hours, rose and moved about the room. She stopped before the window and watched the well-dressed ladies streaming in and out of Madame LeMonde’s. Several students from Mrs. Sinclair’s School of Dancing and Social Graces were milling about, the girls smiling and pretending not to be flirting with the boys.

Raeni watched them and wondered what their futures would hold. She did not know what her own future held. If she had not fled Jamaica, she would probably be with child by now. That was why her father had sold her. One of his friends wanted a slave who could keep house and tend to his personal needs. Raeni had slept in her mother’s room until the age of ten. Her father had often visited when Raeni was supposed to have been sleeping. She understood what men’s needs were, and she would not be sold to a man she did not know to become a mistress like her mother.

She supposed in Jamaica it was the most she could hope for. Her brothers had been sent to England to study with the understanding they would return and take over the plantation. Charles Sawyer had an English wife and children, of course, but she’d heard him say his white son had no intention of living among heathens. And there was also the matter of her brothers’ skin. They looked like true mulattos—their color a creamy brown. Her father had thought they might pass for Englishmen who had been in the sun much of their lives.

But Raeni had been born dark as the night. Her mother said she looked like her grandmother, who had been considered one of the most beautiful women on the island. But Raeni’s father had questioned whether she was his daughter from the moment he saw her. Even as she grew and it became clear she shared some of his facial features, he looked at her with contempt. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to sell her rather than marry her to one of the free Negroes or send her to finishing school when her brothers traveled to study.

Raeni’s thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the door, and she frowned before crossing the room to open it. She wasn’t expecting anyone and usually only Mr. Miller came to the office to speak with her. But Mr. Gaines and Mr. Miller had gone to Wapping early this morning to look in on his business interests there. She did not expect them back yet.

She opened the door to a Negro woman with her hands on her hips. She wore a gorgeous yellow dress of silk with a fine shawl over it, and her sharp eyes slid over Raeni with obvious distaste. “It ees worse than I thought.” She snapped her fingers and the two women accompanying her, one white with pale blond hair and one black with her hair in a chignon, rushed forward.

“Yes, madam?”

“Do you see this?” The woman gestured to Raeni, who looked down at her blue serge dress. “Thees is what you English call ‘a lost cause.’”

“Excuse me, who are you?” Raeni asked.

The woman sucked in a breath and squared her shoulders with indignation. “Who am I? Who are you?”

“I—”

But the woman would not allow her to finish. Instead, she swept past her in a cloud of rose-scented yellow silk and perused the office. She snapped her fingers. “The box here, I think.” She indicated an open area of the room. “And move