Jenny's Passion by Diane Wylie

Author:Diane Wylie [Wylie, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Phillip Winston stood at the window and watched his daughter ride away from the stables. A cold wind blew across the open fields, making her dark cloak billow around her and the hood fall down her back. Even from a distance he could see the shining mass of honey-gold hair held tightly in its long braid down her back, just as her mother used to wear her own hair.

Phillip rubbed his temples to ease the headache that had started to grow. Jennifer was so like her mother in looks and personality. That contributed to his concerns about her. Almost a month had passed since the Yankee soldier had left, and his daughter had not recovered the spark and vitality she had possessed before the man left.

Lovely Patience. Phillip sighed. Every time he looked at his daughter he could see Patience there, not only in her looks, but in many of her mannerisms as well. Jennifer’s mother had loved him with a passion that had left him humbled through their years together and prostrate with grief when she died. Jennifer showed every sign of having the capacity to love as passionately and as strongly as her mother had…and that had him in a quandary.

He did not let on to his daughter that he knew about the soldier. Without meaning to, Luther had let it slip about the “sick Yankee in Kizzie’s cabin.” To keep from upsetting the big man, he had pretended that he had not heard. Rather, he had visited the cabin in the wee hours of the morning and looked in the tiny window hidden by trees in the back of the cabin.

What he had seen would haunt him forever. It had been a quick look to see what was going on, but it was enough to keep his mouth clamped shut or risk alienating his only daughter.

A single oil lamp lit the dismal cabin, its light shining on Jennifer’s tear-streaked face. She knelt on the dirt floor at the head of the small bed. A tall, well-built man lay stretched out on his stomach with his bare feet hanging over the end. Phillip could see the back of the man’s dark head turned towards Jenny. He watched Isaac take a steaming kettle from the fire and set it on the table next to the bed. Kizzie came into view, the small dark woman saying something he couldn’t hear. Jenny nodded and bent close to the man’s head to speak to him. Slowly the man’s hands moved to grip the edges of the straw mattress.

Jenny nodded to Kizzie again. It was then that Phillip saw the man’s back was covered with horrible, raw slashes. It was shocking! He had known that some plantation owners whipped their slaves, something he never approved of doing, but who would do that to a white man and why?

He had watched the proceedings inside the cabin with a strange fascination. Using a pair of black iron kitchen tongs, Kizzie had fished in the pot and pulled out a strip of linen, dripping and steaming with a milky liquid.

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