By October Araminta knew for certain that she was pregnant. She sat for long hours looking down at the beach that had been her undoing, but the white sands and twisted forms of the gnarled old rocks stared back, giving her no comfort. Though she stared bitterly at rosy sunsets and asked herself if the Green Flash had betrayed her, every morning she awoke hopeful that she would hear from him.
Still he did not return. Or write.
By mid-October Araminta had made up her mind. Cook—who secretly sympathized with the unhappy daughter of the house and was the only one in whom Araminta confided—had heard that her Cavalier had been seen in Falmouth only the week before. Araminta entrusted all her jewelry to Cook to sell—there was little enough. She counted up her coins, packed enough for her immediate needs in a basket, and with Cook’s connivance and a helpful farm cart, set out in secret for Falmouth.
That first night on the road, Araminta settled herself uncomfortably in the cart and looked up at the moon shining down over Cornwall. He is in Falmouth, she told herself sturdily. I will go there and I will find him! He would never send me back to suffer shame and humiliation and perhaps worse—perhaps to be turned out of the house by my father and whipped through the streets for giving birth to a bastard child! No, we will be married in Falmouth and he will take me away with him—to America!
Araminta was young, but she was determined. Two weeks later she and tall, dark Jonas London took passage on the merchantman Northern Star bound for the colonies. They were married on shipboard by the captain, once England had disappeared in the distance.
The winter crossing of the Atlantic was terrible for the pregnant Araminta, who was feeling queasy anyway. Wild winter winds and snow and sleet lashed the deck. When she and Jonas arrived in Rhode Island there was snow on the ground. Araminta stumbled ashore, heavy with child, to learn that she was to shiver the rest of the winter in a rude log cabin in a lonely valley.
They reached the cabin late at night, having journeyed up a rude trail by wagon with only the constellation of Orion lighting up the southern sky above the black silhouettes of hickories. Somehow she had not imagined America like this, austere and lonely, and Araminta—suddenly certain that her child would be a girl—asked herself bleakly what future there was for a girl-child in this rude land.
As if in answer, just as the horses reached the cabin, the whole valley was bathed in a sudden vivid display of northern lights. A glow emanated above the dark tree line, eerily shimmering, the ethereal folds of some vast heavenly curtain swirling across the northern sky from east to west, as if blown by the Winds of Fate.
Araminta drew in her breath sharply and her baby stirred within her. If the Green Flash had illuminated her destiny on a beach in distant Cornwall, then this display of northern lights that welcomed her to Rhode Island seemed to draw a curtain of mystery across that destiny, as if to say: You are not to know, you are never to know. . . .
In the full glory of a late New England spring, Araminta London gave birth to a daughter—and named the beautiful child Lorraine for her grandmother.
What follows is the story of that daughter.
II:
THE TAVERN WENCH
CHAPTER 2
The Light Horse Tavern
Rhode Island
June 1675
A THIN SLICE of early moon bathed the hilly Rhode Island countryside in its pale light and silvered the rude but sturdy log walls of the Light Horse Tavern—a relatively new alehouse that had been completed only four years before in 1671. Inside the low-beamed common room, enjoying the cool night air coming in through the open casement beside them, four young men lounged. All four intently watched the dainty sixteen-year-old tavern maid, whose name was Lorraine London—and for whom each privately lusted in his heart—as she moved between tables performing her duties.
“Mistress London-who’s-never-been-to-town looks rather better than usual tonight,” muttered one of them.
The youngest of the four, whose name was Bob, fiddled with his tankard and sighed. “Think you that any of us will manage to bed her, Philip?” he asked plaintively. “She frowns and turns aside with her head in the air if I but speak to her!”
“Aye, I think one of us will,” answered Philip Dedwinton softly. He leaned back, swinging a neat leg as he watched the tavern maid from beneath russet eyebrows. His clothes marked him as the dandy, from his gleaming tan satin coat with brass buttons to his full breeches of good brown cloth, gartered at the knee and decorated at the sides with great loops of yellow ribands. Only his shoes struck an unfashionable note for, like everyone else in the room, he wore the comfortable and readily available Indian moccasins. His full lips curved in a slight smile. “I will bed her. Bob. And I will do it this very night!”
The third member of the party, whose name was Bradford and who had his brown head bandaged from a recent brawl, gave the speaker a ribald look. But the fourth, who had arrived earliest and was already much the worse for drink, burst into derisive laughter and banged down his tankard upon the wooden table.
“What a fighting cock!” he gibed. “All of us have tried, and she’ll have none of us. What makes you think you’re the better man, Philip?”
“The fact that I’ve a head on my shoulders,” declared Philip. His brown eyes narrowed. “Keep your voice down, Clamp, or you’ll alert the wench. “I won’t have you giving my hand away.”
Clamperton, past caution, continued to laugh uproariously. “I’ll make you a wager on that, Philip—for I’ve need of easy coin!”
Philip favored his friend with a cool look. He was very sure of himself. Indeed he looked exceedingly handsome with the candlelight gleaming on his russet hair and regular features, his body shown to advantage in the tan satin coat newly purchased in Providence and in which he was now sweltering for fashionable effect. “Three golden guineas says the wench is mine before cockcrow,” Philip murmured in a hard voice.
“You’re on.” Clamperton agreed instantly. All four of the young gentlemen were prosperous farmers’ sons and Clamperton and Philip both had ready coin. “But I’m told she refused you in better days,” he added slyly.
“I never offered for her,” insisted Philip. “She’d have accepted me if I had! The wench fancies me,” he added, downing his ale.
“Aye, Mistress Lorraine fancies you,” growled brooding brown-haired Bradford, least fashionable of the four. “Mayhap she’ll even have you, Philip. But you’ll have her in a marriage bed and no other way. You will not bed her lightly!”
“You forget,” said Philip in a cold voice, “that I know her better than any of you. Her family were our neighbors before her father set out for the West—God knows what became of him! Indians got him, like as not.”
“Yes, Indians got him, like as not,” echoed Bob, who admired Philip past all common sense, and especially envied him his new tan satin coat. “She’d a haughty way with her when her mother was alive.”
“Mistress Lorraine’s mother was gentry,” Clamperton pointed out. “For all they’d no money, she had delusions about how the girl would marry—above all of us. But then the mother died and the father bound the girl as a dairymaid to their neighbors the Mayfields and took off for the West. She tries to put a good face on it, does Mistress Lorraine, but anyone can see she pines for better times.”
Philip snorted. “Life has its ups and downs and Lorraine is on the downs.” He shrugged. “She’s in need of protection . . . and I think she knows it,” he added softly, studying the girl across the rim of his tankard.
“And your strong arm is offered to protect her?” jeered Clamperton. “Faith, ye’d best not let Lavinia find out you spend so much time in this tavern ogling Lorraine. Not if you want to marry Lavinia, as I don’t doubt ye do!”
Clamperton had brought up the name of the richest young woman thereabouts—Lavinia Todd—on whose fortune Philip had already fixed an acquisitive eye. Philip frowned at him.
“We’ll not be bandying Mistress Lavinia’s name about in a
tavern!” he growled.
“Aye, send her to Providence where she belongs!” chuckled Bob.
Philip gave Bob an impatient look, then peered down into his tankard. “Seems I’m out of ale.”
Clamperton shrugged. If Philip wanted to play both ends against the middle, it was no affair of his. He banged his pewter tankard down energetically upon the rude wooden board. “More ale here,” he called. “Mistress Lorraine, if you please.”
Lorraine, who had been too far away to hear their conversation, came over quickly at his call, her full russet skirt swinging from her shapely young hips. The four young men admired the graceful sway of her walk that carried her between the tables. They took note of her light step, of the smoothness of her skin, of the way her color seemed to come and go, of the tantalizing roundness that pushed softly against the much-mended material of her worn russet bodice. It was not an unfashionable dress, for it showed to advantage her white neck and shoulders and had full sleeves puffed to the elbow, with a daintily ruffled thin white linen chemise showing beneath. The chemise too was much mended, but none of the absorbed four pairs of eyes noticed that, so distracted were they by the daunting beauty of her countenance. The fresh young face that turned toward them had large eyes of a soft blue-gray— that same dusky heart-stopping blue-gray of distant hills at dusk. And those blue-gray eyes were fringed with sooty lashes and winglike brows that contrasted dramatically with her hair. Her thick shining hair, sun-streaked till it was in the main as pale as hemp, was worn young-girl-fashion down her back in a shining cascade that swung as she walked.
Her youth, her freshness, her clean-scrubbed beauty—and of course her unfortunate circumstances—presented a temptation to them all. She who had been serenely above unsavory propositions not so long ago was now forced to serve them ale in the Light Horse Tavern for her very bread.
Still none would have known it from the fearless blue-gray eyes that met their gaze levelly.
“Ale for all of you?” she asked, reaching for the heavy tankards.
Bradford put a hand over his tankard’s rim. “Enough for me for now,” he declared. “I’m off to Providence tomorrow with my father to buy horses and I’ll need a clear head.”
“Three tankards then,” said Philip, adding softly, “Mistress Lorraine, you do light up the room tonight with your presence.”
Lorraine flushed, giving Philip a wary look, but when she saw the obvious sincerity in his admiring brown eyes, her white teeth flashed at him in a smile of amazing sweetness.
“When the wench smiles, she looks like her mother,” muttered an older man nearby, studying Lorraine over his long day pipe.
Hearing his remark, Lorraine hesitated for an instant. Then her dainty hands swept up the three tankards and she whirled away to refill them with ale.
But that overheard reference to her mother had made her wistful, remembering. How she had loved the stories of Araminta’s early life in England, of her elopement, and especially of her romantic shipboard wedding after she and Jonas London had sailed from Falmouth on the Northern Star. . . .
“Why weren’t you married on land before you left?” she had asked, fascinated.
“Because we didn’t want the banns read,” her mother had replied wearily. “They would have found us.”
“Who? Who would have found you?” persisted Lorraine.
“My father. Richard Cromwell was still in power—which meant my father still had influence. I don’t know what he would have done to me.”
That silenced Lorraine.
“But if you really wanted to marry Father so much that you’d run away to do it, if you’d told him that, wouldn’t they have relented?” she asked after a while.
Her mother gave her a jaded look. “No,” she said briefly.
“You mean—”
“That like as not I’d have found myself ... Oh, it doesn’t matter, Lorraine. It was all so long ago.”
Yes, it was long ago. England had slipped through Richard Cromwell’s fingers—fingers more used to holding a book than holding a sword. The Cavaliers had predicted he could not hold the country—and they were right. England had a king again—handsome and dissolute Charles II.
“But haven’t you tried to write to them? To tell them where you are?”
Fearing her father’s vengeance, Araminta had sent a letter to Cook. But the news Cook had written back had been shocking.
Araminta laid down her sewing and considered her small daughter gravely.
“My father shot himself the night he learned the king was coming back to power. When my mother reached him he was still alive. She had him carried out to the family coach and rode with him toward the village, urging the driver to hurry. It was a rainy night, the horses slipped on the road, the coach went over the cliff. It was a long drop. Neither of them survived it.” Strange how calmly she could say those words now. When first she had learned of it she had been inconsolable.
Lorraine digested that.
“Then weren’t you ...” Lorraine had tried to choose her words carefully. “I mean, you said they were wealthy. Didn’t their dying make you some kind of heiress?”
Some kind of heiress. . . . Heiress to the evening stars, to the Green Flash, to seductive magic on a lonely beach. . . .
“Everything they had was confiscated by the Crown,” Araminta told Lorraine calmly. “There was nothing left—no one, nothing to go back to. I’m only sorry that they didn’t forgive me—before the end. It would have been nice to have felt they believed I had done the right thing in marrying Jonas. . . .”
“Did they hate him so very much?” marveled her daughter.
Her mother shrugged. “Things were different then. England was divided, tempers were high. You could lose your head for doing, saying the wrong thing. And Cornwall was always a Royalist stronghold.”
“But Father—why didn’t he go back afterward? I mean, he was a Royalist, wasn’t he?”
Araminta met her daughter’s eyes squarely. “I knew your father’s family would never accept me, Lorraine. That at least would never change!” She opened her mouth to say more, changed her mind. “As for our going back”—she gave a short laugh—“there’s never been any question of our going back. We’ve never had the money!” She leaned toward her daughter. “And I’d rather Jonas didn’t know we had this conversation, Lorraine. The past saddens him. He has enough burdens without thinking on the past.”
Her mother’s voice was so bitter that Lorraine asked no more questions. But sometimes she dreamed about what it would have been like had things been different—had the king not returned to his throne, had her father’s family forgiven him, had her mother’s people not been dispossessed and had welcomed them back. She supposed she would be riding about in a coach with plumes waving from her hat, paying calls on the local gentry.
Not serving tankards of ale in a rude country tavern to men who stripped her with their eyes and made coarse jokes about her behind their hands.
Her mother had liked to talk about Cornwall, about the rugged beauty of the countryside, about the gnarled sea cliffs where the seabirds nested, about the tall house on the cliff where she had been a carefree young girl, about everyday life there—but not about her escape, or Falmouth, or what came after. It was as if Araminta’s life had ended when she left the shelter of her home.
I suppose she was disappointed in my father never really being able to support her, Lorraine told herself honestly. But her mother never complained about Jonas. Indeed she was unfailingly kind to him. She married him for better or for worse and she kept her bargain, thought Lorraine. She had to admire her mother for that. Still, it was a commentary on love—that things didn’t always turn out the way you planned.
Jonas London was a tall silent man, except when something stimulated his interest. He had grayed noticeably with the years. Though Lorraine had been told her father was a Royalist, he never talked about it. Indeed he never discussed politics at all. He had left English politics behind him when h
e adopted this new land. He was more interested in “ventures,” coming home excitedly with wild tales to which her mother listened quietly, seldom making any comment.
But sometimes, later, when she was alone, Lorraine would hear her mother crying.
“What was it Father said that upset you?” Lorraine once asked her mother anxiously.
Her mother had looked up at her with tear-wet lashes. “Jonas is a dreamer.” She stated it without bitterness as a fact that must be faced. “He will never, never change. He believes that in some miraculous way the past can be mended and we will be rich and we can return to England if we like.” She sighed and dashed a hand across her eyes. “It isn’t going to happen. Make sure you aren’t like that, Lorraine.”
“I will,” promised Lorraine in a small voice. She looked on her delicate mother with compassion. She herself was so much sturdier. She’s cambric and I'm muslin, she had thought dispassionately. I’m tougher and will wear better.
And in a way that had proved true. Lorraine’s health was robust, as was Jonas’—but Araminta flagged sadly in the harsh New England winters. She grew paler and thinner every spring. Until at last she was so ethereal that it seemed that any light breeze would blow her away.
So it was no wonder that she succumbed to one of the fevers that were ever visiting the colony—not even a very bad fever, just something that had been transported aboard one of the many ships that cast anchor in Narragansett Bay.
Lorraine had loved her mother passionately and, when Araminta died, felt that her own life was over. Certainly everything changed for her from that moment. Lorraine London, whose elegant and beautiful mother had once promised her a genteel English education, was now a bound girl. After her fragile mother had died, Jonas, who knew his creditors were closing in, had sold what little he owned and had taken off to try his luck in the western reaches. No one had heard from him since; he was presumed dead.
To Love a Rogue Page 3
