He paused and his dark brows lifted derisively. “Yet you were eager enough to go ashore this afternoon. Why do you hesitate now? It is a fine night.”
“That was in New Orange,” she said through her teeth. “I heard wolves howling out there just now!”
Brett gave an indifferent shrug. She could not help noticing the breadth of his chest in his brocaded doublet. “Wild dogs probably.” He would have urged her forward but that she pulled back.
“And a great snarl like a large cat,” she insisted.
He gave a short laugh. “This country used to be full of big cats—indeed the Catskills were named for them—but they are long gone, hunted down and driven off. You imagined it. Come.” He gave her wrist a tug.
“I will not stir a step from this cabin,” she said desperately, hanging back.
“Indeed I am glad to hear it,” said Brett coolly. He released her wrist and went over and latched the cabin door. “We will spend the night here, then. Together.”
“No!” The word was ripped from her violently. She could not bear the thought of his flesh just now. That a man who had just broken her heart should caress her—it was too much!
“Take your choice, Georgiana,” he said quietly. “Here or on land. Either way, I will be with you.”
His gaze on her was very steady. Many a man would have quailed before it. Georgiana did not. She tried to dart around him but he stepped in front of her, blocking the way. She spun around so that her back was to him. Her teeth were clenched.
He came up behind her, stood very close, not touching her. “I know that I have hurt you, Georgiana, and for that I am sorry.” He sounded troubled and he reached out to caress her shoulder.
She twitched her shoulder angrily away from him. “Why could you not have told me the truth? That you were marrying me because you believed me to be the van Rappard heiress?”
“Would you have married me if I had?” he countered.
“No!” she flashed.
“You see?” He spun her around to face him and although his lips were smiling, his hard gray eyes were not. “You have said with your own tongue that deception was the only way I could have you. Ah, I judged you well!”
“And deceived me well!”
“That too,” he said calmly. “I admit it. But not to your disadvantage.” Before the fury in her face he inclined his dark head thoughtfully. “Think on it this way, Georgiana,” he mused. “Would your life have been so much better if I had not come into it?”
Georgiana winced. He was plainly reminding her how he had saved her from that pair of ruffians in Bermuda when they were in the act of carrying her off.
“That isn’t fair,” she cried hotly. “And besides, any man alive would say you were paid in full for rescuing me—with my virginity!”
“That is true.” He inclined his head with gravity. “And after that, what did I offer you?”
“Second place!” Her voice was filled with heartfelt bitterness.
He studied her, frowning. “All I knew of you then was that I had rescued a pretty waif who had given herself to me willingly. I told you that under other circumstances I would have asked you to wife—which was true enough—but since I could not, I offered you my protection.”
"Could not?” she said bitterly. “Say rather, would not!”
“As you like. I still offered you my protection.”
“A life as your mistress?” she scoffed.
“Others have not objected,” he pointed out.
“I am not 'others’!” she flashed.
“No, I can see that,” he said slowly. “You are more spoiled. ’Tis easy to see that Bernice and all the hardships you endured under her rule did not break your spirit.”
“Nothing will break my spirit!”
He sighed. “I believe you are right,” he agreed, with a tinge of humor. “Not to digress, I will ask you what happened then? You flung away from me and when next I saw you, you were again in need of saving. Indeed you had just been flung to the ground by a whip and were about to endure a lashing. Did you ask me to depart and leave you to your fate?”
Her face flushed scarlet. “You are twisting words. Of course I was glad to see you—I would have been glad to see anyone. Arthur was about to tear me to pieces with that whip!”
“We both know,” he said, each word flicking her like a light tap on a bruise, “that Arthur would have been easily persuaded from doing that. In fact, ’tis doubtful he would so much as have marred your flesh—that flesh he so desired that it was driving him to a ridiculous course of action. You had only to say ‘Arthur, I am sorry’ and he would have desisted. Do we not both know that?”
“I would never have said it!”
“Perhaps not. But you were delighted when I rid you of him. And to all your desires, I acquiesced. We were married in the church of your choice. I bought the Articles of Indenture you had, in a moment of madness, signed. I bought your horse, which is even now tethered on the deck.”
Floss—for the moment she had forgotten Floss. Gentle, trusting Floss had stood the trip well; Georgiana had meant at the very least to go on deck and give Floss a good-night hug. “Has she been fed? Watered?” she asked anxiously.
“Of course. Stop trying to change the subject.”
Georgiana gave him an angry look. “Yes, you have done much for me—I admit it. But you still deceived me.”
He leaned closer, a heady nearness that interfered with her breathing. She could smell the light pleasant scent of Virginia tobacco, feel his breath warm upon her cheek, feel the pressure of his overpowering masculinity driving her forward along a course he chose. Her heart gave an uneven lurch and it was difficult to hold her expression taut, to keep from trembling.
“Tell me, Georgiana,” he asked softly, “do you not find happiness in my arms? Don’t clamp your lips together like that. There is no shame in enjoying a man’s caresses.”
She turned her face away sharply, for she could not meet his probing gaze. “You know the answer to that,” she mumbled bitterly.
“Yes,” he agreed in that deep resonant voice that seemed to go right through her. “I know the answer to that.” And drew her unprotesting body toward him with confidence.
Trembling from the mixed emotions that surged through her slight frame, Georgiana looked up into his rapt face. Her gaze was tormented. “Do you love me, Brett?”
“Don’t you know I do, Georgiana?”
“I want to hear you say it,” she whispered.
“Very well. I do love you—more than I ever thought I could love a woman.” His voice was rich and soft and his warm lips were brushing her ear. She could feel his hot breath blowing tendrils of her hair. It was growing harder every second to resist him, to keep her slender body stiff and unyielding in his embrace. And why should she resist him? Had he not said he loved her more than he ever thought he could love a woman? And was not love all that counted? Oh, yes—the rest was worthless!
She let him take her then, melted into his arms, tried to forget her hurtful thoughts. And as his hands played expertly over her slender body, bringing it to tingling desire, she did forget and was swept away on a tide of feeling that welded them together as if their quarrel had never been.
Their clothes were strewn around the room where they had been hastily discarded—a shoe kicked off here, a stocking pulled from a graceful leg there, a belt hurriedly unbuckled and lying where it had been flung. Over here Brett’s doublet fallen atop Georgiana’s yellow voile dress, over there Brett’s trousers and a shimmering pile that was her wedding petticoat. And lying intimately beside his shirt and smallclothes, fragile and only slightly torn, Georgiana’s lace-trimmed chemise.
They were on the bunk now, rapt and clinging. The sparks of their quarrel had ignited the banked fires within them and the flames now leaped up and became a raging conflagration.
“I love you, I love you,” Georgiana was murmuring brokenly against Brett’s straining shoulder. Her voice was a sob of surrender
as passion flamed within her. His every touch was sweet madness and although she was crushed against him, she could not hold him close enough. His passion was her passion, his will her will. He was lover, husband—everything. He was all she wanted from life!
Borne on the wings of that passion, they soared like gods. Their bodies rose and fell like giant waves cresting, and the storm that shook them carried them both away, carried them in a kind of beautiful desperation somewhere beyond imagined delights and in a last burst of frenzy over the brink of the world, a high and lovely place from whence they seemed to float down like feathers from a great height, to find themselves mortal again.
For a time they lay there, still breathing unevenly, lying side by side on their naked backs, bathed in the warm afterglow of remembered ecstasy. And then Brett rose on one strong arm and passed a tender caressing hand over her naked body that responded with sweet submission to his touch.
“Now that we are friends again,” he said calmly. “I would ask that you satisfy my curiosity. I have been waiting for you to tell me what the long objects are that you have wrapped in damask tablecloths and passed off as pokers and tongs. They are indeed heavy and not of a shape to be worn or consumed.”
Georgiana gave him a dazzling smile. “They are the big candlesticks from Mirabelle,” she told him with a calm that matched his own. “I filched them shortly before you found me at Waite Hall along with the clothes I wore to be married in, in St. George." At his blank astonishment, she added defiantly, “The clothes were my own which Bernice had taken from me and the candlesticks had been promised to me as part of my dowry when I married, by Mamma Jamison herself.”
“And you did not intend to leave the island undowered,” he concluded wonderingly.
“I think I was striking out at a world that had hurt me,” she said ruefully, giving him a thoughtful look. “The clothes were my own, of course, and I needed them. But the candlesticks—to me they were a symbol of Mirabelle, of home. Doubtless you would have stopped me from taking them, had you known—that is why I told you they were popcorn poppers and such. But since you have brought them along, you can consider them a dowry. They are very valuable—‘a buccaneer’s treasure’ the minister used to call them.”
Brett struck his bare thigh with his open palm, threw back his head and laughed. “Had I known what contraband I carried, I’d have been in an even greater hurry to leave Bermuda! ’Tis plain, Georgiana, we can never go there again. There’ll be a warrant out for your arrest!”
“It doesn’t matter.” Georgiana’s shoulders rippled in a careless shrug. “I’m never going back.”
“Really?” He ruffled her bright tangled hair with a gentle hand. “For a little while tonight, I was afraid you were considering it. Afraid you would return to Bermuda and leave me to my fate.” His tone was whimsical.
She gave him a troubled look, for his words had brought back to her all the searing turbulence of this night’s discoveries, all the knife-edged thoughts that had cut at her before. Pensive now, she tried to smile and his arms went round her tenderly, protectively, as if he would save her once again from all the hurts of life. But this time when his arms went round her there was not the joy in her face that there had been when he had clasped her aboard the Dame Fortune.
It is my misfortune to love him, she admitted now to herself. But does he really love me? Will I ever know?
What a strange life she had lived! From rags to riches and back to rags again—and now, suddenly an heiress again, she had unwittingly fallen into the trap that so often befell the rich and the fortunate—never to know if one was loved for one’s self or for one’s great possessions.
The eyes of the girl who clasped Brett Danforth to her, the girl who looked up over his broad shoulder at the stars that twinkled through the cabin window, were dark with doubt.
Perhaps I am wrong, she told herself as she lay against him. Perhaps he does love me after all. God grant that I am wrong and that he married me for love, and not because—mistakenly—he believes me to be the rightful heiress to Windgate.
Now that their “Pandora’s box’’ had been opened, now that there was truth between them at last, Brett told her much about himself. About his boyhood in Devon, about his first romance.
“She was very pretty and I thought myself madly in love with her,” he told Georgiana. “But she chose to marry an earl instead of a younger son without prospects. She thought to keep me around lapping up, like a dog, the crumbs of her affection. I ran away to sea instead.”
“And forgot her?” Georgiana asked on a breathless note.
“In a month,” he said absently.
He omitted telling her of the other women he had known—although that was what Georgiana most desired to hear. But he did skim over some of the hard times he had known, and how he had come by this passion for Windgate.
“I was trading far upriver for furs,” he told her. “Up in the Mohawk country. I got caught in a battle between rival tribes and an arrow pierced my back. I went down like a stone and when I came to myself, the battle had raged on past me and the fighting was some distance away. I could hear war cries, and screams of the dying through the trees. Somehow I made it back to my canoe and shoved off, but the wound festered—I bear the scar of it still.”
Georgiana nodded raptly. She had seen the deep scar on his back.
“A farmer found me when my canoe became tangled in some drifting tree branches and came ashore. He cut out the arrowhead, which was deep embedded, and he nursed me through fever—and he told me of Wey Gat. Vast and rich and beautiful, he said, but cursed, for all its owners since the house was first begun had died violent deaths. He aroused my curiosity. I had not much time to get downriver, for my ship would soon sail, but I paused at Wey Gat and studied it. I wandered across its lands. Never had I seen such beauty....” His voice had a deep resonance like some stringed instrument. It made her see, feel, a little of what he had felt then—awe of the high-flung virgin forests, delight in the meadows and sparkling rivulets flowing down from the heights to the broad Hudson far below.
“I determined then that I would buy it,” he said softly. “Even though it was far beyond my reach. And it was being harmed, for although the great house was being kept up and even desultorily completed under the terms of Verhulst van Rappard’s will, the rest of it was being allowed to run down. Owning Windgate became an obsession with me that blotted out everything else. I would have it.”
There was a ruthlessness in his voice now that swept Georgiana along. She began to understand how it was with him and the direct, arrowlike thrust of his purpose.
“The next season I went back again into the Mohawk country. And I made a discovery. It seems that in the battle that near cost me my life I had saved a young boy—a chiefs son. ’Twas no great thing, the lad was being overpowered by two stout warriors and I cut them down before they could finish him. Lying on the ground, the lad saw me take the arrow before he ran away. His father the chief had looked for me to thank me for saving his firstborn, but my body had disappeared—indeed I had staggered away to my canoe and floated downriver, but they did not know that. Since it was thought my wound was mortal—I had been seen to die, as they put it—and since I now returned to them in perfect health, that was considered a miracle. My return was a good omen. In gratitude, I received the fur concession for the whole Mohawk Valley from that chief. It made me rich—but not rich enough to buy Windgate. That took all that I had and all that I could borrow from the moneylenders in London as well.”
“But you still have the concession for furs, have you not?”
He shook his head. “That chief was killed last year and his son with him. His successor does not favor me and has warned me off the Mohawk River.”
“And the farmer, the one who nursed you back to health?”
“When I came back to reward him the next season, I found him dead of a tomahawk wound. And scalped.”
Georgiana shivered. Outside was a land of shadows—and
death.
Windgate,
1673
Chapter 7
Upriver sped the River Witch. Forests and rounded hills were flying by in the sunlight as the wind whipped the sails and carried them on to Windgate.
But Georgiana, like her mother before her, was unprepared for the sight of the tall frowning castle that rose on the bluff to her right. Completed now, the Great Plan of its builder had become a reality. The building of it had spanned two generations, for the great stone edifice had been begun by Verhulst van Rappard’s father and completed years after the young patroon’s death. The house, she saw, would have a commanding view of the Hudson and all the river traffic, but from the river looking up it seemed a jumbled mass of stone wings and gables, of high-pointed Gothic windows and steep slate roofs that sprouted a forest of tall chimneys, magnificent, disdainful, aloof.
“This is Windgate,” Brett told her.
She nodded. “I know.”
Brett smiled down at her teasingly. “How did you know?”
“You said it was the finest house on the river and—it takes my breath away.”
She could feel the pride in him well up. “Is it not all that I said?”
“All that you said—and more,” she told him soberly, for she had been unprepared for such grandeur. This house had no outflung “welcoming arms” like Mirabelle. Its massive pile reared up awesomely before you, flinging down a challenge to all who plied the river. Those gray stone walls silently proclaimed that this was a baronial holding and any man rash enough to cross the lord of this stronghold did so at his peril.
Georgiana felt all that sink in on her as Brett went to speak to the schipper, for they would soon be making fast at the long wooden dock that stuck out into the river.
At least, she told herself ruefully, it is a house and land and not some other woman that he puts before me! Another woman—that I could not stand! For Georgiana had discovered something new about herself. She who had never felt any twinge of jealousy of any man before was wildly jealous of Brett. On shipboard, she had been the only woman, but once in New Orange she had felt tension mount inside her every time a passing woman on the street looked at Brett—and a violent twist of her heart every time he looked back!
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