Beyond the Savage Sea

by JoAnn Wendt

  When he heard Verity’s step on the stairs, he reluctantly dropped a soft kiss on Edwinna’s hair and went out to leave her in Verity’s capable hands. He and Verity conferred quietly in the entry hall as he drew on cloak and hat and gathered sword and buckler.

  “How is she, Drake?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances.” Weary as he was, Drake felt anger surging. “Damnation, Verity. I wanted good things for her, not this. I wanted her to have a good life. Instead? This! God damn it.”

  Verity smiled gently. “You’re fond of her, aren’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “You should lie down and rest, Drake.”

  “I will. I’ll nap at my Thames Street house. Tell Arthur to open the wine shop at the usual hour. I’ll join him when I’ve rested. Tell Edwinna...tell her I’ll come see her again tomorrow.”

  Verity scrutinized him, older sister fashion. “I take back what I said. You are not a great fool, Drake. You are rather nice.”

  He opened the door. A gust of November wind blew in.

  “Is that official? Or just a momentary opinion?”

  “Momentary, I’m sure.” She kissed him good-bye—a peck on the cheek.

  * * * *

  When Drake returned home that night, he found Anne contrite and sweet and apologetic. Her attitude diffused his anger instantly. When she came running into his arms, he felt a surge of love that seemed greater than anything he’d ever felt for her. What they had that night was a honeymoon, sensual and erotic, with wine sipping in bed and endless sex play. When he came to climax—to that glorious moment men called sudden vehemence—she didn’t ask him to withdraw. He came in her ferociously, spasm after spasm. It was glory.

  * * * *

  Worried about Edwinna, Drake stole an hour from his business every day and walked up to Cornhill from his wine shop. He made no secret of the visits, and they irritated Anne. But then, Anne’s visits to court irritated him. Without asking his permission, she’d begun to go to court regularly. He hated it. The thought of lazy, lounging lords ogling his beautiful wife—particularly, promiscuous lizards like the duke of Buckingham and Lord Jermyn, who it was said slept with men as willingly as they slept with women, revolted him.

  But he couldn’t forbid Anne. It would be a cruelty. She’d never been so happy. Her heart was set on going to court. Even the king had sent him a very pretty letter requesting “Lady Anne” be allowed to sing at court as often as possible. So Drake granted her two days a week at court. He thought himself generous, but Anne did not. On the five days of each week she could not go, she smoldered with resentment. It was a sore point between them, sparking many a quarrel. So it was a relief to Drake to sit with Edwinna for a few minutes every day, talking companionably in Verity’s parlor. This sensible woman, he knew, wouldn’t give two pins to go to court.

  On a sunny Sabbath when Anne turned up her nose at his suggestion of giving the children a day’s outing at the Tower of London, to let them see the lions and the elephant that were kept in cages there on public display, he went with the children to Verity’s house and took Edwinna with them. The children liked her and she liked them. She was as patient with them as she’d been in Barbados with Tutu and her slave children. Katherine, especially, took to Edwinna at once and put her little hand into Edwinna’s as they strolled among the sightseers in the Tower. Edwinna told her a story of Priscilla’s adventures in the boiling house and the cane fields, and Katherine clamored for more stories. Drake and Edwinna shared a smile over the top of Katherine’s blond head.

  The autumn wind blew briskly. The Tower of London was a cold place. Drake wouldn’t come here but for the children’s pleasure. His father had caught his final fatal illness here, imprisoned in the dungeon. Drake hated the place.

  “What do I call you?” Katherine piped, looking up at Edwinna.

  “Well, my black children on my plantation call me Mama. You could call me Mama Edwinna.” She shot Drake an uncertain look. “If that’s all right?”

  He smiled. “It’s perfect. I like the ring of it.” She smiled then, relieved, and they gazed at each other, their eyes filling with remembrance. They’d shared a lot: cane fields, middle-of-the-night treks, the bond- slave revolt, the loss of Marigold and Jeremy, happier things...bed. Their eyes met intimately. She quickly looked away.

  “Mama Edwinna, when are we going to Priscilla’s house?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, Katherine. But I will be leaving soon for Barbados, and when I get there I will have Priscilla write you a letter. Will you like that?”

  “Yes! With lots of drawings.”

  “Lots of them,” Edwinna promised.

  “I want a letter, too,” William demanded. “I want mine to be written by a slave. He should be very tall—even taller than Mama says the king is. And he should be very black and very fierce. And he should draw pictures.”

  Drake and Edwinna shared a smile.

  “I have the very slave, William,” Edwinna told him. “His name is Macaw. He is my boiling house slave. He is tall, black, and very fierce. He once tried to hang his own wife. Your papa stopped him.”

  “You did, Papa?” William screwed up his face and looked up at him with admiration.

  “If Mama Edwinna says so, I guess I did.” Macaw. Incredible how a name could bring back such vivid sensations: the trade winds blowing sweetly, the sugary smell of a fresh cut cane field, blue herons flying into the sunset, pink coral dawns. With surprise, he realized he missed it all a little bit.

  “Papa, that’s brave.”

  “Thank you! I consider that my finest compliment.”

  The day passed too soon. Edwinna was easy to be with. She made no demands on him emotionally. She didn’t drain him, as Anne often did, keeping him in a state of jealous agitation. But then, there was reason. He loved Anne beyond all reason, so of course she drained him. Now and then when his eyes met Edwinna’s, the memory of intimacy sparked between them, but she always quickly looked away.

  When he delivered Edwinna back to Cornhill, Katherine didn’t want to let her go. She hugged the children, then alighted from the hackney coach. He walked her to the door.

  A pale winter sun was about to set. Cold wind gusted. London winter was about as different from a Barbados winter as the moon from the sun.

  At the door, she smiled. “Thank you, Drake, for today. Thank you for sharing your children with me.”

  “I wanted you to know them.”

  “And I wanted very much to know them.”

  They looked at each other uncertainly. She pressed her lips together—that wide, sensuous mouth that he’d kissed so often and with such pleasure such a long time ago.

  “Drake? The ship that you arranged for me to take passage on arrives tomorrow. It will leave two days later for Barbados.”

  He drew a breath. “So soon?”

  She nodded. “I would like to say good-bye right now.”

  “No. I want to bring you a farewell gift.”

  “You already did. You gave me today, a day with your children.”

  “No. I will come tomorrow. I want to bring you something.”

  “You needn’t.”

  “I want to.”

  * * * *

  The next afternoon he brought a gift he could ill afford— an opal ring set in gold, which he gave to her in the privacy of Verity’s parlor and which made her cry, and which, a month later, served as the occasion of a heated quarrel between himself and Anne when she found the bill for it.

  “Drake, it’s beautiful,” Edwinna said, slipping it on her finger.

  “I wanted you to have something beautiful to remember me by.”

  The November wind howled. The fire crackled and sent forth its warmth. She wiped her eyes with one finger. His strong, brave Edwinna, who had saved him from the sea. Edwinna, who’d shot a bondslave dead to save his life. His tall, plain, spinster bride. Lord, had he ever truly thought her that? She seemed so lovely to him now.

  She
laughed a little, a teary laugh.

  “Did you really think I would need a ring to remember you?”

  He smiled. “I’m vain enough to think not, but I wanted you to have it anyway. I wanted to give you something beautiful.”

  “I’ll wear it always.”

  “But not when you knock on sugar pots.”

  She smiled, her voice choked. “But not when I knock on sugar pots.” She looked up, eyes shining, “I have a gift for you, too, Drake. Not really for you, but for Katherine and William.” He frowned in curiosity as she went to a side table and brought him a thick sheaf of folded parchment paper.

  “Please read it. I suppose...because of Thomas and Harry, death is on my mind.”

  It was her will. Frowning, he took it to the window light to scan it. She’d made bequests of money to Plum, Tarcher, and smaller ones to Verity and her overseers. She’d named slaves whom she wanted manumitted. To Kena, Tutu, and David she’d willed George Crawford’s plantation. Drake read on, then looked up in astonishment. She’d left her largest, most valuable possession—Crawford Plantation—to Katherine and William!

  “Edwinna, you cannot do this. You are not thinking clearly.”

  “I’m thinking very clearly, Drake. I want them to have it.”

  “No! You’ll marry again someday. Who knows, you may have children of your own. At least, you will want your plantation to belong to your husband.”

  She shook her head, her thick hair sweeping her shoulder. “No. I won’t marry again. As for children...” She left the rest unsaid.

  “Nevertheless, I will not keep this.” He put it back on the table with a firm hand. “Rethink it, Edwinna. It’s too much. It’s great wealth.”

  “I wish you would keep this copy of my will.”

  “No. I want you to reconsider.”

  “If you wish. But I won’t change my mind. I intend to leave a copy with Verity and Arthur.”

  They looked at each other. He drew a deep breath. It was time to go. He didn’t want to, and she didn’t want him to. They gazed into each other’s eyes. He refused to cheapen the moment by taking her in his arms and kissing her. He didn’t have that right. She was no longer his wife. It would insult her. So, simply, humbly, he said his farewell in words.

  “Good-bye, then, Edwinna.”

  “Good-bye, Drake.”

  He looked at her a moment longer, picked up his cloak and hat and strode out of the parlor, pausing in the doorway to say it again.

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Edwinna stood at the window and numbly watched him go. With the wind whipping his cloak and the broad brim of his hat, he stood at the street and took one last look back at her. He lifted his hand. She lifted hers. Then he walked down Cornhill and out of her life.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  Drake worked to exhaustion that winter. He wanted to—for the sake of William and Katherine and Anne, for Verity and Arthur.

  He had a new sign made for the shop, identifying himself as the king’s royal vintner. Suddenly, London found it fashionable to buy wine from him. Business increased a hundredfold, which meant hasty trips across the Channel to the wine cellars of France and freezing cold vigils on the wintry docks of London whenever a ship came in bearing a cargo of wine that he might wish to purchase. He sold nothing that was not fine quality. The Steel Wine Shop on Thames Street had represented quality and honesty for two centuries. He intended to uphold that tradition.

  Yet, finances tormented him. He was deeply in debt. Much of the indebtedness stemmed from the Cromwell years when his father, and later he, had been taxed, dunned, persecuted, harassed. Striving to repay these debts, the money Verity and Arthur had advanced, and Anne’s ransom loan levied against the shop, he sometimes sat in his wine shop well past midnight, his head in his hands. The mounting bills for Anne’s pretty court clothes seemed the last straw.

  He would glance up from his ledgers and long to see Edwinna sitting across the worktable from him, working on her own ledgers—his sensible Edwinna, with her silly hair braid and her zeal for work. Thoughts of Edwinna calmed his heart.

  Anne made him uneasy in his heart. She was so...restless. His refusal to allow her more than two court days a week smoldered between them like an underground peat pit fire, difficult to detect with the naked eye, but smoking and apt to blaze into a conflagration quarrel at any moment.

  Yet he remained adamant. He was not a liberal husband. He was not about to send Anne, like an unprotected chick, into that den of foxes. She was under the king’s protection, Anne argued. Ha! In Drake’s opinion, the king was the least trustworthy of all when it came to pretty women.

  He wished she would show more interest in the children, but she seemed content to leave their upbringing in the hands of tutor and housemaid. She loved them; Drake felt certain of it. Sometimes she romped and played with them as merrily as a child herself. Sometimes he would come home to find Anne seated at the virginal, Katherine in her lap, teaching Katherine to play and sing. Those moments warmed his heart, but they came rarely. In the main she treated the children like playthings, to be enjoyed one day, ignored the next. He didn’t know what to make of her.

  Still, in bed she was the center of his universe. There she was passionate, her nature as inventively erotic as his own. They thrilled each other, in bed no other woman existed for him. Only Anne. Anne!

  On a night like tonight, however, sitting alone in his drafty wine shop at midnight, with only the winter wind and a candle and a scuttling mouse for company, and with financial worries weighing him down, he longed for Edwinna. Edwinna, who could understand a man’s money problems; Edwinna, who wouldn’t care what she wore to court or if she even went; Edwinna, who cheered his soul, who gave him...peace.

  * * * *

  Edwinna welcomed the long, arduous voyage home—the solitary nature of it, the loneliness. She badly needed to be alone. She needed privacy to grieve for Thomas and Harry. She hadn’t been able to grieve properly in Verity’s small, crowded house.

  As the ship plowed south she allowed the days and weeks and nautical miles to wash over her until time and distance blended into a blur and she scarcely noticed or cared when one week ended and the next began.

  A month into the voyage she awoke to a startling event. She was bleeding slightly. She was stunned to discover she’d gotten her monthly courses. She tended herself, then curled into the goose-down quilt in her bunk and savored the unfamiliar feminine cramping and the wonder of it. Her courses. She was a woman!

  She lay there filled with joy, and at the same time, infinitely sad. Had it happened two months earlier, she might have been carrying Drake’s child. She might have had something of Drake to keep and carry back to Barbados with her.

  Her lips parted with surprise. This was Drake’s doing— Drake, who had helped her become a real woman; Drake, who’d given her his companionship by day and his passion by night; Drake, who’d given her fondness. Drake had reawakened her womanhood. She contemplated it with wonder.

  He’d thought his parting gift had been an opal ring, but he’d given her much more. He’d given her back her femininity.

  * * * *

  Drake’s heart leapt with pleasure when he received his first letter from Barbados, from Edwinna. She’d written cordially—a letter dealing mainly with sugar and needed supplies. She told him all the news. Her voyage had been safe and uneventful. In her absence Kena had been safely delivered of a pretty baby girl whom David had named Mary Rose Edwinna. Tutu was a little jealous but loved the baby. Harvest was going well, although an out-of-season hurricane had struck Barbados, flattening three cane fields, which she’d had to dig up and replant. Last, she hoped it might amuse him to hear that Macaw was bedeviling her, requesting a fourth wife.

  Drake smiled reading this last dab of news, but his smile was bittersweet. He missed Edwinna. He was surprised at how much. He missed her sensible ways and her lovely eyes and, bastard that he was, he missed he
r in his bed.

  The letter so gladdened his-heart that he kept it in his pocket, which gave rise to a quarrel when Anne found it there while brushing his jacket. They fought hotly. Anne accused him of being in love with Edwinna. Drake denied it. They fought until bedtime. When the quarrel spilled over into bed, Drake lost patience and ravished her.

  The quarrel melted away in the heat of passion, and later, when they lay lovingly entwined, both sated, both content, watching moonlit clouds sail past the window, Drake scarcely remembered what the quarrel had been about.

  He pressed a kiss to her temple. “It’s you I love. You.”

  “I do love you, Drake.” Her confession thrilled him, for of late he had wondered. Sometimes she seemed to hate him for not letting her spend more time at court. Now they lay content in each other’s arms and talked drowsily. This, he loved—this intimacy of spirit, this closeness.

  “I’m only sorry we’re poor.”

  “We’re not poor, Anne. If business continues as well as it has, I will have my head above water in five years.”

  “That long?”

  He smiled. “That’s not long—not for indebtedness.”

  “Why don’t you ignore your debts? The gentlemen of the court pay their debts not the least attention. They brag of it.”

  “Perhaps that’s why I’m not a gentleman of the court,” he said caustically.

  She peered at him in the darkness, not much liking that. “At least they don’t take their debts so seriously and boringly as you do. They all jest about how much they owe their tailors. Drake, you would have laughed at the funny story Lord Kersey told about climbing out the window of his lodgings to avoid his tailor when the poor, befuddled fool came collecting.”

  “I’m a tradesman. I like to be paid for my wine so I doubt I would have been amused.”

  She trailed a soft hand down his chest and his belly, to his groin. “Don’t be foolish.” Foolish. It was a word that bothered him. He drew her hand away. “Drake, they all are ordering grand new suits of clothes for the coronation. Petticoat breeches with Flemish lace. Capes of cloth of gold. Lord Kersey is having seed pearls sewn on his waistcoat.”