Chance the Winds of Fortune

by Laurie McBain

  “Andrew? Andy, love? Where are you, Andy? Answer Mama, please, Andy,” she called softly, but the death-like silence only deepened.

  “Andy!” she screamed, forgetful of her precarious balance in the doorway. “Oh, Andy, where are you?” she cried. But the ominous gloom seemed to mock her as it echoed back her words.

  With a sigh, Sabrina surrendered to the despondency that had been shadowing her ever since Rhea had been kidnapped. The euphoria she had experienced upon learning that Kate had not murdered Rhea now vanished, plummeting her into a desolation of spirit. As she contemplated the certain death of her son, she now knew a depth of sorrow that filled her mind with a paralyzing black void.

  Rough hands reached out and grabbed her as she began sinking weakly to her knees, too tired to fight any longer against her grief.

  “Rina!” Lucien spoke harshly, because his relief was still overshadowed by the fear he had felt as he’d helplessly watched his wife slipping away from him, the gaping doorway looming perilously close to her swaying body.

  As he had neared the south stairs, her white-clad figure had seemed appallingly ghostlike in the eerie glow of the torches being carried by the group of men following him. They had been climbing the Grand Staircase in search of Kate when Richard had met them with his alarming news; then, upon leaving the nursery, they too had followed the trail of blood into the south wing. It was only as they’d neared the corridor leading to the south stairs that he’d realized Kate’s ultimate destination—for that was now her only hope of escape.

  Butterick had turned back with a contingent of men and was circling the grounds in the hope of cutting Kate off, but now, as Lucien saw Sabrina’s ravaged face, he realized that they had all been too late to stop Kate. Unlike Sabrina, he had forgotten the dangerous condition of the ancient staircase, but now, with a smoking torch illuminating the debris-filled stairwell, he remembered only too well.

  “Andrew,” he whispered.

  Richard leaned closer, holding his flickering torch lower as he strained to catch sight of any figure or movement below. But the shadows were too deep, and the area remained a silent well of death.

  Lucien held Sabrina against him, keeping her face turned away from the destruction below, in which the body of their young son lay.

  Richard continued to squat in the doorway, his nightshirt billowing around him. He refused to believe that this was the end, that his innocent little nephew was lying dead in that heap of rubbish. As he continued to stare unblinkingly, the light from the torches intensified, until the whole stairwell seemed alight with a thousand candles. “Lucien,” Richard said, glancing back at his brother-in-law. And this one grimly spoken word was enough to warn Lucien against what he was about to see. “It’s Butterick. They’re searching below.”

  Lucien tried to prevent Sabrina from glancing down, but she moved too quickly. Richard’s words had struck a note of response inside her, which cut through the blank numbness that had held her enthralled. Lucien could feel her trembling as they stared down at the nightmarish scene now revealed in the dancing torchlight. Kate was dead.

  Violent though her death had been, there was, strangely enough, a restfulness about her broken body. In death, Kate had found the peace that had eluded her in life. Her torment had finally come to an end—abruptly, yes, but the fates had smiled belatedly upon her at last. What she had so desperately sought to hide in life remained hidden in death, for the scarred half of her face was pressed to the earth. Enshrouded in black, the unmarred beauty of her face was like a cameo carved of palest ivory; it was smooth and cold to the touch and gave no indication of the ugliness that lay on the other side.

  It was therefore difficult for the subdued group of men standing around her fallen body to believe that this was the crazed woman who had murdered the elder Mr. Taber, kidnapped Lady Rhea Claire, and come close to destroying the Dominick family. There was only one among them who felt no pity as he stared down at Kate, and that was Butterick, who had known the wickedness of the young Kate Rathbourne. But a few of the younger men, who saw only the beauty in the lifeless face, knew a feeling of sadness at the apparent senselessness of this lovely woman’s death.

  Kate would have been amused to know this, and Butterick could have sworn he heard laughter as he stood there in the stone courtyard, chilled to the marrow by the icy gusts blowing out of the west country.

  He glanced around at the collapsed scaffolding and smashed remains of the old staircase. Shaking his head, he looked up at the figures standing above him like stone effigies. “We’re goin’ to have to be doin’ a powerful lot of diggin’ to get Lord Andrew out from beneath all of this, Your Grace,” he called through cupped hands. He kicked at a fallen piece of stonework, trying to forget the image of Her Grace’s anguished face. But it would only be getting worse, he thought unhappily, for the little lord could never have survived the fall, much less the collapse of the staircase and scaffolding.

  Sabrina pulled free from the warmth of Lucien’s arms and staggered against the far wall, unable to watch any longer. She was weeping softly, when she suddenly heard a shuffling, scratching noise. Thinking it a mouse, or even worse, a rat, she instinctively stepped away.

  But to her shock, she felt something reach out and grab hold of her bare ankle. Her scream caused Richard, who was about to retrace his steps to join the searchers below, to totter on the edge of the stairwell. He had not, however, planned his descent in quite so dramatic a manner and felt quite grateful for Lucien’s steadying hand pulling him away from the edge.

  As Richard turned, the light from his burning torch revealed his sister’s figure. Richard halted a foot behind Lucien, who had come to a sudden standstill when he caught sight of his wife.

  For neither Lucien nor Richard were prepared to see Sabrina standing there cradling her son in her arms, half crying, half laughing, as she met their disbelieving eyes over Andrew’s golden head.

  “He was crawling along the hall. I felt something grab my ankle. I thought it was a rat, and that is why I screamed,” Sabrina explained, her quivering words interspersed with Andrew’s pleased chuckles as she pressed kiss after kiss on his grimy face.

  Lucien said nothing.

  “Andrew is alive!” Richard called out to the men who were digging down below. Then he turned away, but not before he had seen Sabrina and Andrew enfolded in Lucien’s arms.

  Richard grinned widely in response to the cheer that went up from below; then he looked back at his young nephew, wondering why he was not dead. By all rights he should be, for Kate must have been carrying him when she fell to her death on the stones below. What had happened then, to spare his life?

  He glanced around the dusty corridor, trying to reenact the sequence of events; to Richard, a puzzle was a puzzle until he had solved it, and solved it must be before he could rest easy.

  He imagined Kate’s hurrying figure. She would have been slowed by the small boy she carried in her arms. She would have been searching frantically for the door to the south stairs. She would have stopped before it, then opened it to escape down the staircase that she remembered from more than a quarter of a century ago. She would not have hesitated to rush down it. And then she and Andrew would have been dead—but only Kate had died.

  A quarter of a century, Richard speculated, eyeing with growing curiosity the door to the stairwell. This was most likely the original door that had been hung centuries ago, and if the stairs were in so decrepit a condition that they had collapsed, then the odds were that the door was in a similar condition. To prove his theory, Richard reached out and firmly closed the door, momentarily startling Lucien and Sabrina from their absorption in their son.

  Their curious expressions became even more puzzled when Richard exclaimed, “Ah-ha!”

  Then he nearly fell into them when the door finally gave in to his ungentle persuasion and swung back at him with unnecessary force. Richard turned a
triumphant face to his perplexed audience. “It was stuck.”

  “That was obvious,” Lucien remarked with a smile, well used to his young brother-in-law’s eccentric ways.

  “Whatever are you talking about, Richard?” Sabrina asked in bewilderment. “But whatever it is, I think it can wait until we are out of this drafty hall. You and Andrew are going to catch your death of cold standing here in bare feet,” she said sensibly, but more than that, the gloom of the corridor was beginning to unnerve her.

  “Well, to put it quite simply, Rina, the door is warped,” Richard said, as if that explained everything.

  “I am sorry, but I don’t quite see what that has—”

  “Don’t you understand?” Richard interrupted patiently. “Kate would have had a devil of a time opening it. And she certainly could not have succeeded, wounded as she was, and burdened with Andrew. She would have needed both hands to open it. She had to put Andrew down while she struggled with the door. Her time was precious. She must have been frantic, for while she was wrestling with that stuck door, she could probably hear your footsteps, Rina, coming ever closer. Perhaps she even saw the flickering candlelight at the end of the corridor,” Richard said, his speculations vividly recreating the tragic scene of moments before.

  “Finally, she would have succeeded in opening the door, then she would have picked up Andrew and descended—and both would have died.” Richard spoke softly, for he had realized before either Lucien and Sabrina how close Andrew had come to dying with Kate on the stone floor of the courtyard below.

  “As chance would have it, while Kate was struggling with that warped door, Andrew, finding himself in unfamiliar surroundings, toddled off to explore. Kate had no light to find him by, nor did she have the time to search the length and breadth of the hall for him. She had to make a decision—whether to risk capture or to flee and save herself. We know which decision she made,” Richard stated, resisting the urge to glance down at Kate’s black-clad figure. Instead, he reached out and gently tweaked his nephew’s nose.

  Sabrina shivered, her arms tightening around Andrew’s soft body as she pressed him closer to her breast.

  “Come,” Lucien said, guiding his beloved wife and son from the scene of Kate’s death, where he believed Camareigh, the great house she’d coveted, and not chance, had meted out the ultimate justice.

  * * *

  A few hours later the glow of dawn was lightening the eastern horizon as Sabrina stared out at the distant hills. Now a bishop’s purple against the gilded heavens, they would soon turn somber against ashen skies.

  Sabrina sighed and turned away, the warmth of the fire drawing her to it. Sleep had been a stranger to her, and now as she waited for Lucien to return from making the arrangements for Kate’s burial, she found her thoughts lingering on what he’d said about Kate no longer having the power to hurt them.

  “But you are wrong, Lucien,” Sabrina whispered as she opened her clenched hand slowly and gazed down at the delicate diamond and sapphire ring resting on her palm.

  “Rhea,” Sabrina breathed, “I swear that I will never give up the hope that you still live. But where are you? What is happening to you now?” she cried, her shoulders shaking with the grief that would be her constant companion until she found her daughter. And unless that moment came, Kate had won.

  Seven

  Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.

  —John Donne

  Close to a fortnight had passed since the Sea Dragon had cast off her mooring lines and set sail for Antigua. The brigantine was laden with a cargo of lumber, tar, fish, and livestock, and it had been business as usual for its captain and crew, or so it had seemed to any interested bystanders on the docks in Charles Town.

  Only the Sea Dragon’s captain, her supercargo, and the steward had known that this was to be no ordinary run between the Indies and the Carolinas. None but these three knew that once the Sea Dragon’s cargo was discharged in St. John’s Harbour, she would set out on a venture which could change forever the lives of her crew. Whether her quest ended in good fortune or misfortune was the hazard of the die, but it was one which they had been willing to chance ever since prying open that strongbox unearthed on Trinidad.

  Soon, however, the true destination and purpose of the Sea Dragon’s voyage would be a secret no more, and then Longacres, the coxswain, would once again be dreaming of his tavern in St. Thomas; Cobbs, the bos’n, would be imagining himself the Norfolk country gentleman; MacDonald, the Scots sailmaker, would be designing his shop-yard along the banks of the Chesapeake; Trevelawny, the dour carpenter, would be seeing the familiar, rocky shores of Cornwall; Clarke, the quartermaster and self-styled dandy, would be conjuring images of himself in the finest silk, sipping a goblet of claret; and Seumus Fitzsimmons, the first mate, would be outfitting his newly purchased schooner for service as a privateer.

  Young Conny Brady, the cabin boy, had never stopped dreaming of sunken treasure and Spanish galleons haunted by drowned sailors. He had remained fired by his boyish dreams of fame and fortune, which a lifetime of adventure would surely reap.

  Houston Kirby’s gruff demeanor certainly would not alert the crew to the Sea Dragon’s secret. He’d had months to speculate calmly on the possible outcome of this voyage, and he had come to the rather uneasy conclusion that if a fortune they found, then ’twould have been an ill-fated voyage for one Dante Leighton.

  Nor would the crew of the Sea Dragon have gleaned anything out of the ordinary from the behavior of their captain. His grim-visaged expression seldom varied, except when he gazed upon the girl; then it became brooding, as if perplexed by her.

  Dante was gazing at her now, an unamused glint in his narrowed gray eyes. She was whispering into young Conny Brady’s ear, whose giggling laugh was drawing indulgent smiles from the men who always seemed to find some small task to keep them nearby whenever she came on deck. It seemed, at least to Dante’s cynical eye, as if she had bewitched the crew of the Sea Dragon. Every man jack of them had been disarmed by a pair of gentle violet eyes, and what once had been a crew to be reckoned with was now little more than a pack of grinning fools.

  Dante’s scowling gaze settled on his men who were gathered around the companion ladder on the quarterdeck, where Conny and the girl were sitting, their bare feet dangling short of the deck. Dante eyed with growing displeasure the beaming expressions on both Cobbs’s and Fitzsimmons’s faces as they listened to the girl’s quiet voice. She even had that old sea dog Longacres hanging on her every word. MacDonald, who was sitting nearby on a crate of clucking chickens, was apparently not immune to witchery either, for his blond mustache was twitching in response as he mended a length of canvas with sail needle and thimble. Dante’s eyes widened perceptibly when he heard a rustly laugh; turning his head slightly, he was startled to see even the Cornishman grinning over the girl’s story.

  His patience already had worn thin when he caught a whiff of something nauseatingly sweet. Looking around he saw Barnaby Clarke who, in fresh silk stockings and stock, would have been more at home in a salon than on the quarterdeck of a fighting brig. But it was when Dante saw Alastair Marlowe present the girl with a carefully peeled orange, the supercargo’s hand lingering against hers for just a moment too long, that Dante’s simmering temper boiled over.

  “Trim and make sail!” the captain of the Sea Dragon ordered in a voice harsher than it needed to be since the ship had been running smoothly by the lee with the northeast trades filling her sails.

  “Your coffee, m’lord.” Standing beside his captain, Kirby had spoken softly but won an irate look for his trouble. The captain knew well where Kirby’s sympathies lay.

  Even Jamaica seemed smitten with the girl and was forever rubbing himself against her legs, his feline pride gone by the board for a pat on the head, Dante thought disgustedly. He had just spotted the big orange tomcat amongst the men palpitating over
the girl.

  Dante stared hard at Rhea Claire Dominick and wondered if this could possibly be the same girl who had sneaked aboard the Sea Dragon little over a fortnight ago. Although still dressed in the same tattered green velvet she had been wearing then, she bore little resemblance to that wild-eyed, spitting creature he had discovered in his cabin that night.

  For under the conscientious, if at times exasperating, ministrations of Kirby, the girl had begun gradually to regain her strength. Part of his cure had included countless bowls of chicken broth, tankards of warm milk laced liberally with brandy, and, when he had thought she was up to it, his special stew, which the crew swore stuck to your ribs for days afterward.

  Night after night, Dante had swung from a hammock stretched between two deck beams in his cabin, watching with half-closed eyes the feverish girl sleeping fitfully in his bunk. And not for the first time had he found himself wondering about her, for this girl calling herself Rhea Claire Dominick remained an enigma to him.

  However, to the rest of the crew of the Sea Dragon, including Kirby and Alastair, both of whom should have known better, she was the tragic victim of foul play. To his men she was exactly what she claimed to be, and when her wide, innocent-seeming, violet eyes gazed into theirs, they never thought to question her or doubt her words.

  On the other hand, he had been caught up in a deception of his own making, for how could he possibly tell his men of his suspicions concerning this girl whom he’d caught rifling his cabin? They would surely ask themselves why he should be so concerned that she had seen the treasure map that they all thought to be worthless.

  And, to make matters worse, his men thought him a saintly fellow to have rescued the girl, when both he and the girl knew that the reality was quite different.

  She was no fool, however, this ragamuffin with the fine airs of a lady, and since she knew only too well his skepticism concerning her true identity, she had made a valiant effort to befriend his crew. But in order not to lose the sympathies she had so easily culled from them, she’d had to take heed of his warning.