The handsome judge was indeed a notorious wencher and almost invariably successful with women. Many a ripe young beauty had lain in his arms since that night in the garden when he had tripped young Mistress Wells, but her memory had remained green. Even now he could recall her soft resilient flesh beneath his roving spatulate fingertips her instantaneous and spirited response—imagine what that response would be like were it willing!
He delivered himself of a sigh—quite appropriate under the circumstances in the opinion of the audience. How could they know he sighed only because he dared give the accused nothing but speedy justice and not the slow wait in jail and little “visits” in the night that would have pleased him better?
He caught at that moment the evil expression on Mortimer Avery’s stern countenance, as he sat with taupe satin legs crossed beside his pale wife, who clutched her smelling salts in the front row. Mortimer wished to have done with it, of course, get Mistress Wells hanged quickly. And he had better do it. Quickly.
His gaze went back to the accused. Proud and passionate, she stared back at him. His contemptuous gaze flicked over her, from her shimmering golden head to the toe of her satin slipper—then came back to linger on that heaving blue velvet bodice. The flesh above, pale as watered silk, still tempted him. His eyelids fell hoodlike as he let his cold eyes range over that wondrous white expanse that seemed to beckon him. And what real harm, he asked himself lazily, to let her speak—nay, it would be best to let her do so. It would make a better impression on the citizenry, especially since the conclusion was foregone. Then no one could say later that he had muzzled her, denied her a fair trial—not even if his heavy debts to Mortimer Avery should somehow be brought to light. Far better to let her speak now, then let her make the usual confession and plea for redemption on the scaffold; none of it mattered anyway.
“Speak,” he said indifferently. “This is a just court. We will hear you out.”
Imogene cast a sweeping glance over the crowd. In the forefront Mortimer Avery and his wife, wishing her dead. Around them, supporting them, a bevy of plume-hatted gentry, the periwigged men—some of them remembering her rebuffs—taking snuff, the embroidered, satin-clad women— glad to see her brought low—idly wafting ivory fans. Somewhere in there was a friendly face—Bess Duveen’s—but at the moment Imogene could not find it. She could tell them the truth, of course—that Giles had found her and Stephen clasped naked on the beach in scalding embrace with the onrushing surf licking lazily at their toes—and died when he plunged forward, tripped and impaled himself on Stephen’s hastily drawn defensive sword. It was accident, death by misadventure—but never murder. She could tell them, but would this crowd of fishermen and farmers and tenants on Avery land and riffraff from the towns roundabout—tavern wenches and harlots and their ilk—believe that? Surely they’d prefer the excitement of a hanging?
Her gaze left them for the jury. Twelve solid-looking men clad in their Sunday best; wearing stiff uncomfortable white collars that their wives had no doubt fresh-starched and ironed for the occasion. She looked into their stolid faces and knew that they would never understand what had lured a golden-haired aristocrat and a copper-haired adventurer to chance it all for love. Not these dull-faced men who worked dawn to dark and trudged home of nights to fat complaining wives and houses full of clamoring children—-they never knew what it was to wing it to the stars, or look up at a mocking moon and curse their fate. She would never get through to them—never. They would shake their heads and mutter, and then they would hang her high....
As she stood there, poised on the brink, she seemed to hear again the wild surf ringing in her ears and see Stephen’s wicked laughing face as he pulled her, naked and protesting, from the sea to claim her body and her soul upon a warm sunlit dune on St. Agnes Isle. She had danced with him beside the parapet of Star Castle, he had fought a duel for her, and beneath blazing stars flashing from a black velvet sky they had plighted their troth. How she had loved him ...and he had proved false. He had gone away and left her to all that had happened later. But just for the moment an old love’s enchanting shadow had drifted over the courtroom and she had seen through the mists of yesterday another time, another place.
The vision left her and she was standing squarely in the dock in the stark light of day, facing her accusers. Men had called her rash and reckless and wild and willful—and she was all of those things. But no one anywhere had ever doubted her courage. For Imogene was not only a beauty— she had a fighting heart.
If the truth would not save her, something else would!
The jury listened raptly as her lovely voice rang out. They were waiting for that cool mask of challenge to break up, waiting for her to plead for her life, to throw herself on their mercy, waiting for her to weep.
They would wait a long time for that, for the dazzling woman in the dock was cast in a different mold, and what she had to say left them startled, set them back on their heels casting uneasy glances at each other.
It was a day nobody in Cornwall would soon forget.
BOOK I
Trouble in Paradise
This bright moment filled with joy,
Will it warn the girl and boy
Of the earthly paradise they well might lose?
Will they realize its worth?
Hold it dearest on this earth?
Will they choose aright, or will they even choose?
PART ONE
Veronique
Silk skirts and mended petticoats
Blow in the same light breeze,
And duchesses and chambermaids
Are sisters beneath the chemise!
The Island of Tortuga,
1661
CHAPTER 1
Like a hot golden ball, the sun rose over the buccaneer island of Tortuga. It sent its fierce rays impartially over Cayona’s busy quay, the harbor alive with ships, and above them the frowning gray Mountain Fort whose guns gave them safe harbor, and—more caressingly perhaps—through the open bedroom windows of an imposing white-stuccoed stone house where a golden woman, lying late abed, awoke to find her lover gone.
It was those burning rays that had awakened her, shafting a scorching path through the wooden lattice into her bedchamber to sear her long tapering white legs and slender body naked to the heat, and pour its molten light over her long golden hair, turning it to leaping flame.
Now lmogene’s delft blue eyes blinked into the tropical sunlight and she woke confused, and realized that it was only a bolster her slender white arms were clutching—and not the lean hard body of Tortuga’s most celebrated buccaneer.
For a moment she sighed and relaxed, letting her smooth breasts scrape sensuously against the feather bolster. It seemed but moments before that van Ryker had been making love to her, her slender nakedness locked in his strong, sun-bronzed arms, her whole female body alight with the fire of his passion. She had felt herself swept up by that passion, driven before his ardor like a leaf before a hurricane, and the whole night had been one long conflagration of touching and sighs, of tangled limbs and soft murmurs and little bursts of shared laughter over secret things of the heart. And as their passions rose and towered, lingering expectation gave way to soul-shattering excitement and they were tossed aloft and crested into a glittering unreal world of magical splendor and exotic delights, until with mingled hearts and minds they had drifted softly downward to lie together in utter content, with van Ryker’s lean form lying relaxed beside her, lazily caressing her tingling nakedness in the afterglow.
With a little shudder of regret, Imogene pushed away the bolster but it left her fingers reluctantly. Her blue eyes gleamed with pride as she thought of the man whose head had so lately reposed on that bolster: tall and dark and arresting, accounted the best blade in all the Caribbean.
But it was not the intrepid buccaneer who swept Spanish decks clean with broadsides from the Sea Rover that Imogene loved—nor yet the genial freebooter who rested his booted heels upon a tavern table, le
aned back and matched the sturdiest rogues drink for drink.
She knew the man behind the mask, knew that he fought under a name and a flag not even his own. She knew him for what he was—an Englishman hiding from the law for a crime he had not committed, who had taken a Dutch name not only for concealment (for he spoke Dutch fluently) but for the convenience of trading his captured Spanish goods for higher prices in Dutch New Amsterdam than they would bring in overstocked Tortuga or Port Royal.
And Esthonie Touraille, wife of Tortuga’s French governor, had dared to suggest that his affections might wander—indeed, might have wandered already!
The thought gave her energy, even in this oppressive heat that hung over the island. She sat up, tossed her long legs over the side of the bed and stretched her white arms above her head. Her bare toe caught in something and she smiled down at the little mound of lace-trimmed white cambric on the floor—her night rail, hastily shed and somehow fallen from the bed. She rose, snatched up a sheer lacy chemise and felt it slither luxuriously down over her sleek hips and firm thighs. Its light skirts billowed around her ankles as she strode across the room and flung wide the shutters that an errant breeze was just blowing shut.
The town of Cayona stretched before her, with its maze of crooked streets. And beyond the sprawl of taverns and brothels and inns, the quay where heaped-up Spanish loot was being sold. And beyond that the ships. A smile curved her soft lips as she saw the Sea Rover's golden hull gleaming in the sunlight—van Ryker’s vessel. Of course, those other captured galleons lying alongside were his too, a whole covey of them, for Captain van Ryker had done the impossible—he had captured an entire Spanish treasure flota and the buccaneers were still tallying up his wealth.
But now her delft blue gaze glimpsed something else: a raven-haired woman, riding by, cast an upward look at the house. An arrogant woman with smooth olive skin and long, wickedly shaped amber eyes, and a haughty tilt to her head. Involuntarily Imogene drew in her breath and stepped back from that hard predatory gaze that raked the building. Her mouth hardened.
Veronique Fondage (according to the governor’s wife) had sworn she would wrest van Ryker from his golden English bride. And while the bride had lain asleep, Veronique was on the prowl and looking far too beautiful in her sleek black taffeta riding habit. And that rankled too because Veronique, who had been rescued from one of the galleons of the Spanish treasure flota, had been lent that very riding habit by Esthonie Touraille, the governor’s wife, who had had the fabric as a gift from van Ryker.
Imogene closed the shutters with a slam. Sight of that woman with her flaunting beauty had brought to mind her conversation of yesterday afternoon with Esthonie Touraille.
“Ah, you will have to take second place to Veronique, I fear, ma chère," Esthonie had purred. They’d been seated in the garden courtyard of the green-shuttered white house that served as a “governor’s palace’’ for Tortuga. “Even her name, Fondage, means ‘melting.’ ” She waved her ivory-paneled fan meaningfully. “And how appropriate! Have you looked into her eyes? Amber—with little leaping yellow flames in them!”
Imogene had resettled her lettuce green silk skirts on the white marble bench and bent down and stroked Malcolm, the Tourailles’ cat, before answering. Malcolm stretched his white and orange body and purred appreciatively. She replied without looking up. “Van Ryker has sympathy for the lost,” she told Esthonie shortly. “And”—this to remind Esthonie that Veronique had recently been a prisoner of the Spanish—“for the trapped.”
“Lost? Trapped?” Esthonie’s expressive French brows shot up. “I doubt Veronique has ever been lost in her life—or trapped. She would have had those Spaniards wrapped around her little finger long before their ship ever saw the Spanish coast! Ah, it is too bad she speaks no English and you no French. Van Ryker”—this to remind Imogene that van Ryker spoke French fluently—“conversed with her for perhaps two hours in my salon after he brought her to me. Is that a new gown? I don’t recall having seen it before.”
Imogene, nettled at being reminded that Veronique, as a rescued French aristocrat, was now a houseguest of Tortuga’s French governor, shrugged that off. “Van Ryker was only being polite, Esthonie. And yes, it is a new gown. From Paris.” She knew that would irritate the governor’s envious lady.
“Polite? Polite? You think that was his reason?” Esthonie rolled her eyes at the cascading bougainvillaea. “Ah, you English, you must be made of ice. I would be yearning to pull out every hair of Veronique’s so lovely head if she spent so much time with my husband!” Her gaze raked over the delicate pale green silk flounces of Imogene’s wide skirts, wandered with annoyance over the delicate silver embroidery of the bodice that gave it an icy look, cool and tempting below the smooth white skin of her breast tops, so tauntingly displayed by the gown’s low-cut neckline. “I have not seen that petticoat, either,” she grumbled.
“No?” Imogene moved her green satin slippers artfully so that the thin moss-green taffeta of her frostily embroidered petticoat rustled to advantage. She fixed her tormentor with a sweet smile. “But this petticoat is quite old, Esthonie. I have had it for at least two months! And”— she leaned forward to give her opponent the coup de grâce because Esthonie’s sly barbs had upset her— “I imagine Veronique has probably spent at least as much time with Gauthier, since she is a guest in your house!”
Esthonie’s dark eyes left the petticoat and traveled to Imogene’s slightly malicious smile. She meant to wipe that smile off the English beauty’s face.
“Ah, but no so intimately! With Veronique stretched out at her ease on the red velvet divan in my drawing room and Captain van Ryker lounging there with his long legs crossed, observing her as he sipped his Malaga.” Having sent her barb home, Esthonie leaned back and fanned her plump face vigorously and resettled her black brocade skirts. “Tell me, do you think I should redo the walls now that I have the red velvet divan? The green walls seem to clash with it.”
“Esthonie,” laughed Imogene, “in the time that I have known you, you have already redecorated that room three times. It was gold and you changed it to ‘ashes of roses,’ then to ivory and lastly to green. Don’t you tire of having the place torn up?”
“I was thinking perhaps a soft red—not quite a puce but nearly so. In time for my next party.”
Imogene felt sympathy for the short, voluble little French governor, who needs must live in a house in which the furniture was constantly being whisked in and out to make way for the painters. She reminded herself that Esthonie, when not eaten up with envy, had been very kind to her since her arrival in this buccaneers’ stronghold, and that Esthonie’s parties were almost the only social life the island afforded. “The red velvet divan does dominate the room,” she agreed. “So perhaps you are right to change the walls.” Though not to puce, surely!
Mention of the divan brought Esthonie back to her guest, Veronique. Her jet-spangled bodice shook as she leaned forward. “I can tell you she had a lot to say to him!”
“Say to who?” asked Imogene with feigned innocence.
“To your husband, of course!” Esthonie’s fan fluttered indignantly. “She talked and talked while he interposed questions to draw her out.”
The shadow of a frown passed over lmogene’s usually tranquil countenance. She could see the scene as Esthonie must have seen it—a lustrous woman, elegantly displayed in black satin and pearls (for Veronique usually affected black satin in the evening), with her heavy black hair swept up in that unique coiffure and cascading down in shiny ringlets. She could see those amber eyes with their flickering little yellow flames playing over van Ryker’s sardonic face, challenging him to desire her. And she could see her lean buccaneer, elegant in the dove gray silk breeches and silver-shot doublet and wide-topped polished black boots he would no doubt have worn to call at the “governor’s palace,” could see him lean forward, debonair as always, with the frosty lace of his cuffs spilling over his fine hands as he refilled a Venetian goblet
with wine for the lady, could see him leaning back considering her from those saturnine features, the gray eyes hooded, contemplative.
What would he have been thinking? That she was desirable forbidden fruit? And would that not make her all the more attractive?
It also rankled that when she had been introduced to Veronique at Esthonie’s house, Veronique had met her polite nod with a burst of French in which the words El Cruzado came through plainly.
“What is she saying?” Imogene, who spoke no French, had asked Esthonie.
“She is telling you how much she enjoyed her voyage here aboard the Sea Rover."
“I’ve no doubt she enjoyed it!” A woman like Veronique must always enjoy being the sole woman amid a shipload of lusty men. “But I heard her mention El Cruzado."
“That is what she calls the Sea Rover,” supplied Esthonie. “She says it was once Don Luis Alvarez’s flagship.”
Imogene was well aware the great golden-hulled Sea Rover had been called El Cruzado when van Ryker had seized her from the Spanish. But even she had not known that it had been flagship of the fleet of Don Luis, grandee of Spain, a man in the confidence of kings. It nettled her that van Ryker—who must be Veronique’s source for this information— had told Veronique and not herself the great ship’s history.
“Ask her how she knows that,” she had demanded bluntly.
A rapid conversation in French ensued and Imogene had seen a hunted look appear suddenly in Veronique’s amber eyes. “She says,” reported Esthonie, “that she once saw El Cruzado in a French port and recognized her by the magnificent golden figurehead.”
Wild Willful Love Page 2
