Wild Willful Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Captain van Ryker may have run away with Veronique,” she said in an attempt to startle Virginie into more rational behavior.

  “With Veronique?” gasped Virginie. “Then that explains why Georgette—” She stopped short.

  “Explains why Georgette what?” demanded her mother impatiently. “Where is Georgette, anyway? She should be up by now.”

  Virginie considered her answer carefully before she spoke. “That explains why Georgette dressed up in Veronique’s clothes last night. I suppose Veronique gave them to her before she left.”

  “Gave them to her?” Esthonie half rose from the table. “Georgette!” she shouted. “Georgette, come here this instant!”

  There was no answer from Georgette but there was instead an insistent knocking on the front door. It was opened to reveal a panting Dr. Argyll, his eyes bloodshot but determined. He had hold of Andy Layton—in fact, he had him by the scruff of the neck and was propelling the protesting lad forward.

  All the company at the table considered the little doctor in astonishment. None of them had ever seen him so aroused, for his teeth were actually bared. Esthonie was about to ask him if he had taken leave of his senses when he gave Andy a sudden shake.

  “Speak!” he commanded.

  Red-faced and embarrassed, Andy squirmed but he was field in an implacable grip. “I—I happened to be outside the house last night,” he began haltingly.

  “You were lurking in the bushes. Admit it!” roared Dr. Argyll.

  “Well, why didn’t you come inside?” demanded Esthonie tartly. “After all, we sent word to Dr. Argyll that both you and your brother were invited to the wedding.”

  Andy gave the little doctor a hurt look but found no comfort there. In fact, he felt himself being shaken impatiently.

  “And Mademoiselle Fondage came out and met Captain van Ryker,” he blurted out. “And they went away and then they came back.”

  “She did have a rendezvous with him!” marveled Virginie. “She said she did, but I didn’t half believe her.”

  “Veronique?” Esthonie didn’t understand. “What’s this about Veronique and van Ryker?”

  “Well, he brought her back and he left her here. Then she went into the courtyard and there were a dozen men waiting—I think they were buccaneers because they had cutlasses and pistols and—well,” he finished lamely, “they looked like buccaneers. And they took her away.”

  “Carried her away in a sack!” roared Dr. Argyll, giving the young culprit a shake that rattled his teeth. “And you didn’t report it! Instead you slunk home and pulled the covers over your head!”

  “Veronique? Taken?” cried Esthonie. “Then you mean she didn’t run away with Captain van Ryker?” She stopped suddenly for Virginie had clapped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wild. “Whatever is the matter, Virginie? You look ill!”

  “That wasn’t Veronique who was taken,” gasped Virginie. “It must have been Georgette dressed up as Veronique! She said she had a rendezvous with Captain van Ryker and he was going to give her a string of pearls. She said he was going to get rid of Imogene and they’d have a buccaneer’s marriage. Oh”—she wailed—“why didn’t I believe her?”

  The governor sat thunderstruck but Esthonie didn’t wait to hear it all. She was already running to Georgette’s room.

  The bed, she saw, had not been slept in. And a quick check revealed that all Georgette’s clothes were there. If she had left, she had certainly left in other garments—very possibly Veronique’s, for a search of Veronique’s room revealed only two items missing: her riding habit and the black satin gown she usually wore in the evening.

  “Oh, you don’t think Imogene found out about Georgette’s flirtation with van Ryker and arranged to have Georgette kidnapped?” cried Virginie in a tragic voice.

  “No, I do not!” snapped her mother. “I think that van Ryker, long planner that he is, arranged it all to make us think that! I do not know what else is afoot but oh, Gauthier!” She turned with a wail to her husband. “Captain van Ryker has made off with Georgette!”

  At that very moment a meek and very penitent Georgette was slumped beside the rail of the Alforza, for Don Luis himself had engineered last night’s “raid.” It had been carried out by Spanish officers who had come ashore in a longboat dressed as buccaneers to snatch from the “governor’s palace” a woman with a heartshaped birthmark on her arm—and they had brought her back as planned to the tall-castled Spanish ship. Georgette was slumped there because Don Luis had not yet decided what to do with her. She was still wearing the black satin gown she had donned so proudly last night. It had seemed such a great lark at the time. Now in the bitter light of morning, with the gown hopelessly rumpled from having been carried about and slept in—if you could call it sleep, that frightened catnapping that Georgette had engaged in—she was looking hopelessly out to sea. Her elaborate hairdo was rumpled and undone, the carefully contrived heart-shaped birthmark smudged past recognition.

  Her flesh still crawled as she remembered being dragged into the great cabin where Don Luis, handsomely garbed in black and gold, as became a grandee of Spain, had risen to his full height, and then seemed to rise higher and higher in his fury as he exclaimed with a bitter oath in Spanish, “This is not my wife! What deception is this?”

  Georgette had shrunk back in her fright, not understanding what he meant. Don Luis, white with fury, had waved away the man who had brought her and, once he was gone, tried her in English.

  “This is my wife’s doing, don’t deny it. Where did you leave her?”

  “I don’t know,” stammered Georgette. “Captain van Ryker asked me to put on Veronique’s dress and—”

  With an angry gesture, Don Luis seized her arm to see for himself. The heart-shaped birthmark was plain.

  “So she has tricked me,” he said more quietly. “Again. And she has used you to do it.”

  Georgette fell silent in confusion.

  “Who are you?” he asked at last.

  “I am Georgette Touraille, daughter of the governor of Tortuga,” she told him in a quavering voice.

  “So? The French governor of that buccaneer island is your father?”

  Georgette nodded dumbly.

  “And where is this—this Veronique, as you call her?”

  “She is staying at my father’s house.”

  “I knew that,” he interrupted, for his intelligence was excellent and he had spies at work in Tortuga. “But where is she now?”

  “She was not there when I left. She did not attend my sister’s wedding last night. Mamma thought she was angry about something. I slipped into her room and borrowed her gown—”

  “Without asking her? So you are not only a fool, you are a thief as well!”

  Georgette sank back in fright before the whiplash fury of his tone. “1 don’t know where Veronique is,” she mumbled. “And I didn’t know she was your wife. Who are you?” she ventured.

  Don Luis ignored the question. He was pacing up and down. The heavy gold chains he wore around his neck clashed as he walked and then swung softly back against his black velvet doublet. In the froth of lace at his throat was the largest ruby Georgette had ever seen, and the appointments of this cabin were breathtaking. The furniture was heavy and carved and inlaid with ivory and jade and shell. An almost oppressive air of opulence prevailed. Unfortunately Georgette was too terrified to appreciate it.

  “What has she done?” she whispered fearfully. “Veronique?”

  Don Luis gave her a sharp angry glance. “Her name is not Veronique and you will not call her that! She is my wife—the duquesa."

  Georgette’s eyes widened to saucer size. Veronique was a duchess! And married to this Spaniard who must then be a duke!

  That fashionable flatness, thought Georgette, wide-eyed. She might have guessed! For she knew that aristocratic Spanish girls were forced as children to wear iron stays that flattened their burgeoning young breasts and made them—if they survived the torture—as flat
as Veronique. But Veronique’s passionate will to live had surmounted even that. For a brief moment Georgette both envied her and was sorry for her.

  Don Luis gave a pull on a velvet cord. The door opened and a young officer came in.

  “Take her away,” sighed Don Luis with a gesture of dismissal. “Let her stay on deck until I decide what to do with her. If she really is the daughter of the governor of Tortuga, it may be that an exchange can be arranged—my wife for this impudent child.”

  Georgette had been on deck waiting ever since, fighting sleep or taking short catnaps from which she snapped awake, frightened, half expecting to be thrown overboard to feed the fish. She was almost the last to see the sleek Maravilloso come alongside and she struggled up only long enough to see that it was a Spanish ship before she slumped back.

  Thus it was that she was almost the last aboard ship to see Veronique and Diego come aboard.

  Veronique gave Georgette a surprised look as she swept by her, but she gave no smallest gesture of recognition. Georgette, who had started forward hopefully, now crouched back in a disconsolate heap, too tired even to wail.

  Diego accompanied Veronique to Don Luis’s cabin. He did so ruthlessly, brushing aside the ship’s officers who would have stayed him. If Don Luis showed a disposition to draw his sword and bring speedy justice down upon his erring young wife, Diego intended to kill him here and now, regardless of the consequences. He was loosening his sword in its scabbard even as the door was ceremoniously opened for them.

  This was the same sumptuous great cabin into which a shrinking Georgette had been ushered earlier. The rich dark red velvet hangings embroidered in gold made a dramatic backdrop to the ivory inlaid furnishings. Don Luis himself sat behind a large oaken table inlaid with jade and abalone shell. He rose as they entered, a dark commanding figure.

  Veronique swept into the room with all the aplomb of a queen. Diego was proud of her. She swept back into Don Luis’s life as if she had never left it, and inclined her head gravely toward her husband.

  “Don Luis,” she said coolly.

  Diego bowed.

  The frown that had only hovered between Don Luis’s thin dark brows deepened as he studied the gorgeous expanse of pale olive-toned flesh that was displayed in Veronique’s lush décolletage.

  Diego caught that look.

  “We donned these clothes to make our escape,” he explained quickly. “We were taken, along with the plate fleet. Our only recourse was to pretend the duquesa was French. We were taken to Tortuga, where she was a guest of the French governor.”

  “Guests of the French governor, you say?” Don Luis demanded sharply.

  “Yes,” said Veronique. “I see you have his daughter aboard. She will verify what I say. Until yesterday I was a guest in her father’s house.”

  “And you, Diego?”

  “I fought the buccaneers as they stormed the beach in the Antilles,” said Diego truthfully. “And was wounded. A buccaneer doctor treated my wounds—and yesterday I managed to engineer my own escape and the duquesa's.”

  “She came willingly?”

  “I came willingly,” said Veronique, answering for herself. Her amber eyes glinted. If only she dared tell him how willingly!

  “I knew you were there,” Don Luis said with a slight sneer. “My intelligence is excellent—even on Tortuga.”

  Veronique and Diego exchanged glances.

  “I sent a force in to get you—but they netted the governor’s daughter instead. Dressed, surprisingly enough, in your clothes and with an identical birthmark etched on her arm. She said van Ryker asked her to wear your dress. Can you explain that?”

  Veronique shrugged. “I cannot explain it.”

  “And you still maintain you came willingly?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have come to your senses, then?” Don Luis’s voice was blunt.

  “I went to Cartagena—for my sins,” said Veronique carelessly. “I found it hard to pray for redemption in Castile while I was shivering on my knees on the cold stones. I thought—some warmer place.” Her bland smile was infuriating.

  Don Luis’s evil answering smile told her hell would be a warmer place and he might well send her there.

  Veronique stood her ground. Diego trembled for her.

  “I would know where I stand with you, Don Luis.” She faced him fearlessly. The only sign of emotion she gave was the slight rising and falling of her elegant velvet-clad breasts. “Do not ask me to grovel on my knees, for I will not do it.”

  “You will be kept in this cabin,” he told her tonelessly. “You will not leave it. If you attempt to do so, I will have you chained to the bed. You will be returned to Spain there to await my disposition of you.”

  She half expected Diego to shout, “No, by God, she will not!” as he ripped out his sword. But a sudden diversion came in the form of a knock on the door and an excited ship’s officer who burst in and muttered something in Don Luis’s ear.

  Don Luis leaped to his feet. “Keep her here!” he ordered Diego, and took off at a gait hardly commensurate with his dignity.

  Alone in that sumptuous great cabin the lovers faced each other.

  “We are lost,” she told Diego expressionlessly. “He will interrogate the passengers and crew of La Belle France. He will wring from them the truth—about us.”

  “No, he will not,” said Diego fiercely. “His pride will not let him do that. For he cannot bring himself to admit publicly that you fled from him, that you have been living on a buccaneer island.”

  “For that alone,” said Veronique, “he would kill me.”

  “Not if you do as I tell you! Don Luis is most devout. You will tell him that you had a vision, and that vision led you to Cartagena, there to repent. That you had intended to incarcerate yourself there, to find some nunnery and wall yourself away from the world.”

  “Don Luis will wall me up soon enough!”

  “No, no, listen to me. You will tell him that you have changed, that you have forsaken the world. You will beseech him to send you to some nunnery near your home in Valencia. There I will find you, we will make our escape there.”

  “It will never work,” sighed Veronique, casting a glance down at her revealing red velvet gown. “He knows that I am worldly, he will not believe me.”

  “It is our only chance,” said Diego desperately. “He will lose face if he refuses you a retreat among the nuns to weigh and consider your many sins!”

  “You are beginning to sound like him!” she said with a twisted laugh. “He told me of my sins so often that I was burning to be out and sinning! But he also told me that I would live out my life in his alcazar, entombed there living—like Juana la Loca.” Diego repressed an inward shudder, for Mad Juana, the unfortunate wife of Philip the Handsome, had spent the last forty-six years of her life incarcerated at Tordesillas. “He is inflexible and will never change. Diego, give me your dagger.”

  “No!” In terror lest she would plunge the knife into her young breast, Diego seized her arms in his strong hands and whirled her about to face him. “That is not the way, Veronique.”

  “It is the only way,” she said stonily. “For I will not go back to him.”

  “We must play for time.”

  “Time?” She gave a short derisive laugh. “Our time has run out, Diego.”

  “Perhaps not,” he said desperately. “Oh, Veronique, listen to me. Do not despair.”

  Her proud aquiline face softened. She loved him so much, her Diego. Without him she would have despaired long ago and plunged a knife into her heart, ending her war with Don Luis.

  “For your sake,” she said in a sad voice, “I will not despair.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Another man, faced with Imogene’s defiant refusal to sail on the Goodspeed, van Ryker knew, might have resolved it differently. Another man might have handled her roughly, might have dragged her aboard the Goodspeed and left her there locked in her cabin until the ship sailed. Or put something into
her wine and carried her aboard unconscious. But dragged or drugged, van Ryker knew his spirited lady too well to think that she would speedily forgive him for taking such stem measures. So he had chosen another course.

  Imogene would know a few moments of fury, he had guessed, as she dashed aboard the Goodspeed, she would shake a mental fist—and perhaps a physical one as well—at the Sea Rover's sails in the moonlight, and she would undoubtedly rip to shreds the note that told her how he had tricked her. And then—ruefully, of course—she would begin to calm down, and to laugh. And in a day or two she would be asking the captain to slow his ship and signal a message to the Sea Rover and suggest that van Ryker take her on board for supper as he had done when first he met her and she was sailing to America....

  Thus reasoned van Ryker, in his fool’s paradise aboard the mighty buccaneer vessel cutting cleanly through the blue waters of the Caribbean. He never dreamed that Imogene had not received his note, or that she had misunderstood his careful arrangement of her cabin. His face would have gone pale with dismay if he had thought for an instant that she believed herself cast out, that even now she imagined him to be standing with his arm around a dark triumphant Veronique as the Sea Rover breasted the blue waters of the Caribbean.

  Still, foolproof as his plan had seemed last night, van Ryker was having second thoughts about it today.

  The lean buccaneer frowned and ran his fingers restlessly through his dark hair. He was having regrets about the agony—brief though it was—that he must have put Imogene through. He had rightly guessed her proud nature, that she would impulsively fling away from him, seek passage aboard the departing Goodspeed.

  Arne had reported that she had taken it badly, storming aboard crying out her real name.

  “I done what you said, lied about the jewel case, brought her back here.” He shook his grizzled head, looked with disapproval at van Ryker. “ ’Tweren’t right,” he muttered, and spat.