Rye was watching her keenly, seeing in the moonlight the sad expression of her face, her drooping shoulders.
“Tortuga has offended you,” he said softly. “I was afraid it would. But there is an island more to your taste. I am an expert sailor. I could steal us a boat and sail you to my plantation on Barbados.”
His secret cove . . . where these buccaneers would come after him and kill him!
“Oh, Rye, I couldn’t ask that of you.”
“You could ask anything of me,” he told her, his voice deepening, growing in intensity.
“Could I? Could I, Rye?” Her lashes were wet as she looked up at him for in the last few minutes she had felt herself very much a prisoner and very much alone.
For answer his arms went round her. It was not like that other time when he had seized her for a good night kiss at her door. That had been passion—this was compassion. After that first attempt and her sharp rejection, Rye—although he had looked upon her sometimes with yearning—had not again tried to touch her. As the days passed there had developed between them a sense of comradeship, a oneness of the spirit. Companions in misfortune, she had called them whimsically, and Rye had smiled. And his smile had deepened as he realized how she had begun to rely on him. Did she need something? Rye would be her go-between with Katje or the little island girl who served her. Did she wish to convey a message to busy Captain Kells, always out somewhere provisioning or having the barnacles scraped from the Sea Wolf’s rakish hull? Rye would carry the message and bring back an answer. And it was to Rye that she turned now.
The arms that enfolded her were strong arms, warm arms, loving arms—-if she would let them be. But she must be true to Thomas, she told herself, even as she felt, through the thin broadcloth of Rye’s gray coat, the steady rhythmic beating of his heart, as steady, as reliable as the sea. They were comforting arms that held her, but—they were the wrong arms.
“Oh, Rye!” Her treacherous heart was beginning to race again and she twisted away from him in haste— before her breathing grew so short that he would realize the effect he had on her.
He let her go easily—even though he would have given worlds to keep her there, resting against his chest.
“I can’t go with you to Barbados,” she said breathlessly. “These are desperate men, these buccaneers— they’d find you and kill you if they thought you’d tricked them! And besides”—her voice broke on a little sob—“it’s not to Barbados but to England that I must go if I’m to save Lord Thomas. How else can I arrange his ransom?”
His face was in darkness against the moon. She could not see his suddenly changed expression, how bleak it had become. “Surely a letter could be sent by some merchant ship that will eventually call at an English port?”
“Yes, but how would I know it ever reached Northampton? How would I know it wasn’t lost somewhere along the way? I must go myself to make sure Thomas’s family knows what has happened to him. Oh, Rye, you didn’t see him as I did, tied to the mast of the Santiago, hanging there limp and unconscious—and then coming to and calling out to me! I must save him. Rye, I must!” Tears of frustration spilled over her lashes.
She looked very forlorn in the moonlight with her pale hair gleaming against the dark backdrop of the rustling palms. Very dainty, very feminine, very desirable. Rye’s heart went out to her instantly but—she was weeping for another man.
Had she not been blinded by those tears she might have seen his strong hands clench white and his jaw harden.
“I will see you to your room and bid you good night then,” he said in a voice he kept well controlled— indeed with a note of what she took to be finality, an acceptance of the fact that she would not be accompanying him to Barbados. “For they will be coming with the keys to lock the grillwork doors.”
To lock out the night. . . But you couldn’t lock out the night here, the perfumed languorous tropical night. It permeated everything—the wine, your restless bed, even your heart. . . .
Rye saw her to her room and then, instead of returning to the door that marked the “English gentleman’s” quarters, he strode restlessly back to the courtyard. The trade winds rustled the palms about him and above his head, the night was still lovely. But for him it had lost its magic, for she had gone.
He studied the black velvet night sky with haggard eyes. There hung the Big Dipper and there Orion the Hunter. Why could not his course be as steady as theirs?
Chapter 28
Rye did not appear at breakfast the next day and when Carolina tried to ask Katje where he was, all she got was a shrug and a blank stare. She supposed the buccaneers must have routed him out early and that he was off somewhere, perhaps at the careening of one of the captured Spanish vessels to make her fast and fit.
Doña Hernanda chose that day to have one of her migraines and Carolina was left alone after breakfast with nothing to do, for Hawks did not appear to take her strolling through the town, as he usually did.
She wandered into the garden, drinking deep of the tropical perfume that filled the air. Bursts of red and purple and pink blooms lighted up the bougainvillea vines that tumbled over the whitewashed walls, and the stones underfoot felt hot through the thin soles of her shoes. The sky was its usual diamond-hard blue and a land crab clattered by her, scuttling into the bushes at her approach.
She felt bored and restless. Even her nagging worry about Lord Thomas’s fate was stifled by the heat and the inactivity. It was as if time stood still in this exotic place and the clock of her life had stopped ticking. She asked herself in sudden despair if she would be condemned to stay forever on this brawling island, living in seclusion, the perennial guest of a busy buccaneer who so far had not deigned to notice her.
Which was very surprising, considering that he had looked at her keenly enough to have guessed her measurements. . . .
Curiosity about Captain Kells suddenly overwhelmed her. At that moment she would have given a month of her life to have had the answers to all the questions about him that flooded her mind. And she felt one thing very strongly: If she could only confront him face to face, she could make him see how unfair it was to keep her locked up here. She could tell him about Lord Thomas—surely a buccaneer would be sympathetic to the plight of anyone seized from a ship by the Spanish and cast promptly into a dungeon, for such must have been Lord Thomas’s fate. She thought of that vast forbidding fortress, Morro Castle, which Doña Hernanda had described to her. Was Thomas even now lying there, in some dark forgotten hole?
She shivered. Even the merciless tropical sun could not seem to warm her as she thought of what Thomas might be enduring. And here she was, helpless, being walked out like some pet poodle and then returned to her enclosure! It was galling.
Anger made her stride back toward the courtyard, as if to beard the lion in his den—and it was an opportune time. Katje was just emerging from Carolina’s room with a pile of rumpled linens in her arms—she must have been changing the sheets. She did not see Carolina observing her from the garden. Instead of carrying the sheets through the heavy locked door that was opened only to serve meals and to admit her and the little island girl, she turned into Rye’s room and closed the door.
Carolina stepped forward and just as she did, from the gallery Poll the parrot swung gymnastically on the big hoop and screamed “Pieces of eight, pieces of eight!” Poll’s sudden squawk caught Carolina off guard and the toe of her slipper found and tore a tiny portion of the hem of her yellow dress. She looked down at that tear with a frown. There was still a chance that Hawks would come to take her walking and it would be annoying to spend the entire walk holding up her skirt lest it trip her. She walked past Poll, who was ruffling his feathers and beating his elegant green and yellow wings. Perhaps Katje would be able to find her a needle and thread.
With that in mind, she flung open Rye’s door, for she was certain he would not be in there while Katje was collecting the sheets—and stopped in surprise.
The room was empty. Katje w
as nowhere in sight.
She took a turn about the room, half expecting Katje to materialize. The chamber was Spartan in its plainness. It contained a bed and a bedside table—no personal articles at all.
And then she noticed a door set into the wall across from her. It was ever so slightly ajar.
Certain that door must lead into the main part of the house, which was off limits to her, Carolina walked across the room and opened it cautiously. And found herself viewing the same stone-floored corridor she had glimpsed when the island girl brought in food or cleared the dishes.
There was no one in the corridor. This was her chance to explore, and to satisfy at least a part of her curiosity about Captain Kells’s domain—and she could disappear back into her own quarters very quickly by the same route through which she had come. Carefully leaving the door barely ajar, just as Katje had left it, she moved down the empty corridor.
Its walls were whitewashed like the other walls and there were spearlike arrangements of iron set into the wall to serve as torches by night. Her soft footsteps made no sound. Around her in the heat the house was silent. Katie must have carried the linens into some outer courtyard, perhaps off the kitchen, where they would be laundered in big iron pots.
To her right through an open door she saw a room that contained maps. To her left was a locked door that looked very stout. A treasure room perhaps? She had heard that buccaneers had them. She kept going and suddenly entered another courtyard much grander than the one she had left. This one had a far larger stone fountain with several tiers and a gallery that went all around. She judged herself to be in the middle of the main house—and this courtyard too was unoccupied.
Burning with curiosity about how this buccaneer lived, she chose at random one of the closed doors that opened off the gallery and carefully opened it. The room beyond was small and barren of furniture save for a single stout wooden table but there were linens and dishes stacked neatly in a cupboard that stood open. She judged it served Katje as a storeroom.
The next room was a dining room and it had character. It might almost have been a room in England instead of tropical Tortuga. The furniture was Spanish but there were English touches everywhere—no tilework here; the walls were solidly paneled and the windows were glazed with small panes, unlike the jalousies she had seen so far. She walked across the thick Oriental carpet that might once have graced a handsome house in Toledo or Barcelona to open those windows and gaze out.
There was no view. A thick whitewashed wall soared up before her—perhaps the wall of one of the other buildings that Captain Kells had added to the jumble he already possessed. It was a kind of compound, she supposed, a little like the palisaded forts of the early settlers in Virginia.
But why had the Captain chosen this room to panel? And why no view? Why indeed this bit of old England in lawless Tortuga? The only answer that came to her readily was that this was the private domain of an exile, a man who longed for home.
But that was ridiculous. Captain Kells was Irish, not English. Or did they have rooms like this in Ireland? She supposed they did. So he longed for Ireland, did Kells. She thought about that, wondering how she could turn it to her advantage, for her mind was made up—she was leaving Tortuga, with or without his permission!
Quickly she closed the windows and left the room, to try the next door. This turned out to be a bedroom and she thought it must be a woman’s room for there was a beautiful gown of pale orchid silk lying across the bed as if for inspection. Katje’s? Carolina fingered the silk. It was a lovely gown, simple but in perfect taste— lovelier even than the handsome gowns Reba Tarbell had worn back in England. And it made Carolina wistful to see it for here on Tortuga she had been wearing only the one gown, the modest pale yellow frock Captain Kells had given her. She looked about her. The room had other women’s touches as well. There was a dressing table with a French mirror and a cheval glass to twirl before. Little sweet-smelling jars and pomades sat upon the dressing table top. The furniture was more delicate here—she suspected it was French. Everything, it seemed, found its way to Tortuga.
The room puzzled her. There were other clothes, lovely clothes, hanging in the big wardrobe of hard island mahogany. And a stout curved-top chest with brass fittings that opened to reveal all manner of delightful feminine gear from fans and slippers to chemises and petticoats. But they could not be Katje’s —the shoes were too small, the dresses made for someone more slender than Katje.
Some woman was living here—or at least had lived here, someone not Katje. But who was she?
She saw that there was an adjoining door and opened it hesitantly, wincing as it creaked. But her luck held— Katje did not suddenly appear, nor did any stranger confront her. She was again in an empty bedroom, only this was an eminently masculine room. Instinctively she knew it must belong to Captain Kells.
Just as the dining room might have been somewhere in England, so this room might have been somewhere in Spain. Handsome iron sconces stood ready for lighting on the plain whitewashed walls. The furniture was heavy and Spanish, deeply carved, with an enormous square bed. It had once, no doubt, boasted a heavy canopy but it was innocent of one now. In this heat one could not endure a canopy. The room was richly appointed. A pair of massive gold candlesticks rested on a table inlaid with ivory that must have been brought from the Far East and taken to Spain. Beside the candlesticks lay a brace of pistols and standing in their scabbards in one corner of the room was an assortment of swords and cutlasses. She hurried to the large wardrobe and threw open the door. The masculine clothing that hung there was all of the dark and somber Spanish style, very elegant, made for a tall man. Several pairs of boots rested on the floor of the wardrobe and—this shook her—there was a golden rosary hanging from a nail inside the wardrobe door.
Spanish clothes, a rosary—oh, no, Captain Kells could not be a renegade Spaniard turned to buccaneering! She had heard him speak and at the time she had judged him to be a Yorkshireman by his accent, which was vaguely like that of one of her London schoolmates who hailed from York. But he was Irish— the world agreed on it.
There were other things in the room: some well-thumbed leather-bound books, a small brass chest she believed to be a money chest, a pitcher for water that appeared to be made out of gold, a pair of jewel-encrusted goblets, a couple of carved chairs supporting rich tangerine velvet pillows that looked comfortable.
Oh, this buccaneer lived well!
And then she noticed what she had somehow overlooked before, perhaps because it was so ordinary looking in this opulent room. Tossed carelessly over the back of a chair was a coat she recognized. Why, it was the plain gray broadcloth coat worn by Rye Evistock! There could be no doubt. She had faced that coat across the table at breakfast and dinner ever since she had been here!
What could it be doing in this room? she asked herself. Could the Englishman, like herself, have gone a-spying and taken off his coat to look more inconspicuous as he climbed out the window and went down into the town? Could he have taken it off and—surprised by someone in the next room—have melted away into the corridor, leaving it behind?
Her mind was full of speculations—and then she heard the murmur of voices coming down the corridor. Panic filled her. She was trapped. She ran over and stood behind the door, hoping whoever was there would go on by.
To her horror, the voices paused outside the door, and she could hear them plainly. And one of the speakers was undoubtedly Captain Kells.
“I tell ye,” that voice she recognized as belonging to the huge black-bearded buccaneer she had met aboard the Santiago boomed out, “that even if this latest story be not true—and mind you, I believe it is—all Cayona is alive with gossip about her. It don’t do no good to try to quiet it, it just begins again every time she walks across the quay. Indeed”—the big voice sounded aggrieved—“there’s even some as say she’s a Spanish spy."
“A Spanish blonde?” laughed another voice she recognized. “Hardly, with that silv
er coloring—too pale, I’d say!”
They were talking about her!
“I tell ye only so ye’ll be giving it thought,” rumbled the big voice.
“That I will,” was the lighthearted reply.
The door swung open. Carolina shrank back behind it.
It closed to reveal a tall man’s back. His broad shoulders were encased in a flowing white shirt, his narrow hips in typical leathern breeches, and a scarred basket-hilted sword slapped against his lean thighs as he moved into the room.
Carolina stared at that broad back—and gasped.
At the sound he whirled, his long sword instantly drawn, his shoulder-length dark hair swinging back with his catlike movement.
It was Rye Evistock—but a different Rye Evistock from the one she had known.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
He sheathed his sword and stared at her for a long moment. Then he made her a sweeping bow from the waist.
“Permit me to introduce myself. I am Captain Kells.”
Chapter 29
Carolina felt as if her world were tilting. Rye could not be—!
“But Captain Kells is an Irish buccaneer!” she gasped, as if to refute his statement.
“The better to keep my real identity a secret.” His smile was grim.
“No.” He was fooling her. Whoever he was, he wasn’t Kells. “You forget I’ve met Captain Kells,” she said stubbornly. “I met him aboard the Santiago! And you were talking to him in the hall just now. Don’t deny it, I recognized his voice!”
“Oh, I don’t deny it. But it was Doncaster you met aboard the Santiago—and Doncaster in the hall just now, warning me that you’re the talk of the island and coveted by all. He played out a charade for your benefit on board the Santiago—they all did. At my request.”
Lars, Hawks, Katje, this man Doncaster, Rye himself—they all had tricked her. Her head seemed to be spinning. The man she had danced with in Essex and near lost her heart to, the “good catch” Reba’s mother had schemed to obtain for her daughter, Lord Gayle’s third son, so popular among his neighbors in Essex— Rye Evistock was Kells, the notorious buccaneer!
Lovesong Page 40
