Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  Carolina was still angry the next night, for it had been a bad day. Cook had overturned the great stew Carolina had been at such pains to supervise preparing and they must needs eat fish again. The girl who was ironing her favorite gown had turned from her work when a lizard had scurried through the iron grillwork and run beneath her feet—and the iron had burnt a shield-shaped hole in the fabric. It had rained last night after midnight and somewhere the red tile roof had leaked—its slow drip-drip had kept her awake. And to top it all, Hawks had asked her to give Kells a message that properly aged water casks had been found and were ready to be filled for the voyage—which meant of course that the Sea Wolf would soon be sailing and she would be left here, trapped in this supposed paradise like a bird in a cage!

  He knew she was ready for him when he sat down to dinner, for her silver eyes were shooting sparks. She was wearing one of the many dresses which he had showered on her—this one of pale blue Oriental silk with a whisper of lace at the elbows and a cluster of brilliants marking the cleavage of her bosom.

  “Excellent fish,” he commended her, and added appreciatively, “Pale blue becomes you.”

  “I did not cook it,” she said woodenly, ignoring his comment on her gown.

  “Nor did you catch it or clean it,” he elaborated for her. “Still it is excellent fish.”

  She gave him a withering look. “I am delighted that you like it,” she said, sounding not at all delighted. “I take it you will be sailing soon?”

  “Yes,” he said moodily. “Soon.”

  “You intend to sail away and keep me locked up here?”

  “So we are back to that again,” he said.

  Her silver glance narrowed. She leaned toward him. “I wonder what your men—those who do not come from Essex, that mixed bag of buccaneers of many nations who follow you—would say if they were to learn that you are not an Irish rover turned buccaneer at all but an English gentleman late of Essex?” she purred.

  The dark face into which she gazed hardened perceptibly. “To begin with, they would not believe you,” he drawled (and she had learned to her sorrow that when his voice drifted into a drawl he was at his most obdurate). “For there are many here who would swear they have known me in Ireland.”

  Some madness drove her on. “Your English followers would say that, of course. But if that were somehow exploded? What then?”

  His gray eyes were cold but his hard smile deepened. “Then you would learn another ‘truth’ about me,” he said flippantly. “You would learn that I am a renegade Spaniard, sentenced to death for heresy but my sentence mitigated to life as a galley slave. And I can prove that too, if I wish.”

  Her eyes widened. “You have actually rowed in their galleys?” She knew this sometimes happened to unfortunate Englishmen, but she had never met any who had survived it.

  “For four months, seven days and six hours,” he told her grimly. “I counted every hour of it. And knew stripes such as Lord Thomas will never know. So be not so fast to spread tales about me, Christabel—you will only be considered a jealous woman whom I am discarding. There have been others before you.”

  The momentary sympathy she had felt for his plight as a sometime galley slave fled before that last taunt. “I will be careful to make certain that all who come to this table know that there is naught between us,” she said frostily. “Naught,” she corrected herself, “that is in any way important.”'

  “Yes,” he said in a bleak voice. “By all means, save yourself for Lord Thomas.” And he pushed back his chair and strode away before she could add a crushing rejoinder.

  But always there were—like sprays of flowers—the good days between them. Like the day he took her riding in the hills and they threw themselves down beside a stream and picnicked on what Cook had packed for them in their saddlebags. They had lain on a cliff top and looked upon all Tortuga stretched out below—at the town, at the fort, at the ships that rode at anchor in Cayona Bay. It had looked beautiful from up here, fresh and new—a whitewashed town with red tile roofs splashed against the green, and in the blue bay, white-sailed wooden ships from many countries, looking like children’s toys at this distance.

  Kells had taken a swallow of wine from his flask and then, in mellow mood, lain back upon his arms and stared up at the flawless blue sky while she dropped pale green grapes into his mouth.

  “I would we could have met another time, another place,” he sighed.

  “I too,” she murmured, tossing up a grape and catching it deftly between her small white teeth. “When we were young.”

  He was moved to laugh. “And is seventeen so very old?” he twitted her.

  “I feel I have aged years since being here,” she admitted frankly. “It is something about the town, about the people, a—a worldliness perhaps.” She was floundering, trying to explain what it was about this buccaneer town that somehow made one feel older than one’s years.

  “I know.” He nodded moodily. “I have felt it too.” I lost my youth here, he was thinking. I did not lose it in the galleys—I was young then and my anger soared into the topsails of the galleon where I was chained to the oars.

  “How old are you, Kells?” she asked, tossing away the rest of the grapes and watching him sideways with her head resting on her drawn up knees.

  “I am twenty-seven.”

  “You look older.”

  “Buccaneers”—he grinned, rolling over, his mood changing to one of lightness—“live a hard life, do they not?”

  She sniffed. “Your life is none so hard! Servants to wait upon you, the best house in Tortuga, women sidling up to you on the quay!”

  So she had noticed that, the few times he had taken her there. . . .

  “They mean nothing to me,” he told her quickly.

  “Did any woman—ever?” she asked sadly.

  He looked on her with yearning. At the moment she was staring out to sea and she looked very young and fragile in her thin white cambric bodice and soft yellow linen skirt. He would give her a gold chain to wear with this costume, he decided. Something that would glitter in the sun.

  “Any woman ever?” she prodded.

  “There was a Spanish girl once.” He did not elaborate and she did not ask him. The rosary, she thought suddenly, that I saw hanging from a nail inside his wardrobe door—it must have belonged to the Spanish girl

  “Spanish,” she murmured. “And you are at war with Spain. ... So you can never return to her.”

  “No.” It was not so simple as that, and it was all so long ago, but the scars of that long lost love affair had never quite healed. No need to dredge it up now.

  “Then we have both lost someone,” she said, and she sounded so sad that it struck at his heart.

  For a while they sat there in companionable silence— not captor and captive but two mortal beings caught in the web of fate, their lives being spun out in ways not of their making.

  She smiled at him gently as they rode home, and he almost thought she had forgiven him for kidnapping her and holding her.

  “Kells,” she sighed, brushing aside a palm frond that flicked her face as she rode, “whyever did you become a buccaneer?”

  “Because of a woman,” he told her frankly.

  She turned on her mount to give him a sharp look. “The . . . Spanish girl?” she asked, bewildered.

  When he answered, his voice had gone harsh and he was staring straight ahead of him, looking into some dark and distant past. His eyes were windows of Hell. “I loved her—and because I loved her, they killed her. I have wrung a reckoning from the dons of Spain ever since—and taken a toll of their blood and their treasure.”

  So forbidding was his countenance that she did not probe further. She felt that he had retired within himself, to some dark inner vision, and that he would not answer her even if she asked.

  Vengeance without end, she thought with a shiver. And then, almost with a twinge of jealousy, He must have loved the Spanish girl very much. But she was dead�
�he could never return to her. And anyway he was a different man now, the years would have changed him. Just as she was changing. No longer was she entirely Carolina Lightfoot, the lighthearted belle of Williamsburg. Something of Christabel, the Silver Wench of the buccaneers, had entered into her, never to leave.

  Tortuga had changed them both.

  But as the days passed, days when too often the heavy tropical rains drummed against the nerves, his leaving drew close upon them—and for some reason that made her angry with him too.

  There came a day when, passing by on silent feet, she overheard Hawks talking moodily to someone at the front door.

  “Aye, ’tis true the voyage has been put off another day.” He spat.

  “How so?” came another voice she did not recognize.

  “Truth is, it’s been put off because Captain Kells cannot bear to leave the wench. And he will not take her with him because he won’t risk letting a musket ball crease her pretty hair.”

  Carolina, who had paused at the mention of the “wench,” listened to those words with astonishment.

  “Well, you’ll have to admit she’s a beauty, Hawks,” was the rejoinder.

  Carolina had not waited to hear Hawks’s gloomy answer. She had stolen away quietly.

  Was it true? she asked herself. Had she really some power over this man after all? And then she thought of Essex and Reba and the snowy maze and all the lies and deceit that had passed between them since she had been here—no, he was only holding onto the Silver Wench because she was a symbol of prestige in this wild community—and because at night, when he returned to face her across the long shining board of his “English” dining room, he could pretend that he was English gentry once again.

  “Why do you stay here, Kells?” she taunted him that night. “You—the misplaced Englishman? Why do you not return and marry someone like Reba?”

  “I might have,” he admitted frankly. “Had I not met a silver wench.”

  “Bah!” she said. “You are a buccaneer, it is in your blood! You would have returned to the sea in any event!”

  It was not true, and perversely she knew it was not true, but she wanted to goad him. She was wearing the scarlet dress that she had worn during her most dramatic ventures down to the quay. She had worn it tonight, thinking to irritate him.

  “Why do you not return me?” she snapped at him. “Is it not obvious we have no future together?”

  He rose and seemed to tower over her. “I would return you to the Devil,” he grated, “if I thought you belonged to him.”

  She threw back her fair head. “If I belong to anyone, I belong to Lord Thomas Angevine!”

  It was the wrong thing to have said to him just now. “Do you indeed?” His voice was cold but his eyes were hot.

  She divined his intention and made to dart around the table but he caught her, pulled her to him. His lips were hot upon hers, his arms held her motionless while he explored those lips, and then quested over her cheeks, her lashes, her eyebrows, wandered down to caress her throat. When he let her go, they were both shaken and she fell away from him as if her knees were butter, clung for a moment to the table while she glared at him.

  “What you have of me you must take,” she declared bitterly. “For while I am still your captive I will give you nothing of my own free will!”

  “You drive me too far,” he said thickly and turned away as if he could not bear the sight of her.

  But once she was gone, once that shimmering gown of scarlet silk had swept from the room, once the last rustle of her whisper-thin petticoat had faded away, he stood staring wistfully before him, trying to quiet the heat of his blood. For an unguarded moment there, as he held her imprisoned in his arms, he had imagined her loving him as he loved her, imagined himself settling down in some place where Kells and Christabel would vanish back into Rye and Carolina, imagined spending the rest of his days in the bright sunshine of her smile. She would have wonderful children, he knew, shining like herself. . . .

  He was frowning now, for she had made him think on marriage. And marriage—especially to this uncaring silver wench—was not his intention.

  He sighed. He was lost, he knew, but at least he could hope to keep her from knowing it.

  He sat alone that night, in the dark, sat long and drank, staring at nothing, seeing a world that could never be.

  And Carolina, more stirred by his kisses than she cared to admit, tossed her shoes at the wall as she tore them off and plunged into her bed to smother her tears.

  For even though she tried to blind her eyes to it, she knew what was happening—inexorably, every day. She was falling in love with this damned buccaneer! She belonged to Thomas—and she was being untrue to him. She was as faithless as her mother! The thought made her wince. It was the first time she had ever admitted to herself that she considered her mother a faithless wife—trapped by fate, but faithless nonetheless.

  It was the harsh judgment of youth, and it would temper with time, but for now she put her head in her hands and rocked with shame and grief. She had betrayed Thomas. She felt she had committed adultery, for as she lay in Kells’s arms that night, her whole body had rejoiced. She had not meant to feel so—oh, God, no, she had meant only to feign passion—but the passion had become real and honest and soul-shattering. And here she was, confusing it with love!

  Her head was bowed and hot tears fell upon her tightly clenched hands. What lay between her and Lord Thomas might not be a marriage in the eyes of the world, but she had plighted to him her troth—and she was not a faithless woman, she was not! That night in London that she had gone into his arms—and oh, it seemed half a lifetime and more than a world away— she had committed herself to him forever. She felt a bitter inner grief, and a horror of herself that she could prove so unworthy.

  Was she never to know peace? Was she never to face herself squarely in the mirror and see there an honest woman, one who had no secrets, nothing to hide?

  She dashed away her tears and of a sudden she decided that she would escape Kells, she would escape him now before she got in any deeper.

  And of a sudden, she knew just how.

  Chapter 36

  The tunnel! Why had she not thought of it before? (Perhaps because of Hawks’s remark about the rats, but she put that firmly from her mind.) She would take a candle—no, she would take an entire branched candlestick, enough to light a dozen tunnels!—and a very large pistol, and she would make her way from the sheltered cove at the tunnel’s end back to the town. And once there she would scour the taverns until she found a sea captain who would take her away with him. (That few might be willing to risk the enmity of the notorious Kells was another thought she put away from her.)

  Having made up her mind, she felt suddenly energetic. The large pistol—well, that was easy to come by. There was one in the chart room. True, she would have to pass Kells’s bedroom door to reach it, but she could steal by as silently as a shadow.

  And her clothes—she would dress as a Spanish lady, for it might be that she could persuade one of the freed Spanish prisoners who roamed the waterfront to steal a small boat and sail her to Havana. It would be worth his while for he would not only be reunited with his countrymen, but Doña Hernanda would undoubtedly reward him with gold—if she was still in Havana. If not, there was always Ramona Valdez. Yes, that would be even better than seeking out an English sea captain because it would not only get her off Tortuga, it would put her within striking distance of Thomas!

  The clothes were not hard to come by. Black satin slippers, black silk stockings. In the big sea chest that stood in one corner there was more than one gown suitable for a lady of Spain. Bearing in mind the heat, she chose one of thinnest black taffeta—and she regretted its rustle, but the only alternative was a gown of heavy black bombazine, richly braided. A black lacy chemise, a black brocade petticoat—and most important, a drifting black lace mantilla to hide the fair hair by which anybody in Tortuga might recognize her. It would not do to have the
Silver Wench reported seen down in the town! With nervous fingers she swept up her hair and set in it a lofty tortoise-shell comb of intricate design. The black lace mantilla was richly worked and concealing—it would do well as a disguise.

  She was so excited that she could not bear to sit down, but paced about. She forced herself to wait until she was sure Kells had gone to bed, and then she stole down to the chart room and secured the large pistol. It was very heavy, it would make her wrist ache if she had to carry it for long but she was determined to persevere —and she would need that pistol in the town, she had no doubt.

  The branched candlestick she took with her on her silent path to the dining room. She could light it there from the single candle she took with her. For she had no desire to make such a blaze of light that Kells, who slept lightly and might be still awake, would see it through the crack beneath his door. Silently, clad in the rich black clothing of a lady of Spain, she made her way to the dining room, and opened the door without so much as a sound.

  The room looked as always: the long gleaming table, the big high-backed chairs, their velvet coverings rich against the carved wood of the arms. Her candle made strange wavering shapes against the paneled walls. The shadows cast by the chairs seemed like crouching animals. She forced herself to pay no attention, but laid the big pistol down on the table—and even as she did, a bird flew against the jalousies and she started, stifling a scream.

  Keeping her attention now focused on her immediate pathway to the big cupboard that concealed the tunnel, she moved toward it—and put her shoulder against it, just as Hawks had done.

  It did not budge.

  “It takes a bit more strength to move it,” said a grim voice behind her.

  Carolina started so violently that she almost dropped the candle. She whirled and saw just rising from the big chair in which he had been lounging, his body hidden in the shadow—Kells himself.

  “I—” she began, confused.

  “Don’t bother to lie,” he cut in impatiently. “You were attempting to leave by way of the tunnel. How did you learn where the entrance was?”