Thus dismissed and free from the threat of immediate annihilation at the hands of this daunting buccaneer, Lord Thomas hesitated and cast a miserable look at Carolina. It was a look that pleaded with her for understanding. She returned him a frosty glance.
“Goodbye, Thomas,” she said firmly. And she thought, Everyone was right about you, and marveled that she had not seen it before.
After Lord Thomas had left them, after she— standing now looking out the window with her back to Kells—could see him striding somewhat less jauntily down the moon-washed coral roadway, this time without escort, she waited to hear Kells speak. The moments dragged by. Then:
“You are free to follow him, you know,” said Kells in an altered voice.
She turned slowly and looked at him in wonder. She had just learned one of the bitterest lessons in life—that there are some men no woman can hold. Then why should she feel so free, and all at once, so happy? “You would release us both?” she murmured.
He ran a hand through his dark hair and she could see that his face, which had looked so keen and young and vivid when he had faced Lord Thomas, now looked very haggard. “Yes.” His voice roughened. “Yes, I will set you free. I will do better than that.” He seemed to be warring within himself as he came toward her and took both her shoulders in his hands. “I swear that if you wish to go with him, I will set you both upon a ship bound for England.”
How he must love her, she marveled, that after all that had transpired, all her refusals, all the lengths he had gone to win her, he would actually let her go with Thomas if her heart desired it! And of a sudden, all the clashing, all the troubles between them melted away and she felt tears start at what he had said.
“Oh, Kells,” she whispered, and her heart was in her voice. “I don’t want to leave you, don't you know that?"
She felt him stiffen slightly and he held her back away from him so that he might look down into her face. Steel glanced on silver as his gaze found hers and for a moment there was a flicker between them that burned like molten metal.
“How I have waited, ” he said softly, “to hear you say that!"
“So now you can take more than a memory with you to Essex,” she choked in a voice gone husky with love for him. “You can take all of me.”
“I wanted to hear it from your own lips,” he said simply. “For at heart I am no buccaneer—I want only what is freely given. But I can tolerate no wavering, for you have near broke my heart already. I doubt I could survive another such buffeting. Are you truly certain? Christabel would be, but what of Carolina, that creature of high resolve who would rather break than bend? What of Carolina of the already given heart?” His voice had gone wry and he watched her tensely. “Will we be meeting her again?”
The silver blonde beauty in the elegant black dress gave him back a winsome smile. “I think I am more Christabel than Carolina,” she admitted,
“Good,” he said and gathered her within the circle of his arms. “For you may have noticed from the sounds you hear that trunks and gear and plunder are being stacked at the front door to be carried down to the quay for loading. We sail this morning.”
“This morning?” she gasped. For in the heat of these last moments, with her very soul swinging this way and that beneath the pressure of that strong masculine gaze, she had given little thought to the flurry of activity in the house around her. Now she did indeed notice, and realized that there was a fresh breeze blowing—good sailing weather.
“We will sail away,” he told her, “while Lord Thomas languishes on shore. He will be taking another ship no doubt. Back to London presumably. Do not worry about your things. Katje is packing them now. They will precede you aboard the Sea Wolf. ”
She began to laugh. “So you meant all the time to carry me off?”
“Carolina Lightfoot I might have been persuaded to leave on the quay,” he said, brushing her forehead with his lips. “But Christabel—never! She belongs to me and I will fight the whole world for her.” Tenderly he gazed upon his Silver Wench.
“Then I will remain Christabel,” she decided, leaning against him. “But Christabel is a part of this life, Kells. She is part of the blue Caribbean and the white beaches and the trade winds and the tropics—Carolina is part of that other life. Oh, do not go to Essex, Kells, do not chance it—stay here with me!”
The elusive expression she could not quite fathom was playing around his lips again. “Then you would share this buccaneering life with me, with all that it entails? All the hardships, the dangers, the never knowing when the end will come?”
“Oh, yes,” she said breathlessly. “I beg you to let me share it—and I promise that I will never ask for more!” For a moment a flaring triumph lit his gray eyes, savage, untamed. It was as if he had won a great battle. She stared at him in puzzlement.
“I wanted to hear you say that too,” he said quietly. “And share my life you shall. But not here in the Caribbean—there is no longer any need to do that. We will both set sail for Essex. Ah, Christabel, had you not heard? There is a general amnesty proclaimed, and any buccaneer can sail in and claim it! I will have me a King’s pardon for my buccaneering deeds and we can settle down in Essex and look any man in the face!”
“Tell me it’s true,” she cried. “Tell me you are not joking!”
“I am not joking and it is true,” he said, smiling.
Her face was radiant and she threw her arms around him. “To Essex then!” she cried. “To our new life together!”
His face was buried in the hollow of her throat but now he lifted his head and saw the glittering promise in her luminous silver eyes. He swallowed, for he was shaken by what he saw there—more than he had ever dreamed of, all the courage, all the love, all the loyalty that he had hoped for in his wildest dreams was there beckoning in her smile.
“We have a little time before the tide changes,” he told her hoarsely. “Not much—but enough.”
She was laughing softly, triumphantly, as he carried her back to her airy bedroom, that bedroom he had planned for her, furnished for her, in the days when he had thought her lost to him. He had been living cut a fantasy and she had been his dream girl, but now the fantasy had become real and the dream girl was alive and pulsing in his arms.
And for Carolina, all the frustrations, all the guilt, all the remorse were gone, vanished with Lord Thomas down a coral roadway that led down to Cayona. She no longer felt she had to hold back; she could accept him unreservedly and lavish on him all the delights of her love. Silently, dreamily, raptly, she let him remove her clothing with tender fingers and sighed with him in the depths of the big bed as his naked form descended upon her own.
And there in his arms—the right arms at last—her heart seemed to hear music, and her blood sang with an ancient singing that rippled on the magic of a sigh. Then the music swelled and burgeoned and the song grew feverish, frenzied, it wailed and dipped and moaned—even as her own voice moaned low in her throat—and it was a lovesong that she heard, sighing on the tropic wind, pouring over her in the moonlight, making her one with the night, one with her lover.
The time of torment was over and the time of joy had begun. The blissful moments flew by, a time of touching and laughing and playful lovemaking, of warm fiery embraces and mounting passions that crested in waves and spilled over into magic, of feelings so intense it seemed that they would tear the lovers apart, of soft endearing moments that would be remembered for a lifetime. And the wild ageless song that consumed them seemed to gather its forces and culminate in one great triumphant chorus.
They had never been so close, they had never loved each other as they did in those velvet moments, with dawn pinkening the night sky over Tortuga.
EPILOGUE
He came winging out of nowhere, her very heart to snatch,
Found the pulsing woman in her waiting breathless by the latch,
Then the door was bursted open and throughout a night of sighs
Her reckless heart went w
inging past the rooftops to the skies!
They missed the tide of course. But their reasons were compelling—and heartfelt for them both.
“Captain!” Hawks had pounded resolutely on the bedroom door, interrupting their rapt concentration on each other. “Captain, ye’ll have to hurry if ye don’t want to miss the tide.”
Kells, caught up by the magic as desperately as she, lifted his dark head. “There’ll be another tide,” he called. “We’ll catch the next one—no matter, we’ll sail tomorrow. And that will give you time to say goodbye in proper fashion to that wench you’re so fond of in the town, Hawks.”
Carolina couldn’t hear Hawks’s mumbled response, she didn’t need to. She lay there smiling, lost in love.
Eventually they rose, of course. Eventually they ate—a quickly concocted breakfast, mostly fruit, and Carolina felt a sudden pang of loss that this was the last meal she would ever eat in this picturesque courtyard with its blowing palms. She would miss the parrot, but Poll would prefer the tropics to the colder climate of Essex, Kells told her, and besides Katje loved the parrot and Katje wanted to stay. Just as Lars had elected to stay. And next month—perhaps sooner, Carolina sensed—Lars and Katje would marry and Lars would move into Kells’s old quarters and he and Katje would breakfast in this sunny courtyard, even as she and Kells were doing now. Meantime, the house would be kept open for the remainder of the “English contingent,” those who, for personal reasons, chose not to take the King’s pardon but to stay on here, buccaneering to the end.
Hawks had returned imperturbable from his last bout with the red-haired Yorkshire wench he fancied but whose hatred of the ocean was so great that she had declared she’d never trust her body to the sea again— she had refused to sail with him, and he was too homesick for England to stay in Cayona.
“Captain.” Hawks had just come into the courtyard and stood chewing on his lip. “Have ye forgot the American gentleman? I’ve got him cooling his heels in the chart room now.”
Kells, lounging back, just finishing his late breakfast, looked startled. “By heaven, I had!” he cried. “I had more pressing things on my mind. Thanks for reminding me, Hawks.” He got up, unwinding his long legs, encased this morning in elegant Spanish breeches, and reached out a hand to lift Carolina from her chair.
“Who is it who comes to see you?” she wondered, trying to match her shorter stride to his long one as they approached the closed door of the chart room.
“Oh, he does not come to see me. He comes to see you. He arrived last night. Hawks has been entertaining him on my behalf in the officers’ quarters. I have kept him waiting for my own reasons. I am puzzled as to just how to greet him.”
Her curiosity was aroused. “But who is he?”
Kells’s voice was ironic. “I am not sure. It would seem a Virginia gentleman has come to Tortuga to effect your rescue.”
Visions of Ned and Dick vying with each other in that impromptu tourney on the lawns of Rosegill flashed through her mind. Had one of them, egged on by her mother—?
“He says he is your father,” announced Kells coolly.
Had Fielding Lightfoot really come all this way to find her? He must care something for her after all then! Her mind was in confusion as Kells threw wide the door to the chart room and a tall man rose from a seat at the table.
Not Fielding Lightfoot—it was the tall elegant form of Sandy Randolph that seemed to fill the room with its presence.
“I bring greetings from your mother,” he said in his courtly way. “She has commissioned me to bring you home to her.”
Kells raised an eyebrow. “That will be difficult, sir,” he said pleasantly. “For you will have to go through me to do it.”
There was a catch in Carolina’s voice as she spoke. “Kells, allow me to present my real father—Lysander Randolph of Tower Oaks. And this gentleman who claims me is the Lord Admiral of the Buccaneers.” She hesitated, wondering if she should call him by his real name.
Kells saved the day for her by stepping forward and extending his hand in greeting. “Rye Evistock, late of Essex. Here I’m known as Kells.”
“Your fame precedes you, sir.” Sandy Randolph took the proffered hand but his attention was focused on Carolina. “Your mother told me you did not know,” he said softly. “She made me swear never to tell you.”
“I guessed,” said Carolina simply. “And besides, I look like you. Anyone seeing us together would assume us to be father and daughter. And I think”—she considered him critically—“I really am like you. Tell me, did Mother really send you for me or did you come on your own?”
His taut smile relaxed and his white teeth flashed. “I will admit that I came on my own,” he said. “Although your mother would have sent me had she not thought me already gone to England. I heard you had run away and learned that a certain Maud Tate was wearing one of your gowns and bragging she’d helped you. It was Maud who told me you’d gone to London, so I sailed for England and in London learnt a deal more about you from a certain wild young woman who once had a school where now she operates a fashionable gaming house.”
So Jenny Chesterton had come into her own! No more dull meetings with parents of proper young ladies. She could pursue her light loves as she pleased— and keep afloat financially as well!
“What she told me about a certain Lord Thomas Angevine, and what I learnt of a certain ransom being demanded from Tortuga—”
Carolina interrupted, whirling on Kells.
“You were demanding ransom for Thomas?” she gasped.
“I sent a demand for ransom intending it to be your dowry in case you would not have me,” he admitted with a wry grin. “But it seems it won’t be necessary after all.”
She was left speechless. He had not only swept her off her feet and into his heart, he had devised for her an escape route in case she chose to leave him and Thomas again proved false!
“You understand,” Sandy Randolph was saying somewhat sternly, “it is only in this far place that I can claim you, Carolina. To do so in Virginia would be to cast shame upon your mother. And because you are so patently my daughter”—his gaze fell significantly upon her silver blonde hair, her silvery eyes, that coloring so identical to his own—“I tried to keep my distance from you in Virginia, lest we excite notice.”
Carolina nodded. Her eyes had gone suddenly misty. “I understand,” she said.
“But that will not keep you from giving the bride away on the deck of the Sea Wolf, where Carolina has chosen to be married?” Kells’s uncompromising expression said that if the Virginia gentleman wanted to speak out against the marriage, the time was now.
“It would do me honor,” said Sandy Randolph with a sweeping bow to the daughter he could never claim before his friends.
And so on the deck of the rakish buccaneer ship. poised like a painting on the glassy waters of Cayona Bay, Rye Evistock claimed his bride—and her natural father gave the bride away. The bride wore ice blue satin, the fetchingly tight bodice above drifting skirts all set with brilliants that sparkled like stars in the moonlight, and her fair hair, encircled with a chain of sapphires and diamonds, shining like finely spun white metal. Discordant, clamorous, all the church bells rang in Tortuga. There were drunken cheers from the shore and the flash of cutlasses raised in salute from the assembled buccaneers drinking the bride’s health in rum and stolen Spanish wines. Small boats dotted the dark glittering waters of the bay, rowing round and round, their crews calling out encouragement to the Silver Wench who was even now walking beneath an arch of cutlasses held aloft, to reach her smiling bridegroom.
‘‘The Wench! The Wench! The Silver Wench!” came half-heard shouts from shore, drifting out across the water. And then on board ship several violas struck up at once and were quickly joined by other stringed instruments.
The din was deafening. The minister had to shout. And a man who was unmistakably the bride’s father and who had all the courtliness of a prince of the blood roared in a voice that e
choed in the rigging that it was he who gave this woman in marriage.
“We’ll be married more fashionably in a church back in Essex,” Kells bent to shout in her ear and Carolina nodded, her eyes abrim with laughter. Then her buccaneer straightened and glared about him for the minister had just howled, “If any man knows reason why these two should not be joined together in holy wedlock, let him speak now or forever hold his peace!”
Into the sudden comparative silence rose the voice of a massive buccaneer whose forehead was tied with a bright red rag and who had a scar that reached from his eyebrow to his chin. “And if ye speak ye’ll indeed hold your peace forever,” he chortled. “For Kells will surely split your gullet for you!”
There was general laughter at that and loud festive singing as the ceremony went on—and a wild round of applause as they were pronounced man and wife. And then both bride and groom were lifted to eager shoulders and paraded about the deck while the crowd on shore went wild.
It was a raucous ceremony but Carolina forgave that. This was their leader up here, and he was taking a bride. Those rough-looking men who were waving tankards and cutlasses and dancing jigs and shouting their names were wishing them a season of happiness— and they would surely have it.
She looked up at Kells, waving now to those on shore, and her heart went out to them all—they were losing him but they were taking it like men. Their cheers would speed him onward to his new life—in Essex.
“Do you sail for England with us?” Rye asked the bride’s father courteously as they drank a toast to the bride after the ceremony.
Sandy Randolph gave them both a restless look. “No, I’m for Virginia,” he admitted. “Once I was gone, vowing never to return, I found a yearning in my heart to go back to my plantation on the James. My roots are there in Virginia.”
Lovesong Page 51
