Nightsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  'Oh, it is you!’ Carolina cried. She threw herself into his arms and silenced anything he might have to say with her soft eager lips . . .

  His lips left hers and trailed tantalizingly down her white throat, across her smooth bosom, he was loosening the hooks that held her bodice, it was slipping away . . .

  He swept her up into his arms, and fell with her onto the big square bed. The moments sped by - delicious golden moments snatched from time. She had lost Kells, but she had him back again! Every breath, every rasp of his skin against her own thrilled her.

  'Oh, Kells,’ she whispered. 'I thought - that you were dead.’

  ‘señorita,’ he said regretfully, ‘it seems you have mistaken me for somebody else. I am Diego Vivar, late of Castile . . .’

  By the same author

  Lovesong

  Windsong

  VALERIE SHERWOOD

  Nightsong

  GRAFTON BOOKS

  A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

  * * *

  LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

  Grafton Books

  A Division of the Collins Publishing Group 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA

  A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1988

  First published in the United States of America by Pocket Books 1986

  Copyright © Valerie Sherwood 1986

  ISBN 0-586-07312-4

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

  Set in Times

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Table of Contents

  Nightsong Dedication

  Warning

  Author’s Note

  Prologue Port Royal, Jamaica Spring 1692

  BOOK 1 The Silver Wench

  PART ONE The Belle of Port Royal

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO Catastrophe June 7, 1692

  10

  11

  12

  13

  BOOK 2 Rouge

  14

  15

  16

  17

  BOOK 3 The Beautiful Captive

  PART ONE The Spanish Cavalier Summer 1692

  18

  19

  20

  PART TWO The Dangerous Rival

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  BOOK 4 Kells

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  In loving memory of Tarbaby - son of Princess, my very first cat - lovely Tarbaby of the gleaming black fur and brilliant green eyes; vivacious Tarbaby, who whirled gracefully high up into the summer air, trying to catch butterflies - always a second too late; Tarbaby, who gave back the challenge of the mocking jays who screeched at him from the tree branches above the grapevines; Tarbaby, who played with me so joyously along the maze I constructed in the deep snows of our garden one winter; Tarbaby, who was always gentle with me and yet kept all the dogs in the neighbourhood cowed - to Tarbaby, bright companion of my youth, this book is dedicated.

  Warning

  Readers are hereby warned not to use any of the cosmetics, unusual food, medications or other treatments referred to herein without first consulting and securing the approval of a medical doctor. These items are included only to enhance the authentic seventeenth-century atmosphere and are in no way recommended for use by anyone.

  Author’s Note

  In this rousing tale of the exciting 1600s, I bring to you the wild adventures - both amorous and desperate - that now befall that reckless Colonial beauty, Carolina Lightfoot, and her gallant buccaneer lover. Captain Kells.

  Their tempestuous story is set in the Golden Era of that Colonial centre of trade and fashion, old Port Royal. In reconstructing this interesting seventeenth-century town - and I have been meticulous as to streets, topography, the location of its various forts and shops, etc. - I have employed ancient records and maps and the latest archaeological research, but I have tried as well to recapture and bring to you in vivid life the exuberance, the extravagant gaiety, the rich fashions, indeed the whole glamorous way of life being enjoyed when this fabled port of the West Indies was at its height, its harbour flapping with the sails of many nations, its handsome four-storey brick residences and enormous warehouses bursting with the booty of golden galleons, its sandy streets rattling with buccaneer cutlasses. The old port is given to you in all its infamous glory - a jewellike setting for that jewel of the Caribbean, Carolina Lightfoot, the dazzling Silver Wench of the Spanish Main.

  Although the characters and events in this story, save for those noted here, are entirely of my own imagination, I have relied heavily upon historical detail. For example, the short wild voyage of that gallant frigate, the HMS Swan, did indeed take place, and Hawks’s mind-boggling adventure, which seems well nigh incredible, is based upon the actual experience of one Lewis Galdy, Esq., which is carved in stone - indeed Hawks’s epitaph is borrowed almost intact from Galdy’s headstone in a Port Royal churchyard.

  Even Moonbeam the cat’s decorous dining, course by course, at the family dining table in Essex to the delight of invited guests, is based upon an actual cat from English history whose devoted owner enjoyed her pet’s company so much that she trained the cat in ‘good table manners’ and allowed her to sup with the family.

  As to Acting Governor John White, he was indeed acting governor of Jamaica at the time, and an eyewitness account of the Rector of St Paul’s Church, one Dr Heath, places him on board the ship Storm Merchant where my heroine finds him, but whether he continued governing from aboard her I have no idea; indeed I was able to learn nothing about Acting Governor White, save that he drank wormwood wine! So everything concerning him and his family is entirely of my own invention - I hope I have not unduly maligned him.

  You will also find in these pages a faithful recording of one of the great catastrophes of the Western World - and I have spared no effort in delving into historical and archaeological research, using eyewitness accounts wherever possible, to bring it to you in all its fantastic panorama. Where fact could not be established, I have of necessity relied upon invention. For example, I was able to find out what the weather had been preceding the event - but not after.

  As to ‘Diego Vivar’, both Spanish intelligence and Spanish records were very good in the time period of my novel, and he could easily have met his end in such a place and in such a manner.

  When the buccaneers lost their foothold in Jamaica, they really had nowhere to go. Tortuga was unattractive by comparison - and it was French (France and England were engaged in naval warfare at the time). Those buccaneers who were left - and remember that many were at sea at the time - regrouped and headed for the numberless low sandy cays of The Shallows’, which today we call the Bahamas. The town they flocked to was the pirate base of Charles Towne on New Providence Island, which in 1690 had come to be called Nassau. Although the migration of the buccaneers to the Bahamas really marked the end of buccaneering as
it was in Morgan’s time (Morgan was four years dead when the buccaneers left), the pirates of Nassau (which had become in all probability the wildest town anywhere) continued to roam the Straits of Florida and to haunt the Windward Passage and the Mona Passage. There were several attempts to uproot them, and it is of one of these, a combined attempt of the French and Spanish to subdue these fierce sea rovers, that I write - although I have set the date a little earlier than it actually happened, the better to fit my story.

  In the attack herein described, the men - those that could be caught - were promptly slaughtered, the women taken as slaves to Havana. And so it is also of old Havana that I write, in the days when brooding El Morro, standing guard over Havana harbour, was just over a hundred years old, and pirates and buccaneers alike were hanged without mercy and without regret on the Plaza de Armas.

  Although the Spanish may not have planned to raid Jamaica in 1692, it was certainly believed that they did plan to raid Jamaica and drive the English from the West Indies in Morgan’s time, and it was Governor Modyford who, realizing there was no English fleet to help him, persuaded Morgan to collect the buccaneers and mount a raid on Porto Bello, thus keeping the Spanish occupied with other matters than invasion of their neighbours. Thus, although the timing is a little off, the situation I have described - though imaginative - could well be an accurate one. Spies were sent in to assess military might then as now, and could not one of those spies be handsome - and susceptible to a woman as beautiful as Carolina?

  Perhaps my family background predisposes me to a special interest in buccaneers - and other valiant patriots who in times past have fought for their country in unorthodox ways. For my maiden name was McNeill. I am the great-great-great-granddaughter of Captain Daniel McNeill of whom young George Washington wrote in a letter (duly preserved and framed in the Library of Congress) from Winchester, Virginia, that Captain Daniel McNeill across the mountain could furnish him with three hundred men (for Dunmore’s War). During my Pentagon years, I took pleasure in researching in the Army Library the seafaring efforts of a later Captain Daniel McNeill, privateer, who sailed his own vessel to North Africa to subdue the Barbary pirates on behalf of his country. And it was pleasant to realize, when in residence at Dragon’s Lair in Washington, DC, that but a few short blocks away was the home of Stephen Decatur, one of our country’s heroes, who had sailed as a young officer under that same Captain Daniel McNeill. Somehow it brought history close and privateers even closer. And Captain Dan’l, as family tradition calls him, would surely - had he lived in buccaneering times - have been a buccaneer!

  As to the buccaneers, those myriad unfortunates who sought exile for political reasons, many of whom - like the hero of my story - had felt the jaws of Spain clamp down upon them and been brushed by the dread fires of the Inquisition, how they must have savoured their gains against a nation that had driven them from island to island and tried to sweep the seas clear of them! It was the buccaneers (who by rights should be called ‘privateers’ since they fought no flag but Spain’s) who saved the West Indies from Spanish invasion and kept those lovely islands of the British, French and Dutch from becoming mere links in a necklace of Spanish might that girdled the Western Hemisphere!

  And ask yourself, without the buccaneers, could we have held our coast? How thinly scattered then were our tiny Colonies along the east coast of North America! Had Spain swept the Caribbean clean of opposition, what then?

  I say we owe a debt to these buccaneers. A debt that will never be repaid, true, but at least we can honour them in memory. This may well be the last novel I ever write with a buccaneering background - that background I love so well! - so I invite you now to sail with me into the glories of a lost world, to learn its secrets and thrill to its challenges.

  Should anyone ask ‘Who speaks for the buccaneers?’ they will assuredly have their answer:

  / speak for the buccaneers!

  Do you speak of buccaneers?

  Oh, remember them with tears.

  Those men we hanged ’twixt high tide and the low.

  For we owe them all so much,

  We, the British, French and Dutch,

  Those men that we dishonoured and brought low!

  For they saved the Indies then

  And though they were desperate men,

  They’ll be recalled wherever trade winds blow.

  Their stories sung wherever free men go.

  Their ghosts sail out across the sunset’s glow . . .

  - Valerie Sherwood

  Prologue

  Port Royal, Jamaica

  Spring 1692

  In love’s fair arms they lie tonight.

  Embracing in the pale moonlight.

  Convinced no earthly storm could sever

  Their bonds of love, drawn taut forever!

  Beneath a pale moon that shed its light upon Jamaica’s southern coast, a slender curving sandspit cut like a scimitar into the deep dark sapphire of a night-silvered sea. Scattered across that white waste of sand and cut off from the mainland by a gloomy mangrove swamp, evil in the half light, lay the wickedest city in the western world - Port Royal, home port of the buccaneers.

  On Queen’s Street, a block from the waterfront down Sea Lane, the trade winds blew softly through the open second-floor windows of a handsome brick house and cooled with scented breezes the gleaming bodies of the dark-haired man and the moonlight-blonde woman who tumbled in wild embrace upon the big carved bed.

  The lean buccaneer who sprawled there with his lady was accounted the best blade in all the Caribbean. He was the notorious Captain Kells, whose name resounded like a great gong across the Spanish Main. A name the very mention of which caused the captains of Spanish treasure galleons to blanch or redden angrily according to their natures. The pale moonlight gilded his long muscular legs, his narrow buttocks and broad handsome back, and cast in shadow his hawklike sardonic face just now so intent.

  For the lady he clasped so fervently in his arms was the light of his life - and he knew he soon must leave her.

  She trembled and sighed against him. A soft moan escaped her lips and his hard face softened as he pressed tender kisses upon her smooth hot cheeks. And from his heart went up a silent prayer to a God he no longer believed in that she would be safe in this wild town in which he must leave her.

  She was not, he knew, apt to go unremarked.

  For the woman he clasped in his arms, her lissome body silvered by moonlight, her hair a starlit mass spread out upon the pillow, wore the most famous face in all Port Royal. Endless stories were told of her: of her breathtaking beauty (apparent to all and staggering to those who first glimpsed her). Of her wild but aristocratic past (much exaggerated by gossips, who ever choose to believe the worst). Of her tempestuous romantic entanglement with the most dangerous sea rover of all in a port populated by dangerous sea rovers - Captain Kells (all too true!).

  Some said he had married her, some said he had not. Others laughingly maintained that he was an insatiable bridegroom and so determined had he been to bind her to him that he had married her again and again: On Tortuga, in Virginia’s Tidewater from whence she came, in Essex, in London - even in the Azores. And some of the stories were true.

  But true or not, she would ever be the bride of his heart.

  All Port Royal envied him her favours. They called her - affectionately, these buccaneers from so many nations - the Silver Wench, and in the moonlight she was more than lustrous, she was magnificent. Her sweet young body (she was only one-and-twenty) fitted sublimely to the sinewy lines of her tall determined lover and they lay locked in ecstasy, oblivious to the wild carouse that as usual was making the nighttime streets of Port Royal horrendous with noise.

  Even though the clocks had all chimed midnight, the din of carousing in the rows of taverns had scarcely diminished - indeed, many had roared to greater fervour as men who had come by their gold in mortal combat lightly gambled it away or tossed it to the nearest inviting wench for her favours. />
  But the singing and the yelling, the clatter of tankards and the rattle of cutlasses, the howls and tinny laughter, came only faintly to the tall brick house on Queen’s Street, and the pair who strained upon the big square bed heard it not at all.

  Their concentration, sublime in its intensity as they shuddered in ecstasy and then drifted down from the heights, was only upon each other - and on the sudden question the woman with the starlight hair now put to her able lover between their bouts of fiery lovemaking.

  ‘Kells,’ she said, using the name the buccaneers called him, although in truth he was Rye Evistock of Essex and that was the name he had married her under on shipboard just off the Azores. ‘You don’t really want to leave me, do you?’

  Her voice was wistful and the strong arm of the buccaneer, just now lying outflung beneath her as she lay on her back studying the stars, tightened as if to shield her from the world. ‘I never want to leave you,’ he said in his deep rich voice - and it was the God’s truth that he was speaking. ‘Don’t you know that, Christabel?’

  He had used the name the buccaneers called her, for to them she was - would always be - Christabel Willing, the Silver Wench of the Caribbean, who had set Tortuga aflame with her caprices and had married at last the Lord Admiral of the Buccaneers - Captain Kells. She smiled that he should call her that but indeed here in Port Royal she had almost forgotten that she had been born Carolina Lightfoot, aristocratic daughter of Virginia’s Tidewater country, or that her mother ruled in queenly splendour the great domain of Level Green upon the York River, largest and finest house to be found in all of Colonial Virginia.