‘It looks fit for a bride!’ gasped Carolina. ‘Wherever did you get it?’
‘Oh, it was one of those many gowns packed away,’ Penny said with a shrug. ‘Constanza must have worn it as a young girl, so it should fit you, although Luz will have to adjust the hem. Try it on, Carolina.’
These lovely things were impossible to resist. Carolina tried it on and whirled delightedly before the mirror in the big front bedroom.
‘But - I cannot wear it,’ she protested to Penny. ‘This white mantilla. It stands for virginity and I - ’
‘Of course you can wear it,’ said a voice from the door, and the two girls turned to see Don Diego lounging there. He gave Carolina a stern look. ‘You will wear it because you are soon to become my bride. I intend to announce it at the ball tomorrow night.’
‘What?’ cried Penny. ‘Oh, this is wonderful! You can wear the gown tomorrow night and later you can be married in it! Consider it a wedding gift from me,’ she added, laughing.
Carolina’s chiding look reproved her. ‘You must certainly not announce it,’ she told Don Diego. She sought for a reason. ‘My - my past will be looked into. Word has not been spread about Havana that I am the Silver Wench. If that were known, with the price Kells has on his head’ - she gave ‘Don Diego’ a warning look -‘someone might decide that the way to lure Kells to his death in Spain would be to spirit me away there, and so collect fifty thousand pieces of eight!’
She saw she had not won her argument.
‘Don Diego,’ she said desperately. ‘I am afraid to attract so much notice.’
‘You will accompany me to the ball,’ he said in a mulish tone. ‘And you will wear that dress and that mantilla.’
‘Very well.’ Carolina sighed, capitulating to the lesser evil, ‘I will go to the ball and I will wear this dress. But promise me - promise me that you will make no announcement!’
He frowned down upon her. ‘I will make no public announcement as yet,’ was all the promise she could wring from him. He whirled about and left them.
‘I had no idea things had progressed so far,’ laughed Penny, helping Carolina strip off the lovely gown. ‘I’ll drop these things by Luz and tell her how much hem to take up. She’ll do it very swiftly, I promise, for I think she’s afraid of me now that I’m the governor’s mistress!’
‘Do you think you will marry the governor?’ asked Carolina, feeling that in some crazy way it might all come to pass - she who had been the Silver Wench might marry Don Diego and become a lady of Spain, and Penny, who had been the infamous Rouge of New Providence, might marry the governor and have all Havana at her feet. Could such things really happen? she asked herself wonderingly.
‘Marry the governor? Not likely! Marina would expire at the very thought and I think the governor is too fond a father to ask her to accept me as a stepmother! But I am not so set on marriage as you are, Carolina - and anyway, I much prefer the Englishman. Which reminds me’ - she began to make for the door - ‘he has promised to slip away from Marina and meet me by the quay. No less a personage than Don Ramon del Mundo has invited him to view El Morro - I think because he wants to impress this Englishman, who claims to be an envoy of the English King, with Spanish might - and I am to tag along. Isn’t that nice? Care to go with me?’
Carolina shook her head at Penny’s impudence. She could be recognized by prisoners in the dark recesses of El Morro - recognized and denounced.
And would that bring her, too, within searing distance of the fire?
THE GOVERNOR’S PALACE
HAVANA, CUBA
30
The governor’s palace was a blaze of light. All of aristocratic Havana seemed to have descended upon it. The carriages, coming and going by torchlight, discharged elegant dons and their mantillaed ladies at the big handsome house on the Plaza de Armas.
From next door Carolina and Don Diego had just arrived at the door - Carolina had tried to be very late, had kept making excuses, but Don Diego had finally told her impatiently that he would drag her along half-dressed if she did not hurry. With a sigh she had finished combing her hair into a fashionably high coiffure, stuck the high-backed tortoiseshell comb into it at the back and bent her head and let old Juana spread the fragile white mantilla across her blonde hair.
When she lifted her head again, old Juana had clapped her hands joyfully at the sight.
‘A bride!’ she had cried. ‘A very bride!’
‘Not yet,’ sighed Carolina, who felt it would never come to pass, despite Don Diego’s determination.
She had walked down the tiled stairs regally on Don Diego’s arm and now they were being welcomed in the house next door by the governor himself, a pouting Marina, and beside them, a sparkling-eyed Penny. Tonight Penny was an astonishing vision in her tight-fitting black taffeta bodice, her wide matching skirt embroidered in jet, and her sheer black lace mantilla that drifted down over the tall Spanish comb set into the back of her elegantly coiffed red hair.
Carolina lifted her chin when she saw Marina. She tensed, half expecting a scene. But Marina only bowed stiffly, accepting Carolina’s presence as one more insult, and cast a baleful glance at Penny, whom she regarded as being the undoubted cause of Carolina’s presence.
The governor looked startled when he saw her, but he was instantly in control of himself and greeted Don Diego courteously. It was obvious that neither he nor his daughter recognized Carolina’s white gown and mantilla as having belonged to Doña Constanza, and Carolina felt a wave of relief sweep over her.
Perhaps they would be able to get through the evening after all.
But her feeling of confidence was short-lived.
They had barely entered the big candlelit room, where the milling guests were sipping glasses of wine and the musicians were warming up for the dancing, when Carolina looked across the room and met the gaze of a tall dark man in elegant grey satin. A man who registered shock at the sight of her.
Carolina had the dizzy feeling of being transported back in time to other shores, other days. For a moment she swayed against the tall dark figure of Kells beside her, elegant and Spanish-looking in his dark Spanish clothing. She did not think the man across the room could have seen Kells because his grey eyes were fixed on her in thunderstruck astonishment.
‘Don Diego,’ she said hastily, ‘I will be back presently. I see someone I want to speak to.’
Don Diego had been looking over her shoulder at Doña Jimena Menendez, who was waving her black lace fan rather faster at sight of him and considering the beautiful blonde with him in some alarm. Doña Jimena’s messages were among those he had chosen not to answer these days past. He felt it would be best to speak to her before she could say something outrageous to Carolina - for she was quite likely to do just that.
They parted, going their separate ways - Don Diego to wend a circuitous way to his left where Doña Jimena now sought to detach herself from a lively crowd of gentlemen who pressed around her; Carolina to make her way across the room and with the barest nod of her head cause the tall gentleman in grey to follow her into the next room where a table was laid with refreshments for the guests to eat later. The servants had just finished and it was temporarily empty.
Carolina was waiting for him, tapping her fingernails against the side of the long heaped-up table. She was furious to discover that she was trembling as he lounged in, and it was only with an effort that she managed to keep her voice low.
‘Robin Tyrell!’ she said bitterly. ‘Can it be that you are the Englishman who arrived here with some wild tale about being shipwrecked twice?’
The Marquess of Saltenham grinned at the accusation in her voice.‘The very same! An envoy from the King, no less, to the governor of Havana!’ At the expression on her face, he added with lifted brows, ‘Well, what would you expect me to say, Carolina? The truth? That I had run away from Reba and her confounded mother and was escaping across the seas to Barbados?’
‘Is that true, Robin?’ she demanded, hating
him for being so damnably attractive, lounging there in his elegant grey satins with his lazy gaze travelling appreciatively up and down her slender figure.
‘It is true, Carolina.’ He swept her a rakish bow and placed his hand dramatically over his heart. ‘Or should I call you ‘Christabel’ now?’ he wondered. ‘Tell me, does anyone here besides Rouge and myself know you to be the Silver Wench?’
She shook her head, but her lips compressed at the casual way he referred to Penny as ‘Rouge’.
‘Well, they won’t know it from me,’ he said. ‘Your sister told me Kells was dead and that you were most probably dead, too - sunk along with Port Royal.’ His empty grey eyes narrowed. ‘Now why do you think she told me that?’ he asked softly.
Carolina was thinking fast. At first glance Robin Tyrell looked very like Kells - until one looked closer and saw the difference. And he was a danger to them because he knew Kells. At first sight in this unlikely place Robin might not recognize Don Diego as Kells - but if he saw Don Diego with her, he was sure to recognize him! She must get Kells away from here before they met!
‘My sister is protecting me,’ she improvised swiftly. ‘Now that Kells is dead . . .’ She lingered over the words.
‘I am indeed sorry to hear that you have become a widow,’ Robin said promptly - but he sounded his usual blithe self, she noted with irritation. ‘And especially sorry for you, Carolina, since I heard just before I left England that elderly Lord Gayle had died. Had Kells lived, you would have been a viscountess. But what brings you to Havana? I could have imagined you storming some European capital with your beauty - but a Spanish stronghold in the Caribbean? It passes belief!’ He gave her a droll look.
‘I am here because I am Penny’s sister,’ Carolina said blandly. ‘After I lost my home in Port Royal, I sought out Penny, but when Nassau was raided we were both swept up in the net and brought here.’
‘And what a haul it was!’ he said admiringly. ‘Faith, what enterprising wenches you are! Are there any more sisters at home?’
‘Two,’ admitted Carolina, glad of the diversion from talk of Kells. ‘And they will neither of them have you, Robin, so don’t come beating at their door!’
He laughed. ‘Ah, you were ever hard on me,’ he said lightly.
He was abominably cheerful, she thought, nettled that he should greet her so calmly when he was, after all, the cause of all their troubles! ‘Robin, how could you have done it?’ she reproached him. ‘How could you have let Reba’s mother bring false witnesses against Kells?’
He grimaced. ‘You have not been in the toils of such as my mother-in-law,’ he said with feeling. ‘She got me so embroiled that I hardly knew what I was doing. I ended up afraid not to let her proceed for I could see my head rolling from the block if I did not go along with her plans!’
Yes, Reba’s mother was like that, Carolina knew, remembering how the woman had once had her seized and set upon a ship by force. She had been unwilling even to hear what Carolina had to say! Still, she told herself, Robin should have done something. It was shabby of him not to!
‘But Reba should have - ’ she began combatively.
He interrupted to say, with a bitter note in his voice, ‘Reba has become just like her. I think in time they will even look alike!’
Carolina regarded him steadily. She little doubted it was true. She should have seen it for herself.
His grey eyes narrowed. ‘I cannot but think that you forced the marriage upon me to punish me for impersonating Kells!’
‘Well, you deserved punishment,’ she murmured, but there was sympathy in her eyes. She could very well understand why Robin might run away from the pair of them! ‘And Reba loved you,’ she added mildly.
‘Love!’ He snorted. ‘She doesn’t know the meaning of the word. And her mother thinks to run me about at her pleasure, like a puppet on a string.’
Carolina fell silent. She could have heaped recriminations upon him but what good would it do? Robin was what he was; he would never change. He was, as always, looking for an easy way out. And he had found it - by running away.
One of the servants came through the room and looked at them curiously.
Robin stirred. ‘Your escort will wonder what has happened to you. We had best get back to the party!’
‘Oh, I really have no escort,’ lied Carolina. ‘Penny asked someone to bring me and he has melted into the crowd by now.’
‘Then I will escort you,’ he said gallantly.
‘Best not,’ she warned. ‘The governor’s daughter has set her glittering eyes on you and whenever she is crossed she breaks things. We would not want her to advance upon all this food’ - she indicated the groaning table - ‘in a sudden rage!’
The marquess gave her an amused look. There had been a time when he would have changed his life for this bewitching blonde beauty, he remembered ruefully. Ah, well, changing his life would not have suited him - he preferred his rakish ways.
‘For Marina’s sake’ - and mine as well, she could not help thinking - ‘let us go back separately,’ said Carolina. I will go first. Give me a little time to mingle among the guests before you follow me.’ Time to find Kells and somehow get him hidden from your view!
She moved back in among the laughing crowd and looked about for Kells. He was nowhere in sight - indeed - he was at that moment being harangued in an alcove by Doña Jimena, who had promptly charged him with neglect!
Behind her Robin Tyrell moved inconspicuously into the room, and the music struck up.
Carolina jumped as the first chord struck, for her nerves were honed to a fine point tonight; she was tense as a drawn bowstring.
But the second chord was never struck - the musicians came to a jangling, discordant halt.
For across the room near the entrance had appeared the tall arrow-straight figure of Don Ramon del Mundo. He seemed to be dragging a ragged sailor sporting a heavy growth of beard. Silken skirts had been hastily pulled away from this scruffy interloper, and the governor himself had stepped forward to protest - how they had got past him at the entrance, Carolina could only wonder - when Don Ramon’s stern voice rang out.
‘This man’ - he shook the sailor’s ragged arm - ‘was taken but last week from an English ship by one of our galleons, but four years ago he claims he was on another English ship which was sunk by the buccaneer Kells. I have reason to believe that this man Kells is here tonight.
About to seize Don Ramon by the arm and ask him what was the meaning of this invasion of his party, the governor came to an abrupt halt. Kells? Here? He looked around him in dismay.
Among the guests there was a sudden murmur and everybody fell silent, turning expectantly towards the bearded sailor. The musicians let their instruments hang limp in their hands. The servants, moving about, were agape.
‘Look about you!’ cried Don Ramon, his tawny eyes flashing as he spoke. ‘Do you see Kells among this company?’
‘Yes,’ came the growling response, ‘I do see him!’
Carolina felt the world whirl dizzily about her. Her knees buckled and she fell to the floor in a dead faint.
THE HOUSE ON THE PLAZA
DE ARMAS
HAVANA, CUBA
31
When Carolina came to, she was being deposited on her own bed in Don Diego’s house on the Plaza de Armas.
‘I brought you home,’ he was saying solicitously. ‘I liked not the way you fainted. It was indeed oppressively hot but still . . .’ He let the words die away as he looked at her keenly.
Carolina saw that they were alone in the bedchamber. I heard a man cry out that he saw the buccaneer Kells among the company,’ she said faintly. ‘I thought’ - she was still quivering with fright - ‘I thought they had discovered you.’
‘Can you not take it in,’ he asked impatiently, ‘that I am not this fellow Kells? I am in truth Don Diego Vivar. And since you will soon become my wife, Doña Carolina, I think you might begin getting used to it!’
Carolina
had no faith that she would ever become Doña Carolina’.
‘Who - who did they identify as Kells?’ she questioned but she had a sense of fatalism even as she asked it.
‘I was some distance away and heard only the commotion,’ admitted Don Diego. (In truth he had been almost at the opposite end of the house, closeted with a scolding Doña Jimena, who had sought to know in strident whispers why he was so cruelly neglecting her.) ‘I saw no one taken. But when I came back, you were lying on the floor, surrounded by ladies fanning you, and I heard someone say that the guest of honour had been accused of being a buccaneer and that Don Ramon del Mundo and the governor and the guest and someone else had gone into the governor’s private office to sort things out.’
The guest of honour . . . That would no doubt be Robin Tyrell, Marquess of Saltenham. She had not known the ball was being given in his honour. Perhaps it was not. What Don Diego had heard might have been a garbled version.
She had a sense of doom. Robin had been taken; he would tell all within the sound of his voice that Kells was dead, and his source for knowing that would be herself. She wondered when they would come for her.
Luz and old Juana, evidently sent downstairs for water and wine, appeared in the doorway and she fell silent, letting them minister to her.
She was seeking for some excuse to send one of them back to the governor’s palace - and she found it when she realized she did not have her mantilla.
‘I seem to have lost my mantilla, Luz,’ she told the serving girl. ‘Would you run over and get it for me? And while you are there, inquire what happened. There was some kind of commotion and in the heat I fainted.’
Luz brightened. She loved to be in the thick of things. She came back to report that the guest of honour had been accused of being a buccaneer but the governor had taken both him and his accuser aside, and the Englishman had retorted with such heat that the man was a liar that the governor believed him and the accuser had been taken away by Don Ramon del Mundo, back to El Morro, whence he had come.
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