He looked down at her tenderly, this miracle of a woman he had found, and knew that it was true. Their love had come through it, untarnished and bright. That slender thread of love had endured so much - it had crossed the wild seas yet it had suffered no sea change; it had endured near-death and violence and jealousy, all the woes of the world had sought to wrest it from them and yet it held them still together by its gossamer unseen strands.
He stroked her hair tenderly, loving every strand. ‘Carolina, Carolina,’ he murmured huskily. ‘What have I ever done to deserve you?’
It was a golden moment, a moment to remember. But Carolina, after all the fear and strain that had besieged her in Havana - yes, and the doubt, too - was suddenly in a playful mood.
‘Oh, come now,’ she rallied him teasingly. ‘We have enemies who would say that we deserve each other!’
‘No man could deserve you,’ he said softly against her ear. ‘But you have my promise - given as we slip away from death - that I will endeavour to do so.’
His words had moved her, but still she mocked him.
‘All this for a woman who was so recently your slave in Havana?’ she asked flippantly.
His voice was rueful. ‘Well, I am now your slave,’ he said. ‘And will prove it every day of my life.’
A wonderful warmth flooded over her. They had been through so much - together and separately. And they had come through it all - together.
She cast a look behind her. The great fortress of El Morro had vanished, and from just above where it had been, a single star winked in the velvet night. A guiding star that would lead them through this night and across this trackless ocean . . . together.
Always.
Nearby Robin Tyrell, Marquess of Saltenham, studied Carolina and her sister. Two spirited women so alike in many ways - and yet so very different. And his feeling for them was different, too. Carolina was a bright star - but she shone in someone else’s heaven. Carolina had made him wistful to be what he was not.
But Rouge - and that was the way he thought of her, as ‘Rouge’, not ‘Penny’, as Carolina called her - Rouge set him aflame. He desired her in an aching physical way that ground in his groin. For Carolina his heart had ached, but Rouge he must have - whatever the cost.
And she knew it. It was in the warm beckoning smile she now turned upon him, in the silky luxuriousness of her movements as she stretched slightly and then leaned upon the ship’s rail, presenting her eloquent woman’s body to best advantage.
He groaned.
It seemed to him that women had always ruled his life - and now here was another! Worse, another destined to play a role in it that no one else ever had, a dominant role. God, he knew that he would follow after her like a dog, panting for her favours. He, Robin Tyrell, Marquess of Saltenham! It was degrading. It was - ‘Come along, Robin,’ said Penny, noting his steady regard. ‘There must be some place more private on this ship than the deck!’
The light in her eyes was unmistakable, her smile promised everything.
‘We’ll find a place,’ he assured her hoarsely - and hurried forward, following her.
Carolina turned to watch them as they went. A woman like Penny, she mused, could hold even a rake like Robin in line!
‘I rather think that Robin’s the slave!’ she laughed.
‘As I am yours,’ chuckled Kells, sweeping her up in his arms as he spoke. ‘Command me as you will!’
The silver eyes looking up into his sparkled. She was very like to do it!
‘Oh, Rye,’ she whispered, snuggling down into his arms as if to remain there forever. ‘We are safe. We will make it home this time. All the way to Essex.’
Rye Evistock, gentleman of Essex, who never again would be called Kells, looked down at her tenderly. She was so lovely, this vivid girl of his, so touchingly trusting and yet so brave and wise. It made him humble to realize how gallantly she had fought to save him these past weeks and how willing she had been to throw her life away for his sake. It told him more than any words how very much she must love him. Carolina would always tempt other men - that he knew. But - she would always find her way home.
To his arms.
The buccaneer and his lady were on their way home at last.
And so I end my saga
Of those who loved and sinned
And left their footprints on the sand,
Their lovesongs on the wind!
Epilogue
An Essex lady now she rides along the Essex ways
And turns her radiant face away from other stormier days
When as the Silver Wench her fame was every buccaneer’s pride
And made the fair wench Christabel a wild sea rover’s bride!
It was late spring and a sultry air hung over northern Cuba. Cane rats gnawed the young cane in the sugarcane fields that would someday make good Cuban rum. The cathedral bells, clanging all over the country, were calling dark smiling dons and mantillaed ladies to mass.
But at the entrance to Havana harbour a miracle had happened. That great white and gold ship, the El Dorado, had sailed in from out of nowhere, flying the red and gold banner of Spain.
The guns of El Morro boomed a welcome and were quickly followed by a salute from the Punta and - a little slower - by the guns of La Fuerza.
It was Spain’s ambassador to England who came ashore - came ashore beaming, for had he not returned that greatest of galleons, the El Dorado, at last to Havana?
In the white city that day, with the sun gleaming upon the white coral limestone and glinting upon the red tile roofs and the black wrought iron of balconies and grilles of the rococo buildings, all was wonder and excitement.
The ambassador was received in state in the governor’s offices in the frowning fortress of La Fuerza - and then, when the governor learned of the ambassador’s mission here, he was carried away almost at once to the governor’s palace, that big attractive house that fronted the Plaza de Armas, for wine and discussion.
‘But such a thing has never happened before!’ cried the governor, urging excellent Malaga upon his guest.
His guest, tired of shipboard life after his long voyage from London, looked around the pleasant courtyard in which they sat.
‘I know,’ laughed the Spanish ambassador ruefully. ‘But, then, I think that we have never had a buccaneer such as Captain Kells before! He has a certain style, this buccaneer! He flaunts our laws, he seizes our ships at his pleasure - and now at the end of his career, he sails one to England and graciously sends it, to Havana - bearing gifts.’
‘Bearing gifts?’ The governor could not believe his ears. He poured more wine into his guest’s swiftly drained goblet.
‘Near half a shipload of French wine for your excellency,’ said the ambassador. ‘I am given to understand - France and England being still at war then - that the wine was captured by happenstance on the journey to England.’ His lips twisted in a wry smile. ‘This particular buccaneer distributes his largesse as he sees fit. He sends word that not only did you offer him and his lady your kind hospitality in Havana’ - here the governor choked and had to be patted on the back; the ambassador’s eyes gleamed wickedly for he was a wordly man - ‘but you, by the ‘lending’ of this great ship, gave him a comfortable journey back to England to redeem his lost honour - and not only that, but a chance to strike a blow for his country against the French, who were harassing English shores!’
‘I never lent him a ship!’ gasped the governor.
‘No, I am sure you did not, but the impudent fellow chose to put it that way. Your wine cellar,’ he added meditatively, ‘will be none the worse for all this good Bordeaux.’
Indeed it would not! The governor, a fancier of fine wines, felt himself brightening. ‘The ship is undamaged?’ he asked nervously, for he felt he could be called to account if she were not.
'Undamaged indeed,' affirmed the ambassador, who after the coolness of London was feeling the heat of tropical Havana. His host recognized that and signalle
d for a servant to fan him. With cool air from the swaying palm-leaf fan blowing over him at last, the ambassador sighed and relaxed. ‘I bring other gifts as well.’
‘Other gifts?’exclaimed the governor. ‘Madre de Dios, this buccaneer must consider himself a king!’
‘It would seem he was an unofficial king in the islands, this Lord Admiral of the Buccaneers,’ agreed the ambassador drily. ‘But these gifts are in the most part from his lady.’
‘The Silver Wench,’ murmured the governor, shaking his head.
‘Lady Gayle,’ corrected the ambassador, ‘It would seem that Kells was but a name Rye Evistock used for buccaneering ventures, and now that his father is dead he has inherited the title of Lord Gayle. He is a viscount. Lives in Essex.’
The ambassador’s head swam. How they did things in England was beyond him! ‘You mentioned gifts from his lady?’ he inquired weakly.
‘Yes, they are being carried ashore now. And I was to deliver messages with each. One is for your daughter - a rose jar, and I was to say that it is hoped this rose jar finds her in better temper and that she will hurl it at no one - that she is far luckier than she knows.
The governor gasped. ‘Impudent wench!’ he muttered.
‘You will ask me what the message means.’ The ambassador spread his hands. ‘I do not know.
‘There is a handsome black mantilla and high-backed comb for someone called Juana, who is, I believe, in your service - with the wish that she wear it in church and be as elegant to look at as any great lady of Spain. Oh, and another half shipload of fine French wine for one Captain Juarez for saving Kells’s life in Port Royal and bringing him here.’
The governor shook his head dizzily.
‘And there are gifts for one Don Ramon del Mundo. Kells - Lord Gayle - sends him a sword with the hope that it may never be crossed with his in battle. And Lady Gayle sends him the finest white lace mantilla I have ever beheld, which she says was found on the ship and belonged to no one. She wishes him to know that she wore it on the voyage home to England and expresses the hope that he will give it to his bride on her wedding day - and that he will find the lady of his heart.’
‘Yes, yes.’ The governor collected himself. At first he had thought that this buccaneer had bribed del Mundo to keep the guns of the fort silent while he slipped away in the El Dorado, for the fire that night in El Morro combined with the escape of all the English prisoners had been, to say the least, suspicious, but in the light of these gifts - so trifling by comparison to his own rich haul - he was now of a different opinion. For he now remembered that del Mundo had shown an interest in the Wench -indeed he and Don Diego had nearly crossed swords over it. A peace offering merely. His opinion of del Mundo went up - he might choose to bestow his daughter on the man after all!
Don Ramon, receiving his gifts in silence from the hand of the ambassador later that day, was of a different opinion.
‘A fine blade,’ he commented, studying the sword, which was a miracle of Spanish workmanship.
‘The finest workmanship I have seen,’ agreed the ambassador. ‘I believe he said he ‘liberated’ it in the raid on Cartagena.’
Don Ramon del Mundo fingered the sword. A handsome gift indeed, and in its way symbolic. For Don Ramon knew that he could never cross swords with the man who had sent it - not that he would not kill him willingly enough, but he could not do it because it would bring her sorrow. And he thought that the erstwhile Don Diego had sent him this sword because he felt the same way. She loved Kells - but perhaps a small part of her heart belonged to Don Ramon as well, and in this way she had made peace between them. It was Kells’s way of saying. You saved my life, but I know it was because of her.
He looked up at the ambassador, his face inscrutable.
‘He sent a further message, but it is a letter, under seal. You will see that I have not opened it.’
Frowning, Don Ramon took the parchment and broke the red wax seal that secured it. What he read was scrawled in a careless hand across the single sheet of paper.
‘If ever you find yourself in an English jail anywhere, let me know and I will get you out. ’
It was signed with a flourish, ‘Kells'.
It was a buccaneer’s way of saying thank you. Don Ramon laughed.
The ambassador’s curiosity was piqued. ‘Might one know what was in the letter to cause mirth?’ he wondered.
‘Just an exchange of friendly insults,’ shrugged Don Ramon - but he set the corner of the letter into a candle flame and watched it burn nonetheless.
‘And his lady sends you this.’ The ambassador spread out the mantilla before Don Ramon, sheer and white in the candlelight. ‘She said she wore it on the voyage home to England.’
Don Ramon del Mundo - that man of the world - fingered the lovely mantilla. So she had sent him something she had worn, something she had touched - it was a bond between them, saying something more than mere words could express, sending him an unspoken message across the sea: I might have loved you ... In other times I would have loved you . . .
He held it up, studying it. Sheer - but not so sheer as her silken skin. White - but not so white as the gleaming brilliance of her blonde hair in the sun, its pale glow by moonlight. Intricate in pattern - but not so intricate as the web of thoughts he had spun about her, lost in a maze of desire . . .
‘She says she sends it to you in the hope that you will bestow it on the lady of your heart to wear on her wedding day,’ explained the ambassador.
Del Mundo looked up. For a moment there was a lump in his throat and he could not speak. He had found the lady of his heart - but he could never claim her for she belonged to someone else. But he would wish her well, far away across the sea.
‘She was a most wondrous lady, who sends me this,’ he said huskily.
‘I know for I have met her,’ the ambassador said softly. For he noted that del Mundo had spoken in the past tense - it was in its way a renouncement.
Don Ramon did not hesitate. He sat with the mantilla across his knees for half a night while he drank himself insensible on Bordeaux wine from the new shipment which the governor had been pleased to give him. For the governor had decided that it would be best to pass Marina into strong hands that could take care of her rather than give her into the keeping of some foppish son of a merchant prince - and besides, she fancied Don Ramon, had ever since Don Diego and the marquess had left the scene.
Don Ramon had come to Havana a fortune hunter, intending to win in this New World fame and glory and with it go back to Spain and make a great marriage. He had found instead true love - and the governor’s daughter.
And now, staring moodily at that mantilla - lovely reminder of the beauty who had worn it - he resolved to seek Marina out.
He found her next day sitting bored in the courtyard of the governor’s palace on the Plaza de Armas, her duena snoring nearby.
He ignored her arch look.
‘Querida mia,' he said whimsically, for he was still slightly drunk. ‘You deserve a better man than myself - you deserve someone who will truly love you.’
‘But I do not want a better man!’ Marina wailed, for she had already made her choice. ‘And if you do not love me now,’ she added stubbornly, ‘you will learn to love me!’
‘No.’ Don Ramon smiled his regretful refusal. ‘You deserve someone who will not need to learn to love you, Marina. You deserve a dashing caballero whose heart you will enchant at first sight.’
'No!' Marina, who was not used to refusals, leapt up and stamped her foot. She had shouted so loudly that her duena woke up with a start, crying, ‘What? What?’
And Marina won the day, for after a month or two of languishing, Don Ramon del Mundo - that man of the world - remembered his original purpose in coming to Havana.
He returned to the courtyard and proposed on bended knee to a beaming Marina.
And so it was that the governor’s daughter, a little older now and much more slender (having lost what her father had b
een pleased to call her ‘baby fat’), wore the white mantilla, gift of the Silver Wench, when she married the valiant Don Diego del Mundo in the lofty echoing interior of the great twin-towered cathedral behind the Plaza de Armas.
All the bells in Havana rang that day in uncontrolled joy.
But on nights when the moon rode pale across Havana’s skies, nights when the fleecy clouds shimmered fair as Carolina’s long light hair, nights when the stars shone as silvery and as beckoning as Carolina’s eyes, Don Ramon del Mundo, possessed at last of a wealthy bride, sat quaffing his wine in the courtyard of his fine new home in Havana and remembered a woman of moonlight who had swept across his life like a bright wind.
He would always remember her . . .
Port Royal, struck first by hurricane and then by the new more awful disaster that dropped the city into the sea, was never really rebuilt.1
But to Carolina, safe at last in England, riding out in velvet riding habit and plumed hat to call upon her Essex neighbours, it was of little consequence that she had been witness to - indeed a part of - one of the great catastrophes to strike the Western World. She heard with a shudder that what was left of Port Royal was still sinking, and heard, too, a year after the disaster, that the new town of Kingston was being built on what was considered a safer location on the nearby mainland. But she never cared to return to Jamaica. The world she had known there was gone - swallowed up by the blue-green waters of the Caribbean.
There were reminders, of course - and Hawks was one of the them.
The pardon Kells had won from the King included a pardon for his men. And so it was that he sent to Kingston, for Hawks to come and join him in Essex.
Hawks arrived in England looking as laconic as ever, and with his rolling sailor’s gait unchanged. He brought with him a large hoop to which clung a perpetually astonished looking red and green talking parrot he had affectionately christened Poll - and a surprise gift for Carolina:
Moonbeam.
‘Oh, Hawks, where did you find her?’ Carolina gasped, opening the wicker basket in which Moonbeam had cowered during most of her voyage - for she still hated the sea.
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