Bold Breathless Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  In case the Englishman escaped him! A thrill went through that black-and-gold-clad figure by the window as Verhulst envisioned a nightmarish chase across the ice with the tall, handsome Englishman running for his life, pursued by savage hounds. Verhulst and Imogene would watch from the shore. Like bands of steel, his arms would encircle her struggling figure, soft and female in its mantle of velvet and sable. But even through that he would feel the ripples of terror course through her shuddering frame and listen with satisfaction to her screams. White-faced, held fast, Imogene would be forced to watch this drama of life and death played out upon the ice. She would not be allowed to avert her face as Groot barked his orders and the men fanned out, pursuing the hounds and their desperate quarry. Trembling, she would watch her lover die.

  Verhulst’s eyes gleamed in anticipation. Imogene feared the dogs. She had lived in fear of them ever since the night when, half-drunk, he had sat at the table and—between toasts to her white shoulders—had told his shuddering wife in grisly detail how he had come back to Wey Gat from a skating party downriver to find his mother and father dead in their blood, scalped by a roving band of Iroquois. It had snowed that night and the Indians’ tracks had been lost; Verhulst had never found them. His revenge had been wreaked on others. He had bought the fiercest hunting dogs he could find and had Groot train them to hunt men. They got their practice, he told her, raising his glass to toast her eyebrows, on thieving Indians. Woe be to any man, white or Indian, who pilfered the slightest thing at Wey Gat, for Groot, the kennelmaster, had standing orders to bring the culprit down—and it was never a whole man Groot delivered, but some torn and quivering flesh or, more mercifully, the broken remains of a dead man.

  Imogene had stared at him that night with loathing in her wide, blue eyes—and fear too. It was, he told himself with a dark chuckle, the first time she had learned to fear him. There had been other times of course since then and he had reveled in them. Reveled in tormenting the young wife whose spirit he could not crush, and whose body he could not hold.

  Tonight would be his crowning achievement. Tonight he would make Imogene watch the destruction of her lover!

  On the river’s east bank, lmogene’s wind-whipped figure, recognizing the fox for what it was, lost its watchful rigidity. The fox, who had turned to regard the woman with luminous eyes, continued its moon-silvered path to the west bank.

  Imogene watched him reach the safety of the opposite bank and merge into the snow-covered brush. From the second-floor window Verhulst could imagine her sobbing indrawn breath—something had escaped him, she would be thinking.

  But you will not escape, he promised himself. Tonight—even though I have to tie you to your chair—I will make you relive every moment. I will fill my glass with brandy and make you admit I am the better man—and if you are stubborn and will not, I will fling the brandy, goblet and all, into your lying face. No .. . not the goblet, for scars would dim your beauty and that must continue to delight me. You will continue to delight me, but this night’s work will bring in upon you with force that here at Wey Gat you live but for my pleasure.

  He was all but intoxicated by his own thoughts.

  The fox was gone now. Imogene, pulling her cloak tightly about her, bent down and slipped under the wooden pier that protruded on its pilings out into the frozen river. Doubtless she felt more secure there, Verhulst reasoned, for she was now out of view from the house. Her wide, beautiful eyes would be gazing to the south, he told himself grimly, for the note he had learned of had been sent downriver to New Amsterdam. He had not been able to lay hands on the note Imogene had penned but it had been delivered to one Stephen Linnington, fresh from England, and Stephen Linnington was the name he had wrung from her before the child was born.

  ‘‘Linnington,’’ she had sobbed at last, thrust to her knees at his feet, and with her head snapping back and forth from his rhythmic blows. “Stephen Linnington was my lover. But he is dead, Verhulst, he is no threat to you!”

  Another lie—like her virginity.

  For now that same Stephen Linnington had risen from the grave and come across the sea to reclaim his lost love.

  And would die in the doing of it.

  Still, Verhulst was puzzled by Imogene’s choice of the wooden pier as a place to hide. Surely it would have been more like her to seek the cover of the trees that shadowed the river-bank?

  As he puzzled over that, unbidden came the memory of the day he had met her.

  He had been in Amsterdam five days. It was his first visit to the land of his forebears and the slender young patroon in his dark velvets and wide stylish boots was already finding himself a bit bored by museums and statues and parks and sightseeing. It had been very novel at first to look up at the dikes of Holland and see tall-masted ships floating by in stately grace above one’s head as if they wafted along dry land, or to view the storks’ huge nests perilously perched atop tall orange-brick chimneys, to browse in cellar shops or watch the goods of the world being loaded and unloaded into the upper reaches of the tall step-gabled houses. But on the fifth day it had come to Verhulst that he was after all a stranger in a strange land. America was his country and the wide, deep river that flowed from the Adirondacks to the sea was his river. His ships were not the tall-masted merchantmen that scraped sides in Amsterdam’s busy harbor, but the fast, single-masted river sloops that sailed past his home at Wey Gat.

  He was lonely.

  Although he drank deep of metheglin in the inn’s cozy common room, he slept but fitfully and on waking he had his first sight of Imogene.

  She was never to know how much that meeting had shaken him.

  Roused from his fitful sleep by a melody sung in a girl’s fresh, light voice, Verhulst had stumbled from his bed and pushed open the wooden casements. As his dark head thrust itself out, the caroling notes died and he found himself looking into the startled face of a young girl in her night rail who had been leaning on her arms in the open casements of the room next to his, softly singing her heart out to the empty street below.

  It was a magic moment. Verhulst would never forget it.

  It was as if one of the great paintings from the museum’s plastered walls had come to life and smiled at him. A swift, dazzling, beautiful smile flashed from a set of perfect white teeth surrounded by softly curving lips. She seemed completely unaware that she was wearing only her thin white night rail or that her golden hair tumbled uncombed down around her white shoulders. Her eyes were blue as delftware but her voice was English. “We are alone with the dawn, mynheer!”

  Verhulst swallowed, for once at a loss for words. In the face of such earth-shaking beauty he felt tongue-tied. He could but gulp out some trivial answer before a scolding female voice called to her from within and her head disappeared from the casements.

  Later that day, by dint of much clever maneuvering, Verhulst made the acquaintance of this vision—and that of her chaperon, Mistress Peale, and her ever-watchful maid, Elise Meggs, as well. Imogene was. Mistress Peale informed him vaguely, in Amsterdam “for her health” for an indefinite stay. But she did so hope, she added with a look that appraised the young patroon’s handsome garments and priced the heavy gold chain that hung around his neck, that Imogene would be sufficiently recovered by fall that they might return to their home in the Scilly Isles at the southern tip of England, for a frozen winter in Amsterdam was not to be borne by ladies from the islands in the sun where ice and snow were almost unknown.

  Verhulst had thought Imogene looked to be in excellent health and had said gallantly that she had brought the sun with her in the gold of her shining hair. Imogene had given a small perfunctory laugh to acknowledge the compliment, but the delft blue eyes had been looking elsewhere into the far distance ... as far away as the sea or the Scilly Isles.

  Verhulst should have been warned.

  He was not.

  In a chocolate shop on the fabled Kalverstraat he treated them to the expensive new “West Indian drink.” As if he were a
native—having arrived in Holland a few days before them—he took them on a round of sightseeing in this Venice of the north and marveled at the English girl’s grace as she paused on an old stone bridge to look down at her reflection in the canal, or gave a small sigh as she looked up at the Schreierstoren, the Weeping Tower, as if she understood those legions of sailors’ wives who had bade their seagoing men good-bye here—often for the last time.

  Before the week was out Verhulst was madly in love with her. Imogene, preoccupied with her own thoughts, hardly knew he was alive.

  Pressed by Mistress Peale, the attentive chaperon, Verhulst admitted expansively that he was in Amsterdam to collect paintings and fine fabrics to decorate the stone house his father had begun but a year before his death and that he, Verhulst, would complete, the house that was rising along the shore of the great river discovered by Henry Hudson, the Englishman, which the Dutch pleased to call the North River.

  That much was true enough. What Verhulst van Rappard did not tell these fan-wafting ladies in their silk gowns was that, having come early into his patroonship at the untimely death of his parents, Verhulst had instantly chosen to woo the most beautiful daughter of all the river gentry. On graceful bended knee, during an intermission at a ball at her father’s handsome house at Haerwyck, he had offered his fine old name to Rychie ten Haer—and been laughed at. Vivacious Rychie had heard the gossip about his youthful accident; she had no intention of tying herself to a eunuch. Callously, she had let Verhulst know as much.

  Mortified beyond belief, Verhulst had plunged from the room and stumbled back to his waiting sloop, the Danskammer. Upriver the Danskammer had carried him, back to Wey Gat, where for three long months he had locked himself in his half-completed stone house, refused to receive friend or foe, and dined, word had it, on metheglin and brandy.

  At the end of that time he had emerged, sober and apparently at peace with his world.

  In that time Verhulst van Rappard, loftiest of New Netherlands proud patroons, had made a great decision: He had decided to remain a bachelor. Forever.

  This serene intention flew apart when he encountered the earth-shaking golden beauty of Imogene Wells. He was incredulous that anyone could look like that. By God, she was stunning, she surpassed any girl on the North River. Indeed, Verhulst was secretly sure Imogene’s feminine allure surpassed all the women in this world—and very possibly the next! What a decoration she would make for his handsome house. A living painting moving like a shaft of light from room to room. Damme, he would be die envy of every man who saw her.

  The memory of Rychie’s contemptuous turndown of his marriage offer made Verhulst’s dark eyes gleam. This girl—even dressed simply and youthfully as she was in pastel silks and flowered calicos, and not in the queenly velvets and rich brocades in which he would outfit her—would put Rychie and all the rest of them in the shade!

  The memory faded.

  Out there in the snow was a faithless jade who had taken lying marriage vows and borne a child that he could not have fathered—indeed, he now knew the child had been conceived even before he met Imogene—and that, perhaps, he could have tolerated. He had been wild with rage at first, for the conviction that Imogene was pregnant—and not by him—had come to him suddenly at the dining table when, pale and wan, she had pushed aside all her food and in the same breath demanded a pickle.

  Verhulst had laughed. “Did I not know better. I’d think ye were pregnant!”

  He would always remember that proud white face, the way she straightened her slender shoulders and looked straight into his narrowed, dark eyes. “But I am pregnant, Verhulst,” she had said quietly.

  His world had spun, for what his head had told him his heart had not believed.

  He had sent away the servants then and she had told him lies.

  He had pretended to believe them.

  But on another night, when the thickness of Imogene’s waist had become a mockery to his lacerated spirit, he had confronted her again. He had locked the dining room doors and seized Imogene by her long, fair hair, wrenched her from her chair, and shaken her as a terrier shakes a rat. “His name!” he had shouted. “Tell me your lover’s name!”

  Her stubborn silence had maddened him. He had kept his left hand cruelly twined in her hair and struck her head back and forth brutally with his open palm.

  Still she had defied him.

  It was only when he had threatened to kill both her and her unborn child if she would not name her lover that Imogene had given him a name—the name of Stephen Linnington.

  At that moment, borne on a gust of passion, Verhulst had reached out for the carving knife on the dining room table, thinking to kill his errant young wife. But the reaching hand had wavered, for hard on the heels of that thought had come another: Who along the river had ever heard of Stephen Linnington? And what was Imogene saying? The man was dead! A lover dead in England could not come back to haunt him. And when a child was born of this white-faced, half-fainting wench he held so savagely by the hair, all up and down the river that child would be considered his. Only he and Imogene would know, and neither of them was likely to tell. Indeed, when Imogene was delivered of her child, the fact that he would be accounted the father would be a further slap to Rychie and all her scornful ilk.

  Thoughtfully, a man bemused, he had loosened his grip on Imogene’s fair hair and she had slumped in a velvet heap to the floor.

  His feelings toward her had swung widely after that. Like a pendulum, he was one day kind and another day cruel. And during those days she had learned to hate—and to fear him.

  In time he might have forgiven Imogene and come to love the beautiful child she bore at Wey Gat.

  But when he learned that the Englishman had arrived in New Amsterdam, that Imogene had been in communication with him, all the raging pent-up fires within him had burst and he had told himself fiercely that he hated Imogene, that he would yet bring the defiant wench to her knees in penitent submission.

  Thrice before she had tried to escape him: he had stopped her each time.

  The last time she had sat white and quiet before him until he had screamed at her to speak, to say something.

  Looking at him with tired, defiant blue eyes—looking like a very queen, he had thought, in her incongruous diamonds despite her rumpled calico dress and windblown hair—she had said in a colorless voice, “I will find a way to escape you, Verhulst. You cannot hold me here forever at Wey Gat.”

  Now once again, she was attempting it.

  And this time she had the Englishman to help her.

  What had Linnington’s note said, that note to Imogene that Verhulst had intercepted and then, craftily, had delivered to her? I will be waiting for you when the moon is high. I have done all that you asked. Come swiftly, my darling, and we will be away on the wings of the wind!

  The wings of the wind indeed! Verhulst had snorted and stationed a sentry downriver to watch for Stephen Linnington and report his arrival. The sentry had not yet reported. Was Stephen coming by land, then? It hardly seemed likely with all this snow on the ground and roads that were scarcely more than Indian trails but... a man on snowshoes could make it, of course. Or a man on a strong, determined horse.

  Not hearing of Stephen’s whereabouts had fretted Verhulst. He wished he had been able to intercept that other note, the one Imogene had sent to Stephen in New Amsterdam. / have done all that you asked. What had Imogene asked of him? To take her away, most likely ... no more than that. Verhulst snorted and took himself downstairs. He had wanted a wide view of the countryside as his wife left the house, to see if the Englishman would come from some unsuspected angle, but now he would go down and supervise operations.

  Dawn, he promised himself as he clattered down the broad stairs, would find Imogene on her knees before him, tearfully offering to do anything—anything—to save her trussed-up lover.

  Having reached the front hall, Verhulst reminded himself that he must not alert Imogene or he would spoil the h
unt. Carefully he unlatched the heavy front door, opened it and stepped out into the snow. With his gaze never leaving the wooden pier beneath which Imogene crouched, he began to make his silent way down the white slope.

  Away on the wings of the wind. . . . The wind, that wind that was whipping his dark hair into his eyes and trying to rip away the lace that spilled out over his dark velvet doublet ... his father had named the estate Wey Gat, Wind Gate, because of the wild winds that swept downriver from the northern reaches, cold winds that screamed down from Canada, bringing ice and snow, and Verhulst had once heard himself referred to contemptuously at a ball in New Amsterdam as “van Rappard, the big wind upriver.” He had turned sharply in an attempt to identify the speaker but had missed him amid the whirling bright-garbed dancers. The wings of the wind ... it tore at his mind. Was there some secret hidden in the wind? He stared at the frozen expanse of gray ice before him.

  Suddenly he stiffened. He had heard a familiar sound, a kind of crunching, grinding sound coming from upriver. And at that sound Imogene darted out from her hiding place beneath the pier, slipping and sliding as she ran across the ice out toward the center of the river.

  Verhulst knew that sound! It was an iceboat, that was what Linnington had meant by on the wings of the wind—sails! The Englishman had tricked him, he was not working his way up from the south but flashing down from the frozen reaches upriver, driven by the almost gale-force winds that were even now sweeping down out of Canada. The note Verhulst had intercepted from the laconic Indian had come not from the south, as he had assumed, but from the north! In a moment a huge sail would appear out of nowhere and an iceboat on its greased iron runners would thunder down to sweep up Imogene and take her out of his reach forever!