This Loving Torment

by Valerie Sherwood

  No, she must face things out here. Perhaps the group across the courtyard would get so drunk they would pass out and forget her. In the meantime she felt safer in the kitchen with the evil-visaged cook and the friendly mute girl.

  Time passed. The cook cleaned up and began shelling beans, presumably for the next day’s meal. The mute girl helped, her nimble fingers breaking the pods deftly, spilling their contents into a great pottery bowl decorated with Indian designs, that she held upon her lap.

  Charity, having now finished her third flagon of wine, was feeling pleasantly drowsy, when she was snapped awake by the sound of chairs scraping in the room across the courtyard, voices growing louder, the clash of cutlasses being buckled on, heavy footsteps, a noisy wrench as the front door opened and closed amid goodnights.

  Hands clapped. Almost spilling the contents of the pottery bowl, the mute girl leapt up and ran across the courtyard in answer to that signal.

  Charity grew rigid.

  When the girl came back she smiled and gestured to Charity to accompany her.

  Her knees feeling like butter. Charity got up and followed cautiously. She found herself wishing she had brought along the knife she had used to cut her meat. To her surprise, the mute girl did not lead her to the big front room but to a room at the side with a handsome door. Swinging it wide, she gestured Charity inside, and left her.

  Charity, who like her mother had never lacked for courage, took a deep breath, lifted her chin defiantly and stepped inside. So surprised was she, she hardly heard the door close softly behind her.

  She might have been in an English manor house in Devon.

  About her the walls were richly paneled in dark wood; there was a handsome fireplace with huge brass andirons and fender. Portraits in baroque gold-leaf frames adorned the walls. Underfoot was a large deep Turkish carpet. The shutters were open so that the deep blue wonder of the tropic night poured in through the black lacework of the iron grille.

  Her tall host had his back to her and was standing in semi-darkness. As the yellow glow flared up, showing his broad back in silhouette, Charity saw that he was lighting a row of candles. When the candlelight flickered about the room, she realized that she had been in part mistaken. The furniture had a heavy carved Spanish look to it, and the portraits were not of Englishmen but of Spanish dons and their darkeyed ladies. The table that graced the center of the room held a huge silver bowl of exotic tropical fruit.

  The man swung around. He was of good height, with an arresting span of shoulder. His dark straight hair, which hung to his shoulders, looked as if it had been hacked off with a knife. He had removed his coat and he was wearing a fine white linen shirt with ruffled cuffs that came down over his strong sun-browned hands. Tight-fitting black knee breeches of a material she took to be heavy silk, and silk stockings, encased his legs. The coat, which he had obviously just flung onto a chair, was black and trimmed with a quantity of gold braid. About his lean torso was a waistcoat of black silk shot with gold threads, and spilling down over that a white shirt ruffle. A wide black leather belt with a gold buckle held a very serviceable-looking brass hiked rapier in a chased silver scabbard. Instead of shoes he wore black boots with turned-over cuffs, not of the latest style, but perhaps suited to the life in Tortuga.

  His whole mein was arresting. As he turned toward her, his dark face was lit by the branched silver candelabra he had been lighting when she entered. But it was not that which caused her to stand there stunned in the candlelight, her face at first registering shock and then fury.

  The man who stood before her, considering her with narrowed eyes from a saturnine hawklike face was the man who had ruined her first ball at Daarkenwyck, and whose face and impudent hands she had never quite been able to forget.

  The man who stood before her, tall and sinister in the candlelight, was Roger Derwent.

  CHAPTER 32

  “You are Captain Court?” she cried on a rising note, unable to believe it.

  “The same. At your service, mistress,” he said gravely, and gestured toward a chair. “Will you sit and take a glass of wine with me?”

  “Then you are also someone else,” she accused. “For surely you are Roger Derwent!”

  “A name I use when convenient,” he admitted. “I thought you might remember me,” he added. “You called me a beast at our last meeting, if I remember correctly.”

  “And now I’ll call you something else you are—a sea robber and a pirate!” cried Charity angrily.

  “Ah, there’s no need for heat,” he murmured. “I admit I may have been under some misapprehension about you when last we met.”

  “Misapprehension? Your intent was obvious! You were tearing my clothes off.”

  “Hardly that,” he said coolly, “for you left me quite fully attired as I remember. But I’d taken you for a green girl who’d never been kissed. Then the patroon told me, when I asked if it was your first ball, that you were an escaped felon, that both he and his son had known you, and that in fact they shared you for their pleasure.”

  “That’s a lie!” flashed Charity. “I never shared a bed with Killian van Daarken—not even though he chained me in that cold dark blockhouse with the rats!”

  “Ah, he did that, did he?” His face grew bleak. “I must have a word with him when next we meet.” He was silent for a moment and then added, as if impelled by a curiosity too great to be denied, “And the son?”

  Charity caught her breath. Lies did not come easily to her. “Not—not at the time of the ball,” she muttered. “It was afterward. He’d promised to marry me!” she cried defensively. “And he was leaving, and he cried and—oh, damn, what business is it of yours anyway?”

  “Yes,” he echoed moodily, “what business is it of mine?” He turned away from her and stared out the window at the tropical night that had settled its dark wings over the town. “And before the patroon’s son there were no others?” he shot at her.

  “I did not say that,” said Charity stiffly, sticking out her lower lip truculently. She wasn’t going to tell him about Tom, not even if he caned her!

  “No, you did not say that,” he said in a weary voice, and turned to her with a suddenly courtly gesture. “In any case, I owe you an apology, Mistress Charity, that is long overdue. My only defense is that I felt that I, a man of some experience with women, had been fooled by a slip of a girl into thinking her more virtuous than she was, and it galled me. Indeed, I was punishing you for being a tease. I behaved very badly, I am afraid.”

  She bit her lip, still angry, and gave him a dark look. “I accept your apology,” she muttered.

  “But not too willingly, I see,” he said gravely. “Perhaps after you have supped—”

  “I’m not hungry,” she interrupted. No need for him to know she’d eaten already in the kitchen!

  “Come then, shall we tuck old enmities away into their proper places with other lost things, and share a bottle of wine together like new-found friends?”

  She gave him a sulky look, and nodded stiffly as he held one of the high-backed chairs for her. Sitting bolt upright, she accepted a tall golden goblet of wine that he had poured and handed to her with an easy grace.

  “This is an excellent Madeira. It was part of a shipment I intercepted on the way to the governor of Cartagena.” He lifted his glass in a smiling toast. “If you, Mistress Woodstock, are an escaped felon,” he observed, “we should all haunt the jails.”

  “It is true that I am,” sighed Charity, feeling the wine warm her as it went down.

  He did her the courtesy of looking astonished. “What was your crime?” he asked. “A crime of passion? You slew your lover?”

  Charity hesitated. The memory of that bleak New England courtroom and even bleaker jail was so harsh that she could hardly bear to recall it. “Witchcraft,” she muttered, and his face cleared.

  “Witchcraft is not a crime,” he said with a shrug. “It is a diversion.”

  “In my case it was a charge that covere
d up a crime,” said Charity grimly, draining her goblet and allowing it to be refilled. Warmed with wine, she yearned suddenly to tell someone all about it, all the wrongs she had suffered. Why should she not speak? she asked herself recklessly. Court was behaving civilly toward her now, however outrageous his behavior at Daarkenwyck had been. Why not tell him her story? Had she not been assured that he sent all the English women he bought back to England? And if he was going to send her home, she would never see him again. So it could not matter to her if he knew.

  “I had come to Massachusetts to receive an inheritance under—under a misapprehension,” she said, careful not to bring her mother’s name into anything she said. “The fortune was not rightfully mine, but my aunt’s. I told her I would forswear it, but she did not believe me. She ordered me to marry her son, and when I refused she locked us in a room together and he raped me. When I would have brought charges, my aunt swiftly brought her own charge of witchcraft. She and my cousins testified against me and I was sentenced to be burned as a witch.”

  Court’s jaw hardened. A shadow that might have been pity passed over his hard watchful face.

  “There was a highwayman who bribed his way out of the jail, and he took me with him when he left. I—I lived with him until—until he was shot.” Charity paused for a moment, as she recalled Tom with both joy and sadness in her heart. Then she took a deep breath and went on. “His partner took me into New York and tried to sell me to some trappers. But I escaped and hid from them on a river boat. It was there I first heard your voice. You were making arrangements with Killian van Daarken to sell him some goods.”

  Court looked astonished. “We were as close as that in the dark, were we?”

  “I could not see you,” she admitted. “I was afraid to lift my head to peer out from behind the great coil of rope for fear I’d be seen and returned to shore. At Daarkenwyck I remembered your voice but could not recall where I had heard it—not until later.” She shivered and took another quick drink of wine. “When I remembered, I threatened the patroon with exposure.”

  “Did you now?” He looked amused. “That took some courage. And what did the patroon say?”

  “He laughed and said it would enliven his reputation. He had just told me that he had wagered with his son that he could not seduce me before his departure for Holland and—” her voice lowered—“that his son had collected the wager just before his departure.” And, thus, obliquely, Charity managed to tell Court that her relationship with Pieter was not a long one.

  “Ah, yes,” he said dryly. “You said he wept.”

  “Yes.” Her voice grew sad. “I regard it as my one sin; all else that has happened was not my fault.”

  “What was your sin?” he asked curiously.

  “Promising to marry a man I did not love,” she said savagely. “I had confused him with the life he led, his background, his wealth, his fine clothes and fine manners, the servants who pattered about after him doing his bidding, the heritage that would one day be his. I told myself that I loved him, but I did not. It was pity and—and avarice, I admit it—that led me to his bed.” There was grief in her voice as she accused herself of these things.

  Court stared at her in surprise. “Faith, tis a wonder you can admit it,” he murmured. “Most of us cannot face what we are. We lie to ourselves most of all.”

  “Yes, I had lied to myself,” she said, dashing an angry tear from her eye. “And when the patroon told me of the wager, he also told me that Pieter had been betrothed all the time. Pieter was off to Amsterdam to marry an heiress whom he would bring back to Daarkenwyck as his bride. It was then old Killian offered me his own bed. He seemed to think I would find it as good as any other.”

  Court nodded, still watching her intently. “A consolation prize.”

  “An ultimatum. I said I would leave; he said I would not. I ran but his servants caught me and put me in the blockhouse. They chained me to the floor.”

  “And how did you escape?” he asked curiously. “I might have the sinews to break a chain, but assuredly you have not.”

  Shaking her head, Charity accepted another glass of wine, and continued her narration. She told Court of striking down the patroon’s man with an oar, and how she had escaped downriver to be found by Ben.

  “Why did you not stay with this good man?” Court asked, when she finished telling him of her life with Ben.

  Staring into her now empty glass, Charity explained that Rachel, Ben’s wife, had returned to him at last. “Then I managed to buy passage on a ship bound for Carolina,” she added. “On board, I was mistaken for someone else by a mad woman who attacked me. But I was rescued from her by the finest man in all the world.”

  Court lifted his head.

  “His name is Alan Bellingham. He is a planter in Charles Towne.” Having finished her glass, Charity held it out to be refilled. She was crying openly at this point and did not notice the sudden change in Court’s expression. “I was being sent to Barbadoes to his wife’s sister’s to be governess to her children until one could be brought from England when that damn pirate ship attacked us and Polly and I were brought here to Tortuga and sold.” Her voice slurred.

  Court watched her drain her glass and rose quickly to catch her as she slumped from her chair. As he picked her limp body up in his arms, there was a mixture of tenderness and hardness in the pirate’s expression that would have puzzled an observer. Thoughtfully he stared down at his enticing burden with conflicting emotions playing across his face. Then, with a dark scowl on his face, he carried her across the courtyard and upstairs to the room that had been prepared for her. He put her down carefully upon the great fourposter bed and stood contemplating her.

  The moon moved fitfully in and out behind the clouds and fell softly on the girl’s beautiful body, shimmered on her pale hair spread out on the pillow. As that same moonlight bathed Court’s dark saturnine face in light, an onlooker, had there been one, would have said that his visage was threatening, and there were moments when his expression was evil indeed.

  CHAPTER 33

  Charity awoke, huddling down deliciously between clean sheets, faintly perfumed. She looked around in confusion at the richly appointed room, breathing the faint perfume of the linens. For a moment she thought she was back in Stéphanie’s house in Bath.

  As she stretched, the sheets pleasantly abraded her bare skin. Her eyes widened and she felt herself quickly. Naked! Stark naked! Had he slept with her last night? She sat bolt upright and turned her head sharply to look at the pillow beside her.

  Turning her head brought an agonizing pain to her temples and she fell back again. She closed her eyes, trying to think. Was that the impress of a male head on the pillow beside her, or had she merely rolled over in her sleep?

  Last night she had been talking with Jeremy Court, whom she’d known at Daarkenwyck as Roger Derwent, talking—yes, and drinking wine with him. She had been telling him about her experiences in America, talking far too much—drinking far too much, obviously, for she had no memory of how the evening had ended.

  Her eyes flew open again. Had he undressed her? She winced. How else had she arrived in this unclothed condition? No memory of having undressed herself came to her and, as she tried with a groan to get out of bed, she suspected that she had been incapable of undressing herself.

  Wincing, she sat up again and saw what she had not noticed before. At the foot of the bed lay a thin white silk dress with gold embroidery tracing a handsome design across the tight bodice and the full skirt. She got out of bed gingerly, picked up the dress and stared at it in wonder. It appeared to be her size.

  She looked about for her chemise and petticoats. They, and her green dress, were nowhere to be seen.

  She wrapped the white dress about her and stumbled to the door. Holding her head, she peered out. Below her in the courtyard she could see the mute girl, sitting on a bench cutting up some kind of fruit. At the sound of the door opening, the girl raised her head, stopped what she was
doing and moved toward the stairway. Charity, her head splitting, retreated into the room and closed the door.

  A discreet knock sounded.

  “Come in,” Charity called. The girl brought in her bath water and poured it into a metal tub. “My clothes!” Charity asked, climbing into the tub. “What has happened to them?”

  The girl smiled, made washing motions with her hands, and went out. When she returned to towel Charity dry, she carried a pretty little shawl. Charity stared at it. She hoped she wasn’t supposed to wear only a shawl and a thin silk dress.

  At the girl’s urging, Charity wrapped the shawl around her and followed her down the empty gallery and into another room, which contained a number of trunks. As the girl opened the lid of one, Charity’s eyes widened.

  There reposed before her a trunkload of women’s clothes. Stunned, she began pulling them out. They were stiff and handsome—obviously meant for some Spanish girl, perhaps in Cartagena or Maracaibo. With some excitement, she pulled out several petticoats and chose one of heavy white silk—it would do nicely with the dress that she had found on her bed. Beside her the mute girl was rummaging, too, and offered an assortment of chemises, a big square silk shawl of pale sea-green heavily embroidered in the same color, and deeply fringed in gleaming silk, and a high-backed Spanish comb of tortoiseshell. A pair of white satin slippers edged in gold leather completed her costume.

  When she had dressed, Charity felt able to meet the world again. At least she did not look poor and downtrodden in the way she had yesterday. She looked like a woman of refinement, which she was—and of wealth, which she was not.

  Telling herself that whatever had happened could not be helped, she went down to breakfast, her thin white skirts trailing behind her.