“Aye, she always had a wandering foot. Now, if you’ll excuse us, lass, I want a word with my brother.” Leaving Laurie looking affronted, Raile took Rory aside to discuss the guns. “Can Bacon’s group pay for them, do you think?”
Rory stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked out toward the tree on the opposite bank. Although there were many dissimilarities between them, the brothers’ profiles were strikingly alike. It was not surprising that Lorraine had mistaken Rory for Raile in darkness lit only by the flickering light of Jamestown’s dying fires that night on the riverbank.
“I would think so. Both Lawrence and Drummond are wealthy men—and Bacon too, of course, but he’s a spender, probably deep in debt.” Rory looked at Raile curiously. “You said you were in Jamestown when Bacon rode in. Why’d you not ask him?”
“In my experience,” was the dry response, “I’ve found that men in desperate need of guns will take them without paying for them. I had no reason to believe Bacon to be any different.”
“Oh, but he is,” said Rory carelessly. He’s an idealist—like you used to be.” He grinned. “Laurie Ann used to complain of it all the time!”
Raile remembered Laurie Ann’s complaints: he was too easy on people, he did not drive a hard-enough bargain!
“Bacon’s fighting for the good of the colony—and for justice and all that.”
“And you weren’t, little brother?” Raile asked.
“I was fighting to drive the Indians out, not for some high moral purpose. They burned out two families who lived near me—scalped them all, even the toddlers. Who could tell? Laurie Ann might be next.”
“You are content here, Rory?” It was an important question and Raile watched his brother’s face intently for the answer. After all, Raile had been more like a father than a brother to Rory for such a long time.
“Well enough.” Rory shrugged. “I’ve got a good piece of land and I’ll expand my cabin to two rooms in the spring—if the Indians don’t burn it over my head first!”
“And Laurie Ann?”
“She gets restless sometimes and wanders off, but then, she always did.”
“Yes, she always did,” echoed Raile soberly. “The governor will take reprisals if Bacon loses,” he told his brother.
Rory shrugged. “So then Laurie and I will go deeper into the woods and build a new cabin. She won’t mind—she likes change. Perhaps we’ll go south this time, somewhere down into Carolina.”
Raile was cheered. The little brother he had worried about for so long was going to be all right. It seemed he might even be able to steady Laurie Ann, who had always been a handful. He got back to the business at hand. “To your mind, should I contact Lawrence? Or Drummond?”
“Neither. Go directly to Bacon.”
“Will you come with me?”
“No. I’m tired of the war. I want to stay home with Laurie for a while.” He grinned. ‘“Why don’t you join up?”
Raile laughed. “Why? I’m neither frontiersmen nor Virginian!”
“Bacon’s very persuasive.”
“Well, I’m away downriver, then, to sell my guns in Jamestown.”
“It’s not there.”
“What?”
“Burned to the ground. Bacon’s gone to Green Spring, a couple of miles away.”
Raile frowned. “I left someone in Jamestown. A woman.”
Laurie Ann, tired of being left alone, had sidled up in time to hear Raile, and her expression went blank from shock. Both the Cameron brothers had always belonged to her, and Raile’s showing up in Virginia had seemed to her to confirm that ownership.
‘‘You didn’t tell us that, Raile,” she said with an undertone of resentment.
Raile’s thoughts just then were on Lorraine. “I made arrangements for her to evacuate with the loyalists,” he said in a worried voice.
“Then she’s safe in Accomack by now!” Rory assured him.
“Unless maybe she’s like me and doesn’t always stay where you put her!” suggested Laurie Ann with an edgy laugh.
There was always that. Raile felt himself breaking out in a cold sweat. She was a reckless lass, was Lorraine. And she didn’t always stay where you put her.
“Well, if she did stay and Bacon’s lads found her, she’ll be all right,” declared Rory staunchly.
Raile wished he could be sure.
“Unless of course Bacon thought she’d been left there by the governor to spy out what he was going to do next,” drawled Laurie Ann.
Raile turned to stare at her. There was malice in the wide beautiful eyes he once had drowned in.
Anything he had ever felt for Laurie Ann perished at that moment.
“I’m away to look for her,” he said abruptly. “Good luck to you, Rory. And”—he gave the woman who had once been his lover a steady look—“to you too, Laurie Ann.”
Raile paddled off downriver, heading for Accomack, where the governor’s forces had taken the inhabitants of Jamestown. When he stopped to eat at an inn frequented by rebels in Williamsburg, Raile overheard one of Bacon’s men talking about the “pretty spy Bacon had found in Jamestown.”
Cold with dread, Raile eased into the conversation.
The fellow’s description of the blonde beauty in the pink dress left no doubt in his mind that the “pretty spy” was Lorraine. The fellow said he didn’t know what had happened to her after Bacon took her to Green Spring, but that Drummond and Lawrence would know how to deal with her kind!
Terror drove Raile as he hired a horse and thundered to Green Spring. If Bacon’s forces had done aught to harm Lorraine . . . !
At Green Spring he learned from Bacon that Lorraine had gone on to Yorktown. At Green Spring too, negotiating with the debonair rebel leader, he sold the guns. The arms were needed, for there was word that a force from northern Virginia headed by the half-Indian Giles Brent was on the way and Bacon was eager to be off across the York to Gloucester County to intercept him.
On a horse he borrowed from Bacon, Raile pounded toward Yorktown. Just out of town, he ran into Johnny Sears.
“Where is Lorraine?” he cried, dismounting almost before the horse came to a sliding halt.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said Johnny. “I didn’t know whether you’d come here or to Williamsburg. Lorraine’s gone. She come into a thousand pounds from a venture of her father’s.”
The ginseng, thought Raile. His world went very still.
“And there was some fellow off a ship that she wanted to think she was a gambler and had lost everything even though she hadn’t.”
“What was the fellow’s name?”
“I asked the innkeeper. He said it was Dedwingen or Dettenton or some such.”
“Dedwinton,” said Raile softly. So Philip had followed her down here. The lad must love her after all. . . .
“And they went away together,” blurted Johnny. “I didn’t see them go. She’d sent me out to a cockfight.”
“Went where?” But he knew, he knew. . . .
“Sailed on the Lizard. Bound for Rhode Island,
Innkeeper Higgins told me.” The lad looked at Raile anxiously. “I doubt I could have stopped her even if I’d been there.”
“No, you couldn’t have stopped her,” murmured Raile. Nobody could—not if she loved Dedwinton. And it was obvious she did love him, and not some adventurous fool without a future whose life she had lit up like sunlight after a storm. Young Dedwinton could give her the things she wanted—and deserved: a home, children, security, a steady life day after day, year after year—all those things that he could never give her.
His lass had done the right thing, he told himself dully, though it did nothing to quiet the ache in his heart. And it was a good thing he’d not been there to stand in her way. For stand in her way he would have, against Philip Dedwinton or anyone else who tried to claim her.
“Johnny,” he said, trying to keep the pain from showing in his face, “where is Tav?”
“I just got word f
rom him. He told me to stay here. He’s waiting for you. He wondered if you’d sold the guns yet.”
“I have,” said Raile. “Once we get them unloaded, we’re for Green Spring, Johnny.”
“Good,” said Johnny. He brightened. “I liked it there—so did she.”
She would have, his lovely valiant lass. No, not his lass—Philip’s. He must remember that.
And so the French muskets were delivered to Bacon in Green Spring and were paid for in gold.
After which Raile got drunk as a lord and in a burst of romantic patriotism for a cause not his own, joined up with Bacon, roaring into Gloucester County with the rebels to intercept the forces led by Giles Brent.
“ ’Tis the lassie,” muttered a grieved MacTavish to Johnny Sears when he learned Raile was gone. “I always knew she would break his heart.”
Johnny was bewildered. “Will he come back to us, do you think?”
“Aye—if he lives. We’ll sail up and down the coast for a while, do a bit of coastwise trading. And wait for him. Would you like to be left in Yorktown to keep watch for him? ’Twill be a man-size job.”
“Aye,” agreed Johnny. And then, wistfully, “But why would he join up with General Bacon? The captain’s not a Virginian—this isn’t his war!”
“Right now any war is his war, Johnny,” was MacTavish’s moody response. “He’s lost his lassie and my romantic laddie cares not whether he lives or dies.”
VI:
BENEATH SOUTHERN
STARS
CHAPTER 28
Bridgetown, Barbados
December 1675
WHILE SNOW DRIFTED deep in Rhode Island and the settlers of New England fought Indians across swamps and bogs that had turned to ice a man could walk across, the Dolphin's prow cut through blue Caribbean waters. At last she nosed her way into the Careenage, the crowded inner harbor of Bridgetown, capital of the pear-shaped coral island of Barbados.
Benjamin Nicholls was inquired after—and promptly found, since he had taken a room at the town’s best inn. Mistress Hurst bade Lorraine good-bye and reminded her that she was invited to sup with her at her brother’s home upon the morrow.
Lorraine hurried to the inn and greeted Nicholls, who met her in the cool high-ceilinged common room of the Conch and Turtle. They sat down to a delicious lunch of green turtle soup, flying fish, and rosy-gold mangoes in a quiet corner of the spacious jalousied room. While they ate, Lorraine told Nicholls in a low voice of her adventures. He clucked sympathetically but she could see his mind was on something else, and after lunch she discovered what that something else was.
“I will take you sightseeing,” he promised, escorting her out onto Broad Street, where smiling dark-skinned women walked along carrying everything from wooden bowls of fruit to heaped-up baskets of laundry on their heads. It was a sleepy town at that time of day. Palm fronds stirred gently. The tropical heat pressed down and Nicholls fanned himself with his broad-brimmed straw hat.
“You will need a straw hat too,” he said. “At least until we can get you a parasol.” And promptly bought her a floppy-brimmed hat from a street vendor whose white teeth flashed as he bit into the coin Nicholls gave him.
“Ah—there goes our governor, Lord Rawlings,” Nicholls said, looking down the street.
Lorraine turned to see a rider on a pale gray horse just disappearing around a corner in the distance. She had a fleeting impression of height and breadth of shoulder and commanding bearing.
“He sits his horse well,” she commented, for she was learning to be a judge of such things.
Nicholls chuckled. “He does other things well too. I’m told. There are interesting stories about him. ’Tis said he left London in a hurry because two titled ladies both claimed to be betrothed to him. King Charles took mercy on his plight and gave him this appointment to help get him away! He is a rakehell—not at all like the last governor, who, I’m told, was a staid family man.” His eyes twinkled. “All the ladies on the island are vying for his attention.”
Lorraine shrugged. “I doubt I will be seeing much of him. Come, show me this island you have been telling me about.’
“I took the liberty of buying you a carriage,” Nicholls told her. “And a horse.”
They were brought around. The open carriage was commodious, the horse a sleek shining chestnut. It seemed a dream to Lorraine after so much misuse to find herself stepping into her own horse-drawn carriage. After all, she had been dragged through the streets of Providence but a short time ago!
Nicholls sprang into the driver’s seat. She could never quite guess his age but his nimbleness belied his weathered face and the experience that looked out of his shrewd eyes.
They drove south down the coast, passing groups of fig trees whose long “beards” hung to the ground and rooted there. Those bearded figs had given the island its name, Nicholls told her. He pointed out landmarks and where the island notables lived. He was remarkably well-informed. But he obviously had a particular destination in mind and soon the carriage was moving smoothly up a long driveway bordered by stately white hibiscus and tall majestic royal palms. Lorraine peered forward as the house came into view. Built of smooth white coral stone like many of those in Bridgetown, it was by far the handsomest dwelling she had seen on the island. The setting was magnificent, and the house was situated high upon a cliff overlooking the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
When they reached the entrance, where, beyond a sweeping stone-floored veranda, carved doors of the hard purple wood known as logwood marked the main entrance, Nicholls reined to a stop. “Are we coming to call?” she asked in surprise.
“Yes,” he said, jumping out and reaching up to help her step down.
“What a beautiful place,” she commented, looking around her admiringly at the green velvet lawn that ran to the cliff edge, the big mahogany trees. “Who lives here?” she asked. “The governor?”
“No. You do.” He was watching her face.
Lorraine’s blonde head swung about, trying to take it all in. “Mr. Nicholls,” she said slowly, “I cannot believe that all this is really mine.”
“Bought in your name. I have the deed here.” He patted his pocket. “I do think,” he added, “that not only was it the best buy on the island, but it is the best plantation in all ways. There is a mahogany grove just down there, and orchards of lime and lemon and orange and grapefruit and avocados and pomegranates, and the sugarcane fields—”
“I’ll look at them later,” Lorraine laughed, snatching off her wide-brimmed straw hat and letting the sea breezes blow through her fair hair. “Just now I am reveling in this view of the ocean.”
“You can view it every night from your veranda while you drink tall cool drinks,” was his comment as he beckoned her inside.
As Lorraine walked into the cool high-ceilinged interior, her heels echoing on the stone floors, she marveled at the light. The windows were all floor-to-ceiling casements and gave the rooms an airiness she had never seen in a house before. The drawing room and long dining room were on a scale that astonished her. Certainly they dwarfed the largest rooms of Eleazer Todd’s “splendid mansion” and made even Cedarwood in Bermuda seem small. There was a vast fireplace. (“You will seldom need it,” Nicholls told her.) And stone stables out back. Her bedroom was huge and jutted out from the side of the house, giving it a double exposure so that it had not only a view that reached forever out over the ocean’s endless blue but also a view of the gardens as well. All the ceilings were enormously tall. (“You will need tall ceilings; this is a hot climate.”)
“The house looks . . . old,” she said meditatively as they strolled through the elaborate gardens, elegant with the waxy blooms of frangipani and overrun with pink and scarlet hibiscus and bougainvillea.
“A dozen years—no more.”
“I mean, the stonework outside where the sun does not strike it has a mossy look, as if it has been here for centuries.”
“That is because of the porous natu
re of coral stone.” Nicholls explained.
“It’s wonderful. But the rooms are so empty. Will I have enough money left to furnish it?”
“As handsomely as you wish. We got it for a price!” boasted Nicholls, who was enjoying his role of agent. “For the owners had just inherited the family seat in Kent and were eager to return to the arms of their relatives! We were the only ones who could pay so much in gold. All the other offers were in molasses, which would have to be transported to New England to be made into rum. But we could close the deal—like that!” He snapped his fingers.
They strolled on, with Lorraine drinking in the sights and smells of this tropical paradise.
“There is a second plantation I am negotiating for in your name,” he told her soberly. “But your next move, I believe, should be to buy a ship. Perhaps more than one ship. We should carry our molasses to New England in our own bottoms.”
“In our . . . own bottoms?” echoed Lorraine faintly. It was all moving too fast for her.
“Yes, indeed—in our own ships.” Nicholls said, proud to show that he had picked up some shipper’s terms. “We can then bring back New England goods to sell in the islands. Another, smaller ship would be best for the inter-island trading—that is easily arranged. Of course the real future lies in making our molasses into rum right here, cutting out New England, and shipping it to England direct—and possibly some other ports as well. You see . . .”
His voice went on, delineating shrewd plans and initiating Lorraine into the world of high finance. Nicholls was by nature an empire builder, and a fortune had been delivered into his hands for management. He meant to make the most of it. He would set this slip of a girl on a financial throne—if only she would let him.
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