In made juicy gossip around Bridgetown, although no one dared to confront Lorraine with it. She was too rich, too sought-after, on too close terms with the governor. Who knew to what pinnacle the shipwrecked heiress might not rise?
Meantime, Lorraine’s social life was flourishing.
The governor had asked her to dine with him several times. By now, all Bridgetown was buzzing over the governor’s new “lady.” Two of Lorraine’s suitors took umbrage.
“He is too old for you.” Reggie Dorset scowled, striking a dramatic pose against the cold fireplace in Venture’s drawing room—a pose meant to show Lorraine what a fine figure he cut in his new striped waistcoat and garnet coat.
“I did not inquire his age, but I am told he is a duelist of renown,” she added on a warning note.
“You see too much of him. People will talk,” Reggie grumbled.
Lorraine brushed that aside, just as she brushed aside Hal Pomeroy’s, “Our governor is known to be a rake—indeed no woman is safe with him.”
She was gentler with Will Shelby, who warned, “You will live to regret him,” and gave her a wounded look.
“What is this reputation you have?” she challenged the governor the next time they were alone—this time at Venture, where he had ridden for tea on a pleasant afternoon. “I visit Government House unescorted a few times, and everybody looks at me as if I am a fallen woman!”
“My reputation is deserved, I fear,” he said wryly. “But I had not meant my vices to rub off on you.” He was leaning back, regarding her with a lazy, somewhat wistful look. “Perhaps you will favor me with a game of whist? And tomorrow we might ride out together for all Bridgetown to see.”
He watched her deal the cards, observed her game without comment. When they had finished, he said, “I see you take your cards seriously.”
“I had once thought to make my living gaming,” she admitted.
He threw back his head and laughed. “You will never cease to amaze me, Lorraine!” He rose to go. “Tomorrow then?”
“You are giving me a very bad reputation in the town,” she told him humorously. “By showering all this attention on me.”
His whole demeanor changed.
“Let them condemn you to my face, by God!” he said through his teeth. “And I’ll spit their gizzards for them!”
“Is that how it is done in England?” she mocked him. “Those who vie for a lady’s favor spit each other’s gizzards?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, and moved restively. “I will not stay longer, Mistress Lorraine—lest tongues wag undeservedly about you.”
He bowed and left her to puzzle about him.
The next day they rode about the town in broad daylight, along Broad Street, up Swan Street. People turned to stare at the dazzling couple, the governor dramatic in black and silver, Lorraine in black-and-silver riding habit to match his. Her own coat cuffs were almost as wide, the froth of Mechlin at her throat and cuffs as frosty.
“I am suffocating in this tight riding habit,” she said. “It makes me envy those women in their loose cotton dresses carrying baskets on their heads. Tell me, do you not sometimes envy those laborers with their wide straw hats and loose cotton breeches?”
“Sometimes,” he laughed. “But on the whole I would rather rule them.”
She turned to meet his sapphire gaze narrowly and for a mad instant she thought of Philip, laboring in her canefields. “Perhaps—so would I,” she murmured.
They reined in their horses as a group of slaves fresh from one of the ships at the Careenage was marched to the market, clanking their chains. They were Indians. Lorraine had seen their kind often, walking on moccasins down the streets of Providence. It reminded her how relentless the Connecticut men had been in their pursuit of the marauders who had burned and murdered their way through New England. The colonists had taken hundreds of prisoners, many of whom had been sent to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. These Indians, she knew, were some of them.
The governor noted how coldly her gaze brushed over the shackled men as they shuffled past. With a sweep of his arm he indicated the Indians.
“I am surprised that with your passion for freedom, you do not immediately demand that all of these prisoners be set free.”
Lorraine glanced again at the dusty line of newcomers trudging along stolidly in the heat. “Those are Narragansetts and Wampanoags,” she murmured, recognizing distinctive articles of apparel from both tribes.
“Aye,” he said humorously. “Like many an Englishman who fought against Cromwell, their sentences of death were commuted to a life of slavery. Connecticut and Massachusetts have sent them here to us to till the canefields. These poor savages are getting the same punishment we’d mete out to an Englishman for far lesser crimes! Still I am surprised,” he added, “that you aren’t rushing forward to buy them all—so you can set them free!”
Lorraine thought of kindly Mistress Bowman, whose whole family had been murdered, of the Jarvises, and Matthew Stokes, and Mary Wickham and the Rawson children and the MacAldies and oh, so many others in strictly neutral Rhode Island who had been murdered by marauding Indians—possibly by some of these very prisoners—and her young face hardened.
“They mean only terror to me,” she muttered, and the man beside her sighed.
“You are a strange paradox,” he said. “I wonder what has made you so?”
She gave him a bleak look. “Circumstance has made me what I am.”
“But isn’t that true of us all?” was his rejoinder.
“Perhaps for some more than others,” was her cryptic response. “Are you through displaying me to the town?”
“Is that what I have been doing?”
“Of course it is!”
“Perhaps I have,” he murmured, and turned his horse about to head back toward Venture. Halfway there he turned to her. “Lorraine, as governor of this island, it is my duty to give occasional balls and other parties—a duty I have thus far shirked. I have asked you to ride with me today that I might put the question: Will you do me the honor of becoming my official hostess?”
“I cannot live in,” she quipped. And at his frown, “I cannot believe you are serious,” she reproved him lightly. “I have neither the social graces nor the wit—”
“Your social graces are more than adequate,” he overbore her objections. “And if someone by chance should overwhelm you with his erudition—though, I cannot offhand think who on this island would be capable of it!—your beauty will stand you in good stead. Just fix those big lustrous eyes on him and he will forget what he is saying!”
For the first time the thought flitted through Lorraine’s mind: He is paying court to me. . . .
“You may regret having asked me when I do the wrong thing!” she warned.
“Nonsense, I will school you in anything you may lack!” He sounded impatient—not at all like a lover.
Lorraine studied him. A very complex man, she decided. One who might take his choice of the unmarried girls of this island—yet he had chosen none. And apparently he had had his choice in London—and discarded them all.
Why did he choose her! She was mystified. And being mystified made her restive.
She thought of Philip in the slave quarters and came to a sudden decision. That night she walked back and called to him, saw his face appear at his small barred window.
“I am tired of you,” she said. “I am thinking of sending you back to Lavinia. But first you must give me back my articles of indenture.”
“Never,” said Philip instantly. He had toughened in the canefields, he was growing wiry and hard.
“As you wish.” He could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “You will remain here forever if you like.”
A week later, when she asked him again, Philip had had time to reconsider. Bitterly he watched a spider walk down the wall of his cell, briefly appearing in the striped light cast by the bars of the window. He threw his boot at it.
Came her voice from
outside: “I will ask you again, Philip—but it is the last time. Next time you must come to me as a supplicant.”
“I tell you I do not have your articles. I buried them in a box in Rhode Island.”
“Where you can get them at your pleasure?”
“Yes, if you will allow me to leave!”
He heard her low laugh. “You would be back—but with a warrant for my arrest for abduction.”
It was what he had had in mind. But he protested instantly that it was not. “I would give you my word,” he insisted.
Lorraine’s voice had grown suddenly weary. “I would not believe you under oath, Philip, but I do not want you near me. So tomorrow you will be moved to my outlying plantation on the Atlantic shore of the island. Your work will be no lighter there but it may be that if you are diligent you will be given special privileges by my overseer. I bid you good night, Philip.”
“Curse you for a witch!” he muttered.
Lorraine heard that and laughed.
The next morning Philip was loaded into a cart along with a number of tools and hauled to the place she had named Petit Venture. There he worked in new canefields—alongside workmen new to him. And there Philip began to voice his discontent.
“If you speak ill of the mistress to the others, I will have to isolate you,” the elderly overseer warned him sternly.
“Why?” snarled Philip. “Is her reputation then so fragile?”
“No,” was the sober response. “But those men believe her to be the best mistress in the world and they might do you an injury if you spoke against her.”
Philip did not believe it and later spoke against her in most inflammatory terms. He was promptly knocked down by the big fellow nearest him. Looking up in dismay, he saw others were moving toward him with angry faces.
The overseer stepped in front of them. “None of that,” he said. “The mistress has said that she does not want him hurt.” He turned to Philip. “I warned you not to speak against her. She has given us all a chance to live again. Now I will have to isolate you. At least by night. In the daytime you should be safe enough. There is a small hut atop the cliff. The door has a stout lock on it and the window shutter a stout chain that will not permit a man to crawl in or out of it—but at least you will get the breeze from the sea there, you will not suffocate!”
Philip took this new indignity in sullen silence. But he had not been there long before it occurred to him what he must do.
The kindly overseer had provided him with a lantern and had lent him a Bible that he might read if he chose. Philip was in no mood to read holy words. He studied the shutter. It opened on the Atlantic side, and down below was the sea. He was alone. If only he could entice some passing ship to show interest . . . perchance to send someone up to investigate the source of a swinging light?
And so every night Philip slid the lantern through the opening below the heavy slanted wooden shutter where it swung away from the solid limestone building— and swung it so that its light would flash far out to sea.
He was so in the habit of it that he even did it on a squally night when the stars were obscured and the reef below a turmoil of white water. To his credit, he was no seaman and did not know about the reef—nor had anyone thought to tell him. After all, they did not know that he was endeavoring to signal ships at sea!
Through the squall a fishing skiff, the Flying Fish, had lost her way and was coming home late. Her captain mistook Philip’s waving lantern for the lights of Bridgetown and piled up on the reef. The ship broke in half and although by a miracle the crew made it to shore through the wild water, the Flying Fish was no more.
Indignant and half-drowned, the ship’s captain stared up at the light. But Philip had stopped swinging it and pulled it back inside. Still, Captain Mannering had marked well where the light had been.
“What is this place?” he muttered.
“It looks to be Petit Venture,” gasped one of his crew, choking on seawater as he joined his captain on the wild beach. “Bought by the shipwrecked heiress not too long ago.”
“Well, she’s a wrecker then!”
“Don’t be daft, man. She lives on t’other side of the island!”
“If this place be hers, then ’tis her responsibility and I’ll have satisfaction!”
“You’ll not get it. ’Tis said she’s the governor’s doxy.”
“I’ll have it nonetheless!”
But when he reached Government House, Captain Mannering lost his nerve. He turned about and made for a waterfront tavern, where he began to drink—and to tell the story of his lost ship to anybody who would listen.
Soon ugly rumors were flying about. The shipwrecked heiress had not come by her money in the usual way—the shipwrecked heiress was a wrecker.
And now she was plying her trade in Barbados.
CHAPTER 31
THE BALL AT Government House was in full swing. There had been a storm the day before—the very storm that had wrecked the Flying Fish—but the clouds had blown away and now the stars were out. Perfect weather for the magnificent affair.
Standing beside the tall dramatic figure of the governor, Lorraine, looking equally dramatic in white silk with silver slashed sleeves and a deep-cut silver embroidered bodice, was pleased to see several of Bridgetown’s ladies were in a state of shock.
“Where did she get that dress? Do you think it came from Paris?” asked one breathlessly.
“No, ’twas stitched up by the sempstress who does my gowns. I came in as it was being fitted. I wonder why mine never look like that?”
“It is a scandal, the governor displaying his doxy like this for all to see!” exploded pretty young Mistress Phipps, who had just flounced away from the receiving line and was now shaking out her black-lace-trimmed magenta skirts. She had designs on the handsome governor, herself.
“Oh, do be quiet, Mollie, she’ll hear you!” pleaded her mother.
“I don’t care if she does hear me,” muttered Mollie Phipps, turning on her mother. “And besides, that’s what you called her!”
“Yes, but not in the governor’s house,” moaned her mother in an agonized tone.
“I do not believe she is what she says she is.” Mollie tossed her head. “There is a story spreading in the town that she is a wrecker and that that is why she bought that small plantation she now calls Petit Venture—to ply her trade!”
There were gasps from the little knot of women fluttering their ivory fans around Mollie.
“But Mistress London does not live at Petit Venture,” protested Mollie’s best friend, Jane, a sallow young lady in pale green sarcenet.
“She does not have to!” Mollie’s voice overrode Jane’s triumphantly. “She has her infamous slave residing in a hut atop the cliff. There is a captain in the town who swears a light was flashed from that clifftop last night to make him think he had reached Bridgetown and safety!”
“What happened?” came a chorus of voices.
“His ship was wrecked on the reef below!”
“And her people plundered it?” asked Jane, awed. “Well . . . no,” Mollie admitted uncomfortably. “It was a fishing vessel and I am told the men at Petit Venture rescued the crew from the rocks where the tide might have swept them away, and sent them on by cart to Bridgetown, where they arrived late this afternoon. But how could the man who flashed the light know what kind of ship he would snare? Why could it not have been a merchant vessel or a galleon carrying pieces of eight?”
There was a general buzz at that suggestion, for it opened up interesting possibilities.
“Mistress London claims to be from Cornwall,” Mollie said darkly. “And Cornwall is noted for its cliffs and treacherous rocks and shipwrecks!”
“Oh, dear,” moaned her perspiring and frumpy mother, who was wearing one of young Mollie’s made-over ball gowns. “If you say anything at all rude to her, we will never be invited to Government House again—and you know how much you wanted to come!”
“I care for
justice more!” flared Mollie, lifting her rather pointy chin into the air. “Even if it costs me!” she added with a righteous air, and shook out her amber curls.
The story circulated in whispers around the room, all but eclipsing the news from Virginia. But Lorraine was more concerned about it.
The rebellion had been crushed. Bacon was dead, his estate confiscated along with Drummond’s. Lawrence and Whaley had disappeared into the frozen swamps and were presumed dead, Drummond had been caught and forthwith hanged, as had many others. Men were living in fear in Virginia; it was said many had hidden out in the snowy forests. Three king’s commissioners had been sent to Virginia. Finding Governor Berkeley adamant, they had made the mistake of appealing to Lady Frances, now back at Green Spring, to help stop the wave of hangings sweeping the colony—and Lady Frances had sought to return them in a hangman’s coach!
It saddened Lorraine to hear the report, and deep in her heart it frightened her too. What had happened to Raile? She was not really her most alert self when later, in a break during the dancing, Mollie Phipps cornered her as she was leaving the dance floor.
“Mistress London, where did you live in Cornwall?” asked Mistress Phipps innocently.
“Near Wyelock. Our house was on a cliff overlooking the sea,” Lorraine said, for she had become adroit at giving vague or evasive answers when questioned about her background. And to turn the conversation away from such dangerous channels: “Perhaps that is why I chose Venture—because the house stands high on a cliff overlooking the sea. I really think that the view—”
“Oh, do tell us what your home in Cornwall was like,” interrupted Mollie’s friend Jane.
“It was quite large and I suppose the exterior was rather plain—but of course I loved it. I shall hope that at Venture—”
But young Mistress Phipps and her coterie were not to be swerved. “Oh, do describe the interior of your home in Cornwall,” she caroled. “And the grounds! For none of us have ever been to Cornwall.” She indicated her friends.
To Love a Rogue Page 38