To Love a Rogue

by Valerie Sherwood

  Thus trapped, Lorraine launched into what she remembered from descriptions of her mother’s home in Cornwall. How glad she was that her mother had talked about it so often on long snowy evenings in Rhode Island!

  “And your father?” pursued Mollie Phipps. “Did he take you to London? Were you presented to the king?”

  They would trap her if she tried to describe London, for she had never been there and half the people in this room had. Mollie Phipps had actually spent her childhood in London.

  “I have never been to London,” Lorraine told them. “And I certainly was never presented at court. But you must remember that I was very small when my parents died—”

  “Mistress London, are you saying that your father did not side with the king?” asked Mollie Phipps in mock horror.

  “Really, Mollie!” murmured her mother, shocked.

  Lorraine drew herself up. “My parents did not agree on politics,” she said coldly. “It is something I never talk about.”

  “Indeed she has been talking herself hoarse,” interposed the governor, who had come up and was listening to this interchange. “I propose that she dance with me instead, for the music is striking up!”

  Mollie Phipps glowered as he led Lorraine out onto the floor.

  “Bravo!” he whispered in her ear when he had the opportunity. “Your description of Cornwall was flawless. One could almost be persuaded that you had been there!”

  Lorraine’s heart missed a beat. She looked up into a pair of wicked laughing eyes.

  “When . . . how did you know?”

  He whirled her out upon the veranda before he answered.

  “I realized you had never been there when you agreed that Wyelock lay between Helston and Penzance—it does not. And again when you agreed that Wyelock overlooked St. Ives Bay.”

  “It does not?” She sighed.

  “I have traveled a bit, you see.” He gazed upon her curiously. And then he asked, as if it were of no importance but merely to satisfy his curiosity. “Where are you from, Mistress London? For you are assuredly not from Cornwall!”

  “I am from Rhode Island,” she said, looking into his dark sapphire eyes with a level gaze.

  “Then why not say so?” he challenged.

  “I have . . . compelling reasons not to say so.”

  He looked mystified. “Mysteries intrigue me,” he murmured humorously. “I will get to the bottom of this.”

  “No, pray do not!” she said sharply. “I would prefer people to think I come from Cornwall.”

  He shook his head—but he laughed. “In my view, you have come from heaven—a shining light to dazzle us here in Barbados!”

  It was a gallant speech and it gave Lorraine hope that he would keep her secret.

  “Do not tell me that your intentions are honorable?” she quipped lightly. “For I will never believe it!”

  “Mistress Lorraine,” he said, lifting her hand and leaning over it to brush it with his lips in courtly fashion, “my intentions toward you are entirely honorable!”

  She gave him a sidewise look and would have said something outrageous, but Will Shelby came out onto the veranda just then. “Ah, there you are, Lorraine,” he cried. “I have been looking for you everywhere to claim you for the next dance—you promised it to me, you know!”

  “So I did!” Lorraine glided away from the governor and accompanied the triumphant Will out on the floor. He was an energetic dancer, making up in enthusiasm what he lacked in grace. Lorraine felt they cut a very comical figure out there on the floor with Will’s wildly overdone gestures, but he was so whole-souled about it and she liked him so much that she consented to dance with him again despite the disappointed glances of a little knot of would-be partners who waited to claim her the moment Will led her from the floor.

  “Oh, Mistress Lorraine,” cried Will rapturously, “does this mean that you favor me?”

  “No, it means I am grateful to you for coming over so faithfully in the mornings and teaching me to ride!” She laughed. “And I promise to save you another dance later this evening for the same reason!”

  Will was a little dashed at that, but he was an exuberant young man and it did not last.

  “You could do worse than young Shelby, you know,” the governor told her when he again claimed her for a dance. “He will never have a courtier’s graces but he has a fine sound plantation and he is most besotted!”

  “Besotted or not, I prefer ... a different kind of man. And I already have a fine sound plantation myself!”

  “A different kind of man?” echoed the governor. He looked as if that were very instructive. “Pray describe the kind of man you prefer.”

  The dance bore her a step backward from him at that moment and she cast a measuring eye up and down his long figure.

  “I do not require that a man be tall,” she said, and he winced slightly. But Raile had been tall, she thought wistfully. “Nor yet”—she studied the elegance of his black-and-silver garb—“that he be handsomely got up.” But Raile had looked wonderful, whatever he wore!

  “Mistress Lorraine,” murmured the governor whimsically, “is this in the nature of a set-down?”

  “What I do require,” she continued tranquilly, “is that he be a man of force and character and judgment, that he be strong and resolute, a man of quick decision and . . .”

  She stopped. She was describing Raile. Except perhaps for “character”—look how he had treated her!

  “Oh, don’t stop!” pleaded the governor, intrigued. “Tell me, have you found such a man?”

  “Twice,” she said.

  “Then why do we find you here alone and single?”

  “One that I might have loved, had things been different, was married. And I have just learned tonight that he is dead.”

  The governor stared down at her. All the room was abuzz with the news of the death of the rebel leader in Virginia.

  “Could it be that you are speaking of Nathaniel Bacon?” he asked softly.

  Lorraine gave him a tormented look. “He was very kind to me at Green Spring,” she defended. “I was thought to be a spy for the king, but General Bacon let me go!”

  “I can see why he might let you go,” said the governor caressingly. He had whirled her from the dance floor into the library and now he closed the door. “So that is why you wish us to believe you are from Cornwall? You were mixed up in the rebellion in Virginia?”

  “No, I was not mixed up in it. I happened to be there when they burned Jamestown, and Bacon carried me away to Green Spring. And sent me to Yorktown the next day. It was not a love affair, in case you are thinking that.”

  “Then the other cavalier must be the one who has broken your heart?”

  Lorraine flinched. Did it really show so badly?

  “The ‘other cavalier,’ ” she said bitterly, “was an adventurer and a Scot. I was his mistress,” she added defensively. He might as well know that now! “And I would have sailed to hell with him. ...” She was looking sadly out at some distant vista. “But he preferred another woman. He . . . left me.”

  “What appalling bad taste!” murmured the governor, but there was sympathy in those cynical eyes. How could any man leave her?

  To Lorraine’s embarrassment, her own eyes had filled with tears. “Oh, I do not want to talk about him,” she whispered huskily.

  “Then this ‘adventurer’ who sailed away with you has been your only love?” His voice was meditative.

  “Oh, no,” she said in a wry uneven voice. “I spent my early years adoring a man who never intended to marry me, who followed me to Yorktown and knocked me unconscious and kidnapped me. He dragged me through Providence at the end of a rope, and helped his betrothed tie me up in an attic and suggested she teach me humility—with a whip!” He might as well know all about her now that confessions were the order of the day!

  “Kidnapping is a serious offense,” he protested “Were you not able to bring him to heel by law?”

  “The la
w was on his side! For he had bought my articles of indenture from an innkeeper. I was his bondservant and he said he would do what he liked with me!”

  “Faith, I should like to meet this lad,” murmured the governor with a dark, cold tone in his voice.

  “You have,” she told him in a wooden voice. “The day we rode through my canefields. His name is Philip and he arrived on my doorstep thinking to win me back now that I’ve come into a fortune. I remembered how badly he had treated me and I decided to teach him humility!"

  The governor remembered riding beside Lorraine through the canefields and how she had looked back at a sulky bondservant and said, “He is receiving a lesson in humility.” Astonishment broke over his countenance, and he gave a shout of laughter.

  “Lorraine, you never cease to astound me!” he gasped. “You are indeed a wonder! You flit from place to place. You scorn the law and exact poetic justice!”

  “I do not scorn the law! It is the law that scorns me! Philip Dedwinton would not allow me to buy back my papers with the fortune Benjamin Nicholls brought back from China for me.”

  “But I thought Nicholls was your guardian?”

  “He is my agent who passes himself off as my guardian. My mother used to receive small sums from time to time—they were bequests, she told me, from distant relatives who had died and mentioned her in their wills. My father always got drunk at such times and usually managed to squander most of the money on ‘ventures’ that always came to naught. One time it was ginseng, which Nicholls would take to China and sell.

  By the time Nicholls came back, my mother had died, my father had indentured me and vanished into the West.”

  A melancholy look passed over his face. “Distant relatives . . he murmured. “Lorraine, I know Cornwall well. I believe I knew your mother. Could her name have been Araminta—”

  “Dunning,” she supplied instantly.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Araminta Dunning. . . .” He looked out past her through the windows at some other vista where the Southern Cross had been absent from the night sky.

  “Did you know my mother well?” Lorraine was fascinated, hoping to hear about the young Araminta, through the eyes of one of her contemporaries.

  He nodded soberly. “I remember the last time I saw her,” he said in a wistful voice. “We were standing on the beach below the cliffs of Cornwall and the Green Flash suddenly flooded the sky. In that light her eyes were like emeralds. . . .”

  The Green Flash! It was a good thing that he was not looking at her, for Lorraine’s face was so shocked that her expression was almost comical. Her mother had seen the Green Flash only once—and with a man upon a beach in Cornwall. The governor was the man Araminta Dunning had loved all her life long—not the man she had married! No wonder she had chosen a time when Jonas London was away to tell Lorraine about the Green Flash! No wonder when Lorraine had repeated her mother’s disjointed dying words to Jonas— “Tell him I still love him . . . The Green Flash. . .

  Jonas had listened woodenly and turned away. No wonder he had drunk so much, no wonder he had deserted her—she would have reminded him of her mother. It must have been very hard indeed to know all those years that the woman he worshipped did not love him—at least not wildly, passionately, the way she had once loved someone else. . . .

  Lorraine moistened her lips. “Am I very like ...” She tried to keep her voice from shaking, for this revelation had rocked her. “Am I very like my mother?”

  He turned and faced her squarely. There was a glint in his eyes. “No,” he said quietly. “I think you are more like me.”

  There it was, flung down between them. The shining impossible truth. This man for whom she felt such easy camaraderie, with whom she was so much at ease, was her father. Her real father.

  For long moments she stood stunned, staring at him.

  “When did you first know I was your daughter?” she whispered.

  “I think I knew it the moment I first looked into your eyes,” he admitted. “They were so clear, so honest—so like Araminta’s.” He spoke that loved name like a caress. “And then when you told me your name—for I had followed your mother’s fortunes, you see—I thought it might be. But when you told me you were from Wyelock—and then knew nothing about the countryside there, when you told me your age and your birth month—then I was certain.”

  “You speak my mother’s name as if you loved her,” she choked.

  “I did,” he said simply. “With all my heart.”

  “Then why did you not come for her?” she demanded brokenly. “She loved you all her life. Her dying words were for you! She said, ‘Tell him I still love him ... the Green Flash . . .’ Why didn’t you come for her?”

  Her eyes blazed.

  “Lorraine,” he said, “I left Wyelock when the man I had fought a duel with—over your mother’s good name—chose to die. I was a Royalist in a land where Cromwell ruled. I had no choice but to flee the country. I was shipwrecked on the Irish coast and by the time I got back to Wyelock, your mother had disappeared and no one knew where she had gone.” He sighed. “I was very bitter that she had left no word for me, and I threw myself into the king’s cause with redoubled energy. When King Charles was restored to the throne, he wanted to ‘give’ me an heiress in marriage that I might be wealthy. But instead I married a penniless young girl from Sussex whose father had died fighting in the cause. She had no one to take care of her and she was very frail.”

  A new side to him, surely. Lorraine had not quite envisioned him as a protector of the weak.

  “Eventually I learned that your mother had married, had gone to Rhode Island to live. I could not in honor leave Mary, nor do I think your mother would have left the man she had married, to come away with me.”

  Lorraine was not so certain. She remembered her mother’s unhappiness with Jonas London.

  “You could have written,” she said reproachfully.

  “I did write her letters, Lorraine, and she answered them—although she never told me about you. And all during those long years when Mary was ill, wasting away, I sent her . . .” He hesitated.

  More knowledge broke over Lorraine. “You are the one who sent the money!” she gasped. “Not distant relatives dying and leaving my mother little bequests!”

  He sighed. “From time to time I sent her a little money, for I knew she needed it. It was the best I could do. I was not rich and I had other commitments. Mary was dying.”

  “So it was your money Jonas London used to buy the ginseng!” she marveled. “And gained me a hundred thousand pounds!”

  “A handsome gift,” he said softly. “From a man who loved your mother. I could not have given you so much.”

  “You have given me something else this night,” Lorraine told him tremulously. “A real father.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I wanted to get to know you first, and I am proud of you. Now, it is my intention to claim you as my lawful child.”

  The bastard daughter of the rakehell governor! Lorraine was caught somewhere between laughter and tears.

  “You will make of us a fine scandal!” she warned mistily.

  “I have weathered scandals before. Had I known of you, I would have claimed you before, but now I will proclaim to all the world that here is my long-lost daughter and I will have the records amended, damned if I won’t, so that you shall be not only my child but also my heir!”

  “Can you do all that?” she wondered.

  His jaw had a set to it that would not be brooked. “I will do it!” His voice rang. “I will do it now!” He seized her by the hand and whisked her to the door, opened it upon the ballroom where the dancers were whirling about the floor.

  “Stop playing!” he thundered. And when the music had faltered to a halt and the guests had stopped dancing and were regarding him with openmouthed wonder, he indicated Lorraine with a dramatic gesture. “I would present to you my long-lost daughter—Lady Lorraine Rawlings!”

  Across the room Mollie Phipps f
ainted.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE MORNING AFTER the ball, an emissary arrived at Petit Venture and demanded in the name of the governor to see the bondservant Philip Dedwinton. The overseer watched openmouthed as that emissary promptly drew a pistol and leveled it at Philip.

  “My orders are, if you give me any trouble or attempt to escape, I am to shoot you,” he said briefly. “Would you care to accompany me?”

  Philip was in no position to appreciate the irony of that tone. He had heard the shouts, the cries of “There’s a ship breaking up down on the reef!” And it had come to him suddenly how it might have happened. He had pretended sleep when they had come banging on his door—and later feigned outraged innocence.

  But it was a long way to Bridgetown, riding just ahead of someone who had orders to shoot you if you made a false move. Philip’s relief was mingled with fear as they drew up before Government House.

  All the way there he had been rehearsing the impassioned story he would tell about how Lorraine had held him captive. If he could just enlist the governor’s sympathy!

  Still the other matter weighed upon him and his face reflected a lively terror when he was brought in over echoing stone floors before the governor, who sat resplendent in black and silver before a small writing desk atop a gleaming mahogany table.

  The figure before him was so impressive that Philip felt his resolve melt.

  “I can explain about the light!” he cried on a note of desperation.

  “The light?” echoed the governor, raising an eyebrow. His face showed none of the bewilderment he felt.

  “The lantern on the cliffs that wrecked the Flying Fish."

  “Ah, yes.” The governor stifled a yawn with a fine cambric kerchief, lace-edged. “That light, tell me about it.”

  “I swung the lantern only to alert the captain of some passing ship that I was there and needed help. I never meant to wreck anyone!”

  The governor’s dark brows drew together. “And yet I am told that you lived along the seacoast of America—the Rhode Island Colony, I believe. How could you live there and not know that a lantern is a beacon by night and in time of storm?”