Arne could have told these visitors much—of how the buccaneer van Ryker had taken the Spanish treasure flota, and how he had lost Imogene and found her again, of how she had left him in anger and been reunited with him on the Cornish coast—but he never did. He even kept his silence the night a planter named James Scofield passed by him in the front hall of Longview, Scofield casually regaling his host and hostess with the tale of how the buccaneer van Ryker and his “woman” had died on a cliff in Cornwall.
The landgrave and his lady had exchanged glances.
“And were they never found?” asked Imogene carelessly.
“Oh, yes. Their bodies were later washed ashore and identified. A pity that he should have died, don’t you think. Branch? For, surely, by capturing the Spanish treasure fleet entire, no man did more to break the power of Spain in this hemisphere and so secure the Indies. From my view, he should have been knighted for it!”
His tall host looked on him rather more fondly. “Doubtless you’re right, Scofield,” he agreed. “Doubtless.” And Imogene warmly agreed.
Scofield’s angular wife sighed and fingered her less than regal jet and shell necklace set in silver—they had not been able to afford a pearl necklace, for the money had gone to buy seed and labor for the spring planting on their large acreage. “Imagine taking the Spanish treasure fleet!” she murmured dreamily. “I wonder what he did with all that gold?”
Her host—he who had once been himself the notorious Captain van Ryker—cast an amused look around him at the lavish appointments of this colonial barony over which he now reigned, and at the gold lace and gold-shot satin of the new gown his wife was sporting this night.
“I imagine he found a use for it,” he murmured, and Imogene's glance reproved him.
“Just think what he might have done if he had lived,” murmured Madam Scofield. She turned to her husband. “What do you think he would have done with it, James?”
Her husband, a hardworking planter, meditated a moment and chewed at his mustache. “From the tales I’ve heard of him. I shouldn’t think he’d have wanted to do like some of those fellows when they made a great haul, and take off for Tangier or some other barbarous place,” he said. “Decent sort of chap, from what I’ve heard—he’d want to live among his own sort, I wouldn’t doubt. Most likely he’d have changed his name, emigrated to some place where nobody knew him and set himself up like a lord. Some place like you have here, Branch,” he added jovially.
This was getting too close for comfort. “Let me show you my new rose garden by moonlight,” Imogene interposed hastily. “I planted it only last year and with all the musk roses and damask roses, it’s a magical place after dark. The roses were all sent out from England, and they survived the journey magnificently. The scent is heavenly. Just come and smell the blooms!”
Now, years later on another night in the Carolinas, she was breathing the fragrance of those same roses, for it was a long lazy fall all along the East Coast that year and roses still bloomed on the banks of the Cooper River.
With her chin on her knees, Imogene sat soberly reviewing her life—and thinking treacherously of Georgiana, the child she had lost, and who of latter years had been pushed back into memory.
If Georgiana had lived, she would be a young lady now, attracting suitors, thinking on marriage, dancing at balls, swirling with lightsome laughter through the wide corridors of Longview. She would know the whole story of her reckless mother—and forgive her. Yes, of course Georgiana would forgive her, Imogene told herself, for her Georgiana would have a generous heart. If Georgiana had lived, she would be sleeping in one of the big bedrooms down the hall right now with the moonlight silvering her burnished gold hair.
Such a yearning went through Imogene at that moment as to be actual physical pain. If only Georgiana had lived....
“Imogene.” The man on the bed had waked and noted her sitting crouched in the window seat with her head bent and her chin on her knees. “What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”
“No.” Imogene turned to look at him. Her eyes were wet, but silhouetted against the moonlight he could not see that. “Go back to sleep, van Ryker,” she said in a muffled voice, calling him by the name that she had so long trained herself not to use. “I’ll be there soon.”
Sensing something was wrong—for van Ryker had always been able to sense how she felt, her change of moods—he got up and his long naked form gleamed formidably in the moonlight as he moved toward her, leaned down and encircled her lightly with his sinewy arms.
“ ’Tis good there’s no one outside to see us,” she murmured ruefully. “Else surely we’d become a scandal, embracing in windows!” Van Ryker chuckled, but he had discovered when his hawklike face brushed hers that her cheeks were wet with tears. “Come now,” he said in a cajoling voice, “what’s troubling you? Are you regretting that you’ve invited so many people to visit that we probably won’t get to Jamaica this year?”
“No.” Imogene shook her head, burrowing into his deep comforting chest. “I love filling the house with people. And Gale Force will be just as beautiful next year.”
“And Jamaica’s governor—” he teased.
“Will be just as feisty,” she said with a wistful smile.
“And just as much in love with you as ever,” he added, seeking to cheer her up.
Imogene shrugged that off but her spirits rose. “Nonsense. He got over that long ago.”
But they both knew that wasn’t true. And van Ryker, looking down on her pale silky head in the moonlight, feeling her soft lovely body in his arms, thought of the dauntless spirit and fire of this woman and knew in his heart that no man who had loved her ever quite got over Imogene. Not fully.
“Then what is it that keeps you from sleeping?” he asked, letting his hand slide lightly, tinglingly, down her back.
Imogene moved restively. She didn’t want to bring up Georgiana’s name again—she had suffered so much over that already, and van Ryker had endured it all, helped her through it when the world seemed blackest.
“Oh,” she hedged, “I was just wondering if our neighbors, the Scofields, ever figured out what the buccaneer van Ryker could have done with his gold? ’Tis a favorite subject of theirs!”
“He’d have given it to a woman of gold,” said van Ryker huskily, letting his lips wander over her fair hair, down her smooth forehead, across her cheeks. “And tried his life long to make her happy with it. Have I made you happy, Imogene?”
Her body surged against him in a sweet silent rush that gave him his answer. Completely.
“Oh, yes, van Ryker,” she breathed fervently against his chest. “I have been so happy with you....”
With two fingers he lifted her chin so that her tearstained face came under the inspection of those keen gray eyes.
“Then why were you crying?” he asked bluntly.
Imogene looked up at him, feeling as ever the compelling pressure of his masculinity, feeling too the hopelessness of her situation—for all her tears could not bring Georgiana back.
“I woke because I thought—I thought someone called my name. And it seemed to me”—she looked away from him, stricken—“it seemed to me somehow that it was Georgiana’s voice.”
“You were dreaming,” he said roughly, for he could not bear for anything to hurt this lovely lady of his—not even her own bitter memories. “Come back to bed.” He swept her up in strong arms and Imogene, lying relaxed against his chest, was very submissive as he deposited her upon the linen sheets.
Lying there beside her, he held her silently for a while, letting her rest in the shelter of his arms, for he understood the hurt that was deep within her, the hurt that would never entirely heal. And then his gentle hands began subtly, expertly, to explore her woman’s body, playing upon it as a great musician might upon a delicate musical instrument, as he lured her from thoughts of death to thoughts of life.
And Imogene, feeling her passions waked, clung to him, grateful to a heaven that
had sent him her way, grateful for all the years that he had loved her.
Dreams, like dust, were brushed away as their bodies fitted together in silent communion. To van Ryker, Imogene’s nearness was—had always been—heady wine. And Imogene knew the sinewy arms that held her would always be the right arms, the only arms.
They touched and murmured and laughed a little, for they were not only lovers—they were friends as well. But every touch, every murmur, every drifting sigh aroused within them further passions and drove them on to new delights until their tumultous ardor seemed to have a pulsing rhythm of its own that tossed them this way and that, a throbbing beat that filled their ears and their world like the deep resonant thrumming of far-off drums, coming closer, ever closer, as their bodies strove toward the heights—and reaching a crashing crescendo of delight as their passions peaked, their bodies melded, and they drifted earthward through golden showers of ecstasy.
And the golden haze lingered until she fell away from her lover at last and sank into a restless, exhausted sleep.
Imogene, sleeping fitfully this night in the Carolinas, would have been thunderstruck to know that the daughter she had long since given up as lost when the Wilhelmina was sunk off the Great Bahama Bank now occupied her old four-poster in Windgate on the Hudson.
Chapter 9
True to his word, Brett was gone before she waked. Georgiana woke and padded into the next room to find him gone. His big square bed had already been made up by the industrious, early-rising, upstairs maid. She felt a ridiculous sense of loss—he might have waked her to tell her he was going, she told herself crossly.
She could not know that he had walked softly into her room by the dawn’s first light, before putting on his boots. That he had stood smiling down at the lovely young girl on the bed. His gaze had traced tenderly her slender outflung arms and her lacy white cambric night rail, hastily donned for her excursion downstairs last night, open at the throat and revealing a snowy expanse of breast and a peeking pink nipple. She only stirred in her sleep when be bent to plant a light kiss on that winking nipple, but the little protesting noise she made in her throat was so childish and sweet that it caught at his heart. With a sigh he strode from the room to tug on his boots and depart for his difficult journey, first to the mill and then around the bouweries. He would not even get to them all, he knew, so vast was the estate. But he would cover the potential trouble spots at least—that much he could do in the time he had allotted.
For Georgiana, this first day in her new home was a day of exploration. She prowled the big rooms looking out the windows, at the huge walnut and chestnut trees that graced lawns fragrant with junipers, down the bluff to the Hudson River flowing by on its way to Storm King and the Palisades and eventually the sea. It glittered in the sunlight—half as long as the Rhine, unique and lovely, flowing down from its source in the high Adirondacks. Brett had told her the Mohawks had named this river the Oigue, which meant “Beautiful River.” Studying the breathtaking view from Windgate’s tall windows, it was easy to understand why. This was lovely country—different from the soft semitropical landscape that she had known in Bermuda—but in its way even more enchanting: rugged, picturesque, wild.
Although she had met the staff last night, it had been a hasty meeting. Today she set out to get to know them.
She found it a surprisingly international household. Although Wouter, Brett’s personal servant, and Maryje the stout cook and her daughter Annekje, who assisted her, were all Dutch, the grooms and the scullery maids were Scandinavian, and the two little upstairs maids, Linnet and Belle, both fresh-faced lasses with excellent robust figures, were from Yorkshire.
“You can be my personal maid,” Georgiana told Linnet impulsively when she found the girl staggering under an almost unmanageable feather mattress she was attempting to turn over. “Here, I’ll help you.”
Red-haired Linnet blinked, then beamed with delight as together, giggling, they managed to turn the mattress over.
“The last ones as lived here would never have done that—helped me, I mean,” she told Georgiana.
“The last ones? And who were they. Linnet?” The smile froze on Georgiana’s face, for she felt she was about to hear a denunciation of her mother.
“Why, them as took over the house afore it was sold to Mr. Danforth—I mean the patroon.” The girl dimpled and tucked back a lock of red hair behind her ear. “They was Dutch and court-appointed and I hear things were bad here then.”
Georgiana relaxed. Not a slur on her mother, then. She had felt herself go tense. “Were they here long?”
“Oh, lor’, yes.” Linnet nodded her head vigorously. “For years, so they say. And it’s thought”—she inclined her face toward Georgiana with the characteristic pose of the natural gossip and lowered her voice conspiratorially—“that they’d planned to steal everything before they left, all the silver and everything, but then—” She stopped abruptly.
Georgiana gave her a curious look. “Who were they?”
“Why, Huygens ten Haer and that mustard-haired wife of his!”
“Rychie ten Haer?” Georgiana voiced her astonishment. “But why would a patroon’s daughter—?”
“They do tell a story about her. They say that Rychie ten Haer meant to marry the patroon here at Windgate all along, only they quarreled or something and he went to Amsterdam and married this other lady—your mother.” Hastily. “And this Rychie was jealous and couldn’t stand having another woman get ahead of her here on the river, and when they all died—I mean, your parents, ma’am—Rychie got her husband court-appointed and they lived here for a long time. She says now she moved away because the house was too big and gloomy, but everybody else says it was because the place was heavy in debt and she and Huygens, even with her father backing her, couldn’t raise the money to buy it. So when her father, old Hendrik ten Haer, died, she moved back to Haerwyck, where her husband could be patroon ’cause it was plain as day he wasn’t never going to be patroon here at Windgate!”
“You say they were planning to steal the silver?”
The Yorkshire girl’s face reddened. “I ought not to have said that,” she mumbled.
“Oh, come now! Do tell me. I can’t have a maid who won’t confide in me, now can I?”
Thus goaded. Linnet burst out reluctantly, “Well, they do say that when Mr. Danforth offered to pay off the debts and buy Windgate, ma’am, that Rychie was mighty happy and she said she’d just leave everything intact because her daughter Katrina was the best-looking girl on the river, same as she’d been in her day, and Katrina was sure to get it all anyway!” Linnet laughed.
“So Rychie thought Brett would marry her daughter?”
“She was counting on Katrina’s looks, I guess. Katrina’s mighty striking.”
Brett had said she was striking too. Georgiana considered that a bad sign.
“Did any of the ten Haers ever come here—to visit, that is, after Brett took over?” she asked cautiously.
Linnet frowned with concentration, trying to remember. “No-o-o, I don’t think so. Of course, I haven’t been here that long—just a year. I’m indentured.” She dimpled at Georgiana. “When my term is out, I expect to have earned a dowry and I’ll marry.” She stated it as a fact.
"Oh?” Georgiana was amused at such foresight. “And have you already picked out your young man?”
Linnet shook her heavy head of hair vigorously. “I’ll wait and see what’s offered. But I can tell you this, ma’am—it won’t be one of those bottom-pinching sailors who swagger about New Orange!”
Georgiana felt like hooting with laughter. “And have you had much experience with sailors, then, Linnet?”
“Enough! I was black and blue, coming over here on the ship!”
Georgiana hid her mirth. “Have any balls been held here since Brett took over?”
“Not as I know of, ma’am—I don’t think so. Things was very grand here when your mother was alive, they do say. Loads of silver and enoug
h dishes for a banquet every night for supper and the servants all tuckered out. And the two of them just eating alone, and her all decked out in satin and diamonds and them stormin’ at each other—” Her face reddened. “I’m sorry,” she said lamely. “I didn’t think.”
“It’s all right,” said Georgiana firmly. “They didn’t get along.” That much all the world knew!
“Would you like to see where she’s buried, ma’am?”
“Yes, I would. Just point the way to me. I’ll go alone.”
The path Linnet pointed out to her led her to the walled family burying ground. Ivy had grown over the stones, but she tore it free and read the names on the stones. She swallowed as she read the name “Imogene van Rappard” and “Lost to the River.” And beside it, amazingly, carved onto a stone was the name of Georgiana’s real father, “Stephen Linnington, gentleman of Devon” and the date and a Dutch word the cook later told her meant “Tomorrow.”
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