Rich Radiant Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  She had expected to eat heartily on the voyage to New Orange—even ship’s biscuit would have been welcome—but they were barely out of Philadelphia harbor before they ran into a gale. Mattie was promptly and violently seasick. When Arthur decided of a sudden to exercise his marital rights, she retched all over him. Yelping that she had ruined his doublet, he had in fury knocked her across the room—but the humiliating incident had also, she thanked God, made him keep his distance lest she sully his fine clothes again. Mattie learned fast. She had pretended seasickness for the remainder of the voyage—and it had kept Arthur away from her. It had also kept food away from her and now her once plump figure was almost willowy.

  Lack of her usual rich diet had cleared up Mattie’s mottled complexion and her skin was now as clear and smooth as a peach blossom. The sea breeze had added color to her cheeks, and her big brown eyes, echoing her excitement at embarking on this new life—for youth is resilient and Mattie had had several respites from Arthur—looked wide and scared and sparkling and vividly alive

  Even her mousy hair seemed to have achieved a richer shade of brown—which probably had to do with her diet.

  Mattie had never looked so well in her life, and the rose petal silk gown she was wearing (a hand-me-down from her mother and now sizes too large for her slender figure), by its very ill fit gave her slim body a delicacy, a fragility that it had never before possessed. As if she were a little girl—dainty, slightly awkward and embarrassed but excited withall, dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Fearing that she might have been deserted, her frightened gaze had only scanned the busy waterfront. Now she looked up at the big Dutch windmill with its wide sails that dominated the town and her soft mouth formed a silent round O. It was an appealing childish mannerism and somehow it touched the sophisticated Dutchman’s heart.

  “This is your wife coming toward us?” he murmured, trying to keep the astonishment out of his voice.

  Arthur, having already made up his mind about Mattie’s complete undesirability, and preoccupied with desperate plots and schemes, had noticed no change in her.

  “Yes, that’s Mattie,” he said in a tone of complete indifference. “Come. If she stops gawking about, I’ll present you.”

  Nicolas found Mattie’s “gawking about” very fetching, since it consisted of swift shy glances at everything about her and then quickly looking away as if she dared not be noticed. He was smiling when they rounded a pile of kegs, and Mattie, who was daintily stepping over some coils of rope, reached them.

  "This is my wife, Mattie,” said Arthur in an offhand way as if he were making known some upper servant. “Mynheer van Rappard.”

  “A water sprite,” murmured Nicolas—and would have said more but that he reminded himself that he was in the presence of the lady’s husband and contented himself with making a most elegant leg to Mattie and brushing the back of her gloved hand with his lips.

  Shy Mattie was instantly bedazzled. She raised those large brown eyes toward him and he realized with shock that she was sporting the remnants of a black eye concealed beneath a hastily applied layer of ceruse. Somehow the bruise below her fluttering lashes made her seem all the younger and more vulnerable, all the more lost and appealing.

  “My name is Mathilde, mynheer,” corrected Mattie softly, for she had made a firm decision the day she left Bermuda that would no longer be called by her hated nickname Mattie.

  Arthur snorted. He shared his wife’s dislike of the name and for that reason felt it suited her—he intended to call her Mattie until the day she died. “I must leave you now,” he said. “Go with Mynheer van Rappard, Mattie. He’ll escort you to the inn and I will join you there later. Oh, and see to the luggage.”

  “It’s already on deck,” said Mattie timidly and Nicolas could see from her manner how afraid of Arthur she was.

  “Well, have it brought to the inn,” said Arthur irritably, and took himself off.

  “Mevrouw,” Nicolas said in a timbred voice and gallantly offered her a tawny velvet arm. He smiled into her eyes—his best smile, a flash of white teeth, a flash of wicked blue eyes, a jaunty gleam of golden mustaches and beard. Mattie looked up into that face and went weak. The saffron plumes that had near swept the dock when he bowed seemed to sway dizzily overhead. There was freedom in his reckless gaze—the same freedom the sea gulls knew, circling overhead in the endless blue ... the same endless blue of those eyes gazing down at her.

  “M-mynheer,” she faltered, certain he must hear the loud thumping of her heart.

  “Your husband bids me escort you to the inn,” Nicolas said gravely and offered her his arm.

  No one—not even Arthur in the days when he was trying to impress the Waites—had ever bowed to Mattie with such courtliness. And no one ever had gazed on her like that. As if she were—beautiful, desirable, someone to be treasured.

  “But—but the luggage,” she said breathlessly. “I must stay and make sure it is all unloaded properly.”

  “Nonsense. Point it out to me.”

  Moments later, to Mattie’s unbounded joy—for she had expected to spend a vexing hour or more on the task—a masterful Nicolas had requisitioned half a dozen burly men from the docks, and their trunks and boxes were being speedily removed from ship to dock.

  “Should I not check it out?” wondered Mattie vaguely. “There might be something missing, some box I have overlooked.”

  Nicolas was allowing himself to admire her eyelashes and the depths of her large brown eyes—so much softer than Katrina’s. “I am sure you have overlooked nothing,” he said in a caressing voice.

  “But Arthur will be so angry with me if anything is lost.”

  “We will check out every last box at the inn. Come, my lady.” Again he offered her that tawny velvet arm.

  Torn between a fear of Arthur so great it threatened to suffocate her and a mad desire to seize that arm and cling to it and let it take her anywhere it chose, Mattie made a sudden momentous decision. With surprising strength, she seized the proffered arm and marched beside Nicolas with a springy step to the inn.

  On the way there Nicolas amused Mattie with odd bits of information about the colony: one paid for things here with beaver skins or wampum but one expressed their value in guilders or stivers. Lawyers were practically unknown and much disliked by the Dutch—some had arrived with British rule, but now under Dutch rule again New Orange had gone back to its old lawyerless ways—oh, there was no shortage of court cases, to be sure. Slander especially was quite a common charge—the Dutch had a way of speaking their minds!

  Mattie countered by commenting ingenuously on the number of Indian moccasins being worn (“Cheap,” explained Nicolas, laughing); and the lace-trimmed Dutch caps on so many female heads (“Ah, that's Holland for you,” he sighed. “Industrious vrouwen, they make their own lace. And sell it for pin money,” he added casually.) She mentioned the shockingly short skirts she saw about and the brilliance of the well-displayed petticoats.

  “They look like bawds to your conservative Bermuda eyes, don’t they?” said Nicolas wickedly and Mattie colored to the roots of her hair.

  “I—I did not say that,” she corrected breathlessly.

  “No, but you thought it,” he grinned. “Everything you think shows on your face. Your thoughts pass over it like a mirror.”

  “Oh. dear," said Mattie, distressed, hoping he had not read her excited assessment of him on her countenance. From the triumphant gleam in his eyes she rather thought he had!

  They made a grand entry into the Green Lion “at the head of their men” as Mattie romantically put it to herself. Certainly they created a small stir, with a straggle of burly followers sweating under a motley collection of trunks and boxes. Heads turned to watch them from the common room as they made their way up the stairs.

  Mattie, on learning that Arthur had taken not one but two rooms at the inn (“He must be as rich as Mamma says!” was her first startled thought), quickly recovered. “The second room is for the tr
unks and boxes,” she decided sensibly.

  “Better to distribute them evenly between the two rooms.” suggested Nicolas. “And not block access to either bed. Then, if one of you should be sleepless, tossing in a strange bed, you can always steal out to the other room.”

  Mattie gave him a big-eyed look. If Arthur should be sleepless and restive, she knew that she would cling to the edge of the mattress throughout the night and pray that one of his threshing arms or legs would not collide with her trembling body—for that would doubtless cause him to knock her out of bed and she would spend the night shivering on the floor, as she had done more than once in Bermuda. As for herself, she would not dare to be restive; she would lie there stiffly even though her body ached, and fight off sleep until morning to avoid retribution, no matter how dark the circles under her eyes became.

  Well aware that she might be spending the night on the bare floor instead of in the soft featherbed with its bright green quilted coverlet, she called for an extra quilt and laid it carefully, still folded up, upon the room’s single large chest.

  “It will not be cold enough for an extra quilt surely,” objected Nicolas. “There will be a fire built to ward off the evening chill.”

  “Still—I may need it,” said Mattie evasively. The men had gone now—to be paid by the innkeeper and the amount added to Arthur’s bill—and she was standing rather uncertainly in the center of the square low-ceilinged room with her back to the one small window. She felt forlorn standing there in her ill-fitting pink silk dress facing the only man who had ever paid any attention to her—and now he would go away and there would be nothing to do but to sit and wait for Arthur’s arrival.

  But Nicolas had other plans for her afternoon. Now that they had dispatched the luggage so handily, he said, why skulk about here? Could she not join him in a walk about the town? He would show her the sights. There were so few of them, it would take no time at all!

  Mattie yearned to go with him. “I would so love to see New York—I mean New Orange.” She blushed uncomfortably at her slip of the tongue but the golden Dutchman did not seem to mind. “But Arthur will be angry if I am not waiting for him when he returns,” she explained, twisting her hands together nervously.

  ‘‘Then could I not coax you into sharing a glass of cider with me?” wondered Nicolas. And when she hesitated, “No, not in the common room. I can see you feel your husband might object to that, but this inn provides a small private dining room where we might sip a glass of wine unobserved, and Klaus, the innkeeper, will notify us if your husband arrives early.”

  Mattie’s resolve was weakening. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps a glass of cider.”

  They repaired straightaway to the private dining room, where Nicolas consumed a bottle of fine Malaga while Mattie, who found she could not eat much after her long fast, sipped her cider and nibbled at a snack of cheese and little cakes.

  Sitting across the oaken table from her with his back to the big gumwood kas that dominated the small room, Nicolas drew her out. What had it been like living in Bermuda? he wondered.

  Mattie was glad to tell him. Headily aware that she was sitting across from a most attractive—and attentive—male, she never realized how adroitly Nicolas guided the conversation. Was she aware why her husband had come to these shores?

  Mattie looked frightened. She set down her piece of cheese and unconsciously clenched her hands together, but she kept her mouth stubbornly closed.

  “Come,” coaxed Nicolas with his engaging grin. “I think we both know why. He seeks one—Anna Smith, does he not?”

  “Yes,” said Mattie with bitter emphasis. “And I wish he did not seek her. For there will be nothing but trouble if he finds her. Brett Danforth bested him in Bermuda and this time he might well kill Arthur.”

  “Ah?” Nicolas’s golden brows shot up. His blue gaze was focused squarely on Mattie’s ceruse-concealed black eye. “Am I to presume, then, that you are worried about your husband?” he asked softly.

  Mattie hesitated. She had always been truthful and, in truth, she was not sure how she felt about Arthur now. She had been absolutely overwhelmed by his manly beauty when first she had laid eyes on him. If Walter Meade had not interrupted that day when she had been swept from her horse by a low-hanging branch, if Arthur, bending over her to see if she was hurt, had actually made advances to her, she knew she would have responded to him. Indeed it would never have occurred to Mattie not to let Arthur have his way with her, for wasn’t that but a prelude to marriage in the exciting books she read? And wasn’t she a “good” girl who had never permitted any man to take liberties with her (not that any liberties had ever been attempted) and an island aristocrat to boot? No man, she had reasoned innocently, not even a stranger from Boston like Arthur, unused to island ways, would dare to lay a finger on Mathilde Waite unless he intended marriage—and marriage to handsome Arthur had seemed to Mattie at the time a golden unreachable dream.

  That Arthur Kincaid considered Bermuda barbaric and its aristocrats little better than savages, Mattie had yet to learn that day when she had been struck from her horse and Walter Meade had dragged Arthur back to Waite Hall and accused Arthur of attempting to rape Mattie. Weeping, Mattie had been appalled to discover that Arthur’s intentions were a good deal less than honorable—he had told Amanda Waite that he had no intention of marrying her daughter. And Mattie had felt deep galling shame that Arthur had to be threatened into taking her to the altar.

  Still, she had asked herself—even with her heart pounding with apprehension as she and Arthur were escorted by burly Walter and Mattie’s glowering father into the parish church in St. George—was not this what was meant by “an exciting life”? Would not Arthur, once brought to earth, capitulate and love her forever and ever?

  So it would happen with Arthur, Mattie had reassured her palpitating heart.

  It had not worked out quite that way.

  Mattie had survived a disastrous wedding night—when a fuming Arthur had wreaked his vengeance against the excited young girl he had been forced to marry—and waked up to realize with despair that she had married a brute.

  Arthur bullied Mattie. He pushed her roughly aside when she got in his way, which was often for Arthur had a disconcerting habit of turning about halfway and suddenly striking out in the opposite direction. He derided her taste in clothes, which he called dowdy and provincial, her carriage (“stooped”), her figure (“fat”), her coiffure (“ugly”), even her unshakable affinity for pink, which he told her with brutal candor made her look even more sallow.

  In bed he often reduced her to tears by leaping off her and pushing her violently to the far side of the bed—or even off it—and telling her in a steely contemptuous voice that she was stiff and cold and totally undesirable. When in desperation she tried to please him, he would take her with a careless brutality that left her flesh bruised and her spirit cowed and her mind in a seething panic that she was—as she honestly believed, for had not worldly, experienced Arthur said so?—utterly deficient in womanly attributes.

  It might have helped had she known that Arthur’s experiences with the opposite sex—except for those he had raped outright—had so far only encompassed slatterns and charwomen and such unfortunates as could be cheaply had. But Mattie of course did not know that. In matters of sex, in her innocence, she considered Arthur an oracle, akin to gods and devils, and no matter how badly he treated her, when she found herself unable to respond as ordered, she humbly believed his every pronouncement of her ineptitude.

  Arthur was experienced; she was a novice—and she had proved unworthy.

  Time and a few hard cuffs and two ocean voyages and the agonizing realization that Arthur preferred Anna Smith to her, indeed that they were hot on Anna’s trail, had wrought a subtle change in her feelings toward Arthur, but Mattie was not yet ready to admit it.

  In point of fact, she had learned to hate Arthur. She wanted impotently to strike at him—for wounding her innocence, for destroying her
dreams. She wanted to strike at him—but she did not know how.

  And now a smiling stranger, the best-looking man she had ever seen, was staring raptly into her eyes and his glance was—her heart gave a little lurch—admiring. And he was asking her, was she worried about Arthur?

  Mattie swallowed. “No,” she said rather vaguely. “I am not worried about Arthur.”

  Nicolas considered that answer amusing—and perhaps justified coming from a demure little bride who was sporting a black eye.

  “Mevrouw,” he said suavely. “Mathilde—may I call you Mathilde? It is such a lovely name.”

  “Oh, yes,” breathed Mattie, who rejoiced just to hear someone call her by that name. “Please do!”

  “I do feel that we are going to be good friends, don’t you?”

  “Mattie forgot all about eating. This splendid fellow wanted to be her friend! “Oh, yes. Yes, I do,” she agreed earnestly.

  “What is Anna Smith really like?” Nicolas asked suddenly. For if he could avoid a vituperative tirade—such as a similar question might have evoked from Katrina—he might glean a key to Georgiana’s character from this lost wistful child who had known her in the old days.