Erica caught her breath and set her glass down hastily, considered it with some trepidation. She had just noticed that her hostess’s goblet sat untouched.
“The wine is neither drugged nor poisoned,” said Georgiana irritably. “I need your help, Erica—cool-headed and awake—if we are to get away tonight.”
Erica gave her an uneasy smile. She drummed her fingers on the table. “I do not think I can manage it tonight,” she admitted. “Nicolas could prove troublesome—or Govert. But by tomorrow I can arrange it. But then you said Brett would only be gone overnight. It would not do to have him overtake you on the river.” No, that would not do at all!
“Brett will be gone two or three days,” Georgiana admitted. “I am eager to—”
“To be off?” Erica gave her a little slanted smile.
“To make my move before Nicolas can make his. For this I need your help.”
“And you shall have it,” promised Erica. “1 will send word to you tomorrow how I have arranged it.”
“Do not sent word. Come yourself.”
Erica’s fox-brush head bowed in assent. “Very well. Be ready— you and your friend.”
New Orange, New Netherland,
1673
Chapter 36
“Oh, I do hope Flan hasn’t gone!” Mattie said anxiously for the tenth time, as she and Georgiana hurried toward the dock in New Orange. Both of them were heavily cloaked and with shawls pulled up over their heads—ostensibly against the cold but actually that their faces might be hidden from view as they made their way down the quaint narrow street past rows of steep-roofed yellow brick houses with picturesque weathervanes flying aloft, distinctive divided Dutch doors and spotlessly clean front stoops.
Their luggage—such as it was, for Georgiana had elected to take very little with her—resided at the Green Lion, where they had registered as the Bessemer sisters, Pentience and Abigail. Georgiana had done the talking—pretending to have a bad cold and to be perpetually coughing into a handkerchief, which had caused the innkeeper to keep his distance and kept him from having too good a look at her shawl-shaded face.
Their trip downriver had been uneventful. The weather mercifully had held. Erica had indeed accompanied them but she had left them immediately upon arrival in New Orange and taken a sloop back upriver. Her story was already prepared. She had ridden away from Haerwyck on horseback “for a little exercise” right after a limping Nicolas had been packed off on Govert Steendam’s sloop to retrieve from Erica’s house in New Orange the gifts Erica had purchased for the ten Haer ladies and “forgotten” to bring upriver with her. “My best petticoats,” she had said regretfully to Georgiana. “Such a sacrifice.” She sighed.
“Just think,” said Georgiana in a new hard voice, “you will have all of mine to replace them!”
Erica brightened. “1 had heard you found a real trove when you moved the big wardrobe in my—in the bedchamber next to Brett’s,” she said.
A pang went through Georgiana. Those were her mother’s things—and now they would belong to Erica Hulft, just as her mother’s journal in which she had poured out her secret thoughts now belonged to Nicolas. “Yes,” she said in a colorless voice. “How will you explain being gone so long, Erica?”
Erica laughed. It was a buoyant, confident laugh, full of excitement. This was the sort of dangerous game Erica loved to play—and at which she was a marvelous player. “Well, my horse has already been found riderless—and I am sure they are searching the forest for me right now. I have bribed the schipper well to take me upriver and drop me at just the right spot along the shore near one of Haerwyck’s bouweries. I will stagger into the bouwerie and gasp out my story, how I was brushed off my horse by a low limb in the forest and lost my sense of direction and have been wandering around ever since and have only just found the river!”
“Do you think you will be believed?”
“Of course! After all this harrowing running about, back and forth by sloop, these days past, I must look worn enough to have actually done it! And”—she gave Georgiana a wicked smile—“I will have given Govert time to miss me and realize what life would be like without me.”
“So you think you will have him eating out of your hand again?”
Erica shrugged. “Perhaps.” Enjoying Georgiana as an audience for things she would never be able to admit later, she regaled Georgiana with how she would entrap Nicolas: When Georgiana’s disappearance became general knowledge, she said, she would say that when she first rode out the day she became lost—and before Nicolas left on his errand to New Orange—that she had seen Georgiana sail up alone in a small boat. That would not be too surprising, since it was known after all that Georgiana was from Bermuda and a good sailor. But what was surprising was that Nicolas had met her on the riverbank and they had strolled away arm in arm toward that old deserted hut that had once been the Larson bouwerie before its wooden chimney had ignited and burned the low cottage to the ground with the Larsons in it. She would say that she had sat her horse, very still and concealed by the underbrush, and she had heard words of love pass between Nicolas and Georgiana, that she had heard him promise to take her away from Brett, away from New Netherland.
And to make that more credible, she would greet Nicolas when he returned from New Orange with a surprised “What have you done with her?” which would go unexplained at the time but would later assume a terrible significance.
Georgiana told herself grimly that Nicolas had brought it all on himself but she felt, when they arrived in New Orange, and she watched Erica embark for her return voyage upriver, that she had loosed seven devils on Nicolas in the person of Erica. She wondered if Govert Steendam would survive a year with her, or if before twelve months was out Erica Hulft would have become the richest widow in all New Netherland—and once again mistress of the patroon of Windgate.
She wondered about it, but all she could see through a rain of tears in her heart, was Brett's face, wondering where she had gone—and why.
He would discover the note of course. It would not be too easy to find, she had not wanted him to find it right away, so she had left it stuffed into the toe of one of her shoes, knowing that eventually Linnet, who was always trying to force her feet into Georgiana’s smaller slippers, would find it and bring it to Brett to read.
The note would say. Do not try to find me. I have run away with Nicolas. And it would be signed Georgiana.
And Brett would go looking for Nicolas and she could only hope that they would not kill each other. Or Nicolas might realize how neatly he had been tricked and perhaps take to his heels before the schout could come to question him. And Brett would keep Windgate, and Nicolas would be loosed on the world again.
Parting with Floss had been the worst moment. She had spent a long time in the stable, stroking that silver mane while the gentle mare nuzzled her. She had even taken Floss for a short exhilarating ride across the snowy meadow and Floss had danced and made clouds of steam with her hot breath in the cold air that blew down the Hudson out of Canada.
“I cannot take you, Floss,” she had whispered into that silken gray ear that had cocked alertly at her voice. “It would be too easy to trace a beauty like you.”
Floss, of course, had not understood. She would be confidently expecting her mistress back... Georgiana’s heart bled. But she knew that Brett would be good to the sweet-tempered horse, and instinctively she knew that he would never sell her.
About Brett she had tried not to think. He would recover from his blow in time, she told herself gloomily. He would forget her, he would turn to Erica—or to some other woman.
Her own life was shattered, of course. She must accept that. Nor would she brood about it. At least Arthur was gone, and with him the Articles of Indenture, which Brett had fortunately found in Arthur's doublet the morning he had ridden out to Jack Belter’s bouwerie—and had destroyed. Nobody had any claim on her now; she could go where she liked.
Now in New Orange at last, she paused in
front of a little tobacco shop. "Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to Boston?” she asked Mattie. "We could settle Arthur’s estate there and you could return to Bermuda a rich woman.”
“No.” Mattie shivered. “After having lived with Arthur, I’m afraid of everything Bostonian.” She gave a little laugh. “I’d rather let Father make arrangements to handle things for me after I get home.”
Well, she would take Mattie home and then—who knew? The world was wide. But for herself, she had no plans to stay in Bermuda.
“Why didn’t you let that woman who brought us here arrange for our passage?” wondered Mattie. “She seemed so competent!”
“Oh, she’s competent enough—and if she'd made our travel arrangements for us, very likely we’d have been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Barbary!”
Mattie blanched. “Oh, to be out of this terrible country,” she whimpered.
“You soon will be. And it isn’t terrible—it’s beautiful.”
“Not to me!”
“There—I see the Swan lying at anchor. Just keep looking around for Flan.”
It was an hour before they found him, somewhat the worse for drink, reeling out of a waterfront tavern with a girl on each arm.
“Flan!” Mattie was standing directly in front of him and Flan’s step wavered. He tried to focus his bloodshot eyes on her.
“Mattie,” he said thickly.
“I must speak to you. Privately.” Mattie gave his two blowsy companions a look of distaste.
“All right, Mattie.” Flan disengaged his arms and gave his two laughing protesting companions a spank each on the rump, promising them warmly he’d see them later.
Georgiana, with the gloved fingers of her right hand holding her shawl almost closed about her face, had no doubt he would. Flan, adorned with cutlasses and a gold earring, seemed to have come into his own. She could picture him in any seaport in the world, swaggering into a tavern and banging his fist down hard enough to make the tankards rattle as he jovially set up the house.
“I—we have something for you. At the inn. In a box,” muttered Mattie.
“Oh—the passage money.” Flan managed to get his wits together. “We’ll have to hurry, for the ship sails in two hours. I’d given ye up, Mattie.”
“I need passage for two, Flan. Anna’s going with me.”
“Anna?” Flan turned sharply to look at her companion. “Why, it is you!” he cried as he peered beneath her shawl. “Mattie told me you were married!”
“I’m leaving my husband,” said Anna briefly. “You’re not to noise it about. Flan. I’m taking Mattie back to Bermuda. She’s afraid to make the trip alone.”
Flan whistled. He gave the shadowed face beneath the shawl a lascivious look. “Come and have a drink with me,” he offered genially. “Plenty of time before the ship sails. You’ve brought the money, of course?”
Georgiana frowned. Her money had all been given to the sloop’s schipper to buy his silence. “I have a pair of candlesticks,” she said shortly. “Solid silver. They’re worth a dozen passages to Bermuda.”
Flan’s brows lifted and he gave her what she could only categorize as a sly look. “Whether the captain will take candlesticks, I don’t know. Sure you’ve got no gold coins about you?”
Both women shook their heads.
He left them inside a smoky tavern’s common room with tankards of ale set up in front of them. The place reeked from the constant puffing of long clay pipes but mercifully most of the customers were groggy from last night’s carousing and gave the two women little difficulty.
Flan came back in a surprisingly short time. “He’ll not have the candlesticks,” he reported. “Because later they might be called stolen and he’d be caught in the middle. So I’ll have to take the candlesticks and sell them for what I can get. Meantime, I had to give him all the coin I had on me, all I’ve got from this venture, but at least you two shall both have passage to Bermuda aboard the Gudrun, and I’ve heard Captain Maarlandt is a man to be trusted.”
Georgiana hesitated. The candlesticks were all she had. She’d arrive in Bermuda destitute save for the clothes on her back and the light valise she’d left at the inn. “What did the passage cost you, Flan?”
“Enough,” he said, a cold note creeping into his voice.
Her heart sank and she tried to keep the contempt out of her face as she looked at him. He was cheating her, that much was clear. The passage had cost only a fraction of what the candlesticks would bring but she could not afford to press the point—nor to wait, for the ship was sailing within the hour.
“See that you do not sell the candlesticks in New Orange,” she cautioned.
“Oh, that I will not,” agreed Flan instantly, and went along with them to the inn to pick up the candlesticks. He grunted as he picked up the long box. “Heavy,” he muttered. “Must be made of thick boards.”
“Heavy silver,” said Georgiana dryly.
Unable to resist checking out his loot, Flan stopped in an alley and behind a pile of boxes peeked at the candlesticks with their fat molded cupids and entwining leaves. Georgiana could see him run his tongue over his lips at the sight. She wondered how she could ever have liked him.
He looked up at her with a bright insincere smile. “These ought to take care of what I had to put out for the passage,” he said brightly.
“I thought they would,” said Georgiana on a note of irony.
Flan escorted them aboard the Gudrun, introduced them to the captain and left. He had learned a lot on this voyage, he told himself, as he waved good-bye to Mattie and Georgiana from the dock. Once, he’d considered marrying that mocking wench. Now he realized there were plenty of women in the world to suit his needs—and they could be had for the price of a few dollars. Bought smiles, bought kisses—it was enough. And—he patted the long box fondly—there’d be enough left out of this lot to buy him all the whores in New Orange!
Georgiana, knowing she’d been cheated, turned her back on Flan’s wave and thought about their accommodations. It would be a cramped cabin shared by Mattie, but at least it would be private, not tumbled about in a banackslike hold with a lot of other women.
“Thank God we’re headed for Bermuda,” sighed Mattie as they cleared the harbor. “I was sure some Dutch court would hang me for shooting Arthur!”
Georgiana did not answer. She was watching the fort and the big windmill and the skyline of quaint New Orange recede in the distance. She had come here with such high hopes, and now she supposed she would never see it again.
Both of them watched the coast of New Netherland slide away from them, watched until it was a thin slice in the distance and then disappeared over the horizon.
They were going home. Home to Bermuda.
The voyage was a sad one for Georgiana, who saw mirrored in the empty distance an empty life—without Brett. She did not regret her decision but she felt sad and lost without him. He had filled her life more than she had ever realized. And now Erica Hulft would take her place.
But if every scudding sea mile made Georgiana sadder, it had exactly the opposite effect on Mattie.
Now that she was safely away from a place where they might hang her, Mattie was recovering her aplomb—indeed she was possessed of an aplomb she had never had before.
“When you think about it,” she breathed confidentially to Georgiana as they stood on the deck looking out into the blue green distance while the sails snapped and cracked overhead, “it was all really very exciting.”
Georgiana gave her a resigned but skeptical look. Mattie was basically still a child, she thought.
“Promise you’ll never tell a soul,” whispered Mattie, “but I let Nicolas seduce me!”
“Mattie, you didn’t!”
“I did. I don’t know what came over me, but I’ll always remember it.” Mattie looked dreamy. “It was so wonderful, just the opposite of Arthur, who always told me I did everything all wrong.”
Georgiana gave her a helpless look.
“Of course, I realize Nicolas has no character, Georgiana.” She looked up. "It seems so strange to call you ‘Georgiana’ and not ‘Anna.’ ”
“Call me what you like,” said Georgiana easily. “Undoubtedly everyone will call me Anna Smith when we reach Bermuda.” She was beginning to worry over what she might meet there, but everything in her life there seemed so trivial by comparison with Brett’s great affairs in New Netherland, she felt sure she could meet it.
"I know I shouldn’t have done it.” Mattie pursued her own line of thought. “With Nicolas, I mean. And at first I was sure I’d burn in hell for it.” She giggled. “But honestly, Georgiana, do you think it was so terribly wrong?”
Georgiana shrugged. “Don’t ask me—I’ve made nothing but mistakes in my life!” And am paying for them all.
“Anyway it was loads of fun. I wish”—Mattie blushed—“I wish I had the chance to do it all again!”
Georgiana laughed. It was one of the few occasions she found for laughter on the voyage.
True to his promise, Captain Maarlandt set them ashore on the south side of Bermuda Island—not in St. George but in Smith’s Parish. The girls had to hike to the nearest plantation from the isolated cove where he let them off before sailing away. But the first house they came to welcomed them and they stayed the night. The next morning their host sailed them into St. George’s harbor and they stepped ashore in St. George in the lazy summerlike weather as if they had never been away.
“Oh, I can’t wait to get home,” cried Mattie, almost skipping across the familiar dock. “Oh, there’s Mistress Maxwell—hello, Mistress Maxwell! And there’s—”
Her voice cut off suddenly for a carriage they both recognized was just driving up to the dock. It was coming straight toward them and it had a woman in it dressed in black taffeta with a large amber brooch at her throat. She looked around her in lordly fashion at the barrels and piles of conch shells and bananas and pens of turtles— and then suddenly she sighted Georgiana and her face stiffened in shock.
Rich Radiant Love Page 51