Windsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  ‘I am surprised these fellows would demand your jewels,’ he said slowly, thinking better of her now, for she had seemed not to have any feeling at all for a husband housed, perhaps, in the foul hold of a ship, kept from sunlight, lost to hope.

  ‘Oh, they are not my jewels! They are the de Lorca jewels - one of my husband’s kinsmen is bringing them from Spain.’ One of the Duchess’s main complaints against her absent husband had been that she was not allowed to wear the de Lorca jewels which were indeed worth a king’s ransom in any country - and her anger showed in her voice.

  Rye hid a smile. He understood the situation. Suddenly Rosalia seemed a lot older. And far less innocent.

  He chided himself for thinking that. Perhaps the Duke of Lorca had been truly cruel to her - in ways she preferred not to describe.

  The thought hardened his strong jawline and made his voice gentle when he spoke. ‘You will let me know when the money and jewels arrive?’

  ‘Oh, of course I will.’ Such a consummate actress was Rosalia that there were real tears trembling on her lashes as she spoke. ‘Sancho will bring a note to you at your inn.’

  He would be on the lookout for Sancho, the lean buccaneer told himself as he took his leave. In more ways than one!

  And so - in a life that was stranger than that of anyone he knew - Rye Evistock, that one-time Diego Viajar -committed the ultimate folly. He had agreed to carry Rosalia and the ransom to some as-yet-unspecified place in the Azores and then exchange that ransom for the body of the Spanish ambassador, spirited away from London to some ‘dark hole’ as the pouting Duchess now put it.

  ‘It is not that I love him, Diego - God forbid,’ she told him plaintively. ‘I have never loved anyone but you. But the Duke married me unaware - unaware of you, for my kinsmen frightened me so much, I was afraid to tell him about us. They said that you were dead and gone and that to speak of you would bring ruin to us all! And although the Duke is a cruel man and I do fear him, still I feel duty bound to save his life now. Oh, surely’ - her voice grew pleading - ‘surely you can understand that?’

  ‘Diego’ could. On first seeing the Duchess, he had been overcome by memories. At her first touch, he had been carried back to Salamanca and the rapture of first love. Now on reflection what he felt towards the young Duchess was more like duty. Indeed, retrieving her husband for her was in the nature of a last gesture to an old love - an old love he had always felt he had somehow railed. He would make it up to her now. He would take her to this rendezvous as he had promised her he would - and that he had other reasons of his own for doing that, she need not know.

  It was Sancho who let him out, a Sancho whose eyes glittered in the dimness and whose hand longingly caressed a dagger. How he yearned to drive it into the heart of this dog of an Englishman who had so lately been with the lady of Sancho’s dreams, enjoying her charms! But his devotion to his master’s unfaithful wife kept Sancho silent, and it was with only a guttural grunt that he saw Rye Evistock from the house and went back to knock on the door of the Duchess’s bedchamber to learn if there were further instructions.

  He found the Duchess seated cross-legged on a red upholstered stool with her arms in her lap. She appeared lost in thought. Her small white teeth were pressed into her soft lower lip and her dark eyes were narrowed. Sancho’s discreet knock brought from her an absent ‘Enter’. Not till she saw who it was did she bother to pull her crimson robe around her, and Sancho’s dark face flamed at the sight of so much beauty carelessly revealed.

  ‘The Englishman is gone,’ he reported in a reproachful voice.

  ‘Good.’ The lady nodded, noting with spiteful pleasure the anguish of his tone. To torture him, she stretched and again let her robe fall open. ‘This Englishman, this Ryeland Smythe, is the answer to everything, Sancho,’ she told her hot-eyed henchman. ‘We will use him and then,’ she said contemptuously, ‘we will throw him away.’

  ‘That is what you said about the other Englishman who has now sailed away,’ muttered Sancho.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the Duchess airily. ‘They will dispose of each other. It only takes planning, Sancho - careful planning.’ To rowel Sancho further, she stretched out a languorous bare leg. ‘I brushed my ankle against the Englishman’s scabbard just now as he departed. Would you tell me if it is bleeding?’

  Half suffocated by desire, Sancho sank to inspect the slender leg the Duchess had extended. He trembled violently as his fingers touched her ankle. ‘It is not bleeding,’ he reported in a smothered voice.

  ‘Good,’ said the Duchess, rising with a benign smile. ‘That will be all. Good night, Sancho.’

  Her smile deepened as he went out with shoulders drooping. It was such delightful sport, tormenting Sancho, who could not conceal his dumb helpless worship of her!

  When she went to bed that night, the Duchess of Lorca was well pleased with herself.

  But for Rye Evistock it was a bad night. What he had done with Rosalia had seemed at the time so natural, so predestined even. But now as he strode out into the street, their lovemaking assumed a new perspective. Faith, he had done no very honourable thing! It seemed to him that he had cuckolded an old man when that man was being held a prisoner. Worse, he had betrayed the shining girl who waited for him at the inn.

  The golden sun of a Salamancan courtyard sank behind the rooftops of a crooked London alley, and a brighter shaft of light laid bare his shrinking soul. He was tormented by new visions: of a girl in white who had tossed him a sword above the heads of the wedding guests, who had chosen to escape with him to an uncertain future, who waited for him now, knowing nothing of what had transpired between him and the Duchess of Lorca.

  He could not face her.

  And so he spent most of the night getting royally drunk in a waterfront tavern. And as he drank and thought, it was ground in on him the more that there was no shirking his obligations here. Rosalia had reappeared in his life as if she had never been away. She had said she loved him. And he was bound to her - bound by his own vows, freely given long ago. Rosalia had a right to his protection, a right to his strong arm supporting her for as long as she wished. She had a right to his love.

  Indeed she had the prior claim.

  He went home to Carolina that night a chastened man.

  He was not good enough to share her bed, he told himself as he opened the door hours later. Not good enough to brush the hem of her skirt!

  And so it was that Carolina thought he looked haggard when at last he crawled into bed beside her and turned his back.

  He was not fit to touch her, was what he was telling himself.

  Carolina, of course, had misunderstood.

  But even strong drink had not been able entirely to push his problem away from him. He lay silent beside her, but he slept little. For he knew he was faced with a terrible decision - a decision that would alter all their lives.

  A choice!

  Rosalia, to whom he had given heart and hand in Salamanca, Rosalia who had endured all these years - terrible years, to hear her tell it - without him.

  Or Carolina, whose silver shimmer invaded all his thoughts.

  Rosalia - and honour. Or Carolina - and love.

  Bitter thought the choice would be, he still must make it.

  BOOK 4

  Revenge!

  Her eyes stare into the darkness

  But she does not find him there.

  He trampled her heart with his buccaneer boots

  And left her the empty air . . .

  PART ONE

  The Counterfeit Buccaneer

  Life’s a joyous banquet -

  She’s demanding her fair share.

  Let good girls go to heaven -

  Bad girls go everywhere!

  ON BOARD THE SEA WAIF BOUND FOR

  THE AZORES

  Summer 1689

  22

  From the beginning the voyage had been a disaster.

  They had not cleared the harbour before the Duchess of Lorca had lost her
mantilla to a sudden gust of wind. It had gone overboard and floated away while the Duchess wailed.

  Another mantilla had been found in her luggage and she had subsided - but only temporarily.

  Before nightfall she was insisting that she needed - indeed must have - a maidservant. Did Diego - she insisted on calling him that - really expect her to do her hair alone? With her own hands? It was very tedious, she was not used to such tiresome work! When Rye remained adamant she threw things around the great cabin - which the cabin boy, who was awed by her beauty, picked up most willingly at her direction.

  It was then that she conceived the idea of using the cabin boy for a hairdresser.

  When Rye came suddenly into the cabin, looking for his charts, he was treated to the astonishing sight of young Johnny Downs, red-faced and intent, trying desperately to comb the tangles from the Duchess of Lorca’s long black hair with a silver comb.

  ‘Johnny,’ said Rye weakly, almost disbelieving what he saw, ‘get you aft. You’re not in training to be a lady’s maid.’

  Stung, Johnny dropped the comb and shot from the cabin like an arrow from a bow. He quaked lest the men discover the feminine task to which he had been put and was relieved when, later, his captain did not mention it.

  But Rosalia, left alone with Rye, had turned to him with a frown. ‘The boy had some talent,’ she complained, shaking out her curls.

  ‘Not on my ship,’ said Rye.

  Rosalia decided to charm him.

  ‘Would you care to see the ransom?’ She smiled, rustling to her feet in her black taffeta gown.

  What buccaneer would not? Rye watched with interest as she extracted a small teakwood box, heavily chased and silver-trimmed, from among her effects and opened it.

  Even he - used to treasure - was taken aback at the sight that met his eyes.

  Huge rubies of a somewhat uneven Oriental cut but of a pigeon’s blood glow met his gaze - and among them, set in heavy gold, diamonds. The necklace Rosalia held up to his gaze seemed to him enormous.

  ‘I am told the diamonds are from Tibet,’ she said carelessly. ‘The rubies of course are from India.’

  ‘The Duke’s wealth is indeed phenomenal,’ said Rye with feeling.

  She shrugged. ‘He will not miss it. He keeps it hidden away never to be worn. Here, I shall try it on for you and you shall see what it looks like when it is worn around a lady’s neck.’ She gave him a provocative look. ‘Will you work the clasp for me, Diego?’

  Rye lifted the necklace, marvelling at its weight, and clasped it around her neck. It sparkled there like blood on snow, the rubies flashing redder than any sunset.

  ‘Amazing,’ he murmured. ‘All the thieves in Europe would have followed had they known gems like these were on the march!’

  The Duchess was not listening. She was studying the necklace in the mirror, turning this way and that. She meant to have it for herself. She had always meant to have it, ever since the day she had first seen it back in her husband’s forbidding fortress in Castile. A day when he had been pleased with her and had let her try the necklace on. She had teased him to give it to her but he had remained adamant. Upon his death, the necklace would go to his eldest son, he had insisted.

  And be worn by his son’s insipid wife! the young Duchess had thought, enraged. From that moment she had sworn a silent vow that she herself would one day possess the necklace.

  What she did not tell Rye was that, in accordance with that vow, she had among her effects a duplicate silver-encrusted box which contained a copy of this necklace, looking equally majestic against the box’s dark red velvet lining. The reason for her delay in setting out was that it had taken a sweating London goldsmith this long to duplicate in glass the stones of the de Lorca necklace.

  How she meant to use the duplicates was as yet unclear to her. But it was part of her plan to let Rye see and hold the necklace so that when at last he handed it over it would be familiar to him - he would not stop to examine it, would not guess that it was not the original. She herself would have that - for she wanted that necklace more than she would ever want any man!

  She put away the necklace and gave him a sidewise look. ‘You will be dining with me tonight, Diego?’ she purred.

  Rye saw that look in her eyes. It made him wary. ‘A quick meal only,’ he said. ‘For I must study my charts tonight.’

  ‘Study your charts?’ Her tone was derisive. ‘But your ship’s master has told me you know these seas as well as any man!’

  ‘He gives me too much credit,’ Rye said shortly.

  ‘Do I give you too much credit, Diego?’ She looked wistful and moved over to stand before him. She sighed and put her palms against his chest. ‘Or have you forgotten our night together in London?’

  ‘I wronged you there,’ he muttered. ‘You should rather rebuke me for it.’

  ‘Rebuke you?’ She laughed, and her hands began to wander lightly over his chest. ‘Rebuking you was not what I had in mind!’

  Rye sighed and took her hands, put them back at her sides. For him the vision of Carolina was at the moment very bright.

  Rosalia decided to try persuasion. She moved still closer, so that her breasts brushed his chest. She pouted and looked up at him through the dark shadow of her lashes. ‘I am restored to you and yet on our first evening at sea you would spent it with your charts?’

  ‘Better that than we run aground,’ he said grimly, but he was aware of her allure, the way his body was answering hers.

  ‘Oh, Diego.’ Her voice rose to a wail. ‘You are my husband and I have found you at last! We are running away together, away from everything I have known. I have entrusted my very soul to you, Diego! Would you spend this - our first evening - with your charts?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed, and pulled her towards him.

  She came into his arms, moaning, and tangled her fingers into his dark hair, pulled his face down to hers.

  A hot wench was Rosalia, and tonight she meant to lead him down all those paths that had been omitted in that one encounter in London . . .

  For Rye the night was a revelation. He had somehow assumed that in his adventurous life he had sampled all the vices. Rosalia seemed to know a few more. He woke feeling somehow disturbed. Surely the ageing Duke of Lorca could not have taught her all that? But courtiers . . . perhaps at the dissolute French Court?

  She lay beside him, sleeping tranquilly, her dark hair spread about the pillow.

  Yet Rosalia’s amorous night did not deter her from wanting to make changes in the ship. By the following day there were more complaints lodged by the Spanish lady. The Duchess was not fond of English cooking. No, she had lost her taste for Spanish dishes as well. Could they not pick up, say, a French cook on their drive down the Channel?

  She was very much put out when Rye did not accede to her request. She slammed her cabin door and deprived him of her company.

  It was a relief.

  Yet Rye, sometime later, watching a cormorant swoop and dip about the white shrouds that filled and billowed above him, was forced to admit to himself that he was not the same man he had been when, as Diego Viajar, he had set out to change his life, to become in all ways Spanish - a fit husband for Rosalia. It was unreasonable to expect that Rosalia, young and unformed when he had wooed her in Salamanca, would remain unchanged by all that she had encountered.

  That Rosalia had indeed changed, he saw with regret. Along with her petulance, there was a cynical worldliness about her that he did not remember. He preferred her the way she had been. But now, standing upon the open deck as they beat their way down the Channel, his lean face softened as he remembered her in other days. Shadowy pictures flitted by him, infinitely sweet.

  How once she had slipped from the shadow of a cork oak and thrown her slender arms around him, her hands pressed over both his eyes, and said with the breathless innocence of a child, ‘Can you guess who this is, Diego?’

  Her small young breasts - the almost unformed breasts of an aristocratic
Spanish girl brought up in a steel corselet that caged her womanliness to make her fashionably flat - had pressed like fire against his back and he had answered hoarsely, ‘I cannot guess. Let me hold your face in my hands that I may the better reflect.’ And she had laughed and slipped around in front of him and he, with eyes closed, had held her narrow face in his hands and - for the first time - kissed her lips.

  It had been a miracle, that kiss, to a healthy young man long at sea who had already become enchanted by her tantalizing smile - usually seen from behind the iron grillwork when he looked up from the sunlit brilliance of the courtyard. For even though they took their meals together in the cool, vaulted dining room of her father’s house, there seemed always to be a duenna lurking about to keep wayward young Rosalia from smiling overmuch at the young man Don Ignacio had brought home with him.

  But she was the Duchess of Lorca now and he was once again masquerading through her life - this time as , Ryeland Smythe, captain of the Sea Waif.

  The visions died - to be replaced by thoughts of Carolina and how she was faring in Essex. For Rye had no other thought than that Carolina and Virginia had accompanied Andrew to the family seat in Essex. He wondered yearningly how she was and if she missed him. His lean face grew melancholy as he thought of her, wishing it were she sailing with him and not the complaining Duchess.

  Rosalia satisfied his body, but not his soul. He was not the first man to find himself in that predicament, he guessed grimly.

  Weighed down by guilt, he quickly put that thought away from him.

  He had taken a wife for better or for worse. And even though it was for the worse, he had taken her for life.

  So be it.

  And then, just this side of Plymouth Sound, three of his crew members came down with an unknown malady and Rye, already short-handed and unwilling to venture into the broad reaches of the Atlantic with a possible epidemic on his hands, put into harbour at Plymouth Hoe and waited for what seemed an endless fortnight until no new cases of the disease had appeared and his men were better. He used the time to good purpose for he picked up the men he needed from the Plymouth waterfront taverns and sailed at last with a full crew.