“How did he discover it?” Rodney asked.
“I have no idea,” Lizbeth replied. “He told me that he had known it almost from the first moment that he saw me.” She looked at Rodney’s face, and seeing the anger in his eyes and the tightness of his lips, added again, “I – I am sorry, Rodney.”
“ God’s words! Sorry!” He almost shouted the words at her. “So it appears when I come in here to find you in a Spaniard’s arms.”
Lizbeth had expected him to refer to this and yet, now he had done so, the colour came flooding up into her little face. It made her eyes seem vividly green, as with a tremendous effort she forced herself to face him and say in a low voice:
“I am sorry for that, too. It – it was quite unexpected – and uninvited.”
“I am glad to think that it has not been happening for some time behind my back,” Rodney remarked sarcastically. “No – never before,” Lizbeth answered. “ I – I had no idea that – Don Miguel was in love with me.”
“In love with you!” As if to relieve his feelings, Rodney unbuckled his sword and flung it down on the table with a crash. “ This is what comes of having a woman aboard a ship. In love with you! A Spaniard, a man who is our bitterest enemy, a man belonging to a nation which has tortured our people, a man you should loathe, despise and hate with a consuming bitterness! And yet, instead, what do I find? I find you in his arms!”
“I know I should feel all that,” Lizbeth answered, “but, Rodney, somehow it is impossible. I thought all Spaniards were brutes, devils in human form but you know as well as I do that one cannot feel that about Don Miguel. He is only a boy – a boy away from home for the first time in his life, lonely without his mother, missing his father and his sister, and falling in love with me, I dare say, because there is no other woman here for him to talk with.”
Lizbeth had come near to Rodney as she spoke, and now she stood looking up at him, her hands clasped together, her green eyes raised to his, her soft red lips parted. Rodney stared down at her. He had not realised before how lovely she was – her hair released during her embrace with Don Miguel was soft about her face, it seemed to glow almost like a fire against the dark oak of the cabin.
“You are lovely,” he said beneath his breath, speaking to himself and yet Lizbeth heard him.
Yes, she was lovely, he thought, and then suddenly the anger which had consumed him, the burning fury within his chest which had raged there since he first came into the cabin, could be controlled no longer. He stretched forth his hands and gripped her shoulders, dragging her closer to him so that he could look down into her face.
“You are very eloquent when it comes to pleading for some swine of a Spaniard.” he said. “But what about you? If it is kisses you are hungering for, cannot English ones satisfy you?”
His voice was hoarse and brutal and then, before Lizbeth could guess what he was about, one arm was round her and with his free hand he tipped her head back against his shoulder and his lips were on hers.
This kiss was very different from the one she had from him before. His mouth bruised hers, his arms were like bands of steel so that she must gasp for breath. He held her as if he would never let her go. He held her as if he was a man starved and hungry. His kiss was frightening and when at length he raised his lips from hers, he did not relax his hold upon her. For a moment she could not speak then, as he looked down at her, she saw the cruelty in his eyes and the hard savagery of his mouth; and then he kissed her again, kissed her until at last she must cry for mercy.
“Rodney, please – let me go! I beg of you!” But he was past hearing her.
This was not the Rodney she had known and liked, the Rodney she trusted – but another man, a stranger, a devil, it seemed, who had taken possession of the man she had thought of as a friend.
“Rodney, I pray you, God’s mercy, but – ”
She began to cry, tears of sheer fright and terror spilling themselves from her eyes and running down her cheeks so that his lips were salt with them. Then at last it seemed as though he awakened to a sudden realisation of what he was doing. With a cry, which startled her by the very violence of his voice echoing round the cabin, he flung her from him.
She fell on the floor, bruised and breathless, too blinded by her own tears to see what he was doing. Then she heard the slam of the cabin door and realised that she was alone. For a moment she lay there, sobbing almost broken-heartedly, and it was the sound of her own tears which restored her self-control, which brought her to her feet.
At any moment, she remembered, Hapley might come to lay the supper table. She could not be found in such a state. She felt for her handkerchief, mopped her eyes and forced herself to quell the sobs which kept rising in her throat; and then, unsteadily, as if the sea were rough, she made her way to her own cabin. There she locked the door and flung herself face downwards on the bunk.
How thrilled and proud she had been of her new quarters on the Santa Perpetual But now she hated them, hated the softness of her bed, the luxury of the linen sheets the feather pillow and warmly-woven blankets. She wished she were back in the Sea Hawk with its swinging hammock in an airless cabin which smelt perpetually of bilge.
There she had been happy. Even though Rodney had been angry with her at first, they had gradually become friends. She thought of how he had talked to her confidingly and easily as they sat alone at dinner and supper.
They had both of them thought excitedly of the adventures that lay ahead.
This was what adventures ended in, Lizbeth thought. This sense of unhappiness and misery, this sense of being degraded and humiliated by someone one loved. Lizbeth sat up suddenly. What was it she had said to herself? And then she knew, knew clearly and unmistakably – she was in love with Rodney! She must have been in love with him for a long time, she thought, perhaps even before she had left England; yet she had not known it.
How blind she had been, how idiotic, not to have guessed the true state of her own feelings .She thought now, as she raised her fingers to her bruised mouth, that she had loved him since that first moment when he had caught her among the rhododendron bushes and kissed her because she had spoiled his hat.
There was blood on her lips now, his kiss had been the brutal exhibition of a man who had completely lost control of his finer feelings and yet, Lizbeth felt she could understand. Like Don Miguel, he was missing the women he had known and loved and who had loved him; and unlike Don Miguel, he was incensed by her presence to the point of exasperation, so that he longed to hurt her and make her suffer because in some very different and obscure manner she was making him suffer by her presence.
If she had been a man and he could have punished her for annoying him. the whole episode would have been forgotten but because she was a woman, he must revenge himself upon her in a very different manner. Lizbeth began to cry again.
Her tears were not the fearful ones she had cried in Rodney’s arms, they were the gentle, wistful tears of a woman in love, a woman who knows that her love is unrequited and suffers the awful pain of loving, incurably, the man who does not want her.
Was there ever such a tangle. Lizbeth asked herself. Rodney in love with Phillida for she had no illusions about that and Phillida disliking Rodney and all men, wishing only to be a Nun while she loved Rodney as she had never deemed it possible to love anyone in the whole of her life.
She thought now that she had been waiting for this ever since she had begun to dream of love and of men and to imagine the type of man who would be her hero and to whom eventually she would surrender herself for all time. They had been the imaginative dreams of girlhood, dreams which ended with the sound of wedding bells, dreams in which no darkness clouded the face of happiness.
But reality was different. Lizbeth wept because she was, lonely, because her arms ached for the man who had thrown her roughly from him and who, she knew, hated her rather than returned her love. And in that moment it seemed to Lizbeth that she grew up. She was no longer a child, no longer t
he same wholehearted, happy girl who had ridden in the early dew at Camfield, who had played pranks on her stepmother and got into trouble because she would not do her tasks in the stillroom.
It was Lizbeth the woman who sat here in the cabin of a captured ship, far away in the Caribbean Sea, and saw that love was not in the least bit what she had imagined it to be, In a very short space of time this evening she had aroused love in a man she did not want, and lust in a man she loved.
She saw then in that moment the difference between right and wrong, between good love and bad, and knew where her choice lay, however much heartbreak it must bring her.
Her tears stopped after a while and then she washed her face and started to change her clothes for the evening meal. For a moment she wondered whether she could face either Rodney or Don Miguel again, and then she knew that to stay in her cabin tonight would only make matters worse. Tomorrow must come. There was no escape from people aboard ship. They must meet and they must behave as if nothing had happened, because, however much their hearts might ache and break, they were two months’ voyage from home.
For the first time since she had come to sea Lizbeth felt that things would be easier could she appear as herself. This terrible state of affairs of pretending to be Mister Gillingham in front of the officers and the men was beginning to be distasteful and irksome, and she wished that tonight of all nights she could be Lizbeth both to Rodney who hated her and to Don Miguel who loved her.
It was vanity that made her choose Francis’ best doublet of blue satin, the sleeves slashed and puffed; the ruff which went with it was edged with silver, and when she looked at herself in the burnished mirror, Lizbeth was not ashamed of her appearance.
All the same, she saw herself for a moment in her mind’s eye in the green Chinese silk that Don Miguel had described to her and she imagined the emeralds clasped around her neck, the bracelet on her wrist and the ring on her finger; and she wondered if she came into the cabin in such attire Rodney’s eyes would light at the sight of her and he would say again the words he had spoken but a few hours ago in astonished surprise.
“You are lovely!”
She could hear his voice, and yet she knew the words were not spoken as she would have him say them! With a jerk she called a halt to her imagination. Rodney belonged to Phillida her half-sister. They were betrothed and Phillida was pledged to him whether she wished it or not.
With a little sigh Lizbeth put up her hands to her face and then defiantly she threw back her head and opened the door. She might do many things that were wrong, but she was not a coward. She would face Rodney tonight, and Don Miguel, however much she might shrink from doing so, however great the hurt to her heart.
She went into the after cabin. Supper was being brought to the table, and as she expected, Rodney and Don Miguel were waiting for her. Both were pale and grim and both men seemed uncomfortable at her presence. As Hapley came into the room carrying the heavy gold dishes for the first course, Rodney took his place at the head of the table, with Lizbeth on his right and Don Miguel on his left.
Supper was eaten in silence. Lizbeth afterwards had no idea what she ate or what was set before her. It was only when the servants had withdrawn and they were left alone in the soft candle-light that Rodney emptied his goblet of wine and set it down with a sudden thud on the table.
He had been waiting for this moment, Lizbeth thought, waiting until he could speak freely. She knew that what he was going to say would be unpleasant.
“I have spoken to Senor de Suavez,” he said to Lizbeth, “and I have told him that, since he cannot conduct himself as a gentleman, he will no longer have the liberty of the ship. He will have his meals here with us, but otherwise he will be confined to his cabin. The door will be locked and a sentry will be on guard both night and day. In these circumstances it is not necessary for me to tell you that you are to have no intercourse whatever with him. If you wish to address this man, you will do so in front of me.”
“Rodney, you cannot do this!” Lizbeth protested heartily. “It is unjust. Don Miguel has done nothing to offend me, and if he has spoken of love that is my business and his. It has nothing to do with you.”
“It has a great deal to do with me,” Rodney retorted. Lizbeth knew by the pulse beating in his throat that his calm, unhurried manner of speaking was only a pose. He was still angry, as angry as he had been a little while earlier when he flung her to the floor.
“You are here as a guest on my ship,” Rodney continued, “and de Suavez is my prisoner. I should be within my rights if I clapped him in irons and left him down in the depths of the ship. Out of decency I have given him a place at my table, I have allowed him the freedom to talk with you and with the other officers aboard. He has abused my generosity by attempting to seduce an English woman, an honoured guest, the daughter of the man who has a part share in the ship in which we sailed from England.”
“I still say that what you are doing is unfair,” Lizbeth said quietly. “It is unfortunate for Don Miguel that an English woman should be aboard. That is my fault, not his and if you wish to punish anyone, you should punish me.”
Her words did nothing to mitigate Rodney’s anger.
“You are talking nonsense,” he answered harshly. “Besides, I am not inclined to argue with you. I have told de Suavez what to expect, a guard has already been put outside his cabin. There it will stay till I can hand him over to the authorities in England.”
It seemed to Lizbeth that Don Miguel paled a little. He made no protest, but Lizbeth was not prepared to be over-ridden by Rodney’s authority. She loved him, she thought, watching his face in the light of the candle, and yet she was able to see his faults. He was being hard and ungenerous over this. He was being unjust and using his authority in the wrong way just because his anger was aroused.
Perhaps there was something of pride in it, she thought, and perhaps pique, too, because Don Miguel had discovered the secret of her sex. Whatever his reasons, she was not prepared to accept them and pushing back her chair a little now, she said:
“To make different arrangements now as to the custody of Don Miguel will cause comment in the ship. The men will begin to speculate as to what has happened and if people are anxious to solve a mystery, there is usually a mystery to be solved.
“We all make mistakes, and perhaps Don Miguel made one this evening when he told me of his feelings. Shall we say that he should have controlled them but other people also lose control of themselves but are not punished so harshly.”
She was being particularly daring in what she was saying, she knew that. Nevertheless she knew that her arguments were having their effect on Rodney. He was frowning, his brows knitted together. She could see him considering her words and wondering if in reality he was being unwise to alter the arrangements about his prisoner.
“Very well,” he said at length, “I will agree to this on one condition only, that you both give me your word of honour that you will never be alone together in this cabin or in any other place where you are not within hearing of someone else.”
There was a little pause and then quickly, because Lizbeth knew that the concession had been a great effort to Rodney’s pride, she said:
“I agree. Don Miguel and I will not be alone. When we talk together, there shall always be someone within hearing.”
And it will please me if you talk as little as possible. Do you promise, de Suavez?”
“I give you my word of honour;” Don Miguel answered. His dark eyes met Lizbeth’s across the table as he spoke, and she could have cried out at the misery within them. There was nothing more she could do for the moment. She had interceded with Rodney and been successful; but she knew that he was still angry and was afraid of provoking him further.
Don Miguel rose to his feet.
“If you will permit me, I will retire to my own cabin”
“You have my permission,” Rodney answered coldly. “ The guard will be removed.”
“Thank you.”
Don Miguel’s bow was frigid; then he bowed to Lizbeth and left the cabin.
“Thank you.”
Lizbeth said softly to Rodney.
He struck his clenched fist down on the table fiercely.
“Faith! But don’t thank me,” he cried. “If I had my way. I would hang the Spaniard from the yard-arm but I will have no one else on board guessing who you are and why you came here. There is trouble from it as it is.”
Lizbeth did not answer, but rose to her feet and walking across the cabin, stood for a moment looking at the picture behind which lay Don Miguel’s secret hiding place. She saw that the box of jewels had been removed from the table when it was laid for, supper and put on a chest beneath the picture itself. She wondered if Rodney had looked at them or whether in his anger he had ignored them as he had done when she first tried to tell him about them.
And then she started as she heard his voice behind her, not having realised that he had risen from the table.
“Lizbeth, I am sorry.”
His voice was quite humble now and there was no anger in it. She looked up at him and saw that his face had changed – the arrogance had gone, instead he looked like himself again.
“I am sorry,” he repeated. “I should not have behaved to you as I did, but you drove me beyond endurance.
“We will forget it,” Lizbeth said in a low voice, knowing as she spoke that she would never forget the hardness of Rodney’s lips on hers, the strength of his arms around her.
“That is all right, then,” Rodney answered in tones of relief.
Like every man he was anxious to get away from the embarrassing subject and he put out his hand to take up the box of jewels.
“You were going to tell me about these,” he suggested. “They were hidden behind that picture,” Lizbeth answered, striving to speak naturally. “Don Miguel showed them to me.”
Rodney opened the box, which had not been locked again, and now he drew in his breath as he saw the jewels and realised a little of their value.
An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition Page 16