Microsoft Word - Sherwood, Valerie - Nightsong

by kps

  Raymond du Monde had good reason to know it! "I have met the Duchess of Lorca once," he said tentatively.

  "Really?" The delicate hand that was twirling the stem of a crystal goblet came to a full stop. "Where is she now?"

  "No one knows. It seems she has gone into seclusion." Did he note a gleam in the silver eyes opposite him? If so, the lady was making no comment.

  "Shall we go in to dinner?" She had noticed that his glass was empty. He rose from one of the comfortable cane-seated chairs and proffered her his arm.

  Thus in gallant fashion they swept into the large dining room where Carolina frequently gave dinner parties for as many as twenty guests. Upon the long table was a bewildering array of silver, and a dozen candles in wall sconces lit up the room.

  There was a huge centerpiece of fruit and exotic tropical flowers, and the windows were open to the velvet darkness and the night air that streamed in from the sea.

  "Faith, I'm surprised you have your windows open with so much plate about!" he could not help remarking, for he personally considered this city a den of thieves.

  She gave him a mocking look. "Few would care to steal from Captain Kells," she assured him. "He is known to bring speedy justice to wrongdoers."

  A new view of buccaneering, surely!

  "But we have a treat for you," she added. "We will be served tonight by the young girl you saved from harm on the street today." She nodded as the door to the pantry opened and Gilly came in.

  This was an entirely new and more subdued Gilly. She wore a plain gown of indigo-blue and with it a white apron and a flowing white linen collar. Her riotous ginger hair had been combed severely back by Betts and was topped by a white ruffled mobcap.

  She had been transformed, it seemed, from street urchin into neat little serving girl-but her eyes betrayed her. They nearly started from her head at the sight of Carolina's necklace and she tripped and almost lost the silver tray of soup bowls she was carrying.

  "This is Gilly, whom you saved," said Carolina. "I thought you might not recognize her."

  The Spaniard's gaze passed over Gilly without interest. Turning to smirk at him, Gilly caught that indifference and flushed. In other circumstances she would have stuck out her tongue at him but under Carolina's watchful eye she knew she must behave.

  Her gaze went back to the necklace and she set the silver soup bowls down with a clatter.

  "It is green turtle soup," explained Carolina, lifting her spoon. She smiled at him. "If you are but recently from France, you may not be familiar with it. It is a specialty of my cook's."

  Raymond du Monde sampled his soup and pronounced it delicious.

  "As you can see, I have taken Gilly into my house-hold as a maidservant," said Carolina when the girl had left the room. "She has been badly treated by Iife- she will get better treatment here."

  A soft heart then. . . . Somehow the Spaniard had not expected this in a buccaneer's lady. "I have indeed had green turtle soup before," he said. "But none so delicious."

  Carolina smiled. "Cook will be pleased."

  She was studying her dinner guest as she spoke. "I have never been to France," she said. "Is it very beautiful?"

  He shrugged. "I am from Marseilles, a crowded dirty port city." It was his Spanish distaste for the French that was speaking.

  Her wing like brows lifted. Plainspoken for a French-man! Those of her acquaintance had usually beat about the bush when speaking to a lady.

  Yet despite his French name, despite his claim to be from Marseilles, and for all the French foppishness of his dress, there was something about this Monsieur du Monde

  . . . something Spanish. And she who had lived on Tortuga and seen and talked to so many Spanish prisoners there awaiting ransom or working out their ransom, had sensed that about him. After all, Spain had many dashing cavaliers-and some would consider it great sport to pay an impudent incognito call on Tortuga and dine in the home of the Lord Admiral of the Buccaneers!

  Idly, she tried him on it, wondering if she could catch him out. As he bit into his lobster, she asked in Spanish, "Are you staying here long?"

  Perhaps it was his concentration on the lobster, perhaps the dazzling effect this beautiful woman was having on him, but Raymond du Monde, before he could think, answered in Spanish, "Until tomorrow only."

  He looked up as the words left his mouth and saw her smiling at him. Like the adventurer he was, he came instantly alert-and mounted his attack. "You speak amazingly good Spanish," he complimented her.

  "So," she said dryly, "do you, monsieur-or should I say senor?"

  The words hung on the empty air, pervading the sudden silence as Gilly, who had just come into the room, carrying a big platter of beaten biscuits, paused, round-eyed, and stared at Monsieur du Monde, whom the lady of the house had just indirectly accused of being Spanish.

  But the dinner guest proved equal to the occasion. He flashed a smile at his hostess.

  "One picks up a smattering of all languages at New Providence," he admitted engagingly. "Your own proficiency, I would imagine, came from Tortuga?"

  Behind him Gilly gasped. New Providence had no buccaneer port like Port Royal, with a royal governor and a bustling trading center-only a pirate port with lean-to shacks set up on the sand. Desperate tales were told of New Providence. And Gilly knew they were all too true-she had come here from New Providence.

  Carolina was still smiling but her eyes narrowed. His answer had satisfied her, for it suited the man who spoke. He could be a pirate-and perhaps a renegade Spaniard to boot. Oddly she found herself regretting that he was not a buccaneer, for buccaneers were privateers really, patriotic men who would never attack ships of their own flag or those of their country's friends. Buccaneers fought only Spain.

  "So you are from New Providence?" she murmured. "Recently, I mean?" He shrugged an affirmation. "One must be from somewhere, I suppose." "I have often wondered about the place. What is it like there?"

  She was challenging him, he thought. There was a good mind behind that winsome smile, those flashing silver eyes. "It is a hellhole," he said bluntly. "There are words that would describe the place in French-but they are not for a lady's ears."

  "That bad?" she mocked him.

  "Worse," he said with feeling, for he had heard evil stories about New Providence-stories that would truly offend a lady's ears.

  "Still I am told there are some colorful people there." She sensed his withdrawal but refused to let go of the subject. "Rouge, for example?"

  He guessed she was testing him, and under his lace collar he began to sweat. Who could guess what this elegant lady might know of New Providence or its denizens?

  But Rouge, at least he had heard of. She was famous far and wide. "What do you wish to know of her?" he asked cautiously.

  Gilly had set down the platter of biscuits and now she paused in the door and watched him brightly. "Oh, I don't know," Carolina said vaguely. "What she is like, I suppose. Accounts of her differ so." If that was true, he had a chance! "An Amazon,"

  he declared flatly.

  "I am told she wields a cutlass like a man."

  "Not so well," he said indifferently. "She has scars where"-he grinned-"they don't show. Shall I tell you about them?" His face lit up with a wicked smile. He would fling back the elegant lady's challenge!

  "Never mind," said Carolina hastily. "I just wondered-is she very beautiful? I have heard rumors."

  "She does not hold a candle to your loveliness," he declared gallantly. "In fact, I found Rouge quite plain!"

  With a satisfied expression, Gilly closed the door and retired into the pantry.

  "Come now, I did not ask for a comparison!" laughed Carolina, tossing her head beneath that hot gaze. "But I have been told that Rouge is a queen among the pirates, that her hair is like flame, that she has many lovers, that she wears men's clothes--and I wondered what she really looked like."

  "Ah, she wears men's clothes," he agreed airily, feeling that was a safe admission.<
br />
  "But she has no air, no style as you do, my lady."

  Carolina, hard-pressed on this subject of her beauty, changed the subject, and Gilly, who had had her ear pressed to a crack of the pantry door, strolled back to the kitchen looking smug and insulted Cook, who warned her, cleaver raised, that if she didn't hold her tongue she'd chop it off.

  Unaware of the altercation in the kitchen, Carolina called softly to the cat who, fed in the kitchen by Cook, who adored her, now strolled lazily into the dining room through the pantry door that Gilly had left carefully ajar.

  "This is Moonbeam," she told her guest, reaching down affectionately to pet Moonbeam's pale shining fur. The cat mewed softly in answer and began to purr.

  Ramon del Mundo looked politely down at the cat. He saw a striking white Persian cat with broad paws and an enormous plume like tail, who rubbed against Carolina's skirts and looked up at her adoringly with big green eyes.

  "A handsome animal," he observed. "And well named."

  Carolina smiled. "It was Kells who named her." She remembered the day Kells had brought the cat home to her, a half-grown kitten and most distrustful. A failed ship's cat was Moonbeam. She had detested the sea so much-meowing and clinging to anything that she could with desperate claws-that the crew had at first named her

  "Landlubber," then got rid of her in disgust.

  Carolina, who shared with the kitten a preference for keeping her feet dry, sympathized with Moonbeam's dislike ofslippery decks strewn with salt spray. "It must have been terrible for her, having to lick the sea salt from her long fur all the time," she had said, cuddling the kitten. "What shall we name her?" Kells's voice had softened and he had run a gentle hand across Carolina's hair. "I thought we'd name her Moonbeam for she has a pale shimmer--like your hair." Now, dining with this new-met stranger, Carolina's face grew dreamy as she remembered-and the glow that lit her eyes as she thought of how Kells had said that made her something to behold.

  Across from her, the Spaniard-pretending-to-be-a-Frenchman caught his breath at the sight and from the depths of him he envied her lawless buccaneer lover.

  Chapter 3

  In the long dining room Carolina was studying Raymond du Monde's dark face, his mobile mouth, his expressive features. And especially his eyes, wicked and flaring golden in the candlelight. Eyes that commanded, mocked, eyes that could hold one pinned by their gleam. . . .

  Outside, in the distance, the wild Port Royal night was just beginning. From somewhere came the homing cry of a bird and a snatch of raucous drunken song and laughter. In the eerie jungle of mangrove swamp that lay between sandspit Port Royal and mainland Jamaica, the stalking night had begun, and little creatures scurried through the dark to safety. In the jungles up the Cobre the parrots squawked sleepily and the planters sat on their porches and slapped at mosquitoes-and gave up and went inside.

  But here in the elegance of her long dining room Carolina studied her dinner guest, and wondered about him, for she was inwardly sure he was not what he seemed.

  About her white neck the fabulous necklace glimmered like blood against snow. They might have been anywhere in Europe and not in lawless Port Royal.

  Moonbeam had sunk luxuriously down by Carolina's feet, purring. Absently Carolina rubbed the fur just behind Moonbeam's pointy ear with her toe, and Moonbeam's purr grew louder.

  The man across from her was smiling.

  "I am told you loosed a jaguar once," he observed, skillfully spearing a bit of lobster.

  It was but one of the many stories he had heard about her, for he had been asking discreet questions about town all afternoon and had leamed that people were eager to share what they knew about the glamorous Silver Wench.

  It was then she knew where she had seen eyes like his before. They were the eyes of a cat, a big dangerous cat.

  She shrugged. "Many stories are told of me-some of them are even true." He was delighted with her answer. "But about the jaguar," he urged. "Tell me about that."

  She remembered the jaguar all too well. The big cat had been brought in by sea, captured somewhere in the wilds of Mexico. And captured along with the galleon that was to bear her to Havana. Carolina had first seen the proud lustrous animal exhibited on the deck of a buccaneer sloop that had sailed into Port Royal harbor.

  Seen it tied and helpless but roaring its defiance at its captors.

  "A female," a young buccaneer had told her casually. "The Spaniards said they caught her trying to protect her cubs."

  "What of the cubs?" she had asked. "Escaped," was the prompt reply. "They shot at them but the jungle was dense and they got away. But they were young and they probably died without their mother. She might have killed someone had not a lucky shot felled her."

  The signs of that "lucky shot" were there,a long gash where the shot had grazed the skull, cut through a ribbon of fur and stunned the big cat, who had then been taken alive.

  "So they ran off her cubs, left them to die, and took her away to sea?" Carolina's voice had been unsteady.

  "Yes. Is she not a beauty? Our captain thinks to sell her to a man in the town who holds dog fights and cock fights. Think of the sport we will have when we put her in a walled enclosure and loose the dogs on her?"

  Carolina had not wanted to think about that. She demanded to see the captain immediately. "How much," she had asked him peremptorily, "for the jaguar?"

  Surprised, he had named the price he hoped to get in town. "But I might get more,"

  he had said with a frown.

  "I will pay you twice what you ask," she said. "In gold. If you will sail me up the Cobre where I will release her."

  "Release her?" The captain was obviously taken aback.

  "Yes." The word was spoken crisply. "Release her."

  The captain of the sloop had gnawed at his lip and thought about that. Finally he had agreed.

  Kells had been gone, on the other side of the island. It was Hawks, a darkly disapproving Hawks, who had accompanied Carolina on that journey up the Cobre.

  She had made friends with the big cat on the way-after a fashion. At least she had sensed a kind of wild understanding, a kinship in those lamplike golden eyes.

  And when at last she had chosen a place to release the jaguar, she had insisted on doing it herself. Hawks had nearly exploded at her insistence.

  "She will tum on you, Hawks," Carolina had insisted. "But she will not turn on me. I am sure of it."

  Hawks was considerably less sure. He had turned menacingly to the men about him, who had watched with fascination as Carolina, the knife in her hand flashing in the moonlight, had advanced upon the dangerous animal.

  "If anyone so much as breathes, I'll have his ears for it," Hawks had growled. And to Carolina he had said, "At least have a pistol in your other hand-in case she does turn on you after all!"

  "All right." Impatiently Carolina had taken the pistol Hawks proffered. About her the men watched tensely. Hands crept toward cutlasses-and pistols.

  "Stand well back, Hawks," Carolina instructed. "I think we're near enough to shore that she can leap over. I don't know if she can swim."

  There was sweat on Hawks's brow now. He was cursing silently-and praying, too, although he would never have admitted it.

  The big cat had been positioned half over the ship's rail. Swiftly, with her razor-sharp knife, Carolina had slashed the bonds that held the animal, and leaped back.

  But she need not have worried. The jaguar had no thought for those on the sloop. In a single fluid bound the big cat gained the shore, disappearing into the dark wall of green jungle, black and silver in the moonlight, that almost scraped the sloop's hull.

  But behind Carolina, as the cat leaped, a shot had rung out.

  Carolina had swung around and without thought instinctively fired at the man who held a smoking pistol. With a look of disbelief on his face he had crumpled to the deck.

  It had been a very tense moment. Hawks always sweated when he recounted it.

  "There I was
on the deck with a whole crew of armed men," he had said with feeling.

  "And the captain's lady chooses to shoot one of them!"

  The man had lived. Carolina, shooting as she whirled, had dealt him only a flesh wound.

  "Why did you do it?" she had asked in an anguished voice as she stood over him while he held on to his bloody shoulder. "Why did you try to kill her?"

  He hadn't known really. A lovely wild thing just released-his instinct had been to kill it.

  And brag about it later. But along with the pain, he had felt shamefaced as he looked up at the Silver Wench bending over him.

  "Do you think he hit the jaguar, Hawks?" Carolina had demanded. Hawks had shaken his head. "No, the shot went wild. The sloop lurched as the cat went over."

  She had insisted on staying where they were, anchored until dawn. A quick search had revealed no bloody trail on shore, but there were the imprints of big pads on the marshy earth.

  "I promise you," Carolina had told them all with flashing eyes, "that if anybody hunts that animal down ,If any of you so much as tell where we dropped her off-that I will ask Kells for your heads for it!"

  They had shuffled their feet and looked at each other uneasily. The Silver Wench was always more than one bargained for-but she had shot one of them. And now was threatening the rest.

  It was Hawks who had saved the day.

  "Captain Kells will take it kindly that you have done this favor for his lady," he had rumbled. "And now we'd best get us back and leave the cat to fend for herself. I'll be buying the whisky when we get back to Port Royal. Meantime you should look to that shoulder, Roy."

  "I shot you. I'll bind up the wound," Carolina had told Roy bluntly.

  She never, Hawks remarked later, said she was sorry she had shot him. Indeed he was sure she was not! But she did not wish to see a fellow human suffer. A strange contradiction, was the Wench.

  And now her dinner guest was asking her, "Is it true you loosed the jaguar yourself?"

  "Yes," she sighed. "It is true. I have done many reckless things."