Wild Willful Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  Seeing her lips move, her watchful maid hurried up. “Did you speak, Mademoiselle?” she asked anxiously. “Do you wish me to bring you something?”

  “No, Colette.” What Mademoiselle Pernaud wished for, anxious little Colette could not bring her—the gift of life. Poor Maurice, her brother. He had accused her of not wanting to live! It was an expression of his burning disappointment in her, for over the years Mademoiselle Pernaud, who in her youth had been blessed with a rare and fragile beauty, had managed to reject the advances of half the noblemen of France—indeed, she had rejected them all, he said, to moon over the memory of a tiresome Huguenot who had managed to get himself killed in Brittany! He had hoped that this sea voyage to so exotic a place as Martinique would at last make her forget Andre and take a “normal” interest in life. If she would have none of the Frenchmen at home, perhaps she would become interested in one of the French planters who were even now carving out island empires on the beautiful volcanic island of Martinique.

  But Maurice’s plans for his sister had not worked out. Her lovely sad face had not brightened at the dazzling sight of Mont Pelèe towering against the sky. And although she was fond of her brother and had greeted both him and his pregnant wife affectionately, she had hardly bothered to sniff the flowers that overran his beautiful gardens in Fort-de-France. Indeed, she had taken little interest in anything, passing her days as if exhausted, lying recumbent upon a chaise lounge in his sunny loggia, being fanned by an impassive black servant. Nor had she evinced any joy at the succession of hopeful—and single—planters who had journeyed to the governor’s residence to make a leg to her and gallantly offer to show her their handsome plantations. Not a single such invitation had she accepted. Indeed, the governor told his pregnant wife in disgust, his sister would be an old maid to the end of her days.

  When a few weeks before her sudden weight loss had become alarming, the doctors had been called, but they gave conflicting diagnoses. Her alarmed brother had been for sending for a doctor from France, but Mademoiselle Pernaud, who had never been a burden to anyone in her life and was determined not to become one now, had vetoed that suggestion. It was easier for her to go back to France to see a doctor, she had told him gently, than to have one sent out. But when she had kissed her brother good-bye as she boarded La Belle France, she had known it was for the last time.

  Mademoiselle Pernaud did not understand her condition any better than did the puzzled doctors of Martinique, but she was shrewd enough to project the outcome. No one knew better than herself that she was going home to France to die. She hoped only that she would have time—and strength—to make the journey to Brittany to place a last wreath of flowers on Andre’s grave, where he had lain these dozen years past.

  Colette’s timid voice interrupted her reverie. “The de Jonquils,” she suggested hopefully, “appear to be very aristocratic.” For Colette, who was devoted to Mademoiselle, was well aware that Mademoiselle had resisted Esthonie Touraille’s effusive invitations in Tortuga to attend dinners and balls, claiming quietly that her health was so poor she dare not leave the ship. I will not spend my last days in such company, she had told Colette contemptuously. Mon Dieu, what a common woman she is! And did you see how horribly overdressed she was? Going on and on about her husband being the governor, as if to equate him with my brother! Why, this is nothing but a buccaneer island and her husband hardly better than they! Dutifully, Colette had nodded. Indeed it was impossible to overlook what Esthonie Touraille had been wearing the day she had called—all dancing gold and jet and inappropriately placed rosettes and braid and ribands. Plump Esthonie was not chic and elegant like Mademoiselle!

  “You are right, Colette, the de Jonquils do look very pleasant,” Mademoiselle Pernaud sighed. “Perhaps in a day or two, when they can take their eyes off each other for a few moments, I will invite them to share a glass of port with me.”

  Colette looked pleased, for the governor’s last instructions to her had been. Try to help my sister to find friends, bring her out of this despondency for it may well be the end of her. And then he had muttered something under his breath about that damned Huguenot being the root cause of all this! Colette had nodded wisely. She had been jilted by a butcher’s helper back in France—indeed, it was for that reason she had been willing to accept this journey to the islands, which she had always thought of as the outer rim of civilization. Colette knew what it was to love and lose—and her heart had gone out to fragile Mademoiselle Pernaud, so lovely and so lost. She had curtsied to the frowning governor, agreed earnestly to do her best by his sister, and now, aboard La Belle France, was doing her best to interest Mademoiselle in something—at this moment it was the de Jonquils.

  Standing by the rail, that lady of many names who now called herself Veronique de Jonquil, snuggled closer to her lover’s broad chest. “It has happened,” she exulted. “We are on our way! Oh, Diego, we are going to have our chance at happiness at last.”

  “You must remember to call me Jacques,” he reminded her gently.

  “And you must remember to speak to me in French,” she countered, giving him a smile of great tenderness.

  Diego’s strong arm around her tightened. “I will make you happy, Veronique. That much I promise you,” he said hoarsely.

  She gave him a lightsome answer. “Of course we will be nappy. We will live on love and play all day in the orange groves—” Her voice came to an abrupt halt. The de Jonquils’ eventual destination was Paris, which she had heard was cold and rainy. It came to her with force that she would not see the orange groves of Valencia again.

  Diego felt her sudden inward quiver—just as he always seemed to catch her thoughts, so in tune with this tense blazing beauty was he.

  “Perhaps we will yet win through to the orange groves, Veronique,” he promised recklessly.

  “No.” Sadness stole over Veronique’s beautiful aquiline features for a moment. “We will never see them again, Diego, or walk in Spanish sunlight, or see our homes again. Our sons will never take their rightful places in the land of their heritage. We will forever be wanderers, cast out.”

  “Only while Don Luis lives,” said Diego grimly. “Then we will marry, and return with some wild story.” Which may or may not be believed.

  “He will live forever!” she burst out. “Oh, how can fate be so cruel? Why was I forced into marriage with a tyrant?”

  “A moment ago,” he reminded her dryly, but there was a twist to his own lips as he spoke, “you were congratulating yourself that we had got this far.”

  “That is true, Diego.” With a mercurial change of mood that was part of her charm, Veronique turned to him with a sunny smile. “The sun is warm, the sky is blue, and I am full of hope! At this moment I know in my heart that we will win through to the orange groves of Valencia, that God will strike down Don Luis and let us marry—that we will have strong sons, every one exactly like his father.” She surged against him so strongly that Diego said hoarsely, “I think we’d best repair to our cabin, Veronique.”

  And those staid married passengers on the deck exchanged glances and watched the de Jonquils go—with knowing smiles, remembering when it had been the same with them on honeymoons long ago.

  The walls of the de Jonquils’ cabin could have been blackened with smoke or hung with tinsel that day—it is doubtful they would have noticed. To Veronique and Diego it was a cabin of sighs and dreams, for this make-believe “wedding trip” under assumed names was all the wedding trip that either believed they would ever have. And what they could not claim before the world they would have in secret here: the wine of passion, the sharing of dreams.

  Hardly had Diego closed the door behind him before Veronique kicked off her black satin slippers and melted against her tall lover. Diego held her to him, his lips sought the curve of her white throat, found the little pulsing hollow at its base, and trailed down lingeringly to the top of her low-cut gown to nuzzle at the pale smooth hollow between her breasts.

  Vero
nique felt her breath come in short fast bursts as his lips and fingers worked their magic. Beneath the ardent urging of those fingers her hooks were soon released, her sleeves and bodice loosened. A little involuntary moan escaped her lips as she felt the wine red velvet of her gown drift down her tingling body to lie in a soft velvet mound around her black-stockinged ankles. Next her black lace-trimmed chemise—and his fingers were more hurried now, more urgent as they touched the fragile undergarment that was so dramatic against the pale olive of her skin—floated down past her hips and trembling legs to join it. Then Diego lifted her to the bunk and himself removed the black silk stockings and black satin garters that were all the barrier that remained between him and the last of her nakedness.

  Although they had made love many times and passionately in the pimento grove behind the stone church in Tortuga, this was the first time either one of them had ever dared to disrobe. In their flower-hung bower in the pimento grove there had ever been the need to be furtive and quick lest someone come along—and there had been the need for French lessons as well, as Veronique earnestly taught Diego enough French to survive as a staid and remarkably silent Frenchman.

  But now at last they had all the time in the world for dalliance, and the very smallness of their cabin, the very confinement of the voyage, which most passengers deplored, would be for them one long embrace interrupted only by dreamy walks along the deck, hand in hand, and the occasional need for food.

  Silent, intent, they lost themselves to love, the only sound in the cabin Diego’s hard breathing and Veronique’s occasional moans and small impassioned sighs as his hard body strained against her lithe yielding form.

  Diego clasped her to him gently, reverently, and with a new and terrible tenderness. He had made a rash, desperate, and eternal commitment to this woman, and in his heart with each impassioned thrust he was vowing silently to love her always, to stand beside her, care for her, shelter her, protect her, and shield her against all the world. His strongly beating heart sang with the depths of his commitment to this spirited woman, a woman of silk and fire and dreams, that he had loved with a boy’s exuberance—and now as a man clutched fiercely and tenderly in his arms.

  And with every shudder of feeling that coursed through her slight body, each burst more overwhelming than the last—flowering, surging, pulsating—Veronique was passionately promising herself that she would somehow make it up to Diego for all that he had lost in snatching her from Don Luis’s vengeance. Diego had sacrificed all that a man held dear but she would make it up to him somehow—her breath caught sobbingly as those rhythmic shudders of feeling mounted and soared and spilled over into ecstasy—somehow, somehow....

  Eventually—as all things must—their sudden wave of passion ended and they drifted back to earth like ordinary mortals and lay companionably together on the bunk, damp naked bodies touching, and began, as lovers will, to talk about the wonder of it all, and to review the events that had brought them thrilling to each other’s arms.

  “Ah, Diego, Don Luis would never have sent you to find me if he had known we had loved each other since childhood,” sighed Veronique contentedly, running caressing fingers along his thigh.

  “Lovers only in dreams then.” Tenderly Diego ruffled her dark shining curls. “Lovers in fact now.”

  Veronique slid backward away from him and sat up in the bunk. She leaned forward and her dark curls fell over on his lightly furred chest as she stared down into his face.

  “Did you know that I fasted for a fortnight when they told me I must marry Don Luis? I swore that I would stay locked in my bedchamber and never eat again!”

  “What made you break your vow?” he asked curiously, for he knew how resolute she was.

  Veronique made a gamin face at him. “The smell of chicken frying under my window! I determined that I would find another way to your side than starving—I ran away.”

  He looked startled. “I did not know that!”

  “No, of course you did not.” Her naked breasts were lowered now and brushed his chest tantalizingly. He felt ripples of desire flame through him. “My family kept it a close-guarded secret lest my virtue be deemed impaired! But I climbed down from my balcony and traded clothes with a gypsy girl and tried to reach your house.”

  He reached up and tried to pull her down to him. "Poor little Veronique,” he said, much moved. “Had I but known!”

  But she was in a mood to talk and resisted him. “The gypsy girl ended up in a dungeon—for helping me!” She grimaced at the memory.

  “Did they let her out?”

  “Yes, but not till after I was safely married to Don Luis, so she could not talk about my wild ride.” Her dark eyes pondered the past, irrevocable now. “I stole my father’s fastest horse that night. But he went lame halfway there and they caught up with me, dragged me back. And later I learnt that you were not even at home, Diego, you were in Madrid. So it would have been futile, anyway.”

  ‘‘How did they ever coerce you into marrying Don Luis?” he wondered, knowing well her valiant spirit.

  “They almost despaired of me. My father was beside himself—he even dragged me down to the dungeons and threatened me with the Iron Maiden.” She shivered, remembering that silent armorlike suit with spikes turned inward into which a person could be locked, and must stand frozen and rigid forever or be instantly impaled. “He told me that if I did not submit he would lock me inside it and I dared him to do it! It was then he said he knew how to break me, that I would come screaming to him on my knees and beg him to allow me to marry Don Luis.”

  Diego felt a chill of horror go through him. He waited silently for her revelation.

  “All in my family know my weakness, Diego—that I have a terrible unreasoning fear of small enclosed spaces. My world darkens and I feel suffocated by them—it is as if I cannot breathe. It has been so ever since we went to see the great caverns near your home and a bit of the cavern flooring gave way beneath my feet and I was trapped in darkness for hours before they could get me out.”

  Diego nodded soberly. He remembered those caverns—he had nearly lost his way in them himself once or twice.

  “So he locked me in the oubliette.”

  It was Diego’s turn to shiver. For the oubliette was the darkest deepest hole of any dungeon—and the most feared. It was a tiny space enclosed in stone with an opening only from the top. The very word oublier meant “to forget” and into those dark grim holes the “forgotten ones” were lowered, without hope, and left to die. And they had done this to her.... His muscles tensed and at that moment he would have lunged with glee at her father’s throat and brought him instantly to his reward. He controlled himself with an effort, for although her eyes were closed, she was speaking again.

  “I fought back my screams and they left me there. I nearly went mad.” Her pale fists clenched and her whole body trembled with the memory. “Not till just before the wedding did they take me out and at that moment I would have done anything, anything not to be put back into that lost darkness.

  I had had only bread and water and I nearly fainted during the ceremony. People remarked afterward how pale I was—they never guessed the reason.” It had gone by in a dream, a nightmare, that enforced wedding ceremony—but a lesser nightmare, for it took place in the lofty airy dimness of a great cathedral and not in the tight, stifling, airless darkness of a black hole with only the sliminess of cold stone walls to the touch and the only sound the scratching and squeaking of rats running overhead.

  Diego was sitting up now and for a moment he bent his head to shield his face from her view. He did not want her to see the raw emotions that coursed across his strong features. But he need not have done so; Veronique was staring stonily ahead, seeing other places, other times.

  “I remember when Don Luis’s emissaries came. Ah, they were royally decked out, I can tell you. There was enough gold gilt on that carriage to become the altar of a church! They strolled about our courtyard arrogantly in their satins and plum
es with their talk of great doings at court—and my father, who was a simple man at heart, and who had spent almost all of his days at our family estate in Valencia, never stirring forth, was impressed. I watched them from a distance and my heart sank, for I could see that he was flattered that a great man like Don Luis should ask for me. Flattered!'' The bitterness of her tone cut Diego to the heart. In it was all the rejection she had suffered when, young and tender—and frightened although her pride would never let her show it—Don Luis had taken her to his bed. She had not produced a son—although he had striven manfully with her—and he had become impatient and packed her off to court where her dark beauty would at least be a credit to him. There, in his view, she had disgraced him—and she had been made to pay for it.

  Now, groping for the words, she tried to make Diego understand how it had been.

  “That night my father called me into his estudio. He bade me sit upon the high-backed balustered chair that had belonged to his great grandfather. I remember staring at the inlaid ivory of his tall trestled writing desk as he spoke. Even now that design is etched in my memory. At first he strode about extolling the virtues of life at court, a life he was quick to mention that I had been denied. When I proved intractable, he seated himself on the big carved chest that contained his papers. He was very silent for a while, studying me, for I had proved obdurate. Outside the nightingales were singing.”

  Listening, Diego suffered with her, castigating himself for not having been there to snatch her away, to save her.

  “He told me, appealing to my pride, that if I married Don Luis, I would become a duquesa, and was that not worth having? I told him that I did not wish to become a duquesa if that entailed marriage to Don Luis! His lips tightened, but he was determined to reason with me. He told me that Don Luis had only one son from his first marriage, Carlos, and if that son died—and indeed Carlos was reputed to be on his deathbed at that very moment, Don Luis’s emissaries had told him so—that I would sire the heir to Don Luis’s noble line. I told him that mattered not at all to me, that I wished to marry for love or not at all.