Wild Willful Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  She had actually started to climb over when the first drops struck her face. They did not fall gently but landed like a handful of sand dashed in her face. She flinched back from those cold drops that turned swiftly into a sheet of rain that drenched her.

  The shock of that cold water, the misery of standing there wet and bedraggled, brought her painfully to her senses. Not only did it restore her to sanity—it made her realize she was a woman wronged. She had been mourning her loss—now she turned a bright-eyed, resentful face into the rain.

  Nothing would please Veronique more than to have her rival do away with herself—well, she would not give the Spanish woman that pleasure!

  How dare van Ryker profess his love for her when all the time he was deceiving her with Veronique? Wrenching as it was to believe in her heart that he well might be at this very moment lying recumbent in his bunk in the Sea Rover's great cabin toying with the ribands of Veronique’s black chemise, running his hand down through the spiderweb black lace to stroke the creamy olive skin below—instead of driving her over the rail, that thought now made her furious.

  Ah, if she but had him before her once more! What she would do to him! Her blue eyes blazed.

  And—knowing him—what would make him angriest? Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Jealous fellow that he was—despite the fact that he had taken a mistress—nothing would gall him more than for Imogene to take a lover.

  Unfortunately, there were no likely candidates aboard....

  She looked down and saw that Nicodemas had run up to her through the rain. He was rubbing against her long skirts, swishing his tail expectantly in anticipation of his dinner. She swept him up in her arms and looked into his knowing green eyes.

  "I'll find someone, Nicodemas,” she whispered to the cat. “Wait till I get ashore!”

  Nicodemas purred blandly and shook his head and ears to fluff up his fur and dislodge drops of water. Like her, he was getting soaked.

  But as she marched off toward the cabin with him, with the rain pouring down her face, her fair hair wet and sticking to her forehead and her clothes rapidly becoming a sodden mass, her sinking heart admitted something else: She still loved van Ryker, she would always love him.

  Dear God, what she would not give to have him back! No matter what he had done! She would forgive him all....

  A bitter laugh drove raindrops into her mouth. It was doubtful she would have the chance to forgive him. Veronique would see to that!

  Back in her cabin she changed her clothing and dried her wet hair—and dried an unhappy and bedraggled Nicodemas with the same towel. Then she climbed into her bunk and hugged the damp cat.

  “Nicodemas,” she whispered. “We may need our courage. I don’t like the sound of that wind.”

  The captain, frowning on deck, did not like the sound of it either.

  North of the Azores the storm had caught them, and now it drove them before it willy-nilly. For four days and four nights the bleary-eyed captain had hardly slept, trying to guide his ship before the lashing wind. Now with another night drawing on, great sheets of rain beat against the Goodspeed's torn and straining canvas and cascaded down like a waterfall onto her slippery wooden decks. Had the Sea Rover been near, van Ryker would surely have taken lmogene off before the storm broke to the greater safety of the Sea Rover's massive hull. But the Sea Rover was far away, beating its way toward them across the broad wastes of the North Atlantic.

  First there had been a mist so thick that Captain Bagtry could not see where they were going, and then this storm had come out of nowhere, blown the mist away and replaced it with driving rain and seas that rose ominously high, great walls of water that seemed intent on breaking open the Goodspeed's fat sides.

  It was a terrible time for the passengers, most of whom were seasick and groaning. During storms like this one, Captain Bagtry heartily despised them all, complainers that they were, but against lmogene he would forever nurse a special grudge, for at the storm’s height she had done something that had ruined her in the captain’s estimation forever.

  At a terrible cracking sound that meant to her that a mast had snapped, she had raced to the deck. Great dark waves were roaring at them out of sheets of rain that slapped like the crack of a mighty whip. And in a wild bolt of the almost continuous blue lightning that raged around them, Imogene saw the last two survivors among the green sea turtles that had been taken aboard in Tortuga as fresh food for the journey. With the reduction of their numbers, the pen had been abandoned and the two turtles had been bound securely against the day when they too would be served up. But now they lay pitifully in the wash of the waves, being battered back and forth against timber and rigging. At any moment one of those great waves might sweep the deck clean and they would drown!

  Imogene, who loved living things, fought her way toward those helpless gentle giants through the wild crashing seas. The captain saw her and bawled at her to get below. When she continued her course, he moved toward her, bellowing. She could see the knife at his belt—a knife he always wore, ever since that long-ago day in the Bahamas when a crazed sailor had leaped upon him unaware with a long sharp knife and carved a scar upon his arm that would be with him to his grave. Imogene’s gaze fixed on that knife—if she could but reach it! Ah, he was very near now, he was within reach! Before the captain could guess her intention, her hand snaked out and snatched the knife from his belt.

  He saw the knife in her hand and fell back in alarm. “Gone mad!” he gasped, and had a wall of water dash into his face and choke him.

  When the water receded, he saw that Imogene was leaning over the turtles, slashing at them.

  The captain, not comprehending her intent but being in no mood to defend the turtles in such a gale, tottered back to the helmsman. ‘‘Gone mad!” he bawled. ‘‘Trying to kill the turtles now!”

  Intent on trying to keep the ship headed into the wind, the sweating helmsman—the better for his peace of mind—never heard that comment. He was grunting with the strain, for he could not hold the course, and Captain Bagtry, turtles forgotten, threw himself forward to add his own weight to the cause. Meantime Imogene hacked away and watched, exhausted but triumphant, as the green sea turtles, on their backs but freed, slid across the slanting deck and disappeared into the sea with the next wave. Exhausted by her efforts, she drove the knife into what was left of the mast and staggered back to her cabin. When the captain looked back, after a hard ten minutes during which it seemed the ship could not survive another mauling wave, he saw neither turtles nor woman.

  ‘‘Gone over the side,” he mused. “And just as well. Can’t have a madwoman rushing about—” He leaped forward again as another great wave threatened to collide with them from the side. “Hold her!” he yelped. “She’ll turn over!”

  Battered, leaking at every seam, somehow the Goodspeed still managed to hold together. And at her helm the captain now cursed his luck, for they were near England now and these mountainous seas and violent wind-driven rain were sending the Goodspeed with a broken mast hurtling toward the Cornish coast.

  Desperately he turned his ship south, trying to find his way around Land’s End to Lizard Point and thence into the English Channel.

  But it was not to be. The gale that had dogged them since the Azores was now about to dash them upon the Western Rocks of the Scillies—that archipelago of “fortunate isles” that lay off England’s southern tip.

  Imogene was down below, huddled with Nicodemas, trying to snatch fragments of exhausted sleep, for the beating of the gale and the ship’s tossing and the imminent danger of capsizing or being swamped by the enormous waves had battered both passengers and crew alike almost into insensibility.

  She woke to the wild tossing of the ship—woke indeed when the vessel almost turned over and she was flung violently against the wall. She came to groggily in the damp darkness, trying to collect her scattered wits. She was aboard the Goodspeed and van Ryker and the Sea Rover were far away.

  Pray God that
he be safe, she thought treacherously. And then turned her face to the wall and lay there, wracked with silent sobs.

  A wave breaking against the hull nearly tossed her from her bunk and she sat up, hanging on to the bunk, listening to the loud protesting creaking as tortured timbers tried to ride out the storm.

  She knew they were near the English coast. She had heard the captain say so, shouting it through the gale at one of the passengers. They seemed to have been traveling interminably across a fierce and endless ocean. Lifetimes, eons might have passed, but in her heartbreak Imogene had hardly noticed the passage of time. Gradually she had made a hard peace with herself. Van Ryker, she had told herself stonily, was gone. Out of her life. Completely.

  But she had all of her life to live out. Without him.

  Somehow she would do it.

  Nervously, in her rocking bunk, she twisted the ring on her finger. It was a square-cut emerald set in heavy gold—a mate to the one van Ryker always wore on his little finger. Imogene was wearing hers on her middle finger for the jeweler had made it too large and there had been no time to have it cut down. She touched it with bitterness. If ever you need me, he had told her, send me this ring. And even then he had been lying, planning his future without her.

  The ship shuddered again like a creature in pain. Most likely they were foundering. Horrified by the thought of being trapped below with the dark water rushing in, Imogene fought her way on to the deck, being tossed bruisingly against wooden walls as she did so. Once there, the rain struck her like a solid blow and she winced back as a sudden wide bolt of blue lightning lit the scene.

  She would have edged forward, hanging on to whatever was available, but that vivid lightning bolt brought her to a staring halt—for it had illuminated a scene with which she was all too familiar.

  She knew those rocks! The ship was not out upon the North Atlantic’s broad face, where she had confidently believed it to be. Somehow in the night they had careened past Land’s End, somehow missing the rocky monolith that rose menacingly from a cauldron of waves, soaring to a height of some sixty feet. While she lay tossed about in her bunk, they had passed that scramble of weirdly shaped tiny islands with picturesque names like Spire and Shark’s Fin and Armed Knight and Irish Lady. Those sharp sawtooth rocks just ahead that the blue lightning had illuminated, those upthrust rocks with their grotesque shapes sculpted by a thousand such storms, were the Western Rocks of the Scillies! A notorious graveyard of tall ships!

  Slipping in panic over the wet careening deck, clinging to ropes—to anything, she clawed her way to the captain’s side.

  “You must turn hard to starboard,” she screamed at him, "or you’ll end up on the rocks!”

  Through blinding sheets of rain, she saw him turn, saw him start, saw his face turn livid. Up from the dead! he was thinking, and then his careening senses righted themselves. He got hold of himself and shook his gray head.

  “Nay, mistress,” he bawled. “Ye see those lights over there? Them’s shore lights!”

  Her wet hair, come loose, whirled about in the gale and struck her in the face like a wet hand. She pushed back that curtain of wet hair and peered forward. The captain was right. Lights danced in the distance. Lights where there should be no lights. She dashed the water from her lashes to clear her shimmering vision and the lightning came again. It showed her a two-humped landmass rising out of the boiling cauldron of waters that seemed about to engulf them.

  “But that is St. Agnes Isle!” she cried. “Those must be wreckers’ lights! They seek to deceive you, to wreck you. See, that larger mass is the main part of the island and that other smaller part is called the Gugh. Oh, listen to me,” she pleaded, seizing his arm. “I am from these islands, I have sailed these waters!”

  “Go away, mistress!” cried the beleaguered captain, who was having all he could do to avoid the rocks that seemed to come at him from all sides like great snapping fangs.

  “No!” she screamed in panic as she saw a great rock rise up ahead. She made a lunge for the wheel and the captain sent her spinning away from him with one hand. She lost her footing and would have gone overboard with the next onrushing wave save that she managed to seize the rail and cling to it, half into the sea.

  The great sea that had washed over the ship subsided as the Goodspeed wallowed in the trough of the next wave. A sailor saw Imogene hanging helplessly half over the side and pulled her back, shoved her toward some ropes on which her hands closed thankfully. He was moving toward the captain when the next wave struck—and caught him on the clear deck. It was a fatal error. Imogene’s scream was lost in the shrieking wind as she saw the wave go over him, lift him—then the spray smashed into her face, blinding her. When she opened her eyes, choking and gasping, he was gone, washed somewhere out into the fury of the sea.

  Saving her had cost him his life.

  But Imogene knew—if the captain did not—that their sands had run out anyway. Surely no ship could make it through this patchwork of jagged rocks, thrown as they were this way and that by the violence of wind and wave. And even if they did—St. Agnes waited. Rocky St. Agnes Isle that had ground up so many good ships and left the broken bones of men and ships to litter the pounding sea.

  But there was no use, she realized, trying to tell the captain anything. He had made his choice and, like a man demented, he was driving the Goodspeed through rain and rocks and screaming ocean. After four days and nights of storm he had lost faith in nearly everything. He had to believe in those lights. Somehow, magically, the ship still survived.

  Imogene’s gaze, as she clung to the ropes, was still riveted in horror at the sight ahead and those dancing lights that beckoned to the captain. The ship, she knew, had but minutes to live. And the passengers seemed to know it. On deck now, they swirled around her in a screaming mass, dragging their children and their possessions, clinging to whatever offered, crashing into each other. About her all was confusion.

  But one pair of blue eyes was calm now, fatalistic. For Imogene clung to the ropes, watching those giant rocks rise up and disappear beneath the waves with frightening regularity.

  Growing close now was the awesome sight of St. Agnes’s rugged shores, the massive cliffs towering above the breakers. Lightning flashed again and she traced in her mind that landscape she knew so well. Up there on the main part of the island was the cottage where Clara, Elise’s sister, had lived. And down there was St. Warna’s Bay and the tall standing stones men called Adam and Eve, that she had asked on summer nights to send her a lover. ...

  Fate, that deadliest of hunters, had brought her home to the Scillies—to die.

  BOOK III

  The Shipwrecked Beauty

  His hot gaze scorches her burning cheeks

  As his long strong arms enfold her,

  But her future would be a life of shame

  If she stayed and let him hold her!

  PART ONE

  The Wreckers

  The waves that pound upon the beach

  Have many tales to tell.

  They've dragged her back and now they'll teach

  This lass the ways of hell!

  The Scilly Isles,

  1661

  CHAPTER 21

  It is said that in life’s last breathless moments one’s past passes before the mind like some vast roll unfurled.

  It happened that way to Imogene.

  As she waited fatalistically for the ship to strike and break apart, for those sturdy wooden timbers to shatter and the dark wild seas to break over them and drag them down, down into the wet depths, Imogene looked with steady eyes out through the sheets of wind-driven rain and saw St. Agnes Isle once again as it had been for her on that last day there....

  She saw again the copper-haired lover who had seduced her on the night-glamoured beach below Star Castle on nearby St. Mary’s Isle. Her first lover, Stephen Linnington, a man she had thought so true.... She felt again the wild wet surf pour like white lace around her naked thighs and froth like
bridal lace around her shining naked breasts. All that she had felt that night, when in her heart she had pledged her troth to him, washed over her again and she was dizzy with remembering, shaken with the wonder of that first awakening.

  It was Stephen who had known her first, loved her first. Indeed, it was Stephen who had been making love to her on the hot beach at St. Agnes that day they had stolen away from Ennor Castle where she had been visiting her best friend, Bess Duveen, and sailed to St. Agnes... that terrible day when Giles Avery had followed them to bring to Imogene her guardian’s decision that she was to wed not Stephen but Giles. And come upon them suddenly, stiffening in shock as he saw them lying naked together, bodies entwined upon the sand.

  It was a remarkable betrothal announcement delivered as it was as maddened Giles drew his sword and plunged over Imogene’s prone body in a mad attempt to run Stephen through. Instead Giles had tripped and found himself impaled on Stephen’s hastily drawn blade.

  They had tried to save his life, to bring him aid—but Giles had died there on St. Agnes. Stephen and Imogene had looked at each other with a wild surmise. They had both known even then that if they claimed Giles’s death was an accident, they would not be believed. They would not be believed, in Imogene’s view, because her wild nature had prejudiced the gossips against her. But Stephen had known something else, something he had not told Imogene—he had not dared let his own wild past catch up with him.

  So he had fled, and left his love on the Scillies.

  Imogene had been so sure he would come back, she had meant to wait for him. Forever if need be. But Giles Avery’s family were certain Imogene had contrived in Giles’s murder. And her guardian had realized her danger and packed her off to Amsterdam.

  She had not seen the Scillies again. In Amsterdam she had met the Dutchman and made a disastrous marriage from which she had been rescued, by van Ryker.