“You... won’t... have it.” He repeated the words slowly, in wonder. Did this street wench think she owned him? He flung her away from him, so violently that she stumbled and fell to the ground. “Now hear me, Melisande. If you keep on like this. I’ll tell Lomax about it and let him silence you.”
From the ground she stared up at him. “Afraid to do it yourself, Harry?” she mocked. “Afraid you’ll weaken?” She looked beautiful and angry there on the ground with her pink skirts riding up. Harry had seen her fall thus once before, felled by a London whore in a dispute over territory. But Melisande had risen with a long bodkin and driven the bodkin into her tormentor’s throat. Harry had been proud of her.
Now he stared down at this woman who had shared so much with him, who was after all only fighting for her own. And then he took a step forward and bent down and helped her up.
“Melisande,” he said in an altered voice—and for the moment he felt truly penitent. “Ye know where my heart is. With you.”
Melisande was brushing herself off. Her eyes were snapping. “Wherever your heart may be, Harry, I know where you eyes are—on her."
“She may be useful to us, Melisande,” Harry soothed. “She may make us rich.”
Somewhat mollified, Melisande fell into step beside him. “I’m tired of being gentry,” she grumbled. “Taking little mincing sips of wine when I could drink them all under the table! Having to say, ‘La, Mr. Robbins, I don’t play cards!’ when I could win all his money in a trice!”
“We’re playing for bigger stakes, Melisande,” Harry reminded her.
“And having to keep my skirts down prim when I’m dying to toss them over my ears and kick up my heels in a dance with you!”
Harry laughed. The storm was over. Like a lightning bolt, Melisande had washed her skies clean with her sudden rage. Her eyes were deep brown inviting pools as she grinned up at him. “Come on, Harry, let’s have us a swim!”
“We can’t, Melisande,” he demurred. “They’d see us from the castle. And I know you—you’d swim naked!”
“O’ course,” said Melisande sturdily. “Any other way, I’d drown! Well, then.” Her gaze was restless. “Let’s sail over to St. Agnes and drink a few rounds with the lads. Unless,” she rallied him, “you think you’re like to sink this boat like you did the last one?”
Harry frowned. “That was bad luck, Melisande. The wind caught me and the cargo shifted. And we’d best stay away from St. Agnes. Remember, if Lomax and the others get caught, we’ve still time to show the law our heels and get away clean!”
A slight sneer crossed Melisande’s strong features. “Aye, we’ll show them our heels again, Harry,” she said scathingly.
“And what else would you have us do?” he demanded hotly. “Swing from a gibbet with the rest of them?”
Melisande sighed. “No, I guess not, Harry.” She was thinking how Harry had taken to his heels and left her father to battle off the law alone—and her father had died of it. She’d forgiven Harry then because she was deep in love with him, but it would always rankle. Full of excuses Harry had been, but she knew the real reason he’d fled—fear. Harry hadn’t wanted any part of this wrecking operation, but she’d pushed him into it, knowing he could sail a boat. He’d been some help with that, delivering goods to the contacts she’d made in Helston. But she’d doubted his story about losing the boat, guessing that a sail had come too near in the night and Harry had thought it was the law and sunk the boat not to be caught with the cargo. Harry, she told herself contemptuously, was always running. The real leadership was her She’d inherited leadership of the gang of thieves and cutthroats her father had led—but because she was a woman, Harry must front for her. Harry didn’t know it, but it was Melisande who was the true leader of the pack, Melisande to whom the men turned for advice. She was canny and she was bold. And she was experienced, she’d grown up in crime. On the streets at eleven. In Newgate at thirteen. Bought out by her father and a successful whore at fourteen. And at fifteen, still freshlooking and pretty, she had met Harry and fallen in love with him. She was nineteen now, although she looked older. Despite her deceptively vacuous expression, Melisande had a keen and decisive mind. She had known instantly that she wanted Harry—and she was still willing to take him as he was, with all his flaws.
Now her gaze on him softened. Harry, she knew, was irresistible to women. They loved his wildness, his ready laughter, his gambling, his insatiable lovemaking, his mad pursuit of any wench he wanted.
Harry grinned back at her. He felt a kinship with Moll—his Melisande. All his life Harry had taken long chances. It was in his blood, his scholarly father had told him mournfully— the hot blood of those rakish cavaliers that had been introduced into his own bookish strain courtesy of the aristocratic young wife who’d died when Harry was a child. He had complained that Harry never fretted over anything. Harry enjoyed the best of everything—and when it came time for the piper to be paid, Harry took to his heels. His father had viewed Harry’s undoubted popularity with a long face. Did you want to take a long chance, he was wont to say, Harry was your man!
It had puzzled his father, why women had always adored his son. It had never penetrated the old man’s consciousness that Harry, like another great lover, Don Juan, was blindingly sincere. He loved with absolute passion—but only for the moment. Harry had unshakable faith in his own romantic prowess and when he wanted a lady nothing else counted for aught.
It would be the death of him. Everyone had always said so. To none of the gorgeous blondes of whom he had been so wildly enamored had he stuck—only to Melisande, and that was not so much a hot love affair now as a companionable business arrangement.
Perhaps she was the only one who really understood him. She worked through Old Isaac, a goldsmith in London whose real profession was that of master fence. When Isaac had decided to widen his scope to include the southern tip of England—the Scillies, graveyard of a thousand ships—Melisande had seemed the perfect front for his operation: tough, resourceful, a survivor—and she had Harry. Isaac considered Harry too soft but that didn’t matter, for Melisande was there to stiffen his backbone. Melisande was ruthless enough for two. Harry, a gentleman born, was the perfect front for them and Harry had taught Melisande enough that she could pass under casual inspection as a lady of wealth and breeding.
They were a dangerous pair.
Imogene had guessed but half of Harry’s story—that he was a rogue, traveling with his doxy. Had she known he was part of the gang of wreckers, she would have recoiled in disgust.
Harry sensed this—and feared it.
For it was fast coming to him that Imogene was the one woman in all this world whose approval he most desired.
And Moll—or Melisande as he had rechristened her—was threatening that approval.
She threatened him even more that night at supper, for she came down dressed flamboyantly in bright orange and black striped taffeta with enormous black and orange rosettes artfully planted at strategic points to accentuate her sensuous figure. Harry ground his teeth. He had warned Melisande about looking like a flaunting London whore in conservative Ennor Castle. Indeed, before they arrived he had personally stripped—while Melisande heaped him with abuse—rosettes and spangles and dangling ribands and all manner of decorations from her striking wardrobe. Somehow this dress had escaped his notice and now Melisande was swaggering toward him with jet earrings dangling from her ears and a golden lovelock falling down upon her white shoulder and an expression on her hard face that boded no good for anyone.
“Harry.” She minced him a charming curtsy as he growled a greeting. Imogene and Bess had just entered the room. There was nothing for it but to offer Melisande his arm and take her in to dinner.
Conversation languished under Lady Moxley’s frowning surveillance. Ambrose, vexed at Bess’s refusal to get rid of Imogene, had been dining out of late, so the only person at the table of whom Lady Moxley wholeheartedly approved was Mr. Robbins, the bird-wat
cher, who chirped gratefully about auks and puffins and kittiwakes and petrels under her insistent prodding.
Dinner was excellent and Harry said so heartily.
Bess smiled kindly on him. “But now you must sample cook’s crowning achievement—gooseberry cream. For it is made from a recipe that I was told in Barbados came from the old Lord Protector’s wife. And even if she was a hypocrite and wore all the fine laces and brocades her husband banished for the rest of us, I think you’ll find this seasoning of nutmeg and mace and rosewater delicious.”
“What else is in it?” asked Melisande, whose mother had worked briefly as a pastry cook and let her precocious daughter sample everything.
“Oh, cinnamon and eggs, garnished with sugar,” smiled Bess. “I do think you’ll like it. And do try a bit of this cake as well.”
Melisande took a spoon of the gooseberry cream. “Why, ’tis as fine as anything in London!” she declared almost indignantly.
But not so fine as Tortuga, thought Imogene, remembering the gilt icings and crystallized rose decorations and delicious marchpane that Esthonie Touraille had served at her last party. Not to mention the sit-down dinner for fourteen that she had herself given that had featured some thirty-two dishes, including the popular carbonados—meat broiled over hot coals—and complicated compound fricassees made of fritters and tansies and quelque-choses (the tansies themselves were an elaborate dish made of scrambled eggs blended with cream and wheat-blade juice, strawberry and violet leaves, walnut tree buds and spinach, mixed with grated bread, cinnamon and salt and nutmeg, and all of it sprinkled with sugar before serving). “A princely feast,” van Ryker had called it, and Esthonie had been green with envy.
The smile Imogene turned toward Harry was bittersweet, pensive.
He thought her the most enchanting woman he had ever met and ignored the black looks Melisande was giving him.
“Imogene tells me you sing.” Ever the gracious hostess, Bess swept forward after supper when she had brought her guests into the drawing room. It was not necessary for an innkeeper, nor had she invited her paying guests into her drawing room before, always allowing them to return to the “inn wing,” but tonight she was smarting under Lady Moxley’s obvious disapproval and yearned to shock her. “This harpsichord is sadly out of tune, but I’ll try my best to give you an accompaniment.”
Harry opened his mouth—and closed it again.
Melisande tossed her head at Harry and sauntered arrogantly to the instrument. “Do you know this one?” She leaned against the harpsichord:
“Come, all you stout fellows and drink up with me!
For I’ve a fair lassie from over the sea—”
“No, Melisande, no!” Harry was on his feet, his face scarlet, for the next two lines were unprintable.
Imogene had covered her face with her hand to hide her laughter. That was a song she’d heard sung, from her windows, in Tortuga, by passing drunken buccaneers, and it was very explicit indeed. She took her hand from her face. “Try the song you were singing as you passed by today,” she suggested politely.
Melisande gave Harry a withering look. She was in no mood to be stopped. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said. She began to clap her hands and sway and tossed over her shoulder to Bess, “Try to play this one:
“Harry Hogue was a reckless rogue,
Whose plans all went awry!
And Harry, if he don't watch out,
They'll hang poor Harry high!”
“I think I have the lilt of it now,” cried Bess, and began to tinkle the harpsichord keys.
Convulsed, between watching Melisande’s arrogance and Harry’s obvious dismay, Imogene sat through another stanza, beside a gradually stiffening Mr. Robbins.
Melisande, her brown liquid eyes glittering, was beginning again.
“Harry Hogue, that London rogue,
He stole the gentry blind!
But it was Moll, queen of them all,
Who was really Harry's kind!”
Lady Moxley’s eyes bulged. She seemed past speech.
Melisande went recklessly on with a verse on which she’d collaborated with Roge one day when she was mad at handsome Harry. Roge had been in love with her and glad enough to lance at Harry’s pride. She missed Roge, who’d had his throat cut in a brawl over a tavern wrench just before they left London. Now she smiled into Harry’s furious face and sang out:
“Handsome Harry's in command,
His hot gaze seems to tease her!
But she stands in awe of a man with a flaw—
A coward, if you please, sir!”
She was about to go on when Harry leaped to his feet.
“Stop!” he cried in a smothered voice. And as Bess’s fingers faltered to a halt and Melisande gave a contemptuous shrug and let her hands, which she had been waving for emphasis, fall to her striped taffeta hips, he turned to Imogene. “You must understand that those verses are about a highwayman called Jack and a woman called Flo. Melisande has a perverse sense of humor. She has chosen to make mock of me and thereby dragged herself down!”
Melisande sniffed, but Imogene leaned back in amusement. “Why don’t we hear a song from Bess, then? ‘Greensleeves,’ perhaps?”
Melisande sauntered back to flounce into her chair beside Harry. The look they gave each other had daggers in it, but Imogene forgot them both in the lure of the lovely love song, ‘Greensleeves,’ as Bess’s sweet voice rose clear and high to peal into the castle’s old rafters.
“ ’Twas said old King Harry himself wrote that song,” Bess smiled as she finished with a soft chord. “To his love. Nan Bullen.” She sighed. “Wooed like that, no wonder she became Queen Anne Boleyn!”
“And lost her head,” Harry said warningly to nobody in particular, but beside him Melisande took the hint.
She bridled. “Queens ’ave got nothing to do with me,” she declared stridently. “Whether they lost their heads or no!”
All in all, it was a grim evening and it ended with Lady Moxley tottering away to her room, wondering if she could warn Bess’s mother with sufficient force of the bad company her daughter was keeping.
Harry had excused himself early and taken Melisande in an iron grip and escorted her upstairs. Melisande, looking impish and glad to have his full attention at last, had skipped along beside him.
Harry pushed her into the bedroom and closed the door hard behind him. Then sudden fury had washed over him and he dragged her across the room and flung her on the bed, stood there shaking with rage.
“What did ye mean by doing that, Melisande?” he demanded. “They’re onto us now!”
“No, they aren’t,” said Melisande sulkily. “They’re puzzled that such as you took up with the likes of me—that’s all.”
“I’m puzzled about it too,” he grated.
Melisande laughed and arranged herself sinuously on the bed. When Harry stood and watched her with a wooden expression, she gave another laugh. Finally, seeing he was not going to join her on the bed, she gave him a look that scorched, rose and stretched, and moved to the window and began to hum. After a while it was not humming but low-voiced, insolent song—a bitter verse Roge had made up the day Melisande left him for Harry:
“Harry Hogue was a dandy rogue,
Who sets girls’ hearts aflutter,
But Harry’s character was flawed—
He was destined for the gutter!"
“I reached the gutter when I found you!” Harry grated.
“No, you didn’t.” Melisande gave an arrogant twitch of her shoulders. “You were already in the gutter—’twas I got you out of it!”
Harry gave a ragged sigh. “Cut it out, Melisande,” he said roughly. He came up to her and clamped a hand down on her shoulder. “Try to remember that’s all behind us. We’re gentry now.”
She was laughing up at him. “We’ll never be gentry, Harry. No matter how much gold we garner. We’ll always be us, headed for the gallows!” She began to sing again, “Harry Hogue was a dandy
rogue—”
Harry’s teeth were clenched and suddenly his other hand slapped her face hard enough to snap her head back.
Melisande was used to blows. She’d taken many a one from her drunken father—and given some herself to ensure her position as queen of the London streets. She gave Harry a dangerous look from her murky brown eyes but her lips formed a reproachful and seductive pout.
“I want you for me, Harry! I don’t want to share you.”
“Melisande, you don’t understand—”
“Don’t I now, Harry? Don’t I, though?” Her seductive body was pressed against his, her breasts crushing softly against his chest, her hips moving gently against his thighs. “Tell me about it, Harry.”
With a groan, Harry looked down at this iron-willed woman who could turn all to softness at his touch. “You’ll be the death of me, Melisande!”
“And you’ll be the death of me, Harry,” Melisande sighed, knowing she had him now. “But we’ll go out together, you and me!”
Trancelike, moving sinuously as one person, they made it to the bed and fell upon it like two strong young animals. And Harry, to his discredit, closed his eyes and pretended that it was Imogene he held in his arms, golden Imogene who responded to him with such amorous violence.
If Melisande knew this, she gave no sign. She was content to take Harry as he was—and sure she could hold him.
Melisande did not come down to breakfast the next day. Harry came down, announcing that Melisande had twisted her ankle and when Bess offered to call a doctor, he said it was no great matter, a couple of days’ rest in bed would cure it, he’d take her meals up to her.
In the turmoil that surrounded Lady Moxley’s presence, Bess was rather grateful that the servants—who were being ordered about on the run by Lady Moxley’s trumpeting voice—would not be further burdened.
Wild Willful Love Page 38