In the prow of the longboat, Imogene leaned against van Ryker, blissful and content. Harry and the Scillies were already fading from her mind. Van Ryker was working his magic on her once again and she was lost in happy dreams of bright tomorrows.
EPILOGUE
They scrambled down the cliffs, those huers, seeking their quarry. But by the time they reached the place where Harry and Melisande had fallen, the pounding waves had carried the bodies out to sea. It was three days later that they were washed ashore—and by then they were unrecognizable: their faces were smashed—and the woman's hands as well, where they had struck the rocks.
Bess was dragged, trembling, to the beach and asked if this was the buccaneer van Ryker and his woman, who had once been Imogene Wells.
Bess took one look at that streaming golden hair, the rags of a sky blue velvet dress that even after three days in the ocean was unmistakably the one that Imogene had been wearing. No one, not even Bess who had known her, would have dreamed that she was looking, not upon Imogene, but upon Melisande, queen of the London streets. Bess’s tortured gaze flew to the tall man with wet dark hair and a smashed face lying there in clothing she had never seen Harry wear. Dark hair—Stephen had said van Ryker was dark. And tall. This man was tall. And on his hand a ring exactly like the one Imogene had given her to send to van Ryker. Bess never dreamed it was the identical ring that she herself had entrusted to Harry!
“Is it van Ryker? And his woman?” came a harsh voice beside her.
“Yes,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “It is van Ryker—and Imogene.” And when, insistently, they made her look again to make sure, she reeled on her feet and added, “Those are the clothes she was wearing at the trial and that emerald ring on the man’s hand—Imogene told me that van Ryker always wore a ring like that on his little finger. And”—her voice was hoarse—“I know he would have come through hell to rescue her.”
They would have asked her more, but she fainted.
Grim-faced, those men of Cornwall buried the lovers—that pair of opportunists who had sought fortune the wrong way and found death waiting. None save Bess wept for Imogene and her buccaneer, none save Bess mourned them. And there were many scathing remarks passed among the crowd of curious about the graveside that van Ryker’s buccaneers had not come back to save their leader or even to rescue his body. Then the skies opened and the rain poured down.
No honor among thieves, it was agreed damply.
Bess wept. And looking up, blinking into the pouring rain, she thought God wept too. Wept for doomed lovers passing into history.
Bess sailed back to Barbados and in the savage brilliance of the tropical sun beating down, she took a deep breath and looked around her at the blowing palms of her island world And realized with force that, shocking as the though now seemed to her, she was glad that Stephen had not seen Imogene again, that the love so deeply imprinted on his memory had had no chance to flare up from the ashes. Bess flayed herself for thinking that, but the thought was lurking in her mind even as Stephen flung his arms around her when he met her ship in Bridgetown.
Van Ryker had been right—by “dying,” Imogene had given kindly Bess peace of mind.
The coarse gray homespun dress Melisande had worn that last day was found at the spot where Melisande had flung it at Imogene. That was proof, wasn’t it, said the townsfolk. Proof that Imogene Wells had been planning to change into more sober garments and slip out of here to safety—after all she'd done! The poor woman who owned that dress, frightened by all that had happened, must have run away! They asked about, exhibiting the dress, and finally a hard-faced serving wench from Mousehold claimed it. It gave her stature in the taverns to tell how Imogene Wells and her buccaneer lover had caught her out walking on her way to visit her brother and forced her to disrobe. The story was always good for a free tankard of ale.
And it tied the events all up neatly. For she had been at the trial and could describe Imogene very well.
No one doubted her. No one at all.
Some few, talking it over in taverns and alehouses, voiced their puzzlement that the men of the Sea Rover had not stormed ashore at Penzance, plundering and killing as they went, to avenge the death of their captain and his bride. Strangely enough, they had not done that. Instead they had poured ashore on St. Agnes Isle and killed every man on the island. Some religious sect—nobody local knew anything about them, but it was strange the buccaneers had chosen St. Agnes for their vengeance. Even poor Clara who had lived there so long, the only resident until that religious group came, had been found in a half-concealed shallow grave. When someone pointed out that the body they exhumed there had been dead some days, only shrugs greeted the pronouncement. Those pious recluses who had moved onto the island wouldn't have done that, would they? So it must have been the buccaneers! And when someone, prying Clara’s still-clenched fingers apart, found a link of what must once have been a diamond and topaz necklace, they shook their heads learnedly and agreed that proved it was the buccaneers who had done her in.
But the huers and the townsfolk had not searched well enough. They had searched the sea—but not the shore.
They had not noticed the tiny cleft between the rocks where Imogene and van Ryker had crouched and waited. They had completely overlooked the tall man with the saturnine face and the very serviceable-looking sword and brace of pistols, and the woman with him who wore a plain homespun kirtle. She had kept her head bent in its flowing gray silk scarf and her eyes modestly downcast. And though some had noticed her pretty face, none had more than a passing glimpse of it as the pair hurried through the onlookers. Nor did anyone, among all these people milling about, wonder where this pair of strangers went, as they disappeared over a grassy rise, heading down the coast. None ever guessed that the pair they had glimpsed was van Ryker and his woman, strolling away to rendezvous with a waiting longboat.
They did not see a great golden-hulled ship, anchored far offshore, sail away into oblivion.
The Sea Rover was said to have perished in a great storm that swept the North Atlantic that year, for she never made port in Tortuga again. And in Cayona the buccaneers mourned van Ryker in their fashion—by telling of his exploits and downing great amounts of rum to his memory. And Esthonie Touraille sighed irritably over lmogene’s passing—if she was going to die in Cornwall anyway, why must her trunks have gone down with the Sea Rover? Why couldn’t she have left some of those gowns and jewels in the house on Tortuga where they could be made good use of by herself and Georgette?
Esthonie glared at the plain lantern clock that graced the spot where the handsome marquetry long-case clock should have stood—and sighed that it had gone down with the Sea Rover as well, traded for a lot of Canary wine that had since disappeared. The governor insisted obdurately that it had been stolen, but Esthonie had reason to doubt it. She railed at her plump husband, the governor, about the wine, about the climate, about his personal habits. Why had he been such a fool as to pay cash for this great barn of a house when, if he had but bought it on credit, there’d now be nothing to pay, since van Ryker was dead?
The governor met all these verbal onslaughts equably—as he had over the years. He was far more worried over the pearl necklace his daughter Georgette had inexplicably “found” than over the rantings of his wife. Esthonie would soon realize that she had the best house in Tortuga and that, now that van Ryker was dead, the Spanish were unlikely to deign to send a fleet to destroy it. Esthonie would come round—she always had. But Georgette! He was not fool enough to believe the girl’s story of “finding” the necklace even if Esthonie chose to swallow it. He put her in Virginie’s old room and told himself he must get her married before she became a trollop!
And none on Tortuga guessed—for if Arne knew, he did not tell it—that a battered ship with a golden hull and the name Victorious painted across that hull, had limped out of the great Atlantic storm that was said to have claimed the Sea Rover, into the mouth of the Cooper River in Carolina, and that
buccaneers turned pioneers were even now carving out an empire whose capital would one day be called Charles Towne and later Charleston.
They never guessed—in either Cayona or Carolina—that the tall Englishman, Branch Ryder, and his lustrous lady, who came down to Port Royal from their plantation called Gale Force upriver toward Spanish Town and dined with the governor—Branch Ryder with a huge sandy periwig and his blue-eyed lady with a wig black as ebony and almost as large—were the fabled van Ryker and his golden Imogene.
The governor of Jamaica knew. He chuckled as he lounged back and clinked glasses companionably with them as they toasted other days and other places. For the governor of Jamaica was a London rake reformed by love of this same lustrous lady who lounged beside her ex-buccaneer and whose delft blue gaze challenged him above her silver goblet of port. The governor of Jamaica thought it all a great joke—but he would never tell.
“You should marry,” Imogene told him bluntly, smiling beneath his glowing gaze. “And stop ogling married women!"
“I would marry,” agreed the governor idly, “if I could find a woman like you. Why do you not send this great fellow out to sea again so that he may chance upon some mishap? Then I will pay you court!”
The “great fellow” shrugged. “I am afraid to let my golden lady out of my sight,” he admitted with a grin. “For she has a knack of getting into trouble and must needs be saved from it.”
“True,” sighed the governor, his wistful gaze playing over Imogene. “But then, she’s so very worth saving....”
Van Ryker lifted his glass in silent acknowledgment of the truth of that remark. He thought so too.
Word spread across the western world that the tall buccaneer was dead. And women sighed who remembered him. And men who had envied him his seizure of the Spanish plate fleet grew thoughtful as they drank their wine, for he had lived so short a time after winning it—and lost it all for a woman.
But those who remembered golden-haired Imogene could understand that he would throw away his fortune for her, and his life as well. For not a man on whom those delft blue eyes had rested but had kindled to them, and those who had come close had drowned in them.
As the years went by a mighty legend grew up around van Ryker and his woman. They became a part of Western culture—like fabled Henry Morgan who had sacked Panama and lived to be knighted and made a lieutenant governor of Jamaica. Only, van Ryker’s story was more romantic, for he had been cut down at the height of his prowess and almost at the moment of his triumph. They are more glamorous who do not live to be old.
And if there were those who whispered in Tortuga that the Sea Rover still sailed the seas, if there were those in Port Royal and Spanish Town who claimed to have seen the fabled lovers, who claimed they anchored sometimes on a river in Carolina and sometimes in some unnamed Jamaica bay, they were not believed, for from that cliff in Cornwall Imogene and van Ryker had vanished into legend.
And so the story of this pair of lovers—changed and altered with each retelling—passed into legend and became part of the lore of the Western world. And on soft summer nights in the Scillies, with voices muted against the endless unchanging murmur of the sea, you may hear them tell again the story of van Ryker and his gold—and his woman.
Especially the woman.
The stories that men told of her
Were very seldom true
For all they really know of her
Was that her eyes were blue....
Wild Willful Love Page 43