Lovesong

by Valerie Sherwood

  All the passengers were on deck now, milling about uneasily.

  “What will they do to us, do you think?” the little birdlike woman was whimpering.

  “They should do nothing to us for we’re a peaceable ship disturbing no one.” Carolina heard the birdlike woman’s husband’s staunch reply.

  “But if they’ll do nothing, then why are they chasing us?”

  Why indeed? Each minute brought the leader of the three ships closer to the steady beat of tired but powerful arms upon the oars. Bulky merchantmen like the Fair Alice were easy prey for the warlike galleons with their tall towers and heavy guns.

  “A single broadside would sweep us from the sea,” she heard one of the men mutter. “I’ve put my most valuable papers in my boots. Have you?”

  “Yes, but little good ’twill do us,” came his friend’s laconic rejoinder. “They’ll steal the boots!”

  Carolina shivered. She did not really believe that. The Spanish dons, for all that was said of them, were civilized aristocrats—they would not stoop to pilferage.

  And then, without warning it seemed, a single shot was fired across their bow.

  “They’ll be boarding us now,” came a sigh.

  And then it was happening. Carolina, who had prudently donned her change of underthings and so was wearing a double set, watched the Spaniards come aboard over the captain’s huffy protest that he was a peaceable merchantman and not subject to search on the high seas!

  There was no reply in English to that. The boarding party did not speak English—they were depending on guns, not conciliation.

  Carolina stepped forward. “I speak a little Spanish,” she volunteered. “Perhaps I could translate?”

  Captain Frobisher gave her an amazed look. A strange servant girl indeed who looked like an aristocrat and spoke the language of the enemy!

  Her Spanish was rusty and the officers of the Santiago spoke very fast. Sometimes she had to grope for words but generally she was able to make their meaning clear. The three galleons were part of the treasure flota that came in the spring to collect the gold and silver of Peru and carry it back to Spain. They were warships all, part of a larger group that had been scattered, some time back, in a storm. Their duty was clear: They had found an English ship sailing in their waters and must dispose of it. The captain of the Fair Alice almost had apoplexy when this was translated to him; he growled that these were open seas and the English had as much right to sail them as anyone. Not so, replied the Spanish dons icily. The Pope in Rome himself had divided this entire New World between Spain and Portugal—and no other—and these were therefore Spanish waters. Their plain duty was to sink this English vessel and they would do so forthwith. This brought a wail from the passengers. The Spanish captain held up his hand. Ah, but they were merciful. They would not execute anyone, not even the captain of the Fair Alice. The crew would be impressed into service aboard their three ships for they had lost men during the storm. The strongest of the passengers would be required to replace the Spaniards’ galley slaves who had been lost when their oars snapped in the high seas. And the ladies—well ... he looked perplexed, then his face cleared. The ladies would be placed on board the smaller ship Coraje and dropped off at Havana. Arrangements to dispose of them could be made there.

  Carolina duly translated this message, which was greeted with horror. Their ship sunk? Their goods all perished? And to row in the galleys?

  It had been on the tip of Carolina’s tongue to tell her captors haughtily, “I for one do not choose to go to Havana!” But the words were never uttered. Upon the deck of the Santiago, so close at hand, she now saw, as the wall of Spanish officers parted, something that she had missed before.

  Tied to one of the Santiago’s masts and stripped to the waist was a man who sagged, unconscious, against his bonds. He looked to be English, she thought at first glance, for his hair was sandy and the skin of his back and shoulders was burnt red by the sun. And, she noted in horror, it was striped by the lash as well. Red welts crisscrossed where the whip had drawn blood.

  In the instant that her mind took that in, a sailor dashed a bucket of water over the unconscious man to revive him and reached out and roughly jerked the man’s head up so that he sputtered to groaning life. As his blue eyes snapped open he was looking full at Carolina.

  For the space of a heartbeat her world stood still. It could not be!

  “Thomas!” she screamed.

  And Lord Thomas Angevine, coming to in a world gone mad, where Carolina Lightfoot, dressed as a serving wench, peered at him over the side of this Spanish warship that had sunk the ship that was carrying him to Barbados and taken him prisoner, saw her as in a dream, saw her, indeed, as an angel of deliverance come to effect his rescue. Hardly had her cry rung out than he gathered his voice in a wild appeal.

  “Carolina!” he called hoarsely.

  Transformed by the pitiable sight of him into the very avenging angel Lord Thomas, in a moment of madness, thought her to be, Carolina swung to face the tall dark-garbed Spanish captain.

  “That is Lord Thomas Angevine!” she cried in a voice that rang with accusation. “Dear God, what have you done to him?”

  Taken aback by her fury as much as by her imperious tone, Captain Garcia was hard put not to retreat a step. His thin olive countenance reflected his amazement. He turned in bewilderment to view the source of the wench’s concern—ah, the insolent Englishman in the salmon breeches, of course, who was now desperately bellowing out the name of one of the English Colonies in this New World—God alone in his wisdom knew why, for the Englishman’s ship had been headed for Barbados! But his interpreter, Mistress Christabel Willing, was young and pretty and she deserved an answer.

  “We stopped another English ship on the way,” he explained. “She was sailing our waters so we sank her. This fellow has given us perpetual trouble. He needs to be tamed.”

  Tamed! Carolina’s hands were clenched.

  “You are killing him, you murderer!” she shouted.

  The Spanish captain, used to blood, looked even more amazed. “Before God, señorita, he has had only ten lashes,” he cried. “It was the scorching sun that caused him to faint.”

  The angry eyes that stared up at him flashed silver in that same blinding sunlight. Carolina’s overwhelming indignation at seeing Lord Thomas thus so humbled and abused had made her forget how precarious was her own position here. “You must release him immediately!” she cried, and turning to that struggling figure bound to the Santiago's mast, she called out with determination, “I am coming, Thomas, I will take care of your wounds!” She would have brushed past the dark frowning figure of the Spanish captain, whose officers looked dumbfounded by this turn of events, and leaped over the side onto the Santiago's deck had not Captain Garcia reached out a long black taffeta-clad arm and caught her firmly by her sleeve.

  “I think you would be a disrupting influence on board my vessel, señorita,” he said severely. “But one of my sister ships, the Valeroso"—he nodded at another of the towering galleons—“has on board a lady bound for Cartagena. Doña Hernanda’s maid was unfortunately washed overboard in the storm. She is in need of a maid, and I believe we will press you into service.”

  Carolina gave him a dangerous look and clawed at his coat. “I will not serve as anyone’s maid!” she cried, trying to shake free of his grasp. “You must take me aboard and let me care for Lord Thomas!”

  Captain Garcia shrugged and pushed this violent wench away from him. “I am sorry to lose you as an interpreter, señorita,” he said grimly. “But your presence on my vessel is not desired.” He made a jerking motion of his head and rough hands seized Carolina and dragged her into a waiting longboat. “Take the wench to the Valeroso," he called. “Let Captain Santos deal with her!”

  “Thomas!” she called back futilely as the longboat pulled away from the Fair Alice, taking her to the nearby Valeroso. “Oh, Thomas, they are taking me away but I will be back to free you!” In her exci
tement, the unlikelihood of that event never crossed her mind. She would do it! “Thomas!” she wailed. “Thomas!”

  And Lord Thomas, hearing her, set up such an uproar of anger and self-pity and denouncement of his captors that of the torrent of words he loosed only her name being called out was distinguishable to Carolina. Her nails dug into her hands as she imagined him back there—bare-backed, sunburned, lashed—but still unbowed. He would be struggling valiantly against the cruel ropes that bound him to the Santiago's mast, fighting to free himself. He would be facing down his captors but they would never subdue him, never! Carolina’s beautiful face was pale beneath the sunshine of her hair, her flashing silver eyes gone dark with anguish as his roars drifted to her heartbreakingly across the water. She was bent forward, her face was held in her hands, and she was sobbing when she heard his last desperate cries of “Carolina! Carolina!” suddenly choked off. She turned a face of fear toward the Santiago's massive gilded foretower, seeming to overhang the Fair Alice demonically, like a cliff risen menacingly up from the sea. Choked off by what? Fingers grasping his throat? A hard blow?

  How could she know that Lord Thomas, thwarted, thrashing about in rage, had collapsed in tears of frustration, great gulping sobs that precluded speech?

  “They have killed him!” she cried, and would have tumbled from the longboat had not one of the swarthy sailors quickly reached out a callused hand to stop her.

  “No, no, señorita,” he tried to soothe her. “The Englishman has already had all the lashes intended. Someone will only have dashed a bucket of water into his face to quiet him. Tis nothing to be alarmed about.”

  But the girl in the gray servant’s gown had collapsed into the bottom of the boat in despair and refused to be comforted. Above her the tall towers of the Santiago were replaced by the tall towers of the Valeroso and she might have given a care to her own fate, but she did not—she wept only for Thomas, murmuring his name. And her torment was the worse because her heart had flown to the instant conclusion that Lord Reggie had told Thomas she was in Essex, that Thomas had descended on Essex to find her spirited away to America, that he had taken to the sea to retrieve her—indeed that he had been on his way to Yorktown to find her and bring her back to London as his bride when the golden galleons had intercepted him. It was a natural enough conclusion—though far from the truth—and it increased Carolina’s suffering because she blamed herself for his present predicament. If she had not been such a fool in Essex, none of this would have happened. It was all her fault!

  “Santa Maria!” muttered the sailor who had kept her from leaving the longboat. “It would be worth a few lashes to be loved like that.”

  “Rosita loves you like that,” jeered his companion, whose taste in wenches ran to more buxom females than this one. “And so does Dolores. Think on them— for you’ll have to decide between them one day!”

  His friend gave him an impatient look for not understanding. “I meant a girl like this one,” he muttered. “Made of moonlight.”

  “You’d best leave off your gabbling and get your backs into your rowing,” advised a third companion cynically. He cast a quick uneasy look upward at the sky. “For there’s a storm coming or my name’s not Gomez!”

  His prediction proved to be correct. A wild West Indian hurricane was on its way—and the days that followed were to be the strangest in Carolina’s life.

  THE SPANISH MAIN

  Summer 1688

  * * *

  Chapter 23

  The next few days were a revelation to Carolina— or Christabel as she was now called. Haunted by the hellish vision of Lord Thomas, alone and friendless and bound to the mast, tormented by the memory of his wild agonized cry of “Carolina!” she found herself now confronted by a new specter: In all her life she had never even contemplated the possibility of becoming a lady’s maid.

  Doña Hernanda was not an exacting mistress. She was of middle age and middle height and quite unfashionably plump—for to be fashionable in Spain one must be reed thin and flat-chested, a shape induced by iron stays that flattened the budding breasts of young girls unfortunate enough to be born into aristocratic families. Those who survived viewed their altered figures as proudly as across the world Chinese women viewed their tiny bound feet. But poor Doña Hernanda had always been too healthy a specimen for that. Her mother had died when she was a tot and her father had taken a peasant mistress who—when little Doña Hernanda had wailed at the pain of her iron cage—had surreptitiously removed the iron grating that bound her young body. As a result Doña Hernanda was healthy and strong in her middle age and happier in the New World to which she was returning than in Madrid, where her unwelcome girth was a frequent subject of discussion. She had never quite mastered the floating walk of the thin willowy Spanish Court ladies, but she still had a light step—and, widowed now, a taste for dashing young men.

  She viewed her new lady’s maid with complacency. Such a beauty would be sure to attract all the young officers of the ship and Doña Hernanda could bask in their attention too. And she counted herself fortunate that this captured wench spoke Spanish—imagine being able to find a replacement for poor Maria, washed overboard, here in the middle of the ocean! She was not entirely lucky however for the fact that Carolina was not apt to become proficient in her new duties became immediately apparent.

  On her first evening in the small private cabin that Doña Hernanda’s rank entitled her to aboard the Valeroso, Carolina demonstrated that. Sick at heart over the sight of Lord Thomas being abused and with her mind only half on the task of garbing her new mistress for dinner in the captain’s cabin (she was to learn that Captain Santos was Doña Hernanda’s only surviving son, her elder having been lost in a mine disaster in Peru), she had reached out to steady herself when the ship rolled, her hand had caught in Doña Hernanda’s black lace mantilla just as that lady lurched against the wall, and she had heard the lace rip. A moment later as the ship rolled again, sliding down into the trough of a wave, she felt herself thrown to the side and stepped on the hem of Doña Hernanda’s fine black taffeta overskirt, tearing that.

  Good-natured Doña Hernanda had only sighed and tottered to her bunk, narrowly missing a chair that slid toward her. She told Carolina there was another mantilla in the curved top trunk—no, not that large one, the small leathern one over there. And as Carolina slipped and nearly fell against the trunk, the ship having taken another violent lurch, Doña Hernanda suggested half humorously that she would require the services of a costurera—a sempstress—if the wind and Christabel continued in this vein.

  “Christabel” was too miserable even to reply. She rummaged for the mantilla in silence and gave it to Doña Hernanda.

  “Never mind, niña,” sighed Doña Hernanda. “I can understand how you must feel, to lose your ship and your friends. And besides, the wind is coming up—it makes the vessel sway.”

  Carolina felt comforted somehow when Doña Hernanda called her “child.” Indeed she had felt as helpless as a child when, from the deck of the Valeroso, she had watched the Fair Alice set alight. Once all the goods the Spanish wanted had been removed from her, including some of her sails, the English ship was left to drift like a funeral pyre, burning down to the water line before she sank.

  She was in enemy hands—but Doña Hernanda’s hands did not seem like enemy hands. They were white and rather pudgy and helpless, for she had been cared for from childhood like a China doll and had never even had to comb her own hair.

  “Oh, how could they do it?” moaned Carolina, and Doña Hernanda took that to mean not the punishment meted out to Lord Thomas but the firing of the Fair Alice.

  “The captain of your vessel was breaking the law,” she told Carolina severely. “His Holiness the Pope gave the lands of this New World to Spain—and therefore these are our waters.”

  “Who gave him the right to portion out a continent?” cried Carolina, and Doña Hernanda looked shocked.

  “I had forgot you were a heretic,”
she muttered.

  Carolina was brought up short. To say more might subject her to a trip to Spain to be tried before the Inquisition—and she could end up by being burned at the stake. It angered her that the Fair Alice had been summarily destroyed, and the forcing of her passengers into menial service was surely inexcusable—but she managed to hold her tongue. She was on an enemy vessel running through what Spain had always claimed were Spanish waters, and a slip of the tongue might be her last. But she could not resist one parting shot.

  “I worship God even as you do,” she told Doña Hernanda defiantly.

  The older woman sighed. “We will not continue this conversation, Christabel,” she decided. “Bring me my fan and pour me out a small goblet of that wine. I would fortify myself before essaying dinner with my son. He was always a difficult boy and he becomes no easier—” She gave a small scream as the cabin floor suddenly took on an evil slant and a wooden table and two chairs glided toward her.

  “I do not think you will be dining with your son tonight,” predicted Carolina. “He will be too busy trying to keep his ship afloat!”

  As it turned out, Doña Hernanda did not dine with her son that night or for many nights to come.

  At first there were long slow swells into which the ship seemed to sink, only to rise triumphantly. And then as the wind gathered strength the seas appeared to pile up and pour down upon the vessel. The Valeroso seemed to shudder and fall down into deep troughs between waves, enduring great seas that crashed green across her decks. Trembling violently, the ship would shake off the onslaught of the waves, but each time more weakly.