Beside him, stiffly erect, walked Carolina. No, she told herself bitterly, it was Christabel who walked beside the lean buccaneer captain—Carolina had been lost somewhere, perhaps never to be found.
It was early but already the quay was alive with traders. Indeed the quay was busier at this time of day, before the burning sun made walking on the hot sand and pitiless white coral rock almost unbearable.
Unwavering, Kells walked her through the crowd, nodding occasionally to those he knew. Curious stares followed them everywhere. Sometimes scarred men sporting cutlasses sidled closer to get a better look at the disheveled beauty in scarlet strolling beside her buccaneer.
Twice Carolina would have turned back, but the pressure of his left arm that held her right arm pinioned to his side carried her irresistibly forward.
“You are holding me too tight, Kells—you are hurting me,” she said under her breath.
“Then cease to struggle,” he muttered and immediately nodded to a passing trader from Holland. “Smile!” he said beneath his breath.
Dead center of the quay there was a little knot of men, and in that group Carolina could see O’Rourke. The sun was shining on his coppery hair and he looked very dissolute in the penetrating rays of sunlight that dazzled the eyes and glittered upon the blue-green waters of the bay.
“You are not—you are not going to speak to him?” she gasped.
“I am,” he told her grimly. “It seems he has made your acquaintance. You should not ignore a friend!”
She ignored that taunt and, color high, twirled her parasol arrogantly as he dragged her along. She could hardly keep up with his long booted stride.
They came to a halt directly before O’Rourke, from whom the others seemed to fall away as if they expected cutlasses to be drawn.
“Shawn,” drawled Kells. “A good morning to you.”
“A good morning to you,” said O’Rourke warily. He had been sitting on a keg but now he came to his feet.
“I believe you’ve met O’Rourke here, Christabel.”
“Yes,” Carolina admitted in a stifled voice. “We have met.”
“Mistress Christabel.” O’Rourke swept her a low bow. There was a tinge of regret in the green gaze that passed over her as he rose from that bow.
“Mistress Christabel is about to take a sea voyage with me,” Kells told O’Rourke.
“Is she indeed?” murmured O’Rourke. He was regarding Kells from narrowed green eyes. “I thought it was Havana she wished to visit,” he added with a trace of humor.
“Mistress Christabel has changed her mind,” Kells told him. “She no longer yearns for Havana. She wishes to accompany me wherever I go. Is that not true, Christabel?”
Carolina yearned to kick him. But his grip on her arm was crushingly tight—tight enough that he could swoop her up in a moment and carry her away with her feet dangling. She preferred to avoid the ultimate humiliation of such a moment, which she could all too easily bring on herself. “Yes,” she agreed in a choked voice. “It is true.”
O’Rourke studied her silently. He would never understand women.
“We will bid you good morning, Shawn.” Kells swung Carolina around and walked her away to O’Rourke’s growled, “Bid ye good morning.”
But Kells was not done with her yet. To a pile of dress lengths of shimmering silk he led her—silk that had come from the Philippines on Spanish galleons, been transported overland across Mexico, loaded again onto other galleons and snatched from them at gunpoint by buccaneers roving the Florida straits. Silk from the Orient that now lay ready for bartering on the quay of Tortuga.
Carolina thought he wanted her to select a length of silk—as further proof to the quayside crowd that he owned her. But he had something worse in mind than that. Beside the pile of silks lay another pile—of women’s clothing, garnered from captured ships carrying buttons and buckles and leather flasks and kegs of gunpowder to Spain’s colonies in the New World. And atop that pile of women’s clothing lay several chemises, sheer and black, meant for some Spanish beauty in Lima or Cartagena.
To her dismay, he stopped beside the chemises and held up one to the light, studying its flimsiness. “Oh, no,” she whispered, as very deliberately, he turned her about and measured its width against her shoulders.
“It seems about the right size,” he told her in a cheerful carrying voice. And then he bought it, counting out the coins with deliberate slowness while Carolina looked down, sure that her face must be as scarlet as her gown.
“Stuff it in your pocket,” she whispered, certain that everyone was looking at them and chuckling inwardly. “Or here—let me tuck it into the pannier of my gown.”
“No need,” he said carelessly. “’Tis a light burden. And now I think we have done with shopping for the day.”
Firmly he took her arm again and marched her away, with Hawks trailing along behind, still marveling at his folly. Kells’s step was jaunty as he led his Silver Wench back through the town—she on one arm, the lacy black chemise billowing sheer over his other arm.
He could not more firmly have declared her his woman had he shouted it from the housetops.
Carolina, dragged along beside him, told herself she hated him.
“Are you done with me?” she panted, when at last they reached the house.
“Yes.” He gave her a bleak look. “I have done with you for the time being.” And he strode away from her to hurl himself upon his bed and sleep the clock around.
She did not see him at supper, and although she started awake nervously at every sound, he did not visit her bed that night.
She awoke from an uneasy sleep to find him fully dressed and standing with his back to her, staring out the window at a green chameleon with a pink throat that peered back at him timidly over the giant blossoms of a red bougainvillea.
“Why are you here?” she cried, aware that it must be morning and that Katje had not chosen to wake her up. “Am I to have no privacy?” Her voice was laced with resentment for she had returned from her humiliating walk along the quay yesterday to discover that someone —undoubtedly on captain’s orders—had removed the bolt from inside her door.
He turned toward her then. She saw that he was clean shaven and that his hair was carefully combed. His white shirt was spotless—for all that it was tucked into a wide leather belt that sported a cutlass.
“I behaved very badly yesterday,” he said tersely. “You have every right to scorn me.”
“I am surprised that you would have second thoughts,” she said on a bitter note. “First you took me when I had had too much to drink. Then—”
He gave her a tormented look. “There was no such taking,” he interrupted. “I never touched you—not then. It was Katje who put you to bed.”
“But then why lead me to believe—?”
“That I took you then?” He sighed. “There was something in your manner that goaded me. Faith, you drive a man to excesses! You were so ready to believe the worst of me that I let you think what you wished. Had I known where your belief would lead you, I would have disillusioned you then and there as to my character, which had been rather good up to then, where you were concerned.”
“But all that has changed now,” she pointed out spitefully.
“Yes.” He looked weary. “All that has changed. When you began conniving with O’Rourke and Skull, you drove me too far and I determined that since you had given me the name, I would have the game as well. It does little good to say that I am sorry.”
“No good at all,” she scoffed.
“I feared you would think so.”
“Well, what else could I think?” she burst out. “You keep me here, locked up—oh, I realize that I am allowed to stroll about the town under guard, but what kind of a life is that?”
“A safe one where Tortuga is concerned,” he said bleakly.
“It is one I do not choose!” She tossed her head. “And now I suppose you will double my guard?”
He ga
ve her a lingering look. Her lower lip was thrust out, her hair was an unruly mass of silver-gold that tumbled down over her bare white shoulders, her gray eyes snapped rebelliously. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. He averted his eyes.
“No,” he said. “I will not double your guard.”
“Indeed?” Hope sprang into her voice for she had escaped Hawks once, and she could do so again!
“There will be no need to double your guard,” he told her tersely. “For you will no longer leave this house except in my company.” He gave her a twisted smile. “I have already killed too many men in your behalf, Christabel. Would you have me decimate the entire male population of the island?”
She ignored his levity. “You mean Hawks will not—”
“You are too much for Hawks. You might get him killed. In future you will remain at home unless I accompany you.”
He was walking toward the door as he said it, and her fury caught him midway.
“Oh, damn you, damn you!” She choked. “You would keep me here for your pleasure!” She reached down to snatch up a shoe from beside the bed and fling it at him.
The shoe bounced harmlessly off his broad shoulder. He did not seem to feel it. He was not looking at her but at some distant vista, endless and empty.
“You have no need to damn me,” he muttered as he strode toward the door. “I was already damned before you met me. But as for your virtue, Mistress Christabel”—he turned and gave her a straight look— “henceforth it will not be assailed by me.” Bitterness tinged his attractive voice. “I prefer willing women.” Her other shoe hit the door as he left.
Chapter 35
That exchange marked a change in Carolina’s relationship with the lean buccaneer. True to his word, he came not to her room by night. She slept alone, tossing and turning, hating herself for missing him, mourning her lost virtue, yearning for Lord Thomas and a relationship that she could understand—not the sword-edge relationship she shared with the strange complex man whose captive she was.
Kells was very busy these days, outfitting the Sea Wolf to prowl the sea lanes again and harry Spanish shipping. The refitting of the Valeroso was now completed and she had been renamed the Sea Shark, but now it was the Sea Wolf's turn. The lean gray ship was being careened down by Cutlass Point and Kells went there every day, supervising the removal of the barnacles and the calking and greasing of the hull, for a sleek hull made for speed—and speed was his ally.
But behind the whitewashed walls of his lair on Tortuga, the “Irish” buccaneer underwent a sea change —he became for the space of a few hours an English gentleman again. And when the sun went down on his red tile roof, when the green shutters were changed by the last rays of the western sun into a greenish gold that darkened, just as the waxy leaves of the nearby lemon trees darkened into the deep silver green of the tropical night, the world that lay behind the elaborate wrought iron entrance to his courtyard was an English world, moving to the dignified pace he had known as a youth in Essex.
“A buccaneer with a butler!” Carolina had scoffed, for Katje had announced one day with blushing cheeks that she intended to marry Lars sometime next month and Kells had pressed one of the buccaneers from Essex into taking charge of the house.
Kells smiled at her. “After the rattle of cutlasses, I find it relaxes me. Will you not take a seat at my table and dine with me?”
They were, as usual with them now, facing each other in the “English” dining room.
Kells had changed to the sober gray broadcloth which he had been wearing when she first met him, and it was Rye Evistock, gentleman of Essex, who pulled out her chair with courtly grace and smiled at her across his table as the food was brought.
They had struck up a truce, these two. He came home to her now with news of the Colonies, news of England, gathered from the sea captains who prowled the quay. And she, bored with her inactivity—and having read half a dozen times The Nunnery of Coquettes and Harriot, or the Innocent Adulteress and all the other novels Kells occasionally thought to bring her from the quay—tossed her books aside and took to supervising Cook, who, after a first skirmish, now accepted her domination with tranquillity and served up dishes that would tempt even a Williamsburg palate.
“This duck is very good,” Kells remarked, savoring it.
“We prepare it so on the Eastern Shore,” she told him absently.
“You live well on the Eastern Shore,” he smiled.
“Yes,” she agreed, but there was a tinge of sadness in her voice. For it was a shore she would never see again, she felt. She had always been an embarrassment there, although she had not understood why. The girl with the wrong father. . . .
One night she told Kells about it, and found him a surprisingly good listener. “Any man should be proud to claim you as a daughter,” he told her with more vehemence than he cared to show.
“Not any man.” Her voice caught. “Fielding Lightfoot did not feel so. You see, I was to him a reminder of his shame.”
He studied her with heartfelt sympathy. This was the scar he had guessed at, the one that had marred her childhood. His heart went out to her—and it grieved him that his was not the heart she wanted.
“It is as well that I have lost myself somewhere far from Virginia,” she told him frankly. “Best all around.”
How many times he had thought the same thing— about himself! He lifted his glass to her and their eyes met above the ruby liquid flashing in the goblets. Hers were damp with unshed tears. He wanted to embrace her, to comfort her, to tell her that nothing that had happened to her before mattered now or would ever matter.
He did not.
“I drink to your eyebrows, Mistress Christabel,” was all he said, and they drifted back into the gossip he had heard along the quay that day.
These were the good times, the close times, the times when they shared a common bond and felt they shared a common fate, the times that brought them close, that might even one day make them lovers again.
But there were other times as well—times when they clashed.
“I suppose that now that you have worked your will on me, you imagine that I will still keep your true identity a secret?” She shot the words at him one day when she had been brooding long over Lord Thomas and what might have happened to him.
“No,” he said quietly, studying her across the long board of the dining room. “I do not suppose it.”
She laughed. She wanted to strike at him. “You are right not to suppose it! Unless—Kells, you owe it to me to let me go!” she burst out. “If you let me go, if you will send me to England, I promise that I will never reveal to anyone who you are.”
Did she notice a sudden ripple in those broad shoulders beneath the gray broadcloth? His voice, when he spoke, sounded strained.
“I cannot do that, Christabel.” It jarred her now that he called her by that name, for it somehow kept up this farce of a buccaneer and his wench when they were really something quite different. “I cannot let you leave.”
“Why not,” she cried, “if you have my word?”
“For myself I could trust your word,” he said wearily, running his long fingers through his dark hair. “But there are others here who came to this calling at my behest. Like me, they sail these seas incognito. If my identity is discovered, Essex might be looked at more closely, and they could be found out too—traced through my friendship with them. And then they could never return home.”
Those other men who had trusted him, given him their loyalty—some of them, like Hawks, from his father’s estate in Essex, others from neighboring estates—these were the English contingent, and sometimes one or the other of them joined them at table. These were men going about under false names just as their ships flew false colors, pretending to be Irish when they were indeed English—as English as Rye himself.
This was the stumbling block, these men with ties back in England, men to whom he owed an allegiance that far preceded her entry upon the scene.
> Her voice sounded dull to her own ears, deadened, hopeless. “So you will not let me go?”
“No.” There was a ruthless certainty in the way he said it. “I will not let you go.”
“Then I am to be forever confined, a prisoner?” she burst out despairingly. “Shut up as if I had committed some great crime? You are the buccaneer but I am to suffer the punishment? Faith, that's justice!”
“They hang buccaneers,” he told her in a noncommittal tone. “There’s a difference between your rather luxurious confinement and a damp jail cell with rats gnawing at the toes of your boots!”
“I wish they would hang you,” she mumbled, and for a single wild moment of frustration she almost meant it. Her voice when she spoke again was colored by grief. “Then I am not to be allowed out? Ever?”
His face showed the strain of the warring forces within him. Almost he relented. Almost. . . . Then his jaw hardened. There were others besides himself to think of, and Carolina had proved herself to be rash.
“I will take you walking tomorrow,” he promised shortly. “You may wish to buy some things along the quay.”
“You will flaunt me as your doxy!” she cried, rising from her chair.
“That too,” he said with a sigh.
“You are a devil!” she cried, and ran from the room sobbing.
It was one of their worse nights, he told himself gloomily after she had gone, and he fixed his mind on going to sea again. Perhaps he would get himself killed and solve all this—for he had instructed Hawks and the others of the English contingent that should anything happen to him, Mistress Christabel was to be sent to London with a letter to his London agent, who would provide for her handsomely. Now, left alone in that room that reminded him so bitterly of home and all that he would never know again, he pondered his fate. Better far to get killed, better to be out of it than to have his lacerated feelings rubbed raw every day by a woman who held his heart in keeping, but who would never love him.
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