But her impetuous dinner invitation was forgotten when the same serving girl - a child of the London docks, her face scarred by her misadventures, a girl whom Carolina had rescued and who adored her beyond measure - handed her a letter and said solemnly, "Twas delivered by Captain Trollope of the Hopemont, mistress, who said he had it by Captain Carleton of the Bombay, who told him he could not recall who it was gave it to him.’
‘Never mind, Betts,’ Carolina said drily, snatching up the letter. ‘I can guess who it was gave it to him!’
For her sister Virginia always clung to the forlorn hope that even though the authorities had come and searched Rye’s father’s house, that the present whereabouts of the notorious Captain Kells had escaped them.
Carolina sighed - how like Virgie to believe that!
But the letter was to her a breath of home. She paused only to give Betts, who was frowning a little as she stared down at Gilly, instructions to remove Gilly’s petticoat and chemise and turn them over to Hawks, who would dispose of them.
Betts looked amazed at such orders from her mistress.
‘If I give her underclothes to Hawks, what’s the girl to wear?’ she blurted. ‘Just her dress against her skin?’
‘Just see that she has a bath,’ said Carolina, who was impatient to read her letter. ‘And a dressing gown. I’ll find her some proper attire as soon as I’ve read this.’ She waved the letter. ‘Gilly, go with Betts. She’ll take care of you.’
Gilly fixed Betts with a belligerent eye. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced sullenly.
‘Of course you are,’ said Carolina. ‘Betts will get you something to eat. Go along with you now.’
Gilly flounced away arrogantly after a doubtful Betts, and Carolina went into the cool, airy high-ceilinged living room to read her precious letter.
And that letter, which had reached her so circuitously, took her mind from everything else.
It was indeed from her sister Virginia, written from Essex - and since Virginia, worried that the authorities would trace her letters to Carolina, wrote so seldom, its arrival was an event.
‘I should have penned this letter sooner,’ Virginia began apologetically, ‘but I am kept busy with Andrew’s literary projects - he has just begun a new translation of Virgil!'
Studious, bookish Andrew! Carolina’s face broke into a smile. He and Virginia were so well suited.
But the next lines made her catch her breath.
‘I am afraid I have sad news for Rye,' wrote Virginia.
‘His older brother Giles died last week. He drank himself to death at last - just as we had predicted. And the end was terrible - he screamed and saw demons and clawed at the sheets. I could not face it. I ran away although I know I should have nursed him, but Andrew said I was right for I must keep a happy face for my little one. And we may have another death soon, for although Rye’s father is still alive, he gasps for every breath - indeed I do not see how he holds on at all.’
Carolina expelled a deep breath. For a moment the hand holding the letter dropped to her lap and she looked out through the window at the brilliant blue sky over Jamaica.
Kells’s brother Giles was dead. And his father soon would be.
They had discussed what was happening far away in Essex, Kells and she - and Carolina had not been happy with his conclusions.
Rye Evistock was elderly Lord Gayle’s third son. But his wastrel eldest brother Darvent was dead, shot last year in a brawl over a wager in a Colchester tavern. They had been aware that Rye’s brother Giles, next in line for the title, was slowly drinking himself to death and might well precede his father to the grave.
And in that event, when old Lord Gayle died, Rye Evistock, who was next in line - not Andrew, the youngest son, but Rye, whom the world knew as Captain Kells - would inherit the title and the family estate in Essex.
He would become a viscount, he would be Lord Gayle - not just plain Rye Evistock. And once he became Lord Gayle, would that not help him win his pardon from the King? Carolina had asked anxiously.
The man who called himself Kells had given her a wistful look and rumpled her fair hair with tender fingers.
‘You must not look forward to that, Carolina,’ he had sighed. ‘For in the event that I were to inherit the lands and the title, as matters stand now everything would most likely be seized by the Crown. Indeed I’ve been toying with the idea of renouncing all claim and letting the title and the estate pass on to Andrew.’
Virginia’s husband! Her brother-in-law would wear Rye’s rightful title - her sister would become Lady Gayle instead of her!
And now this letter, telling her that Giles had drunk his life away . . .
And now Rye would renounce all claim and they would sink a little farther into their island prison.
Carolina clenched the letter with a grip that crumpled the paper. She would not tell him yet! He had borne his two older brothers a measure of ill will, believing that between them they had wasted the family holdings and broken his father’s heart - still it would grieve him to learn of Giles’s death and his face would grow grim, his jaw stonier as he resolved to give up his heritage.
She smoothed out the parchment and began reading again. She read and reread it, devouring every word. Dear Virgie, happily married at last to Rye’s brother Andrew and living in his father’s house in Essex - it had been over a year since Carolina had heard from her.
‘I am expecting my second child in late summer,’ Virginia’s letter confided. ‘Andrew is hoping it will be a girl since we already have a fine boy. But I will be pleased enough if - whatever the baby turns out to be - it is as robust as little Andrew, who is playing at my feet and tugging at my skirts as I write this. We are all well here in Essex and Andrew plans to take me down to London if there is a Frost Fair. We will have our names printed on a card on a printing press set right on to the ice of the frozen Thames!'
Carolina frowned as the letter dipped into other problems, back home in the Tidewater: ‘I have been home to the Tidewater only once since you left. Things are very bad there - financially, I mean. Tobacco prices are low, no one has any money - and I really think that this time Father will lose Level Green. Oh, he should not have built that huge house, he must have known he could never pay for it! Mother and he continue extravagantly, however. Their horses and carriages are the finest, Mother met me wearing an exact replica of a Paris fashion doll she had received but recently, and Father was just as splendid in a new rose satin suit trimmed in gold braid and a great new periwig that cost a fortune - he hasn’t paid for either of them yet, I'll warrant! But they are getting along better now in other ways. They didn’t have a single spat all the time I was there - which must be something of a record for them, they’ve always quarrelled so much!' (Here Carolina smiled, for the pitched battles between Letitia and Fielding Lightfoot had caused local wags to nickname their first home Bedlam’. Their quarrels were legendary, the subject of constant gossip in Williamsburg and Yorktown. Her expression tightened again as Virgie’s flowing scrawl mentioned their older sister Pennsylvania:
‘No one has heard from Penny - not a word since Emmett came back from Philadelphia. No one at home speaks of her now. Everyone is sure she must be dead - after all, it has been seven years since she ran away with Emmett to the Marriage Trees! And if Emmett knew where she was and was just too stubborn to tell, we will never find out from him because he drowned last summer while fishing. He was wearing big boots at the time, and before he could get them off they filled with water and he was dragged under. By the time anyone could get to him he was dead. It made me shiver, remembering what a dolt we all thought him and not nearly good enough for Penny, and now - if she is still alive - she is a widow and doesn’t even know it. Even Della and Flo have stopped romanticizing about Penny and imagining her running away somewhere to become an actress. They are quite grown up now - it made me feel old to see our little sisters beginning to talk about boys and betrothals. Some of their older friends are already
spoken for, can you believe that?'
There was more, for it was a long rambling letter - the kind Virginia usually wrote, on those rare occasions when she wrote at all - but these were the parts Carolina read over and over. Virginia’s words brought back to her pictures of their older sister, tall statuesque Penny with her vivid red hair and her impatience and her swift, wicked smile and husky voice and ready laughter. Penny had been Fielding’s favourite, Carolina remembered wistfully. Indeed, Penny had been everyone’s favourite, including hers! They were right to miss her at Level Green. For the thousandth time she tried to imagine what had happened to Penny and could envision nothing good.
But that other reference, the one about losing Level Green, worried her, and she tossed aside the letter and began to walk restlessly about. Fielding had certainly not needed the largest house in Virginia - but he had built it anyway! He had squandered his inheritance, which could have kept him forever, on that one big wonderful impossible project - and her mother had been so proud of it! Ruefully she remembered how Letitia and Fielding had quarrelled over where the furniture was to go when they had first moved in - and then had run up flocks of new bills trying to fill the multitude of rooms. It would break her mother’s heart to lose the house - and it would kill Fielding, too. And even though Fielding was not her real father - although he had tacitly claimed Carolina as his all these years - even though he had never loved her, she still felt a kind of responsibility to him, for after all, he had not cast her out, not even when her impending marriage to a buccaneer had made her a scandal in the Tidewater.
She was aroused from her perusal of the letter by sounds of warfare coming from the kitchen. Carolina dropped the letter and ran towards the noise, which culminated in a loud howl as she reached the kitchen door.
The sight which greeted her gaze was a comic one. In the low-ceilinged kitchen, Cook stood before the hearth glaring, with arms akimbo. In the centre of the floor Betts was trying to push Gilly’s thin body down into a metal tub. Gilly’s ginger hair fairly stood on end; she was spitting like a cat and she screamed her defiance. As Carolina reached the door, Gilly slammed her big wet sponge into Betts’s face, sending the taller girl back against the sturdy wooden table on which reposed a couple of lobsters and a large earthenware bowl of beaten biscuit dough.
‘What on earth is the matter?’ demanded Carolina.
‘This water’s too cold,’ wailed Gilly. ‘It shocks my tender skin, it does!’
Carolina would have replied tartly that they all bathed in the tepid water, for constant heating of large amounts of water for baths made the house unbearably hot and damp - but just at that moment she caught sight of a huge bruise on Gilly’s wet, bare shoulder.
‘How did you get that, Gilly?’ she asked gently.
‘Get what?’ Gilly looked alarmed.
‘That bruise on your shoulder.’
‘Oh, that?' Gilly was about to shrug, but she saw the concern in Carolina’s face and decided to make the most of it. ‘They was beating me just before I run away,’ she declared dramatically. ‘Those women who were chasing me when you saved me.’
Cook sniffed and Betts, who was trying to wash the soap from her eyes in a basin, muttered something that sounded like ‘Ha!’
Carolina gave them both a reproving look. ‘Well, I’m glad I found you in time, Gilly, but we all use lukewarm water here. I’m sure you’ll get used to it.’
Gilly looked glum. In point of fact, the bruise had come from a rough cuff from her current lover and had been delivered when he had found Gilly picking his pockets. She decided she had not made her point well enough. ‘They treated me powerful mean,’ she added.
‘Yes, well, no one will beat you here, Gilly. When you’ve finished bathing, wrap yourself in a towel and come up to my room. I’ll see what I can find for you to wear.’ She turned to Betts. ‘Did Hawks take the petticoat and chemise back?’
Betts, who was just drying her wet face, nodded. ‘He left a little while ago.’ She forbore saying that the petticoat had almost had to be dragged off Gilly, who insisted she ‘fancied’ it. ‘He said he wouldn’t be back for a while,’ she added.
Carolina recalled that Hawks had a predilection for brothels. She expected him to be gone half the night. She didn’t say so. Instead she turned to Cook.
‘I’ve invited a guest for dinner,’ she said. ‘Lobster will be fine, and green turtle soup. I see you’re making biscuits, and do you think you could manage a great tart?’
‘I think so,’ said Cook, her good humour restored.
‘Good,’ smiled Carolina. ‘Your dinners are always wonderful.’
‘I’ll see what else I can manage,’ grunted Cook. She was one of Carolina’s ‘finds’ herself. She had spent her life working in hot kitchens, driven to desperation by bad-tempered housekeepers, and Carolina’s easy way with her servants always melted her. ‘Maybe a bit of conch, maybe a bite of fish,’ she muttered.
‘Gilly could wear Nell’s things,’ suggested Betts. ‘She’s about Nell’s size.’
‘You’re right,’ said Carolina. ‘I’d forgotten Nell didn’t take her work clothes with her. What a good suggestion, Betts!’
Betts glowed.
‘Who’s Nell?’ Gilly asked suspiciously.
Betts answered before Carolina could. ‘Nell was a fool,’ she said bluntly. ‘She had the best job in this house she’d ever had in her life - easy hours and easy work. And she chucked it all away for a trader who’ll drop her in the next port he goes to.’
‘Nell only took her best gown with her,’ sighed Carolina. ‘She was under the impression she’d never do housework again.’
‘And you say she left her work clothes here?’ asked Gilly sharply. She felt very disappointed. The red silk petticoat and lacy chemise had made her feel like a lady. And here she was being proffered work clothes!
‘Yes. Dark blue linen. Very neat. Indeed you can serve supper in those clothes tonight - you have served tables at some time, haven’t you, Gilly?’
‘Oh, yes,’ was the eager response. ‘I worked in a tavern in Bristol and again in an inn. I serve very elegant,’ she added with a toss of her ginger curls.
Carolina hid a smile as she left. That smile might have wavered a bit had she guessed the reason for it: Gilly was hoping to make a good impression on the dark stranger who had stepped forward with bared blade to defend her in the street. Her dancing thoughts blithely ignored the obvious: that it was Carolina’s beauty that had brought out that flashing blade.
Carolina dressed for dinner with her usual easy elegance. She wore a jade-green gown that brought out the sudden flashing green lights in her amazing silver eyes.
The gown had three-quarter sleeves and a figure-hugging bodice that swept out into rustling jade-green silks over a lime silk petticoat. Emerald earrings flashed from her ears, and a single emerald on a golden chain found its way to the cleavage between her high rounded breasts.
She had finished combing her hair and piling it into the tall sweep fashion now demanded, when she paused and put down her silver comb and studied herself in the mirror. A slight frown creased her smooth whit: forehead.
The dress was cut a trifle low for dining alone with a stranger. Its jade-green colour seemed to highlight spectacularly the pearly skin of her bosom, the tops of her breasts. She supposed she should change it . . .
But then, practically all her dresses were low-cut. Kells liked them that way. It amused him to show her off, his flamboyant lady, and let all Port Royal envy him!
Carolina shrugged. This dinner after all was only a courtesy gesture. Did it really matter what the strange Frenchman thought?
Monsieur du Monde was punctual. He arrived even as Carolina was finishing her toilette. She gave a last pat to her hair and would have swept down the stairs but at the last moment she hesitated, ran back and extricated from the bottom of a huge locked chest a little silver-encrusted box of teakwood. She opened it and stood staring down at the contents winking up at h
er against the box’s dark red velvet interior. Before her - worth a king’s ransom - lay the diamond and ruby necklace the buccaneers of the Sea Wolf had voted as her ‘share’ when she had manoeuvred them out of a delicate situation - at least it seemed at the time that she had done so. She lifted it, letting the huge stones run through her hands caressingly. On an impulse she decided to wear it, for she had been thinking hard ever since she came home and this, she knew, might be the last occasion it would ever grace her neck.
She removed the emeralds from her ears and substituted gold earrings - whatever she wore in her ears would be eclipsed by the barbaric beauty of the huge pigeon’s-blood rubies with their frosting of heavy gold and diamonds.
That necklace, she told herself critically, would not only cover a large part of her bosom but surely distract the average man from thoughts of lust to thoughts of avarice! Smiling at that, she swept downstairs in her rustling froth of light skirts to greet her dinner guest.
Betts had let him into the living room and he rose quickly at her approach and swept her the deepest of bows - but not before his gaze had focused on that fortune in gold and diamonds and rubies that blazed about her neck.
The de Lorca necklace, by God! he was thinking. For surely it could be none other. He had heard stories that the Wench had it, had got it under peculiar circumstances which had been hushed up by the Duke. That it had been ransom for the Duke of Lorca was the official story, but there were other tastier ones the gossips told. Looking at those fabulous stones, Raymond du Monde was ready to believe them all!
Du Monde himself was a peacock this night. He was attired in violet silk, cut in the elegant French style (he had been hard put to find this suit and get it altered at short notice, but a scattering of coins had accomplished it). The Mechlin at his throat was a white froth set, unfortunately, with a dull pink stone of little value that he had borrowed from John Daimler. Still, his lilac silk stockings flashed from his well-turned calves in the candlelight, his strong thighs were encased in violet silk trousers and a burst of gold braid on his wide-cuffed coat completed his glittering appearance.
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