And in his wild fear that she would escape him, Verhulst gave an order he would later regret, for it had never been in his mind to loose that savage pack of man-killing dogs while Imogene was running, frail and vulnerable, across the ice.
“The dogs!” he roared, stumbling down the slope. “Loose the dogs!”
BOOK I
Imogene
A toast to the fairest of maidens
That mortal eyes ever have seen,
A toast to her folly, her courage—
A toast to Imogene!
PART ONE
The Desperate Lovers
A toast to the desperate venture,
A toast to the lovers who dare,
Who—divided and lost and abandoned—
Never will cease to care!
The Scilly Isles, 1657
CHAPTER 1
It was a soft night in the Scillies, those sunny “Fortunate Isles” flung like a necklace of emeralds and gold westward into the Atlantic from England’s southern tip, and behind the moon-washed stone battlements of Star Castle, despite all the edicts of the Puritans and the Lord Protector, a ball was in progress.
Two gentlemen, both resplendent in gold braid and sweeping plumed hats, clattered up the stone stairs to the rooftop festivities and were greeted by their satin-clad host and hostess. That formality accomplished, they betook themselves to a crenellated corner of this great eight-pointed edifice that surmounted Garrison Hill and there stood assessing the woman-flesh of this glittering assemblage.
“And who would that one be, Ambrose? The girl with the fine ‘figger’?” wondered Stephen Linnington, the taller and older of the two newcomers. Not a woman in the room but had noticed the entrance of this tall stranger with the swinging gait and the shoulder-length copper hair, and now several soft glances were turned toward him. For above his lean body that bespoke the competent swordsman he was, gleamed a wickedly carefree smile that incited the innocent to lush forbidden thoughts and the experienced to infidelity. Stephen was not unaware of the effect he had upon women—indeed, seduction was his hobby, when he was not amusing himself with other things: dice and cards and dangerous adventures aimed at gain that usually came to naught. He had been reared in a luxury he could no longer afford. Even the ruffled white linen shirt on his broad back and the fine sweeping hat with orange plumes that seemed to highlight his own gleaming copper hair were not his own. Both borrowed—as was the appearance of respectability he was enjoying this night.
“Come, Ambrose, the lady’s name. Ye must know her.” Stephen’s voice was lazy and jaded, but above the quizzical smile he flashed at Ambrose his hard turquoise gaze had come alert, for through the throng he had sighted a most wondrous torso clad in pastel pink silk. Now he stood assessing what he could see past three vaguely military-looking gentlemen who crowded about the girl, their heads bent over in their concentration as they talked to her. What Stephen Linnington could see delighted him: delicately molded breasts ornamenting a lithe torso that nipped to a tiny waist before the pointed silk bodice billowed out into wide rippling skirts and petticoat. Past an interested masculine back he could see that her slender white arm wafted a plumed fan. Those rosy plumes concealed the face that surmounted the “fine figger,” but the hair that crowned the lady’s head gleamed lustrously gold in the light of the torches that had been thrust into the stone merlons. She moved, gracefully, as if to elude the three men who pressed so close, and the pale pink silk of her gown rippled and was gilded by that same torchlight to tones of peach and gold like a tea rose. At the far side of the parapet the musicians would soon strike up, and the tall gentleman who had asked the question gave his young friend an impatient look.
“Who?” His stocky companion, young Ambrose Duveen, squinted short-sighted eyes across the torchlit throng.
“The lady in pink—the one waving the plumed fan,” answered his copper-haired friend, wondering in his heart how he could have been thought to mean anyone else.
“Oh—her.” Stocky Ambrose frowned. “That will be Mistress Imogene Wells. Ye’re a stranger in these parts, Stephen, while I’ve lived here all my life, so I do feel I should warn you—well, she’s not your dish, I’d say.”
“And why would you say that?” Amusement in the lazy voice.
“Imogene’s a rattlebrain. Two betrothals of marriage she’s broken off at the last minute and both good matches who will not offer for her again, I can tell you!”
Light broke over his tall companion’s hard visage. “Ambrose, did you offer for her by chance?”
Ambrose flushed to the roots of his brown hair. “No, of course I did not! ’Twas my brother Hal,” he finished lamely.
“Ah,” said Stephen, his mind contemplating big Hal Duveen: silent, steady, dull-eyed, a good sailor—and doubtless he’d one day make some girl a fine husband. But not this artful wench who wielded her fan so flirtatiously! “So she turned Hal down,” he said softly.
“ ’Twas not like that.” Resentfully. “Hal did but reprove Imogene for her wild ways and that’s when she told him she would not marry him.”
“Her ‘wild ways’?”
“Hal said ye could see clean to her hips when she mounted her horse!” Ambrose sounded indignant.
“She must be very clever then,” murmured the copperhaired fellow beside him, “for I’ve spent half my life looking and never yet seen—”
“And her wild ways with the kerchief and other things.” Ambrose was on the defensive now.
His tall friend looked as if that were most instructive. Actually he was reminding himself that the orange-plumed hat on his head and the full-sleeved shirt of fine linen on his back were both borrowed from Hal, and therefore refrained from the ribald comment he would ordinarily have made. But one thing he could not let pass. “Her wild ways with the kerchief", he demanded, fascinated.
Ambrose looked hunted. “That sheer lawn thing the young ladies wear across their bosoms above the bodice-—I think Bess calls them whisks or pinners.” He was floundering beyond his depth now and when Stephen looked baffled, he raced on, trying to explain his aversion to the beauteous Imogene. “Her guardian, old Lord Elston—he’s not here tonight, for his health is poor, seldom goes out—admits to all who will listen that he doesn’t know what to do with Mistress Imogene. ’Tis said he’s given her an ultimatum: the next time he betrothes her to someone, she’ll ne’er break it off, she’ll to the church to be wed if he has to drag her there trussed up like a capon. My sister Bess likes her—I don’t know why—but you wouldn’t, Stephen. Anyway, she’s too young by half, too—arrogant,” Ambrose finished grandly with the firm conviction of extreme youth.
Stephen could guess that the dazzling Imogene must have ignored young Ambrose as “a mere child.” How that must have rankled! Still he was moved to protest.
“ ‘Too young’?” he demanded in astonishment. “Why, she looks to be all of sixteen.”
“About that,” agreed Ambrose sullenly.
“Then I’d say she was ripe for the plucking.” Stephen’s broad russet-clad shoulders gave a slight start as the lady in question swung around and he got a full front view, though her face was still hidden flirtatiously by her fan. “I like her gown,” he muttered appreciatively.
“That’s another thing Hal chided her for,” said Ambrose, his tone severe. “Goes too far, she does. Not that—” he added scrupulously—“she goes all the way, I didn’t mean to say that.” His face grew brick red at Stephen’s sardonic grin.
“Ye mean she’s the type to say ‘Lud, sir, I hadn’t meant to let you take such liberties—what will the world think of me with my skirts up like this?’ and dash away, leaving ye to gnaw at your knuckles?” he wondered wickedly.
Ambrose’s crimson face grew a shade deeper. “I meant,” he said in a smothered voice, “well, look at her, bare to the nipples!”
“Past that,” murmured Stephen, leaning forward the better to view this gorgeous piece. “They’re showing.”
“T
here, you see?” Triumphantly. “Any other girl would have worn a sheer gauze kerchief, or whisk or whatever they call them, to cover herself for modesty—as I don’t doubt she did until she got here and her chaperon had her usual fainting fit and had to go and lie down! ’Twas after she got rid of poor Mistress Peale, I’ll wager, that she took off the kerchief and tossed it over the battlements—as I’ve seen her do twice before!”
“Ye can criticize that?” demanded Stephen incredulously, dazzled by the distant display of pink-tipped white bosom rising above the dainty ruffled silk. “Why, man, all the fashionable ladies at court do peep out above the bodice the same way.”
“ ’Tis not right,” insisted Ambrose. “ ’Tis not such a display as a young lady of rank and fashion should make. Nor yet should she lie to poor Mistress Peale about it—saying the wind took it, indeed! Though she’s a friend of my sister’s and I’ve known her all my life, for she lives on the Isle of Tresco. just to the northwest of us—” he made a vague gesture toward the stars and the sea, his anguished gaze still riveted on the disturbing vision before them—“I do fear for Bess in Imogene’s wild company, for she’ll come to no good end with her blatherskite ways.”
“If she’s wild enough company, I should rather think she might make it all the way to the Lord Protector’s bedchamber,” murmured Stephen, but Ambrose, carried away by his own tirade, did not hear him.
“Some say ’tis old Lord Elston’s fault. He’s allowed Imogene to run wild ever since she came here to live with him. She’s been his ward since her parents were killed when they got in the way of a volley of shot during the civil wars. Happened in their own garden too, in Penzance! Shows a man never knows where he can be safe. And because they were royalists, all the property that would have been hers was confiscated by the Lord Protector. Lord Elston would be poor as a churchmouse, too, if he did not somehow manage to keep on the good side of the Puritans, although who could stomach—damme, ye’re not a Puritan by chance, are ye, Stephen?” he finished weakly, a note of horror creeping into his voice.
“Never,” said Stephen in a deep consoling voice, but he gazed at his young companion in some wonder. A lad who’d condemn a lass for being high-spirited and flashing a bit too much bosom or ankle? Faith, he seemed more like an old gentleman of eighty-three than a young buck of nineteen summers!
Still, from the wisdom he’d acquired in his twenty-seven adventurous years—the last ten of them spent as a rover—Stephen reminded himself that it was Ambrose and Ambrose’s older brothers, fine sailors all, who had pulled him out of a churning ocean that wild night a week ago when his light craft had piled up on the black sawtooth rocks of the Scillies. It was Ambrose’s family who had generously taken in the stranger who had washed up on their beach with a cut head and been nearly reclaimed by the sea again as the great waves thundered in. Stephen had collapsed on the beach, half-conscious, and been vaguely aware that there were boots about him and that strong hands were dragging him across the sand away from the reach of the clutching waves. Sick and dizzy and weak from loss of blood, for he had been near swept from the deck when the mast broke and fell on him, he had come to for a moment when they’d laid him down. He had looked up just as a white flash of jagged lightning had rent the sky from end to end, weirdly illuminating the beach and the wild sea and the black rocks—and had seen above him a lovely face. Wide concerned blue eyes had looked down into his, and a wealth of fair hair streaming down mermaidlike in the wild spray from the waves frothing against the rocks had lightly brushed his wet face.
“An angel! ” he had gasped in astonishment. “So I’ve gone to heaven and not the other place!” And had sunk back into unconsciousness.
Two days later, when he was sitting propped up with pillows in a big square bed and a beaming Ambrose had ushered in a serving girl carrying hot broth, he had asked where he was and who Ambrose was and who the “angel” was he’d seen when he was half-drowned.
“Ye’re on Saint Mary’s, the largest isle in the Scillies, and this is the Castle of Ennor, or what’s left of it,” Ambrose had grinned. “For there was fighting here during the civil wars and some of the walls were blown up. I’m Ambrose Duveen and ’twas my brothers and I saved ye—though not your boat, I’m afraid. We saw her go down in deep water. And—” his eyes did not quite meet Stephen’s—“there’s no angel here save my sister, and none have yet called Bess that.”
“Your sister? Blond and blue-eyed, is she?”
“Dark-haired and gray-eyed.”
A mirage then, a vision born of being hit over the head with a falling mast . . . perhaps an angel for all that, hovering over him, promising him glory in death.
“Your name I already know,” Ambrose had beamed. “For ye gasped out that ye were Stephen Linnington of Devon before ye lost consciousness.”
So he had told them that much. . . . The knock on the head must have been worse than he thought. He felt of his scalp gingerly, winced. “I’m late of Hampshire,” he supplemented, fabricating as he went. “Although ’tis true I was born in Devon.”
Ambrose’s broad pleasant face took on a disappointed look. “Too bad,” he blurted, “for we’ve kin in Devon. Though in truth,” he added earnestly, “we see them but seldom.”
Very seldom, Stephen Linnington hoped fervently. For he’d left Devon in his teens with two musket-carrying fathers in hot pursuit, each claiming he’d debauched their daughters—as indeed he had. Under pressure from his own father he’d have been only too happy to make amends by marrying one, but he found it hard to choose between pretty Peg and lightsome Molly. To run had seemed the best course—and Stephen Linnington had taken it.
His flight had carried him north to Yorkshire, where he’d fallen in with bad company, and one night while drunk he had married a highwayman’s sister. But he’d married her under an alias, and did that count? Anyway, she’d fled with the highwayman one stormy night when the king’s men surrounded the tavern where they’d taken shelter, leaving Stephen to the law, and once he’d escaped jail he’d not known where to find her. Fate and a strong horse had carried him to Lincoln, and there he’d taken up with a pretty barmaid and because she’d plagued him so, he’d married her, too. Since then he’d ranged the north and west of England, his hot temper and stubborn pride getting him into more trouble than his strong sword arm could get him out of.
As matters stood, the tall gentleman from Devon was wanted in York for murder and in Lincoln for bigamy and in half the rest of England for this or that infraction. He’d been locked into stocks for drunkeness, and pilloried for roundly cursing a constable—and from that event he still bore a slight scar over his right eye. In London they’d have locked him up in Newgate forever for debt had he not eluded his pursuers by leaping off London Bridge into the Thames and swimming away from the shots that rang out in the night. Homesick for the land of his birth, though long estranged from his family, who in shame told everyone he was dead, he had journeyed south again into Devon—and fared no better there. There the young adventurer with the wicked gleam in his turquoise eyes and the ready hand on a sword hilt had swaggered his way into a dice game and from it acquired a boat. He had departed on that boat in a hurry when his remarkable luck at last came under closer inspection and he was accused of cheating. Dodging bullets again, he’d intended to sail for Falmouth and try his luck there, but a storm had come up and carried him clear to the Scillies. When his boat shattered against the ugly black rocks the young man with the tarnished past had been lucky to escape with his life.
The Duveens little knew the character of the man they had so generously offered their hospitality and—Ambrose at least— their friendship. From his clothes, his bearing, the tone of command in his voice, they knew him to be a gentleman and as such they accepted him. It would have astonished them to have learned the truth about him.
Stephen Linnington thought the less they knew of him the better and in the big square bed he had cursed himself silently for having gasped out his real name al
ong with a gurgle of salt water. Even a half-drowned fool like himself should have known better than that, he thought. All the names he’d used as he roistered across England, and here, but a short sail from Devon, he’d given his real name! Faith, his family would not thank him for that if they heard about it!
Always generous hosts, the Duveens had told Stephen he was welcome to stay with them as long as he liked. He’d been grateful for that, since his head wound was giving him dizzy spells. But now he was feeling fit again, and Hal—the only Duveen with a shoulder span that matched his own—had lent him a clean ruffled shirt and a sweeping hat with orange plumes—his own shirt having been torn and his hat lost when his boat went down. And Ambrose Duveen had taken him along to the ball at Star Castle and was bent on scorning the best-looking girl there.
“Whatever her morals, will ye introduce me to Mistress Imogene Wells, Ambrose?” His expression intense, Stephen bent toward his short young friend so abruptly that his thick shock of copper hair cascaded over his wide white collar.
“Well,” said Ambrose in an undecided voice, “I’ll introduce ye, of course, because Imogene is received everywhere still, although there do be wild tales about her.”
“Let us hope they are all true,” muttered Stephen fervently, for it had been all of two weeks since he had lain in a pair of yielding white arms, and he’d been too aware of the kindness of his hosts, the Duveens, to try to seduce their daughter, Bess. Tonight might change all that! He squared his russet velvet shoulders jauntily and strode forward beside Ambrose to meet the daring beauty, Imogene.
But the introduction, brief as it was, went unheard in his ears. For the face that was turned toward him, suddenly revealed as the pink plumed fan was wafted away, caught him up as stunningly as a blow.
Bold Breathless Love Page 3