Bold Breathless Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  As he opened a chest and lifted out a clean ruffled shirt, he accidentally pulled out along with it lmogene’s lost whisk. Feather-light and white as drifting snow, it fluttered to the floor.

  “I see you keep souvenirs,” laughed his long-legged friend as van Ryker scooped up the whisk. He pushed back the copper hair that was forever falling into his eyes. “I, too, had a whisk once—from a girl who kept losing hers.”

  Van Ryker, replacing the whisk in his chest, turned to look at him sharply and then checked himself. No, of course it could not have been the same girl. Nevertheless he changed his mind about leaving the ship and poured his guest another glass of wine. “What did you say your name was?” he asked. “I did not catch it at the tavern.”

  “Linnington,” was the careless reply, for what did his real name matter here? “Stephen Linnington. Late of York, late of Devon, late of half the world.” He laughed again, and his face took on a rakish expression. “They think me dead in England, for this is the story I put out when the law was near catching up with me.” He could admit that here in the Sea Rover's great cabin, for this was a buccaneer captain to whom he was speaking; it might even gain him something in the esteem of those cold gray eyes that had rested on him in sudden speculation when he spoke of the whisk. “I suppose ye’ve more than one price on your head. Captain van Ryker?” His tone was curious.

  Van Ryker’s wry laugh rang out. “If ye’re thinking of selling me, Linnington, the price is highest in Spain. The Spanish dons would pay a fortune in gold for me.”

  “Dead or alive?” wondered Stephen innocently.

  Van Ryker leaned back so that his broad shoulders rested against the back of his carved oaken chair. He hooked one long leg over a chair arm, let the wide-topped boot swing negligently. His long body lounged at ease. “Either, I imagine. But—” the gray eyes shot a very level look at the smiling Englishman' before him—“ ’Tis not apt to become a popular sport, this taking of my body and slipping it back to Spain.”

  “No, I imagine not,” murmured Stephen, gauging the length of sinewy arm and the look of force in the man before him. “Ye’ve my word on it, van Ryker. I’ve no intention of trying it.”

  “Several have.” The gray eyes went murky. “But not for Spain’s reward—remember, we’d all be heretics there and trussed up ready for the fires of the Inquisition.”

  “So there’s another reward on your head as well?” laughed Stephen.

  Van Ryker looked at his wine with distaste as if it had gone suddenly sour. He checked himself before that knowing green glance, for he had almost said, “England does not love her wayward sons,” when all the world knew he claimed to be a Dutchman. Instead he said, “Last year I raided Maracaibo and several other towns along the Spanish Main. England seeks to appease Spain by putting a price on my head.”

  “ ’Tis an unfair world,” agreed Stephen jauntily, who’d have had a price on his head, too, in England if they had not thought him dead. “There are those of us who can never go home. But at least you have Holland.”

  “Yes, I’m still welcome in Holland and the Dutch colonies.”

  That admission did not make the captain as merry as it should have, Stephen Linnington noted. There was more to this man than met the eye, he thought. It would be interesting to know what thoughts just then were going through the captain’s dark head.

  For van Ryker’s mind was not really on what he was saying as he toyed with his glass, staring into its gleaming golden depths. He was thinking of the girl with the whisk, and his sudden black frown came from the fact that he was at the moment cursing himself for not having seized her from the Governor’s Ball in New Amsterdam, willing or not, and borne her away with him no matter how many guns spat at them from the fort!

  His attention came back to his guest and he grew thoughtful. This handsome green-eyed Englishman was such a man as might attract a woman like Imogene. No, it was too great a coincidence. Van Ryker downed his wine and dismissed it, went back to sounding out the Englishman. He seemed to be a man of parts, he knew ships, and there was a serviceable look to the blade he carried. Van Ryker liked that.

  Now he poured more wine and propped up his long legs and listened to Linnington’s droll story of running away from two wives—and divorced from neither. It was a common enough story in England these days, van Ryker reminded himself. Men left for the colonies and found for themselves there new wives from the plentiful supply of widows the hardships and marauding Indians produced—and forgot to divorce the wives they’d left behind in England. Or, like Stephen, a man might marry a wench in Lincoln and another in York. Or Winchester or London. It was the turbulence of the times that produced these things.

  He offered Linnington more wine, noting with approval that the fellow seemed able to hold his liquor and match him glass for glass, something few men could boast of. “Of the two, I preferred the sound of the first one—the highwayman’s sister,” he commented. “Was she a beauty?”

  “Aye.” Stephen’s green eyes kindled as he held out his glass to be refilled. “The comeliest lass I ever knew—save one. ” He was thinking of Imogene and was lost for a moment in the memory of her loveliness. For a stabbing moment he wished he’d never left her. He shook his head to clear it. Had he stayed they’d both have hanged—he’d done her a favor by leaving!

  “An English beauty....” van Ryker sighed.

  Stephen shrugged. “Kate was an English beauty all right, but she looked to have Spanish blood, perhaps gypsy blood. She had wild black hair that reached to her knees, and sparkling black eyes and red lips, and hips that swayed when she walked. She could handle a pistol as good as a man, Kate could. She’d take a chance on anything, Kate would. She always insisted she looked like her brother, Gentleman Johnnie, but I never could see it.”

  “I knew a Spanish girl once who looked like that. Wore big loops of gold in her ears. Had a voice like a purring kitten and a nasty way with a knife. She gave me a scar on the arm I’ve got yet before she realized I meant her no harm.”

  “One of your captives?”

  “Aye. I returned her to Cuba.”

  Stephen Linnington looked surprised. “I’d have thought—”

  “That being a buccaneer I’d keep such a lustrous captive to warm my bed? Well, a pirate might, but we buccaneers live by a code. We return all the Spanish ladies we capture to Cuba or some other Spanish shore—minus their jewels of course. Although in this case—” the tall buccaneer smiled wryly—“the lady returned to Cuba with all of her jewels and a few more I gave her.”

  “I’m surprised she wanted to return.”

  “She didn’t, but a great marriage awaited her there. I’d no desire to wreck her life—or marry her, either, which was what she wanted.”

  “Ye’re not married then?”

  Van Ryker shook his dark head. “ ’Tis a pleasure I’ve managed to miss.”

  “Never even came close?”

  “Once.” He thought regretfully of Imogene. What a wife she’d have made him! What a wife she was making van Rappard at this moment no doubt—he envied the young patroon.

  Stephen, who had given little thought to buccaneer “codes,” became thoughtful. “And if I should sign on to a ship such as yours?” he wondered. “What are the conditions? Not that I can sign up for this voyage,” he added hastily, “for I’ve a deal that carries me to Barbados.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve met a planter in Barbados who’s in need of a factor,” explained Stephen. “He’s offered me the post at a handsome salary.” His rakish face split into a grin. “I thought I’d try my hand at something legal for a change!”

  So Linnington was not up for grabs by the buccaneer captains. ... A pity. Ah, well, there were other likely lads, good with a sword, eager to sign on such a ship as the Sea Rover.

  “If you signed up with me, you’d sign articles,” van Ryker told him, “the same as for any other ship. Only these would be a bit different from those you’re used to, I expec
t. We buccaneers award extra money for injury, we send a dead man’s share to his wife or his relatives—in short, we care for our own.”

  “ ’Tis a bit different from, say, His Majesty’s Navy!” said Stephen in surprise.

  Van Ryker nodded and his gray eyes looked past the copperhaired Englishman into some distant future. “Some day we’ll own the West Indies,” he said quietly. “It will be our gift to England—courtesy of the buccaneers.”

  Stephen looked up sharply from his drink. “ 'To England?' And you a Dutchman?”

  He was returned a hard challenging glance. “To England.” Suddenly van Ryker lifted his glass and there was a deep resonance and pride in the way he gave the toast. “To England.” And Stephen Linnington, listening spellbound, knew in his heart at that moment that he was talking to a counterfeit Dutchman, that this man was an Englishman, as English as Dover’s white cliffs or the broad River Thames or London Bridge. He made no comment, for that hard gray look warned him not to, but somehow he believed it all would happen, that Captain van Ryker’s dream would come true, that this lean buccaneer and men like him would someday break the power of Spain and deliver these islands to the English.

  “Whenever ye’ve a mind to sign on, we’ll find a place for ye on the Sea Rover,” van Ryker told him, for he liked Linnington.

  “Perhaps your next voyage,” suggested Stephen gracefully. Although not if Barbados works out, he was thinking.

  They were silent for a while and Stephen would have been floored to know that the captain’s morose thoughts had been on Imogene, but there was no more talk of a whisk or of a girl who was always losing hers.

  And when next Captain van Ryker pulled out the little whisk along with a clean shirt, he took care to replace it carefully. It lay there nestled among his freshly laundered shirts—always in the way yet never discarded. Sometimes he would start to push it away impatiently and then the soft touch of it would remind him of her, and instead of throwing it away or tossing it into some corner, he would pick it up caressingly. It had lain in seawater, it had been washed, yet to him as he fingered it, it brought back the enchanting indefinable scent of a woman. Of one particular woman, whose smile still lingered in his heart, whose lips—soft beneath his own—had promised everything—and who had told him coldly in New Amsterdam that she loved another man, was indeed bearing his child. Van Ryker would frown, but he would pause and touch the delicate white whisk lingeringly—and then push it away from him with a rueful laugh.

  Even buccaneers dream.

  And so, though he laughed at himself for doing so, he kept the whisk.

  Wey Gat,

  New Netherlands, 1657

  CHAPTER 17

  Life at Wey Gat swiftly settled into a kind of routine. Verhulst scrupulously ate dinner with Imogene—and she did not see him again until morning when he ate breakfast with her—if she was up. His day was spent out supervising his men on the work of completing the vast unfinished wings of the house, or visiting the tenants on the bouweries, or farms, that made up his vast estate. Once or twice he took her with him and she warmed to the sight of curtsying Dutch vrouwen in their simple home-spun aprons and caps and their smock-clad wide-breeched spouses, solemnly offering the patroon and his lady beer or cider and little cakes. Imogene remarked to Verhulst her surprise that they were not wearing wooden shoes, of which she had seen so many in Holland.

  “That is because Indian moccasins are so cheap,” Verhulst told her. ‘‘My people—” he always called his tenants his “people” although Imogene, now that she knew him better, always half-humorously expected him to call them his “subjects” because here at Wey Gat he was almost a king—“My people trade surplus farm produce to the Indians for moccasins.”

  “I should like to have a pair. They look so comfortable.”

  “You—” his voice sharpened—“will wear shoes, as befits your station. Let the servants wear moccasins.”

  “Vrouw Berghem told me she often goes barefoot as she works about the house,” said Imogene irrepressibly.

  Verhulst gave her a quelling look. “Vrouw Berghem is not the wife of a patroon.”

  Imogene reminded herself that Verhulst had been generous, kindly, about the one big thing—the baby’s coming. The least she could do was to please him in small ways.

  She wore shoes.

  Life on a great patroonship was a constant source of amazement to Imogene. There was, to her surprise, a surplus of dairy products and she was told that New Netherland was the only colony in America where butter was cheap, for the hardworking Dutch had brought over their dairy animals with remarkable care and they had not died on shipboard as was the fate of so much livestock. It seemed to her that the hard work on the outlying bouweries never ended. Some of the newer tenants lived in hastily constructed “cellar houses,” some seven feet deep, floored with planking, lined with wood and bark and roofed over with planking and sod. Next year, Verhulst told her carelessly, they would build proper farmhouses of thick stone held together with a mortar of ground oyster shells.

  Imogene’s heart went out to these women of the bouweries, who with their men had emigrated from many other European countries besides Holland—there were Norwegian and Swiss and German, but on this patroonship no Englishmen. She was disappointed in that, for she would have enjoyed talking to her own countrymen in her native tongue. And she was indignant when she learned the terms of their tenancy—five hundred guilders a year, a tenth of their produce, repair the buildings, keep up the roads, three days’ service to the patroon with horse and wagon—it went on and on. And all for the price of their passage to this New World and the use of land they could never own. Imogene thought it all vastly unfair, but when she spoke up in defense of the hard-working tenants, Verhulst curtly silenced her. “Leave these things to me,” he said coldly—and in the main, Imogene did.

  But there were moments....

  Once, she rode back beside Verhulst, silent and brooding, after one of their rare visits together to a bouwerie. As they dismounted, leaving their horses in the care of grooms, and entered their own broad echoing hallway, it came to her sickeningly—like a slap in the face—the difference between her elegant life in the great house and the lives of those hardworking women in the bouweries.

  The difference was love.

  That Helga, whose warm hearth she had so recently left, worked perhaps fourteen hours a day, sometimes in the fields beside her Sven—but she sang over her work as she prepared the oatcakes and the beer she had been so proud to serve the patroon and his lady. Helga was happy—and her broad, smiling face showed it.

  Imogene shook out her heavy taffeta skirts and let Elise take her fur-lined velvet cloak from her—and thought wistfully of Helga’s warm bare living room with its crude furniture, of the big thick-furred tabby cat stretched out purring on the rude hearth, of the two rollicking dogs who had dashed up playfully to bark at the horses of the newcomers. Verhulst did not care for pets. The barn cats were left in the barn to forage—and fed surreptitiously by the kitchen help; they justified their existence by keeping the rat and mouse population down. Of all the vast kennel of dogs Verhulst kept, not one was a pet. One lonely day Imogene had wandered out to the kennels and been met by a shocked Groot. When she had tried to pet one of the friendlier-looking dogs, the kennelmaster had seized her arm and hoarsely warned her off. From his earnestness and volubility—all in incomprehensible gutteral Dutch—she gathered that the dog might have torn her arm off. She had kept her distance from the pack ever since, although sometimes at night their howling kept her awake.

  Imogene stood in her front hall and looked around her sadly at the opulence of hand-carved wainscoating and imported French wallpaper and elaborate gilt-framed paintings. She had a whole house full of elegant carpets and gleaming silver and crystal, presses and trunks and a large armoire filled with clothes any woman would envy.

  And yet at that moment she would gladly have exchanged it all for Helga’s worn moccasins and hard, unrelen
ting life—if only she could have matched in her heart the glow she had seen in Helga’s blue eyes when her Sven came striding home from the fields.

  “Are you just going to stand there? Aren’t you coming upstairs?” Verhulst asked her impatiently. “It will soon be time for dinner.”

  “Yes, I will want to change—but not yet. You go on up.”

  He nodded and left her and Imogene wandered listlessly into the dining room.

  Elise followed her in. Noting Imogene’s pensive air and surmising that it was something the patroon had done that had caused it, she seized and began to polish violently the handsome ooma, a sifter used to sprinkle sugar and cinnamon over waffles and cakes. “His tenants are afraid of him,” she muttered.

  “Nonsense,” said Imogene sturdily. “And let Gretha do that. She is giving you baleful looks, for you are intruding on her territory.”

  Elise sniffed but she set the ooma down. “The scherprecter was here this morning while you were putting on your riding clothes. He had a long talk with the patroon and then he rode away. I have learned what a scherprecter is—he is a hangman.”

  “That means nothing,” Imogene told her, turning to go. “There are hangmen in England, too, and they ride about there as well.” But her face was sober, for she too had noticed the watchfulness in the eyes of the sturdy blond men in their loose shirts and wide trousers who shuffled deferentially into the estate “office” to speak to the patroon. They doffed their hats, but their faces were solemn and they shifted their feet a bit too much. The servants too were dour—and yet, she told herself, they were well enough treated. It was coming clear to her how people felt about her husband. A titled lord in this wild new country Verhulst might be, but he was not beloved by his vassals.

  “How do you feel?” asked Elise, following Imogene into the handsome long living room with its carpet that Imogene herself had selected in Holland.