Bold Breathless Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  “You will never get out of here,” Elise told her with a sigh. “Oh, yes, I will!” flashed Imogene.

  But as her body thickened and became more unwieldy, and as the hard northern winter closed in about them, dashing ice and snow against the windowpanes, she knew that her chances were dwindling, one by one. No one came to the house anymore. All invitations were refused and visitors—in a land famous for its hospitality—were turned away. The excuse: the delicate state of health of the patroon’s wife, lmogene wondered what they must think, these erstwhile friends of the young patroon, frequenters of Wey Gat. What strange tales must be circulating about them along the river!

  Since the night of their confrontation, Verhulst had studiously ignored her. He ate breakfast early and she took hers in bed and had her lunch brought to her on a tray in her room, so they avoided sight of each other until supper. Supper was now a silent meal served in the cavernous dining room, where the patroon and his lady stared coldly at each other across a table set as if for a banquet.

  lmogene no longer dressed to please him. Angry with him, feeling somehow betrayed that she should have thought him so noble and found out he was no better than anybody else, she deliberately wore all the dresses he disliked most, concentrating on the deep jewel tones he had often remarked were too striking for her pale loveliness. She had abandoned wearing whisks entirely, carelessly letting the servants view her deep décolletage and disregarding Verhulst's deepening frown as his gaze rested upon the pearly tops of her delicately molded breasts.

  “Are your jewels still sewn in your sleeves?” he demanded ironically one night at dinner.

  lmogene, who had not been wearing any jewels since their confrontation, gave him a look of distaste. “I do not know where they are.”

  “Well, find them. I should like to see you wearing them. If you cannot behave like the wife of a patroon, you can at least try to look like one.” His tone was brutal.

  lmogene leaned forward. The candlelight gleamed hotly in her blue eyes, making them dance like blue flame. “You have made it clear that I cannot live up to your standards, Verhulst. The least you could do is let me go. I will divorce you quietly—or you can divorce me. In any event, you would never see me again.”

  “No!” His jaws closed with a snap.

  “But why not?” she wailed. “I ask nothing of you. I will go empty-handed from this house and make my way as best I can. Only send me downriver and I will leave this colony and you will be free to marry again—someone you can respect.”

  Down the long table he was looking at her with dull hatred. He seemed not to have heard her. “I do not like your dress. Red does not become you. Tomorrow you will wear yellow.”

  Imogene’s fingers clenched around her crystal wine goblet so hard the delicate stem broke and the red wine spilled on the tablecloth. She leaped up, dashing the glass away from her dress. “I will not dress to please you,” she said through her teeth, “unless you will promise to let me go—by the next sloop that goes by on its way downriver!”

  Blood suffused Verhulst’s sallow countenance. With a sudden violent gesture he threw his glass at the fireplace. It shattered against the marble with a sound like a shot. One of the servants burst into the room to see what was the matter and Verhulst leaped up and waved him out, shouting at him in Dutch. In three strides he had crossed the room and locked the dining room doors. That done, he turned his furious gaze on his wife’s thickening waist that threatened to burst through the bodice of her red velvet gown, even though Elise had already let it out twice.

  “You mock me!” he cried. “You dare to mock me!”

  Imogene had jumped to her feet as Verhulst threw the glass. Now, appalled by the look on his face, she sank back into her chair, gazing up at him as he loomed above her. Before she knew what he was about he had swooped down, seized her by her long fair hair and wrenched her from her chair. Imogene suppressed a scream as he swept her to her knees and began to shake her as a terrier shakes a rat.

  “I will have answers from you!” he shouted. ‘‘His name! Tell me your lover’s name!”

  White-faced and silent, in agony from his cruel grip on her hair, Imogene clawed at his arms in an effort to win her release.

  “You will not tell me?” Still holding her by the hair, he struck her head back and forth brutally with his open palm.

  Half fainting before this assault, Imogene closed her eyes and tried to shield her face with her arms.

  “Still reluctant?” His voice was an evil whisper in her ear. “Then I will tell you this! I will kill both you and the child you carry, if you do not tell me his name!”

  Her eyes snapped open in horror. “You would not?” she whispered.

  “I would.” His lips were twisted in a sneer and his eyes had taken on a glaze of madness. She could not know that he was imagining her naked on the Sea Rover's deck in van Ryker’s sinewy arms. “I swear to you that if you do not tell me, I will carry you from this room and hurl you into the ice-cold river.” A nasty smile curved his lips. “Who is there to stop me?”

  In fascinated horror, Imogene’s wide blue eyes gazed up at him. Who was there to stop him, indeed? He was the patroon, the law of Wey Gat. He could throw her in the river if he chose. Perhaps he would be brought to justice later but it would be too late to save her—or her baby. She might survive the icy waters, might be able to swim away from him and make it to shore but she would surely die of exposure even if she managed to elude him. And her baby—her defenseless child would have no chance at all.

  As if to drive home his point, he began to strike her again. Imogene gasped. She could not stand this kind of punishment—not pregnant as she was. The baby would suffer.

  “Linnington.” the word came out as a sob. “Stephen Linnington was my lover. What good does it do you to know his name, Verhulst?”

  Verhulst’s face glowed with a kind of hateful triumph. At last he had made her name her lover! And with the name—and the sudden harsh reality that name brought to him—he felt a wild surge of inner rage, murderous rage. Borne forward on that gust of passion his hand reached out for the carving knife that lay on the dining room table.

  Imogene saw his hand snaking toward the knife.

  “But he is dead, Verhulst!” she wailed. “He is no threat to you! Stephen Linnington is dead. He was killed in a duel in England while I was in Amsterdam!”

  Slowly her words sank in. Verhulst’s hand wavered, fell away from the knife. This man who had held the innocent Imogene in his arms, this man who had made her pregnant, was dead. A lover dead in England could not come back to haunt him. None on the river knew of this man, and when a child was delivered of this white-faced, half-fainting wench he held so savagely by the hair, all up and down the river that child would be considered his. Only he and Imogene and that maid of hers would know—and none of them was likely to tell. The Dutch servants might be listening at the door but none of them spoke English and all his conversations with his young wife were in that tongue.

  And now a new and heady thought came to him. When Imogene was delivered of this child, he would be accounted the father. How that would give the lie to all the tales told about him! How Rychie would burn!

  Thoughtful now, a man bemused, he loosened his grip on Imogene’s fair hair and she slumped in a velvet heap to the floor. Verhulst stood looking down at her for long minutes, his rage coming back to him in waves, rolling over him like a great incoming tide and then washing away, leaving behind the cleanswept beach of his thoughts of what he had to gain: A child, an heir to Wey Gat. Not a child of his body—that was not possible in any case—but an heir who would be believed to be a child of his body....

  Anger at this lovely woman who had deceived him poured over him again and he picked up a glass of wine and splashed it in her face. She came to, coughing, lifting a white hand to fend off further assault.

  “Tomorrow,” he told her in an expressionless voice, “you will wear a yellow gown to dinner. If you do not, I will te
ar off your clothes before the servants, strip you naked and make you eat your meal thus!”

  He turned on his heel and left her.

  From the floor, Imogene lifted a hand that shook. She held it to her throbbing head and gazed after him in dazed, speechless anger.

  The next day Verhulst had her abruptly moved to a different bedroom. This one was smaller, plainer, and it did not face upon the river with its flow of traffic—and its chance of escape. Now she could not see the sloops that tied up at Wey Gat’s dock. She could look out only on the far-flung forests and fields of Wey Gat, which had become her prison. Imogene protested the move, but Verhulst remained adamant. A new servant girl—one who spoke only Dutch—now occupied the room next to hers. Every hour of the day Imogene felt watched—cornered.

  The first snow fell and with it the weather turned bitter cold.

  Imogene caught cold and was for a time confined to her bed. It was a gloomy time for her. From her window she could look out and see tracks upon the snow—the tracks of foxes, rabbits, free wild things. She envied them. What matter that their lives were often short? At least they were not caged!

  Bess Deveen wrote to her again but this time Imogene was not allowed to read the letter. Verhulst, kept at home by the weather, called her into the library and waved it at her. “A letter from your friend Bess.”

  Imogene brightened. “When did it come?” She reached out an eager hand for it.

  Verhulst snatched it away from her, held it up beyond her reach. “It came before the first flake fell,” he said deliberately. “I have been saving it.”

  Imogene’s hand dropped to her side. “ ‘Saving it’? For what?” she asked tonelessly.

  “Until you were well enough to come downstairs, so you could watch me do this.” He tore the letter across and flung it into the fire.

  Now heavy with child, Imogene stood with clenched hands and watched it burn. It would have meant so much to her to read Bess’s letter. “Have you done with me?” she asked dully, turning to go.

  “Not quite. There will be no more letters received or sent. And go change your gown,” he added coldly. “I have told you before that red does not become you.”

  “Good,” said Imogene defiantly, giving her dark red velvet dress a pat. “I wore it because I know you dislike me in red.”

  So he had not yet broken her spirit! Verhulst’s face darkened. “You would do well to placate me,” he warned. “For I hold your fate in my hands.”

  Imogene shrugged. “If I am distasteful enough, perhaps you will let me go.”

  His laughter rang out—discordant, rude. “Do you still believe that? Lord, what does it take to convince you? You will come down to dinner tonight—no more excuses of headaches or stomach aches—and you will wear a gown of a yellow hue. You have many such. I bought them for you in Amsterdam.”

  She faced him squarely. “No, I will not.”

  “I will remove every gown you have that is not to my liking and have them burned!”

  “If you do,” said Imogene in a stubborn voice, “I will refuse to come down to dinner at all!”

  A light almost of madness flashed in his dark eyes. Verhulst leaned toward her, a dark and menacing figure. “You will come down and sit at dinner with me tonight, Imogene, or before God, I will lock you in your room without food or water until you do!”

  The pale woman before him would have flung him her defiance but—there was now another life besides her own to think about. She could not let her unborn child suffer.

  That night she came reluctantly down to supper attired in a gown of heavy Chinese gold satin—and gazed at her husband with such scorn across the glittering board that he was nettled.

  “You will also make conversation,” he told her as he lifted a bite of capon to his mouth.

  Humiliated, raging inside, Imogene looked about her. “Why have you not replaced the dueling pistols that used to hang beside the mantelpiece?” she taunted. “Do you really think I might seize one of them and shoot you?”

  The gleam of his eyes over the capon was answer enough. He wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Why not?” he asked with elaborate sarcasm. “From your own lips I have heard that you have already struck down one betrothed. What might you not do to a husband? Indeed, I had a sample of it in the woods when you pointed my own gun at me!”

  Whatever else, Imogene had never thought to murder Verhulst, but only to escape from him. Now, white with fury, she leaned forward, knocking over her glass of wine upon the white tablecloth. “You can be sure of this, mynheer! “I wish you dead!”

  His head rocked as if she had struck him and his gaze went murky. “Time will sober your spirit and end these ravings,” he said carelessly. “And we have much of it. Indeed, we have all our lives to look forward to—together.”

  It was too much. Imogene threw down her napkin and stalked from the table. Verhulst’s insolent laughter followed her.

  It was but the first of many humiliating nights, and they took their toll of her. Watched and spied upon, forced to eat her meals amid derision and scorn, Imogene began to change. The color left her cheeks and she lost interest in everything.

  It would have stunned Imogene to know that Verhulst looked forward to these shared evenings with morbid pleasure, that he was sometimes hard-pressed not to speak to her kindly, to reach out an arm to help her as she made her way heavily up the stairs. The truth was that he loved Imogene—a fact that he had never admitted even to himself. The wild jealousy that overcame him when he thought of her lying in another man’s arms, he passed off to himself as the righteous anger of a man whose possessions are stolen by another. He was punishing her, he told himself—and she well deserved that punishment. Eventually he might decide to forgive her.

  He was unaware that during that terrible winter he alienated his young wife forever.

  Here at lonely Wey Gat, with a baby coming, a husband who seemed to hate her, and no one to talk to, lmogene drooped. She had lost the man she loved, she had fled across the sea and driven away a man she might have loved, she had tried valiantly to be wife to a man who would have no true wife.

  Like a flower at eventide, lmogene wilted; her lovely petals seemed closing one by one.

  She might have written of her troubles to Bess Duveen—had she been allowed to. She might have wept on Vrouw Berghem’s shoulder had that stout kindly woman come upriver for a visit. But she had neither friends nor kinfolk in this harsh new land.

  Driven, and without even Elise to talk to, lmogene began secretly to keep a journal. Into it she poured out her heart in passionate words. She told of her affair with Stephen Linnington and how she was bearing his child here in the far fastness of Wey Gat. She told of her life as the patroon’s prisoner... a life that would end, she believed, when her child was born and Verhulst killed them both.

  Wey Gat,

  New Netherlands, 1658

  CHAPTER 20

  Shrieking February winds lashed the thick stone walls of the mansion of Wey Gat. Wind howled bansheelike down the tall chimneys and moaned against the windows of Imogene’s bedroom, where bustling servants came and went at the bidding of the doctor hastily summoned upriver from New Amsterdam. For the young mistress of the house was in labor and the patroon might at any minute be blessed with a son to carry on the mighty van Rappard name.

  By the bedside Elise watched anxiously. During these last weeks of Imogene’s pregnancy she had been allowed to tend lmogene, replacing the Dutch girl who had been guarding her, for the patroon had no fear that a woman in the last stages of pregnancy would strike out on her own in the heavy snow. Now Elise clung to Imogene’s damp palm, as frightened as if she were bearing her own child.

  “Has Verhulst—asked about me?” wondered lmogene, as a spasm of pain subsided and the doctor, frowning, went across the room to peer into his medical bag.

  “No,” said Elise in a low voice. She bent over and sponged Imogene’s forehead gently with a damp cloth. ‘‘Not yet. But he is in the house.
Downstairs in the library, I think.”

  Their eyes met in fear and Elise, who couldn’t stand the sight of naked fear on Imogene’s usually fearless countenance, rose and harshly ordered the fire to be stirred up, for icy air seeped in around the windows and it was cold in that February room on the bluff above the frozen river.

  “No, wait—Elise.” Imogene’s faint voice called her back and the gaunt serving woman bent once more over the bed and on the pretext of arranging the covers, leaned down to hear Imogene’s whisper. “Promise me, Elise, that if I should die, you will take care of my baby and save it from Verhulst.” Her fingers clutched the older woman’s hand with frantic strength, the strength of panic. “Promise—if I should die...”

  “I promise.” Elise’s eyes filled with tears and she choked back a sob.

  “Come now,” said the kindly doctor in his thick Dutch accent, for he had heard Imogene’s last words. “This is no time to think of dying. You are giving birth! Soon you will have not only your own life to think about but your child’s!”

  His gruff heartiness did not cheer the beautiful woman lying on the bed. I will have my life to think about only if Verhulst lets me live, she thought grimly. For now I am truly at his mercy. And then another wave of pain began and she was borne away on it, gasping and clenching Elise’s hand and trying desperately not to scream.

  For Verhulst’s treatment of her in these last months of her pregnancy had swung like a pendulum. Sometimes he had been deceptively kind—but those moods never lasted. At other times he had stormed at her—always in English so the Dutch-speaking servants would not know what he was talking about. He had derided her, called her a whore and a murderess who had sought protection from her crimes under the shelter of his fine old name. Imogene had dug her fingernails into her palms until they bled in her effort not to respond violently to his charges, for as she grew great with child—and was watched every minute that she was not locked in her room—she knew that there was no escaping Verhulst; she would bear her child at Wey Gat and after that only God knew what would become of her.