Bold Breathless Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  But Imogene, lost in her reckless plan, was unaware....

  In an agony of doubt, the two women crossed the green 'awns. They were so near, so near the pier. Before them the captain stood at the tiller, the sloop was ready to cast off and—yes, she liked this captain’s looks, a good, steady man with a sailor’s distance-scanning gaze.

  “Now,” muttered Imogene to Elise. “We must not appear to hurry but the sloop must not leave without us. We will stroll down the pier toward the sloop and go aboard at the last minute.” She cast a quick glance back at the house. “No one is watching us.”

  Elise ducked her head as if to make her tall, gaunt form less conspicuous and both women fought to keep from breaking into a run as they saw escape loom so tantalizingly close.

  “Captain,” called Imogene in a light voice.

  He turned and at that instant the cabin door opened and Verhulst stood in the opening. He was resplendent as ever. The heavy gold chain he always wore glittered against his black brocade doublet and a smile of wolfish triumph spread across his dark face.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  Imogene and Elise had frozen in their tracks and now Imogene lifted her head, determined to carry it off. “I had thought to inspect the captain’s sloop before he left, for it is very different from the Danskammer.”

  “True,” mocked Verhulst. “I thought you might care to see it.” And Imogene knew that he had guessed her intent, had allowed it to happen.

  He had wanted to humiliate her—one more time!

  Still, Elise and the baby were here. She had to carry off this charade—somehow. She allowed herself to be handed aboard by her husband and introduced to the captain, who bowed low. She inspected the sloop through an anguished blur. And then, as Verhulst wandered some distance away, Imogene turned with a little gesture of appeal to the smiling captain. “Please take a message to Vrouw Berghem in New Amsterdam,” she begged. “Ask her to invite me downriver to visit her. Tell her I am a prisoner here.”

  The captain gave her a puzzled look and muttered something in Dutch, shrugging his shoulders. Imogene’s heart sank—he spoke no English.

  A moment later Verhulst was at her side, mockingly handing her ashore.

  Next was Elise’s turn to come ashore. Imogene took the baby from her but Verhulst waved Elise back. “I believe you both meant to go downriver,” he said smoothly. “Surely at least one of you should be allowed to do so.”

  Imogene turned to Elise, standing on the deck. “The patroon says you may go, Elise. He will pay for your passage downriver. Vrouw Berghem is kind, she will take you in.”

  But Elise, horrified at the thought of leaving Imogene, shook her head.

  “Come, come, ladies, make up your minds,” mocked Verhulst. “The captain here is in a hurry to cast off.”

  “Go!” cried Imogene. “It is your chance to escape!” For a moment Elise hesitated. She cast a look downriver at the bright waters that led perhaps back to England—and then her troubled gaze fled back to Imogene, standing tense on the dock with her child in her arms. Imogene trembled as she watched the play of emotions struggle across her old nurse’s countenance. If only Elise would realize that with someone to help in New Amsterdam, her own chances for escape must increase tenfold!

  But Elise could not leave her. Tears of apology spilled from her pale blue eyes as she scrambled over the side to rejoin Imogene on the pier. Impulsively Imogene threw an arm around the older woman’s neck and hugged her. From the deck of the river sloop, the Dutch captain watched this display, puzzled.

  These English were more demonstrative than he had thought! He wondered what the patroon’s wife had said to him in that choked strained voice and why two women who had been companionably together when they clambered aboard his sloop some moments before were now having what seemed to be a tearful reunion on the pier.

  The captain shrugged. Foreigners, he told himself, had mysterious ways—they were not easily understandable, like the Dutch. He barked an order and left the pier of Wey Gat behind him and headed his sloop downriver toward Storm King and the Highlands and thence to New Amsterdam.

  From the shore Imogene watched him go with terror in her heart.

  For now Verhulst knew her intentions.

  At Verhulst’s command, Elise took the baby and trailed along behind them miserably as the patroon, holding Imogene’s arm in a punishing grip, escorted his errant lady back to the house. In the front hall Imogene jerked away from his restraining grasp, losing her light shawl in the process, and would have confronted him then and there but that he seized her again and dragged her upstairs to the big front bedroom that was now hers again, had been ever since the child was born.

  “You seem to have gained some weight,” he observed, standing back to view her.

  “Perhaps I am pregnant again,” said Imogene crushingly, hoping to face him down.

  “Ah, now I see what it is.” With a swift ruthless gesture, Verhulst ripped off her gray overdress, laughed as he saw the blue overdress beneath. “So you hoped to run away and take your wardrobe with you?” he mocked.

  “Only a change of clothes. Surely you would not deny me that?”

  He stepped back, secretly admiring the spirit with which she faced him. “I am surprised you do not lie about it,” he marveled.

  “About my desire to leave you? Verhulst, you know I wish to leave you!”

  His answer astonished her. “Why?” he asked in a puzzled voice. “Have I not bought you everything, even a virginal? Your possessions are the envy of all on the river. Why should you wish to leave?”

  “Because I cannot live with your scorn, your jealousy, because you wish to take my child from me!”

  “Oh, the child?” He shrugged and paced about the floor. “You may keep the child,” he flung over his shoulder.

  Imogene felt her knees go weak. She sagged toward a chair, grasped the carved back in time to keep from falling. She had won—something at least. Verhulst would not take Georgiana from her.

  “Unless you displease me again,” he added dispassionately. “Then, of course, the child must go.”

  Barbados,

  The West Indies, 1658

  CHAPTER 21

  It was ten o’clock and a light breeze ruffled the brilliant flowers of the bougainvillaea vines as Bess Duveen stepped out on to her wide veranda. Before her stretched the wide green fields and fruit trees of her uncle’s island domain—a domain that was now hers, for her uncle had died two fortnights ago and been buried in the churchyard at Bridgetown. Bess had breakfasted in the high-ceilinged dining room, made sunny by its big fanlight windows encrusted with dainty wooden louvered shutters. Those windows were only one of the many refinements of “Idlewild,” for her uncle had loved the big stone house he had built and had spent the last years of his prosperous life in making it a showplace of the island. It was indeed a fine home and much envied, for even its stones had been brought across the seas—thick blocks of the soft Bermuda stone, which could be cut with a carpenter’s saw and yet when mortared and plastered over with a white lime wash were as impervious to the corroding sea air as granite. The stones had been brought as ballast in ships her uncle had owned.

  Bess stood a moment before lifting her full skirts and walking down the wide front steps. She had paused to enjoy, as she always did, the view of sweeping lawns and carefully imported plants, which, in this mild climate, flowered lushly as did the native plants, which—save for the gardeners’ constant efforts—would soon have overrun everything with tropical vines.

  Bess knew she should hurry to her waiting green-and-gilt coach, for her liveried coachman was even now giving her an inquiring look, and a black footman, equally resplendent in green-and-gold livery, stood patiently waiting to hand her into the coach.

  There was much to do this morning. Bess was going into Bridgetown to check out the unloading of a vast lot of goods her uncle had ordered before his death. Although most plantation owners would have left such matters to
their factors, Bess intended to supervise the unloading personally. She’d much have preferred to ride in on horseback, but since she was in deep mourning for her uncle, it seemed more respectful to ride in the coach.

  Still, hurried as she was, Bess paused and gave a quietly happy look around her.

  She had come a long way from the broken-down grandeur of Ennor Castle in the Scillies—and all in such a short time. None of the Duveens had had any idea how wealthy Uncle Dicken had become in the island trade—they had thought of him as a planter of modest fortune and never realized that the major source of his wealth lay in inter-island trade, plus a sprinkling of piracy when he chanced upon a Spanish ship with fewer guns than his own. Of late years he had retired from the sea, sold his ships, and devoted his energies entirely to the development of his plantation—and it had flowered beneath his benign reign.

  Bess had been astonished to find herself met at dockside by a coach and bowing footmen to take her luggage, and doubly astonished to find herself ensconced in a mansion and thrust into the busy social life of the island. Not only social but snobbish, for only last week one of her neighbors had been sending a trunk of old clothes to relatives in Boston and had laughed behind her fan to Bess as she lifted out a black lace whisk as being “too fine for Boston, they’d have no place to wear it there!”

  But Bess Duveen’s mind had not been on the parties and balls at which she would be guest of honor, nor on the beautiful clothes her uncle had promised to have stitched up for her the moment he had laid eyes on her sweet face and pronounced her a beauty. All her attention had been riveted on the stranger she was to marry—someone named Robert Milliken, whose plantation “MillOak” adjoined “Idlewild”—and almost as she greeted her uncle she implored him to tell her what Robert was like.

  To her astonishment, her uncle had grown choleric. He had cursed roundly, consigning Robert Milliken to the devil in various languages—and finally admitted sheepishly to Bess that Robert Millken had discovered two days ago that his young housekeeper was pregnant and had come round last night to announce bluntly with some embarrassment that his marriage to Bess was off because he had “made an honest woman of Bonnie at last, and indeed he’d have done so before had he known she was pregnant, for his first wife, God rest her soul, had given him neither chick nor child.”

  Bess, far from falling into tears as her worried uncle had imagined she might, had let out a great sigh of relief and sunk laughing into a cane-backed island chair. That night she had slept well for the first time since leaving the Scillies.

  Her apologetic uncle had been charmed by Bess’s forthright attitude as well as by her serene acceptance of the situation. He had always valued young Robert’s friendship and hated to lose it, so when Bess graciously called upon the bride, thereby guaranteeing her an entrée into island society by way of Idlewild plantation. Uncle Dicken’s joy in his hitherto unknown niece overflowed into a concrete display of gratitude. He had called in his solicitor and drawn up a new will leaving everything to Bess on the condition that she stay with him throughout his life.

  It was a condition easy to meet, for his doctors had long since told him he was a dying man and “living on borrowed time” and Bess met it gladly—not for what she could gain but because she had swiftly developed an affection for the old man. She liked his pleasant, gruff ways and his sly little jokes and the brave way he met his often painful heart condition. He was dying by inches—but Bess, with her sweet staunch ways and her gaiety, made those inches the best of all the long miles he had traveled in his hectic life. She brushed aside his halfhearted offer to try and find a husband for her, told him she was well enough as she was, and settled down to life on Idlewild plantation as if she’d been born there.

  Now, standing on the top step, she smiled down at Lucifer, the big, handsomely furred, copper-colored cat who’d escaped over a ship’s side in the harbor, swum to shore, and strolled inland until he had found a plantation to his liking. That plantation was Idlewild, which had seemed to offer the best selection of feminine feline fur in the locality—and a shortage of pussycats was why masterful Lucifer had left the sea in the first place; he had diligently roamed the ship and to his disgust had never found a single one! He had arrived at Idlewild pawsore and tired and had frightened immediately at the sight of a beautiful long-haired tabby sitting atop one of the stone gateposts with her wide fluffy tail draped over the edge. She had stretched luxuriously, displaying her charms, and Lucifer had paused to watch appreciatively. With a long green look at Lucifer, she had leaped down from the gatepost and strolled toward the house, tail waving.

  Lucifer had followed, limping on a paw that had picked up a thorn.

  She had led him straight to her dish and Bess had found him there, sitting expectantly beside the empty dish, when she brought out a pitcher of milk to feed the cat.

  “Annabel,” she’d chuckled, “You’ve brought a friend home to dinner!”

  By nightfall Lucifer had had the thorn gently removed from his paw by Bess, he had washed the dust from his fur, and his acquaintance with Annabel had reached the yowling stage.

  Now, seeing Bess come out of the house, he had hurried forward to greet her. He rubbed against her black mourning skirts, left a dusting of copper hairs, for he was shedding in the island heat, arched his back as she petted him and then curled up beside a white pillar and began to give himself his morning bath with an energetic pink tongue. Bess’s affectionate gaze went from Lucifer to the box in one corner of the veranda from which a loud purring rose and now a gray tabby cat lifted her head to peer at Bess over the box’s edge. She gave Bess a sleepy green-eyed look, yawned and went back to washing her kittens—she hadn’t been getting enough sleep since they were born. Bess chuckled. Lucifer had not been idle since his arrival—and he and Annabel did not spend all their time mousing. The fluffy copper-toned tabby kittens were proof enough of that.

  With a feeling of deep content, Bess let her long black veil fall across her forehead, went down the steps and allowed herself to be handed into her coach, and set out for Bridgetown with its splendid harbor. Bess would much rather have ridden one of the spirited horses in her stable to Bridgetown, but she had thought it more dignified for one in mourning to travel by coach. Her uncle, she knew, would have liked it that way, for he had been basically a very proper man. Bess was proper, too, but now as she felt her bones almost rattle as the coach jolted along the rutted road, she half regretted her decision.

  The new factor of Mill Oak plantation had been up since before dawn. He had supervised the driving of several carts into Bridgetown—heavy carts, for Robert Milliken had ordered several stone mantels and other improvements for his plantation from England, and Stephen Linnington, who had disembarked but yesterday and seen his new quarters by candlelight only, had been roused on this, his first day as a factor, by a white bondservant who had tersely informed him that the mantels and other goods awaited unloading from the ship and hauling to Mill Oak.

  Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Stephen had stumbled from his narrow uncomfortable bed and swiftly gotten into his breeches. Hardly had he gulped a hasty breakfast before his horse was brought round and he threw a leg over an unfamiliar saddle. The horse was not much to look at, young and very skittish, for Robert Milliken had no intention of trusting his best stock to a new man, and Stephen found his work cut out for him to keep the mare from shying and bolting at every bush or bird. Once at the dock he worked grimly, supervising the reloading of this heavy yet delicate stuff that had been placed into his keeping. By midmorning the goods were all loaded onto Mill Oak wagons and Stephen was on his way back to the plantation, wearily jollying along a mare who had the bit in her teeth and was rolling her eyes wildly so that the whites showed as she pawed and neighed—just as if she had never seen this road before rather than having traversed it a few short hours before.

  The creaking of the wagons, the whips cracking above the draft horses’ heads, and the general shouting among the men kept Stephe
n from hearing the approaching coach until it was upon him, coming into sight suddenly around a blind turn beneath the thick trees whose foliage met overhead.

  True to form, the mare reared up, this time unseating her surprised master, who fell to the road and was struck by a wheel of the careening coach.

  Bess Duveen, thrown almost on her head as the coach came to a lurching halt, and aware that they had struck something, from the curses and bawling shouts now rising from the road, stuck her head out the window.

  What she saw almost stopped her heart.

  A tall man in worn russet clothing, his copper hair and angry green eyes unmistakable and seared into her memory, was trying to struggle up from the dust of the road and cursing as he did so.

  Bess threw back her long black veil.

  “Stephen,” she called haltingly. “Stephen—can this really be you?”

  Wincing from the pain in his leg and suddenly throwing his weight upon the driver who had sprung down from a wagon to support him, Stephen looked up at the sound of that familiar voice. All expression was wiped from his countenance as he found himself looking up into Bess Duveen’s sweet anxious face.

  “Surely I’ve misplaced myself,” he muttered. “This isn’t the Scillies!”

  “Stephen, it is you.” Bess had the coach door open and was being helped down into the road by her footman. “But we thought you dead!”

  “So did many people,” agreed Stephen laconically. “But I’ve risen.” He sighed.

  Bess’s heart was in her gray velvet eyes. “And now to think, I’ve nearly killed you!” she cried. “Can you stand on that leg? Or is it broken?”

  Stephen tested the leg ruefully. “Broken, I’m afraid, Bess.” She bit her lip, then turned to her coachman, taking charge not as sweet Bess Duveen but as the competent mistress of a great plantation. “Unharness the horses,” she instructed. “You, Jack, ride for the doctor—the leg shall be set here in this very place. I’ll not have Stephen carted about, injuring it worse. And you, Simon—” this to the footman—“ride back to the house and bring a wagon with a mattress upon it and pillows—and bring a flask of brandy.” She turned to Stephen. “’Tis not so far to Idlewild and Doctor Stapleton lives this side of Bridgetown, but a little way farther along this road. Now make him comfortable.” This to the men who had clambered down from Stephen’s wagons and now shuffled their feet in the road.