Bold Breathless Love

by Valerie Sherwood

  And so it happened that Captain Middler of the Annabelle was, at the urging of his Dutch friend, riding to ldlewild plantation on Barbados this day to deliver a letter from Imogene.

  Bess, who had not seen Stephen yet this morning, saw the captain riding in when she looked out an upstairs window and guessed his mission, for he had a nautical look about him. Letters were her only ties with home and family—and they arrived infrequently. Each one was an occasion!

  Bess hurried downstairs to receive her mail from his hand. Disappointed to hear that the letter was not from the Scillies, Bess put the letter aside, offered the stout captain a tall cool drink and sat down to talk to him. When Stephen came by, attracted by their voices, he found Bess entertaining a strange ship captain on the long veranda. He gave her a keen look and Bess, who had mixed feelings toward her lover just now, promptly suggested that Stephen show Captain Middler about the plantation and bring him back to the house for lunch.

  The captain hesitated. On his voyage to Barbados he had stopped at the port of Philadelphia and there picked up a handsome married lady returning to Barbados after a visit with relatives. The lady had been equally smitten and the voyage under fair skies had been a lightsome affair. As he set out for Idlewild this morning. Captain Middler had observed the lady’s husband supervising the unloading of stores a little way down the dock and little doubted he would be thus occupied all day. Faced with a choice between a pair of welcoming white arms and a yielding white body—or lunch with this tense pair—there was no contest at all. Captain Middler said he would enjoy a brief ride around the plantation but he must regretfully refuse lunch as he had pressing business in Bridgetown.

  Still troubled, Bess watched her copper-haired lover ride away with the stout captain and broke the seal on Imogene’s letter. The very first line evoked a gasp from her and she sank down onto the nearest chair, a tall fan-backed reed chair woven on the island, and read it through twice.

  Bess, I am in deep trouble, Imogene wrote. Georgiana was born in February and Verhulst knows she is not his, but Stephen’s. At first he seemed to accept her, and I even thought that we might make a life together, but now he has become wildly jealous of Georgiana and resents any time I spend with her. He plans to send her to Holland and keep me here. Bess, I cannot bear it. Verhulst is alternately cruel and kind and keeps me tense and afraid. Now he will take Georgiana from me. Three times / have tried to escape downriver and each time he has thwarted me. Next time I will be more careful so that my plans cannot go awry. I believe that he will follow me, Bess, and may even kill the baby if he finds us—he has said he will kill me if I try to escape again—so I am writing this to ask you to receive us in Barbados—if we can get there. I will need a place to recover and make plans, and I promise not to be a burden on you, Bess. Tomorrow I will entrust this letter to a riverboat captain who has called at Wey Gat. Verhulst entertained him at dinner but I was locked in my room; he is afraid to let me speak to people lest they aid me to escape. But I saw this captain from my window and he looks to be a kindly man—and I have heard of him that he speaks English. Tomorrow morning I will find a way to slip down to the pier and somehow manage to give him this letter. Do not write to me, Bess, as Verhulst will only seize the letter and destroy it before / can read it—as he does all my letters. I hope you are happy, Bess, in your new life and only wish that I were there with you instead of here at Wey Gat with a man who hates me.

  There was more but Bess could hardly read it through her tears. She dashed them away and read on, then read it all again.

  When Stephen returned, he found her sitting on the veranda, perfectly composed but with her eyes wide and dark as if she saw visions of hell. She sat so still he was almost afraid to approach her.

  “You have decided—about us?’’ He tried to sound casual but there was fear in his voice—fear that he would lose her, the best woman he had ever known.

  Silently Bess handed him the letter and his face went white as he read it. A child! Imogene had borne his child! And now she was in desperate case because of it.

  He stood tall above her. “You need not have shown me this, Bess,” he said quietly. “I’d have been none the wiser.”

  She looked up at him. “I know—but then I’d have had to live with it.”

  Stephen looked down into those clear gray eyes and for the first time felt he really understood her. And was shamed by the extent of her goodness.

  “Have ye written to tell her I’m alive after all?”

  Bess shook her head. “I neglected to do that,” she said dryly and proudly suppressed the note of heartbreak in her voice. “I thought it could do her no good now to know—but that was when I thought her to be happy with her patroon. She laid her hand gently on his; it was gossamer soft and he ached at the touch. “I know you must go to her, Stephen, for she’s in dire trouble and then there’s the child—your child. But—” Bess gave him a crooked smile, “if you’ve a mind to, after you’ve done what you must, you can come back to me.”

  “I’ll be back, Bess. You can count on it.”

  ‘‘Don’t be so—positive,” she said in a soft slurred voice as he swept her up in his arms. She was remembering Imogene’s bright disastrous beauty.

  His arms tightened. “Oh, Bess,” he sighed. “I do love you. I do.”

  “I know that, Stephen, but once you see her again ..." In all her shattering beauty. Bess’s voice trailed off forlornly. “Go now, Stephen,” she said thickly, pushing him away. “Pack quickly and go to Bridgetown and make your arrangements. Captain Middler said there’s a ship leaving for America in the morning. She’s called the Godspeed.’’

  He gave her an anxious look. “Take care, Bess.”

  “You know I will.”

  He came back after he had packed.

  “Are you taking only what you can carry in your saddlebags?” she asked, startled.

  “Aye,” he nodded. “To convince you I’m coming back to you.”

  She gave him a sad, unbelieving look. “God go with you, Stephen.”

  Stephen gulped. He had never felt so miserable at any leave-taking—not even when he had left Imogene in the Scillies and sailed away. He could hardly believe how calm Bess was.

  She bore her heartbreak well. Back straight, chin high, she stood and fluttered a handkerchief and watched him go, saw him hesitate and turn as if he would come striding back to her. Bess waved a determined good-bye and he gave her a light salute and climbed onto his horse. “I’ll take a groom and send the horse back,” he called.

  Bess nodded. She could not speak right now.

  He said he would come back, but Bess knew. This was good-bye. She could not compete with Imogene. Dark-haired Bess sank into a tall-backed reed chair and watched the spot where Stephen’s tall form had disappeared. She knew in her heart that she would never see him again, for once he found Imogene he would fall under the reckless beauty’s spell once again. And be lost to her forever.

  As the tropical twilight settled over beautiful Barbados, Bess, the stouthearted girl from the Scilly Isles, her hopes crushed, her air castles tumbled to dust, sat alone on the dusky veranda and thought about her future—a future that stretched out bleakly before her. She decided she would stay on Barbados and grow old here at Idlewild, an old maid with her cats and her parrot. She gave a wry look at handsome Lucifer, the ship’s runaway, purring at her ankles and at Annabel and her kittens, spilling out of the box at the end of the veranda, and looked up at a squawk from the beautiful green and gold parrot that had been her uncle’s pride. Cats and a parrot... she already had both.

  The days, the weeks, went by for Bess—and still no word from Stephen.

  But Stephen Linnington was not the only man headed north.

  In Spanish Town, Jamaica, a certain buccaneer captain, strolling through the marketplace with a likely lass on each arm, paused to watch a flight of northern birds winging south overhead down the Great Eastern Flyway to their winter home in South America. They made a wild
sound as they passed over and van Ryker’s gray eyes followed them.

  Hanging on to his right arm, with her dark brown eyes flashing, her tumbling words clacking like castanets, was a girl who was either French or Spanish as the mood seized her, a girl he had met in a tavern last night and taken to bed with him. Van Ryker’s head was inclined toward her as she volubly described all the things she wanted the gallant capitan to buy her.

  On his left, a giggling little red-haired whore who had come to Jamaica by way of the London streets, dangled from his arm and entreated him drunkenly to buy her another drink.

  But van Ryker forgot their babble, and the world of Spanish Town spun away from him as a white feather from the flying flock overhead drifted down—like a whisk. ..

  His wide boots came to a sudden halt in the dusty street and both women pouted and tugged at his strong gauntleted arms, urging him forward. But the captain had for a breathless moment gone back in time. He was standing again on the Sea Rover’s swaying moonlit deck beneath the stars, looking deep into the delft blue eyes of a woman—his woman, although she did not know it, the only woman he had ever desired more than he desired his life. And fool that he was, he had given her up.

  Brought back with a thud to Spanish Town, with a diamond-hard blue sky and a brilliant white sun burning down overhead. Captain van Ryker disentangled his gauntleted arms from the curving ones that held him. He smiled down into brown eyes and hazel, pressed some coins into the hand of the London whore and told her to buy herself a royal hangover. She staggered away, laughing. The girl who was sometimes French and sometimes Spanish stood with her hands on her hips, bare feet planted wide apart, and gazed at him malevolently from beneath a thatch of dark lashes. Did this mean she was being abandoned? she demanded. And without her promised shopping spree?

  Van Ryker laughed, and this time it was a boyish, lighthearted laugh, as he tossed her a velvet purse. “Buy yourself all the silks in Spanish Town!” he told her, and gave her a light spank on her handsome rump. “Wear them and think of me!” As he strode away, still laughing, her head was bent, her hair streaming down as she delved into the purse, ooohing and aaahing at how generous the tall buccaneer had been.

  The bright sun beat down on van Ryker’s heavy shock of dark hair, highlighting it with gleaming bronze, and flashed on his white wolfish smile as he walked with a springy step toward his ship, with his sword swinging against his lean thigh. And the spring in his step came from his just-made decision to round up his roistering buccaneers and clear Spanish Town by this evening, to be off with the tide on the Sea Rover. He’d go adventuring again!

  He sought, as he always did, forgetfulness, for the pull of the golden-haired beauty he had left in Dutch New Amsterdam was forever drawing him north.

  And he had vowed he would leave her there with her patroon—to happiness.

  With all the Caribbean to choose from, the Sea Rover beat steadily northward. He’d go to the Carolinas, van Ryker told himself jauntily, and turn around, prowling the islands he knew so well.

  But off the Carolinas the Sea Rover ran into a piece of luck. A storm had driven a Spanish galleass, La Golondrina, onto the Outer Banks and torn her masts and shrouds from her. She was floating adrift, manned by an exhausted crew, when van Ryker sighted her. A little good sailing and the exhaustion of the oarsmen even under the lash brought the Sea Rover in range of a broadside—and La Golondrina's Spanish captain struck her colors without firing a shot. She was out of Barcelona, the boarding crew learned, laden with supplies for the Spanish colonists; she carried wine and leather goods, plate and china, brocades and fine laces and boots of Cordovan leather. Van Ryker smiled; he had captured a prize to be envied.

  As part of his share he selected, somewhat to his own surprise, a big curved-top trunk full of ladies’ clothes, doubtless destined for the wife of some misplaced Spanish grandee, sighing on alien soil for the civilized comforts of Spain. He had chosen the trunk, he told himself, on a whim—these silken things, so dear to feminine hearts, could be distributed to any number of transient loves—he would strew them around the Caribbean to any winsome wench who momentarily caught his fancy. As he lifted out these rich garments one by one, his sleeve caught on something. It was a sheer white whisk and for a moment as he studied it, it twisted his heart.

  Gently he replaced the whisk and went back on deck. There was ransom to be arranged for the Spanish officers, who would accompany him back to his base at Tortuga and be released unhurt when that ransom was received. There was repair work to be done, for La Golondrina drifted like a bird with a broken wing—but van Ryker saw her as she would be, a beautiful vessel again, cutting the seas with her gilded prow, as lovely as the swallow for which she was named. And there was the captured Spanish crew to be quartered—these men would be treated more humanely than English, Dutch, or French prisoners would be if they had the bad luck to be captured by the Spanish. This Spanish crew would not be forced into the galleys or burned as heretics or maimed; they would work out a ransom on Tortuga of some three or four years—and many of them would elect to remain on Tortuga; some would even join buccaneer crews and harry the ships of Spain.

  Uppermost in van Ryker’s mind was the disposition of the galley slaves, those bedraggled men of many countries who had been laboring, chained to the galleass’s oars. Most of them were guilty of nothing more than trespass, sailing in Spanish waters—for, to Spain, the waters of the entire Caribbean were Spanish waters. Van Ryker wondered if there were any buccaneers among them, closed the trunk with its memory-jogging whisk, and went up on deck to inquire.

  The galley slaves, dirty and ragged and with tangled beards—but now freed of their chains and with hope burning in their tired eyes—crowded around him, talking excitedly in many languages. Here and there he spotted a dark Morisco—a Moor living in Spain who had accepted the Spanish faith— perhaps imprisoned for backsliding and worshiping in the old way. And here and there a tall Scandinavian with a pale matted beard and weathered face and the look of a sailor about him—those men he could use on the Sea Rover if they cared to sign on; if not—well, they were seamen, they could sail out of Tortuga on one of the many merchantmen who came in to trade for captured Spanish goods. Van Ryker spoke in French with several of the freed French galley slaves, assuring them they’d see Paris and Marseilles again. And then a blue-eyed, heavyset man stepped forward and asked him in good Holland Dutch:

  “Captain van Ryker, I’ve heard ye’re a Dutchman. My name is Johann Culp. I was born in Leyden but now I call New Amsterdam home. I was fishing in the sea and a storm swept me south in a small boat. I thought to perish in the rough weather but I was picked up by a Spanish vessel and chained to an oar. That was three years ago and my wife and children still don’t know what has happened to me. Captain, where are ye bound?”

  At that moment there was an enormous noise from the sky as a huge flight of wild geese darkened the sky overheard. Van Ryker, in the sudden din, turned his head toward the north from which they were steaming down the Great Eastern Flyway that encompassed Carolina. And suddenly he remembered the floating white feather, so like the little whisk he had just seen in the Spanish trunk, the drifting white feather that had sent him restlessly adventuring again, away from the taverns and brothels of Spanish Town.

  What better place to sell his goods than a wintry New Amsterdam, where there’d be little competition and merchants would be stocking such stuff as these captured goods for holiday buyers? Faith, he’d stayed south long enough!

  “Johann Culp, ye’re in luck,” he laughed, clapping the sturdy fellow on the back. “I’ll even take ye home to New Amsterdam—for that’s where I’m bound!”

  La Golondrina would need extensive work before she could be sailed to Tortuga. Van Ryker towed her to the little town of Port Royal on the Carolina coast and left a crew making the needed repairs. He’d pick her up on his way back—and the Swallow would be added to his little fleet, which now numbered five ships.

  He took on
fresh water and what food he could find and set sail for New Netherland. The birds were flying south, drawn there by some ancient urge, and van Ryker—drawn by an urge even more ancient—was going to sail north. North to New Netherland! North to Imogene!

  He would have been astonished to learn that Stephen Linnington was already there, seeking The Girl with the Whisk.

  Wey Gat,

  New Netherlands, 1658

  CHAPTER 24

  Winter was coming to the Catskills, to the Adirondacks—all along Henry Hudson’s river the trees, in a luminous burst of red and gold and bronze, were enjoying their last brilliance. Indian summer had brought a last breathless hush to the land, and the field mice and chipmunks were making their last forays, storing up winter supplies of nuts in dead trees and holes in the soon-to-be-frozen earth. Save for the brilliantly tinted trout that spawned in November, the fish had all run downstream. By day the air was brisk, by nights it was chill—a cold warning of the snows to come.