Sweet Savage Eden

by Heather Graham

  Wordlessly he pushed himself from her and rose. He straightened his breeches. She lay still, dead still, spent and dazed.

  Jamie stared at her for one minute. She did not meet his eyes but stared at the canopy above her. He swore softly, vehemently, then turned from her. She heard him sweep up his hat and his doublet from his desk, and then his long strides bore him swiftly across the room. The door slammed in his wake.

  She lay there a long, long time. She heard the coach departing below, and she heard the grooms and the milkmaids and the servants as they set about the business of the day.

  She realized that she lay in dishevelment and shame, her shift and petticoats pushed up high to her waits, the sheets beneath her twisted and dislodged. Her limbs were so sore, she scarcely could move them. She drew them together, and she rolled over, and despite the June day, she began to shiver. He was gone, she thought dully. He was gone, and it would be many months before she saw him again.

  She could run away, she thought, but she did not want to. She liked being Lady Cameron; she needed to be Lady Cameron.

  No matter what it entailed.

  She would not be on the ship, the Sweet Eden, she decided. He could rage and protest and swear and thunder all he liked, but he would be three months away on another continent. She would not go; that was all there was to it. She would not go.

  She shivered, remembering his conversation with Hornby. She would be dragged aboard the ship if she did not walk upon it. Not if they couldn’t find her, not if she disappeared …

  She lay there miserably with her arms curled about her chest, cold, her teeth chattering, despite the June sunlight streaming in. As time passed, she realized that she would be on the ship. Even across the vast distance of time and an ocean, she hadn’t quite the nerve to defy him. He would hunt her down, she was certain, and he would find her.

  Three days later, Robert and Lenore were duly married. Jassy sat in misery through the ceremony, then smiled brightly for them both.

  That night she lay awake a long, long time, tossing and turning. As dawn came, she realized with horror that she missed her husband beside her. She missed the startling rapture he had taught her to feel. She missed the strength of his arms.

  The next morning, she was summoned to her brother’s house. Jane was in labor. After fourteen hours, a beautiful little girl was born. Jassy came home exhausted, but happy.

  A week later her happiness faded when morning sickness began to plague her. She lay in bed in terror, looking about her beautiful room. It would be one thing to bear a babe here.…

  But hers would be born in the wilderness, with savages.

  She hated Jamie fiercely.

  But still, she was missing him. Every bit as passionately.

  XI

  Their crossing was one of the fiercest Jamie had ever endured. Storms beset them across the Atlantic and continued to plague them as they neared the American coastline. Heavy crosscurrents pressed the flagship of his four-pinnace fleet, the Hawk, ever northward. Jamie stood with Captain Raskin at the bow, his glass in his hand as he observed the distant shore beneath a gray day and a dripping rain.

  “ ’Tis what happened to the Separatists, the ‘Pilgrims’ who left London late last summer,” Captain Raskin said morosely. “They meant to settle somewhere southward, in the land chartered as North Virginia. But the currents swept them northward to the point that John Smith had drawn as Plymouth on his map, and there they stayed.”

  Jamie cast Raskin a quick stare. He wouldn’t have minded a side trip to the Puritan community under normal circumstances. He would liked to have seen how the men and women of the Plymouth colony were faring now that their first brutal winter was over and they had learned something of survival. In London he had heard that the death toll had been tremendous. He hoped that they were surviving well.

  The death toll in the Jamestown colony and its surrounding hundreds had often been tremendous, he reminded himself. And yet Jamestown had survived thus far, and with the plantations and hundreds arising along the peninsula on the James, the area seemed destined to endure.

  The Pilgrims were escaping religious persecution, while the Jamestown settlers had come for more commercial reasons.

  He had come for the adventure himself—and because his father had deemed it appropriate for a young man of his situation to see the world and seek his place. When he had first seen the land before the starving time of 1609, he had felt its draw. Within the Chesapeake Bay lay hundreds of fine natural harbors. The bay was fertile, and the Indians had proven that the fields were rich. The forests were verdant, and he had thought he had never seen a more natural state of the earth, nor a more beautiful one. The very loneliness, the very wildness of the land had excited him.

  By 1613, he had turned twenty-one and taken over the trust his mother had left him. Wise investments, backing hardworking London merchants, had tripled his income. He had invested in the ships then, and his little fleet had carefully traveled the Caribbean, avoiding the Spaniards, who liked to claim the whole of the New World, and moving onward to the Bermuda colony and then back to England again.

  He needed no more commerical gain. He was well set for life, and he had built his beautiful home in England. He didn’t know why he felt the obsession to build here in Virginia. It was as if the land was a comely mistress, a tart who flirted and laughed and seduced, and in the end, would have her way. Like a woman, the land was unpredictable. To reach it, one challenged dangerous shoals. And once upon it, a man faced starvation and the hazards of hurricanes and Indians’ arrows and knives. But to Jamie Cameron the rewards were endless. To touch the land, to build upon it, to create a new world. He could not deny the fascination. It was like something that stirred in his blood, ever driving him. It was like the passion and obsession that had seized him when he had first seen Jasmine.…

  “Let’s move inward and anchor for the evening,” Jamie said. He handed the glass to Captain Raskin. “I don’t want to lose a month’s time by being forced northward. My wife will be arriving by the start of fall, and there are things that I would have prepared.”

  “Aye, aye, milord!” Captain Raskin said, and he called out orders to his men.

  Jamie stood on deck while the sails were furled against the treacherous power of the wind of the dreary gray day. Though his cloth was finer, his clothing that day was much like that which the sailors wore: loose breeches and a simple jerkin of tough leather. He was known to take the wheel of his own ships, and to pitch in with the men when a heavy wind threatened, or when any decisive, demanding change of course was commanded. He liked to sail. He liked the wind and the tempest of the sea. One of his mistresses had told him once that he was hot-blooded, that he loved anything that demanded challenge or fever or high passion. He wondered idly if it was true.

  He watched as the mainsail came down, then he turned away and headed toward the aft, and his cabin, which rode high above the waterline and was graced starboard and port with paned windows and heavy damask drapes. It was an elegant cabin with a velvet interior. There was a cherrywood desk and a big bunk and a wardrobe, and all were well nailed into the floorboards against the whims of the waves.

  The difficulty with it now was that he sailed alone.

  Inside the cabin, he drew open a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He swallowed some, plopped down upon his bunk, and closed his eyes.

  He should have made her come with him, he thought, and wondered why he had not commanded her to do so.

  He had married her under false circumstances, he mused. He had known from the beginning that he was determined to come here, and that was why he had determined to take a wife. For the first time he had been seized with the concept of destiny, of future years and future generations. This was where he wanted to build, and this was where he wanted to raise a family. He wanted to see his sons cutting down the forest, and he wanted to see the day when a fine brick government house might rise in the wilds. In a hundred years when Virginia flo
urished, he wanted his grandsons to be a part of it, a part of the founding of the New World.

  He swallowed again on the whiskey, and he winced against the burning sensation that trailed down his throat. He should have made her come with him. He wanted her, now, beside him. Perhaps she would not have been so dismayed by the savage rawness of the new community if she had accustomed herself to life with him upon the ship. Perhaps she would have believed that they could one day create a home as elegant as the cabin. Perhaps he could have inflamed her with his own enthusiasm and passion for the land.

  He swallowed again upon the whiskey, and the fire of it all seized him, and he gritted his teeth and shuddered. He had believed in the promise in her eyes, and at last he had discovered that there was, indeed, a steaming sensuality that lay beneath the genteel airs with which she had cloaked herself. He had married her because he had wanted her—and more. He had married her because of the fire and spirit with which she had challenged him that very first night at the Crossroads; he had married her for the very sizzle of her hatred. He had married her because he had longed to take her between his two hands and force her to turn around and see him, to tame her, to live a life in a raw Eden with a savage passion and a never-ending flame of life and desire.…

  He had married her, he admitted bitterly to himself at last, because he had fallen in love with her.

  He swallowed down more of the whiskey, and he wondered if he hadn’t been wrong to force so much upon her. Perhaps he could have won her heart in a more gentle fashion. He remembered that last time between them with a surge of shame, for she had so seared his temper that his violence had surpassed all tenderness and care. He could remember her now … the sight of her sprawling in the tangle of covers upon the bed was forever etched in his mind. She had never seemed more vulnerable to him, more soft and fragile and feminine, her hair splayed in soft, golden tendrils and tangles across the pillow, her eyes so wide open and glazed.…

  He had touched her at long last. He had grown weary of seeking a response from her. He had believed that he had been wrong, that he had indeed been a fool. That he had married a cunning little wench with no warmth, no heart, no soul whatsoever. That he had doomed them both to a life of bitterness and hatred.

  And then had come their last night together, when she had come alive, like kindling set to a sudden flame, like a fierce blaze raging through a forest. He had found the passion within her; he had discovered that the warmth, indeed, existed. And in the aftermath of his violence and fury, she had met him again in a rage of desire, and remembering her, even now, locked him in an anguish of longing once again. She detested him still. But he had at least discovered that her blood ran as hot as his. He twisted and hardened his jaw, and he thought of the eager young ladies, the daughters of dukes and earls, who had batted their lashes his way, and he thought of the eager mamas who had longed to wed their girls to the Duke of Carlyle’s third son. Women had teased his senses before, and he’d known many of them. But none of them had so swept into his heart as the one he had married, the bastard waif who had despised and defied him at every turn. It was ironic and painful to love her. He, the proud Lord Cameron, brought low by the waif.

  He laughed aloud, and the sound was dry. They were cast to their fate now. Perhaps he never could make her love him, but he would be damned if she would continue to crave another. She could rue the day that she had met him every moment of her life, but she would be his wife in all ways, at all times. That was the bargain, the covenant they had made. Perhaps he could be a bit more like Robert Maxwell and offer her the laughter and the courtesy she so craved. After all, she would spend two to three months upon the Savage Eden with Robert. Robert Maxwell was his friend, but he knew his friend’s faults. Jamie once had saved him from Newgate for indebtedness. He was a charmer, but one with little sense of responsibility. The New World was his last chance at respectability, and Jamie had promised Robert land when his father had sworn that he had washed his hands of his son and his careless ways.

  He tensed, remembering the time he had come upon the two locked in an embrace. She would not deceive him now. Surely even she would not go so far. Still, the thought plagued him, as it had a number of times. The pinnace was not so large. Robert would be aboard ship with his own wife, and certainly Jassy would be in Elizabeth’s company.

  He rolled over, clenching his teeth. He had seen passion in her; he had never known her laughter. An ugly vision reared its head, of his wife riding upon his best friend, her breasts firm and beautiful and dancing above him as her eyes shimmered and her mouth curved with laughter. Rage came so sharply to his mind that he nearly blacked out with it, and then it subsided. Robert was his friend, and in his debt, and though he might covet Jassy, he would not touch her. Jamie knew it. And still, the vision haunted him. He had found her passion; he had never seen her laughter. Not for him.

  Maybe he could try to woo her. Maybe he could attempt a more tender approach. If he could just dispel the haunting image and the anger, he could give the laughter a chance.

  There was a fierce pounding upon his cabin door. “What is it?” he said.

  Captain Raskin, with a broad smile splitting his bewhiskered mouth, entered. “The wind, milord! The wind turns in our favor!”

  Jamie leapt up, corking the whiskey bottle and slamming it down upon his desk. He followed Captain Raskin out. Indeed, the wind was in their favor. It had picked up from the northeast, and it would drive them homeward.

  Homeward. Aye, the Carlyle Hundred was his home.

  Three weeks later they came upon the natural harbor of the hundred. From the deck of the ship Jamie stared toward land, and his heart swelled with pride and pleasure. When he had left last fall, his plans had been drawn and his instructions clearly set out, but little had stood then, except for the wall and the palisade and the few small houses where the farmers and laborers had lived, the kiln, the chapel, and the storehouse.

  Now, as he looked, the homes had already spilled beyond the palisade. The cannons he had sent in the spring were mounted upon the wooden palisade in four places, three facing inland and one facing the sea. Though he doubted that the Spaniards would invade this late in the game, it seemed only wise to be prepared. The fields to the right and left of the hundred center had been cleared. Cattle and sheep and goats grazed close to the coast, while farther inland, he could see the summer growth of tobacco and corn and grain. Dead center of the palisade, he could see his own home.

  Once it had been a hastily constructed creation of logs and wattle and daub. Now, though the materials remained much the same, the house had grown. Though there were no glass panes for them, Jamie could see that the windows he had drawn had been cut and completed, and that a second story had been added to the structure, and two long els on either side.

  “She’s grown, eh, milord?” Captain Raskin said.

  “Aye, and finely so!” Jamie replied. “Captain, let’s get her berthed, then see to the unloading of the vessel. Give the sailors double rations. We’ve come home again, and I’m eager to touch foot upon the soil!”

  Twenty minutes later the pinnace had been drawn to her deepwater dock. Before the slips were tied, Jamie leapt onto the wooden dock and strode toward its end. It was a hot day, with the sun fiercely shining down, and it was late summer and glorious. At the end of the dock he met with Sir William Tybalt, sergeant at arms of the ten trained fighting men he had in his employ, and governor of the community in Jamie’s absence. They were old friends, having fought Indians together as lads, and an occasional Spaniard upon the sea. William rode a bay gelding and led a mount for Jamie. William dismounted and greeted Jamie with a firm handshake, then the two men mounted together and rode toward the palisade.

  “How fare things here?” Jamie asked.

  “Well!” William assured him with a broad grin. He was a man of thirty years with dark brown eyes and sandy hair and a quick grin. Like Jamie, he had found a fascination with the land. He had not cared for the Jamestown community
life itself, with its ever-changing authority, but he had well liked Jamie’s determination to build a new hundred.

  William grinned. “We are working diligently here, and I think that we will have plenty of grain for the winter ahead. And young Tom Lane has become an expert marksman, and brings down wild turkeys with little effort. We’ve carefully planted food and gardens as well as tobacco, and still the tobacco does well. Come, let’s hurry onward, for the men have arranged a display of arms, Father Steven is eager to greet you, and when the good father is gone, I’ve arranged a surprise for you myself.”

  They came before the palisade. The gates were open, for no danger threatened, and the people came and went. The wives of the laborers, hurrying along footpaths with their water buckets or laundry or produce, stopped to greet him, bowing low, and hailing him with true enthusiasm. He responded to all of them with nods and a deep smile as he rode into the palisade and saw that the soldiers were lined up before his house, dressed in their steel helmets and half-armor, front- and backplates, and prepared for an exercise with their pikes. William rode to the end of the line of men and began to shout out his commands. The men assembled impenetrable formations with their sharp, long shafts, went at ease, and grouped formation again. Jamie applauded their efforts, and William excused them from their ranks. Jamie informed them all that there would be a feast that night; they would slay one of the huge hogs that had come with him on the ship and roast the pork over a spit throughout the afternoon. Cheers went up, and he was glad of it.

  “There’s some business to attend to,” William cautioned him. “A few cases on which we’ve awaited your judgment.”

  “It will wait until I’ve seen the house,” Jamie told him. Dismounting from his horse, he cast the reins down and hurried the few steps to the heavy wooden door and pushed it open.