by Jill Jones
“Maram. The first Healer of Keinadraig. She must have lost her family, too. They say the plague took nearly everyone.” She raised her eyes and met his gaze. “There are many kinds of plague, aren’t there, Jack?” At last he saw tears shining in her eyes.
“Yes,” he replied softly.
“Disease was Maram’s plague. Fear was ours,” she continued. “Ninian did what she did because she was afraid. As was Alyn. Even…”
The cup crashed to the floor, and Keely covered her face with her hands. “Even Genny. She ran away because she was afraid.” The tears arrived at last, and Jack gently eased Keely back into his arms, where he held her and rocked her and let her cry.
“You never have to be afraid again,” he said. “It’s over. And I’m here for you…if you want me. I’ll be here forever, unless you ask me to go.”
He felt her arms tighten around him. “Ye must na make promises like that, Jack,” she scolded between sobs. “I know ye can na keep them. Ye have a life of your own, and I can na lean on ye. I must make a new life on my own.”
“I want you to lean on me, at least until you are strong again, Keely. I want to help you.” He raised her head and looked into the gray-green turbulence of her eyes. “Please, let me help you, Keely. I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”
Her eyes widened as he lowered his head, then he saw them close as she leaned into him and parted her lips. She tasted of salty tears and tea, and it was the sweetest taste Jack had ever sampled. He wanted her to lean on him, not just for now, or until she was strong again, but forever.
Keely was not sure she’d heard correctly as she allowed herself to be surrounded by the protective strength of Jack’s arms. She had heard him say he wanted to help her and repeat again that he would be there for her. But this time, he’d used some new words. Words like “forever.” And “I love you.”
How she wanted to believe him. How she wanted to think he loved her and would always be there for her. But she was not sure she could ever trust again. She’d trusted Ninian above all others, as the Healer, as a mother, as a friend. She’d trusted Alyn, her own mother’s brother. She’d trusted the laws of Keinadraig, and the legend of the Dragon.
And they’d all betrayed her.
Could she trust anyone ever again?
But there was something in Jack’s kiss, some fierce, unnamable presence that bespoke the truth behind his promises. She wanted to believe him, with all her heart, because deep inside, she believed that she loved him, too. But love was another of those things that was very new to her, and she was not sure if she could even trust her own heart.
“Oh, Jack,” she murmured, drawing away from him and leaning her forehead against his chest. “I’m still so addled.”
“It’s okay, Keely,” he said, running his fingertips up and down her spine in a reassuring way. “You’ve a right to be addled. You’ve been through a lot. It’s going to take some time. We’ll just take it easy, one step at a time. Okay?”
She liked that word. Forcing a smile, she raised her head. “Okay.”
Keely allowed Jack to encourage her to eat a few bites of the ample breakfast that was set before her, and she felt some of her strength returning. She took a hot shower, and afterward donned a soft knitted shirt he loaned her to sleep in. A T-shirt, he called it. How was it, she wondered in rather dazed amusement, that she never seemed to have anything to wear whenever she left the island with Jack?
He’d virtually ordered her to take a nap, and in the bedroom, she saw that he had turned down the covers of one of the two large beds. She sighed. How inviting it looked. She was weary clear to her toenails. But during the course of her bath, she’d thought about what Jack had said, what he’d told her all along, that he would be there for her. She had considered her own questions of trust. Could she trust him? Aye, she could. He’d said he’d be there for her, and he had been. He had found a way to come to her at a time when all others had forsaken her. He had risked his life for her.
And just now, Jack Knight, the stranger, had told her he loved her. That he didn’t want to lose her. What did that mean? She would not be able to sleep until she spoke with him again.
She tiptoed into the sitting room where Jack sat slouched in a chair. He looked as if he were dozing, and she knew he must be as tired as she was. She hesitated, not wanting to wake him, but he heard her footsteps and turned to her. Keely’s heart skipped several beats as his gaze skimmed very slowly from her head to her toes and back again.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Jack, there’s something…we need to talk about.”
He gave her a worried frown and stood up. “I’m listening.”
Keely took a hesitant step toward him. “‘Tis about what ye said just a bit ago. Ye said…ye said ye loved me.” Her face grew warm at this difficult subject, but she was determined to see this through. “Ye said ye did na want t’ lose me. What…what did ye mean?”
The worried look melted away from Jack’s face and was replaced by a slow smile that warmed his eyes and her heart. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms to her.
She went to him, and together they dropped into the overstuffed armchair where Jack had been sitting. She curled into his lap, inhaling his scent and exploring the texture of his stubble of a beard with her fingertips. He grasped her hand and kissed those fingertips. “Better not do that just now,” he murmured. “Not if you want to talk.”
Keely wanted to talk, but the feel of Jack’s body molded against hers made her want something else as well. Still, she remembered how she had felt when she had awakened after making love with Jack to find him gone. How afraid she had been that he had only obliged her curiosity toward things that happen between men and women. She no longer thought that, but she must know his true feelings for her. It would be too easy for her to become dependent on him now, only to be hurt again when he moved on with his life.
“What I meant,” he spoke again, touching her chin lightly, “was what I said. I love you. I think I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you.”
Her heartbeat quickened at his words. “What is this thing…love?” she asked, truly wanting to know. Keely had never felt like this toward anyone in her entire life. She had no reference point to describe the tenderness in her heart and the longing in her body and soul for the stranger who had come so unexpectedly into her life.
Jack looked at her long and thoughtfully, and she wondered if he was aware that he was tracing tiny circles with his finger on the bare skin of her thigh. “Love. I’m not sure I know what love is,” he said at last, and cleared his throat. “Not this kind of love. I’ve never been in love like this before. All I know is that when I am with you, I feel…filled up. I’ve never had anyone who gave my life so much meaning. When you left, I was devastated. If anything had happened to you…” He broke off and kissed her with all the fire and passion that she’d heard behind his words.
And her questions were answered.
Within his kiss, Keely let go of the betrayal and confusion and heartbreak that had torn her world apart. She allowed herself to trust her feelings, and allowed Jack to teach her about a kind of love she never knew existed. Where once she’d faced a chasm of fear and darkness, she now was consumed by light and love. Where once there had been lies, now there was truth. Truth, and love, and hope, and a whole new world, all introduced to her by a stranger.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Later that afternoon, Jack’s cell phone rang, awakening him from the depths of a love-sated slumber. He stirred, trying not to disturb Keely, whose body lay intimately entwined with his.
“Hello.” Jack tried not to sound irritable, but his brain was still half asleep, and his body longed to return to hers.
“Sorry to waken you,” Sandringham said, “but I need you both over here as soon as possible. You are not going to believe what we’ve found.”
Although the inspector’s voice was edged with excitement, Jack
was uneasy. What now?
“We can be ready in twenty minutes,” he said.
“I’ll send a boat.”
Keely rolled over and gazed up at him lazily, not bothering to cover the creamy expanse of her leg that was exposed from the hip to the toes. “Who was that?”
Fresh from sleep, her face flushed with desire, her lips rosy and beckoning, Keely had never looked more beautiful. Their lovemaking had been both tender and torrid, and neither had wanted to give it up until pure physical exhaustion temporarily forbade them more pleasure. For Jack, however, holding her in his arms as they drifted off to sleep had been a pleasure unto itself. Wrapping his body around hers, he felt at last he could protect her.
But Sandringham had just stolen away that illusion. He had ordered Keely to return to Keinadraig. God, how Jack hated to drag her back to that place. At least this time, she would not be alone.
He saw the distress in her eyes when he told her what they must do. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Hopefully this will be the last of it.” But he knew it would not be. Keely would be questioned now and called to testify later. God forbid if the media got hold of her…
She rose from their bed without a word and slipped back into her clothes, now stiff from dried salt water. Jack wished he’d had the presence of mind to ask Maggie Evans to find something else for her in a nearby store and silently promised that soon Keely would get the shopping spree of her life.
Her silence worried him, and he stopped before opening the door to their room. “You don’t have to go,” he told her. “I can explain to Sandringham…”
“I have to go, Jack.” She smiled at him. “Do na worry. I feel better now. I can do this, with ye by my side.”
He took her hand and squeezed it hard. “You couldn’t pry me away.”
Inspector Sandringham looked tired as he greeted them on the quay, and Jack gathered he had not slept for the past day and a half. “Thank you for coming, Miss Cochrane,” he said, then turned and extended his hand to Jack. “And you, Mr. Knight.”
“What have you got?” Jack was anxious to get this over with. He would be glad when they could go back to London.
“Follow me.”
He led them to the Council office, where he showed Keely a large, ledger-style book. “Have you ever seen this before?”
She stepped closer to where it lay on Alyn’s desk and touched it lightly. “No,” she said after a moment. She turned to the inspector. “What is it?”
“A record of some rather interesting transactions that have taken place on Keinadraig.”
“Transactions?” She furrowed her brow. “What kind of transactions?”
“Smuggling.”
Jack could not have been more astounded if he’d said tourism. “Smuggling! You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Seems there’s been an active trade here for a long, long time. Look at this.” He turned to the first entry. It was written in a spidery handwriting in ink that had faded to a pale brown. It was dated 1588. “The year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada,” he said, sounding awed. “Seems French brandy was the fancy of folks in those times.” He pointed to a long list of goods, most of it numbered kegs of brandy. “As best we can tell, the caves of Keinadraig were used to warehouse goods coming in from the Continent until they could be moved inland and disposed of. Historically, Cornwall has been notorious for this sort of thing. But given the history of Keinadraig…” His voice trailed away, and he shook his head in disbelief.
Neither could Keely grasp what he was telling her. “Are ye saying the Dragoners dealt in stolen goods in those days?”
Sandringham looked at her patiently but not unkindly. “In those days, Miss Cochrane, and these.”
“What?” Keely glanced uneasily at Jack, and he took her hand.
The inspector turned to the last entry marked in the old ledger. It was dated the current month and year, and it recorded the transport of four crates of stolen goods from Keinadraig to Penzance, where they were entrusted to Kevin Spearman. The items were listed in detail and included jewels, antiques, artifacts, and art pieces.
“This can na be!” Keely exclaimed. And then she covered her mouth with her hands. “Ah, but, mayhap…”
“What is it, Miss Cochrane?” Sandringham urged her to finish her sentence.
Keely looked bewildered as she fought to understand this new information. “When I was held captive in Penzance, they took me through a large warehouse, filled with boxes and crates. The men who kidnapped me said a curious thing as they were leaving. Mr. Spearman said something about a vow of silence, and one of the men told him, ‘we’ve been doing business for years. We wouldn’t want to…to bugger it up now.”
Keely twisted her nose up at the word “bugger.” “What does that mean?”
Sandringham laughed. “It means to ruin things. I suspect Spearman uses those men to fence the stolen goods in London and other parts of the country. It would make sense for him to call on his underworld contacts to find you and kidnap you.”
“My uncle killed Genevieve for breaking the laws of Keinadraig,” Keely said thoughtfully, “and yet it seems to me those laws were broken long ago when the Dragoners became smugglers.” She looked at Jack, and he saw bewilderment turn to anger. “There must have been many strangers come to Keinadraig bringing their stolen goods. But how did the Keepers manage to hide what was going on from the rest of us? This island is small.”
Sandringham went to the door of a closet in the hallway. “Come. I’ll show you.”
Would the deception never end? Keely had passed by the door Sandringham now opened for her hundreds of times when she’d visited her uncle in the Council office. She’d fetched cleaning supplies from the closet behind it and arranged stores of dry meal and flour there.
But she’d never suspected there was another door, hidden behind a false wall.
“Our men found it from the other side,” the inspector explained. “They searched the caves and discovered an extensive labyrinth of tunnels under the island. Want to take a look?”
Keely and Jack followed him down the damp stone stairway. The air was cool and dank, sharp with the smell of the ocean. The scent raised a memory of her terrifying ordeal and sent a shiver down Keely’s spine. The police team had placed electric lighting on poles at intervals, but Keely was uneasy in the tomblike atmosphere.
“Most Dragoners probably don’t know it,” Sandringham said as they crept along, “but they are actually quite wealthy, if one overlooks the fact that their wealth is in stolen goods. The owners, though, have long since passed away.”
“What are you talking about?” Keely asked. The Dragoners had always enjoyed sufficient income from the trade of their fish to provide food for the table and clothes on their backs. But wealth was unknown to them.
“Take a look.” He guided them into a small chamber off the main tunnel, and Keely stared in astonishment at chests filled with gold coins that gleamed in the artificial light.
“Spanish gold, no doubt,” said the inspector, dipping his hand into the treasure in one ancient wooden crate and letting the coins trickle through his fingers back into the stash. “Been here for a long, long time. A little hard to fence these days, unless it’s melted down and made into something else. I have sent samples to the lab to determine exactly what it is we have here.”
“Good God!” Jack exclaimed, looking around at five more chests filled with similar treasure. “Is this for real?”
Keely just shook her head. “I can na believe this.”
“Oh, there’s more,” Sandringham said, almost gleefully. He led them into yet another chamber wherein were stashed hundreds of rifles and boxes of ammunition. “Stolen from the British Army in World War II,” he said. “With the ammo, it’d be worth quite a bit to some third world commando or terrorist organization.” He lifted the lid on another old chest, revealing a cache of odd antique firearms, mostly pistols.
“Your uncle was a very neat Keeper,” remarked the inspec
tor. “Everything is stored according to some kind of order and carefully recorded in that ledger upstairs. We suspect the gun he used in London came from here, as well as the pistol the girl used.”
Keely leaned into Jack, who slipped his arms around her. She was overwhelmed at the depth and the duration of the lies of Keinadraig. “We never knew…” she muttered.
Sandringham eyed her shrewdly. “I must be certain of that, Miss Cochrane. That you never knew about any of this. We are interviewing everyone in the village.”
Keely refused to be offended. The man was only doing his job. “I never knew that my uncle had been involved in killing anyone,” she stated. “I never knew about the smuggling. I never knew the secret tunnel existed. Nor do I believe most other Dragoners knew any of this.”
“But the woman called Ninian knew?”
Moisture sprang to her eyes at the sound of Ninian’s name. “Yes,” Keely said, “I believe now that she knew about all of this. And somehow, Erica found out. She probably overheard the quarrel between Ninian and Genevieve. She was always snooping, too,” she added, recalling the day she’d caught Erica administering the kiss of the Dragon to her doll.
“It must have been Erica singing in the caves that day,” Jack mused. “She must have come through the tunnels.”
“Aye,” Keely agreed, believing it quite possible that Erica might have tried to kill Jack. Thinking back on the incident, Keely was surprised that Erica hadn’t tried to drag Jack’s unconscious body to the pit and dispose of him on the spot. The idea caused the hair to rise on the back of her neck.
“Who else would have known about the smuggling?” the policeman continued.
Keely gave it thorough consideration. “Nobody on the island,” she answered at last. “I think it was a tightly held secret between Alyn and Ninian. Maybe Ninian told Genny, to prepare her to become healer. And then she refused…Mayhap that’s why they felt compelled to kill her. Erica said they were afraid Genny would talk and give away the secrets of Keinadraig. I thought she meant that Genny would go to the police with information that people like Timothy Jenkyns had been killed for breaking the laws of the Dragon. But now, I think it was because they wanted no one to know about…about all this,” she finished, gesturing toward the stolen goods.