Rash Reckless Love, page 14
For now he wanted Branch’s woman—and Branch, whom the world knew as the dangerous buccaneer van Ryker, stood squarely in his way.
Anthony knew he should have tried to keep from Imogene the great strides he had made with the plantation—for any day Branch might appear and whisk her away, and if Imogene was kept in ignorance there might still be the chance to hoodwink Branch. But he had not been able to resist strutting before Imogene, proudly showing her the orchards he had caused to be planted, taking her riding over the cane fields, exhibiting the sugar mill that was going up, the increasing livestock—in short, parading before her his wealth.
The effect on the lady had not been quite what he had hoped. Two afternoons ago had been a fair example.
They had all been sitting on the long veranda, relaxing in the shade with cooling drinks. Imogene, her golden hair bound up and looking pensive in her light yellow calico dress, so suited to the tropics, was leaning back in one of three throne-backed woven reed chairs made on the island. She was toying with a glass of limeade that had been chilled in the spring near the house.
Across from her on the other thronelike reed chairs lounged van Ryker’s half-brothers, Charles and Anthony. Charles was carelessly dressed, for he was of a careless nature and tended to be slovenly in appearance. His shirt was open in the heat and the lace at his throat looked wilted.
Anthony Ryder presented quite a different picture. Faultlessly attired in peach brocade, he seemed not to feel the heat at all. His grooming was meticulous—indeed he might have been seated on a marble bench at the Court of St. James rather than on a reed chair on a hibiscus-covered veranda in Jamaica.
“The furnishings here are lovely,” Imogene was saying frankly. “I had not expected anything half so fine.”
“Almost all are of rosewood,” Anthony admitted proudly. “Some pieces are imported, of course, some things were made locally, for rosewood abounds here—’tis actually mahogany, but of so fine a grade that when the wood is fresh cut it emits an odor of roses. I have ordered carved mahogany doors to be constructed for the entire house.”
“I am sorry van Ryker—Branch—” Imogene tripped apologetically over the name, for she could not rid herself of the habit of calling her husband “van Ryker”—“could not stay to see all that you have done with the plantation. I am sure he would have been delighted.”
“Aye, Tony is a wonder,” agreed Charles gloomily.
Anthony’s chest expanded beneath his peach brocade doublet. “I have done fairly well,” he admitted modestly.
“Better than that!” Imogene’s voice was warm. “Had van Ryk—had Branch stayed overnight and seen it all, I think he might have been persuaded to leave off his voyage and settle down here at last.” There was a wistful note to that, for it was what she most desired.
The brothers exchanged glances.
“Yes, he might,” said Anthony with a quelling look at Charles. “But...I think the time is not yet, Imogene.”
“Oh, how could it not be?” she demanded passionately. “Surely you, as much as I, would urge him to leave off his dangerous profession? For someday if he persists in it some Spanish shot will surely reach him!” A shudder went through her spontaneously at the thought.
“That could happen, I admit it,” murmured Anthony. “But you are not to think on it, Imogene. Branch has always been lucky in such matters—he will surely live a long time.”
“So we are to hope his luck holds,” said Imogene bitterly. “Instead of persuading him to leave off!”
Anthony saw he was losing ground by taking this tack and hastily amended his stance. “Not at all,” he said, and in an attempt to change the subject, “I have just heard from Esme.”
“I didn’t know you’d heard from her!” Charles looked startled.
Anthony gave his brother a silencing look and Charles fell back, realizing there had been no letter, that this was just another ploy of Anthony’s devious mind.
“Esme writes from London,” continued Anthony smoothly. “She begs to be remembered to you, Charles, and hopes your fortunes are improved. But it was what she had to say about Branch that interested me most.”
Imogene, who remembered that part of a letter from Esme that she had snatched from Branch’s table and read, lifted her head. She half expected Esme’s quoted words to be something about Branch’s marriage of which she so strongly disapproved, but Anthony’s next words caused her to lean forward tensely.
“She is moving in lofty circles now, our Esme.” Anthony leaned back, smiling at Imogene. “She had dined at Whitehall only the night before she penned the letter. She has friends well placed at court and she thinks it might be possible to secure a king’s pardon for Branch.” He watched her for effect—it was immediate.
“Oh, that would be wonderful!” breathed Imogene.
And Charles, who was half persuaded by Anthony’s manner that the letter was genuine, demanded, “How? How does she say she can do it?”
“She does not say, Charles. She promises she will write to me at greater length about it.” Anthony was bedazzled by the full power of Imogene’s gaze, now bent upon him. “Perhaps I will be able to give her some guidance,” he added expansively.
“Oh, do write to her,” begged Imogene. “With a king’s pardon, we could live anywhere we liked!”
“Yes, Tony, they could even choose to live in Jamaica,” pointed out Charles gloomily.
“Yes—even in Jamaica!” In her happiness at this startling new development, Imogene missed the gloom in Charles’s tone.
“I should very much like to have you live in Jamaica, Imogene,” said Anthony, and she ascribed the sudden warmth in his voice to his delight at having a cloud removed from the family name, and not to the real reason. She could not know that at that moment Anthony was envisioning her as Branch’s widow, now married to him. Had she known, she would have recoiled from him in horror. As it was, Esme’s suggestion of a pardon for Branch seized upon her mind and she thought of little else, asking Anthony daily if anyone passing upriver had brought him a letter from Esme.
It was her preoccupation with the river—and the river traffic coming and going up and down the Cobre from Spanish Town to Port Royal, that led her to make a terrifying discovery.
From her upstairs window she saw a riverboat approach and saw Anthony down at the landing. Hurrying downstairs, she would have rushed out the front doors but that one of the slave girls was just dumping a large bucket of water over the tiles, preparatory to scrubbing the flow. Imogene elected to go out the back. She found herself in a tangle of uncut undergrowth and was just about to emerge from behind a screen of cascading vines that spilled down from one of the large trees, when she heard something that caused her to stiffen to stillness and listen.
Anthony had been dashing up the slope and on the other side of those vines he had obviously encountered Charles, for she heard Charles’s gasping, “My God, Tony, what is it?” And then Anthony’s low savage growl, and his, “How did ye think to fool me? Out with it!”
“Fool ye? I didn’t!” She could hear Charles writhing in Anthony’s grasp, for the older brother was by far the stronger. “What’re ye talking about, Tony?”
“Did ye not?” A crash of broken branches as Anthony flung Charles from him. “The Reverend Gibbons sends you his regards. He says he forgives you for rowing away and leaving him in the stream but he would appreciate the return of his hat! Why didn’t you kill him as I told you to?”
“But I thought he had perished,” wailed Charles. “I did as you told me, I pretended to a seizure and managed to lurch against him and knock him overboard into the current—and I was sure his boots would drag him down. There was no one about. I just—”
“You just simply left him.” His scorn lashed out at Charles. “You didn’t make sure he was dead.”
“Oh, I was sure of it. The river was terrible there!”
“You came back and told me he was dead,” said Anthony bitterly. “And now there’s this message delivered by Amos Whittel that tells us he is not. He has got himself back to Port Royal and entered the marriage in the record books!”
There was a sniveling sound from Charles. “ ’Twas too much to ask of me, Tony,” he burst out. “I could not strike down a man of the cloth! Not while he floundered in the water! I could not watch, I seized the oars—”
“Damn your niceties, Charles!” Anthony’s voice was laced with fury and with something else—something very like despair. “For you have forced on me a decision I did not want to make. For now there’s no way out—we must kill Imogene—for if Branch dies and she lives, we are still lost. The will leaves everything to her—ye know that.”
“Oh, we cannot—I will not be a party to it, Tony!” Charles’s voice was filled with mounting horror.
“I will think on it.” Anthony sounded tired. “I think I have the answer, Charles. We can neither of us afford to be a party to anything happening to her, for Branch would tear us to pieces in his vengeance. No, we must spirit her to London, Charles, and let Esme deal with her.”
“Ye think she would?” Charles wondered fearfully.
“I know she would,” sighed Anthony. “For Esme’s a good head on her shoulders and she knows we’d share with her if she broke up this marriage for us.”
“True, I do remember she hoodwinked Branch into taking the blame when you killed Vincent Dunworth,” agreed Charles.
“Ye’d best forget that,” said his brother sharply. “All the world believes Branch did it—he signed a confession, if you’ll remember.”
“Esme loves you well,” sighed Charles. “I doubt she’d have done it for me.”
“She was angry enough with Dunworth to kill him herself and well you know it. ’Twas a toss-up who’d kill him—Esme or me!”
“But he was her lover!”
“And was going to marry another woman and put me in debtors’ prison for my tailor’s bills, which he refused to pay!”
“ ’Twas not enough to kill a man for, Tony—a tailor’s bill! Ye should have found a way to pay it.”
“How?”
“Ye could have asked Branch for the money.”
“How, you fool? None of us knew Branch was back in England before he showed up that night at Dunworth Hall with pockets full of gold and Esme had the presence of mind to tell him Vincent had raped her and she’d killed him in defense of her honor!”
“But if Branch returns and finds we’ve spirited his bride away from him—”
“She’ll go, Charles,” came the gloomy response. “She’ll go willingly to secure this pardon for Branch that I invented. Oh, damn ye, Charles!” His voice was of a sudden grief-stricken. “For I wanted the wench for myself and now I must lose her!” There was the sound of a hard blow and the vines bent back whiplike as Charles’s flabby body careened into them.
But by now Imogene, who had stopped dead in her tracks at their first stunning words, was pressed tight against a tree bole, holding her breath. All that she had just learned resounded through her head like the sonorous beat of a great drum.
They were false, these half-brothers of van Ryker’s—as Esme was false. Esme had probably never been near Whitehall—it was all Anthony’s invention. Anthony and Charles and Esme—they had all fed on Branch’s generosity, his greatness of spirit, his chivalry. They had all profited by it! Imogene yearned to burst out of the enveloping vines and accuse them—but she knew death awaited any such move, here in the hot Jamaican sunlight.
Instead she waited, breathlessly still, while Charles struggled up and dusted himself off and followed, complaining, after Anthony, who was striding toward the house. After they were gone she made her way at right angles to the house to a little spring-fed pool Anthony had shown her. There she took off her shoes and stockings and dipped a foot into the water.
Let them find her here wading! Let them put their minds to rest that she had heard nothing—nothing.
Anthony had said she’d go willingly—ah, indeed she would! For somehow she must get word to van Ryker, somehow she must tell him that some horrible plot was afoot to get him killed—for that was how she had interpreted Anthony’s deadly “if Branch dies and she lives.” Yes, and she must tell him of Esme’s treachery, of his own chivalrous foolishness—oh, perhaps there would yet be a way to resolve it all in his favor!
So reasoned Imogene in desperation as she stared down at her reflection in the mirrorlike depths of the pool.
It was there Anthony found her, lying apparently relaxed by the pool with her shoes and stockings beside her, munching on a mango.
She saw he looked worried and came to a sitting position, as if in alarm. “Is something the matter?” she cried. “You look so—upset, Anthony.”
His expression cleared as if by magic, for by her very startled manner he was assured that she had heard nothing.
“I am a bit upset.” He studied her. “For I have just learnt that Charles deserted poor Mr. Gibbons in the river and rowed away, leaving him to his fate. Fortunately Gibbons made it to Port Royal....”
Imogene gave him a suitably bewildered look. “Oh, Branch must not hear of it, for he would be doubly angry with Charles.”
“I am glad you wish to keep peace in the family, Imogene.”
“It is my greatest desire.” She met his sharp gaze with an innocent stare. “What time is it, Anthony? Don’t tell me I have whiled away the whole afternoon here?” Hastily she began to don her shoes and stockings.
“It is indeed time for dinner,” he said more softly, watching her graceful movements with delight. It made him the more bitter toward Charles, as he escorted this winning woman back to the house. And it never occurred to him that the smiling face she turned to him was as full of guile as his own.
The High Seas, 1660
CHAPTER 10
A fresh wind billowed the sails of the Carolina, bound for London from Port Royal, Jamaica, but her captain, John Wilkerson, found nothing in that to comfort him.
“I like not the look of the weather,” he said, shaking his head as he spoke to the ship’s master, Curtis Watford. “What think ye of it. Mister Watford?”
From her place by the rail nearby—for she had been walking up and down the deck as restlessly as a caged cat—Imogene turned to hear the answer.
She had lost a little weight in the two weeks the Carolina had been at sea. All morning she had been recalling every step of how she had come to be here—outmaneuvered and outgunned, she told herself bitterly.
It had all seemed so simple, the perfect solution, when Anthony had brought up at supper the day after she had heard the angry discussion between the brothers, the subject of her voyage. He had been dressed most correctly in apple green taffetas. He had taken snuff delicately and put away his enameled snuffbox before he had brought up the subject.
“I have this day heard from Esme again,” he had announced in a portentous way.
It took a physical effort for Imogene not to curl her lip in scorn. ‘‘What does she say?” she managed.
“Gossip is rife through the court that there is to be a Spanish marriage for the king—and that could well mean the end of the buccaneers.”
Imogene felt fear go through her. She was almost certain that Anthony was lying for his own ends, but suppose there was truth to the rumor?
“Esme feels the rumor is well founded and thinks we should move with all possible speed.”
“We?” asked Imogene mechanically.
“Esme fears she will not be able to engineer Branch’s pardon in time,” Anthony elaborated. “But”—he lifted one of his long fingers—“there is still hope.”
“I can hardly believe it,” she murmured.
“If you go to London.”
Imogene stared at him fixedly. “But what could I do there?” she wondered.
Anthony gave her a supercilious smile. “King Charles,” he murmured, “is a notorious roué. He acknowledges a dozen or more mistresses and has God knows how many more.”
Imogene stiffened. “Are you suggesting I become Charles’s mistress?” she asked frostily.
For a moment he gave her an admiring look. Blast, the wench had style! Any ordinary woman would jump at the chance of being a king’s mistress—would simper, indeed, at the mere suggestion of it! “No, I’m not suggesting that,” he said. “But Esme says Charles is frequently deep in his cups. She hints that a woman with beauty such as yours could easily lure him to a private supper, ply him with drink, get the pardon signed and be gone before Charles woke up.”
“Is that the way such things are done?” Imogene hoped she could keep the scalding fury out of her voice.
“That—and other ways.... The point is, Charles is susceptible to beauty, Branch is in need of a pardon—you will find a way.”
“In London?”
“In London.”
“Very well.” Imogene rose as if the discussion had tired her. “When shall I go? Or do you not think I should wait for Branch’s return before I go?”
“Oh, by no means. Do you think he would let you go to the court of a licentious king to plead his cause?”
“You are right,” she agreed carelessly. “He would not.” She frowned. “But how am I to go? I have not enough money for passage.”
“I will advance all you need,” said Anthony, frowning.
“Oh—would you do that?” Imogene gave him a bright, insincere smile.
“I will do more. I will take you to Port Royal and put you on the ship myself.”
“To see that I am not mislaid on the journey downstream?” Her smile was quick to cover that, for her hatred of this pair was a palpable thing and she was constantly afraid that she would give herself away.
Anthony laughed tolerantly. “I would also satisfy myself that it is a stout merchant ship that you set your foot upon, for Branch would hold me accountable were I to let you embark upon some leaky barge.”
