Rash Reckless Love, page 9
Van Ryker was cursing under his breath.
Suddenly Imogene gave a little cry. A man’s foot was sticking out from the doorway that led into the next room—and that foot had just moved.
“ ’Tis MacDermott!” Van Ryker bent over the fallen man, who was clad in buckskins and had a shock of graying hair. “What happened, man?”
The Scot lifted his head a little. He had a ruddy face gone ashen. There was a bloody gash in his cheek and his voice was weak. One of his legs seemed to be broken. Beside him lay a long musket and a sword.
“Your brother—Charles,” he gasped.
“What about Charles? Is he dead?”
“No—fled.”
Van Ryker’s shoulders rocked as if he had been struck a solid blow. He stepped aside that de Rochemont might tend the injured man. “We will get ye to the ship, MacDermott,” he said in an altered voice. “After the doctor here takes care of your wounds. What of the others?”
MacDermott rallied but his voice was faint. “I think Will Canady is dead and the slaves have all run off. I’ve lost a bit of blood and my leg pains me—I think it’s broken. ’Twas Canady and I fought off the war party and though I tried to stop him, Canady would run off after them, shooting at them with arrows when his ammunition ran out. I heard a terrible howl after he disappeared in the woods and then—nothing. I fear they got him.”
“We’ll send a search party. Which way did he go?” MacDermott nodded inland and his head lolled. He had passed out.
“Do what you can for him,” van Ryker told de Rochemont morosely. “He’s a good man—better than my brother, apparently.”
“I’ll need bandages,” muttered de Rochemont. “I won’t have enough.”
“I’ll tear off strips from my chemise,” offered Imogene.
“Good.” De Rochemont smiled at her, then turned to van Ryker. “These Indians, do you think they’ll come back in force?”
“No way of knowing,” muttered van Ryker. He cast a worried look at Imogene. “In case they do, I wouldn’t want Imogene here.”
De Rochemont gave him a sympathetic look. “It must have been a small war party for two men to fight them off almost single-handed.”
“Yes, but I can’t understand what happened—it was so peaceful here. The Indians were very friendly.”
“Times change,” said de Rochemont cynically. “Could ye heat me some water?” he asked Imogene.
Quickly and efficiently—for she was always cool in emergencies—Imogene went to work. Van Ryker was off with the search party, but with the help of the guard he had left, she got a fire going. She helped de Rochemont bathe MacDermott’s wounds and stanch the flow of blood, and tried to make him as comfortable as she could.
“All the beaver skins were stolen from the dock,” MacDermott was saying disconsolately as he came to.
“It’s all right,” soothed Imogene. “Just lie quiet.”
“And the logs that had been cut for shipment were set adrift.”
Imogene remembered seeing logs floating by them as they came upriver. “It just happened then?” she asked quickly.
“Yesterday, I think,” he said weakly. “I have drifted between sleep and waking since Canady left and could not count the passage of time.”
“Don’t talk,” admonished de Rochemont. “You’ll open up your wounds.”
The search party found Will Canady’s body with a number of arrows sticking out of it. The top of his head had been severed by a tomahawk blow and his scalp was missing. They brought him back and buried him in a little grove behind the house with only a few hurried words said over the body. Imogene had to turn her head away, for the sight of his torn body made her feel ill. Van Ryker snatched up the plantation papers and account books, Imogene seized what silver and pewter she could find, MacDermott was carried carefully down to the longboat, and they all tumbled in and made their way back downriver.
That night aboard the Sea Rover, shaken by her experience, Imogene held van Ryker with a special tenderness and there were tears wet upon her cheeks as their bodies locked together in the moonlit great cabin—tears she was quick to brush away, for she did not want to explain to him why she was crying. She had never, before the revelations of these last two days, realized quite what a man he was—a man who shouldered everything, who tried to solve everybody’s problems. He had flung his young life, his career, his good name, all at Esme’s feet, to save her in her hour of trouble. Imogene imagined Esme, seeing her as fragile and helpless, a timid girl who had struck back blindly at an attacker and by accident killed him.
And the gold he had won by blood and suffering had been invested—part of it at least—with a fool who ran before the foe! And even back on Tortuga, van Ryker had stood ready to defend all those shadowy Spanish women who had disappeared from aboard Le Sabre.
Van Ryker, she thought tenderly. Brave and daring, trying to right all the ills of the world!
For the next three days search parties were sent out combing the woods to look for Charles, but he seemed to have disappeared. None of the slaves were found, either. All on the ship were of the opinion that the Indians had carried them off—perhaps they would even be marched to the big slave market the northern Indians operated up on one of the great northern lakes.
MacDermott, worse hurt than he had realized, had lapsed into delirium, but on the night of the third day he was able to tell them more coherently what had happened.
“ ’Twas over an Indian woman that the trouble came about,” he said. “I warned your brother—I warned the landgrave it would bring trouble but she was young and pretty and he would not let her alone. The woman was married, but she kept coming to the house on one excuse and another. She would stay closeted with Charles for several hours and when she left he would give her little gifts.”
“Charles was ever a wencher.” Van Ryker sighed.
“Came the day the wench stole something the landgrave valued,” continued MacDermott. “A snuffbox, I think it was—anyway they had a falling out about it. The landgrave demanded it back, she clawed at him, he struck her in the face and drew blood and she ran away screaming that he would be sorry. I do not know what she told her people but that night a small party attacked us. We were holding out pretty well until the landgrave panicked.” MacDermott threw van Ryker an apologetic look. “Bent low, he ran down to the water and cast off in our only boat. The slaves saw him making his escape and went crazy. They broke and ran for the woods. Some of them were killed. Others disappeared into the trees. Canady and I were left to fight the Indians off alone and we did. If only Canady had not pursued them, he would be alive today.”
“We did not find the bodies of any slaves,” interposed van Ryker.
“They may not have been dead. The Indians may have dragged them off in the night.”
Imogene shuddered. “Are there no neighbors who could help?” she wondered.
“Too far away,” van Ryker told her morosely. “And with troubles of their own.”
“I am sorry about your loss,” said MacDermott, for he knew very well whose money had financed Charles’s venture.
Van Ryker ran a hand through his hair. “The place can be rebuilt—but that will not bring back Will Canady nor mend your wounds, MacDermott.”
“I’ll be all right,” said MacDermott. “But I’ll miss Will. He had five years to go on his indenture and we planned to buy a place together once his time was over.”
Van Ryker cast a look at that injured leg that might never be right. “I’ll see you get your place, MacDermott,” he promised quietly, and the man on the bunk gave him a grateful look.
Imogene leaned forward. “You said the place could be rebuilt?”
“Someday—the time is not now.”
Imogene went on deck and looked back upriver in the gathering darkness. The landscape looked strange and deserted and alien now that the light was going. An alien shore... And yet in her heart she could not but believe that van Ryker would return here someday, that he would carve an estate out of this wilderness, and turn his wild holding into civilization. It was hard not to believe in a man like van Ryker.
He joined her, there on the deck. Around them the night was very still. She saw that he had posted a double watch in the event of Indian attack—not that a buccaneer ship of forty guns was much troubled by that, but a sneak attack could wreak havoc, even setting the ship afire.
“I am sorry for what has happened,” she told him sincerely.
‘‘Worse for Canady and MacDermott than for me.” He dismissed it tersely.
‘‘But it means the end of a dream.”
“Only for now. Someday I will return—and take over myself. I am not apt to run away in the face of danger.” His tone was ironic.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“Now I will take you to Jamaica,” he said. “To Gale Force. My brother Anthony is cast in a tougher mold.”
“But you have already lost so much time sailing to Carolina,” she pointed out, hoping to divert him from leaving her in Jamaica. “Shouldn’t we—”
“Imogene,” he cut in. “Save your breath. I will not take you buccaneering with me. You saw the results of a small Indian raid—imagine if you will what it is like on the decks of shattered ships, locked together, awash with blood!”
She winced. “So we are going to Jamaica?”
“Yes, we are going to Jamaica.”
“But what about your brother? You cannot just leave him here!”
He turned on her fiercely. “Have you seen a boat? Can you yourself ferret out where he can be?”
“No, but—”
“For once, Charles will have to take care of himself,” said van Ryker bitterly. “I have looked for him long enough. I consider that by his selfish action in running away he got Canady killed and probably a number of slaves—those the Indians do not choose to enslave themselves—and near did for MacDermott. A man must pay for something like that.”
In her view of Charles, Imogene was getting a picture of someone soft and unable to cope. She had a nightmarish vision of him lurking in tatters near the shore, his flesh torn by brambles, peering out fearfully through the brush, hoping for sight of a sail.
“But he is your brother,” she said unhappily.
“He is also a man and should act like one. Perhaps I have coddled him too much.”
It was strange, she thought, that van Ryker—youngest of the clan—should seem like the older brother. It was because he accepted responsibility, she supposed, and wondered what his other brother, Anthony, would be like.
But for all his callous talk, she noticed that van Ryker sailed carefully up and down the coast once more, studying the coastline through a glass. “There is another plantation far to the northward,” he told her. “And another to the south. If Charles reaches either one, he will be safe.”
And with those words, he set sail for Jamaica.
She became friends with MacDermott on the voyage and was sorry to learn that he would not be accompanying her to Gale Force, but would voyage on with the buccaneers until he could be landed somewhere to proceed on to Barbados, where he had a sister. There he would convalesce at his leisure, having promised van Ryker that he was “his man” whenever he wished to try to rebuild the plantation. “For there’s a great future in Carolina,” he told van Ryker earnestly. “Your brother, he knew not how to run a plantation, nor would he take sound advice.”
“So I’ve discovered.” Grimly.
“But with you at the helm,” said the old Scotsman, “we could steer a clear course.”
Imogene thought so too.
Only one thing happened to mar their trip to Jamaica. And that was their first night out, when Ryker was busy in the great cabin going over the plantation papers under the light of a swinging ship’s lamp. Imogene, looking out the windows in the stern, turned as he tossed down what looked to be part of a letter with an irritable exclamation.
Curious, she crossed the room and picked it up.
“Do not read that,” he said tersely.
“Why not?” Her interest aroused, she moved away from him, holding the paper up to the lamp.
“Very well, read it,” he sighed. “But it will not make you happy.”
It was obviously a page from a letter of which they had neither the beginning nor the, ending sheets, for it began in the middle of a sentence at the top and ended the same way at the bottom.
“... and by now you will probably have heard from Anthony and I am sure that like me you can hardly believe it," the letter began in a large flowing scrawl, “but although Anthony says it is only a rumor so far, it is obviously a very-well-founded rumor, for it resounds everywhere—” Imogene looked up. “Who wrote this?”
“It is Esme’s handwriting. Charles was using it for a bookmark in his account book.” He looked grim and would have again reached for the letter but that she held it back from him.
“What is Esme like?”
“She is foolish and headstrong.”
“No, I mean—what does she look like?” For somehow a disturbingly dominating vision had arisen from that snatch of sentence. This was not the way she had pictured Esme.
Van Ryker frowned. “Esme is very striking. Perhaps a little taller than you, of delicate build. She has an oval face and lavender eyes that sometimes change to tarnished silver. She has a high light voice and charming mannerisms.”
“And she is very fashionable? Very—proud?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Why do you ask?”
Something in the letter.. . something that she felt lay just ahead, something she dreaded, had prompted her to ask that. Perhaps something in the word “rumor.” She felt she was marking time, putting off something unpleasant.
“Do your brothers resemble her?”
“Tony does. Both Anthony and Esme look like their mother, who was the beauty of the county and swept all before her. I never saw her of course. She died giving birth to Esme.”
“And Charles?”
He gave a wry. laugh. “Save that he is dark like the others, Charles resembles nobody—unless it be his mother’s great uncle, who is supposed to have died of a heart attack when highwaymen attacked his coach near Salisbury. Charles is plump and easygoing and slovenly in his ways.”
“You do not look like them, then?”
He shook his head. “No, I look like my father.”
She looked down at the letter again, almost tempted to give it back to him unread, but something drew her to it.
“ ...but if Branch has really been fool enough to marry some dockside whore in Tortuga,” she read, “then I suppose we must live with it, although I cannot believe he has forgotten Elinor, who you'll remember he was so hot to marry!”
Her head lifted. “Who is Elinor?”
His face was grim. “The girl who threw me over when Ryderwood was sold.”
“Oh.” She returned to reading the letter. The next line cut her to the heart.
“But there is some comfort at least in what Anthony says,” it went on, “that a 'buccaneer marriage’ would count for little save on Tortuga, that the ‘minister’ who married them”— the word “minister” was derisively in quotes—"is probably some outcast from the church and the ‘governor’ of Tortuga probably has no authority to issue a license anyway, so I suppose it is no legal marriage at all and we can forget about it, as Branch undoubtedly will when—”
There the page ended.
With shaking fingers Imogene laid the letter back on the table.
“I told you it would make you unhappy,” growled van Ryker. He was watching her keenly.
“Is it—true?” she asked painfully. “That the governor of Tortuga has no authority, and we are not legally married?”
“I do not know,” he scowled.
“I think—I need some air,” she choked, turning away from him.
“Imogene.” Van Ryker rose from the table. His dark face was concerned. “I have not written to them about you—indeed, I had hoped to bring you together in some more joyous way than this on which we are embarked. But ’tis only natural that wild rumors would spread. I am a man who gathers rumors as a ship gathers barnacles. You are not to mind what Esme has written; she is an impetuous woman and not in possession of the facts. When Anthony meets you, he will write and tell her what you are like.” He tossed down his quill pen and closed the account books. ‘‘I am tired of reading about losses and mismanagement,” he said, taking her hand. “It is time for bed.”
But although he cajoled her as only a lover could, although as always she found herself thrilling to his touch, swept to heights by the insistent urging of his strong masculinity, long after he was sleeping soundly beside her Imogene lay awake staring at a crescent moon through the bank of windows at the stern.
For something told her, some deep inner voice, that nothing was going to be right with Esme or with Anthony—or with Charles, if he turned up.
Nothing would be right because—now she knew what they thought of her.
Jamaica, 1660
CHAPTER 7
Growing larger on the horizon hour by hour, the tortoiseshaped island of Jamaica stretched green before them, rising out of the turquoise sea.
“Are we going to land at Port Royal?” wondered Imogene. She was leaning on the taffrail beside van Ryker, her hip in her lightweight sky blue linen dress pressed companionably against his lean thigh. He had insisted she wear it, for he loved her in blue.
“No, we’ll land at a sheltered bay some distance up the coast.”
Imogene was disappointed. From what she’d heard about Port Royal, it was as bad as Tortuga and she’d hoped to convince van Ryker that it would be even worse to leave her in Port Royal than to take her with him. Now her mind raced ahead to the plantation where they were bound. Doubtless she’d discover some good reason why he could not leave her there—dangerous Indians, fever, imminent attack by the Spanish... she’d think of something.
