For Her Love (25 page)

Her heart stuttered and lurched in her chest when she heard the office door open. She would have thought that he would stay and oversee his men a while longer. “Giles?” she called out.

When no one answered, a strange uneasiness coiled itself around her insides. “If you seek my husband,” she said, moving to the top of the stairs, “he will return at any moment.” She looked below and felt her throat constrict. A wave of shock nearly impelled her straight down the stairs, but the man who had entered was blocking the door. She was trapped!

“Well, well,” Jacques Renault remarked, and his voice was every bit as thick and slimy as she remembered. “You have grown,
ma chère
.”

His brown hair was pulled back tightly away from his pale face, skimming the shape of his skull. His eyes were dark and sunken, shining with malice. He smiled at her, his thin lips pressed tightly together. Fear bubbled inside of Grace, but it churned with a goodly measure of anger, as well. Here before her, the man who still wielded far too much power in her life.

She lifted her chin. “My husband is on his way home,” she warned. “I have told him all. I need only speak your name and he will spit you upon his cutlass. And I warn you, he was first mate to the notorious Geoffrey Hampton!”

Jacques chuckled. “Aye, so I am told. But you lie,
ma petite
. You have told him so little. He has no idea who has caused his bride to hold so fast to her virginity.”

Grace gasped. “How…”

Moving with all the predatory grace of a cat, Jacques glided to the foot of the stairs. “He brought me here. Brought to you your worst nightmare. You still have them, he says, nightmares, memories.”

She shook her head in mute denial.

“
Mais oui
. You see, Grace, it is I who know everything. Imagine your
capitaine’s
relief to meet a member of your family who did not hide your past.”

A whimper escaped her tight throat. “You told him…”

“About your near rape at the hands of a crazed slave?
Oui
. And I told him about us. About how close we always were. He is, even now, delaying his return so that I may allay your fear of the marriage bed.” Jacques chuckled as though at some clever irony.

“But he will return. You only delay the inevitable. When he comes, I will tell him who you are. What you have done.”

The door opened again behind Jacques, admitting two sullen looking men in filthy rags. They held flintlocks in their hands, and cutlasses hung in scabbards at their hips. “The others is on the ship,” one muttered. “They’re makin’ it damn ‘ard for ‘im to put ‘em off, but ‘is patience won’t ‘old long. That ‘er?” He nodded up the stairs toward Grace.

“She is the one,” Jacques answered. He looked at her. “We are in a bit of a hurry,
ma petite
. I have two more gentlemen in my employ who are with your husband right now. They will delay him for a time, then follow him home. Unless they receive the proper signal from me, he will not make it back here alive.”

“He is very strong and was once a pirate,” Grace protested, but fear for Giles began to churn in her stomach. “He will defeat your hired killers.”

Jacques shrugged carelessly. “I wonder which of us is more certain of the outcome? I will tell you what, Grace. We will wait and see, together. I will stay here, and if my men fail, I will take the consequences. I imagine you are right about one thing, if he returns and you tell him what I did, he will kill me.” He propped one foot upon the bottom stair and leaned forward. “I am staking my life that your captain will die ere he can dispatch me.”

The fear had wormed its way from her stomach into her throat. “What do you want?”

“I have booked passage to Havana for the two of us. I want you to board that ship like
une bonne jeune fille
.”

“I am no longer a little girl,” she retorted.

His eyes swept over her with a look of pure disdain. “
Quelle dommage
. A pity. You are a beautiful woman, but you were much more appealing as a child. Nonetheless, I want you to accompany me.”

“Why? Why Havana?”

He shrugged again. “Why not?”

Why not indeed, she thought. It seemed to her that Cuba was better than Saint-Domingue. He would have many friends in French Hispaniola, but Cuba was surely more neutral territory. And ‘twasn’t too far from Jamaica. Granted, it was Spanish, and perhaps that was why Jacques had chosen it. He thought a Spanish port would keep Giles at bay. But Grace was no longer a terrified child. She was a woman fully grown. She had been given life and had been raised by women who had survived the worst that life could deal them. She had a future worth living for. Jacques had stolen her past; he would not have her future.

She set her mouth in a grim line and squared her shoulders. “Very well. I will accompany you to your ship. But I tell you this now: somehow I will come back here, and if you have not kept your word, if anything happens to my husband, I will go straight to his best friend, and you will rue the day that you were born. Ere he has finished with you, you will beg for death.”

Jacques stepped to the side and made a sweeping gesture to indicate that she should pass him. “No doubt. This way,
Madame
Courtney. You have been kind enough to warn me, so I will return the courtesy. I will walk behind you with my hand upon my flintlock. Do not make a scene.”

Flanked by Jacques’s hirelings, surrounded by the stench of stale rum and sweat, intensely aware of her uncle’s sinister presence at her back, Grace walked briskly out the door and down High Street. Her rough-looking escorts seemed to deter the usual crude comments of men passing her on the road, though for once, she would have gladly welcomed their attentions. She looked all about her, hoping to see some face in the crowd that she recognized, but she had seldom ventured beyond the office of Courtney and Hampton Shipping. She knew no one here. Faith, her newfound friend, was clear across the bay, and Geoff with her, Grace could only assume.

How could this be? How could whores smile at sailors and men laughingly swill rum in the taverns that lined the busy street? How could she cast such desperate looks at the people crowding High Street, only to be ignored? But Port Royal was filled with desperate people, and the last thing any of them wanted was to encounter the likes of her entourage.

Tantalizingly, frustratingly, so much so that she could have torn the hair from her head, she saw
Destiny
at the far end of the dock, but ere they came close to it, Jacques and his minions turned sharply and they all mounted the gangplank of a decrepit-looking vessel. Once on deck, she looked over and saw Geoffrey, his broad back to her. She looked even more frantically and saw
Reliance
, her sails furled and quiet, no sign of Giles on deck.

“Oh please,” she whispered. “Please, Captain Hampton, look behind you. Turn around and see me.”

But he didn’t, and a shifty-eyed swab with but five teeth, had he any, led her and Jacques to the hatch that would take them below the deck. Another brief look around revealed that sailors were quickly climbing about the rigging. They would be setting sail within minutes. Then Jacques gave her a little push toward the ladder and they descended into darkness. The sailor took Jacques and Grace to a dim, stifling cabin with a narrow bunk covered in stained linens that smelled of mildew. Grace thought longingly of Giles’s immaculate bed. There was also a trunk bound in highly polished leather. She assumed it to be Jacques’s, as it didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the surroundings.

“Giles will notice that my things have been left behind,” Grace informed him. “He will never believe that I left without packing so much as a change of clothing.”

Jacques crossed to the one tiny porthole in the wall and gazed out. “Again, I have no doubt that you are right. Of course, now that we are under way, the realization will be of little use to him.”

The knowledge that they were heading out to sea made Grace’s heart begin to race, and she was finding it hard to breathe. Still, she forced herself to stay calm. “Giles would never trust you. He knows what kind of person Iolanthe is. How could he trust her brother? He came home by another route. I saw his ship ere we left, and he was not on it. He’ll search for me and learn that I have been taken here. You think yourself so clever, but you marched me straight up High Street, in front of God and everyone. It will take him no time at all—”

Jacques turned away from the window and back to Grace, no trace of worry or concern on his face. “Who knows where he was? But he was not on his way home. He left you to me,
ma chère
, whether you wish to think so or not.”

“Nay. Not with the brother of Iolanthe Welbourne.”

Jacques shoved her hard, and she fell onto the narrow bunk behind her. Then he stood so close to her that she could not rise without being far closer to him than ever she intended to be again in her life.

“I acknowledged my sister’s faults. God knows, she despises you so, I could hardly hope that she had hidden it. I told him that, in my sister’s mind, Edmund spoiled you. She was jealous. It does not take a genius to see that Iolanthe is vain and selfish.”

“Ha! But that was not the explanation my father gave! Giles would have seen right through you. You, who claimed to know me so well!”

“
Oui
. He said that your father had sited Matu as the cause of the rift. I explained that it was but one of many such problems. I told him that Iolanthe had wanted you and Matu separated when you had grown too old for a nurse, and that Edmund’s indulgence in allowing you to keep her, despite her failure to protect you from other Africans, had incensed his wife.”

That would have made perfect sense, but Grace refused to admit it. Instead, she smirked and said, “I
have
told someone though, told her all. How long do you think it will be ere my husband seeks his friend’s counsel over my disappearance? How long ere that man’s wife reveals my attacker to be none other than my uncle. He will seek you out. He will find me.”

“If it is I whom he seeks, then he will never find you.”

“What—what do you plan to do?”

Jacques ran his fingers lightly over the side of her face. “Are you afraid of me, Grace? Was it rape you thought I had on my mind?”

She swallowed hard. Aye, ‘twas exactly what she thought, but she’d not say as much to him. She gave him a mutinous glare.

“Save your defiance,
chèri
. You are no longer to my taste. Too hairy, too plump in all the wrong places, on the whole too big. But my tastes are somewhat—unique. In fact, many men prefer women just like you. The money I make from a Havana brothel for your voluptuous body and untouched maidenhead will buy a dozen flat-chested, slender mulatto girls, with coin to spare.”

Grace’s brave front began to crumble. Nonetheless, she whispered, “He will find me.”

Jacques moved away again, back toward the window. “By the time he does, will he want you? You will be sold for what you are. Not an innocent white woman, but as an African slave. ‘What?’ witnesses will ask your
capitaine
. ‘That mulatto wench? She is your wife?’ Is he so noble, Grace, your fine husband, that he will claim before the world that he bound himself to a Negro whore?”

“I am not purely Negro,” she snapped back. “You forget; my pure African blood is tainted by my white father’s—and yours! I am your sister’s child.”

“So you would have the world believe…”

“So I am! I remember much of that awful night. I remember the tale that Iolanthe told. My mother was conceived of a union between
your
father and one of his slaves. I am the daughter of your black half-sister!”

Jacques’s face went purple. “You dare to place yourself on the same level as…”

Grace rose to her feet. “Oh, aye, I dare! I will not cower before you, Jacques Renault. I believe myself to be your equal or better. I believe that I am worthy of the freedom I have known all my life—freedom to which my mother was entitled as well! And aye, I believe Giles will want me, because I am a woman worth having. Nay—not worth having, worth loving. Can you say the same of yourself,
mon oncle
? Whom have you ever loved? Who has ever loved you?”

Jacques sneered at her, but there was something in his dark eyes, something almost intimidated, when he looked at her. “A few days in a Havana
bordel
will teach you your place.”

“I already know my place, and by God, I will not lose it to you again.”

*

Giles had been relieved to finally be rid of the two men who had come on board his ship seeking work. He had sent them on their way, but now that he was striding up High Street to the office, they were back, a few yards behind him. His hand resting lightly upon the hilt of his cutlass, he paused once to take a long, hard look at them. ‘Twas better they should know that he was aware of them. But they seemed unperturbed. Then a man, an acquaintance of some sort, beckoned to them from a tavern across the street, and they went inside.

For days, Giles had been steadfastly refusing to consider the possibility that Grace had done as she had vowed and gone back to Welbourne. Now, although his man had confirmed that Grace had not left, doubts assailed him. His palms were sweating as he opened the office door and paused to listen for the voices of Grace and Jacques. When he heard nothing, he went to the foot of the stairs and called up softly. “Grace?
Monsieur
Renault?”

Silence. On the other side of the office door, the street was filled with the usual sounds, shouts and laughter, all softly muted. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, half wondering if she had convinced her uncle to take her away.

“
Monsieur
Renault!” Giles called, mounting the steps. “Is anyone here?”

He reached the top and smiled. The bed didn’t look like he had made it, but it was presentable. Combs, jars, trinkets littered the dresser top. To reassure himself, he opened the wardrobe and saw tiny bits of lace trapped at the edges of drawers. He glanced at the kitchen table and spied an unwashed cup and plate. There was no fire, but when he walked over to the hearth, some warmth radiated from it, and a pot of hot water hung over coals that had not long been cold. He used a bit of the water to wash the dishes and put them away.