Microsoft Word - Sherwood, Valerie - Nightsong (48 page)

She shook her head, but her lips compressed at the casual way he referred to Penny as "Rouge."

"Well, they won't know it from me," he said. "Your sister told me Kells was dead and that you were most probably dead, too-sunk along with Port Royal." His empty gray eyes narrowed. "Now why do you think she told me that?" he asked softly.

Carolina was thinking fast. At first glance Robin Tyrell looked very like Kells-until one looked closer and saw the difference. And he was a danger to them because he knew Kells. At first sight in this unlikely place Robin might not recognize Don Diego as Kells-but if he saw Don Diego with her, he was sure to recognize him! She must get Kells away from here before they met!

"My sister is protecting me," she improvised swiftly. "Now that Kells is dead . . ." She lingered over the words.

"I am indeed sorry to hear that you have become a widow," Robin said promptly-but he sounded his usual blithe self, she noted with irritation. "And especially sorry for you, Carolina, since I heard just before I left England that elderly Lord Gayle had died. Had Kells lived, you would have been a viscountess. But what brings you to Havana? I could have imagined you storming some European capital with your beauty-but a Spanish stronghold in the Caribbean? It passes belief!" He gave her a droll look.

"I am here because I am Penny's sister," Carolina said blandly. "After I lost my home in Port Royal, I sought out Penny, but when Nassau was raided we were both swept up in the net and brought here."

"And what a haul it was!" he said admiringly. "Faith, what enterprising wenches you are! Are there any more sisters at home?"

"Two," admitted Carolina, glad of the diversion from talk of Kells. "And they will neither of them have you, Robin, so don't come beating at their door!"

He laughed. "Ah, you were ever hard on me," he said lightly.

He was abominably cheerful, she thought, nettled that he should greet her so calmly when he was, after all, the cause of all their troubles! "Robin, how could you have done it?" she reproached him. "How could you have let Reba's mother bring false witnesses against Kells?"

He grimaced. "You have not been in the toils of such as my mother-in-law," he said with feeling. "She got me so embroiled that I hardly knew what I was doing. I ended up afraid not to let her proceed for I could see my head rolling from the block ifI did not go along with her plans!"

Yes, Reba's mother was like that, Carolina knew, remembering how the woman had once had her seized and set upon a ship by force. She had been unwilling even to hear what Carolina had to say! Still, she told herself, Robin should have done something. It was shabby of him not to!

"But Reba should have--" she began combatively.

He interrupted to say, with a bitter note in his voice, "Reba has become just like her. I think in time they will even look alike!"

Carolina regarded him steadily. She little doubted it was true. She should have seen it for herself. His gray eyes narrowed. "I cannot but think that you forced the marriage upon me to punish me for impersonating Kells!"

"Well, you deserved punishment," she murmured, but there was sympathy in her eyes. She could very well understand why Robin might run away from the pair of them! "And Reba loved you," she added mildly.

"Love!" He snorted. "She doesn't know the meaning of the word. And her mother thinks to run me about at her pleasure, like a puppet on a string."

Carolina fell silent. She could have heaped recriminations upon him but what good would it do? Robin was what he was; he would never change. He was, as always, looking for an easy way out. And he had found it-by running away.

One of the servants came through the room and looked at them curiously. Robin stirred. "Your escort will wonder what has happened to you. We had best get back to the party!"

"Oh, I really have no escort," lied Carolina. "Penny asked someone to bring me and he has melted into the crowd by now."

"Then I will escort you," he said gallantly.

"Best not," she warned. "The governor's daughter has set her glittering eyes on you and whenever she is crossed she breaks things. We would not want her to advance upon all this food"-she indicated the groaning table-"in a sudden rage!"

The marquess gave her an amused look. There had been a time when he would have changed his life for this bewitching blonde beauty, he remembered ruefully. Ah, well, changing his life would not have suited him-he preferred his rakish ways.

"For Marina's sake"-and mine as well, she could not help thinking-"let us go back separately," said Carolina. "I will go first. Give me a little time to mingle among the guests before you follow me." Time to find Kells and somehow get him hidden from your view!

She moved back in among the laughing crowd and looked about for Kells. He was nowhere in sight-indeed he was at that moment being harangued in an alcove by Dona Jimena, who had promptly charged him with neglect!

Behind her Robin Tyrell moved inconspicuously into the room, and the music struck up.

Carolina jumped as the first chord struck, for her nerves were honed to a fine point tonight; she was tense as a drawn bowstring.

But the second chord was never struck-the musicians came to a jangling, discordant halt.

For across the room near the entrance had appeared the tall arrow-straight figure of Don Ramon del Mundo. He seemed to be dragging a ragged sailor sporting a heavy growth of beard. Silken skirts had been hastily pulled away from this scruffy interloper, and the governor himself had stepped forward to protest-how they had gotten past him at the entrance, Carolina could only wonder-when Don Ramon's stem voice rang out.

"This man"-he shook the sailor's ragged arm-" was taken but last week from an English ship by one of our galleons, but four years ago he claims he was on another English ship which was sunk by the buccaneer Kells. I have reason to believe that this man Kells is here tonight."

About to seize Don Ramon by the arm and ask him what was the meaning of this invasion of his party, the governor came to an abrupt halt. Kells? Here? He looked around him in dismay.

Among the guests there was a sudden murmur and everybody fell silent, turning expectantly toward the bearded sailor. The musicians let their instruments hang limp in their hands. The servants, moving about, were agape.

"Look about you!" cried Don Ramon, his tawny eyes flashing as he spoke. "Do you see Kells among this company?"

"Yes," came the growling response. "I do see him!" Carolina felt the world whirl dizzily about her. Her knees buckled and she fell to the floor in a dead faint.

THE HOUSE ON THE PLAZA DE ARMAS HAVANA, CUBA

When Carolina came to, she was being deposited on her own bed in Don Diego's house on the Plaza de Armas.

"I brought you home," he was saying solicitously. "I liked not the way you fainted. It was indeed oppressively hot but still . . ." He let the words die away as he looked at her keenly.

Carolina saw that they were alone in the bedchamber. "I heard a man cry out that he saw the buccaneer Kells among the company," she said faintly. "I thought"-she was still quivering with fright-"I thought they had discovered you."

"Can you not take it in," he asked impatiently, "that I am not this fellow Kells? I am in truth Don Diego Vivar. And since you will soon become my wife, Dona Carolina, I think you might begin getting used to it!"

Carolina had no faith that she would ever become "Dona Carolina." "Who-who did they identify as Kells?" she questioned but she had a sense of fatalism even as she asked it.

"I was some distance away and heard only the commotion," admitted Don Diego. (In truth he had been almost at the opposite end of the house, closeted with a scolding Dona Jimena, who had sought to know in strident whispers why he was so cruelly neglecting her.) "I saw no one taken. But when I came back, you were lying on the floor, surrounded by ladies fanning you, and I heard someone say that the guest of honor had been accused of being a buccaneer and that Don Ramon del Mundo and the governor and the guest and someone else had gone into the governor's private office to sort things out."

The guest of honor. . . . That would no doubt be Robin Tyrell, Marquess of Saltenham. She had not known the ball was being given in his honor. Perhaps it was not. What Don Diego had heard might have been a garbled version.

She had a sense of doom. Robin had been taken; he would tell all within the sound of his voice that Kells was dead, and his source for knowing that would be herself. She wondered when they would come for her.

Luz and old Juana, evidently sent downstairs for water and wine, appeared in the doorway and she fell silent, letting them minister to her.

She was seeking for some excuse to send one of them back to the governor's palace-and she found it when she realized she did not have her mantilla.

"I seem to have lost my mantilla, Luz," she told the serving girl. "Would you run over and get it for me? And while you are there, inquire what happened. There was some kind of commotion and in the heat I fainted."

Luz brightened. She loved to be in the thick of things. She came back to report that the guest of honor had been accused of being a buccaneer but the governor had taken both him and his accuser aside, and the Englishman had retorted with such heat that the man was a liar that the governor believed him and the accuser had been taken away by Don Ramon del Mundo, back to EI Morro, whence he had come.

"Thank you, Luz," said Carolina, sipping her wine and feeling suddenly much stronger. "You did an excellent job of hemming my gown," she added graciously."I will recommend your work to mysister for I know that you would like to return to the governor's household."

Luz looked pleased. Carolina watched her go. She felt she was standing on an unprotected beach in the way of a storm spreading out on a long front and about to reach her. There was nothing for it but to wait and try to ride it out.

Don Diego was watching her searchingly. He, of course, could have no idea that the governor's guest would instantly recognize him if they were seen together.

She could only hope that the Marquess of Saltenham would be leaving soon-and that she could hold Kells at home until he went.

Kells was studying her, she saw, as she looked up. "I think you have been under too much strain," he said, frowning, and she realized that he was referring not only to her sudden fainting spell but to her constant references to him as Kells.

"Yes, I have," she told him, for she had a feeling that it was all out of her hands, that fate was going to decide the issue for her one way or another.

"You should rest," he decided, and with his own hands helped her undress. But although her nakedness tempted him-she saw that heat in his gray eyes-he did not try to stir her to desire. He cradled her in his arms and gave her an affectionate kiss on the forehead, then lifted her up lightly and settled her on the big square bed. She might have been a child, she thought, whom he held in affection, for tonight there was nothing of the lover in his manner-only the friend.

She lay beside him, wakeful and watchful, through the long night, and at last, just before dawn, fell into an exhausted sleep.

She insisted upon getting up early to breakfast with Don Diego. He looked every inch the Spaniard, she thought, so relaxed and easy in his dark Spanish silks, his bronzed face as swarthy as that of any Spanish caballero.

He conversed easily in Spanish with Luz, who brought their breakfast and looked more kindly upon Carolina than she had at any time since she had been plucked from the governor's household and sent against her will to serve next door.

He fits well here in Havana, Carolina admitted to herself reluctantly. He must have fit very well back in Salamanca, where he learned his Castilian Spanish and his ease with Spanish ways. Of course, he was an easy adapter. He had carried off the part of an Irish buccaneer in Turtuga with aplomb-and never been challenged. She had asked him questions about what he knew of what he believed to be his "old life" back in Spain, and she had learned that he was a bachelor, that his family were all dead, that he came from a small town and had by an act of heroism saved the life of a prominent member of the King's council-a gentleman who had since died. He had never been at Court; few knew him. Ifshe had not come along, he could perhaps have settled down happily in Havana-perhaps have eventually married the governor's daughter although, knowing his restless nature and taste in women, she doubted it.

But pondering now, she thought that perhaps her fears for him if he went back to Spain were unreasonable. It was her own presence here that endangered him. No one had guessed this dark Spanish gentleman to be the notorious Kells-it was the English marquess in his gray suit, that color of which Kells was so fond, who had been denounced.

I am disturbing him, she thought sadly. I am trying to make him reconstruct from his shattered memory a life he once had and does not now desire. I am trying to bring him back to me as he was-not as he is now. It could pull him apart.

Luz was pouring their strong black coffee. Its aroma mingled with the scent of bougainvillaea in the courtyard. The sun streamed down near their table, shaded beneath the gallery behind the pillars.

"They have arrested the governor's guest of honor," she told Carolina importantly.

Carolina, poised with her cup in midair, set it down very carefully upon the table. Her world seemed to spin out, and time stood still. Nearby the fountain tinkled, but she felt for the moment as if she had left the world of Havana and journeyed back in time to the events that had brought her here. She felt as if it had all been predestined long ago.

"That's interesting, Luz," she heard herself say. "You aren't eating," remarked Don Diego suddenly, a few minutes later.

"I am never hungry this early," she remarked vaguely. "But I have just remembered-I promised Penny I would go over there this morning after breakfast. She is having a new dress made and wants my advice." She rose. "I hope you will excuse me if I am not back for lunch-Penny is such a stickler about these things. Every quarter inch of hem becomes a crisis!"