Microsoft Word - Sherwood, Valerie - Nightsong (53 page)

"Lady Gayle," corrected the ambassador. "It would seem that Kells was but a name Rye Evistock used for buccaneering ventures, and now that his father is dead he has inherited the title of Lord Gayle. He is a viscount. Lives in Essex."

The ambassador's head swam. How they did things in England was beyond him!

"You mentioned gifts from his lady?" he inquired weakly.

"Yes, they are being carried ashore now. And I was to deliver messages with each.

One is for your daughter -a rose jar, and I was to say that it is hoped this rose jar finds her in better temper and that she will hurl it at no one-that she is far luckier than she knows." The governor gasped. "Impudent wench!" he muttered. "You will ask me what the message means." The ambassador spread his hands. "I do not know.

"There is a handsome black mantilla and high-backed comb for someone called Juana, who is, I believe, in your service-with the wish that she wear it in church and be as elegant to look at as any great lady of Spain. Oh, and another half shipload of fine French wine for one Captain Juarez for saving Kells's life in Port Royal and bringing him here."

The governor shook his head dizzily.

"And there are gifts for one Don Ramon del Mundo. Kells-Lord Gayle-sends him a sword with the hope that it may never be crossed with his in battle. And Lady Gayle sends him the finest white lace mantilla I have ever beheld, which she says was found on the ship and belonged to no one. She wishes him to know that she wore it on the voyage home to England and expresses the hope that he will give it to his bride on her wedding day-and that he will find the lady of his heart."

"Yes, yes." The governor collected himself. At first he had thought that this buccaneer had bribed del Mundo to keep the guns of the fort silent while he slipped away in the El Dorado, for the fire that night in EI Morro combined with the escape of all the English prisoners had been, to say the least, suspicious, but in the light of these gifts-so trifling by comparison to his own rich haul-he was now of a different opinion. For he now remembered that del Mundo had shown an interest in the Wench-indeed he and Don Diego had nearly crossed swords over it. A peace offering merely. His opinion of del Mundo went up-he might choose to bestow his daughter on the man after all!

Don Ramon, receiving his gifts in silence from the hand of the ambassador later that day, was of a different opinion.

"A fine blade," he commented, studying the sword, which was a miracle of Spanish workmanship.

"The finest workmanship I have seen," agreed the ambassador. "I believe he said he

'liberated' it in the raid on Cartagena."

Don Ramon del Mundo fingered the sword. A handsome gift, indeed, and in its way symbolic. For Don Ramon knew that he could never cross swords with the man who had sent it-not that he would not kill him willingly enough, but he could not do it because it would bring her sorrow. And he thought that the erstwhile Don Diego had sent him this sword because he felt the same way. She loved Kells-but perhaps a small part of her heart belonged to Don Ramon as well, and in this way she had made peace between them. It was Kells's way of saying, You saved my life, but I know it was because of her.

He looked up at the ambassador, his face inscrutable. "He sent a further message, but it is a letter, under seal. You will see that I have not opened it."

Frowning, Don Ramon took the parchment and broke the red wax seal that secured it. What he read was scrawled in a careless hand across the single sheet of paper.

"If ever you find yourself in an English jail anywhere, let me know and I will get you out."

It was signed with a flourish, "Kells."

It was a buccaneer's way of saying thank you. Don Ramon laughed.

The ambassador's curiosity was piqued. "Might one know what was in the letter to cause mirth?" he wondered.

"Just an exchange of friendly insults," shrugged Don Ramon-but he set the comer of the letter into a candle flame and watched it bum nonetheless.

"And his lady sends you this." The ambassador spread out the mantilla before Don Ramon, sheer and white in the candlelight. "She said she wore it on the voyage home to England."

Don Ramon del Mundo-that man of the world-fingered the lovely mantilla. So she had sent him something she had worn, something she had touched-it was a bond between them, saying something more than mere words could express, sending him an unspoken message across the sea: I might have loved you. ... In other times I would have loved you. ...

He held it up, studying it. Sheer-but not so sheer as her silken skin. White-but not so white as the gleaming brilliance of her blonde hair in the sun, its pale glow by moonlight. Intricate in pattern-but not so intricate as the web of thoughts he had spun about her, lost in a maze of desire....

"She says she sends it to you in the hope that you will bestow it on the lady of your heart to wear on her wedding day," explained the ambassador.

Del Mundo looked up. For a moment there was a lump in his throat and he could not speak. He had found the lady of his heart-but he could never claim her for she belonged to someone else. But he would wish her well, far away across the sea.

"She was a most wondrous lady, who sends me this," he said huskily.

"I know for I have met her," the ambassador said softly. For he noted that del Mundo had spoken in the past tense-it was in its way a renouncement.

Don Ramon did not hesitate. He sat with the mantilla across his knees for half a night while he drank himself insensible on Bordeaux wine from the new shipment which the governor had been pleased to give him. For the governor had decided that it would be best to pass Marina into strong hands that could take care of her rather than give her into the keeping of some foppish son of a merchant prince-and besides, she fancied Don Ramon, had ever since Don Diego and the marquess had left the scene.

Don Ramon had come to Havana a fortune hunter, intending to win in this New World fame and glory and with it go back to Spain and make a great marriage. He had found instead true love-and

the governor's daughter.

And now, staring moodily at that mantilla-lovely reminder of the beauty who had worn it-he resolved to seek Marina out.

He found her nextday sitting bored in the courtyard of the governor's palace on the Plaza de Armas, her duena snoring nearby.

He ignored her arch look.

"Querida mia," he said whimsically, for he was still slightly drunk. "You deserve a better man than myself -you deserve someone who will truly love you."

"But I do not want a better man!" Marina wailed, for she had already made her choice. "And if you do not love me now," she added stubbornly, "you will learn to love me!"

"No." Don Ramon smiled his regretful refusal. "You deserve someone who will not need to learn to love you, Marina. You deserve a dashing caballero whose heart you will enchant at first sight."

"No!" Marina, who was not used to refusals, leaped up and stamped her foot. She had shouted so loudly that her duena woke up with a start, crying, "What? What?"

And Marina won the day, for after a month or two of languishing, Don Ramon del Mundo--that man of the world-remembered his original purpose in coming to Havana.

He returned to the courtyard and proposed on bended knee to a beaming Marina.

And so it was that the governor's daughter, a little older now and much more slender (having lost what her father had been pleased to call her "baby fat"), wore the white mantilla, gift of the Silver Wench, when she married the valiant Don Diego del Mundo in the lofty echoing interior of the great twin-towered cathedral behind the Plaza de Armas.

All the bells in Havana rang that day in uncontrolled joy.

But on nights when the moon rode pale across Havana's skies, nights when the fleecy clouds shimmered fair as Carolina's long light hair, nights when the stars shone as silvery and as beckoning as Carolina's eyes, Don Ramon del Mundo, possessed at last of a wealthy bride, sat quaffing his wine in the courtyard of his fine new home in Havana and remembered a woman of moonlight who had swept across his life like a bright wind.

He would always remember her....

Port Royal, struck first by hurricane and then by the new more awful disaster that dropped the city into the sea, was never really rebuilt.

*A fragment of the old town survives upon the sandspit that once provided a haven to the buccaneers, but Kingston, a white city against a backdrop of blue hills, now has taken the place once occupied by the old port. The olive-green waters where the ruins lie at ocean bottom only grudgingly give up their secrets, but underwater explorations almost three hundred years later would prove the exact time of the first great shock to strike the doomed city-for divers brought up a watch, and when the coral encrustation was cleaned away, the watch was found to have been made by one Paul Blondel of Amsterdam, a Huguenot refugee, and X-ray showed it to have stopped at seventeen minutes before noon on the fateful day.

But to Carolina, safe at last in England, riding out in velvet riding habit and plumed hat to call upon her Essex neighbors, it was of little consequence that she had been witness to-e-indeed a part of-one of the great catastrophes to strike the Western World. She heard with a shudder that what was left of Port Royal was still sinking, and heard, too, a year after the disaster, that the new town of Kingston was being built on what was considered a safer location on the nearby mainland. But she never cared to return to Jamaica. The world she had known there was gone -swallowed up by the blue-green waters of the Caribbean.

There were reminders, of course-and Hawks was one of them.

The pardon Kells had won from the King included a pardon for his men. And so it was that he sent to Kingston, for Hawks to come and join him in Essex.

Hawks arrived in England looking as laconic as ever, and with his rolling sailor's gait unchanged. He brought with him a large hoop to which clung a perpetually astonished looking red and green talking parrot he had affectionately christened Poll-and a surprise gift for Carolina:

Moonbeam.

"Oh, Hawks, where did you find her?" Carolina gasped, opening the wicker basket in which Moonbeam had cowered during most of her voyage-for she still hated the sea.

"I found her clinging to a branch in the mangrove swamp," Hawks told her. "I went there with some men who were looking for somebody's sister who was washed away the day of the quake and they wouldn't giveup looking for her. And I could hear a catcrying. I floundered about for a while and then I found her-I don't know how she got there but there she was!"

"Oh, Moonbeam!" Smiling and damp-eyed, Carolina gently drew the cat out from the wicker basket in which she had remained during the rolling voyage. She held her up in the air joyfully. "Welcome to Essex, Moonbeam!"

The cat, grown thin from her misadventures, began to purr, and when Carolina set her down, after a couple of token rubbings against her ankles by way of greeting, she set off determinedly to explore the gardens and hedges of her new domain.

She settled down happily to make her nighttime trysts in boxwood hedges instead of streets made up of coral sand-and Virginia was later to claim proudly that there wasn't an estate in Essex that didn't boast of having one of Moonbeam's kittens!

The fluffy white cat of the adventurous life was to become even more famous, for it amused Carolina to train Moonbeam-who Was nothing loath-to sit primly on a chair at the long dining table at dinner, being served a small portion of each course along with the family. Moonbeam thoroughly enjoyed the whole ritual -although she steadfastly turned up her dainty nose at the salades and took only halfhearted laps of dessert. She would sit in queenly fashion meeting the amazed gaze of Carolina's dinner guests with a level look from her glowing green eyes. "It is a look," Virginia was heard to whisper irrepressibly, "that says 'I am a buccaneer's darling-I have even survived Port Royal's sinking into the sea!'"

"As has her mistress," murmured Virginia's brother-in-law fondly, eyeing his beautiful wife down the long table as she merrily engaged the rapt attention of both a duke and a belted earl. As he watched, Carolina threw back her lovely fair head and her laughter rippled. Her heavy emerald necklace flashed against the pale smooth skin of her bosom and her white satin gown was the most elegant in the room. She was every inch the viscountess tonight, he thought-and after dinner not a man but would vie to propose a toast to her eyelashes. He who had so long been known as Captain Kells had been proud of her when she had dazzled first Tortuga and then Jamaica-he was even more proud of her tonight.

Carolina had indeed melted effortlessly into the easy ways of the Essex gentry. To a marveling Virginia, she seemed to have forgotten the old days in Port Royal.

There were nights when she dreamed about it of course-restless nights when she found herself back again, strolling sandy tavern-lined streets full of swash-buckling men, listening to the squawk of brilliant macaws and red and green parrots like Poll, hearing the clash of cutlasses and women's strident laughter. Nights when she tossed on her handsome English bed and felt again the seductive lure of the tropics and worried that Kells was off on some dangerous mission from which he might never return.

It was wonderful at those times to wake with a start and tum over in bed and see Kells's dark hair gleaming in the moonlight beside her on the elegant goose-down pillow, his strong features relaxed in sleep... wonderful to touch reassuringly that long lean masculine body and feel a sudden rush of joy that after all their harsh experiences they had at last won through.

In time she bore him a son, a wild youth who became a swashbuckling adventurer like his father and ended up marrying the greatest heiress in England-for love alone.

And a daughter who grew up to be-almost-as beautiful as Carolina, and who broke half the hearts in Essex.

Just as the news of Carolina's miraculous escape from Port Royal had been reported the moment she

heard it, the news of each of those births was hastily