Paxton Pride (65 page)

The words, softer than the crackling conversation of the flames, echoed in the fullness of her heart, filling her with a melody too sweet to be sung, a blending harmony of memory and desire, the secret knowledge of self and self-sacrifice, the give and take and ever-surging tide of sweetest bliss and headiest ecstasy, and that which defied the telling because words were simply not enough to capture or hold or define.

“I love you too, Vance,” came her whispered reply.

They held each other and did not speak again that night. The last Karen heard before she fell asleep was his heart, pulsing at one with hers, with life and love, the two inseparable.

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Chapter I

Marie Celeste Ravenne sighed with lazy contentment, leaned back against a huge chunk of driftwood and gazed across the sparkling sea. Far to the northeast lay Cuba, an island she had never seen. Squinting and trying to imagine the wonders of La Havana, she curled her toes into the sand in order not to be carried away by dreams. A gull screamed and she looked up and half-consciously reached for a shell to pitch at the intruder. The black and white gull banked to the left and disappeared beyond the headland.

Alone again with her thoughts, Marie appeared but a waif tossed upon the shore, lonely and lost. Black hair, damp from sea spray, fell in shoulder-length waves around a lighthearted young woman's face. A streak of dirt soiled a slightly puggish nose that accentuated the tomboy look left by cutoff men's breeches and altered cotton shirt. Both knees—and an elbow as well—were scraped, in contrast to the bronze tone of flesh that glowed with health imparted by the fierce Caribbean sun. Barely parted full lips and the soft line of swelling breasts under the thin, bloused shirt were infallible indicators of her sensuality.

Contemplation erased the impish look, left behind the more serious countenance of a young woman, out of which stared liquid gray eyes slitted against the noon sun. She had traveled in solitude from La Cachette, and if her father, Jean Ravenne, discovered she had left without telling him … How he disliked her wandering off alone, without Tomás to keep her company. She squirmed, dug rounded bottom deeper into the sand and fit her toes back into the series of round notches in the blazing white beach. The impish look returned and she giggled with the sure knowledge of the dearly loved, who know exactly which rules may be broken with impunity.

“Oh, father,” she would say with a small, crooked, sweetly devious smile calculated to melt his heart, “Whatever is there to worry about? What could possibly happen to me? You yourself have said there is no danger.”

She could hear his answer and sighed in resignation. So much fuss about a tiny trip around Mysteré. After all, she would travel much farther one day. How wonderful to be as free as one could be! Sometimes she couldn't understand her father. One moment he averred she was as free as Pia had been, the next he ringed her about with a thousand constraints.

Mysteré! The beginning. A tranquil jewel in the shimmering sea. Place it a short hundred leagues south of the western end of Cuba, a long hundred north of the eastern tip of Honduras, which is to say almost exactly halfway between the two. There, from the Mysterioso Bank, a shallow, submerged reef in the midst of the azure Caribbean, spring many tiny islands, most forgotten or ignored
.

No longer than five miles, nor broader than three at the widest point, an unnamed island lay like a teardrop falling toward the morning sun. It was here the crew of the battered sloop Raventazón dropped anchor in 1692. Sick of a life of buccaneering and seeking haven, the hopeful arrivals named the small but well-protected harbour Voûte Paix, or as it would be said in English, Peace Bay. The name was apt, for the isle was uninhabited and there was, indeed, peace to be found
.

The island itself they called Mysteré, a name chosen by my mother in honor of an uncommonly accurate representation of a human face on a cliff readily visible from the southern approaches to the island. Whether this sculpture was hewn by human hands or the elements, we never knew. In any case, Mysteré suited the tiny band's needs. Of native foods there were plenty, as of cattle and feral hogs, no doubt left there to grow wild by earlier callers
.

A colony of respectable citizens, their crimes buried in the past, had been established by 1695. I was born in April of the same, an event sadly followed by my mother's death some eight months later, on the last day of the year. Notwithstanding this grief, our colony throve, as may be discovered in my father's journal, which I was lucky enough to find some years ago. Suffice it to say we numbered ninety-three by 1712, among us not a few women, a half-dozen children my own age and even babes in arms. Our population included an additional hundred and fifty slaves, not counting their issue
.

Mysteré had become self-sufficient. A bustling town, La Cachette, grew up around Voûte Paix. Spread inland on a small, fertile plain were plantations which supplied most of the food we ate and tobacco for trading with smugglers and, occasionally, pirates (my father's old ties kept us safe from attack). Meat, tobacco and rum were exchanged for such manufactures as civilization could best supply. In addition, though of this little was said when the slender threads of Spanish authority touched our shore, we were in occasional receipt of luxuries originally destined for others' hands
.

My years on Mysteré were uneventful for the main part. I took for granted our emerald isle surrounded by the deep, throbbing blue of the Caribbean, for we lived at peace with as much of the world as we could see. I remember hardly more than happy days and quiet nights, broken only by occasional storms which broke over Mysteré and left the air clean and vibrant. I remember studying my lessons, playing games on land and aboard the sailing vessels that visited us, running and swimming and riding on horseback. I remember the taste of fruit, the warmth of sun on my back and legs, the gentle tug of sea breeze through my hair. I remember a state of innocence in which the days flew by without note
.

Innocence came to an abrupt end on a bright July day in the year 1712
.…

She glanced at the sun. There was more than enough time to get back before sunset, when, in daily pilgrimage, father and daughter visited wife's and mother's grave. Marie often wondered about the daily climb up the mountain to the flowered glade where Pia Ravenne lay. Why the ritual was so important to her father was an unfathomable mystery to a child. She had questioned the trip but once, only to receive a hurt stare in answer. A tear had run from his eye. Never before had she seen such a troubling display of emotion, and from that day she suffered the climb and stood in reverent silence while Jean kneeled by the ivory cross over the white stone slab and prayed for the woman he had loved and would never forget, the woman Marie had never remembered.

Pia Marie Ravenne

Born 1672–Died December 31, 1695

On a clear day Marie could look from the back door of their house and, if the riot of vines had been cleared recently, see the little white marker high on the slope. Pia Ravenne, in death, overlooked the slumbering village of La Cachette, the middle plantations where the tobacco grew and the fruit- and grain-laden fields sloping up the flanks of the mountain. Sometimes the lofty emerald height was concealed by a cloudy shadow as gray and fathomless as Marie's eyes. Often, as she gazed up the long trail to the clearing, Marie wondered if the dead could see through the mist, if Pia watched her daughter, standing below and looking up.

Whether or not Pia watched, Jean did, with trepidation and sometimes fear, for Marie resembled her mother more and more with each passing day. How the daughter reminded him of the mother, especially when she tossed her raven-black curls! The ebullience of spirit, the headstrong will, the ravishing beauty that drove men to excess. How incomparably fortunate he had been! Pia was a woman to choose one man and one man only. Would Marie mirror her mother in this respect too? He hoped so, yet dreaded the day she would leave him.

The years passed and Jean became less and less able to separate daughter from mother, past from present. Secretly at first, then openly, he took to filling large wooden mugs with palm wine and wandering aside to sit beneath the low sweeping branches of an ancient ycao tree. There, nearly hidden from sight, he drank to assuage the bitter loss.

The older Marie grew, the more often such episodes occurred and the greater was Jean's pain. With greater and greater frequency, he retired to the quiet, haunted realm at the base of the ycao, leaving Marie at liberty to explore the island that was her home. This day she had coaxed a mare from the corral and, ignoring Tomás, the mestizo servant, rode off in reckless exploration. Why not? Father was brooding with the last of his wine.

The day was warm, balmy and ripe for adventure. Marie was young and full of life and energy, free as the gulls and carefree as the wind. One day soon, her father had threatened, she would have to act her age, wear gowns and assume a woman's responsibilities. Seventeen was, after all, past the age for marriage. Until that day came, Marie had decided, she'd better have as much fun as possible, not only for herself, but for her mother, who would never laugh or love again, who lay beneath the mist and spongelike loam high on the mountainside. No matter what Jean would have said about that, Marie imagined that Pia watched with approval, taking sad joy in her daughter's escapades.

The trip around the island was always a pleasant adventure. The pony, a small, barrel-chested brown mare, climbed the steep rise out of La Cachette, dipped back down to the shore a half-mile north and followed the long curve of open, sandy beach along the western side of Mysteré. Here on the lee side of the island, the water lay calm and gentle, not at all like a vast sea. Horse and rider plodded along the water-packed smooth sand, stopping from time to time to inspect a shell or piece of driftwood, carefully avoiding the purple-jeweled air-bags and streaming tentacles of Portuguese men-of-war washed up during the night before. By eleven in the morning they had reached Point de las Pleurs, the point of tears at the northwestern tip of Mysteré, where currents swirled around the huge, water-sculpted boulders.

A half-hour later, after Marie fell off one of the boulders and received a thorough and frightening drenching, they started down the eastern side of the island. Here, on the windward beaches, the Caribbean took on a new aspect as the sea, driven by the easterly trades, sent streaming combers to beat on the rocky, boulder-strewn shore. A hundred yards south of the point, she stopped to rest and dig for shells in a shallow cove. Now, rested, Marie sprang up as the pony started to nibble at a low-hanging branch of a stunted, gnarled tree sprouting from a pile of rocks heaped near the shore.

“Aiae!” she yelled, throwing up her hands in alarm, gray eyes glinting with the fiery inheritance of her Spanish mother.
“Caballo loco!
Would you torment yourself with the venom of the mancanilla? Even the fish have more sense!”

The startled mare bolted from the tree and galloped down the coast, leaving the exasperated girl to heave a parting shout of disgust. “Stupid horse! To eat poisoned apples? I should rather walk home than ride on your back. I am glad to be rid of you. Tomás was right!”

The mare disappeared around a boulder and Marie slumped dejectedly against the driftwood log. The long walk home promised to be more adventure than she had anticipated. Now Jean would surely miss her, and as usual, assume the worst. She pouted. He worried to excess. “Well, let him worry, then,” she said petulantly, immediately regretting the words. That was no way for a daughter to talk. Even if she didn't understand his unreasoning fear, he was her father and deserved respect and love. He didn't like her to wander the whole island unescorted? Very well. If she went over the mountain, she could say she'd only been visiting Pia's grave. This will take some clever talking, she mused.

A small red fruit from the mancanilla dropped into the water. Marie sighed, got to her feet and started for home, following the mare's zigzag path along the increasingly rocky coast until she came to the beginnings of a trail leading upward and hence over the mountain. That the trail had been used by wild dogs and feral hogs was evident from the multitude of old tracks, but Marie determined to follow it anyway in order to avoid the longer walk around the southeastern belly of the island.

The first hundred yards bent slowly upward. Once under the trees, the offshore breeze was cut and an eerie, howling wail floated down from the summit ahead. Wild dogs. Marie gritted her teeth and wished she'd brought along one of the big flintlock pistols. She could shoot as well as any man and frequently went hunting with her father or Tomás.

The unearthly chorus plummeted past like some tangible substance and lost itself among the breakers below. Grimly, she determined to continue rather than wander around the island in a runaway horse's footsteps and face her friends' laughter as she trudged through town. After all, there was little real danger: such animals generally preferred to be left alone and usually avoided humans. Still, there were gruesome tales of shredded remains and gnawed bones found along solitary trails. “I shall not be afraid,” she said aloud, brushing back the raven-black tresses. “A stick will have to do.” Armed with a dead but stout branch, she continued.