Beyond the Savage Sea Page 25

  “Are you unhappy about Kena’s baby?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “I’m happy for them, but sad for myself.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. The linen rasped under her thick, curly hair. At night she wore it the way he liked it—unbraided, loose for love.

  “I have always wanted to be a mother, Drake, but I cannot.”

  He kissed her forehead in sympathy. She knew he felt sorry for her, but she also knew he had reservations. He was not the sort of man who would sire a child in the Caribbean and be willing to leave it behind. He was too possessive a father.

  “What is the cause? Do you know?”

  He gave his hand to her to hold while she told him. She gripped it tightly. “I am not a normal woman.”

  “Yes, you are. Our marriage bed is testimony to that. You are normal in every way.”

  “I do not get my monthly courses, Drake. I have not had them since I was fifteen or sixteen.”

  He lifted up on one elbow and looked at her in the moonlight. He smoothed a lock of her hair from her forehead. “Have you consulted anyone?”

  “Yes. Midwives. Also, a doctor in Bridgetown a few years ago. They all say the same thing. I will never have a child.”

  “Maybe they are wrong. You’re very slender, and I’ve heard that women who are too thin sometimes do not get their courses. When they gain weight, their bodies adjust.”

  Unwilling to be morose for him, she gave him a humorous smile. “Then I hope I get as fat as a cow.”

  Because she gazed at him with such love and humor, he smiled and said, “I hope so, too.” But she knew he did not hope that. She knew he didn’t want to leave a child in the Caribbean.

  * * * *

  With two plantations to oversee, and one of them in wretched condition, life became so busy Edwinna scarcely had time to think. She worked. Drake worked beside her. Each night they slept in each other’s arms, and she found it harder and harder to think of parting with him. But she had promised he could leave at the close of his first year, and that year was fast slipping away.

  Truly a planter, she couldn’t stay away from George Crawford’s plantation, which she’d renamed the Thomas and Harry Crawford Plantation. The slaves were her prime concern, and then the poor condition of the soil. Drake was always grinning at her, teasing her because she was ecstatic about every cartful of cattle dung that was brought from Crawford Plantation to fertilize the new fields.

  Physicians in the Caribbean proved to be as scarce as icebergs. She failed to get one for the new plantation. She had to write London. In the meantime, David Alleyne nobly covered both plantations. Overworked, he remained cheerful, exuberant. His love for Kena filled him with zest. On the day Kena began to show and exchanged her gowns for loose smocks, he was jubilant. Edwinna was not. She felt devastated. Drake sensed it, and that night he made tender, gentle love to her. When it was over he held her in his arms and whispered consolations in her ear. She had lots of children, children who loved her. She had her slave children.

  But it wasn’t the same. She knew it. Drake knew it.

  * * * *

  Drake and Plum accompanied the season’s first load of sugar down to Speightstown, where they watched with pride as the top-quality muscovado was emptied out of the barrels into enormous, two-thousand-pound hogsheads and then loaded aboard ship for transport to England. Drake was surprised at the immense satisfaction he felt. Sugar was a long, arduous undertaking, but a man could take pride in seeing it done right, from the first cut in the cane field to this final step, seeing it off to England. He felt as if he were sending a child off. No wonder Edwinna was passionate about planting.

  He and Plum stayed the night with Simon Tarcher, partaking of Tarcher’s hospitality, dining companionably on fish, lingering long at table, drinking wine, talking.

  “So, Mr. Steel. Now that you’ve been through a harvest with us, what are your plans?” Tarcher asked, using the table candle to light his pipe. Aside from the single candle, the cottage lay dark. Plum took up a pipe, too, and gestured to Drake, who declined. He disliked Barbados tobacco.

  “The same. I haven’t changed. I am who I am—a London wine merchant. My business is wine. My home is London.”

  “Meaning you will leave Barbados at your twelfth month.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you come back?” Plum asked bluntly.

  Drake first looked Tarcher in the eye, then Plum. “No.” He liked and respected Tarcher and Plum, and he had no intention of lying to either of these men. “By now you know I’m not a pirate. Edwinna knows it, too. I’ve worked hard during harvest. I deserve my freedom. I have my family and my wine business to tend.”

  Tarcher sucked on his pipe, bushy white eyebrows meeting in a frown. “What about Edwinna?”

  Plum seconded the question, smoking on his pipe. “Yes. What about Edwinna?” The scent of Barbados tobacco curled into the air, rank, raw.

  “She is my legal wife. She will remain so. I will do nothing to change that—nothing to jeopardize her legal status or her right to rule her plantations. I would never hurt her in that way.”

  “We mean her feelings,” Tarcher said plainly.

  Drake felt his hackles rise. He disliked people probing into his private matters, but Tarcher and Plum were not being inquisitive. They were concerned. They loved Edwinna. Between the two of them, they’d been far more of a father to her than had that bastard, Peter Crawford. Drake owed them answers.

  He swirled the wine in his cup and gazed at it. “I’d thought of taking her with me, but that would be a cruelty. London is not Barbados. She would be unhappy there, shut in a city. She would pine for her cane fields, her sugar making.”

  Plum sucked on his pipe. “Ay, she’d be a fish out of water.”

  Tarcher took the wine pitcher and refilled their cups, one by one: Drake’s, Plum’s, his own. “Tell us, Mr. Steel. What can we say or do to persuade you to stay?”

  Drake shook his head. “Nothing. I have children I haven’t seen in over a year, Mr. Tarcher. I have a wine business that has been in the Steel family six generations. I have a commitment to it. I owe it my loyalty.”

  They drank and smoked in silence. Tarcher looked at him from beneath white, bushy eyebrows—an acute, alert look.

  Tarcher said, “You must know, of course, that Harry and Thomas must be dead. They must be. They have not been heard from in three years. If they were alive, they would have sent word, written.”

  Drake drew a slow, deep breath. “I have hoped, for Edwinna’s sake, that they’re alive. That at worst they are prisoners aboard some pirate ship, as I was, and will one day be freed.”

  “Your fate was an exceptionally lucky one, Mr. Steel.” Plum spat a shred of tobacco leaf into his palm and discarded it. “Few men are fortunate enough to survive captivity aboard a pirate ship. ‘Dead men tell no tales.’ That is the pirate’s credo.”

  “I hope Edwinna doesn’t begin to realize they’re dead. It will destroy her.”

  “It is up to the three of us to see that she does not.”

  “Yes.” Drake agreed. “Yes, it is.”

  They drank and smoked in silence, their hearts heavy with the thought of two vital, vigorous young men, probably dead, their bones possibly at the bottom of the sea.

  “Mr. Steel,” Tarcher said, breaking the silence, “if the day should ever come that Thomas and Harry are proved dead, Edwinna will need you. She will need you more than she has ever needed any human being on this earth.”

  Plum’s nod, his worried eyes, seconded it.

  Drake brooded on the words, took them to bed with him, lay in the darkness in his hammock and turned them over and over in his head, then slept with them and awoke in the morning still thinking about them.

  * * * *

  The thing Edwinna had dreaded happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, she hadn’t even a moment to shield her heart from the blow.

  It was the Sabbath. Finished with bond- slave prayers and slave
petitions, she and Drake were alone eating midday meal, talking together, enjoying the Sunday respite from work, when a packet of letters arrived, sent up from Bridgetown. She quickly riffled through them with a momentary lowering of spirits. Again, there was nothing from Thomas and Harry. But a letter had come for Drake from Verity. She passed it to him and he received it with both a smile and a look of uneasiness. She understood. Letters could bring bad news as well as good.

  He broke the seal instantly and had read for only a moment when he looked up with enormous excitement. “Edwinna, it’s happened. The Protectorate government is gone, abolished. Parliament voted to restore the monarchy, and King Charles has returned from exile. He set foot on English soil May the twenty-fifth!”

  Edwinna smiled happily. She didn’t care who ruled England, monarchy or Protectorate, so long as they didn’t meddle in Barbados sugar, but she knew Drake cared passionately, and that Drake’s father had cared to the point of sacrificing his life for the king.

  “Drake, it’s wonderful.”

  “Yes, yes, it is.” Blue eyes bright with excitement, he read his letter swiftly, silently, raking his hand through his black hair. He glanced up often to share bits and pieces aloud. Not all of it was pleasant to hear. The Restoration had meant another bloodbath. Eager for revenge, the persecuted cavaliers and Royalists were now doing to Cromwell’s followers what Cromwell had done to them. They were hunting them down, throwing them in the Tower of London, hanging them, drawing and quartering them, and displaying their decapitated heads publicly.

  Edwinna shuddered. When King Charles and his procession had ridden into London by way of London Bridge, they’d been able to look up and see impaled on spikes the heads of the very men who’d beheaded King Charles’s father a dozen years earlier. Radical Royalists did even more. Burning for revenge, they had disinterred Oliver Cromwell’s body, which was two years buried, cut off the head, climbed with it to the tallest spire of Westminster Abbey, and impaled it there for all of London to see.

  King Charles, Drake read, had stopped the bloodshed. Determined to heal the wounds of the civil war and to knit the divided country together, he’d granted amnesty to all of Cromwell’s supporters excepting the actual regicides.

  Drake grew silent, reading on by himself, lost in the text. She watched his excitement grow. He drew a deep breath and raked a hand through his hair, then looked up with a smile.

  “How does this sound: Sir Drake Steel.”

  For a moment she didn’t comprehend. Then she gasped.

  “Drake! You’re to be knighted?”

  He nodded happily. “Listen to this, Edwinna.” Too excited to sit, he leapt up and paced the dining chamber as he read the rest of Verity’s letter to her. As reward for the Steel family’s loyalty to the crown during the civil war, the Steel family home, High-gate Hall, was to be restored to the family immediately. The present owners were to be turned out and ordered to pay restitution for the years they’d occupied it. Further, for his service to the king and his service to the secret organization known as the Sealed Knot during the years of the king’s exile, Drake was to be granted a knighthood. The grant of arms would be a hereditary title, remaining in the Steel family with the right to be passed down from generation to generation,

  Drake looked at her, eyes alive with excitement. “When I am long gone from this earth, William will be Sir William, and when William is gone, his son....”

  “Drake, it’s wonderful,” she said softly.

  “It is, isn’t it, Edwinna?” He gave her a dazzling smile, then paced and finished reading the letter to her. The king’s coronation would take place in Westminster Abbey in April of next year. Drake’s knighting would be one month after the coronation in the assembly of others to be knighted. Further, having been petitioned by Verity, the king had ordered all charges of piracy to be stricken from Drake’s name and ordered Drake to present himself at Whitehall Palace in London as soon as possible.

  Drake read on, providing details from Verity’s letter, but Edwinna heard nothing more. She sat shattered, stunned. The king had ordered...Drake was leaving!

  He finished the letter and looked at her with an excited, happy smile, wanting her to be proud. She forced herself to say what she had to, but her lips were wooden.

  “You must go, of course.”

  “Yes! As soon as possible.” He headed out of the room. “Excuse me, Edwinna. I’m too excited to eat. I want to draft my letters and send them to Bridgetown at once—one to His Majesty and one to Verity. I’ll use the privacy of the office.” His footfalls faded down the corridor.

  Edwinna couldn’t breathe she hurt so badly. With effort, she pushed herself to her feet and left the house, dazed.

  At the stable, she saddled her mare and rode east into the trade winds to the privacy of the desolate Atlantic shore. The trade winds blew hard, drying the tears on her cheeks as they spilled. Without consciously searching for it, she reached the spot where Drake had kept her company the day of the Bridgetown executions, comforted her, talked with her. She tethered her horse and sat alone where they’d sat together, her arms wrapped around her knees. The tears wouldn’t stop.

  She wiped them away. It was so foolish to cry. Before Drake had come into her life, she’d never cried. She hadn’t cried when her mother left. She hadn’t cried when her father died. She hadn’t cried when Thomas and Harry had run off to sea.

  But here she was, weeping for a London wine merchant she’d known less than a year—a man she could surely live without if she would but try. She wished Drake had never come to Barbados. She wished she’d never gone to Speightstown on pirate execution day.

  No. That wasn’t true. She could never wish that. She wanted Drake alive, even if she would never see him again.

  She rested her forehead on her knees and let the tears flow. Deep in her heart, she knew she was not crying for Drake alone. She was crying tears that were years overdue. She was crying because she’d loved her mother, because she’d loved her father despite what he’d done to her. She was crying because she missed Thomas and Harry. She was crying for Marigold and Jeremy. And—stupid!—she was crying for Jocko. She sensed the tears were Drake’s gift to her. He had taught her how to feel, how to be alive.

  When the tears were done, she lifted her face and let the wind dry her cheeks. She felt cleansed, reborn. She stayed past sunset and waited for moonrise so she would be able to ride home by its light. She’d just stood to go when she saw Drake riding toward her.

  She could see from the set of his shoulders that he was angry. He leapt down from his horse, strode toward her, grabbed her by one shoulder, and wrenched her chin up so he could see her face plainly in the moonlight. It was the first roughness she’d ever had from him, and it would have scared her, except that his eyes shone with worry, not meanness.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. “Where in hell have you been?”

  “Here.”

  “All day? Why?”

  “I had to be alone.”

  “Why?” he demanded again. “This was my happy day. My triumph. You belonged at my side, sharing it. You owed me that much. Now I want to know why. Why did you go off alone?”

  “To—to get used to living without you.”

  He was taken aback. His anger slackened, and so did his grip. His eyes searched hers. “Good lord, Edwinna. Did you think I would go to London without you? Receive my honor and be knighted with no regard for you? Have you been sitting here all afternoon, alone, thinking that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You damned idiot.” He crushed her close. “Edwinna, you are my wife. I want you at my side. When the king knights me, I want you standing there, taking pride in me. Of what use is an honor if a man’s wife is not there to share it?”

  For a moment she thought her heart might burst with joy.

  “You want me with you? Me?”

  He smiled. “You.” He pressed a soft kiss on her lips. “You.”

  “But, my plantation
s—I can’t live in London.”

  “I know that. But you can visit. Stay a year. Then I’ll bring you safely back to Barbados. I swear it. I’ve already talked to Plum and Nansellock while I searched for you this afternoon. They agreed. They can manage both plantations for a year.”

  “Drake, I love you!”

  He cupped her face and leaned his forehead against hers. “Edwinna. I once told you that what I liked best about you is your good clean soul. That’s true. Because it is, I want to be honest with you. I want to speak to you about my feelings for Anne, if you can bear it.”

  “I can bear it, Drake.”

  He smoothed her cheeks with his thumbs, a husband’s affectionate gesture. She wanted him to go on doing it forever. She placed her hands fiercely over his.

  “I loved Anne more than it’s possible for a man to love a woman—more than it’s sensible to love. Beyond all reason, all logic, all sanity. I cannot explain it. I do not understand it myself. It simply was. It was like...lightning between us. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anne still owns my love. Even in death.”

  “I know that, Drake.”

  “But what I feel for you is a fondness so deep and so satisfying it leaves me entirely at peace. Edwinna, you give me the one thing Anne never was able to give me...peace. I’m not a fool. I cherish that. And you. If you can make do with me, if you can make do with fondness, with a husband who will not always be with you, who may be gone for years on end...if you can make do with a husband who hates slavery and will fight you tooth and nail on the issue until the end of our days...”

  She gazed at him with shining eyes.

  “I can,” she said fiercely. “I can make do, Drake.”

  “So can I.”

  * * * *

  The weeks flew by at an exhilarating pace. Leaving a plantation for an entire year was no small matter. There was much to do—preparations to make, problems to foresee and prevent.