Beyond the Savage Sea Read online

  “I am not a pirate.”

  “So you say. No one in Barbados will believe it.”

  Drake drew a heated breath. This was impossible. “You do not understand. I am a poor candidate for marriage. I am a widower, still in mourning.”

  “You do not understand. You are lucky to be alive. And if you think I want to marry you or anyone else, you are sorely mistaken, for I do not. I am marrying to save my plantation. By the terms of my father’s will, if I am not married by the age of twenty-six—which is tomorrow—I forfeit my plantation to my uncle.” She wore her hair in a braid, but raked at it as if it were loose—a nervous habit, he suspected. “I think it a fair trade. You save your life and I save my plantation.”

  “It’s fair,” he admitted, but he felt overwhelmed with frustration, fatigue. There was nothing more to say. He swallowed angrily. Then, lest he end up back in the sea—she looked bold enough to do it—he shut his mouth, retreated to the bench, and sat. She sat on the bench opposite.

  He looked at her. Plainly she believed him a pirate. So why marry him? Why not marry someone of the island? He could only think of one outlandish reason. She was a female with a bizarre sexual appetite for “pirates.”

  “Do your wrists hurt?”

  He looked down at them. They were as bloody and raw as anything hanging in the shop windows on Poultry Lane in London.

  “An understatement,” he said dryly.

  “I thought they might, so I brought balm from my storehouse. I’ll dress them, if you like.”

  He looked at her in surprise as she fetched a bowl of godawful smelly balm from the livery cabinet, plus linen bandage strips. She knelt in front of him.

  “Hold out your wrists.”

  Orders from headquarters. He held them out. She was gentler than he’d expected. The rancid smell of the sticky yellow balm curled into the air, making his nostrils flare.

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wonderful.”

  She frowned. “My slaves swear by it. We buy it by the barrel. It comes from the Gambia River area in Africa. Whenever my slaves hurt themselves or become ill, they smear it on their bodies. They even eat a bit of it. The next day they are well.”

  “I do not intend to eat any.”

  “Well, I did not say you had to.”

  She was a stiff, humorless woman. He watched her in curiosity. When, in the course of rotating his wrists for her, their hands touched, she jerked back. He could have sworn he saw a flicker of terror in her eyes. What was wrong with her? Was she insane? Even if he were a pirate, he was hardly in a circumstance to do her harm.

  A bell began to toll somewhere in the rotten miserable hamlet, its echo waxing and waning in the trade winds, signaling that the executions were over. A chill shot up his spine. Dear God, how close he’d come to dying. He panted a little. She heard the tolling and flinched.

  “They deserved to die,” he said. “I saw them murder helpless men, rape women, cast innocent little children into the sea.”

  “Perhaps you did those things, too.”

  “I am not a pirate.”

  “As you say.”

  This was an impossible woman. When she’d finished bandaging his wrists and put her things away, he sat back and kept silent. The slow, measured tolling went on. By and by it stopped. Footsteps sounded in the yard. Smoothing his windblown, feathery hair, Magistrate Tarcher entered the cottage, acknowledged Drake with a glance, and said to the woman, “Did you explain the situation to him?”

  “I...not everything.”

  The magistrate scowled. “Edwinna, he deserves an explanation.”

  “I deserve more than an explanation,” Drake said. “I am not a pirate.” Both glanced his way, but ignored what he’d said. Edwinna. So that was her name. It suited her. It was a bold name. Drake glanced at her. Chided by the magistrate, she’d at least had the grace to flush. He got his first real glimpse of her eyes. They were lovely—long-lashed, a clear brown.

  Tersely, without wasting a word, Magistrate Tarcher put the matter before him. Drake was a merchant, a man of business; he grasped the situation. Basically, the woman was in a box. Unless she married, and at once, she would lose control of the family plantation, which her brothers were due to inherit at twenty-one. He could understand that. He was grateful to her for saving his life. He would gladly work his tail off for her for a couple of years. But marriage?

  “If there is any other way to save my skin...”

  “None,” the magistrate said crisply.

  “I am not a pirate.”

  Tarcher eyed him sternly from beneath bushy white brows.

  “Mr. Steel? I detest executions. I have no wish to witness another tomorrow. Now, come to the table and sign the papers. I need to send word to the governor today, at once.”

  Drake glared at him. Having no choice, he went to Tarcher’s worktable and grabbed the first of the papers the magistrate held out to him—the betrothal contract. It was predated six months earlier. He was grateful. It protected him, “proved” he’d come to the Caribbean as a bridegroom, not a pirate. He signed it.

  He read the marriage contract next. Under its terms, he was not to be a husband at all, but a puppet. By signing it, he would relinquish his right to rule his wife’s property. Further, under threat of being retried for crimes of piracy, he was not to set foot off the island of Barbados without his wife’s permission.

  “This is no marriage contract,” he snapped. “It’s little more than a bondslave indenture.”

  The woman panicked. “Mr. Tarcher, my plantation!”

  Tarcher calmly held out the quill pen. “You have a choice, Mr. Steel.”

  A wonderful choice—sign or die. He wrenched the pen from Tarcher’s outstretched hand, stabbed it into the ink pot, and scrawled his signature.

  The marriage license came next. As he took pen in hand and held it poised above the document, a memory pierced him—Anne, bubbling with excitement, clinging to his arm as he purchased and paid for their marriage license in the city hall at Cornhill, London. He glanced at Edwinna. She would never cling to a man’s arm. She wouldn’t need to. She looked to be as self-sufficient as an Amazon.

  He scrawled his signature and pushed the license down the table to her, parchment rustling. She took pen in hand and signed with as little emotion as if she were ordering a shipment of tools for her plantation. Her signature was as bold and upright as a man’s. Anne’s signature had been dainty, feminine. She’d taken pride in her pretty penmanship.

  The marriage rite immediately followed the signing. It was simply a matter of standing side by side—she was almost as tall as he—and giving heed to the words as the magistrate read from his leather-bound, insect-chewed book of civil ceremonies. The vows they were required to repeat were mere lip service, and Drake spoke his tightly, with a grim jaw.

  “I, Drake William Steel, take thee, Edwinna Charlotte Crawford...forswearing all others...with my body I thee worship and with all my earthly goods I thee endow...”

  Edwinna felt a qualm as Drake Steel spoke his vows. He had a magnificent voice—full-timbered, mellow, resonant. She wondered what it would be like to have that magnificent voice say those vows to her and mean it.

  She glanced at his profile. He was tired and upset. Well, she was upset, too. She wanted this marriage no more than he. When it was her turn, she said her vows in a soft voice, faltering twice, but managing to finish. Simon Tarcher pronounced them man and wife, and she realized with a jolt that they were married. Her plantation was safe!

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  Supper that night was tense. At least it was for Drake as he sat at the table with Edwinna and Tarcher, dining by the meager light of one candle in Tarcher’s dark cottage. Candles, evidently, were in short supply in the Caribbean and were burned sparingly. Beyond the table, in the darkness, Tarcher’s manservant was already asleep on a pallet on the floor. Edwinna’s servants were asleep also—an Irish pea
sant bondsman and the boy, Jeremy. He drew a breath and contemplated his situation: He was in a dark cottage on a darker island on an even darker, moonless sea. England and home were thousands of dark, watery, distant miles away.

  The trade winds wafted in the open window shutters, bringing the scent of jasmine. The surf hummed and whispered, rhythmic as a lullaby. He wanted to sleep for a month. He glanced around the table. They made a ridiculous trio: Edwinna wary and silent, Drake weary and spent, Simon Tarcher bearing the brunt of the conversation, optimistically marching in with topics like a soldier marching in to shore up a breach in a wall.

  Drake was too tired to think, let alone talk. He couldn’t believe the trap he found himself in. He couldn’t stop brooding. William and Katherine doubtless thought their father dead. In the morning, before traveling to Crawford Plantation—wherever in hell that was—he would write his sister, Verity, and then ask Tarcher to send the letter for him. Tonight he was too tired, too emotionally spent to take pen in hand.

  A brief spate of conversation hit the candlelit silence like buckshot. Sugar again. Drake swung his gaze to Edwinna. Sugar seemed the only subject that interested her. She felt his gaze, looked at him, then swiftly looked away. She seemed afraid of him. Why? He’d done his best to convince her he was not a pirate. He’d done his best to appear civilized. Courtesy of Tarcher, he’d managed to bathe, shave, and dress himself in clean clothes. He’d expected his civilized appearance to lessen her wariness; instead, it had heightened it. He didn’t understand her.

  He continued to gaze at her. She had fabulous hair and knew it. She wore it like a sexual banner. Combed out now, loosened from that ridiculous braid, it was a light sunny brown in color and as thick and curly as sheep’s wool—hair a man would want to touch. Her sexuality confused him. Sometimes she looked at him with interest, and sometimes as if she wished he would drop dead.

  “Might I inquire, Mr. Steel,” Tarcher tried optimistically, “as to your political persuasion? Are you Royalist or Protectorate?”

  “Royalist,” Drake answered without hesitation. He saw displeasure on Edwinna’s strong, candlelit features and squared his shoulders, eyed her steadily, and deliberately said it again. “Royalist, Mr. Tarcher. Royalist yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I am implacable in that sentiment and I do not apologize for it.”

  He looked at her disapproving profile. If she didn’t want a Royalist husband, send him home. He’d gladly go.

  Tarcher’s eyes bore the suspicion of amusement. So he and Edwinna amused Tarcher, did they? Damn the man. Tarcher helped himself to another piece of fried fish, flipping it from platter to plate with the flat of his knife, saying, “Then life in London must be difficult for you, Mr. Steel.”

  Drake looked directly into Tarcher’s eyes. “I was ten when the civil war broke out, seventeen when Oliver Cromwell beheaded King Charles. My father was one of the few London merchants brave enough to label Cromwell for what he was: a regicide, a murderer. For his honesty, my father was incarcerated in the Tower of London, despite his advanced age and fragile health. In that damned dungeon, he fell ill with Tower cough and died. Yes, I am pro-king, and I intend to remain so. What was good enough for my father is good enough for me.”

  Edwinna had stopped eating to stare at him, her expression arrested, her spoon hovering midway between plate and mouth, its pewter glowing in the candlelight. She had alluring hair. He wanted to touch it. Drake took a deep breath to calm himself and went on more quietly.

  “And if you perceive, Mr. Tarcher, that my life in London is difficult, you are quite right. My ancestral home, Highgate Hall, has been seized and sequestered by the Cromwell government. My wine business suffers constant harassment. Vandals regularly break my shop windows. More the Lord Protector cannot do to me. I am an Englishman, and I have an Englishman’s inalienable right to live. At least I did before I was Barbadosed.”

  Pointedly he used the scurrilous term in vogue in London drinking houses to signify persons who were kidnapped off the streets and transported into forced labor in the Caribbean. It was a common practice in these lawless times. Lawlessness had prevailed in England since the civil war. Highwaymen ruled the highways, robbing every traveler. Pirates commanded the seas.

  Tarcher smiled wryly. “Come, come, Mr. Steel. Your political persuasion makes no difference in Barbados. You will find Barbados planters amiably divided on the issue— some pro-Royalist, some pro-Protectorate. I myself am elderly and sentimental enough to long to have the monarchy back, the king.”

  “And you?” Drake said to Edwinna. Not that he cared. He was only being polite.

  “Protectorate,” she said bluntly. “The Protectorate does not enforce the Navigation Acts. Under the Cromwell government I am free to sell my sugar anywhere, at the best price it will fetch,” Her manner was as forthright as a man’s, challenging, looking him straight in the eye, her shoulders as squared as his. He’d never met a woman so sure of herself.

  It provoked him, yet he knew he was being irrational. The woman had a right to her own opinions. A realization struck. In his first marriage, he had been the protector, the provider. In this marriage—if it was a marriage—Edwinna was protector, provider. It pierced his vanity.

  He felt building in him the urge to lock horns with her.

  “Then your allegiance can be bought—at market price,” he challenged.

  That brought sparks to her eyes.

  “Nonsense. My allegiance is to Barbados.”

  “You are an Englishwoman. Your allegiance belongs to England.”

  “My parents were English, yes. But I was born in Barbados. I am Barbadian first, English second. I care little who rules England—king or Lord Protector—so long as I can market my sugar unhindered.”

  “A specious, self-serving attitude.”

  “Specious, self-serving? And how does England serve us? Our waters teem with pirates. Does England send help? No. Instead, she sends us all manner of undesirables whom she sells to us as indentured servants, bondslaves out of Newgate Jail in London. What allegiance has England ever felt for us but to clamor for our sugar, slap a high tax on it, and then rub salt in our wounds by sending greedy governors to rule over us? England deserves and gets no allegiance from me, nor from any sensible-thinking planter on Barbados.” She slanted a hostile chin at him. “You find that an unnatural attitude?”

  He speared a piece of fish from the platter. “Not,” he said caustically, “in a colony that sees fit to traffic in black slavery.”

  “You object to black slavery?”

  He laughed harshly. “With all my heart. Every decent-minded Christian Englishman objects to it.”

  “What nonsense. Slavery has always existed in the world.”

  “Not in the world as God designed it. Not in Eden.”

  “You do not know what you are talking about.”

  “Nor do you.”

  “In the first place, most of the slaves we buy were already enslaved by other black tribes in Africa. In the second place, our slaves are treated better here than in Africa.”

  “Ah, you beat them less, do you?”

  She gave him a look that had fire in it. Evidently two topics could fire her up: sugar and slaves.

  “We do not beat slaves on Crawford Plantation. Only fools beat and abuse their slaves. Sensible planters do not. Slaves cost thirty pounds sterling each. They’re a considerable investment.”

  “Human life is an ‘investment,’ then?”

  “You know nothing!” she finished.

  Flatly dismissing him and his argument, she returned to her eating. Drake gazed at her in mild astonishment. He’d never met such an outspoken woman in all his life. She is a totally unfeminine female, Drake thought, eating his fish, eyeing her.

  An idiot, Edwinna thought, picking at her fish, eyeing him.

  A dried up spinster.

  A rogue pirate.

  As charmless a woman as ever I’ve met.

  Probably a drunkard and a woman beater.
>
  She baffles me.

  He frightens me.

  Still, she has a right to her own opinions.

  Still, he has a right to his own opinions.

  She has...fine, erect posture. I like that in a woman...

  He has...a magnificent voice. It rings with the passion of his convictions. I like that in a man...

  Their eyes lifted and met across the table at the same moment. Edwinna was first to look away. During their crisp exchange, Magistrate Tarcher had sat eating, his eyes bright and watchful and amused. Drake resented it. Tarcher behaved as if he were a matchmaker and pleased with the match he’d made. It was about as much of a match as yoking an ox with a donkey and expecting them to pull in unison.

  Now Tarcher injected a mild statement. “Mr. Steel, you are unaware that Edwinna is one of the few planters in Barbados who manumits her slaves. They are granted their freedom papers at age thirty-five, and they are free to go, or they can stay on and live free of charge.”

  Drake was unimpressed. One year was too long to be enslaved. Thirty-five years? Impossible. But for the sake of peace he kept his tone neutral and nodded at Edwinna.

  “Admirable, I am sure.”

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting his remark at face value. “It is no more than they deserve. I love my slaves.”

  Drake’s lips parted slightly in surprise. While he opposed slavery on principle, he had never actually known a black person, had never thought of them as individuals one might come to know and like and even to love. He scowled, studying Edwinna in the candlelight, more mystified by her than ever. She was, he decided, an enigma.

  A diplomatic man, Tarcher adroitly took the conversation away from slavery, refilling Drake’s wine cup as he did so. He didn’t refill Edwinna’s cup. She drank no wine, no beer, no alcoholic spirits of any sort. She ought to, Drake thought caustically. It might mellow her.

  “You have children, Mr. Steel...” Tarcher said.

  Edwinna reacted to the refilling of his wine cup with a look of alarm that vexed Drake. What did she think he was—a drunkard, as well as a pirate? Besides, the wine was of such poor quality that a man would need a wooden palate to bear getting drunk on it. One taste of it had told Drake the wine it had been poor quality to start with and had further deteriorated in the tropical heat. Wine did not belong in the tropics. Only the Madeiras improved in a warm climate. Wine was his business; he knew it inside out, from top to bottom.