DARE THE WILD WIND (45 page)

"What would you have me do?" he asked.  "Compromise your reputation with every planter on the island?"

Brenna's frayed temper snapped.  "My reputation hardly matters when I can't stay on your island."

Cam
shot her an impatient look.  "And can you really go back to England?" he said bluntly.  "Do you think the English dog you married would take you back now?"

Something cold went through Brenna, and
Cam's acid smile taunted her. 

"Not if he has any pride.  Not if he's still the man who tried to run me through in
Scotland."

                                        *****

Not if he has any pride
.  Drake had nothing but pride.  Brenna had never dared to face one possibility, that Drake might turn her away from his door.

Drake had no way of knowing she never intended to abandon him when she boarded the
Red Witch
.  To every eye that witnessed her joyful reunion with Cam, she had gone willingly with him.  Not even the child she had carried could bind them now.  What right did she have to expect Drake to take her back, even if she could somehow make her way back to London?

Then, abruptly, any opportunity to find someone in the town sympathetic to her situation slipped away. 
Cam changed his plans to stay on in the island's French capital.

"The rollers and boilers have arrived for my new sugar mill.  If I mean to get the mill built before harvest, I can't leave the machinery sitting idle on the dock."

"It's here in
Cap  Haitien
?" Brenna asked. "You sent for it?"

"Unfortunately, the best is made in
England."  He grimaced at lining an Englishman's pockets.  "I thought the better of making port in Liverpool and taking delivery myself.  In the end, I decided to trust it to a Dutch merchant who doesn't have a price on his head with the Crown. 

"It's in crates, ready to be put together once I transport it to the plantation."  He spread his hands in apology.  "I meant to give you an introduction to island society before I spirited you off to Scotsman's
Bend.  But now I'm afraid that will have to wait."    

His smile was rueful, but a niggling voice inside Brenna said he only told her half the truth.  After their quarrel the day before, he might be more anxious to see her safely away from a port where ships set sail almost daily across the
Atlantic. 

"What will I do about Madame Bonnard?" she asked, as if suddenly stricken to leave
Cap  Haitien
without her new wardrobe.  

Cam laughed in relief at her female preoccupation with vanity.  "Madame Bonnard is most understanding.  As she should be," he said in a tolerant voice, "considering the size of your order.  She's promised to send your gowns on to you at the plantation, along with a dressmaker to fit them."

It had been a flimsy straw at best.  And Brenna had no other to grasp.  They departed almost within the hour. 
Cam summoned a maid from the
pension
to speed Brenna, and at the wharf, Brenna saw great wooden crates being loaded aboard the ship.  Cam had told her there was no question of the machinery traveling overland in wagons.  The roads on the island were far too rough for the crated parts to arrive at the plantation intact.      

After such a short leave ashore, Brenna was surprised to see how quickly
Cam's crew had come back aboard the
Red Witch
.

"They've had time enough to carouse in
Cap  Haitien
," Cam told her.  "Most of them have women at Scotsman's Bend.  And the inlet there is deep enough for the
Red Witch
to navigate, a better hiding place from English guns than the harbor at
Le Cap
."

Her heart leapt in her chest.  "Would the English dare raid a French port?" she asked, barely able to disguise her reaction.

"It's been known in the past,"
Cam said, "but not, as a rule, while England is at peace with France." 

Brenna's brief surge of hope evaporated. 

"At worst,"
Cam finished, "an overzealous captain might sail into the harbor and shell the ships tied up there.  But Scotsman's Bend is better protected.  I chose it for just that reason."

They sailed up the coast, to a point just short of the
island of Tortuga.  As the brigantine nosed inland, Brenna saw why Cam had picked the spot.  Scotsman's Bend was an ideal pirate base.  On a small estuary shrouded by a thick growth of jungle, it offered an anchorage invisible to ships passing along the coast.  And a harbor no vessel larger than the
Red Witch
could enter.

Bartholomew Fletcher stood next to Brenna as they glided into the narrow mouth of the river, running silently in on the tide.  The thick tangle of trees cast inked shadows on the water, and their branches seemed almost to claw at the brigantine's sails. 

"We toast the
Red Witch
for her speed," he told her with a smile, "but the great virtues of a brigantine are its maneuverability and shallow draft.  It can slip past shoals and reefs where bigger ships can't follow.  The
Red Witch
can sail into the mouth of the river, but even if they sniffed us out, the British frigates and Spanish men of war that hunt us would run aground here."

The darkness of the encroaching jungle was eerie.  Then they rounded a snaking turn, and sunlight broke over the water.  A great sweep of greensward, painstakingly cleared, led up to a house overlooking the river, and a wooden pier jutted from the bank.       

The house gleamed freshly whitewashed against the sky.  Doric pillars soared two stories to the roof, and deep double galleries ran around every side, shading tall windows with shutters flung open to catch every cooling breath of wind.  It was a mansion, graceful as a wide
skirted beauty at a ball.  And far more inviting than the imposing stone monolith of Wellingbroke, with all its formal wings and gardens.  But to Brenna, it would be a prison. 

How could she make her way back to
Cap  Haitien
through miles of jungle alone?  And who could she persuade to help her here?  Every soul at Scotsman's Bend owed allegiance to Cam, and she had no illusions that either his slaves or his crew would risk reckoning with him to guide her.

Cam
came to join them at the rail, and she heard pride in his voice.  "There isn't a finer house in the West Indies.  It's taken most of the last year to build it."    

"You built it?" Brenna repeated, surprised he had spared the time from privateering. 

"Not singlehanded," he answered with his disarming grin.  "I depend on my overseer.  I drew the plans with the help of a neighboring planter, and checked on progress between voyages." 

Belatedly Brenna understood
.  Until the last cruise of the
Red Witch
, Cam and his men had roamed the Caribbean, and returned far more frequently to their hidden island base.  And, seeing the plantation house, she understood that much as Cam might thrive on a life at sea, the loss of Cairn Creath and his land in Scotland weighed heavily on him.  He was determined to create a new kingdom in Saint Domingue to take its place, richer and grander for the lack of a title that could attach to it. 

The brigantine dropped anchor, and
Cam ordered a boat lowered over the side to take them to the landing.  A boy of perhaps eight hailed them in a high excited voice, grinning a welcome before he ran for the house. 

"That's Timbo,"
Cam said.  "He was born on the island, and he's as loyal as if he'd been raised on the plantation."

Brenna already knew
Cam insisted on trained domesticated hands. 

"I'm not fool enough to burden my overseer with taming a raw shipload of Africans," he had told her in
Cap  Haitien
.  "I much prefer to sell them to other planters, and pocket the price."

The magnificent house overlooking the river was proof of the wealth
Cam already had amassed.  It stood above them, shining and beautiful, a beacon of civilization at the edge of the jungle. 

"Is this why you turned pirate?" Brenna asked when
Cam handed her up onto the dock.  "To have a home again?"

He answered with a shrug and a wry, offhand smile.  "I like my comforts when I'm not at sea."

Gazing up at the house, she was seized with a treacherous longing for the crags and moors they had left behind them, and the aching sense that, for both of them, the loss was final.  The past they shared was dead.       

"What you've built is beautiful.  With this, and all the prizes you've taken, do you have any reason to go back to sea?"

He laughed, but there was an edge to his voice when he spoke.  "I told you before.  The life suits me.  I wasn't meant to rot on a veranda drinking bomba and rum."

He took her by the elbow to guide her up the smoothly
swept path.  "I will admit to a certain pleasure in the leaves I take between voyages.  And I think you'll find furnishings from Paris an improvement over any you've seen in London."

As they stepped onto the gallery, its shade immediately cooled the faint breeze from the river below.  Quickly they were greeted by a handful of house slaves speaking a soft, musical
patois
Brenna could barely understand.  But their shy, quicksilver grins welcomed the two of them in turn. 

Inside, she saw the house was done with an unerring, and decidedly French, sense of taste.  The heavy Palladian grandeur of
London drawing rooms seemed stodgy by comparison.  Delicate sugar glacé silks in shades of blue and silver covered fruitwood settees and curving Rococo chairs pierced with arabesques of carved leaf and ribbon, and the room was as light and airy as the gossamer hangings stirring at the wide  flung windows.

"You chose all this?" she asked, astonished.

Cam
smiled at her expression.  "I relied on my neighbor's factor in Paris.  But the result does the money I spent credit."

The housekeeper appeared, winded from her haste and her enormous weight.  A black woman who might have been thirty or fifty, she was garbed in a shapeless tent of a dress and a striped bandanna knotted in a turban that made her smooth face seem almost rounder than her girth. 

"Master, I am  most sorry," she said, wiping her hands on her apron.  "I see to things in the kitchens when you come.  My women cook wild duck gumbo and stuffed crab for your supper tonight."

Cam
shot her a swift glance.  "Then you got the word I sent?  You've prepared
Mademoiselle's
room as I instructed?"

For a second, her eyes slid to Brenna.  "
Oui
, everything is just as you wish."    

Brenna felt
Cam relax beside her.  "This is my
fiancée
, Euphémie, your new mistress."

Cam
couldn't go on presenting her as his promised wife, but Brenna knew this wasn't the moment to remind him of that. 

"Send for the girl you've picked as
Mademoiselle's
maid.  Brenna will want to change and rest once I've shown her the house."

Brenna felt no need for rest, but she divined that an afternoon nap must be the custom of languid Creole women, and
Cam must have other business to attend to on the plantation.

There were no inner hallways in the plantation house, only the double galleries that opened off every room.  Stairways outside connected the ground and second
  floor verandas.  As Cam had said, upstairs there were rooms still unfurnished, awaiting her touch. 

But the bedchamber
Cam had ordered prepared for her was as lovely and inviting as the receiving rooms downstairs, a feminine sanctum from its gauzy hangings over the bed to the artfully veneered dressing table and still empty double wardrobe.  Every detail spoke Cam's intention to bring her here, to make it a home even more magnificent than Cairn Creath Castle, a place of gracious ease and beauty, where she would want for no luxury he could provide. 

Cam
had stinted nothing to please her.  He had found a new dream here, and made it reality.  But she couldn't embrace the second chance fate had given them. 

Deep in her blood and bones, some primitive part of her had responded to Drake, and in her secret heart she had slowly grown to love him.  It shamed her that she had resisted admitting it for so long.  When they had said their marriage vows, she had thought all hope, all emotion, was dead in her.  But Drake had brought her back to life.  She had lain with him and learned the feel of his touch, the hard muscled contours of his body, and they had left the bounds of earth behind them in the spiraling, pinwheeling crest of desire.  And she had come to need Drake in a thousand ways.

She had blindly worshipped
Cam as a girl.  But Drake meant more to her.  The love she felt for Drake was the love a woman, deeper than she could ever have imagined, a need simply for the comfort of his presence beside her, for his strength as a man, his unbending character and honor, even with his enemies.  Though she had been too stubborn and willful to see it, he had put her ahead of his country and his pride from the day they first met.  She missed him, ached for him, and knew whatever their differences,  Cam could never take his place now.