DARE THE WILD WIND (46 page)

Cam
and Brenna dined alone that night.  Bartholomew Fletcher and Cam's other officers had made their excuses, impatient for reunions with the quadroon and
sang mélé
women most of the crew had brought to their fortified compound on the plantation. 

Unobtrusive, cat
footed servants presented course after course of a cuisine more sophisticated than Brenna would have imagined possible, from the rich Creole gumbo and fresh garden greens to stuffed crab and delicately  seasoned rare roast of lamb to the
crème brúlee
that added the finishing touch to the meal. 

Despite his usual gallantry, Brenna could see
Cam was oddly preoccupied.  Finally, over their
café noir
, his mood lifted.

He pushed his chair back from the table.  "Why don't we take a walk on the gallery?  The air here is wine." 

The night was cloudless and balmy.  The air was perfumed with a thousand scents of the jungle, and a faint breath of wind caressed Brenna's skin like the teasing touch of a lover.  Abruptly she was conscious of
Cam close beside her, of the warmth of his body, almost brushing hers.  She forced her gaze up to the dark star pierced sky, counting the glittering constellations she had learned on their voyage.  Somehow the wide dome of heaven seemed smaller than it had aboard ship. 

"The sky is different here," she said.

"On the open sea, the horizon stretches away forever,"
Cam responded, his hand sliding up her arm.  It was a gesture from long ago peaceful nights at Lochmarnoch, when there had been no discord between them. 

"I feel closed in on land now, even at Scotsman's
Bend."

Despite all he had told her, Brenna hadn't really grasped the lure the sea had for him.  It was in his voice now, and suddenly she understood more than the prospect of gold or revenge drove him in pursuit of the prizes he took. 

"You've changed more than I ever guessed."  The
Cam she knew as a boy would have angrily rebuffed any man who told him one day he would find the Highlands too small a ground for his ambitions.

"I haven't changed at all, Brenna."  His tone had altered, and he turned her toward him.

"I want the same things I've always wanted
, first and last, you."  His craggy features half in shadow, he looked exactly as he had the night he had formally asked for her hand in marriage, heart stoppingly handsome, full of irresistible need. 

His eyes held hers, and his mouth moved down to hers, seeking.  She twisted away.

"Don't,
Cam.  Please, please, don't."

He cupped her face in his square callused hands, and made her look at him again.

"Why, Brenna?  Why not?  What's to stop us now?" He searched her eyes.  "Haven't I waited long enough for you?  Shown you how much I care about you?"     

"If you respect anything I say or feel, you'll let me go."

"Brenna, you're not some passing light
of love to me," he said in an uneven voice.  "You've been half of me for as long as I can remember."

And once he had seemed half of her
.  But that had been before Drake. 

"Don't let anything stand between us any longer." 

It was a plea and a demand, and once she would have yielded, gladly, recklessly to him.  But she wasn't that wild
Highland girl who had raced eagerly across the moors to his arms.  That girl was gone, as irretrievably lost as the childhood they had shared.

She backed away.  "It's wrong,
Cam."  He took a step toward her, and she put out a hand to ward him away.

"I'm Drake's wife.  I belong to him, and I always will, even if I never see him again."

Cam
stood rooted at her words, something darkening in his face, and Brenna fled up the gallery stairs before he could move to stop her.

Chapter 25

Brenna woke at dawn to the cries of the birds in the jungle, shrill and wild, a shrieking cacaphony of sound.  She padded on bare feet to the french doors onto the veranda.

The plantation's hands started for the cane fields, shambling with heavy feet, already looking worn from the previous day's labors, as if sleep had offered no more respite to them than it had to her.  An overseer on horseback armed with a flintlock pistol and black drivers with whips pushed them forward.  Brenna shuddered at the barbaric sight.

Turning away, Brenna halted at the sight of
Cam, astride a blooded chestnut horse.  He rode from the direction of a narrow track leading out of the jungle, then wheeled his horse to gallop up the road past the cane fields and the house. 

Last night, for the first time, had he finally believed her?  Had his blind determination to recapture all they had lost finally wavered?  She had to hope his old sense of honor would surface at last, that now he might be persuaded to let her go.

She had shot the bolt in her door when she reached her room, aware he could easily kick it in, relying on his pride to forbid it.    

She had never meant to hurt him, never wanted anything but to make him happy, before the deadly wind of the rebellion that had swept them apart.  But she had changed, they both had.  She could only hope he finally saw that, would at last accept it.       

At least this morning, wherever he was bound, she wouldn't have to face him over breakfast. 
And she longed for the overdue refuge of sleep.

When Euphémie knocked with a morning tray of
coush coush
and coffee, the sun was high overhead.  She brought the message Cam had left word he had business in the small village inland.       

"The master say to tell you he will be back a little after
noon."  Frowning at a vase of flowers already wilting in the heat, Euphémie swept them up from the top of the
chiffonier
.  "He say to tell you he have news for you then."

Before Brenna could question her, the black woman's broad back retreated toward the veranda stairs. 

What news?  Short of passage back to
England, what could Cam possibly have to offer that could please her?  Brenna's head ached, and she smeared butter and berry jam on the warm cornmeal bread and cracked the soft boiled egg in the cup in front of her.

A girl with
café au lait
skin slipped in to prepare her bath.  As the softly scented water lapped at her body, Brenna tried to put Cam out of her mind.  After she dressed and the maid had gone, she heard a rap on the gallery door.  An oddly furtive, turbaned figure appeared.  Darting a glance back over her shoulder, the enormously tall woman dropped Brenna an absurd curtsy.

"Missy, please, you come with me."

Brenna stared at her.  "Who are you?  Did Euphémie send you?"

She shook her head.  "You
must not tell.  You must come with me.  My mistress say bring you to her."  

Brenna felt a leap of hope.  Could help be close by after all?  

"Your mistress?  You're from another plantation?"

The woman froze at the sound of footsteps on the veranda.  With an agility that astonished Brenna, she shrank back into the shadow of the
chiffonier
just as Euphémie paused in the doorway.

"
Mademoiselle
, the master has returned.  He asks you to join him in the garden." 

"Tell the captain I'll be down directly."

The housekeeper turned back toward the stairs, and Brenna faced her caller again.  The woman edged toward the door. 

"I must go."  She pulled a small leather pouch from her apron pocket.  "My mistress say give you this."  Thrusting it into Brenna's hand, she took two strides to the door.  "I will wait for you.  By the well in the quarters.  You hurry up, come
bientôt
."

Then, like a gangling wraith, she disappeared.  What could inspire this sort of intrigue?  Brenna hefted the pouch in her hand.  It hung on a looped drawstring large enough to be worn around a slender neck, and it weighed nothing.  Then, just as she pried at the knot, she heard
Cam calling impatiently up to her.  She laid the pouch aside.

Though exotic vines and blossoms splashed the green of the encroaching jungle with violent color, a formal garden had been laid out to the rear of the house, with tamer plantings of boxwood hedges and pink and yellow roses. 
Cam revealed nothing about where he had been that morning until he led her to a bench that sat at the end of a graveled path.

"I have a very simple solution to your so
  called marriage.  If you have to clear your conscience, so be it.  I've found a way."

Brenna stared up from the bench at him.  "You're making no sense." 

"This morning I rode to see the village priest.  He's promised to perform the ceremony if we agree to be baptised first in the Holy Roman Church."

Brenna jumped to her feet.  "You must be mad."

"What does a little holy water matter, as long as the priest will marry us?"

Brenna jumped to her feet.  "I'm already married," she shot back, almost too disbelieving and furious to speak.   

Something dangerous crept into his voice.  "You were promised to me first.  Have you forgotten that? 
England is half a world away.  We can begin again here.  Look around you.  You'll never want for anything at Scotsman's Bend.  We can right every wrong that's been done to us, laugh at every Englishman born."

"No priest will condone bigamy," Brenna said flatly. 

"In the eyes of the Catholic Church, you're not married. 
Rome doesn't recognize a ceremony in the Church of England.  This is a French colony, and Catholic.  By French law you'll be my wife."

Brenna could no longer spare his feelings or his pride.

"I don't want to be your wife.  It's Drake I love.  I'm sorry,
Cam, truly I am.  I don't think I really knew until you set sail with me aboard the
Red Witch,
until I realized I might never see him again.  Too much happened to both of us after the Rising, too much has changed, and there's no going back."

His face had gone still, and under the bronze of the sun, his skin went gray.  "You love him?" he grated out.  His voice rose.  "That English dog?"

"I never guessed I would.  If the Rising had never happened, if we could have married as we planned..." she broke off.  "But everything is different now.  I want to go back to
England."

He drew back a hand, fingers curling, as if he struggled not to strike her.  "You faithless little slut."  His face contorted to an ugly mask.  "The second you saw your chance for an English title, you took it.  The second you could bed an Earl. 

“
Did he scatter gold over your soft white belly on your wedding night?  Do you refuse me now because I'm stripped of my title and my land in Scotland?"

"I believed you were dead," Brenna reminded him, cut by his accusations.  "I married Drake because he was good to me, and kept Malcolm from giving me to Charles Godwin."

"Charles?"
Cam jeered.  "Not even Malcolm would sell you so cheap.  You married Seton because he and his cursed German king put down the Rising.  Because they won."

"Believe what you like, then," Brenna snapped.  "I told you from the first I wanted you to put me ashore.  I begged you to let me go in
France.  You've treated me like a prisoner, and you have no one but yourself to blame for not listening to me."

A little of
Cam's control returned.  "Do you think you can go back to Stratford now?  That he'd have you?"

Something went still inside Brenna, and he smiled coldly at her.  "Very likely he's already divorced you."

The breath squeezed from Brenna's chest.  Parliament had the power to grant Drake a divorce.  She had given him irrefutable grounds, deserting him so publicly, willing or not. 

"You have nowhere left to go.  In
England you'll be turned away from every door.  You can consider yourself fortunate I don't turn you from mine."

Brenna stared at him, uncomprehending.  "You can't want me now."  After all the vile things he had called her, after she had said how she felt about Drake.

"Ah, but I do," he said tightly.  "I don't give up what's mine.  Land, yes, even my title.  But not you, Brenna.  The English may h
ave taken everything else from me, but Seton will spend the rest of his life a laughingstock and a cuckold.

"And, you, Brenna, will make me a proper and obedient wife.  The priest has a
greed to marry us in two days' time, and with sufficient generosity on my part, I think he'll overlook any nervous protests from the bride."

Chapter 26

Had Drake divorced her?  Or set a bill in Parliament in motion to be legally rid of her?