DARE THE WILD WIND (47 page)

Would he take another wife?  Young and easy to get with an heir, as she had been, or a ripe and experienced paramour like Caroline Scoville?  Caroline's husband was old, and in ill health.  If he died, she would be free to marry again.  And a small hateful voice inside Brenna still whispered Drake might never have married her if Caroline had been free.   

Abruptly Brenna halted her pacing on the garden path where
Cam had stalked away from her.  She must be mad to wring her hands over a rival in England while Cam was bent on forcing her into a bigamous marriage. 

He might drag her before his island priest, but he couldn't
force her to say any vows with him.  Swayed by bribery or threats, could a priest proceed in the face of protests from an unwilling bride?  Not if he was firm in his faith.  But if he was as much a renegade as Cam, he could close to his ears to any objection she might make.  On an island that sheltered pirates and thieves, anything was possible.

She knew only one thing.  She would never be
Cam's wife.

She had to think, to escape the prying eyes of
Cam's servants.  Brushing past the slave tending the path's alien roses, she returned to her room.  She dismissed her maid, saying she wanted to rest.                       

"But,
ma'amselle
, this heat.  You must let me unlace you.  Your gown will be crushed."

"It isn't the habit of Englishwomen to undress in the middle of the day," Brenna told her.  "I only mean to write in my journal."

Brenna kept no diary, but it was the single excuse she could invent to be alone.  At the dressing table, she stared blankly at her reflection in the mirror.  Burying her face in her arms, she willed herself not to give way to tears of rage and frustration.  One elbow bumped against the leather pouch she had carelessly tossed on the tortoise
shell top of the dressing table.  Straightening, she idly worked at the knot that tied it.  And stared in disbelief when it burst suddenly open. 

A ring rolled out onto the veneered surface of the vanity, spinning in the slanting afternoon light.  Brenna captured it in her hand, and stared down at her palm, the skin prickling at the back of her neck.  A small circlet of gold, it was set with a single opal that radiated an iridescent rainbow of colors as she held it up to the sun.  And before she looked inside the band, Brenna knew the familiar initials she would find engraved there. 

It was the ring Brenna had given Fenella before they left
Scotland.

*****

Fenella's ungainly messenger waited at the well in the quarters.  Only a few naked children and scrawny chickens braved the tropical afternoon, the first darting across the narrow street in a shrieking game of tag, the last scratching in the dust from one patch of shade to the next.  With the lethargy of women heavy with child, two women with swollen bellies fanned themselves with tattered palm leaves, drugged by the heat, watching the children with half an eye and talking in their African tongue.

Brenna strolled idly toward the well.  Wordlessly, the tall ebony
skinned woman drew a dipper of water and offered it to her.  Brenna cupped the hollow yellow gourd in her hands.

"Where is your mistress?" she asked in a low voice.

The turbaned slave inclined her head toward the encroaching jungle.  "Come with me."

Brenna followed quickly after her between the palm
thatched cabins, to fetch up on a path that led to a narrow break in the tangle of trees. 

At the jungle's edge, they were instantly swallowed in a green twilight broken only by the occasional play of sun filtering through the leafy canopy high above them.  Briefly, Brenna was cooled by the darkness, but the air was steamy and close, and the woman ahead of her set a swift pace.  By the time they emerged again into the light, sweat soaked from her every pore and salty trickles of perspiration ran down her face to nearly blind her. 

They came into a clearing with
a house facing a secluded white sand beach.  It had only a single story and a low thatched roof, but a wide porch overlooked the breaking surf, propped above the water on wooden stilts.  Someone sat at a table in an enormous wicker chair.  Brenna made out a bright fair head in the shadowed gloom, and Fenella rose as they drew closer.        Brenna gathered her skirts and rushed up the steps. 

"Fenella, you're alive.  I was almost afraid to hope."

"I wasn't certain you'd come."  Her tone was oddly distant.

"How could you think I wouldn't?  When I saw my mother's ring, nothing could keep me away."

"Join me."  Fenella indicated a silver pitcher and crystal goblets on the table.  "It's a decoction from fruits and roots we find on the island.  We chill it in stone jugs in the surf.  It should cool your throat after your walk."

She might have been inviting Brenna to afternoon tea in her father's parlor in the parsonage below Lochmarnoch.  But her pale lilac gown was of far finer stuff than she had ever worn in
Scotland, the latest in French cut and fashion. 

A dozen questions sprang to Brenna's lips, but sudden caution held them back.  Fenella's manner was strangely guarded and aloof.  Could she be the wife of the overseer Brenna had seen that morning? 

"Fenella, how did you come to Saint Domingue?  When you disappeared in
London, I feared you'd come to harm." 

Fenella's soft mouth tightened.  "A polite way to put it."  With a flick of her hand, Fenella dismissed her servant.  "Did you try to look for me at all?"

"Of course, we did," Brenna began.  But a week had passed before she had even known Fenella was missing.  She had been prostrate with grief for
Cam, conscious of nothing else.

"We?" Fenella repeated.  Then she sent Brenna an ironic smile.  "Forgive me, I'd forgotten.  You were taken in by the Wittworths, and completely undone.  And under the protection of your future husband, the Earl."

Then she had talked to
Cam. 

"Fenella, if any of us could have done anything we would have.  Drake sent his aide to search for you."

"Not with any great haste."  Her oval face set.  "By then I'd been abducted and put aboard a stinking hulk bound for
Tenerife."

"Fenella," Brenna said quietly, "how can you ever forgive me?  I should have kept my wits, insisted Drake send someone for you that day.  Up until the moment they told me
Cam had been...hanged, I thought if you were free, you might find Cam and Iain.  Then..."

"You were paralyzed by grief," Fenella finished for her, the words cold and clipped.  "That isn't why I asked you to come.  I don't have the luxury of dwelling on the past.  It's the future that concerns me now."

Brenna's glance swept the snowy linen on the table, the diamond
  engraved pattern on the crystal goblets.  "Surely you're free now, and safe here.  No one can hurt you now."

Fenella's mouth compressed in a bitter line.  "I'll never be free again.  I'll never be safe.  That's been taken away from me forever.  I live only by the whim of the latest man to fancy me."

Brenna's guilt magnified.  "You're the overseer's mistress?"

For a second, Fenella looked very old.  "I'm
Cam's mistress."       

She heard Brenna's sharp intake of breath, and Brenna saw scorn in her face.

"Who do you think chose the furnishings for his house?  Who do you think slept in your room before you?  When
Cam sent word two days ago from
Cap  Haitien
, Euphmié swept the room clean.  I was packed back here with everything I possessed. 

"This is where
Cam and I lived while the plantation house was built.  This is where Cam expects me to stay once you're married."

The picture of
Cam that morning came back to Brenna.  Cam on horseback, riding out of the same track she just had taken through the jungle.

"He came to you last night?"  After begging her to marry him, after trying to make love to her that same night.

Fenella's nod confirmed it.  "I admire your ability to hold him at arm's length.  He was in a fine rage.  And he made it clear I couldn't expect to set foot inside the plantation house again."

"That's why you sent for me?  To stop me from taking your place?"

"To warn you what he's capable of."

Capable of more than Brenna ever imagined.  Capable of going to the bed of another woman while he tried to force her into a sham of a marriage.  Practiced at glib lies and deceit, and a bully and a tyrant in the bargain.  Why was he so determined to weave such a fabric of lies?  Why couldn't he be satisfied with Fenella now? 

"If you wanted to show me how he's deceived me, you've succeeded," Brenna told her in a low voice.

"You're not angry?" Fenella said, disbelieving  "You don't feel anything at all at what I've told you?"

"Oh, I do feel like a fool," Brenna responded.  "I only wonder how long
Cam made a fool of me, with how many women, while I blindly trusted him."

Brenna thought of Malcolm's spiteful remark that
Cam had scattered his seed the countryside over in Scotland, and how she had rushed to defend him.  Not that it mattered now.  It only wounded her pride that he had found it so easy to keep her ignorant.

"Not half the fool I am," Fenella said, her brittle defenses cracking.  "Or half the coward."

"Because you're fighting to hold onto him?" Brenna asked.

"Because he has the same power over me he has over every woman born.  And in spite of all he has to answer for, I owe him a debt I can never repay."  She drew a small breath.  "He took me out of the bordello where he found me on Saint Kitts.  I might be poxed or dead by now if he hadn't."

Brenna couldn't imagine the horror of such a place.  "He rescued you?"

"He could have turned his back on me.  I was nothing to him in
Scotland.  Then I thought he pitied me, later I knew it must be guilt.  But that's never stopped him from taking his pleasure with me, or me from letting him."

"Do you love him?" Brenna asked quietly.     

"How can any woman love a man like
Cam?"  Her eyes pitied Brenna.  "I suppose you think he sailed all the way back to Scotland just for you.  He was bound for Liverpool until he learned his reputation had preceded him with the British Navy.  Even using Iain's name, he found he'd never be able to slip the
Red Witch
into an English port. 

"He meant to take delivery himself on his precious machinery for the mill, and rendezvous with Tavis MacCavan. 
Cam had sent old Tavis a letter, telling him to bring Cam's family heirlooms from Cairn Creath.  When Cam was forced to outrun a British sloop of war, he turned south again for France.  The
Red Witch
was beating back down the coast toward Land's End when a squall drove him into your cove in Cornwall."

"So he never intended to come for me at all?" Brenna said slowly.

"Oh, he was glad enough to take you aboard the
Red Witch
, and make off with you.  You were the last possession he'd left in Scotland."

"Then why is he so bent on marrying me?"

"He can hardly marry me," Fenella told her.  "I can never be the mistress of his plantation.  There always might be someone who would recognize me, one of his neighbors on the island who might have seen me on Saint Kitts.  It would never do for an exiled Scottish lord to claim a woman with my past as his wife."

Brenna heard the bitterness in Fenella's words.  Aside from taking his revenge on Drake, what was it
Cam really wanted of her?  The proper sort of wife to grace his drawing room, to bear his children? 

"It's no more mad than insisting on marrying another man's wife.  Fenella, I don't want to marry
Cam.  I want to go home."

For a few seconds, Fenella only looked at her, seeking the truth in Brenna's face.  "Then you should leave Scotsman's
Bend, as quickly as you can."

"How?" Brenna asked.  "Who would help me?  How would I find my way back to
Cap  Haitien
?"

Fenella leaned across the table.  "I can help you.  You can leave now, from here, with my girl Odelia, before
Cam realizes you've gone."

"Odelia and I were seen together in the slave quarters.  If she disappears with me,
Cam will know you had a hand in my escape.  Have you thought what he might do if he finds out?"

"Odelia can be back before dawn.  She'll only take you as far as the
cimarrón
village inland.  They're runaway slaves and outlaws, but Cam's men are hardly better.  And Odelia has a lover there.  He'll guide you to the Spanish side of the island, out of Cam's reach, for a purse full of gold."

Brenna considered.  She would be forced to put her faith in a man who might slit her throat in the jungle, but it might be her last and only hope.  

"There's a swamp a little way upriver.  If Odelia leaves torn scraps of your gown on branches and something else of yours floating in the water, a search party will think you blundered in and drowned."  Fenella gripped Brenna's hands.  "I have the gold
enough to bribe Odelia's
cimarrón
and the women in the quarters."