Princess Annie (44 page)

Phoebe’s conscience, always overactive, pricked a little. Okay, suppose she
did
call the toll-free number and book herself on the next flight to Paradise. She’d be making the trip under false pretenses, since she had no intention of buying a condominium. Her credit was fine, but she was divorced, female and unemployed, and there was no way she’d ever get a mortgage.

Still, there was nothing in the flier specifying that buyers had to be qualified. It was an invitation, pure and simple.

Phoebe closed her eyes and imagined the warmth of the sun on her face, in her hair, settling deep into her muscles and veins and organs, nourishing her spirit. The yearning she felt was almost mystical, and wholly irresistible.

She told herself that she who hesitates is lost, and that it couldn’t hurt to call. So, she went to the wall phone next to the sink and punched in the number.

Four hectic days later, Phoebe found herself on a small chartered airplane, aimed in the general direction of the Caribbean, with her one bag tucked neatly under the seat. The man across the aisle wore plaid polyester pants and a sweater emblazoned with tiny golf clubs, and the woman sitting behind her sported white pedal pushers, copious varicose veins, a T-shirt showing two silhouettes engaged in either mortal combat or coitus, and a baseball cap adorned with tiny Christmas tree lights—all flashing. The seven other passengers were equally eccentric.

Phoebe settled against the back of her seat with a sigh and closed her eyes, feeling like a freak in her brown loafers, jeans and blue cashmere turtleneck, all purchased with a credit card and a great deal of optimism. She might have been on a cut-rate night flight to Reno, she thought, with rueful humor, judging by the costumes of her fellow travelers.

The plane lifted off at seven o’clock in the morning, rising into the foggy skies over Seattle, and presently a flight attendant appeared. Since the aisle was too narrow for a cart, the slender young man carried a yellow plastic basket in one hand, dispensing peanuts and cola and other refreshments as he moved through the cabin.

The woman in the battery-powered hat ordered a Bloody Mary, and received a look of disapproval from the steward and a generic beer for her trouble.

Phoebe, who had planned to ask for mineral water, merely shook her head and smiled. She was making the trip under false pretenses, after all, and the less she accepted from these people in the way of amenities, the better she would feel about it afterward.

She tried to sleep and failed, even though she’d lain awake worrying the night before. So, she pulled a thin volume, borrowed from Professor Benning’s extensive personal library, from her bag. The book, published by an obscure press, was entitled, “Duncan Rourke—Traitor or Patriot?”

Phoebe opened it to the first page, frowning a little, and began to read.

Mr. Rourke, according to the biographer, had been born in Charlotte, in the colony of North Carolina, to gentle and aristocratic parents. His education was impeccable—he spoke French, Italian and Spanish fluently, and was well versed in the work of the poets, those of his own time, and those of antiquity. He was also known to be proficient with the harpsichord and the mandolin, as well as the sword and musket, and he’d been no slouch in the boudoir, either, the writer hinted.

Phoebe yawned. Duncan Rourke, it seemed, qualified as a true Renaissance man. She read on.

Until the very day of his death, no one had known for certain whether Rourke had been a cutthroat or a hero. Speculation abounded, of course.

For her part, Phoebe wondered why he couldn’t have been both rascal and paragon? No one, after all, was entirely good or bad—a human being, particularly a complex one, as Rourke must have been, could hardly be reduced to one dimension.

Presently, Phoebe closed her eyes—and the musty pages of the old book—and a faint smile trembled on her lips. Pondering Mr. Rourke’s morality, or lack of same, she slept at long last.

1780
Paradise Island, the Caribbean

The precious letter, penned by Duncan’s sister, Phillippa, and sent to him by devious and complex means, lay slightly crumpled on the desk before him.

Come home … the diabolical angel had written, in her ornate and flowing script.

Please, Duncan, I implore you to act for our sakes, Mama’s and Papa’s and Lucas’s and mine, if not for your own. You must return to Charlotte, and the bosom of your family. Surely nothing more would be required to prove your loyalty to His Majesty than this. Papa might then cease his endless pacing—he traverses the length of his study, over and over again, night after night, from moonrise until the sun’s awakening—if only he knew you could be counted among the king’s men, like himself and our esteemed elder brother, Lucas … Papa fears, dear Duncan, as we all do, that your escapes in those southerly seas you so love will be misunderstood, that you will be arrested or even hanged….

Duncan sighed and reached for the glass of port a serving girl had set within his reach only moments before.

“Troublesome news?” inquired his friend and first mate, Alex Maxwell, from his post before the terrace doors. A cool, faintly salty breeze ruffled the gauzy curtains and eased the otherwise relentless heat of a summer afternoon in the Caribbean.

“Only the usual rhetoric and prattle,” Duncan replied, after taking a sip of his wine. “My sister pleads with me to return to the fold and take up my place among His Majesty’s devoted adherents. Her implication is that, should I fail to heed this warning, our sorrowing and much-tormented sire shall wear out either the soles of his boots or my mother’s rugs, in his eternal and evidently ambulatory ruminations.”

Alex grimaced. “Good God, man,” he said, with some impatience, turning at last from his vigil at the window overlooking the sultry blue and gold waters of a sunsplashed, temperamental sea. “Would it do you injury to speak in simple English for once in your bloody life?”

Duncan arched one dark eyebrow. Language was, to him, a toy as well as a tool. He loved to explore its every nuance and corner, to exercise various words and combinations of words, to savor them upon his tongue as he would a fine brandy or an exquisite wine. Although he liked and even admired Maxwell—indeed, Duncan had entrusted Alex with his very life on more than one occasion—he would not have foresworn linguistic indulgence even for him. “Tell me, my friend—are you liverish today, or simply obstreperous in the extreme?”

Alex shoved the fingers of both hands into his butternut hair in a dramatic show of frustration. Like Duncan, Alex was thirty years old; they had been tutored together from the time they could toddle out of their separate nurseries. Both loved fast horses, witty women with sinful inclinations and good bourbon, and their political views were, in the opinion of the Crown, at least, equally subversive. Physically and emotionally, however, the two men were quite different—Alex being small and delicately built, with the ingenuous brown eyes of a fawn and all the subtlety, when vexed, of a bear batting at a swarm of wasps with both paws. Duncan’s temperament was cool and somewhat detached, and he stood tall enough, as his father said, to be hanged from a high branch without a scaffold. He prided himself on his self-control, and his enemies, no less than his friends, credited him with the tenacity and cunning of a winter-starved wolf. His hair was dark as jet, and he wore it tied back at his nape with a narrow ribbon, and his eyes a deep and, so he’d been told by grand ladies and whores alike, patently disturbing blue. His features, aristocratic from birth, had been hardened by the injustices he had both witnessed and suffered.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said, with a weariness that troubled Duncan greatly, turning at last to face his friend. “I don’t deny that I’ve been in a foul temper in recent days.”

“I trust there is a reason,” Duncan ventured, in a quiet voice, folding Phillippa’s letter and placing it, with more tenderness than he would have confessed to, in the top drawer of his desk. “Or are your moods, like those of the delicate gender, governed by the waxing and waning of the moon?”

“Oh, Christ,” Alex moaned. “Sometimes you drive me mad.”

“Be that as it may,” Duncan replied moderately, “I should still like to know what troubles you. We are yet friends, are we not? Besides, a distracted man makes a poor leader, prone to grave errors of judgment.” He paused to utter a philosophical sigh. “If some comely wench has addled your wits, the only prudent course of action, in my view, would be to relieve you of your duties straightaway, before someone in your command suffers the consequences of your preoccupation.”

Alex’s fine-boned face seemed strained and shadowed as he met Duncan’s searching gaze, and his eyes reflected annoyance and something very like despair. “How long?” he asked, in a rasping whisper. “How long must we endure this interminable war?”

Duncan stood, but did not round the desk to approach Alex. There were times, he knew too well, when an ill-chosen word, intended to comfort, could be a man’s undoing instead. “Until it has been won,” he said tautly.

The vast, sprawling house, dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century, seemed to breathe like a living creature, drawing in the first cool breezes since dawn and then expelling them in soft sighs. A goddess of white stone, with the sapphire sea writhing in unceasing worship at her feet, the palatial structure was a haven to Duncan, like the welcoming embrace of a tenderhearted woman. And it gave him solace, that place, as well as shelter.

Alas, he was wedded to his ship, the
Francesca,
a swift and agile vessel brazenly named for his first lover, the disenchanted wife of a British infantry officer named Sheffield. While the lady had been spurned and sent back to England, years ago, where she languished yet, according to the gossips, in a state of seedy disgrace, her husband remained in the Colonies, waiting, taking each opportunity for revenge as it presented itself.

Duncan tightened his jaw, remembering even though he had schooled himself, through the years, to forget. He rotated his shoulders once, twice, as the tangle of old scars came alive on the flesh of his back, a searing tracery mapping another man’s hatred. He’d been fifteen when Sheffield had ordered him bound to a post in a public square and whipped into unconsciousness.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Alex said, startling Duncan out of his bitter reverie, “whether it’s Mother England you’re at war with, or the lovely Francesca’s jealous husband.”

It was by no means new, Alex’s propensity for mind reading, and neither was Duncan’s reaction. “If you will be so kind,” he said curtly, “as to keep your fatuous and sentimental attempts at mystical wisdom to yourself, I shall be most appreciative.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I have it,” he said, in the next instant, feigning a rapture of revelation. “We’ll capture Major Sheffield, truss him up like a Christmas goose so he can’t cover his ears, and force him to endure the full range of your vocabulary! He’ll be screaming for mercy inside half an hour.”

Despite the memories that had overtaken him, Duncan clasped his friend’s slightly stooped shoulder and laughed. “Suppose I recited the whole of Dante’s
Divine Comedy,
” he said.

“In Italian, of course,” Alex agreed. “With footnotes.”

Duncan withdrew his hand, and he knew his expression was as solemn as his voice. “If you want to beat your sword into a plowshare and spend the rest of your life tilling the earth,” he said, “I’ll understand, and not think less of you for it.”

“I know,” Alex said. “And I am weary to my soul from this blasted war. I long to settle down, take a wife, father a houseful of children. But if I don’t fight, the sons and daughters I hope to sire will stand mute before Parliament, as we do now.” He stopped and thrust his fingers through his hair, which was, as always, hopelessly mussed. “No, my friend, to paraphrase Mr. Franklin, if we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately. I will see the conflict through to its end or mine, as God wills.”

Duncan smiled, just as the supper bell chimed, muffled and far off. “You are right, and so is Mr. Franklin. But I must take exception with one of your remarks—we rebels can hardly be accused of ’standing mute before Parliament.’ Our musket balls and cannon have been eloquent, I think.”

Alex nodded and smiled.

A bell chimed in the distance, a signal that dinner was about to be served.

Without speaking, the two men moved through the great house together, mindful now of their empty stomachs. They sat at the long table in the dining room, with its ten arched windows overlooking the sea, watching as the sun spilled over the dancing waters, melting in a dazzling spectacle of liquid light. A premonition touched Duncan’s spirit in that moment of terrible beauty, a warning or a promise, or perhaps both.

For good or ill, he thought, with resignation, something of significance was about to happen.

“Geez,” complained the woman with the flashing hat and the dreadful T-shirt, when the small party of potential investors left the plane, at last, to stand on the grass-buckled tarmac of Paradise Island’s one and only airport. “The place don’t look like much in the dark, does it?”

Phoebe, blinking in a stupor of exhaustion, offered no reply. She could hear the tide whispering elemental vows in the distance, though, and the breeze was gentle and cool. A minibus, yellow with pink splotches painted on for a pintolike effect, chugged out of the gloom, horn tooting.

“Welcome to Paradise!” cried the driver, a plump, middle-aged man with a crewcut and a Jack Nicholson smile, scrambling out of the van to greet each of the tired travelers with an exuberant handshake. “Don’t make any snap judgments, now,” he boomed, before anyone could express a misgiving. “After all, it’s late and you’ve had a long trip. Tomorrow, you’ll get a good look at the place and, trust me, you’ll be impressed.”

Phoebe didn’t want to think about tomorrow, didn’t want to do anything but take a quick shower and fall into bed. This guy was certainly right about one thing: It
had
been a long trip. After leaving Seattle, the plane had landed in Los Angeles, Houston, Kansas City and Miami to pick up a dozen other weird characters, before proceeding on to Condo Heaven.