Read The Pirate and the Pagan Online

Authors: Virginia Henley

The Pirate and the Pagan (65 page)

He groaned. “The final selection rests with the artist, Babs; let’s not talk of it now.”

“Now,” she insisted, brushing his velvety tip with her thumb. “Charles, who has a better right than I?” she demanded.

He realized that she must have gotten wind of his choice of
Frances Stewart for Brittania. “Who has a better right?” he repeated. “Why, the Queen, of course,” he said, trying to distract her with a red herring.

“Piffle!” shouted Barbara, pushing at his hard chest to dislodge his body from between her legs. “I know the rabbit-toothed little Queen is the last person you have in mind!”

“Barbara!” he warned.

She ignored his tone of voice completely, working herself into a fine breathless passion. “You’ve chosen that prime little Stewart bitch over me,” she said, her breasts heaving.

He tried to defend his choice. “The artists all agree she has a most noble profile.”

“Oh!” Barbara cried, jumping from the bed and flinging her slippers across the room. “You make a laughingstock of yourself. She teases you with her virginity so you’ll run panting after her.”

“You’re doing a damn good job of cockteasing yourself at this moment,” he complained.

“You beast! How can you call me that when I make myself available to you day and night? If you think for one minute she’d be able to satisfy your lusty appetite, you’re completely mistaken in her. You are as randy and as big as your damned stallion, Old Rowley. Why, that narrow-hipped little bitch wouldn’t even be able to take you. She’d wear white gloves to bed in case she had to handle the beastly thing, and she certainly wouldn’t ‘French’ you whenever you fancied it, like I do.”

“Barbara … darling … come and do it now. Let’s not fight, you know how I hate these scenes,” he pleaded.

“Then you’ll arrange it so that I can be Brittania?” she pressed.

“Barbara, no, you can’t have everything you want under the sun, and bargaining with your body when you know I’m hot for you is acting like a strumpet.”

“Oh, you brute!” She picked up a crystal bottle of heliotrope and flung it across the bed. “Take back your gifts, I don’t want them!” she cried.

He noticed with a jaundiced eye that she never flung back any of the jewels he had given her.

“I hate you, Charles! Get out of my house and never come back,” she shouted as if he were the meanest lackey.

His temper snapped and he slapped her face, hard. She began to sob, and when he held out his arms she went into them and buried
her face against his neck. His lips nuzzled her ear and he whispered, “Go on and cry, you’ll piss less.”

Her tears turned to laughter and she turned her face up to his and said provocatively, “A man who doesn’t give his woman a hard slap when she’s begging for it doesn’t have that woman’s respect.”

“You know I’m not a violent man, but you drive me to it on purpose,” he said, stroking her generous curves until she almost purred. She reached up to rub her body full length against him then lowered her hands to knead his hard buttocks. His hands and mouth moved across her flesh so temptingly that her knees buckled and they fell entwined onto the bed. He rolled her under him and she immediately separated and lifted her knees in blatant invitation, then he dove into her and the heavy seas of passion rolled through them and over them.

A
fter Lord Lord Ruark Helford had served his king and country, he immediately set sail for Cornwall. His mouth curved whenever he thought of Summer and how she had taken her own sweet time in returning to Helford Hall from London. It was her way of showing him that even when he held all the cards, she wouldn’t come begging. Well, he’d been away almost three months—long enough for her to have had some private time at Helford Hall with Ryan. Now, however, she was going to have to learn to share their son. She was also going to have to learn to be a wife again as well as a mother.

He swore that from now on he would tell her and show her exactly how deep his love for her ran and in return he wanted all of her love, given without reserve. He anticipated with lusty relish a second honeymoon.

However, when Mr. Burke and Mrs. Bishop claimed that Summer was not there, that she had never been there, he was stunned. He immediately sailed back to London and by now he was frantic with worry. Straightaway he went to Court and made inquiries. No one had seen her for months, since before the fire, and he went to Lil Richwood’s house on Cockspur Street with dread in his heart. He wasted no time bantering with Lil. “She never turned up at
Helford Hall. She must have been in touch with you,” he insisted grimly.

“Ruark, darling, I do believe you are accusing me of lying,” she drawled.

“Not lying, precisely, but there’s something you’re not telling me,” he insisted.

“Whatever makes you say such a thing to me, Ruark?”

“Because you’re not frantic with worry over her. If you had no idea where she might be, you would be mad with anxiety—filled with mental anguish, as I am, until you went out of your mind.”

Lil cast him an apprehensive little glance. “Ru, darling, sit down.” She patted the satin-covered love seat coaxingly as if she were about to divulge a confidence. She looked at his dark brows and thought he looked like Lucifer after his fall from grace. His black hair was in wild disarray from running his distraught fingers through it.

“I hoped I wouldn’t have to be the one to tell you this. I don’t want to hurt you, Ruark. I believe that Summer went off with your brother, Rory. I believe she is in love with him.”

A wail of anguish came from Helford’s throat which sounded like a wounded wolf. Lil wished with all her heart she had never told him, for he was plainly devastated by the news.

    Summer had stopped living. She had stopped daydreaming, stopped wishing, even stopped thinking. She existed—barely. In her heart she knew she would never again know a moonlit night on the balcony overlooking the garden at Helford Hall. Ebony and her dawn ritual were lost to her forever. When she had first been imprisoned, she felt outrage at the injustice of it all, but since then she had killed; she had become unclean, evil. Her son would be better off without her, so it was only right that she had lost him.

She had lost her husband. She had lost her lover. She had lost her looks, her youth, her health. She no longer cared. She was numbed to passivity; frozen, encased in ice, impervious to any further pain or torment.

She was so thin, her wrists and ankles looked delicate enough to snap. Her clothes and skin were layered with so much dirt she was unrecognizable. Her hair had grown but the lank, greasy shags were now plastered down the back of her neck.

*   *   *

Under cover of darkness the
Phantom
slipped silently up the Solent, past the Isle of Wight, into Portsmouth Harbor. Prince Rupert, disguised as an ordinary seaman, disembarked and was soon swallowed up by a waiting carriage. Black Jack Flash had safely delivered him to France and returned him twice in the last month without one soul being the wiser. He was acting as proxy for his cousin King Charles in a secret matter, namely handling the transfer of money from Louis to Charles for favors rendered.

Rory Helford never lingered in a port. Before dawn his
Phantom
would be safely out of Portsmouth, tucked snugly in a hidden cove off the Isle of Wight. Though he never appeared to be in a hurry, he wasted no time returning to his ship. He knew immediately he was being followed and his hand slipped over the carved handle of his long knife to caress it intimately. Damn and blast the man, thought Rory. I hate to take life unnecessarily.

He was in black from head to foot and easily concealed himself by slipping behind an iron capstan. As the seaman stood glancing about in the dark, Rory stepped silently forward and wrapped his forearm about the man’s throat. His knife, palmed in his other hand, pricked into the man’s kidney. “Talk fast and make it good,” he threatened.

“Black Jack, it’s me, Gitan. I sailed with you once. I lost an arm, remember?”

Rory’s hand slipped down the man’s shoulder to feel the empty sleeve. “Turn about slowly,” he ordered, “so I can see your face.”

The swarthy Breton was indeed Gitan. Rory grinned. He could let him live. The only people he allowed to know his identity were those few who had sailed with him. “You need money, Gitan.” It wasn’t a question.

“That’s not why I’ve been watching for you,” he denied. Rory arched a black brow.

“It’s a woman. Four or five months back they brought in women prisoners on a ship from London. The soldiers arrested a woman right here on Portsmouth dock and shackled her to the others. She gave me a message for you. She said she was your woman.”

“Cat?” demanded Black Jack Flash.

“Aye, that’s the one.” Gitan nodded.

“Christ Almighty,” swore Rory, “so that’s why she seemed to drop from the face of the earth.” He slipped his knife back into its sheath. “Can the warden be bribed?” he asked.

Gitan shook his head emphatically.

“Is there a way I can get in?” Rory asked.

Gitan shook his head again. “There’s no way in and no way out except through death’s door.”

“You’ve earned yourself a bag of gold this night. Come aboard and tell me the whole tale again in minutest detail,” invited Rory.

He took the risk of staying in port, but after three visits to the prison, Rory Helford was convinced he would get absolutely nowhere. Bludwart would answer no questions, give no hints, take no bribes. Short of storming the stronghold with the entire crew of the
Phantom,
Rory had no way of helping Cat. Lord Ruark Helford, however, should be able to come up with some sort of plan which would allow him to walk in and at least try to assert his authority. A vile curse dropped from Rory’s lips. He was loath to leave Cat incarcerated for one more hour while he sailed to London, but he knew in his heart it was a job for Lord Helford and not Black Jack Flash.

    Ruark was in danger of letting his anger and his impatience get the better of him. It was a platitude to say that knowing the fate of a loved one was better than being left wondering. In this case it simply wasn’t so. To think of his sweet, precious Summer in a prison cell, and worse, to think that she had been moldering there five months, was unendurable to him.

A knife was twisting inside his heart, the pain made more unbearable because of the great burden of guilt which threatened to crush him. If only Lil Rich wood’s suspicions had been correct. If only Summer had sailed off with Rory five months ago. Well, he wouldn’t enlighten her—wouldn’t inflict even a small part of the pain he was suffering on her. Somehow, someway, he would free her, and no one would ever know she had spent one shameful, degrading hour in an English prison.

He paced about the anteroom to the King’s closet like a caged animal. His body cried out for action, yet here he was trapped with all his excessive energy coiled tight within him. At last he saw the door open and Charles emerge and he schooled himself to patience.

Charles smiled at his friend. “All was accomplished with the precision of a well-oiled machine.”

Ruark looked at him blankly for a moment. Then he recalled he must be speaking of the covert operation involving Rory and Rupert. “I’m here about a totally unrelated matter,” he said with
what he hoped was an affable grin. “The high magistrate in Hampshire has been indisposed for over a year and as a result there have been no trials in Southampton and Portsmouth. The prisons are bulging at the seams and I think I could do something to ease the backlog before I return to my own district.”

“Find a suitable replacement for the magistrate if you will. That is a ridiculous situation which should never have been allowed to go on this long. All the seaports are overcrowded, unspeakably evil and filled to the rafters with scoundrels who daily break the law, but they should not be incarcerated without trials.”

“Sire, all I need is a letter of authority.”

“See Cornwallis for that. I’ve appointed him head of the justice system. Apparently it stands in need of a damn good overhaul. He has some scheme under way which transports petty criminals to the Americas. Apparently there is a grievous shortage of laborers and a crying need for women in the colonies.”

“It sounds like the scheme has merit,” said Helford, his brain already at work on a scheme of his own.

“Makes more sense than letting them sit on their backsides, eating their heads off at my expense,” said Charles.

Ruark Helford lost no time visiting Cornwallis. He put it in such a way that he would assume the King had ordered him to Portsmouth. “Some women were shipped to prisons in other counties after the London fire. That was five months since and they haven’t even been tried for their offenses.”

Cornwallis warned him. “The selection must be a careful one. We don’t want cutthroats and murderers overrunning our colonies, but I see no reason why women who were arrested for small debts or stealing bread to feed their children cannot be given a chance to help populate the New World. I’m still undecided about prostitutes. What do you think, Helford?” he asked, raising bushy eyebrows.

It was the closest Ruark had come to smiling since he’d learned the whereabouts of his wife. To think the fate of perhaps hundreds of ladies of the night rested with him. He considered the matter gravely, then said without the least hint of mockery, “Since men in the colonies are in need of women to warm their beds and make a harsh life more bearable, I think women who have loose morals would be welcomed with open arms.”

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