An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (19 page)

He got to his feet suddenly and glanced towards the door on to the outer deck. It was closed, the men were still singing; overhead they would hear the slow steps of the officer of the watch.

“I will show you something,” Don Miguel said.

He crossed the room and, taking a picture from the wall, laid it on the floor. The panelling behind the picture was the same as the rest of the room. He pressed s secret spring and a portion of it flew open. It was a place of hiding skilfully contrived so that no one could guess of it.

Lizbeth gave a little gasp of excitement. From the hole in the panel Don Miguel took a carved and ornamented box. It was padlocked and he drew from around his neck a ribbon on which hung a gold key. The small padlock, which was also made of gold, opened, and now the lid of the box was turned back and Lizbeth gave a cry of sheer astonishment, for the box was filled with jewels of every sort and description.

There were pearls of all sizes and shapes, some strung, some just as they had been taken from the oyster. There were great sapphires set in carved silver and a necklace of emeralds set in gold, which Don Miguel held for her to see. It was the loveliest thing she had ever seen.

Instinctively her hands went out towards it.

“I would like to see it against your neck,” he said.

“They are lovely,” Lizbeth exclaimed, not really listening to him. “I have never seen such big emeralds before.”

“There is a bracelet and ring as well,” Don Miguel told her.

“They seem to have a strange fire,” Lizbeth said.

“But that is true. Do you not know that the fire in an emerald is the reflection of the fire in a man’s heart when he sees the woman he really loves?” Don Miguel asked. “Rubies are for passion but in Spain emeralds stand for a love that is greater than passion.”

As he spoke. he drew the ring from the box a great, square-cut emerald with a shaft of gold carved in a strange, tortuous design. Don Miguel reached out and took Lizbeth’s hand in his, and before she realised what he was doing, he had slipped the ring on her finger.

For a moment she looked at it, and then Don Miguel raised her fingers and she felt the touch of his lips on them.

“It is yours,” he said. “Keep it somewhere secret because I have given it to you.”

With a violence that took him by surprise, Lizbeth snatched her hand from his.

“How can you think I would do such a thing?” she asked angrily, and pulling the ring from her finger, she threw it back into the box. “Do you not understand that everything in this ship belongs not to one person but to all? Part goes in prize money to those who man her, the rest to the shareholders who have financed the voyage. If I took the ring that you offer me. I should be stealing. What is more now you have shown me where it is, you must tell Rodney about the secret hiding place.”

Don Miguel seemed to hesitate.

“If you do not do so, I must.” Lizbeth said.

He smiled at her then and somehow she found her anger evaporating.

“Pray do not be angry with me,” he pleaded. “I did not think you had such strict ideas of justice. What is a ring, one way or another, in this great cargo, which is worth thousands of English pounds? I wanted to give you something that is mine. I forgot I have nothing.”

Lizbeth was touched then by the humility in his voice.

“I should not have spoken as I did,” she said quickly. “It was kind of you to wish to give me a present and I thank you for the thought even while I can take nothing.”

“But you have already taken something,” the Spaniard replied.

He shut the emeralds back in the box as he spoke and his voice was low and serious.

“What have I taken?” Lizbeth asked, puzzled.

“My heart,” he answered.

For a moment she could hardly credit what he was saying, and then, as her eyes stared at him in surprise, she saw the expression in his, saw the sudden fire behind the seriousness of his gaze – a fire such as she had seen in the depths of the emeralds.

“Oh, no! No!” she exclaimed impulsively.

“It is true,” Don Miguel affirmed. “Surely you cannot be so modest as to think that I could be with you day after day, that I could see you, listen to you, talk to you and not fall in love with you? Do you not know how attractive you are?”

“No, of course not.”

In spite of her distress at what he was saying, Lizbeth could not prevent the dimples appearing in her cheeks. “ You are lovely – you are entrancing – you enchant me every moment I am with you,” the Spaniard said. “You are English and, before, I believed that all English women were cold and staid and very, very dull, but you are like quicksilver, your hair draws me as the warmth of a real fire draws a man who is cold. I need your warmth, little Lizbeth. I am lonely and cold and far from home. I need you.”

Lizbeth put her hands to her ears.

“This is wrong. You must not talk to me like this. I must not listen to you.”

“Why not when we are both lonely people?” Don Miguel asked. He came a little nearer to her as she spoke, and now to answer him she must look up at him. He was very much taller than she, yet as she saw his face, soft and tender with his longing and his love, she felt a sudden desire to put her arms around him and hold him close. He was only a boy after all a boy like Francis, far from home, being brave and keeping a stiff upper lip under the most difficult circumstances in which a man could find himself – a prisoner in his own ship with no one of his own nationality to speak to or to keep him company.

For a moment Lizbeth forget that he was an enemy, forgot his secrecy about the jewels and even her surprise at hearing that he loved her. She remembered only that he was young and lonely and that she had thought not once but many times that he was making the best of an almost insupportable position.

“Poor Miguel,” she said, using his name for the first time before she could stop herself. “I wish I could help you.”

She spoke from the depth of her heart and only as she saw the expression on his face did she realise the construction he might put on her kindness.

Before she could say anything more, before she could prevent his doing so, he had swept her into his arms. She felt his strength for the first time and was surprised at it because she had not thought of him as a man; and then his lips were on hers, and he was kissing her tenderly, yet with a demanding passion which took her breath away.

9

On the quarter-deck Rodney was humming softly to himself as he walked to and fro. It was swelteringly hot and the ship was moving very slowly, for the breeze was almost indiscernible and most of the time the sails hung limp and empty, while the sea itself was so still that the water seemed to cling against the wooden sides of the
Santa Perpetua.

The
Sea Hawk
about half a mile away was in the same plight. Rodney could see Barlow gazing agitatedly at his top-sails. Barlow always worried unduly when there was a dead calm; it seemed unnatural to him somehow, while a tempest left him unmoved and quite unperturbed as to what might be the result of it.

Rodney, on the other hand, rather enjoyed periods of calm seas and sunlit skies. There was nothing to do except wait until the wind blew again and at the moment it was a relief to be able to relax after the excitement and agitation of the last few days.

With two ships to worry about he found himself unable to sleep at night, rising half a dozen times to look for the lights of the
Sea Hawk
shining across the intervening water. He would not have admitted this weakness to anyone, but he felt that he could not bear to lose either of his ships after his triumphant success in capturing the
Santa Perpetua.

Their position until they were well away from Nombre de Dios and the Panama Isthmus was extremely precarious. The Spaniards had a fleet of ships at Havana and nothing could be more likely than that two of them or maybe more might be sent in search of the Santa
Perpetua.
Don Miguel, too, was a person of importance. Rodney had learned that his father was one of the greatest landowners on the Spanish Main and master of many of the ships which sailed for home laden with the treasures brought down to Panama from Peru and the gold mines. It was not to be expected that the only son of the Marquis de Suavez could be lost without causing great commotion not only in Havana, but in Spain itself.

Don Miguel had, with extraordinary self-control, taken his capture with a dignity which had forced everyone aboard, even the fire-eating Master Gadstone, into an unwilling but sincere admiration of him.

But his compatriots might feel very differently, Rodney thought, and it was not until they were many miles from the danger zone that he began to breathe more freely and feel that he could move about without continually looking back over his shoulder to watch for a sail looming over the horizon.

It grew hotter and the vegetation on the mainland become more tropical and more exotic. Yet the birds of brilliant plumage could not equal the wondrous variety and colour of the fish which swam around them in the clear water – fish of every size and shape, of every pattern and hue.

Rodney felt he would never grow tired of looking at them, and it amused him to see the efforts of the big, rough sailors to capture some of these delicate, fairy-like creatures and keep them aboard. But in earthenware or pewter vessels they soon lost their beauty and their lives, and the men had to content themselves with making a pet of a giant tortoise and with buying the vivid-feathered parrots, macaws and toucans which, when they went ashore, the natives were only too ready to sell for the smallest possible piece of silver, whatever nation had minted it.

There were flowers in great profusion; and Rodney, noting now a strange white blossom not unlike a lily lurked behind the ear of one of the native volunteers as he ran lightly up the rigging, thought suddenly of Phillida. He had compared her with a lily when he first saw her.

With that clear white skin and hair that was gold as the wheat when it first ripens in the sun, her loveliness had left him breathless and yet he remembered guiltily that it was a long time since he had last thought of her or even remembered her existence. It was difficult in the warmth of the Caribbean to recapture the thrill her beauty had given him.

Somehow he could only find himself remembering the expression in her eyes. They had nothing in common with the warm, glowing blue of the sea over which he sailed. They were the blue of the English sky in spring – a cold, rather chilly blue which made no effort to arouse and warm the blood in a man’s veins.

Mentally Rodney shook himself as he walked across the quarter-deck. Phillida was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he had seen a great many women one way and another as he wandered round the world with Drake. But there had been no one even in Whitehall to rival her – he was sure of it. Though he had spent but a short time in London, he had managed to see most of the acclaimed beauties – Lady Mary Howard, Elizabeth Throgmorton and the Countess of Warwick. Phillida was lovelier than any of them, and when he returned, rich and successful from this voyage, she would belong to him.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to hold her in his arms, to seek her lips, to feel the soft silkiness of her skin beneath his hands. Yet somehow, try as he would, his imagination would not serve him rightly and he could only remember Phillida pleading with him on the terrace at Camfield that their marriage should not take place too soon.

There had been fear in her expression then, and something else that he had not understood, something which made him feel vaguely uneasy.

He strode across the deck and back again, thinking how much more comfortable it was to have the greater space of the
Santa Perpetua in
which to stretch his legs rather than the more confined space of the
Sea Hawk
His brain raced away on this new subject as if glad to be released from concentrating on Phillida.

It ranged over the great guns of the
Santa Perpetua
which had never ceased to thrill the Master Gunner and at which the men practised every morning; and remembered the precious cargo lying in the hold. Now Rodney turned his head and looked back to where the
Santa Perpetua
trailed their last capture – a small pinnace. They had taken her yesterday from her Spanish owner with his crew of six natives.

She was laden with hens, hogs and honey, a cargo which had been rapidly transferred to the
Santa Perpetua.
Rodney was towing her now, meaning to use her if she could be of service while they cruised down the coast, and then intending to do as Drake had always done, break her up before he left for England. These small pinnace were useless in the open sea but useful enough to the Spaniards in their coast work and she could not, therefore, be left intact.

The Cimaroons coveted the ironwork and Rodney had already promised this to their friend the pilot. He had been hoping today that they would encounter a pearling lugger and get a chance of taking the pearls before they were deposited at Nombre de Dios ready for shipment to Spain. He would collect a necklace for Phillida’s white neck, he thought, and knew, even as he decided it that this was but a sop to his guilty conscience and then he smiled at his own self-accusations.

Men, when they were engaged on difficult and dangerous tasks, had little time for women. When he returned home, things would be different. He would teach Phillida then what love meant. He would waken her to a passion as warm and as ardent as his own. At the moment there were more important things to do.

He took another turn about the deck. The
Santa Perpetua was
almost still now. but Rodney knew that the wind would rise in the night. It was too dangerous to proceed far in the darkness, but they could always set sail immediately dawn broke and keep forging ahead until the heat of the day drove the breeze away and once again they rocked becalmed on a glassy sea.

He took a quick look at the
Sea Hawk
and at the empty sea – there was nothing they could do but wait for the wind. They were near the shore but the water was deep. The only real danger was from hidden coral reefs. The man with the lead was chanting the depth. Rodney could hear his voice.