To Love a Rogue Read online

  TO LOVE A ROGUE

  by

  Valerie Sherwood

  INNER

  CIRCLE

  Copyright © 1987 by Valerie Sherwood

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 1988 by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd of 5 Windmill Street, London W1

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Sherwood, Valerie To love a rogue.

  I. Title 813'.54 [F]

  ISBN 1-85018-079-2

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn

  Table of Contents

  TO LOVE A ROGUE FOREWORD

  I: ARAMINTA CHAPTER I Cornwall, England August 1658

  II: THE TAVERN WENCH CHAPTER 2 The Light Horse Tavern Rhode Island June 1675

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  III:THE LIKELY LASS CHAPTER 8 Narragansett Bay

  CHAPTER 9 A Week Later

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11 The Lady of the Lilies

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14 St. George, Bermuda Summer

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  IV:THE GIFT OF THE SEA CHAPTER 17 The Storm-Lashed Seas

  CHAPTER 18 The City of the Dawn The Coast of Yucatan, Mexico

  CHAPTER 19

  V:DARK OF THE MOON CHAPTER 20 The Carolina Coast September 1675

  CHAPTER 21 The Siege of Jamestown, September 1675

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23 Green Spring, The Virginia Colony

  CHAPTER 24 Yorktown, Colonial Virginia

  CHAPTER 25 The Lizard

  CHAPTER 26 Todd House, Near Providence, Rhode Island October

  CHAPTER 27 Narragansett Bay

  VI: BENEATH SOUTHERN STARS CHAPTER 28 Bridgetown, Barbados December 1675

  CHAPTER 29 Venture Plantation, Barbados

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To valiant Sir Thomas, cat of my teens; big beautiful Sir Thomas, who bounded in on a gust of wind one summer evening when I opened the front door, and dashed on through the living room and up the stairs—and adopted us; Sir Thomas of the thick soft tabby fur who curled up on a blue satin comforter and watched me with his big lamplike green eyes as I taught myself to compose stories directly on the typewriter instead of scrawling them out first in longhand; Sir Thomas, who fell head over heels in love with my neighbor’s kitten and—in the time-honored manner of males— promptly stood back to let the strolling kitten and her mother share his dinner; when in spite of his obvious good looks and largess the kitten spurned him anyway, he turned to me with the unhappiest of meows—like any rejected lover; to dear Sir Thomas, friend of my youth, this book is affectionately dedicated.

  FOREWORD

  It was said by the Cavaliers that the devil rode the Great Storm of 1658 that lashed England, to fetch home the soul of the usurper, Oliver Cromwell. And this tale I now spin you, of love and treachery and revenge, has its roots on a beach in Cornwall the night before that tempest struck—although for my stormy heroine, Lorraine, it begins in Rhode Island on the eve of “King Philip’s War” and carries on to Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and the lush plantations of tropical Barbados.

  Indeed it must have seemed to Lorraine that:

  The lad she loved on Wednesday, he has proved untrue,

  The lad she loved on Thursday, he has vanished too.

  Now that it is Friday, she’s no place to lay her head—

  Or will she find another lad to take her to his bed?

  —Valerie Sherwood

  I:

  ARAMINTA

  CHAPTER I

  Cornwall, England August 1658

  ALONG THE CORNISH coast the sky was darkening. The horizon was cloudless, yet far off to the west above the ocean’s glitter there was an odd shimmer, perhaps a dace of vapor trailing. All this breathless summer day the air had been strangely oppressed—the birds felt it. Even now a flight of gannets, their bodies white against the darkening sky, swooped and screamed as they fled back to their nesting places in the cliffs.

  From an open casement in a tall plain house almost at the cliff’s edge, a young girl leaned out, impatiently scanning the black rocks and white beach below. Her name was Araminta Dunning and she too felt the oppressiveness that dogged the gannets. She tossed back her head with its coil of golden hair and her slim shoulders moved restively in her light blue gown.

  He should be here by now, she told herself, studying the sands. Down on the beach as he had promised, striding about restlessly, waiting for her. Yet she had seen no signal. . . . Her fingers clenched. He might have received bad news—as so many others were receiving bad news these days—and perhaps could not keep the tryst.

  Indeed all England was in a ferment. The lord protector’s daughter had died some three weeks past, and with her passing the old warrior had lost heart. Word had reached Cornwall this morning that Oliver Cromwell was dying, and Araminta’s father—well aware that all he had, he owed to the lord protector—had gone pounding off on a fast horse to see to his own fortunes.

  Word had already reached the village of the lord protector’s imminent death. When Araminta and her mother had ridden down to the village earlier in the afternoon, their coach had been stoned by the mostly Royalist villagers.

  As the first stone thudded against the coach’s painted side, Araminta’s mother peered out only to be grazed by a second stone. She screamed and with her gloved hands pulled down the coach’s leathern curtains, losing her fashionable tall-crowned hat as she did so. Araminta, more self-possessed, stuck out her head and cried to the coachman, “Drive back home— quickly!” Immediately, the driver executed a sharp turnaround, which flung her against her mother’s voluminous skirts.

  They returned to their clifftop house at a gallop. Araminta’s mother alighted from the carriage shuddering. Shaking the broken plumes of her high-crowned hat in the direction of the village. Mistress Dunning wailed that “they” would pay for this infamy!

  Araminta had helped her mother into the house, where she retired to her bed chamber. Even now she was lying prone on the feather bed of her comfortable four-poster while a servant bathed her aching forehead with rosewater. From her post by the window Araminta could hear her mother’s petulant voice in the next room, complaining that she simply “could not understand it!”

  Araminta could understand it. Through the lover she was now so eagerly awaiting, she had gained a glimmering of how the people felt. They had sturdily backed Parliament against the unpopular King Charles, and Oliver Cromwell had led them. But that victory was long won on the battlefield at Naseby and elsewhere. Araminta had been barely seven years old when the headman’s ax had hacked Charles’s head from his shoulder one January day. “On a scaffold erected before his own palace of Whitehall,” she remembered hearing her father murmur, shaking his head. Her father often spoke of the wrongs his own family had suffered at Royalist hands, but he had never wished the king to die.

  With the death of their dissolute monarch, easygoing England had been plunged into a Puritanism so strict it chafed. In London the theaters were closed, public dancing was forbidden. One day, when Araminta was ten and strolling through the nearby village of Wyelock beside her father, she had passed a woeful figure with ears nailed fast to the pillory and heard someone mutter that it was “unlawful for a man to laugh anymore!” Her frowning father had promptly pulled his golden-haired daughter away.

  After that Araminta had taken more interest in her father’s comments at the dinner table about Royalist plots that would
“bring this government down about our heads, mark my words!” Young as she was, she had come to understand that an undercurrent of revolt was drifting all across England—even into their remote village.

  That undercurrent had flared into open rebellion three years ago in a Royalist assault upon Salisbury led by John Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne. Oliver Cromwell, now lord protector and uncrowned King of England, had been swift to crush the rebels. Sensing the unrest all about, he had abandoned civil rule altogether and divided England into ten military districts, each governed by a major general with broad powers. Soon even the most submissive villagers had grown tired of living under harsh military law—Cromwell’s “sword government,” they called it. Not only that, but a hotly resented ten percent tax had been slapped upon Royalists’ incomes to pay the cost of all these troops in the wake of Penruddock’s ill-fated rising—and the man for whom Araminta waited now so anxiously had been one of those who had galloped into Salisbury with Penruddock, there to seize the judges come down for the assizes. But her beloved had been luckier than some; he had escaped being hanged for it.

  To Araminta, impatient of politics, it was all a bad dream.

  Only her lover was real—and forbidden.

  Still, she reasoned, their own bad luck could well be his good luck. After all, was he not a Royalist, whilst Araminta’s parents were loyal to the lord protector?

  She could wait no longer! Stealing past her mother’s room and down the stairs, she flew outside. Then through the small garden where, on the lee side of a stone wall, the maiden’s-blush roses were still blooming—and on along the dangerous path that led down the cliffs rugged face until at last she burst out upon the beach itself.

  Araminta had lost half her hairpins on her fast decent. Before her feet touched the sand, the coiled braid at the back of her head had come loose and her great mass of gold hair cascaded down across the back of her tight blue linen bodice and mingled with her blowing side curls (Araminta had fought against wearing a fringe across her forehead like her mother’s by insisting fringes were no longer fashionable).

  She arrived on the beach in pell-mell fashion, pushing against the sea wind. Around her the sand was deserted, inhabited only by tall wastes of rocks ranged like an army of giants. Still she ran on, hoping to find him. And peering ahead, she failed to see a long trailing strand of seaweed underfoot. She tripped over it and would have fallen full-length upon the sand save for the tall man who stepped suddenly from the shadow of a craggy rock and reached out to break her fall.

  “Why didn’t you signal?” Araminta gasped. “I was watching from the window, but I didn’t see you.”

  His voice sounded odd. “I was late. I arrived but a moment ago—I was about to signal.”

  It was not true. He had been there for half an hour, debating with himself, wrestling with his better nature, telling himself that he should abandon his pursuit of this Cromwellian beauty, that loving her could only wreck them both. A moment ago he had decided to depart from the beach and leave her—forever.

  But he had waited too long. For even as her soft body plummeted into his arms he could feel his resolve weakening. She was so young, so pliant, so alluring. He caught her in a hard embrace against his strong chest, and for both of them time stood still.

  Another flight of seabirds streamed by, homeward-bound in the dusk to the age-old cliffs that rose like a tugged curtain wall behind the beach. The evening air whirred with their wings, the dying sun turned their flying bodies a rosy hue. They were like airborne jewels, long necklaces of rose quartz flung high above the white lace of the surf.

  Araminta’s lips were parted softly. She looked up at her lover with her heart in her eyes. He could feel her heartbeat.

  It was a magic moment.

  He opened his mouth to tell her good-bye, but could not bring himself to say the words.

  The waves crashed against the rocks, sending up showers of spray like trailing white veils. Soon the tide would be coming in, the beach would be awash. But not for a while yet, not for a while. . . . For now, they had the beach to themselves. There might not have been another living soul upon the earth. . . .

  “Araminta,” he murmured hoarsely. “Araminta. . . And his lips brushed the gold of her hair.

  There was everything to keep them apart—and they both knew it.

  Only one thing bound them—the tenuous threads of a love forbidden. First love for her. Perhaps for him the last.

  He knew he should let her go, but still held on to her. The blood rushed through his veins—he had no desire to let her go. Instead his grip tightened.

  As if in blazing answer to the sweet sharp inward call of both their straining bodies, the light from the red ball of the setting sun seemed in that instant to detach itself and change. The sky abruptly exploded into a fierce and wonderful radiance, a sudden burst of green. A strange, compelling sight.

  Araminta looked up, startled.

  “That must be the famous Green Flash,” he said with a quick smile to reassure her. “I have heard of it, of course, but this is the first time I have ever seen it.”

  Her lips were parted, as she drank in the radiant green world that had erupted around them even as their bodies touched. Her blue eyes had been turned to emerald by that marvelous flash of burning copper green that suffused the sky and sea and turned the cliffs and whitecaps an unreal—magical—color.

  “Don’t look so startled, Araminta,” he murmured, cradling her in his arms and letting his hands rove along her slim upper arms caressingly as he spoke. “The Green Flash does not linger. It will soon be gone.”

  It will be gone, yes, but it will leave its mark. Araminta looked up at the sky, awed, for the moment meant so much more to her than it did to him. She knew the Green Flash was a glimpse into the future, and the face you were looking into when the sunset sky turned emerald would be the face you would hold in your heart all your life long. . . . She remembered her grandmother telling her long ago that to the women in her family the Green Flash meant coming face-to-face with Fate. It was as if a great celestial fist had slammed down upon the sheer wall of cliff behind her and the whole world echoed with its force, intoning: You are his now, you will be his forever. . . .

  “You have been shy with me,” he murmured, for he could feel the heat rising within him at the touch of her soft pale flesh. Just her light breath on his cheek seared his senses.

  Araminta clung to him in sudden wild abandon. “Yes, I have been shy,” she admitted. “But I will be shy no longer!” she promised in her soft hurried voice.

  A thrill went through him. Her meaning was clear. After all these weeks, she would resist him no longer. All her virginal refusals were behind her now. . . .

  But one more thing needed to be said.

  “Araminta, if Shirlock dies—”

  He was reminding her of the duel he had fought over her. One day a week ago, Araminta had made an excuse to walk down to the village—hoping to see him. He had been riding at a leisurely pace toward the cliffs—hoping to see her. They had both feigned surprise at their meeting and she had announced that she had come to look for wildflowers in the woods. His offer to accompany her had been instantly accepted and they had spent a pleasant half-hour strolling through the sheltered little copse. While she breathlessly warded him off, they had gathered a handful of wildflowers. Then just as they were sauntering out from beneath the trees, holding hands as lovers are wont to do, Robert Shirlock, an ardent Royalist, had chanced to ride by on his horse.

  Shirlock brought his mount to a halt at sight of them and considered them down his long nose. He was in a bad mood for he had gambled the night away and had lost a packet. The glowering look he gave her reminded Araminta that her father had once testified against him in a court of law.

  “Are you no longer one of us?” Shirlock demanded of the man beside her. “What are you doing with this Cromwellian slut?”

  With a curse, her lover had sprung forward and seized Shirlock’s bridle
. “You will take back that foulness, Shirlock! And apologize to the lady!” He spat the words between his teeth. “Now, if you please!”

  Shirlock gave him a mocking look and tried to wrench the bridle away. It was held fast in an iron hand.

  “Lady?” Shirlock sneered. “Take the wench if you want her. But bed her down in some cow pasture as she deserves—do not strut her about among your friends on public roads!”

  At that point Shirlock found himself dragged from his saddle and tossed to the ground. He jumped up immediately—white-faced and with a naked blade in his hand.

  And just as quickly faced another blade as long and as bright as his own—and better wielded.

  Their duel was fought on the spot. A sudden clash of raging tempers and steel on steel—fought out vengefully while Araminta shrank back against a tree trunk. Her hands came up to cover her white face (though she could not resist watching them through her fingers), and she prayed with all her heart that he would survive.

  It was quickly begun and as quickly ended. Thrust and parry, thrust and parry, leaping from hummock to iree root to hummock. And then of a sudden her lover slipped. As he dropped down upon one knee, his arm was fully extended and his sword was thrust directly into Shirlock’s body.

  Araminta would never forget the surge of relief that coursed through her that he was unhurt. It took her a while to realize how badly the other man had been wounded.

  From that moment, they had been obliged to meet in secret, for Robert Shirlock had lain in a coma ever since. A duel not properly witnessed in which a man was killed was accounted murder, and Araminta’s lover had made no secret about who had done the deed. Indeed he had ridden into the village leading Shirlock’s horse with Shirlock lying prone across his saddle, found the local barber-surgeon, and told him crisply to “Tend this man, for he offended me and I think that I have given him some hurt.”