Taming Charlotte (41 page)

“You married Patrick
twice,”
Deborah reflected. “Oh, that’s just about the most
romantic
thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jayne, ever pragmatic, snorted in an unladylike fashion and said, “ ‘Romantic’? Surely you jest—he divorced Charlotte in a fit of pique, simply by clapping his hands and saying a few silly words! In my opinion, our Patrick could use a lesson or two in simple courtesy.”

Charlotte smiled but said nothing. She was too busy thinking.

Jayne was a firebrand, born, like Charlotte herself, to make things happen rather than sit back, watching and waiting and keeping her clothes clean. In a burst of inspired revelation, Charlotte knew that it was this energetic, opinionated redhead Gideon should marry—provided Jayne would have him for a husband, that is. She had the spirit for life in the Australian bush, the strength and determination and innate sweetness of heart required of a clergyman’s mate.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” demanded the missionary-unaware.

“I was just doing a little matchmaking,” Charlotte admitted.

Nora smiled dreamily and uttered a small sigh.

“She’s sweet on Billy Piper,” Deborah announced in an important whisper, indicating Nora with a wave of her hand. “He was her special patient when he and the others were down with the fever.”

Charlotte hadn’t even played a hand of cards yet and she was already feeling confined, restless. She wanted to be outside, with the men, part of the preparations to defend the island and all its inhabitants. She got up from her chair and began to pace, arms folded.

The others followed her train of thought without difficulty, which wasn’t at all strange because the approach of a pirate ship would naturally be uppermost in just about anyone’s mind.

“Do you think there will be bloodshed?” Deborah asked fearfully, her hands clasped together in her lap.

“Of course there will,” Jayne blustered, and though her eyes flashed with excitement, her skin was even fairer than usual. Her freckles stood out because of the contrast. “They’ll shoot at us and we’ll shoot at them, and we women will either end up tending our own wounded or being ravished as spoils of war.”

Deborah went gray and gave a soft, plaintive cry of terror, and Nora immediately leaned over to put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Hush!” she scolded, frowning at Jayne. “You’re frightening the poor child to death!”

Jayne shrugged. “Might as well face reality. If Patrick and the others can’t hold off the invaders, my dears, we can all kiss our maidenly virtue a fond farewell!”

Deborah emitted a wail of despair.

“One more word,” Nora warned, shaking her fist at Jayne, “and I’m going to blacken at least one of your eyes!”

“Wait,” Charlotte protested quickly, holding up both hands in a bid for peace. “Please. We’re all in terrible trouble. We mustn’t turn on each other now.” She sighed, then added, “Patrick will protect us.”

After that, though they all tried to concentrate on games of cards, the room fairly throbbed with tension. The hours crawled by with all the speed of fat brown slugs traversing a broad garden.

The room became shadowy and Charlotte lit the candelabras. The company of women ate French chocolates and sandwiches and fruit, and they waited.

Just after sunset, cannon fire made the walls of the house quiver. Charlotte yearned to be in the center of things, where she could see what was happening with her own eyes instead of having to speculate and imagine. Had Raheem dropped anchor on the far side of the island and led his men through the jungle or along the beach? Or had he simply
sailed around to the main harbor and opened fire on the house from there?

Long since bored with pacing, Charlotte finally went to the door and tried to open it. She was irritated, if not surprised, to find it locked. Since she had already inspected the rest of the room for a possible escape route during the long afternoon, Charlotte was forced to accept the fact that she and the others were there for the duration.

The cannon fire boomed; the war between the invaders and the defenders was proceeding in earnest.

Deborah covered her face with both hands and began to weep with a quiet hopelessness that twisted Charlotte’s heart.

“Are you happy now?” Nora demanded of Jayne, and there was a distinct edge to her voice. “Look what you’ve done, talking about being ravished and all that rot!”

Jayne looked both chagrined and defensive, and she opened her mouth to respond, only to be silenced by a grating sound out in the passageway. Clearly the cabinet that hid the door was being moved.

Everyone held their breath, including Charlotte, but it was Gideon Rowling who joined them, not a leering pirate.

Charlotte practically flung herself on the man, gripping his vest as she looked up into his face. “What’s happening? Is Patrick safe?”

Gently, briefly, Gideon covered her grasping hand with his own. “As safe as can be expected—”

Deborah cried out just then, in an agony of fear, and rose to her feet, sobbing.

Naturally, being a man of God and sworn to lend comfort, Gideon went to her. Charlotte hesitated only a moment, then took advantage of his distraction and slipped out through the doorway into the shadowy hall. The house reverberated with the impact of cannonballs, and a part of her wanted to stay in hiding. In the end, though, her concern for Patrick and the incessant curiosity that was her personal cross prevailed. She hurried away from safety and light and into darkness and peril.

Even though she moved as carefully as she could, Charlotte bumped into more than one piece of furniture as she
made her way to the front of the house. She was bruised by the time she gained a window in the parlor, overlooking the harbor, still boarded up against yesterday’s storm. Through a crack between the planks, she saw not one ship in the bay, but three, and flashes of crimson blazed on their decks as they fired their cannon.

Charlotte was too enraged to feel fear; that, she knew, would come later. For now, she wanted,
needed,
to be at Patrick’s side. In life or in death, she belonged with her husband.

She was just turning away from the window when suddenly there was a deafening noise, a sensation of unimaginable shock, and then it seemed that she’d been absorbed by, become a part of, some massive creature made of light and fire.

Patrick was drawn back to the house from the ridge, where he had been overseeing the cannon defending the island, literally pulled by some inexplicable demand of his spirit. He was met in the rear dooryard by a half-frantic Gideon.

“Thank God you’re here,” the missionary cried, and Patrick had an unsettling feeling that he’d been brought down from the ridge by prayer. “It’s Charlotte—”

It took only those two words to propel Patrick into motion again; he flung himself through the back door, Gideon’s words droning at his ears like bees on a hot summer day. “I blame myself—Jayne’s with her—slipped past me—”

Patrick did not have to be guided to Charlotte. Her soul called wordlessly to his; his strained to be joined with hers.

She was lying on the floor of the parlor, near a shattered window. Jayne knelt beside her, holding her hand and sobbing.

Patrick’s heart slammed against his rib cage and stopped beating entirely for several moments, then started up again, painfully. He dropped to his knees beside Charlotte and would have gathered her up in his arms if Jayne hadn’t warned that she mustn’t be moved.

“Charlotte?” The name came ragged from his throat.

Her eyelids fluttered, but otherwise she didn’t stir.

“Oh, God,” Patrick rasped, and it was all the prayer he could manage, verbally at least. “Oh, God.”

Gideon laid a hand to his shoulder. “We’ll look after her for now,” he said reasonably. All around the house, the sounds of combat raged, but Patrick didn’t care about anything but the woman lying so still before him. “You take care of Raheem.”

Patrick’s spirit went corpse-cold at the mention of the name. Raheem, the man who had brought injury and perhaps death to Patrick’s wife and unborn child.

Solemnly Patrick leaned over and kissed Charlotte’s bloodied forehead. Then, without another word, without looking at either Jayne or Gideon, he rose slowly to his feet and strode out of the parlor.

Charlotte was surrounded alternately by a delicious light, pure joy made visible, and by crushing pain. In one moment, she knew everything, all the secrets of the universe, and in the next, she knew nothing at all. She wanted to divide herself somehow, and travel in two directions. Then she heard someone calling to her, in hoarse and anguished tones.

Slowly, like a flower unfolding to the sunlight, Charlotte came out of the inner world and followed a pathway of the heart that led straight back to Patrick.

H
AVE YOU GONE MAD?” COCHRAN ASKED, WIDE-EYED WITH
disbelief as he watched his captain strip away his boots and shirt and slip a knife scabbard onto his belt. The two men were hidden from the harbor by the darkness and by an outcropping of large rocks. The seaward volleys of cannon fire had ceased half an hour before, on orders from Patrick.

Trevarren raised a hand to silence his friend and listened. The island was eerily quiet, now that the explosions had stopped. However, just as he had expected, he soon made out the soft, rhythmic whisper of oars sliding into the water and then breaking the surface again.

At last Patrick answered Cochran’s question. “Yes, my friend, I
have
gone mad. It happened a long time ago, in a faraway place.” He felt cold, clear through to his soul, and did not allow himself to think of Charlotte lying abed in his house, broken and perhaps dying.

He started toward the water.

“Christ in His heaven, man,” Cochran rasped, grabbing at Patrick’s arm in a vain effort to stay him. “You can’t take a chance like this. She’s bound to awaken and ask for you—
do you mean to leave me with the task of telling Mrs. Trevarren you’ve gone to the bottom with the
Enchantress?”

Patrick’s smile felt like a grimace on his face; there was no humor or mirth in him that night. “Calm yourself, Cochran,” he said. “You’re beginning to sound like an old woman.”

Cochran was evidently desperate. “ ‘Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord’!” he quoted as Patrick proceeded into the sea.

The holy words had no impact on Trevarren, no meaning. A kind of madness had indeed taken him over, and he would not, could not, rest until he had done what needed doing. He listened again, heard the soft murmur of the tide, the dipping of the oars, and his own heartbeat.

Patrick knew Raheem believed he’d won the war as well as the battle, that the island forces had been defeated, and he was coming ashore to claim the spoils.

It was always foolish, Patrick reflected grimly, to be overconfident.

When he was waist-deep in the warm, quiet water, Patrick turned to look back once, lifting his eyes above Cochran’s frantic form to the great storm-and-war-battered house where Charlotte rested. Because of him, Patrick, she might well die this night, and their child had almost certainly perished already. Since he could not go back in time and undo his mistakes, he would offer the only sacrifice, the only penance, he could.

Revenge.

“Patrick!” Cochran whispered, skittering up and down the shoreline now, like an anxious bird. “Damn your ass, you bullheaded sea snake, you get back here!”

Patrick’s eyes stung as he thought of what he’d done to Charlotte, just by loving and wanting her. He told himself it was the salt water, and then glided forward into the deceptively gentle embrace of the sea and began to swim. His strokes were strong, silent, deliberate.

The dinghy was easy to track, even in the blackness of the night, for the soft slaps of the oars against the water reverberated in Patrick’s ears like gunshots. The low, drunken talk of the men rowing rang out like shouts.

Patrick swam on, and bright, colorful images of Charlotte played in his mind, tormenting him, driving him on.

He surfaced within a few feet of the dinghy, on the starboard side, and none of the three men in the little craft so much as glanced in his direction. He kept pace with them easily, and when the oarsmen paused and the vessel bobbed on the calm surface, Patrick heard their consultation, and although it was all in Arabic, he understood it.

“I don’t like it,” a small, wiry man said; he was sitting on the port side, and a turban covered his head. That was all Patrick could make out for the moment. “Trevarren wouldn’t surrender so easily as this. It’s a trap.”

The leader of the group, clearly Raheem, had been perched at the bow, and doing none of the rowing. “You overestimate him. He is an American; he can think only of his own comforts and indulgences. He is hiding from us, even now, and probably taking consolation from the woman, knowing he will soon lose her.”

Patrick’s throat filled with acid, but of course, he made no sound or movement.

“Americans like their pleasures,” the third man remarked, “but they are like the cobra when aroused; there is no escaping them, and their strike is lethal.”

Raheem made a hocking sound of contempt and spat into the water.