Sweet Savage Eden (6 page)

“Mistress! Jamie bid me catch you, as you shall need these!”

Nearly choking on the tears she tried desperately to swallow, she stared up into his sympathetic light eyes. She shook her head vehemently, unable to speak. He stuffed the things into her arms, and in horror she turned to run.

“Mistress … Jassy! Please, wait! If there is some problem, I would help!”

Help! Ah, too late! She could not bear to see him again. Not now, not ever.

She kept running. Running, heedless of ice and snow and wetness and cold until she reached the kitchen entrance of Master John’s. Cook, by the fire, let her in, pressing a finger to her lips. Jassy gave her a grateful nod and went tearing up the servants’ stairway.

She quickly went through the attic door and saw that Tamsyn was back in the room, by her mother’s bed.

“I’ve got it, Tamsyn. Money. Please, will you get the quinine for me? I feel I must stay by her side.”

“Jassy—”

Molly caught her arm. She shrugged off her friend’s touch. Tamsyn stood quickly and caught her. “Jassy, lass. Your mum’s at peace now.” “Peace?”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then his words began to sink in to her mind, and she shook her head in fierce denial.

“No.
No!
You must get the quinine, Tamsyn! Surely she just sleeps!”

Neither Tamsyn nor Molly could stop her. She fell to her knees at her mother’s side, grasping the frail white hand. A hand as cold as the blustering wind outside. Stiff, lifeless.

“Oh, no! Oh, God, please, no!” She screamed out her anguish, then she cried, and she tried to kiss her mother, to warm her with her body. She stared down at her beautiful face and saw that indeed the Master Johns of the world could touch her mother no more. Linnet was gone.

Jassy laid her head upon the bunk and sobbed.

Molly came to her and took her in her arms. And still Jassy sobbed, on and on, until there were no more tears to cry.

“ ’Tis all right, luv, ’tis all right,” Molly said, soothingly.

And at last Jassy looked at her, eyes glazed but wildly determined.

“Molly! I shall not live like this, and so help me—I shall not die like this!”

“There, there,” Molly said with a soft sigh of resignation.

And Jassy discovered that after all, her tears were not all spent. Because she caught her mother’s cold, delicate hand once again and warmed it with a new flood of sobbing.

III
   

“I
shall be going back,” Jamie Cameron said to Robert. “And you should be coming with me.”

The stableboy had saddled his horse, a bay stallion called Windwalker, but Jamie felt compelled to check the girth himself.

“I don’t know,” Robert said doubtfully, watching Jamie as he mounted the prancing stallion at last. They were both dressed elegantly for their travel, for by nightfall they would reach Jamie Cameron’s family home, Castle Carlyle, near Somerfield. Jamie was to meet with his father on business, and he was dressed today as his noble sire would wish him to, in a fine white shirt with Flemish lace at the collar and cuffs, slashed leather doublet, soft brocade breeches, a fur-lined cloak, high black leather riding boots, and a wide-brimmed, plumed hat. He was the perfect cavalier. Robert thought with a mild trace of bitterness that his friend could deck himself in any apparel and still appear negligent of it all, masculine and rugged.

Though Jamie was not his father’s heir, but rather a third son, he admired his father greatly, and they were business partners, both greatly enthusiastic about their joint venture.

“I’m starting to think that you are mad!” Robert said.

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Well, Jamie Cameron, perhaps you will not be the next Duke of Carlyle. But nevertheless, were you not the son of an extremely wealthy and powerful noble, you have used your own trust funds well. You have fought on the seas, and you have met with the savages in Virginia. Any one of them might well have skewered you through. And for what? A company that much more often fails than prospers, and a plot of land given you directly by the king. When you’ve so many acres here in England that I find it doubtful any of your family has ever ridden over them all!”

Jamie laughed and stared westward, almost as if he could see the New World, where it seemed his heart so often lay, even when he was home. “I don’t know myself, Robert. But there is a draw. I feel it always. It is a passion that grows in my blood, in my heart. I love the land and the river and the endless forests. There are places of such beauty and quiet!”

“I’ve seen the sketches brought back of the Indian attacks, and of the ‘starving time’ in 1609, my friend. The Indians are savage barbarians. It is a savage land, so they say. Bitterly cold, then humid and hot.”

“The Indians are of a different culture,” Jamie mused. “But they are men and women, just as we.”

Robert laughed out loud. Jamie cast him a quick glance and shrugged. He’d had the pleasure of meeting the colonizer John Rolfe and his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas, both in Virginia, and at King James’s royal court. It was said that she had saved the life of John Smith when her father would have taken his head, and the lady did not deny the story. Jamie had been saddened to hear that she had died in England. And recently, her father, the great Powhatan, the big chief of many tribes, had died too. It was as if an era were already over, when so much had just begun.

When the London Company had first sent its men sailing across the sea, and when they had first established their settlement at Jamestown on the James River in Virginia, the days had been dreary indeed. They had
left England in 1606. King James had sat upon the throne then, but it was just three years after the death of Elizabeth, and three years after a tempestuous age. The age of explorers, of Sir Francis Drake, of Sir Walter Raleigh, of the Spanish Armada. Entering into Virginia, they were aware that there was a constant threat of invasion from the Spaniards, of attacks by the Indians. Many things had hindered the growth of the colony. Supplies hadn’t always arrived, as planned, from England. Men had looked for profits, and they had planted too much tobacco and not enough food. They had starved, they had clashed with the Indians, the Pamunkies, the Chickahominies, the Chesapeakes.

But much had improved since then. Though Pocahontas and Powhatan were dead, the peace formed at the time of her marriage to John Rolfe seemed to have lasted. There had been few women in the colony; now married men brought their wives, and the Company had made arrangements for young ladies of good character to cross the ocean, and the colony and the various “hundreds” surrounding it were beginning to flourish and prosper. From the Old English hundred, established before the Norman Conquests. A great swath of land where a hundred families could live.

On his last trip to Virginia, Jamie had staked out his own land. He and his father were heavy investors in the London Company, but Carlyle Hundred, as he was calling his land, came to him directly from the king in recognition of the services he had rendered there.

His land was directly upon the James River, in a far more fortuitous spot than Jamestown, so he thought, for his land was higher and not so dank and infested as the Jamestown acreage. It was beautiful, high land, with a small natural harbor. The pines and grass grew richly, so profuse that the area seemed a blue-green. By the water there was a meadow, and as Jamie had stood there, alone with the sound of the sea and the very quiet of the earth, he had felt anew his passion for the land. It would be great. The country stretched forever. It was where he would dig his roots, and it was where his
children would be born, where they would grow, where they would flourish. The Carlyle Hundred. “It seems to be a land of endless opportunity,” he said aloud.

“I’d enjoy any of your opportunity,” Robert replied with a sigh. He had gambled away much of his own inheritance and, indeed, traveled with Jamie now in the hopes of meeting a lady of fortune who would appreciate his fine lineage and ignore his lack of a purse.

“If you choose to come with me, I will deed you a thousand acres of your own.”

“Acres covered with savages and pines!”

“It is an Eden, Robert. Raw and savage, yes, but with the promise of paradise.” He pulled up on his bay suddenly, for they had come to the outskirts of town, and they could no longer pass easily on the road, for there was a funeral procession passing by. People stepped out of the way. An old crone looked up at the two of them and whistled softly. “ ’Tis nobility! Best we give way!”

“Nay, woman!” Jamie said. “Hold your peace. All men are holden unto God, and we would not disturb those who grieve.” The woman stared at him and nodded slowly. Windwalker pawed the cold earth, impatient to be on, but Jamie held him still. He watched as a bony nag dragged a cart forward. There was a gable-roofed wooden coffin upon the cart, but Jamie saw that it was constructed so that the foot of the coffin would give way.

Apparently the family had not been able to afford the cost of a permanent coffin. When the final words had been spoken, the shrouded corpse would be cast into the earth, and the coffin retrieved.

The day was nearly as cold as the night had been. But behind the cart with the coffin walked a black-swathed woman. Slim but very straight, she did not cry; she made no noise and held herself with the greatest pride. Yet in the very stiffness of her spine, Jamie sensed something of her grief. Pain so great that she dared not give way to it.

“Who has died?” Robert queried softly. The old crone snorted. “Linnet Dupré. Her Majesty, the actress. Though were ye to ask me, my fine lord, I’d
say that Master John as well as killed her, for he is a mean one. She never had no strength. Were it not for that girl of hers, she’d have languished in Newgate long ago.”

Listening, Jamie frowned. A gust of wind caught the black hood on the woman’s head at last, causing it to fall about her shoulders. It was Jassy, the wench who had so fascinated him the night before. The thief.

His jaw hardened for a moment, then he relaxed, and he almost smiled. Well, her fascination had been for Robert. And perhaps she had been stealing for a reason. Perhaps she had longed to buy a proper coffin.

Or perhaps her mother had even lived and needed medication.

“Why, look, ’tis the beautiful tavern wench!” Robert exclaimed.

“Indeed,” Jamie agreed.

“Perhaps we could help her. Perhaps we could be of service.”

Jamie thought dryly of the night gone past and determined that she would not want any help from him. And yet she had taken the coin he had tossed her. He would never forget her eyes, though. They had burned like sapphires in the night, blue fire filled with hatred and a fierce, fighting spirit.

There was more about her he might not forget, he reminded himself. She was beautiful, of course. She had all her teeth, and they were straight and good. Her skin was achingly soft. Her face was fragile and fine, high-boned, exquisite. She seemed like a fragile flower, and yet there was that tremendous strength to her. No one would ever hold her down, he thought with amusement. Then he felt a flash of heat, for he had held her, and that, too, would take time to forget. She might have been created with the hottest sensual pleasure her entire purpose, for though she was overly slim, she was sweetly lush, with wonderful, firm breasts, rose-crested, beautiful. Her back was long and sleek, her legs long and shapely. Her stomach dipped and her hips flared, and
she had been mercury to touch. She had left him aching in every conceivable way.

She had wanted Robert, he reminded himself. Women never seemed to realize where true strength lay, for Robert could not provide what she had needed. He hadn’t the purse for it. Nor, for that matter, Jamie decided—with a certain arrogance, he was ready to admit—could his friend have provided what she needed in other ways. She was an innocent maid, but there was something about her that reminded him of his raw, untamed land. There was a promise of something wonderful and tempestuous and passionate about her. It was in her eyes; aye, even in the hatred she felt so wholeheartedly for him.

“She will not want any help from me,” he said softly. He turned to Robert, reaching into his doublet for the pounds sterling he carried there. “Robert, follow her. When you are able, see that she receives these. Insist that her mother be buried in the coffin if she fights you.”