Enemy In The House Read Online Free PDF Page A

to tease her. His eyebrows arched up. “I didn’t think you’d want to write to me!”
    “You’ll want to hear about—about him.”
    “Address me in care of Colonel Holiday. Keep your ears open, there may be ways to send mail—sometimes it arrives, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll try to communicate with you. The ship you’re boarding has clearance from Savannah but you’ll find—I hope—that she has no difficulty in docking at Port Royal.”
    “Do you mean she’s a smuggler?”
    “She’s a privateer—and, yes, a smuggler. She’ll bring back sugar, molasses from Jamaica, salt from Turk Island, anything she can, if she can get through. The captain has his eye on money and he’s shrewd. In fact, I suspect, a thorough-going scoundrel but a good seaman. He has supplied himself with Dutch papers, a Dutch flag.”
    “The Southern Cross. That’s not a Dutch name.”
    Simon shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. Privateers are captured, bought, sold, traded, shuffled around like peas in a pot. So are seamen, with or without their consent. No, she’s still the Southern Cross. I think she was originally a British boat.”
    “Simon, if my father is dead you own his estate. Please try to stop confiscation. Put in your claim. You are my husband. It belongs to you legally.”
    He frowned at his wine, turning the mug in his fingers. “There may be nothing I can do, Amy. I told you that.” Suddenly he smiled. “There in the library, while we were being married, just in a flash I thought of all my lessons—and my canings, too, in that room. I thought of old LeCoeur, too, and the French lessons your father made us study. It’s odd how small things in the past can influence the future.”
    “What do you mean? What small things?”
    “What—oh, I was only thinking of—thinking of the way your father found old LeCoeur. If he hadn’t been resting, there on the step of the tavern, your father wouldn’t have stumbled over him, wouldn’t have stopped to apologize—wouldn’t have brought him home to teach us—” He paused, musing, and then said, “Well—whatever the situation in Jamaica, you’ll be out of the clutches of the Grappits.”
    “Simon! Is that why you married me?” she asked impulsively.
    His eyes held her own for a second. Then he laughed softly. “Darling, I married you because I’ve loved you since you were a child. As you grew to womanhood, my passion grew so strong, yet so hopeless, I thought, that until you admitted your own—”
    “Don’t tease me, Simon.” She had had time to think during those days and nights. “Please, listen. I want you to understand. I know I was very wrong, wickedly wrong to—to make you marry me in this way. It’s a poor excuse to say that I didn’t realize it until it was too late. But it isn’t really too late.”
    “Are you now proposing to divorce me?”
    His eyes were dancing; it disconcerted her. “Please, listen. Now it’s done I do want to go to Jamaica. But—but Simon, sometime you’ll see the woman you want to marry and—” She couldn’t meet his eyes; she moved the mug in a pattern on the table. “And I’ll not stand in your way. Ever. I promise you.”
    “I see.”
    “And meantime—meantime you said you would require promises of me and I gave them. I made vows and I intend to keep them. I’ll be a good and faithful wife.”
    There was a silence. At last she looked up and his expression told her nothing. “I’m sure you will. It’s time to board the ship. Have you any money?”
    She felt her cheeks flame with embarrassment. “I was so hurried. I didn’t think of money. But I have my mother’s miniature. It’s set in diamonds. I can sell that for the passage money.”
    His eyes danced again. “You thought of everything else. The lawyer, the marriage contract, the parson. Fie, Amy! Don’t sell your mother’s miniature. She was a dear and gracious lady. Kind to me, always kind and loving to a boy who had no real claim on her.”