Rash Reckless Love by Valerie Sherwood

Author:Valerie Sherwood
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2016-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Such a woman was Georgiana’s mother—little Georgiana, who was being brought up in Bermuda as Anna Smith.

BOOK III

Anna

On the day her mother bore her,

A sighing bitter wind

Swept sear across the rooftops

And promised her—to him!

PART ONE

The Little Princess

Like the reckless lass who bore you,

You will fling yourself at life.

Will you end up, island beauty,

Mistress, chatelaine, or—wife?

The Bermuda Islands,

1673

CHAPTER 21

In the diamond-clear weather the crests of those giant submarine mountains shipwrecked British sailors had named the Summer Islands rose from the sea to sparkle like emeralds in the sun. To the high-flying gulls the low rounded green hills of those islands must have seemed like jeweled links in a frilly necklace of foaming coral reefs—and all of it surrounded by crystalline depths of brilliant blue that rivaled the sky in intensity. The gulls saw other sights too, for from the air an occasional cruciform plantation house cut its white stone cross into the green.

In heat unseasonable to early June, humid heat that seemed to oppress and smother the white manor house of Mirabelle Plantation, seated on the broad stone front steps that widened out in a graceful curve to form what everyone called “welcoming arms,” young Mistress Anna Smith was holding court. Her thick shining hair, of a burnished gold so deep it was copper in some lights, was fashionably caught up and her curls shimmered and danced in the sun. Just beyond the toe of one strawberry pink satin slipper that peeked from her pale strawberry silk skirts, a grinning little black slave boy languidly waved a big palm-leaf fan mounted on a broomstick, meant to keep cool the young lady and the two ardent suitors who importuned her on either side.

The young lady was but fifteen but she was tall for her age and beautiful and, by the standards of her day, eligible for marriage. Indeed, most of her friends were wed already— Anna had been bridesmaid to one who’d been wed two years ago at the ripe old age of twelve.

Young Mistress Smith smiled indulgently at the boy waving the fan—she was well liked by all the staff on the plantation—and her dark-lashed turquoise eyes flashed as she vividly recounted to the two enraptured youths who flanked her pale strawberry skirts on either side how this morning she had ridden her new silver mare. Floss, up under the giant cedars that rose on the hill behind the house and thundered down to the white beach to ride gaily through the foaming surf. Her light voice bubbled with laughter as she told them how Belize, one of the black servants at that moment engaged in whitewashing the thick, coral stone roof slabs an even more sparkling white, had stood up on the roof and yelled, “Mis’ Anna, you goin’ to kill yourself on that horse!” as she flashed by the house on her wild descent to the sea.

“He almost fell off the roof,” she laughed. “And wouldn’t Papa Jamison have taken a switch to me if I’d caused poor Belize

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