Shadows of Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for Gail MacMillan and…

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Other Books You Might Enjoy

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Shadows

  Of

  Love

  by

  Gail MacMillan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Shadows of Love

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Gail MacMillan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Tina Lynn Stout

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Historical Mainstream Rose Edition, 2014

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-194-6

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-195-3

  Published in the United States of America

  Praise for Gail MacMillan and…

  HOLDING OFF FOR A HERO

  “Great wit and humor start this suspenseful romance that keeps you guessing.”

  ~Matilda, Coffee Time Romance & More (5 Cups)

  “An incredibly entertaining read. The characters are great, the chemistry is there from the start.… It’s one light, wonderful read I gladly recommend.”

  ~Rain Hart, The Romance Reviews (4 Stars)

  “Enjoyable read. The author did a great job of building background and character as well as suspense and mystery…. I recommend this as a good read.”

  ~Marcie Oropeza, Siren Book Reviews (4 Siren Stones)

  “Full of emotion, intrigue, and laughs.…characters that have their good and bad traits and can grow on you.”

  ~Storm Goddess Book Reviews (3.5 Lightning Bolts)

  GHOST OF WINTERS PAST

  “Entertaining and well written,…definitely worth checking out.”

  ~Long and Short Reviews (4.5 Stars)

  “A wonderful read….riveted me to it till the last page. This was a fast read but exciting.”

  ~Daniella, Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews (3 Stars)

  CALEDONIAN PRIVATEER

  “A lovely story of romance and suspense with history thrown in…. I loved [this] story of love and piracy.”

  ~Robin, Romancing the Book (4 Roses)

  LADY & THE BEAST

  “A sensuous, true romance if ever there was one…. Worth a look for the casual romantic.”

  ~Megan, Night Owl Reviews (3.5 Stars)

  Dedication

  To friends, family, and fellow writers

  who have always had faith in me.

  Thank you.

  Chapter One

  My mother was five months pregnant with me, her first and only child, when she learned of the death at sea of her husband, Captain Morgan Reynolds. Her grief was overwhelming. For a time, she once told me, she wished to die also. Then, on the star-filled, wind-tossed night of May 17, 1827, I was born, and Rose Reynolds discovered a new reason to live. She named me Starr because my father had told her he charted his voyages back to her side by these suns of the night.

  As soon as she recovered from childbirth, my mother took stock of her situation. My father had made no provision for his wife and child in the event of his death. His wealth had been his ship and the frequently illegal cargoes he carried in her. Although he never dealt in the highly lucrative commodities of arms and slaves, he had often circumnavigated tariff inspections and slipped through marine blockades to bring food and other necessities to people cut off by these barriers.

  Because of the dangerous routes and suspected unlawfulness of his commerce, no insurance company would back my father’s enterprises. He and my mother lived from cargo to cargo. When he had a good voyage, when he’d managed to elude customs officials or the blockaded people had been able to pay for his services, he and my mother would celebrate royally on his return to London. No gown was too expensive for his wife, no champagne too fine.

  The poor of the great city benefited as well. Captain Reynolds readily shared his bounty with the needy. And when it was gone, he’d once again head back to sea.

  But when the voyage had been unsuccessful or when his ship, the Sea Star, limped back into port damaged, his wife would gather up her finery and make for the music halls to replenish the family coffers. A popular singer and dancer, Rose Reynolds had, before her marriage, drawn sizable crowds. Later, as the wife of the dashing outlaw of the high seas, she became an even greater attraction. Londoners flocked to glimpse the handsome, legendary swashbuckler who sat at the rear of the hall to watch his wife perform, the man who was as colorful as any of the characters in the currently popular romantic novels.

  Rumors also circulated from time to time that Captain Reynolds, because of his remarkable ability to slip through the tightest blockades, was frequently employed by the British government to perform certain acts of espionage. This suspicion explained the fact that while he was in port in London and might easily have been apprehended by authorities he was left in peace.

  He was on such a clandestine mission for King and Country, gossip had it, when his ship was sunk off the coast of an enemy power. Because he was in waters unlawful to British shipping, the English government branded him a pirate and an outlaw in the press. My father, thus denied by those he had in all probability been aiding, died in disgrace.

  As a result, no one came forward to help the family of a man declared a traitor by his own country. Even my parents’ relatives turned a cold shoulder on my mother in her time of need. Morgan Reynolds’ only real friends, the poor of London, were in no position to offer financial support. There was barely enough money to see my mother through her last days of pregnancy, her confinement, and recovery. Consequently, as soon as she was physically able, she was forced to leave me in the care of our landlady and return to work in the music halls.

  Fortunately, she was in as much demand as ever. Her beauty and talent had not diminished, and as the widow of a famous outlaw, her presence exuded an aura of adventure and romance not to be found around other performers.

  But the years passed and the legend grew cold. My mother had to search harder and harder to find employment, then work ever-increasing hours to keep us housed and fed. I remember awakening just before dawn as an exhausted sigh and a casting aside of shoes announced her return to our cramped rooms.

  In the morning, I would awake early and amuse myself until near midday when slight noises from her room would tell me she was astir. Delighted, I would scurry to her and climb up onto her bed to snuggle close against her. Her hugs and kisses were constant reassurances that I was loved and wanted. Then she would laughingly draw me to my feet and together we’d go into the kitchen to share bre
ad and tea.

  In the afternoons, she’d read to me, then teach me to sing and play the guitar as she practiced for her evening performance. On Sundays we’d have an outing together—a picnic in season, or sometimes just a happy stroll through the park. I loved my mother dearly. Childishly unaware of her exhausting struggle to ensure our survival, I simply believed she was the most beautiful, most wonderful creature in the world.

  Then she met Sir Harry Blackwell, and our whole world changed. Smitten by Rose Reynolds’ vivacious beauty and sparkling talent, he soon became her most ardent admirer. I was seven years of age when he began to call regularly at our London rooms and my mother dismissed the bevy of younger men who had become an eager throng around her.

  I disliked him at once. Large and overpowering, Sir Harry, with his corpulent red face, ham-like grasping hands, fusty dark clothing, and brandy-scented breath, appeared a totally unattractive suitor in my innocent eyes. I was too young to understand the appeal a wealthy knight of the realm might have for my mother, who at thirty-two was growing weary of the constant battle to support herself and her child.

  I hated the mornings when I awoke to hear stirrings in my mother’s room that told me Sir Harry had been our overnight guest. I despised the retching cough he roared forth as he arose. But most of all, I abhorred the thought of him in my place in my mother’s warm bed, his sweating obese body pressed against her delicately scented, lace-and-silk-clad form.

  He had been coming to our rooms for over a year when the word “wife” began to crowd the conversations he had with my mother. He was not proposing to her, I soon understood; there was a Lady Charlotte who already held that position in his life. And it was my mother, not he, who constantly drew this lady into their discussions. Rose Reynolds wanted him to divorce Lady Charlotte and marry her. A clever woman, my mother realized that once her beauty was spent and the romantic myth of her past forgotten, London would cast her aside and find another darling. Married to Sir Harry, she would have established financial security for both of us.

  “Sometimes one must do certain not altogether agreeable things to survive, my darling,” she’d tried to explain to me when I questioned her. “Harry will never, never be able to replace your father in my heart, but I must think of us, of you in particular. If anything were to happen to me, you would be alone and destitute. But if I marry Sir Harry, you’ll have security for life. Remember, Starr, many marriages of convenience become great successes.”

  “I hate Sir Harry, Mother!” I cried. “Please, please don’t marry him. We can go away. To America! You told me Father and you planned to settle there when he retired from the sea. You told me Father said it is a wonderful place where everyone becomes rich. If we were rich, you wouldn’t have to marry that horrid old man. Or anyone, if you didn’t want to.”

  “America, my sweet, is far away and a great wilderness, not a place for two ladies alone.” She’d gently ended my arguments. “It was your father’s dream, a dream I shared with him. But the time for dreaming has come to an end. I must be practical. Marrying Sir Harry is the best way I can deal with the reality of our present situation. One day I pray you will understand, my precious little Starr.”

  Sir Harry proved unwilling to free himself from his wife. Although he often referred to her as a horse-faced nag and their grown son Charles as a milksop, he was not about to involve himself in divorce proceedings. Divorce was a messy business, he declared, something to be avoided at all cost.

  But Rose Reynolds was adamant. A survivor who wasn’t above resorting to harsh means in order to stay afloat in life’s tempestuous seas, she was ready to grasp at the most promising bit of debris floating about her. If he did not begin divorce proceedings at once, she told him bluntly, she would tell the London newspapers of their affair. Peering out of my bedchamber, I saw his rotund face become a beet-red portrait of outrage.

  “Damn you, Rose!” he exploded. “Don’t you realize what a divorce will cost me? It could put my seat in government in jeopardy! People will not support a man who’s been shown unfaithful to established values like marriage vows. And you must be sufficiently astute to realize that most of my income is derived from Charlotte’s holdings. With steam power the coming thing, those coalfields of hers are more valuable than gold mines. Using my influence in government to secure contracts for that commodity, I’m becoming a rich man, and I don’t plan to let all that slip away for a bit of fluff like you.”

  “Then I must go to the papers.” My mother calmly picked up her cloak and started for the door. “I’m sorry, Harry, but you leave me no choice.”

  “God damn you, Rose!”

  Those huge, sweating hands seized my mother and threw her across the room. With a dull thud, her head struck the upper bricks of the hearth. Rose Reynolds gasped, shuddered, then moaned as she sank to the floor in a crumpled, silken heap.

  “Rose!” Sir Harry rushed forward to kneel beside her.

  I watched as he struggled to revive her. Sweat broke out on his forehead and trickled down his face as he chafed her limp wrists. For what seemed like hours, he kept muttering her name over and over again. Finally he must have realized his efforts were useless.

  He stumbled to his feet, his breathing harsh and ragged in the quiet room. Frozen with shock and horror, I remained at the crack in the slightly opened bedroom door. The clock on the mantel tick-tocked in the shadowy firelight. Then a red liquid began to trickle from the heap of silk that had been my mother. And I screamed.

  “Mother!” I rushed into the room and flung myself over her body.

  Instantly I was seized and dragged to my feet.

  “She’s dead,” Sir Harry muttered, his sweating face close to mine. A desperate glare lit his small, darting eyes. Cupping my face in a jaw-crushing grip, he forced me to look up at him. “She’s dead, and you saw it all, didn’t you, you little bitch!”

  I started to struggle, to cry out, but one of those giant, wet hands hit me a numbing blow across the face. Dazed, I went limp in his grasp. Moments later he had swathed me in a bed sheet and carried my semi-conscious body from the flat.

  Like a sack of dirty linen, I was taken away from my dead mother and thrust into one of the most brutal existences a child could face.

  Sir Harry put me to work in his coal mines with dozens of other miserable, homeless children. I became his prisoner, incapable of voicing to anyone in a position to react in my favor the horrendous fact of his brutal murder of my mother.

  In those horrible mines I was harnessed to other children and forced to crawl into tunnels barely large enough to admit our small bodies in search of the black gold called coal. Behind us we pulled a heavy cart. Cave-ins were common in the cheaply constructed mines; the idea of being buried alive in one of those hellholes haunted my waking and sleeping hours.

  I soon discovered that in order to survive I had to be tough and strong. I learned to fight back whenever another child tried to rob me of my meager food or ragged blanket. I also developed an entirely new vocabulary, rich with invectives and laced with profanity.

  Then, just when I felt I was becoming proficient at taking care of myself in the Hades to which my life had been reduced, Darcy arrived. Recently orphaned by his father’s death, Darcy Pod had been commandeered on a London street, promised food and a home in return for an honest day’s work, and then tossed, like myself, into the brutality of the mines. Blue-eyed and fair-skinned, with golden curls forming a soft halo about his finely featured face, he was a beautiful child. When he was thrown into the earthen-floored hovel that was our sleeping quarters, he was clad in a threadbare velvet suit and soiled, once-white linen blouse.

  As we settled for the night after his first day in the depths, I heard him sobbing. The other children ignored him. None had the strength or spirit to mock or comfort the newcomer. Pity managed to overpower my exhaustion, and I crawled across the dark room’s dirt floor to join him.

  “Hush,” I whispered. “If the overseer hears you, he’ll whip you for
keeping us from our sleep. We can’t work our best if we’re not rested, he says.”

  “They promised me a nice house and good food and warm clothes,” he choked. “But the mines are horrible, and I’m cold and filthy, and the food is pig swill, and…”

  “Hush,” I said again. “We must be brave. One day we’ll escape. One day”—I searched my mind for a dream—“we’ll escape and go to America. My father was a sea captain. He told my mother America was a golden land, a land where everyone’s dream could come true.”

  “Shall we go together?” The sobbing ceased. Interest entered the thin voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “You and I will go to America and be free and rich and happy.”

  Darcy and I were both nine years old when I fashioned the dream that would come to dominate our lives.

  ****

  America proved to be an elusive reality. Our next five years were spent in a grinding, dehumanizing world of darkness, filth, and brutality. Chronically tired, cold, and hungry, we lived our childhood as slaves to a brutal master.

  All that kept us alive was the hope of a paradise called America. Planning for the glorious day when we sailed to our Eden, Darcy and I did what we could to prepare ourselves for life as a gentleman and lady in the new land. We practiced what we believed to be a refined manner of speaking and the gestures we fancied befitted members of the gentry.

  Darcy took advantage of the few daylight hours we spent above ground to teach me to read and write by scratching words and sentences in the hard-trodden earth floor of our hovel. Sometimes he composed poems and recited them to me as part of my education. A lady must be able to appreciate such things, he declared.