Free Roanoke (The Keepers of the Ring) by Angela Hunt, Angela Elwell Hunt Page A

waters. I don’t know why you compel me to leave all behind, but Papa said you would give me grace to bear what lies ahead. But mark me, my Lord, and know my heart: I would as lief die as continue without that grace. Cover me, Lord, and hold me in the palm of your protective hand . . .”
     
     
    Behind the shadow of the mizzenmast, Thomas Colman watched Jocelyn White stand with battleship solidity at the stern, her eyes on the distant and receding horizon. The gravity that had filled her eyes in the past week had bloomed fully into despair since the public news of her father ’s death, and Thomas knew something about desperation. Once, as she raised her hand to wipe a tear away, he thought about walking forward to comfort her, but common sense detained him.
    If God ruled justly and honorably, this girl could not be meant for him. Why, then, did events conspire to push them together?
    On their first departure from Portsmouth, Thomas had been shocked beyond words when John White pulled him aside and pointed to the petite brunette who stormed about the ship demanding to be taken off at the first opportunity. “That is your niece?” he had gasped, amazed at the girl’s beauty and her temerity. Any girl who had to be bartered in marriage should have been less than beautiful or past the age of youth, but Jocelyn White was rosy cheeked with energy, a vividly pretty young woman whose hair blew in silky tangles around stormy blue eyes. On that day her eyes had flashed with strength and anger, bowing neither before her uncle or the sallow-faced captain Fernandes.
    He knew then that he could not marry her. If God was just, any wife meant for him should have been mealy-mouthed and plain, ill tempered or sickly. ‘Twouldn’t be fair to ask a stunning beauty to serve as the wife of a minister, or even to marry Thomas Colman, indentured servant.
    But John White had held him fast and insisted: “Soft, good reverend, but watch her, talk to her, make her trust you.”
    He amazed himself when he began to shadow her movements; he had never intended to follow White ’s orders. But Jocelyn White fascinated him; was it the allure of forbidden fruit? I’faith, this girl was not like the other women aboard ship. They collected themselves in small knots below deck and talked or giggled or wrung their hands in endless worry and boredom. But Jocelyn rarely spoke to anyone save her maid. She usually walked below or on deck with a book or parchment in her hands, and often he spied her writing at the table in her uncle’s small cabin. What was she writing? Letters? To whom? Did she keep a journal? What in heaven could she find worthy of writing about on this horrid ship?
    On one late afternoon he stood outside the window of John White ’s cabin and peered inside. Miss White sat at the desk, her face like gold in the flickering light of sunset, her eyes concentrated upon the parchment under her small hands. Once or twice she sighed as she wrote, what was she thinking? She put the pen down, and, fearful of being seen, Thomas jerked away from the window.
    After a moment, he gathered the courage to look in again. She had rolled the parchment into a tube, then she leaned toward the small porthole in the cabin and thrust the rolled parchment through it. Startled, Thomas strode to the ship ’s railing in time to see the parchment unfurl in the wind and flatten itself upon the face of the billowing ocean.
    What kind of woman wrote letters to the sea?
    His fascination for her became a spying game; there was little else to do while aboard ship. Her young maid naturally caught sight of him, and doubtless alerted her mistress, and on that humiliating afternoon when he finally gathered courage enough to speak to her, he had done nothing but offend her. Bumptious fool! He should have known better to approach her like one of the ill-mannered seamen.
    Smarting under that humiliation, he renounced his fascination with Jocelyn White and consigned himself to