Jade Star (Star Quartet 4)

1

Lahaina, Maui, 1854

The warm, coarse beach sand was the odd pinkish color of the squirrelfish, the ocean as deep an aqua as the bluefin trevally.

“Come on, Jules, stop dreaming the morning away!”

Juliana DuPres laughed with the pleasure of a now forbidden swim, tightened her kapa-cloth sarong more tightly over her breasts, and dashed into the swirling waves after Kanola. The tides were strong at Makila Point, but Jules, an expert swimmer, merely relaxed in the grip of the pulling crosscurrents until she was safely beyond them.

“Slow down, Kanola,” she called. “There should be a school of parrotfish here and I want to see them.” Without waiting for a reply from her friend, Jules drew a deep breath and dove down several feet to the coral reef below. She knew her eyes would be red and swollen from the salt water, but it didn’t matter. Not only were there parrotfish, but yellowstrip goatfish as well, a treat. She thought to herself as her head cleared the surface: Father, if you truly believed in the glory of creation, you would open your eyes to the incredible beauty that surrounds you.

She grinned at her thought, and spit out a mouthful of salt water. She could just see Reverend Etienne DuPres stripped of his sweat-soaked black broadcloth, cavorting in the ocean and calling out the names of fish. Or lying on his back on the beach, his sallow face becoming healthy and tanned.

“Well, what did you see, Jules? An eel maybe?” Kanola shuddered in distaste.

Juliana swam easily to where Kanola was resting on an irregular outcropping of coral that acted as something of a narrow breakwater. The coral was rough, pitted, and slimy. Jules dug her fingers into a crevice, holding tight to keep from being pulled back into the water. There was room enough for just the two of them.

Jules, her voice filled with enthusiasm as she pulled two soaked hunks of bread from a large pocket on the side of the sarong, told her tolerantly smiling friend, “Now, let’s see just how hungry all my friends are. Maybe even that zebra moray who was slithering between my feet.” She scattered the bread all about her. Within seconds more fish than she could count—even a whitetip reef shark—were swarming about her and Kanola. Jules smiled when their smooth bodies brushed hers. “More saddle wrasse than anything else,” she said in some disappointment.

Kanola regarded Jules with the same affectionate smile she gave her own sister. Jules was only two years younger than she, but she clung tenaciously to her childhood pursuits, and, Kanola admitted, Jules knew more about fish than any haole she’d ever known. She listened to her friend go on about every sort of fish consuming the bread, then interrupted her with a raised hand. She said in English as idiomatic as her friend’s, “Your papa has been after you again, I gather?”

Jules sighed, and fell silent for a moment. “Papa is Papa,” she said finally. “Everything fun and natural is kapu—particularly,” she added on a bitter note, “if one happens to be a female.”

“I thought as much,” Kanola said. “What has he done now? Forbidden you to swim?”

Jules nodded, a small smile playing about her mouth. “Three years ago,” she said.

Kanola was startled. “However have you managed to keep it a secret from him all this time?”

“Thomas helps me, washes me down and all that. I assume that Papa thinks I’m just excessively susceptible to the heat and take a lot of baths, because my hair is usually wet. He doesn’t seem to notice my red eyes.”

“You are nineteen, Jules, a woman grown. There is more to life than searching out and cataloging fish, birds, flowers . . .” Her voice trailed off when Jules shot her an angry look.

“For instance,” she continued at her friend’s obstinate silence, “there’s John Bleecher.” Kanola had been married for five years now and was the proud mother of two children.

Jules stared off into the distance, the endless expanse of ocean blurring before her eyes. “He used to be a friend,” she said.

“I’m sure he still is,” Kanola said dryly. “And he’s not a missionary. He’d give you no orders like your father does, or make you pray on your knees until you’re stiff as a board.”

“I wish he’d turn his attentions to Sarah. She wants to get married.”

“Sarah is a stick,” Kanola said, not mincing matters.

“She’s also beautiful, fragile, and soft, which is what I’ve always been told men want in a wife.”

“Ha! And you, I suppose, are a hag.”

Jules’s hair had come loose on her dive, and masses of corky wild curls framed her face. “No, not anymore, I don’t guess,” she said. “But I’m about as fragile as one of my peacock groupers.”

“Well, I think you’re lucky you didn’t gain your beauty sooner, else your father would have kept a closer watch on you.”

“Spoken like a true friend.” Jules grinned. “Incidentally, he still thinks I’m a scruffy twit, looks at me like I give him pain. It’s the red hair, you know, that I got from my French grandmother, the immoral actress. Come on, let’s swim out a bit more. We’ve the time and I’ve got a good fifteen more minutes before the sun does awful things to my skin.”

That was certainly the case, Kanola thought as she watched her friend dive cleanly into the smooth water. Her skin beneath her sarong was as white as her hair was red, and too much sun, even on her lightly tanned face and shoulders made her not only a blotched mess, but sick as well. Kanola slipped into the water after Jules, and swam lazily after her.

“Would you have a look at that, Captain!”

Jameson Wilkes followed Rodney Cumber’s pointing finger. He studied the two very female figures striding cleanly thro

ugh the water. One was a native, clear enough, but the other . . . Even from this distance he could tell that she was different, a real find.

He was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then said briskly to Cumber, “Take three men and lower the boat. Bring the both of them to me.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Beg your pardon, Captain, but the other one . . . she ain’t no native gal, sir.”

“No, Gallen, I don’t imagine she is,” Jameson Wilkes said to his first mate. “But then again, Bob, we won’t be coming back to Maui, will we?”

Bob Gallen didn’t like the direction he knew his captain’s thoughts were taking. Plowing prostitutes in Lahaina was one thing, even bringing over those Chinese girls to be sold in San Francisco wasn’t too bad, but capturing a white girl was quite another, and it made him feel funny. “What if she’s a missionary’s girl?”

“Then she’s probably a virgin,” Jameson Wilkes said. “Don’t worry, Bob. If she’s married, or is covered with the freckles that usually come along with that color hair, I’ll set her quickly back into the ocean. Let’s wait and see.”

“I don’t like it,” Bob Gallen said.

Jameson Wilkes knew the moment the two women recognized their danger. He heard one of them scream, saw them flip over and race back toward shore. But his men would be faster, of course.

“Kanola, hurry!” Jules gasped over her shoulder. But Kanola wasn’t as strong a swimmer. Jules slowed, and grabbed her friend’s hand.