Then in that masculine gathering there was a small stir. A woman, moving with deft grace, came from the back room of the cottage with a silver tray and began to collect the empty liqueur glasses that a few of the men held or that sat here and there. She was no servant, however. The silk gown she wore was in the latest mode and draped over a generous-sized hoop, and her hair was tastefully arranged. The delicate application of cosmetics enhanced a vivid natural beauty. Her manner was gracious and unaffected as she moved about the room, as if she were perfectly at home. Which she was, of course. Her skin was the light creamy brown color known as café au lait, the badge of the quadroon.
The woman stepped near Ravel, picking up his glass that sat on the commode table. She said something to him, perhaps a light apology as she moved on in front of him. He turned to reply, giving her a brief smile that seemed to hold a special warmth.
Pain gripped with the feel of steel claws inside Anya’s chest. Damn the man! Was one mistress not enough for him? Were his appetites so demanding that he not only had to keep an actress under his protection and seduce every woman who crossed his path, but support a beautiful quadroon placée as well? He was depraved, an immoral monster who obviously felt he was entitled to every prerequisite that wealth afforded in a city like New Orleans. She wondered if Simone Michel knew about this quadroon, and if she did, how she felt about sharing her lover.
So great was Anya’s indignation that it was a moment before the discussion taking place among the men inside took on meaning. The words were muffled, not always distinct, but she could make out enough to guess the rest. First one and then another spoke, with Ravel taking little part for the moment.
“—the arsenal behind the Cabildo. It’s poorly guarded, hardly more than a skeleton force in the hours after midnight and half of them asleep. The arms and ammunition there would give us a decided advantage. Gathering up our hunting guns and ancient family muskets is all very well, but we need more.”
Arms. Weapons. That was what the thugs at Beau Refuge had been after. There was no time to consider the implications of that memory. Other men were speaking.
“Artillery. Nothing less than artillery will win the day.”
“That seems a little drastic.”
“So is the situation. It will take a lot of convincing before—”
“You are speaking of much killing, m’sieur.”
“It may be that’s what it will take.”
Anya caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. She turned her head. Marcel was beckoning from the rear of the house. He called in a sibilant whisper, “This way, mam’zelle! Hurry!”
What she was hearing was of such potential importance that she hesitated, turning back for one last look though the crack between the shutters.
At that moment there came a thunderous knock on the door of the shotgun house. It was followed at once by shouting: “Police! Open up!”
The men inside started out of their seats with consternation in their faces. An instant later there was pandemonium as they fled in every direction. The candles in the girandoles were extinguished so that darkness closed down. In the last fading glow Anya saw a man swinging toward the window where she stood, wrenching up the sash. She stumbled back, turned to run. The shutters crashed open and a man hurtled headfirst out of the window. He somersaulted and his heel struck Anya at the knee. She went down, a small scream catching in her throat as she fell. The man bleated with surprise, but did not stop. He jumped to his feet, blundering off in the dark.
The dark forms of other men came pouring out of the window, sprawling, becoming entangled, leaping up to sprint away. Anya scrambled out of their reach and raised herself to her knees.
From the front of the house there rang out a yell of triumph. Anya turned her head to see a pair of men rounding the corner. A distant shaft of lamplight glinted on their painted caps and on the spontoon clubs they waved in their hands. She had no reason to fear the police, and yet there was nothing to say that they would believe she was not party to the meeting that had been taking place.
“Mam’zelle,” Marcel cried, then he was beside her, hindering as much as helping with his one good hand as she struggled to stand upright despite her skirts wrapped around her knees.
There came a soft, fluent cursing from out of the darkness at the rear of the building. Dread seized Anya as she recognized the voice. Abruptly Ravel appeared beside her. “That way,” he snapped to Marcel, giving him a shove toward where he had come from; then he spun to meet the two policemen who were upon him. He swung a hard fist, connecting with the chin of the man in the lead. As the man fell, Ravel wrenched the spontoon from his hand and, on the backswing, struck a blow that made the second man howl and clutch his elbow. Immediately Ravel sank the end of the club up to his fist in the policeman’s belly and, as he bent over, gave him the coup de grace on the back of the neck. He did not wait for more. Catching Anya’s arm, he jerked her into violent flight.
Behind them there came a strangled shout followed by the pounding of footfalls. The muffled explosions of guns firing shook the night. Ravel did not look back. Anya, dragging her skirts high above her knees the better to run, had no time to do anything other than follow his example.
They dodged around a clothesline pole and skirted a cistern on piers before plunging between two houses. A dog ran out to bark at their heels until Ravel snapped out a sharp command that made the animal whimper and veer away, slowing to a trot. Men and women put their heads covered with nightcaps out of bedroom windows. Lights blossomed behind closed shutters. Still they ran on, jumping drains and flower beds, leaping low fences and clipped shrubbery, swinging around the ends of porches.
Anya gasped for breath, yet there flowed in her veins in that headlong plunge through the night a mixture of terror and exhilaration and rage that made her feel as if she could run forever. No obstacle was too wide or too high, no stretch of deserted street or corridor between buildings was too long. She had shaken off Ravel’s hold that was throwing her off-balance, and raced at his side unimpeded. It hardly mattered where she was running to or why, only that she and the man at her side were winning, leaving their pursuers behind with their heart-jarring effort.
They were pounding alongside a wall. They turned a corner. Ahead of them was an opening in the wall. “In here,” Ravel said, and without hesitation she complied.
Sanctuary. Silence. It enclosed them. When Anya would have halted, Ravel reached for her hand and drew her deeper inside until they came finally to where a weeping willow, symbol of mourning, grew against one of the four great walls. She had never been here at night before. Strange how peaceful it was, though it did not somehow seem empty. Her chest rising and falling as she fought for breath, Anya leaned against the wall that behind her held in ranks the burial vaults known as ovens. Raising her head, she looked out over the cemetery, one of the many that were similar in New Orleans, but the first to be called the City of the Dead.
The tombs, like small houses above the ground, were made of marble and plastered brick decorated with weeping angels and crosses and inverted torches, with pediments and columns and wrought iron. They gathered the light of a rising moon to shine whitely in the darkness. So closely set together were they, as if for company, that there was hardly room to walk except for narrow paths between the rows, like small streets, and a wide walkway around the walls. So little room was left, in fact, that hardly any new burials were made here.
The above-surface tombs and the thick walls of vaults that surrounded the burial ground were a Spanish custom transplanted to New Orleans, but one so useful due to the waterlogged nature of the soil that it had become entrenched, and was seen even in the cemeteries of the American section.
Anya had not been here in years, not since she had come as a child on All Saints’ Day with Madame Rosa to help put armfuls of chrysanthemums at the monuments of her stepmother’s relatives. She had played hide-and-seek among the tombs and traced with her small fingers the names an
d phrases chiseled into the marble, ici repose — here lies; famille A. B. Plauche — A. B. Plauche family; morte, victime d’honneur — dead, a victim of honor. Madame Rosa had never allowed gruesome tales of graves and malevolent specters, and so Anya had always felt that the spirits who inhabited such places, if such there should be, were benign presences with souls at peace.
There was no peace in the man beside her.
“You have,” he said with vitriol in his voice, “the most damnable talent for thwarting me and interfering in my affairs that I have ever been called upon to endure. I couldn’t believe it when I heard Marcel call to you back there. I couldn’t believe it, and yet it seemed so surely where you would be and what you would be doing that it made a terrible kind of sense. I can understand what witchlike genius you used to find out where I was, but if you had to come, why in the name of all that’s holy did you bring the police with you?”
Anya turned her head, staring at him in blank surprise. “I didn’t bring the police.”
“Don’t lie!”
She faced him with her hands on her hips. “I’m not lying!”
“Who else would lead them there?”
“Lead them? Why should that be necessary? With so many meeting regularly there must be hundreds of people who know the time and place. It wasn’t hard to discover.”
“Who else but you would have a reason to send the police, then?”
“How should I know? Maybe your fancy quadroon mistress. Maybe your kept actress. Maybe both, if they found out about each other!”
It was a moment before he answered, and then there was a strange timbre in his voice. “I have no quadroon mistress.”
“Don’t lie!” she said, flinging his order back at him in the same precise tone.
The words measured, he repeated, “I have no quadroon mistress.”
“I saw her! I saw her dressed in her silk and lace, smiling at you as if she couldn’t wait for everyone to leave.” She had not meant to say those things, but her wrath had bubbled up inside her, forcing them out.
“You’re jealous.” There was savage satisfaction tinged with amazement in his tone.
“Jealous?” she exclaimed. “I’m disgusted. You are vile and corrupt, a murdering scoundrel and a blackmailer who tricked me into your bed and tried to use me to make yourself respectable.”
“That may be,” he said, taking a step toward her so that he towered over her, “but while you were in my bed you enjoyed it.”
“I didn’t!” There was a tremor in her voice as a peculiar convulsive shudder ran over her.
“Oh, you did. And even if you would rather die than marry me, even if you would like to see me rot in jail, you are still jealous of any other woman you think I might put in that bed.”
She took a step backward, alarm and something more leaping inside her as he advanced upon her. “Don’t be ridiculous. I have no grudge against you!”
“No, certainly not,” he said in dry sarcasm. “By the way, a surgeon removed the stitches from my scalp today and told me my broken pate is healing nicely.”
“That was an accident!”
“So you said. But it was a small price to pay when all was said and done.” His voice slowed, becoming seductive in its hard depth. “I give you leave to try breaking it again, if it pleases you. There has never been anything between us but hate and distrust, and sometimes the sudden bright flare of— what? Desire? Lust? Whatever it is, it can be a partial recompense for what we have done to each other. If we permit it.”
Behind her was a corner where the wall turned. She glimpsed it from the periphery of her vision, but before she could step around it, Ravel blocked her way. There was so much tension in the air between them that the night seemed to vibrate with it. She could sense the sheer masculine power he held in control, feel the warmth that radiated from his body. The surface of her skin tingled with an awareness so strong it was like pain. Her muscles tensed as if expecting a blow. She stared up at him with her lips parted and moist and the silver-blue sheen of moonlight in her eyes.
“No,” she whispered, the faintest ghost of sound.
His laugh was ragged. “You are the devil’s own daughter, Anya Hamilton, the scourge of my soul, my personal nemesis sent to hound me to hell and back. Do with me what you will, but I must have you. And if I must, what better place than here?”
He reached for her, his hard soldier’s hands closing on her upper arms. She could not tell if it was anger or lust or desperation that drove him, but as he pulled her against him a matching force exploded inside her. For a single moment she resisted, twisting in his arms; then with a volte-face that would have shocked her to the core if she had stopped to consider it, she flung herself against him, sliding her arms upward to clasp them around his neck. She lifted her lips to meet his firm mouth, and a small sound of gladness escaped her as she felt its stinging heat. The nipples of her breasts hardened, pressing into the satin of his waistcoat and the hard muscles of his chest underneath. She could feel the studs of his shirt against her breastbone and the pulsing firmness of him through the thickness of her skirts. A primal ecstasy swept in upon her, erasing thought and time and place, leaving only a searing sense of need and a strange, ravaging joy.
Ravel took the onslaught of her response, absorbing it as a thirsty man might some pure, sweet liquid, reeling with its potency that like fine brandy seared deep into him, driving into his loins to send the consuming ache there flaring higher.
The firmness of her breasts against him, the slender turn of her waist and the swelling curves of her hips under his hands brought both rich pleasure and torment. There had never been and would never be another woman who could drive him to such dizzy heights or so easily breach his defenses, one who could wound or heal, save or destroy his very being if she so willed, if she ever discovered her power. She was magic, the taste and feel, the warm female-and-rose scent of her, an enchantment he sought with blind craving, without the will or wish to escape.
The clothing that separated their bodies was an intolerable barrier. Anya lowered one hand to slide it beneath his frock coat, smoothing over the muscles that swathed his chest and rib cage to clasp the ridged strength of his back. Undulating against him with slow movements, she brought her other hand down to slip it between them, working at the buttons of his waistcoat. His soft indrawn breath was both reward and spur, and she moved quickly on to the fastenings of his shirt. When it hung open with the gold studs dangling in their holes, she spread the edges and, with her fingers spread wide, pressed her palms to the soft furring of hair on his chest with deep sensuous delight, finding the flat nubs of his paps and teasing them to hardness.
With a deep sound in his throat, he shrugged out of his coat and threw it on the ground. He drew her down with him to kneel upon its silk lining. He pulled away the snood in which she had confined her hair in her haste to follow him. The silken tresses fell about her in a tangled, shining curtain. He wrapped them around his hands and brought her mouth to meet his once more in a deep invasion. His tongue twined with hers in sinuous play, the rough surfaces abrading each other, savoring, exploring. At the same time, his fingers traced the high collar of the velvet jacket she wore and her gown underneath, finding the loops and the row of tiny buttons that held them closed from the neckline to the waist. With patience and dexterity he released them one by one until he reached and passed the softly rounded curves of her breasts where, maddened by the task and the warm vibrancy of her body, he suddenly inserted his hands and pulled, tearing the last buttons free, tearing also the camisole she wore beneath.
Anya gasped as the firm globes of her breasts were released into his warm, caressing hands. She was drowning in sensation and moonlight, awash in dark seas of perilous longing. Her skin was hot with the fever of exertion and desire and her blood flowed molten and throbbing in her veins. As Ravel bent his head to taste the apricot rose nipples he had uncovered, she pushed aside his shirt, exposing the sun-browned width of his shoulders that we
re defined by shadows and gilded silver-gold by the moon. She threaded her fingers through the vital waves of his hair and leaned to nuzzle his ear, touching her tongue with small catlike licks to its convolutions.
He released her with a lingering wet and warm caress and straightened to unfasten the buttons of his trousers. She reached out, not to help, but to trace with tingling fingertips the long strutted shape beneath them, to brush upward to the hard flatness of his belly with its thin line of dark hair and, in an absorbed and intuitive gift of pleasure, to follow the opening vee of trousers and underdrawers to where his manhood sprang forth.
His chest swelled, and with urgent strength he pressed her down, brushing her skirts high and stripping away her pantalettes so that the gently turned lengths of her legs gleamed pale and perfect among her petticoats. In suspended fascination, he smoothed along the taut muscle of her thigh to the shape of her knee and the sweetly turned calf below. He bent his head to flick the sensitive bend of her knee with his tongue, easing upward over the fragile inner surface of her thigh, and higher still to the shadowed and secret juncture of her body, lingering there.
A paroxysm of desire caught her and she writhed with it, consumed by the sudden onslaught of violent rapture. She clutched at his shoulders, digging her nails into him, pulling him toward her. In answer to that silent plea, he raised himself above her, his eyes dark with passion as they searched her face. She met his gaze, her own naked, without armor, softly beseeching. He positioned himself for entry, gently probing her readiness. She caught his waist and with a soft cry drew him hard and quick and deep inside her, wanting, needing to feel his strength and power. He recognized that need and met it without reserve, plunging into her with firm, sure, and endless strokes. Gooseflesh rose along the surface of her skin in shivering reaction to the immensity of her gratification. She surged against him, holding, rocking, meeting his driving power in a ravishing frenzy. With limbs entangled and breaths mingling, panting with effort, they moved together in the most ancient of exorcisms, most wild of moonlight rides and midnight comforts. There in that place of serene and careless death, they were marvelously, violently quick with the turbulence of life. Between that quiet rest and this rampaging intoxication of the spirit, between the glory and pain that was life and that entombed nothingness, there was no choice.
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