Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

  She started to climb the ladder, stopping when her eyes were level with the wooden planks. Darkness here too, and no one seemed to be about. She saw the lights of the tavern now, across the street from the pier, and three men lounging in the doorway, mugs of grog in their hands. A redcoat on horseback came riding up the street, gaping at his comrades who were shouting as their boats drew near the pier.

  My luck could not be worse, she thought.

  Still, her only chance lay in flight. And she chose it, pulling herself up onto the dock, ready to run. There were textile warehouses and clothing shops in this part of town, and if she could reach one of them she’d at least find something to cover herself, even if she had to break a window or kick a door down in order to do it.

  The horseman had paused about twenty yards away. His attention was directed toward the boats.

  Selena ran.

  “Duck in here quickly and don’t make a sound.”

  A tall figure stepped out from the shadows of a waterside warehouse, intercepting her in mid-flight, and a strong arm gathered her in. She was whirled around and caught a glimpse of polished brass buttons, epaulets, and a tricornered British officer’s hat. She clawed at the face hidden in the shadow of the hatbrim.

  “My God, Selena,” said Royce Campbell, “is this any way for a Scottish lady to carry on!”

  Royce? It was. It was! Their predicament grew more threatening as the soldier looked toward them, raised himself in his stirrups, and shouted, “Halt! Who goes there?” But Selena felt a rush of safety and security course through her, like adrenalin or strong wine.

  “Oh, darling!” she cried. “My God, I’m so glad…Are you all right?”

  She clung to him and he held her close. The brass buttons of his long, swallow-tailed officer’s uniform pressed into her breasts, hurting her and imprinting images of the imperial British lion in her flesh. She didn’t care.

  “Am I all right?” he repeated, astounded. “The question is, are you?”

  “I feel wonderful,” she answered, wishing there were time to kiss him. Then she remembered her condition, her rat-wet straggly hair and lack of clothing. “Oh, I look just terrible—”

  “On the contrary, my love. You have never looked better to me, but I think we’d better discuss it at a later time. You’re freezing. Here,” he said, slipping off the big coat, “put this on. Tie the tails around in front. It’s the best we can do right now.”

  Selena complied.

  “Now put your arms behind you as if you’re bound,” he said, rushing her along toward the horseman and shouting, “I’ve got her. I’ve got her. You. Soldier. Bring that horse over here right now.”

  The boats had reached the pier; soldiers in pursuit of Selena were climbing up onto the dock.

  The horseman cantered over, reined his mount, and saluted, staring down at the officer and the half-naked woman with him.

  “Devil be bound, sir. What on earth…?”

  Royce, with his arm around Selena, grabbed the horse’s reins.

  “Get down, man, and be quick about it. I’ve just seized the notorious spy, Selena MacPherson, and I must take her directly to General Graves’ headquarters on Wall Street. Get off. I need your horse.”

  The baffled yeoman, beginning to dismount, was partially cowed by rank, but also distracted by the shouting riflemen swarming onto the pier.

  “Selena MacPherson?” he wondered. “Aye. And isn’t there a price on ’er ’ead?”

  “Yes, and I’ll give you fifty percent of it,” Royce snapped, dragging the man down from the saddle and pushing him aside.

  “Ye seen a woman swim onto shore?” yelled one of the redcoats, racing toward them across the dock, the muzzle of his musket brandished like a guidon. “I say, ha’e ye seen…?”

  And he saw Royce lift Selena onto the prancing horse, swing up behind her, spur the beast, and gallop off into the night.

  “’E forgot t’ ask me m’ name!” complained the now earth-bound horseman sullenly. “’E promised t’ share the reward money wi’ me, but ’ow can ’e do tha’ when he don’t even know me name?”

  “Oh, ye ninny and ye oaf!” decried the musketeer, as he realized that Selena had been snatched from under his very nose. “Ye’ll be lucky not t’ be ’anged, ye stupid lout.”

  With one arm around Selena, holding the reins with his free hand, Royce urged the fleet chestnut gelding along the waterfront. Selena saw the closed windows of shops flash by, and the darkened facades of houses shuttered against the night. She was freezing. The smooth leather of the saddle, as she rocked in rhythm to the horse’s pace, felt sensuous, solid. But far more comforting was the presence of her beloved, better even than this strong horse or the refuge toward which it carried them. She began to feel warmer.

  “They are looking for you,” she told him, turning her head slightly. “I heard talk in the fortress.”

  She saw his strong teeth glinting. “It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before, now, is it?”

  Then he laughed and so did Selena, and everything in the world was fine and good.

  Perhaps half a mile from the point at which Selena had come ashore, Royce slowed the pounding horse and turned it into an alleyway. Here he reined the beast to a walk, picking their way slowly far back into a tiny canyon of darkness between two rows of brick houses. He was looking upward, searching for something. Selena could not imagine what.

  “Home,” he said then, halting the animal, “for the time being anyway.”

  He stood up on the beast’s back as the animal shifted nervously, and pulled Selena up as well. Her bare feet slipped a little on the smooth saddle.

  “All right,” he whispered, “feel up along those bricks. You’ll touch a ledge—”

  She did.

  “It’s a window. Open, I hope. Pull yourself up and crawl inside. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  Don’t leave me, she wanted to say, but did as she’d been told, clinging to the ledge for a moment, catching a toehold in the bricks. The ledge scraped against her belly and thighs, but then she was up and over and into a dark room. The outline of a table and chairs took shape in the gloom. Outside, in the alley, she heard the receding clip-clop of the horse, followed by a burst of excited shouting.

  The redcoats! They had spied Royce!

  The thought was too much to bear. For a moment, Selena debated whether to cry or not, but before she could decide, she felt the floor tremble ever so slightly, heard footsteps coming nearer, closing on her in the night.

  A door opened.

  “Selena? It’s me. I’m safe. The British are chasing a horse.”

  Royce drew the curtains on the window through which Selena had entered, and then they held each other and lost themselves in a kiss that went on forever. She had grown to know the many nuances of his kiss, lazy or searching or tender, playful or powered by raw passion. But this kiss was one of gratitude and relief. He could hold her again, and she him, and it was as if a shroud of serenity descended out of the darkness to protect them.

  When at length they drew apart, he lit a candle on the table. Selena saw a small, neat room, sparsely furnished. In addition to the table and chairs, there was a washstand with a cracked porcelain pitcher and bowl, a battered waist-high cupboard, and several rolled-up packets of bedding piled along the wall.

  “Our agents use this place from time to time,” Royce explained. “It’s behind a false wall at the back of a harnessmaker’s establishment. Erasmus Ward stayed here quite often, God rest his soul.”

  “You know?”

  Royce nodded. “When we learned of his capture, we held a conference and decided to send Penrod over to the fortress in priestly disguise. I understand he suffered a great deal?”

  “It was terrible. Oakley did not spare him. But I don’t believe he revealed anything about the coming attack on Yorktown.”

  “Shh!” Royce cautioned. “One never knows where there are ears. We will even it with Oakley in due time. And you? Did h
e harm you?”

  “He would have, had you not rescued me. Did you know I was in the fortress?”

  “Not for certain. But I had a feeling. It was the strangest thing, as if you were speaking to my mind.”

  “I know.” Selena smiled. What she had learned in the Orient regarding the mystical bonds between true lovers was indeed valid, and she was glad.

  “Anyway, you saved yourself,” Royce was saying. “I had precious little to do with it.”

  “Modesty sits strangely upon you, my dear,” Selena teased. “What are we going to do now?”

  “We’ll remain here in hiding until late tomorrow night. Oakley will expect us to make a run for it immediately. Let us wait until he has lowered his guard a bit. I ordered the Selena to sail around Long Island to Newport. We’ll ferry across to Connecticut and make our way up the coast. And then we’re off to the Caribbean.”

  Selena, who had been rejoicing over the whole day they would spend together, and the fields of time that stretched out after that, was puzzled.

  “The Caribbean?”

  “Yes. It’s rather a first stop. I have some plans.”

  He said no more, turning from her and walking to the cupboard. Opening it, he took out a bottle of wine, two glasses, a loaf of bread, and a large wedge of cheddar. Then from a compartment at the bottom, he also withdrew a fluffy towel.

  The excitement of being with him again had momentarily put everything else out of Selena’s mind, but the smell of bread, the sight of cheese, stirred the juices of appetite. She was famished. She was also bedraggled and suddenly aware of how she must look, standing there barelegged and draped in that purloined officer’s uniform. Well, he would certainly tell her of his plans later. Curiosity could wait.

  “Hand me the towel please, darling? Is there water and soap? Is there anything for me to wear?”

  Royce set the wine and the food on the table. He smiled.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know exactly what you’d require. But Penrod will be coming by tomorrow. I’m sure we can ask him to get some clothes for you.

  “It may be,” he added, “that you won’t need any until then.”

  “I hope not,” replied Selena, meeting his eyes.

  He uncorked the wine, sliced bread and cheese. Selena washed herself, feeling better every moment, and even succeeded in putting her hair back into a semblance of order, using Royce’s own pearl-handled comb, into which—as into all of his personal effects—was set a small silver image of a wolf’s head. That noble animal, so often misunderstood and reviled, was his symbol. More too. In a manner at once vague yet irrefutably clear, the wolf—which roams and hunts, which attacks only when provoked, which mates for life, and which will sacrifice itself for the safety of its own—was Royce Campbell’s brother, mirror-image, empath. Once aboard his previous ship, the Highlander, he had held her in his arms in the hammock in his captain’s quarters and told her what he had had to do to become a man in the eyes of the wild Highlands clan of which he was a part.

  She had recently suffered the loss of her father, and the hidden meanings of life, if any, perplexed her, so first Royce had asked, “You even believe in God, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” Royce said, giving her a lazy, indulgent kiss. “But I met him, and there are no longer any obligations attendant upon a vow in his name.”

  “What do you mean? You could not have met—”

  “God,” Royce said simply, and nodded. “It was my time, in the spring. The sun was falling that day, and I was readied in the usual manner. First I was stripped naked and my body was greased from crown to sole with bear oil, for symbolic strength and to protect me from the cold. We were in our hunting lodge near Loch Nan Clar, and the torches were lighted. I will remember forever the way my shadow loomed against the stone walls, and when I saw the shadow, the way the light had thrown my image upon the stone, I knew there would never be need of fear in my life. Selena, it was an exultation I cannot describe. I knew, at that very instant, that nothing could touch me. Not then, that night, nor ever.

  “After the oiling, I was girded in the tanned hides of wolves, strong with the scent of the wolf, and dressed in boots and gloves and a hat of fur. I took up a dagger and sheathed it at my side, and I was given whiskey to take with me against the cold. Then I left the lodge and set out upon my quest.”

  “Were you afraid?” Selena had asked, pressing herself against his long body as they lay in the hammock.

  “No. Excited. Overjoyed might be a better way to describe the feeling in my soul that night. Because, you see, my time had come. The time to be a man and to claim what was mine in the world. But first I had to succeed in the ritual. Midnight came and fled as I skirted the northern shore of the loch and began the climb toward the caves of Ben Kilbreck Mountain. I stopped for a time and had a bit of the whiskey, listening for the wolves.”

  “You were hunting wolves? How old were you?”

  “Six,” he answered casually, as Selena gasped. “You see, at that time of the year, the female whelps. She remains in the den with the cubs while the male brings prey for food. I found a cave, a den, and struck.”

  “You killed the father wolf?”

  “No. Not then. I entered the den when the father was gone, dressed in the skins of a wolf, smelling like an animal. You see, my first task was to suckle from the she-wolf, then to kill her, then to skin her and remove the dugs, to take them home with me as proof of my suckling.”

  Hearing this, Selena had almost cried out. A boy with a dagger, crawling upon hands and knees into the reeking stench of the den. That boy had become the man beside her, whom she loved as much as all the earth.

  “You might have been killed!”

  “No, I knew that I would not be. I knew it from the time I saw my giant shadow wavering against the stone wall of our hunting lodge. The she-wolf came at me, but I caught her beneath the throat with my dagger, and drank her bitter milk while the blood poured out. Her litter of pups squealed in panic, and in moments I could hear their father scrambling over the rocks outside the cave. But I was ready when I saw him, a dark, howling shape at the mouth of the cave, illuminated by a crescent of rising sun. The puppies, emboldened by his presence, were yapping and nipping at me now. I threw them off as the father charged. There is nothing to match the rage of an animal whose young are threatened, save perhaps the rage of women who want the same man, and I saw my death in the eyes of that attacking wolf.”

  “But why did they make you do that?”

  “No one made me. I wanted to. It is the way things are, because we Campbells believe that the only thing one must fear is God—”

  “And you said that you met—”

  “—and that God exists only at the instant when man is poised upon the thin line between life and death—”

  “—God, and he was—”

  “—for me, that father wolf, charging, fangs bared, out of the dawn, with his whelps gnawing at me too. But I dropped him with a dagger to the heart. He died with his teeth at my throat. Then I cut his throat where the skin is soft. And on that dawn I drank the blood of God…”

  Selena had reached out hesitantly then to touch his skin, as if afraid that some alien force would be transmitted from his body to her own. But nothing seemed to happen; no charged current came from him to her. In truth, it could not. They were already the same. She did not yet know, had not yet learned, that they were both possessed by the power of pure impulse, that they shared heartbeats with a rare, feral universe.

  “I killed the puppies too,” he had told her casually, “except for one I brought back home. He was a symbol of the fact that I had sacrificed what I must, but also spared what I could. Wolves cannot be domesticated, but I cared for him until he was able to fend for himself, then set him free. I think of him sometimes, roaming those Highlands of mine, and I feel gladness for him and for me.”

  “And you chose his image as your own.”

  H
e had, and it suited him. Although, Selena had come to believe, there were differences. The man who seated her at the table now and wrapped more tightly around her the blanket in which she sought to warm herself, the man who brushed her forehead with his lips and poured her a glass of red wine, no, that was not a man who would roam wild ever again, nor set the selfish interests of lust and lucre above those of compassion and love.

  Yes, she had gentled him and turned him from his willful ways.

  “To us,” he said, sitting down at the table with her and raising his glass.

  They drank.

  “To victory,” she said, and they drank again.

  Selena attacked the bread and cheese, even gulped the wine, as if she would never eat again. She’d had no idea how hungry she was. Royce sipped wine, smiling indulgently, but he cautioned her too.

  “Don’t overdo it, darling. You’re not used to this fare.”

  Already, she felt the effect of the wine, a slow, soaring light-headedness, a voluptuous ease spreading through her body. “I never want to see barley porridge again, not for the rest of my days. I think I lost three or four stone in prison.”

  “Spirit is the thing you cannot afford to lose, and you haven’t, as far as I can tell. Weight can always be regained.”

  “But not too much!” Selena cried, laughing and increasingly giddy from the wine. “Or would you love me fat?”

  “Time will tell.”

  “No, I’ll never get fat,” she babbled, cutting an immense wedge of cheddar and putting it between two crusty slabs of bread. “When I was locked in the fortress, I thought—” She was about to tell him of how, lying half-famished on the plank bunk in her cell, she had sometimes recalled the great holiday feasts of her youth, of lamb roasted in spices and basted with sweet wine, of pheasant stuffed with honey and butter and baked, of bread, soft and white as clouds, of apples and pears and candies, of tangy sausages and cold, strong ale. She meant to tell Royce about those delicacies, but the wine intruded, and she remembered what he’d said earlier.