Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

He gave her a close look then, and she noticed that the other men were staring too. She ducked her head, hiding behind the hatbrim again, and thinking of the jewels in one pocket, took some paper money out of the other, setting it on the table amidst the cards and mugs.

  A big hand reached out suddenly and seized her wrist.

  “What have we here?” he said slowly, in a playful, wondering voice. “A lady’s hand? I do declare—” Then he looked her full in the face for a moment—she saw the undeniable glint of interest in his eyes—and yanked off her silly little hat.

  All her golden hair spilled down.

  Behind the bar, the tavernkeeper let out a gasp of astonishment.

  The men at the table were more appreciative.

  “You’ve found yourself one for tonight, Cap’n,” said a blackhaired young man with quick, intelligent eyes.

  “You might just be right, Rafael. Now, young lady,” Beaumain asked, with a proprietary hand on her shoulder, “how on earth did you have the good luck to know I was here?”

  He was grinning, and with the way he looked her up and down, Selena was glad for the jacket that concealed her breasts. The barmaid had been right. Jean Beaumain’s interest in women was genuine and most direct. Yet it was not mean or tawdry, however blatant his approach, and she noted, with considerable relief, that his eyes were friendly. She thought she saw, only for a moment, something in or behind his eyes that could not be interpreted, but the measure of his gaze bespoke primarily a man who had known many women, liked almost all of them, and who had been oft rewarded with reciprocal affection.

  Selena almost felt that she could trust him.

  In the next moment, she knew that she had to, because the barmaid helpfully yanked the poster down from the wall, brought it over, and threw it onto the table.

  “Twenty-five hundred wonderful pounds!” she cried. “Now, there’s six of us, so if we split evenly that means—”

  “Pipe down, Liz,” ordered Beaumain. “I’ll see you get what you deserve.” He turned toward Selena.

  “It is really you, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me, how’d you get out of the fortress last night?”

  “You know about that?”

  “It’s all over lower New York. Everybody’s heard. You’re a heroine. Why, I bet there’s old women and little kids on their knees right now, praying that you’ll escape.”

  There was no time left. Selena thought she heard heavy footfalls closing on the door.

  “I’m asking for your help,” she said quickly, glancing at the rest of them and settling her gaze on Beaumain. “Any moment now, Lieutenant Oakley of British Intelligence will come through that door to arrest me. He was following me up from the harbor roadway.”

  “Oakley!” said Beaumain. He spat on the floor. “We’ve been looking to put a little tar in his wings, haven’t we, mates?”

  The other men murmured in eager assent.

  “Rafael, give me your pea jacket there. Louis, your hat. Hand it over. Quick.” He gave the barmaid the little hat Selena had been wearing. “Liz, ditch this, will you?

  “Now,” he added, turning toward Selena and slipping the big coat over her shoulders, “there’s just one thing. I never do something for nothing. What can you offer me in return for the aid I’m giving?”

  Selena was hurriedly pushing her long hair up beneath Louis’s high-domed headpiece.

  “Money?” she asked.

  “Ha, ha! I’ve got plenty of that. How about you spend the night aboard ship with me?”

  The tavern door crashed open and Clay Oakley appeared, his powerful body outlined against the night.

  “All right,” Selena told Jean Beaumain, thinking: I’ll worry about that later.

  “Deal!” exulted the sailor, and when Oakley entered, he saw six men bent to their cards and the barmaid busy washing mugs.

  “On your feet!” Oakley commanded those at the table. He was wheezing heavily; his face seemed scarlet in the light of the lamps and candles. “On your feet, by order of His Majesty George Third.”

  Nobody moved. Selena did not know what would happen. Slowly, Jean Beaumain stood up and walked over to the lieutenant. Selena kept her eyes averted, but peripherally she could see the sailor as he stood, hands on his hips, before the sputtering Englishman.

  “I am French, as you know,” he told Oakley. “Your sniveling monarch means nothing to me. What is the meaning of your intrusion?”

  “I am looking for a spy. A woman. Selena MacPherson. Have you seen her?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I had, but go look around if you want to make a fool of yourself.”

  Oakley hesitated, and Selena guessed why. The lieutenant was alone, and he was far too astute to provoke a brawl, which in spite of his strength he could never hope to win.

  “Is there a back room to this pit?” he demanded of the barmaid—a transparent ploy to salvage some small tatter of honor. “I’ll look there.”

  Officiously, he disappeared momentarily into a curtained door-way behind the bar.

  “You ought to clean up in there,” he admonished Liz upon reappearing. “It’s a nest for rats, not feathers. Now all of you, at the table, I want to see your papers.”

  “No,” said Beaumain, standing in his way. “We’re not your subjects. We’ll show you nothing.”

  Oakley moved forward. Jean Beaumain pushed him back. Livid, the lieutenant drew back one of his mighty arms. Beaumain closed fast, grabbing the other’s solid torso. They scuffled. Something fell to the floor. Selena’s glance informed her that it was Oakley’s mustache. The lieutenant’s one piece of hair was false, affixed to his upper lip by glue.

  With a cry quite like anguish, the humiliated Englishman pulled back from Beaumain, retrieved his dinky prop, and backed hastily toward the door.

  “Beaumain,” he ordered, “if your ship does not leave the harbor at dawn, I will confiscate it.”

  “You haven’t the right. I’m a private merchant. I—”

  “Hah! We all know what you are. Nothing but a privateer. We’ve left you alone so far because, as far as we can tell, you haven’t shipped contraband. But I can bring up charges and hold your ship here until you go broke!”

  “That would take a long time. Longer, I’m afraid, than you British are going to be here. But no matter. I was planning to sail tomorrow anyway.”

  Oakley departed without closing the door. Beaumain kicked it shut. “Good evening!” he said.

  His men applauded when their captain sat back down at the table.

  “Thank you,” Selena said, in admiration as well as gratitude.

  “No, darling, you will do that later,” he grinned. “Whose deal was it anyway?”

  It was after midnight when they left the Nest of Feathers. Selena, whose mind had been occupied primarily with how to elude Beaumain, had played badly, losing all of the money that Royce had given her. She also suffered a mounting concern about him. Where was he now? What would he think, do, now that she was separated from him once again? Even worse, what if he had been captured?

  “Do you think the barmaid will inform the British that she’s seen me?” Selena asked Jean Beaumain, as she walked with him and the sailors down the narrow alley toward the harbor.

  “No. I gave her my winnings tonight and I promised to spend a lot of time with her on my next trip to America. Liz is a good woman.”

  The way he said “good” made the sailors laugh.

  They walked in a dark column down the darkened alley. Selena saw that there was no hope of slipping away. A cold wind had sprung up, coming down on them from the north, out of the wide Hudson valley. It struck with particular force when they left the alley and came out onto the Battery. Selena shivered, and Beaumain put his arm around her, patting her shoulder possessively through Rafael’s heavy coat.

  “Not long now, my love,” he said.

  They took a dinghy from dock to ship, and Selena climbed a rope ladder, boarding the Liberté.
/>   Great, ocean-going ships had carried Selena in her time, and dismal freighters, river barges, three-masters, even rowboats on the Teviot River in Scotland long ago. But never had she been aboard a vessel like the Liberté. Every touch was just right. From the solid-oak decks to the teak railings, from the tall, imperial masts to the sleek, exquisite sweep of her hull, she was superb. Royce’s Selena was larger, and possessed of more cannon, but the Liberté was built for poetry of flow upon the sea, for speed.

  It was also built for comfort; Jean Beaumain was obviously a man who loved his pleasures and could afford them.

  Selena’s initial impression of him as being a forthright, good-natured merchant of the oceans was dispelled when he led her belowdecks—their companions had discreetly disappeared—through wide, glossily paneled gangways. Captain Jean Beaumain was—or appeared to be—a very wealthy man, and a highly unusual one. Most freighters were designed to provide their greatest space for cargo. Officers’ quarters were generally small and Spartan. Crewmen, quite often mean, illiterate, and pugnacious, slept in hammocks or high-sided wooden boxes in spaces so grim and grimy they would have driven most animals mad. But aboard the Liberté, it seemed each officer, each crewman, had a cabin of his own. Selena judged that there could be very little hold space for cargo, given the lines of the ship. And however Beaumain presented himself to harbor officials at his ports of call, he was obviously no mere trafficker in common merchandise. His vessel gave no stench of transported slaves, nor the heavy reek of rum or molasses, nor the scents of hides or textiles, indigo or rice or hemp.

  But even had Selena the impulse then to comment on these observations, she would have been forestalled. Because Beaumain, holding on to her hand, led her up a steep, short stretch of stairs, threw open a door, and ushered her into his quarters.

  Privately, Selena admitted to a slight feeling of competitive dismay. The Liberté’s captain enjoyed a cabin more elegant than did Royce on the Selena. If the two ships clashed at sea, of course, there would be no contest. The Selena was more heavily armed by far. But in luxury, Selena had to admit that Beaumain’s quarters were superior.

  The cabin was situated below the ship’s aft deck, above the rudder, and the view through three adjoining sections of small-paned windows gave one a great sense of height over the water. Writing desk and captain’s chair stood near the windows, desk, chair, and all other furnishings of the finest mahogany. Next to the desk was a map table, on which was spread a projection of the entire earth. A globe rested on the table, and Selena noted that there were small red flags in similar locations on both map and globe. There was a small dining table as well, a sideboard, and a hammock hanging between two mighty timbers looked wide enough to sleep three. The hammock contained blankets of fur. There were rugs of bearskin, leopardskin and sealskin on the floor.

  “Welcome, Selena,” Beaumain said grandly. “I shall do my best to make your visit enjoyable.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, she thought, removing Rafael’s coat and Louis’s hat. Beaumain, swaggering a bit when he noticed Selena admiring his quarters, hung the garments on a peg on one of the beams, and rang a little bell that he lifted from his desk. Within seconds, a uniformed steward knocked on the door and entered.

  “Yes, sir?” he asked, paying Selena no heed whatsoever. Female visitors aboard the Liberté did not, apparently, create much of a stir.

  “We’ll dine, shall we, Selena?” pronounced Beaumain. “Drinking always whets my appetites.” She did not miss the plural. “Steward, bring us some beef stew, if you please. And champagne. We must have champagne.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Beaumain sat down in his captain’s chair, selected a long, black cigar from a humidor on the desk, and lit it lovingly, savoring the taste, sending her a disarming grin. She felt her guard lowering in spite of herself. Dammit, the man was immensely likable, and also very attractive. Moreover, he seemed in no hurry whatsoever to collect his due…which she had decided he was not going to get anyway.

  “I heard about Erasmus Ward,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “We are going to miss him. Do you support the revolution?”

  He laughed in reply, blowing a thick, perfect ring of blue smoke, which rose to the curved ceiling of the cabin and melted into the dark timbers.

  “No. I admire the Americans for their combative spirit, as much as I loathe the British for their contemptuous arrogance. But I am a man without politics. Selena, I’m forgetting my manners. You oughtn’t to be standing. Here, take my chair. Or take a seat on the hammock.”

  He half-rose, but she waved him down. “I’m fine. I’ll just”—she wandered over to the map table—“walk around…”

  The last thing she wanted to do was get trapped in that hammock!

  “How can a person be without politics in times like these?” she asked. “Have you declared a plague on both their houses? You’re French, aren’t you? How do you feel about your own country?”

  “France? She means nothing to me. She is simply the place where I was born.”

  “But…but your country has given us so much…General Lafayette, for example, who came to us in our hour of darkest need. And Comte de Grasse, who is sailing now from Haiti to aid Washington at Yorktown.”

  “Ah, Haiti!” Beaumain said lovingly.

  “You are familiar with it?”

  “That is where I make my home. Off the coast, that is. I own an island. St. Crique.”

  “You own an island?”

  He laughed. “I took it for myself and so far no one has managed to get me off. But as for your Lafayette and de Grasse and the others, I spit on them!” He seemed genuinely angry. Selena was surprised. He did not appear to be a man easy to anger. “I despise them,” he continued, puffing his cigar furiously now. “They are of the nobility that is destroying France.”

  Selena thought of this luxurious ship, and looked about the well-appointed cabin. “I would think,” she observed, “that you are no stranger to the finer life yourself.”

  Jean Beaumain laughed again, but bitterly this time. “Not quite,” he said. “I was born the son of a fisherman on the coast of the province of Côtes du Nord, hard by the English Channel. In our part of the country, everyone obeyed a certain vicomte, whose name is Chamorro”—the intensity with which he spoke this name sent shivers through Selena—“and woe betide him who did not. One had to pay him fifty percent of whatever one earned. You could not hold a job, not even the lowest, stinking sort of job, without his approval. A man could not even marry without his permission because, you see, the nobility in France are in league with the clergy. They have you nailed down and shut up tight from the moment of your birth until you are laid in the ground. It is a common practice, or did you know, for the clergy not to bury the dead until a grave tax has been paid.”

  “My God!” exclaimed Selena. Even when Scotland suffered under the British yoke, things had not been that horrendous. “But you are here, free—” she began.

  They were interrupted by the steward, who entered with a steaming kettle of succulent beef stew and a bucket containing a jeroboam of champagne. He set it on the small dining table, also laying out glasses of cut crystal, fine bone china, heavy silver.

  “Let us partake, Selena,” Beaumain said, seating her.

  Be careful, Selena warned herself. Perhaps he is simply putting you off your guard with his talk—interesting though it was to her. Or maybe there was a drug in the food or the wine.

  No, hardly the wine. Before her eyes, the steward uncorked the wine with a resounding pop, poured some into both glasses, and withdrew.

  Beaumain himself ladled stew onto Selena’s plate, then onto his own, and began to eat with relish.

  So did she. From the first mouthful, all other considerations were subjugated to an overwhelming, resurgent hunger. The bread, hardtack, and cheese that she’d shared with Royce, good as they had been in comparison to prison fare, could not come close to this stew. The chunks of beef were
juicy, butter-soft. Potatoes, onions, carrots, and peas complemented the meat, and the champagne teased her palate.

  Go slow, go slow…

  Yet she had to eat, to drink—the cannonball she’d wisely left mostly untouched at the Nest of Feathers—and it had always been thus. Sometimes to her chagrin—the plum pie for example—but more often to her satisfaction, Selena indulged her appetites. She saw the wisdom in the ancient country air: “…there be no drinkin’ in the grave.”

  Nor anything else.

  “So what will you do with me,” she heard herself asking, filled to satiety and bold with the wine, “after you’ve taken your debt?”

  Beaumain wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked at her with amused appraisal.

  “You’re certainly welcome to remain aboard. We sail for the Caribbean in the morning.”

  Haiti. Of course. And Royce was planning to sail to the Caribbean soon as well.

  But he would now—she reasoned—be making his way to the Selena in Newport. He would probably expect her, if she could, to join him there.

  “I had really planned to go to Newport,” she said lightly. “Perhaps you could take me there?”

  “You don’t know how you’ll feel about that at dawn, now, do you?”

  He had the male look in his eyes now, powerfully.

  “Tell me more about this Chamorro whom you mentioned earlier,” she said, buying time.

  Once again, the man’s mere name stirred Beaumain. Selena saw clearly in his eyes what she’d sensed at the tavern: something vulnerable, haunted, and ruined. It was startlingly out of character, given his bearing and charm. But it was there.

  “Yes…” he said slowly, his concupiscence for the moment ebbing. “Well, Vicomte Chamorro was, in every way, our lord and master. But I was something of a renegade from the time I was a boy. By young manhood, no risk was too great. I set fire to the priest’s house when he refused to bury my penniless grandmother. I stole freely from the gardens and orchards of Chamorro’s château. I lied about the size of my fishing catch, saved the money, and began to make plans of my own.

  “And I was never caught. I was never caught But once, in my absence, Chamorro and his men came to our house. They accused my father—who knew nothing about what I’d done—of falsifying the catch. He denied it and begged for mercy, but they cut off his ears and his nose, and came hunting for me.