Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

  “The older lady,” said Jean, noticing Selena’s interest, “is Martha Marguerite. She is the wife of the man who designed Hidden Harbor. He died last year of tropical fever, tragically, and she stayed on to manage my household affairs. But she is a Parisian noblewoman and really yearns to go back home.”

  “And the other one?” asked Selena, trying to manage a matter-of-fact tone.

  Jean permitted himself the hint of a smile. He saw the manner in which Selena was regarding “the other one.” “That is Yolanda Fee,” he said. “She’s Haitian. An octaroon. That is, she’s of mixed blood.”

  “And what does she do here?”

  “She’s my mistress.”

  “I see. She’s very beautiful.”

  “But so are you,” said Jean.

  While the Liberté was roped to the pier, Selena looked at the two women and they stared at her. In India, Davi the Dravidian had, among other insights and advice, once said this: “Selena, it is sometimes difficult to know a friend, but enmity stands out like a black panther on a field of snow.”

  Selena smiled pleasantly at the two women, feeling waves of hatred coming up at her.

  She did not know from which of them the hatred proceeded.

  Maybe both.

  Martha Marguerite wore a scarlet gown, high-necked, long-sleeved, and flowing. Yolanda was dressed in a peach-colored, frilly little garment which exposed her breasts almost to the nipples, and which, with its tight waist, accentuated the voluptuous curves of her body, a body made to drive men mad.

  Now Selena understood to whom the two types of dresses in Jean’s shipboard wardrobe belonged.

  She herself was wearing one of the blue satin dresses she had made during the trip, conscious of its makeshift quality in comparison to those of Martha and Yolanda. She was still wearing Ward’s cross, of course—Jean had noticed it without much interest, saying only that the words upon it “were being used by some revolutionary hotheads in France.” She gathered up the other two dresses she had fashioned, along with the bag of sovereigns and jewels—about which Jean did not know—and went down the gangplank onto the pier. Jean Beaumain made the introductions. Martha Marguerite could not have been more pleasant as she smiled and offered her hand.

  “Welcome to Hidden Harbor, Selena. I shall do everything in my power to ensure that you enjoy your stay here.”

  The manner in which she said this, however, seemed to indicate that she hoped such a stay would not be long. And on the third finger of her right hand, she wore a ring of gold, onyx and diamond; a dot, a circle and an oval, the shape of an eye.

  “You have suffered much,” observed Yolanda Fee, gazing at Selena with her hot, black eyes as Jean told what had happened in New York. Her eyes were depthless, full of feeling, but Selena sensed no malice. The only unusual part of the encounter was the way in which Yolanda stared at the cross and gold chain around Selena’s neck.

  “We have heard news,” Martha Marguerite said, “that the Americans were victorious at a place called Yorktown. The war is over. America is free.”

  Jean threw his hat down onto the deck in exultation, and Selena shivered in what might well have been called an ecstasy of triumph. If only Royce were here with her now to share this news! Rafael, Louis, and the other sailors, who had secured the Liberté and were now clambering down the gangplank and onto the dock, shouted and cheered in joyous unison.

  “It is a great time, a great time,” Jean pronounced, “particularly for Selena.” He told the two women of her background, her struggle, her deeds. “We must have a huge feast tonight in her honor,” he declared.

  “I shall see to it right away,” said Martha Marguerite, not quite as excited as Jean was.

  Yolanda Fee just smiled and said nothing, reappraising this newcomer in the light of the adventures her lover had related.

  Martha Marguerite, friendly in a cool, detached manner, led Selena up the pier toward the great house.

  “I’ll get you settled, my dear, and see that you have suitable garments”—her opinion of Selena’s handiwork was not wildly flattering—“and we can talk more later when we dine this evening.”

  As she was shown into the house, high-ceilinged to preserve the cool, teak-floored, with vast white walls, Selena turned for a moment and noted Jean and Yolanda. They were walking up toward the house too. His arm was around her slim waist, and her lips were pressed close to his ear. Jean was smiling, and Selena knew that the sloe-eyed Haitian beauty was promising things she would do to him in just another minute, when they were alone.

  Martha Marguerite read Selena’s thoughts.

  “If you have dreams of him, give them up,” she said, not without sympathy. “No matter what may have happened on board ship—and I’m certain that something did because I know Jean like a son—forget about it. Because Yolanda Fee is a temptress and a witch. Nothing stands in the way of what she wants.”

  “Thank you, but I’m afraid you have the wrong impression. I am betrothed to another, and he will come for me or I will go to him as soon as possible.”

  “But meantime you are here,” Martha Marguerite observed pointedly, “and I saw the way Jean was looking at you.”

  She clapped her hands. Three white-garbed servants appeared.

  “Show the young lady to the rose bedroom. She will wish to bathe, I’m sure. Call for the seamstress. Prepare a plate of fruit. Fetch wine.”

  The servants bowed and scurried away. Martha Marguerite was very much in command of Hidden Harbor.

  Before Selena was taken to her quarters, Martha Marguerite leaned close to offer a warning terse and strange. “Do not cross Yolanda in any way,” the woman hissed. “She knows the secret of black magic. I have seen it.”

  Black magic? wondered Selena a while later, as she soaked in the scented waters of the bathing pool, alternately savoring sections of an orange and sipping port. There is no such thing as black magic. Oh, in Scotland during her girlhood she had heard tales of peasant women who mixed strange concoctions which, when consumed, were said to guarantee winning a lover or curing the ague. But magic was superstition, a leftover myth from Europe’s Dark Ages. These were modern times. No one believed in that sort of thing anymore.

  Languidly, she stepped from the pool, dried herself with a fragrant towel, and slipped into a thin, lemon-colored robe she had been given. The rose room, named for the primary color of its walls and furnishings, was a marvel such as Coldstream Castle did not possess. Clear water from a hidden source emerged mysteriously into a spacious tub of rose-tinted marble, flowed about, and sank away. The effect was luxurious, soporific.

  Selena lay down on the wide, soft bed, drifting against her will toward sleep. She wanted to dress, go out, and have a look around.

  Black magic…

  At the same time, somewhere in the indeterminate distance, there were sounds that held slumber at bay, low, intermittent keening moans, oddly familiar and…exciting.

  The sounds of passion.

  These persisted, and presently Selena arose. The rose room, wide and spacious, gave out onto a tropical garden in which a flagstone path seemed to disappear into tropical undergrowth. She opened the French doors and stepped out into the garden. The sounds, the gasps and cries, were clearer now, and she was sure they were coming from the undergrowth itself.

  Looking around, guessing that she was unobserved, Selena sped down the flagstone path and tentatively pushed aside the leaves and vines. To her surprise, they parted easily, like a curtain, and revealed a continuation of the path itself. She stepped through the veil of greenery and once again looked about. At the end of the path, she saw a small, domed structure like a miniature temple. The keening cries were more audible now, and they were coming from the temple.

  Curious as always, and already thrilled physically by the moans of ecstasy, she tiptoed stealthily along the flagstones, approaching the temple. An insinuating fragrance came to her then, and she recognized it as the perfume she had smelled on the vexing white dress
aboard the Liberté.

  Then Selena crept up next to the temple itself, pressed close to it, and peered into one of the airy, vaguely oriental slits with which the structure was perforated.

  She did not know why her gasp of wonder was not overheard.

  Jean Beaumain, his body glistening with sweat and oils, was in the center of a great circle of burning black candles. He was naked. His eyes were closed and his head was thrown back in the transports of ecstasy.

  He appeared to be suspended in midair, levitating, unsupported by anything that Selena could see.

  Kneeling outside the circle of candles, naked and oiled herself, her eyes closed and her hands pressed together as if in prayer, was Yolanda Fee. Her lips moved from time to time, and when they did Selena noted that Jean would rise in delight, that his maleness throbbed as if he were being teased and stroked.

  Yolanda was making love to him as if with her mind alone, the two of them lost utterly in some strange trance beyond Selena’s ken. Jean’s delight went on and on—possibly, if conscious, he could not have borne the bliss—and Yolanda began to writhe in ecstasy herself.

  Transfixed and astounded, Selena could not tear herself away from the preternaturally gorgeous woman and the man upon whom she worked in a way so unfathomable, from the wonder of her sorcery.

  Finally, Yolanda cried out, and Jean Beaumain cried out, and from his body erupted tide after tide after tide, which, as he settled to the blanketed earth, Yolanda Fee crept forward to consume.

  Selena fled.

  Yolanda was waiting for her inside the rose bedroom.

  She was loosely clothed in a wrap of green silk. Her hair hung limp and wet around her triumphant face. She smelled strongly of strange perfume, and of Jean.

  “I was just…outside…” Selena faltered, wondering what secret passage Yolanda could have taken to come so quickly here from the temple of delights.

  “I know where you were,” the other said. “But it does not matter. What did you see?”

  Selena sought words.

  Yolanda smiled. “You saw only what you wished to see, what you wished to see in your own imagination.”

  “But out there—”

  “Out here?” asked Yolanda, stepping toward the French doors and leading Selena once again into the garden and down the flagstone path. “Out here? What?”

  They came to the part of the path where the veil of vines and leaves seemed to hide the temple beyond. Yolanda moved the leaves aside…to reveal nothing but more leaves, more vines, and impenetrable undergrowth that ran on into the jungle of St. Crique Isle.

  “You must be very careful of what you allow into your mind,” advised Yolanda helpfully, as she took Selena back inside the rose room. Selena sank down upon the bed, her senses spinning disorientedly, her usually clear mind in a turmoil of wonder.

  “I want you to know,” said Yolanda, not at all threateningly, “that Jean is mine.”

  “I love someone else…” Selena began. “I do not desire—”

  “Ah. But he desires you.” With that, she knelt down beside the bed and took Selena’s hands in her own. “Listen,” she said fervently, as if she were Selena’s sister, “we must be friends. We must fight together.”

  “Fight? Against whom?”

  “Why, Martha Marguerite of course. She is insanely jealous of Jean. She will destroy both of us, if she can. Did you see that ring she wears?”

  Selena managed a nod.

  “It is the source of her powers. Somehow she must be divested of that ring. Will you help me?”

  Selena remembered how Martha Marguerite had warned her against Yolanda’s black magic. “If I can,” she temporized. “But I don’t see how I can.”

  “Leave it to me,” replied the other woman, with a sloe-eyed grimace that might have been a smile. “You help me when I ask it of you, and I shall do all in my power to speed you to your lover.”

  “But I intend to go to him anyway, as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, but do you know that Jean will seek to keep you here?”

  “No, of course he won’t—”

  Yolanda nodded soberly, knowingly. “Believe me. You must. Jean will attempt to keep you here, and Martha Marguerite, outraged at his attentions to you, will seek to destroy you. I have seen it—”

  “You’ve seen it? Like a vision?”

  “My power is not so great as Martha’s—because she possesses the ring—but I have managed to learn a few things. Trust me and be my friend, and all will be well with you.”

  Yolanda stood up, moved to the door, and turned.

  “Why do you wear that talisman around your neck?” she asked.

  “This cross? It was given to me. I treasure it.”

  Yolanda seemed doubtful. “You mean it is not a source of power?”

  “What? No. Just a remembrance.”

  Yolanda remained dubious. “But just trust me,” she said, going out.

  And leaving Selena uncertain about whether she could trust anyone at all.

  A musky whiff of savage scent, and the spilled smell of Jean Beaumain, hung in the air.

  The initial flurry of hospitality extended to Selena at Hidden Harbor fairly overwhelmed her. A seamstress appeared to take her measurements—aboard the Liberté she’d regained the weight lost in prison—and to give her a gown to wear to dinner. A houseboy, dark, shy and soft-spoken, knocked on the door to ask, in French, if her quarters were adequate. Did she need more towels, pillows, linen? She did not; the rose room was equipped to meet the needs of the most demanding queen. And a servant appeared with tea, brandy, and a tray of biscuits and sweets.

  Yet, while Selena appreciated the attention, she realized that the constant flow of servants posed a problem: how ought she to conceal the pouch of jewels?

  Temporarily, she had hidden her inexplicable cache beneath the mattress, but that would not suffice for long. Who knew how many times a day they changed the beds in this white palace?

  She looked around the rose room, thinking it over, calculating. The walls were solid plaster; the wardrobe was stark and empty; there were no bureaus or drawers. At length, she buried the pouch among the roots of a potted rubber plant, surreptitiously discarding the excess soil in the garden.

  As darkness began to fall and the time to dine drew near, she took another long bath, groomed herself, and put on the dress that the seamstress had brought her. It was satin, sleek and shiny, and had about it the voluptuous feel of a living thing. It was black, which displeased her. The color of mourning. But when she saw in the mirror how it set off her golden hair and the deep tan she’d acquired at sea, Selena felt better.

  At least until, again, she began to experience the nervous, burning, needful sensations of physical arousal.

  Pulling off the garment, looking, she found again inside the hem that mysterious, embroidered eye.

  And thought immediately of Martha Marguerite’s ring.

  Perhaps Yolanda, for all her strange ways, was right about the power possessed by the older woman.

  She’d just decided to wear one of her own makeshift creations, damn it all, when there was a subdued rapping at her door.

  Martha Marguerite entered, with a slippery white silk gown draped over her arm.

  “Wear this to dinner,” the woman said, handing Selena the gown. “And don’t be alarmed. It is much in fashion at Versailles.”

  Court of the French king, Louis XVI. Selena was impressed.

  Martha Marguerite withdrew. Selena instantly inspected the hem, found neither mark nor symbol, and slipped on the dress.

  And knew why Martha had expected her to be alarmed.

  A tight-fitting, floor-length garment, it exposed a bit of her hips, all of her back, her left shoulder and left breast. She blushed even as she looked at herself in the mirror, reddening in face, throat, and all the way down to her bare breast, where her nipple stood at attention.

  I can’t wear this! she was thinking, when Jean Beaumain knocked and entered simultaneo
usly.

  “Jean!” she cried, covering herself with her hands.

  He smiled. “When in Rome, Selena. Come, let’s go to dinner. And let us humor Martha. She wants tonight to seem as if we were among the nobles of Paris. Her one dream is to be among them again, as she was when she was young.”

  Selena continued to balk.

  “Come now,” he persisted. “She herself will be in a dress similar to yours.”

  “When in Rome…” Selena repeated, steeling her nerve and following him out of the rose room. At least this dress did not elicit those dastardly sensations of arousal.

  Also, to her surprise, she began to feel almost comfortable in the garment, and proud of her body.

  Moments later, entering the dining room, she felt something else entirely. Already seated at the banquet table was Yolanda Fee. Her dress was identical to Selena’s!

  The two women stared at one another in considerable hostility.

  Also at the table, seated between Louis and Rafael, was Martha Marguerite, who had on a demure lavender creation, which covered her from throat to wrist, from clavicle to ankle.

  The woman is toying with Yolanda and me, Selena realized.

  Veiling her discomfiture, acutely conscious of male eyes, she took her seat at the table on Jean’s right. Yolanda sat opposite him, brooding and remote. Only her great black eyes were alive.

  “The light and the dark,” exuded Martha Marguerite, with a theatrical gesture toward the two young ladies. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  None of the men disagreed.

  A servant came forward to pour champagne, and as Selena accepted the toast that Jean made in her behalf—“to a brave girl whose visit here we honor tonight”—she noted that her hand was a bit unsteady from tension. So was Yolanda’s, however, and Selena was secretly pleased, even though her opinion of Martha Marguerite had declined. It seemed the older woman was deliberately provoking some sort of confrontation.