by Nancy Morse
As the sun went down and the stars came out, the tempo increased, the drums and tom-toms beat steadily, and the high-pitched wind instruments wailed and whined.
It was then, when night had fallen and the faces of the dancers shone like black glass in the torchlight, that Squier appeared. A gigantic man, he leaped higher and shouted louder than any of the other slaves. In his giant fists he wielded beef bones, rattling them upon the head of one of the drums with a mighty roar as he cried “Badoum! Badoum!”
Pru stood among the throng, watching the dancing, feeling the rhythm of the drums pulsing through her as the big African slave weaved and stamped and shook the ground under the sycamores.
“He is magnificent, isn’t he?”
A familiar voice startled her, and turning, she found Nicholas standing close behind her, his sweet preternatural scent mingling with the sweating bodies of the dancers and the burning torches lining the square.
“But I would not try drinking from him. He is sure to put up a good fight and is big enough to do some damage even to ones as strong as us. Besides, it would be a shame to deprive the world of such a specimen.”
“Are you following me?” she asked with a huff.
“Not at all. I often come to the square to watch the dancing.”
She could tell by the rosy flush upon his cheeks that he had recently fed. “By way of the Vieux Carre, I suppose.”
He grinned. “Yes, that is where I like to dine. There’s such a selection on the menu in that part of town.”
She turned away from the dancers and started down the street. Nicholas fell into an easy stride beside her.
People were out and about, and carriage after carriage passed them coming in from the river road. The ragged leaves of banana trees fanned the galleries of the inner courtyards of the houses lining the street. On the balconies figures sat silhouetted against the candlelight shining through the high windows, pewter smoke curling from the men’s cigars and fans fluttering before the faces of the women.
“Look at them” Nicholas mused, nodding toward the people who crowded the banquettes. “There is so much diversity in this city—French and Spanish, free people of color and those of mixed blood, Indians and planters, sailors off the ships in the harbor. Here, a vampire can walk the evening streets virtually unnoticed among the throng of exotic characters. There, do you see? They scarcely look at us as they rush by. This city was made for us, Prudence, with its wealth of dastardly throats upon which to feed. Why, just this evening I followed a man into the Sure Enuf Hotel where he paid a picayune to deflower a young girl brought in off the street. I wrenched him off of her in the nick of time and sent her off with a stern warning never to go near the place again. And then I escorted him into one of the city’s many dark alleys and made certain he would never do it again. His demise will no doubt be attributed to the bands of robbers that roam the streets unless, of course, one looks closely and spots the bite wounds on his neck. But fortunately for us, people have an aversion to getting too close to the dead.”
“It may interest you to know that I have spoken with Sabine Sejour,” she said. “I was right. It is the witch Lienore.” The flash of fury she expected from him did not materialize. “What? No lecture from you? Are you feeling ill?”
“I’m quite well, thank you,” he said. “And what good would a lecture do except to waste words on a stubborn woman like you? When did you ever heed my words about anything?”
“At last you are beginning to understand me,” Pru said, unable to contain a laugh.
“I always enjoyed the sound of your laughter,” he said. “It’s good to hear it again. At least you’re not hating me at the moment. I’ll take any bit of levity I can get from you.”
She was tempted to argue not to confuse a moment of lightness with tolerance, but she kept the saucy reply to herself. What was the point of angering him when she could feel his tension simmering in the sultry air?
“Aren’t you the least bit curious about what I learned about the voodoo queen?” she asked.
“Not really.”
Was he toying with her? He was such a clever game-player. “There is something I am curious about,” she said.
“I can hardly wait to hear it,” he replied sardonically.
“You know full well that Lienore can chant the words that will restore our souls, yet you do not express any interest in what I have learned, nor have you taken it upon yourself to find out anything about her on your own. Why is that, I wonder?”
“Why do you assume I have done nothing to find out on my own?
“I assume nothing. If you had found out anything, you would have come to me with it, to prove me wrong if she is not Lienore, or to hatch a plan if she is.”
“Why should I be so eager to reclaim a soul?” he asked. “What good would a soul do me, anyway?”
“What a contradictory fellow you are. And here I thought reclaiming your lost soul would have been high on your list of priorities.”
She looked at him through the moonlight that sifted through the moss-hung trees beneath which they strolled. He was so beautiful with the tips of his midnight hair rustled by the river breeze, his emerald eyes shining brightly in the swaying light, and his mouth full and somber. With the bloodlust abated for the time being, for a haunting instant he looked like a fallen angel whose emotions could so easy shatter. And yet something about his expression gave her pause. As the silence between them lengthened, a slow realization dawned on her. Her eyes narrowed upon his face. “You don’t want to find Lienore and make her chant the words, do you? You don’t want to reclaim your soul at all.” She stopped in her tracks. “Good God, Nicholas, why?”
The angel spread his tarnished wings when he bitterly complained, “God was not so good when he forced this existence upon me.”
“Don’t be sacrilegious,” she admonished. “And don’t change the subject. Are you telling me you don’t want your soul back? You don’t want to be mortal again?”
“There was a time when that was all I wanted. Every waking hour, each moment of my existence was focused on that which I had lost. But it changed.”
“When?”
“When you came into my life. At first I wanted to be mortal again so that you wouldn’t fear or despise me. Then I was forced to give you the dark gift, and— Oh Prudence, don’t look at me like that. We’ve been over this. I couldn’t let you die. I had to turn you into the undead, and in doing so, deprive you of your soul. We became alike, you and me, two soulless creatures. Don’t you see, Prudence? We can go on forever like this together, discovering new places and things. We don’t need our souls for that. We don’t need our souls for anything as long as we have each other.”
She turned away from him, saying with an audible groan, “It cannot be,” and continued on down the street.
His lips compressed into a thin line. “Oh, that’s right, the pirate.”
When she looked again at him, his expression was black and scowling. “It has nothing to do with him. If it were not him, it would be someone else. Someone mortal. For that is what I wish above all else to be. Mortal. I don’t want to live forever. Who knows what lies beyond this century or the next? Perhaps it will be something so terrible we will wish we were dead. But we cannot die. We cannot escape this prison of immortality.” Her back stiffened and her chin shot up in typical defiance. “You may not want to reclaim your soul, Nicholas, but I want mine back.”
“Is that why you went to see the voodoo queen?”
She saw past his anger to the hurt inside and did not wish to wound him further by telling him that she had gone to Sabine Sejour for a love potion. “Yes,” she lied. “That is why I went to see her.”
Like a sullen child, he asked grudgingly, “And you are convinced she is Lienore?”
“She displays all the symptoms. A beautiful host to inhabit, a hatred of men, an aversion to me no matter how hard she tried to hide it.”
“But you are not certain.” He said it matter-of
-factly, annoyingly able to read her doubt.
“Not completely certain, no,” Pru admitted.
“And have you come up with a clever plan to trick her into uttering the words you long to hear?”
She detested that mocking tone. “No, I haven’t. But the next time you come to the house to see Papa, I’d like you to bring the book that holds the ancient chant, the one you took from the alchemist’s house.”
“As you wish. But what if your pirate plunges a stake through your heart before you can trick Lienore into chanting the words to reclaim your soul? Have you thought about that, sweet Prudence?” His mouth curved up at one corner as if he had just delivered the decisive blow in their game of parry and thrust.
She quickened her pace, but his long, graceful strides would not allow to get too far ahead of him. “He is dangerous,” Nicholas said tautly. “How can I make you see that?”
“I see only a man so jealous he would do anything to thwart a rival. You dare not kill him for fear of my loathing, so you seek to demean him in my eyes.”
He looked dark and magnificent as he glared down at her. “The bag, Prudence,” he sharply reminded her.
“How do I know you did not place it there yourself?”
The threat in his eyes caught the starlight. “You don’t.”
This was the Nicholas she knew, the clever manipulator, the angel from hell. Each time she thought she saw a vague humanity in him, he shattered the illusion by revealing his true nature. The man she once thought him to be never existed. This was what he was, this creature, this vampire who had made her and would never let her go.
His lips curled in a cruel smile. “From the look on your face, it appears we understand each other perfectly.”
As she watched him cross the street and walk off into the night, his footsteps making nary a sound, it wasn’t so much his uncanny ability to read the thoughts written upon her face that made Pru feel as if she were strangling. It was the doubts that plagued her, each one like a hand at her throat squeezing tighter and tighter. Did Nicholas place the black bag in the armoire? Was Stede a vampire hunter who would destroy her if he knew what she was? Was Sabine Sejour the ancient witch Lienore? Would the potion bring her the love she longed for?
As she turned onto Rue Bourbon she heard the music of the violoncello streaming from the open windows of her house, and smiled through her gloom. Papa was playing his beloved instrument. At the gate, she paused with a pale hand on the latch, listening for a moment as the music floated out into the night. Her eyesight pierced the impenetrable darkness under the spreading limbs of the Spanish lime tree and moved slowly upwards to the warm yellow light emanating from the parlor.
Into her mind sprang an image, not of her papa, but of another seated before the instrument, cradling its curved body against his chest, midnight hair falling across his brow, green eyes closed to the magic of the music. When she hated him as much as she did, why was it his image that tortured her thoughts? Why was it his music that transcended heaven and hell and carried her to a place that could not be described with words, music she had once thought could only come from the depths of one’s soul. But that was before she knew him for the soulless creature he was and her own soul had been wrenched from her being. Oh, yes, she hated him down to her bones, and all the sweet music in the world would not change that.
Forcing the image from her mind, she opened the gate and hurried up the walk that was strewn with fallen leaves and the shriveled fruit of the lime tree.
Chapter 11
The marshes and bayous of Barataria were as beautiful as they were deadly. It was a blue-green jungle of moss-hanging cypresses and tall marsh grass where fat cottonmouths slithered through the iridescent water and alligators lay partially submerged like fallen logs on the soggy banks.
A man could get lost in this untamed wilderness and wander until he died of starvation or madness, but Stede Bonham knew every inch of the impenetrable, hot, ever-muggy mass with its quicksand traps and undertows. Confident that all those American soldiers quartered in their forts up and down the Mississippi would never find him and his stash of plundered goods, he had established ingress routes to the marshes of Barataria where his fleet of barges hewn from cypress trunks shuttled merchandise back and forth to New Orleans. The barges were unloaded below the city and the goods put on pirogues which moved through Bayou St. John beyond the stations of the pesky United States Customs. The freight was then unloaded on the banks and placed in wagons for delivery to the city’s shop owners.
Stede was proud of the entrepreneurial ingenuity that had enabled him to rise to the top of his illicit profession, avoid tariffs and capitalize on the lion’s share of the trade. And with his siege guns in place around Grand Terre, there was little threat from the Americans to dismantle the operation he had spent years building.
But Stede was not content to sail the high seas with his letter of marque under the legal pretext of plundering Spanish shipping and transporting the pillaged merchandise to the city. The trip by water from Barataria to New Orleans could take as much as a week, longer if the weather did not cooperate. The delays could leave the merchants’ store shelves empty and foodstuffs rotting before he could get them to the French market. And although he himself did not traffic in slaves, many of his men did, and if the barges carrying slaves did not arrive on schedule, his operation was in jeopardy from irate plantation owners unable to harvest their crops.
To avoid risking the wrath of the men upon whom his profits depended, he devised a clever scheme to create a chain of retail outlets where the public could browse the endless supply of furniture, clothing, the latest silks and finest embroideries, fruits and vegetables, wine and cheese, and medicines, purchase the contraband goods at handsomely reduced prices, and carry them home in their own wagons. All that remained was to build the outlets and set his ambitious plan in motion.
On this sun-bright day in mid-September, from his stronghold on Grand Terre, he relaxed in a red-clothed hammock strung between the ragged leaves of two banana trees. Grasped lazily in his hand was a glass of green liquid that he lifted frequently to his lips. The caws of gulls flying overhead brought his gaze skyward. With a lopsided grin, he glanced at the banner of Cartegena flying over the island, flapping in the breeze that blew ever-constant from the Gulf.
“Bos?”
He turned his head lazily toward the voice that spoke and blinked hard in an effort to see past the intoxicating haze that enveloped him. He laughed. “Delphine’s right,” he said, his speech slurred by the effects of the drink. “You do look like a baked apple.” He took another swallow from the glass. “Ah, la fèe verte,” he said, licking his lips. “She may have sold my Evangeline to the highest bidder, but damn if that voodoo bitch doesn’t make the best Green Fairy in town.”
He struggled to sit up. The hammock rocked and overturned, sending him to the sand. He rose unsteadily to his feet and stood swaying over his shadow. “Did you do what I asked you to do?”
“Yeah, bos.”
“And what did you find out?”
“I followed her to the cottage of the voodoo queen on Rue Ste. Anne.”
Stede took a stumbling step forward, his expression clouded. “How long was she there?”
“Not long. From there she stopped at the square to watch the dancing. She was joined by a man.”
The fog lifted a little from Stede’s eyes. “What did he look like?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“Try,” Stede tersely suggested.
“Tall. Well built. Dark hair. I didn’t get a good look at his face, but I got a glimpse of his eyes as he turned away. Green, they were. Bright and cold and green. They made me shiver down to my bones. And there was something odd about him. It was the way he moved, like the wind, noiseless and fast. When they parted on the corner of Rue Bourbon, he disappeared before I even knew he was gone.”
“And the woman? What did she do?”
“She stood at the gate listening
to the music and then she went inside.”
Stede digested it all with a calculating look. “Ready the Evangeline,” he ordered.
“Where are we headed, bos?”
“Honduras. There’s a Spanish fort in Omoa that guards the silver shipments from the pines of Tegucigalpa to overseas destinations. Once they put to sea, those ships are fair game, and the Evangeline can take them. Call the men away from their mistresses and tell them to be ready at dawn.”
He sent the man away with a wave of the hand and started up the beach, his bare feet leaving staggered footprints in the sand, the bottle dangling from his fingers. He staggered past the warehouse that contained the plundered goods and the barracoon where the slaves were quartered awaiting sale, to the brick two-story house facing the Gulf.
Passing through the wide arched doors to his office, he sank down into a chair and stared morosely at the papers on his desk. Given his humble beginnings, he was well-dressed, well-read, spoke four languages fluently and could discuss politics with ease. He knew the unique habits and customs of the city, the lay of the land populated by Creoles and Cajuns, found company among merchants and bankers, and had under his thumb a fleet of fifty sailing vessels and an army of buccaneers. All in all, he considered himself a pretty smart fellow. Yet despite all this, he could not unravel the mystery surrounding one enigmatic woman.
What was she doing at the voodoo queen’s cottage? Had she gone there for some gris-gris? But for what purpose?
He thought back to their first meeting when she appeared in the alley with a blood stain on her dress. She was as mysterious as she was beautiful. She was a woman who seemed to know what she wanted, if their coupling under the live oak along the riverbank was any indication of it. And even that had marked her as different from any other woman he knew, not because she made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was not a virgin, but because of the strength she had exhibited during their lovemaking. He would not have thought a woman as slender and pale and fragile-looking to be so physically strong. It had both delighted and shocked him.