Tainted Love

by Nancy Morse

Prudence. The thought of her at this moment both excited and infuriated him. Who but she would have had been bold enough to attempt to kill him? And who but she would he have forgiven for it? Not that she had always been so daring. When he met her, she’d been a timid little mouse afraid to speak her mind or give in to the passion he sensed brimming just beneath her placid surface. It had been a delight to initiate her into the pleasures of the flesh. As he followed the dead soldier’s directions to a steep stairway and descended the narrow, winding stone steps, he thought about how she had taken to his lessons, and how her timidity had turned into the self-confidence of a seasoned courtesan, and he felt a surge of pride at having been the instrument behind her transformation. It hurt him that she thought of him as her enemy. If only he could convince her that the real enemy was the mortal he was here to rescue.

  It occurred to him that he could simply kill the pirate and tell Prudence that he died trying to escape, but he could not take the chance that she would see through his lie and hate him even more than she already did. He had no choice but to help the mortal who was a rival for her love.

  He found the place where the prisoners were kept by following his nose. The smell of human waste and fear led him to a dungeon in the subterranean depths of the fortress. A lone Spanish soldier sat before a thick iron door, his chair tilted back against the wall, hands folded across a bulging belly, asleep. Nicholas heaved an impatient sigh. He’d done enough killing for one day. Closing his eyes, he focused all of his thoughts and energy on transforming.

  The soldier shuddered in his sleep when a cool mist passed over him and disappeared beneath the iron door.

  Once inside the dungeon, the mist solidified into human form. Shaking himself off, Nicholas prowled the row of iron-barred cells, wrinkling his nose at the smell. He found the pirate in a cell at the far-end of the corridor and stood for a moment looking at him.

  His wrists were shackled in iron rings embedded in the stone wall. His body slumped forward as far as it could go, head hanging down, dark, tangled hair obscuring his face. His breathing was labored.

  “What she sees in you I will never know.”

  Stede lifted his head at the voice that spoke from somewhere close by. His hair was plastered to his face, and he blinked glassy eyes at the tall figure of a man inside the cell. His voice emerged as a rusty sound from the back of his throat. “How did you—?”

  “Never mind that,” Nicholas said in a harsh whisper. “And keep your voice down. “We don’t want that fat excuse for a soldier to hear us.”

  Stede straightened his back, wincing from the pain of bruised muscles “Who are you?” he rasped.

  “I’m a friend of Prudence Hightower’s.”

  “Pru? I—” He lost his voice in a choking cough. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Later. Right now, I have to get you out of here.”

  Swallowing and trying to take control of his faltering voice, Stede asked, “Did you bring the keys?”

  “No. There wasn’t time.”

  Stede rattled the chains. “Then how are you going to get me out of these things?”

  “Like this.” Nicholas grasped the chains in his hands, and with a mighty pull they came loose from the stone that held them. Ignoring Stede’s wide-eyed astonishment, he knelt on one knee, dragged the manacles toward him and snapped them open, freeing Stede’s wrists. At any other time the sight of blood staining a mortal’s flesh would have enticed him, but having already fed, and not wishing to see the hatred in a certain pair of blue eyes, he refrained from the impulse to draw the bloody wrists to his mouth for a taste. “Can you stand?”

  “It’s been a while, but I think so.” Pushing himself up from the vermin-infested ground, Stede rose shakily to his feet. He took a step and stumbled and would have fallen had Nicholas not reached out in time to steady him.

  “Do you want me to carry you?” Nicholas asked.

  “Hell no. Just give me a minute.”

  “Be quick about it,” Nicholas griped. “We haven’t got all night.” It was just a matter of time before the bodies of the dead soldiers were discovered, but he didn’t want to tell him that.

  Stede took a few faltering steps. “I think I can make it now.” He clutched his belly as a fierce pain shot through it. “Damn those Spaniards.” Gathering what strength was left in his battered body, he walked unassisted to the door of the cell.

  “Stand back.” Lifting a leg, Nicholas crashed his boot against the bars. The door swung open with a squeal of rusted hinges and slammed against the stone wall.

  “Great,” Stede muttered. “That’s sure to bring them running.”

  “There’s just one of them,” Nicholas said. “And I’ll take care of him.”

  Sure enough, the crash of the iron bars against the stone wall roused the sleeping guard. They could hear the jangle of the key ring as he opened the big iron door and stepped inside.

  Stede blinked his eyes at the torchlight that spilled in from the outer corridor and felt a cool breeze rush past him. One moment Nicholas was standing beside him, and in the next moment he was at the door, propelling the guard backwards and out of sight. The torch went out, throwing everything into darkness. There came the sound of thrashing about, followed by a muffled groan and a thud, and then silence.

  Poking his head back in, Nicholas urged, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  A wave of excitement washed over Stede as he followed Nicholas out the door. He did not get more than a few feet when he tripped over something in the darkened corridor. His belly tightened at the sight of the guard lying motionless on the cold stone floor. “Is he—?”

  “He’s alive,” Nicholas answered curtly. “But I suspect he’ll have a massive headache when he wakes up.”

  Stepping over the prostrate body, fueled by the promise of freedom, Stede’s limbs came alive with deadly energy. Matching Nicholas now stride for stride, the two raced down the darkened corridors and up the winding stone steps. Behind them they heard shouting and the stomping of boots as the Spaniards discovered the two dead bodies.

  “This way,” Nicholas urged. They could not leave the way he had entered, but he had thought of that. Fortunately, none of the Spaniards had paid any attention to the little brown bat that flitted about the night before, familiarizing itself with the best possible way out of the fortress. With the Spaniards hot on their heels, they raced toward it now.

  ***

  The sun was emerging behind the treetops and the air was thick and humid beneath the mangroves when they stopped to rest along the shore.

  Breathing hard, Stede sank to the ground, his back pressed against the trunk of one of the massive trees. “I can’t wait to get aboard the Evangeline.”

  “The ship went down,” Nicholas said flatly.

  “The Evangeline? Scuttled?” Stede turned disbelieving eyes toward the water, as if he expected to see his vessel’s sails furled against her masts.

  “So the story goes.”

  Stede tore his eyes from the water and looked up at the tall, imposing figure standing over him. Lit from behind, the sunlight burst all around him like a halo. But there was nothing angelic about those green eyes. He thought back to the day on Grand Terre when one of his men had described this man’s eyes as bright and cold and evil-looking. Suppressing a shudder, he asked, “How did you do those things you did?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Nicholas replied, although he had no intention of doing any such thing. “Here, drink this.” Into Stede’s hands he thrust the bottle of green liquid that he brought along and secreted in this spot. With enough of the drink in him, the pirate would never know if what he had seen was real or if he only imagined it.

  Stede drank greedily, then ran a torn and soiled sleeve across his mouth. “I sure did miss this stuff in that place.”

  “From what I heard, it was this stuff that got you into that place,” Nicholas commented sourly. “You seem to be overly fond of it.”

  “We all do
what we must to survive,” Stede replied. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and drank again. “These mangroves, for instance. They survive in hot, muddy conditions that other trees don’t like. They take the salt spray and deal with swollen rivers and violent storms. Me, I drink to survive the memory of someone I loved and lost. I don’t suppose you’d know about doing what you must to survive.”

  Nicholas replied with a bitter laugh under his breath. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  “When I get back to Nawlins,” Stede went on, his speech slurring, “the first thing I’m gonna do is have me a big bowl of gumbo.”

  “And what about Prudence?”

  “You say Pru sent you?”

  “Prudence,” Nicholas said, stressing her full name. “Yes.”

  “I wonder what she’s been up to since I left.”

  That makes two of us, Nicholas thought, recalling that she was acting funny during their last encounter, as if she were keeping some great secret.

  “I’ll have to find another ship.

  “Sorry. I can’t help you there,” Nicholas replied. It annoyed him that Prudence was merely an afterthought in the pirate’s mind, while she was his entire world. “I stole one of the Spaniard’s horses. It’s tethered just over there in the bushes. You’d better get going. You want to get back to that bowl of gumbo.”

  “What about you?” Stede asked.

  “Don’t worry about me. I got here. I can get back.”

  Stede grunted with pain as he pushed himself away from the tree and got to his feet, tripping over a mangrove root.

  Overhead, a flock of brightly colored macaws flew from tree to tree and a giant egret winged its way across the brightening sky.

  Thrusting his foot into the stirrup of the Spanish saddle, Stede mounted and grasped the reins. He looked down at Nicholas and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

  “My name is Nicholas.”

  “How can I ever repay you for what you have done?”

  “Perhaps there is a way. I have taken a little quadroon whore into my home. I’ve grown tired of her but I don’t want to return her to the flatboat where I found her and the life she had before. You could take her off my hands.”

  Stede swayed in the saddle. “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Good. Her name is Marie. She’s quite lovely. I’ll send her over. She’ll be waiting for you when you get back to New Orleans. She’ll bring you many hours of pleasure. Go now. I have done my part. The rest is up to you.”

  “I am in your debt. If ever you have need of me, you have only to ask.”

  Feeling pleased with himself, Nicholas stood back and watched Stede trot off into the forest.

  His ploy worked. As much as he was loathe to admit it, Prudence was right whenever she accused him of doing things only for himself. It wasn’t for her benefit that he had gone through all the trouble of freeing the pirate. And he certainly hadn’t done it for the pirate. No indeed. He did it for himself. For when Prudence discovered that Stede Bonham was dallying with the lovely Marie, she was sure to break things off with him. And what better shoulder for her to cry upon than his own?

  There was, however, something that troubled him. He had always relied upon his astute senses to alert him to the proximity of a hunter, and yet, except for a nasty smell from languishing for days in the dungeon, nothing about the pirate had alarmed him. The man was careless and reckless to a fault and had a penchant for the absinthe that would one day be his ruin, but Nicholas was now quite certain that he was not a member of the accursed Sanctum. But how did that explain the existence of the black bag? If it was not the pirate’s, then who did it belong to?

  Chapter 19

  On a dark and chilly day in late November, in the Hall of the Cabildo, the French Colonial Prefect received the keys to the city from the Spanish Governor, despite word having arrived in July that Louisiana had been purchased by the United States for the sum of sixty million francs.

  Tensions were high as the citizens of New Orleans awaited the arrival of the American commissioners and their troops. The Creoles were angry over the Americans’ threat to close down the balls that were so much a part of the life of the city. As were the African slaves who gathered on Sundays on the green by the swamp and rocked the city with their dancing. The Americans, accustomed to quiet Sabbaths, viewed the city as a haven of depravity and dancing.

  In the parlor in the house on Rue Bourbon, Pru poured more coal on the fire to ward off the evening chill.

  “New Orleans is a tinderbox ready to ignite,” James Hightower said as he sipped the blood in his glass. “I wonder what the Americans will do about the slaves. Everywhere you look you see the result of slave labor—in the carpentry, the ironwork, the cultivated fields outside of the city. Slave dealers are on every corner.” He shook his head. “Such a nasty business.”

  Pru prodded the fire with an iron poker, recalling the night she met Stede Bonham and the disagreement over slavery that had gotten him tossed out of The Snapping Turtle. Heaving a sigh, she said, “It seems no one can decide who wants this territory. The Spaniards, the French, the Americans.”

  “The Americans will prevail,” James said. “They cannot be stopped. They are coming to make money. I hate to think our days in New Orleans may be nearing an end.”

  Pru glanced up at him. “We can’t leave this city.”

  “Why not?”

  Because Stede has not returned, she wanted to say. “Because we have traveled all over the globe. It’s time we settled down permanently.”

  Her papa looked at her from over the rim of his glass. “Isn’t it you who is constantly complaining about the conditions here? Mud, mud, mud. That’s all I hear from you. Wouldn’t you rather be someplace that isn’t as soggy as this?”

  She drew in an uncertain breath. “Where would we go?”

  “Why not home?”

  “To London? You would trade the mud of these streets for the fog of those?”

  He shrugged.

  “And what about Nicholas? I thought you enjoy his company.”

  “Indeed I do. Although something tells me I would not be the only one who would miss him.”

  Pru rolled her eyes. “Oh, Papa, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s not likely Nicholas and I will ever be as you wish us to be.” Besides, she thought mutinously, I am in love with someone else.

  It had been days since she swallowed her pride and went begging to Nicholas. Had he succeeded in freeing Stede from the Spanish fortress? Her anxiety mounted as she awaited word from him.

  “There are too many memories in London,” she said, hoping to divert the subject from the unlikely possibility that she and Nicholas would ever become the couple her papa wished them to be. “I have no desire to return there. I’m quite content to remain here. The Americans can be coarse and vulgar, and none of them understand a word of French or Spanish, but here we can move about freely and undetected, and I suspect that in time New Orleans will become as refined as Boston or Paris.”

  Her papa laughed. “Now whose imagination is running away with them? No, my dear Pruddy, this city on the delta is destined to remain a place of gambling dens, cabarets, balls and brothels. And men bent on pleasure will always find a way to profit.”

  She crossed the room, her feet treading noiselessly over the carpet, and bent to pinch her papa’s cheek. “You are sounding very philosophical tonight.”

  He smiled sheepishly and was about to respond when there came a rapping upon their door.

  “Who can be out on a rainy night like this?” James wondered.

  Pru straightened. “I’ll get it.” Her breath rushed into her throat as she forced herself to walk calmly to double French doors. In the hallway her pace quickened until she was running. She stopped short to catch her breath and assume a casual pose as she opened the door.

  “Why Prudence,” Nicholas scoffed as he strode inside, “were you in that great a hurry to see me that you ran all the way to the doo
r?”

  He looked wind-tossed and robust and smelled of the night and the rain, and despite the sarcasm dripping from his voice, his smile was luminous.

  “It’s about time you showed up,” she said irritably. “When did you get back?”

  “Two days ago.”

  Her hand went out to catch his arm, fingers tightening over the wet woolen sleeve of his greatcoat to halt his steps. “Two days ago?” she echoed. “And you’re only just now coming by?”

  Looking down at her hand, he covered it with the cool press of his and pried her fingers loose from his arm. “I’ve been busy.”

  Pru bit back the urge to wince at his immeasurable strength, not because he was hurting her, but to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing it. She flashed him a heated look. “If I haven’t told you lately how much I hate you, I’m telling you now.”

  He lifted his wet lashes. His eyes sparkled with mischief and candlelight. “I’d love to go to your room so you can show me just how much you hate me.”

  “That’s not likely to happen. And can you please stop thinking about yourself for a minute, and tell me about Stede? Did you—”

  “Yes,” he cut in with a bored tone.

  “And is he—”

  “Your pirate is on his way back to New Orleans.”

  The tension that had been steadily mounting since she learned of Stede’s imprisonment escaped in a muffled moan. “Thank God.”

  “It wasn’t God who winged his way over there, stole a horse, broke the chains and manacles, and was forced to kill two soldiers in the process.”

  “And for that you shall have my eternal gratitude.”

  “It’s not your gratitude I want.”

  “I’m not going upstairs with you,” she reiterated.

  “That’s not all I want from you, and you know it. Once, a very long time ago, I almost wed a girl from my village. I believe I told you about it. Since then, I haven’t thought about marrying, but I could be persuaded.” There was an earnest plea in his eyes. “When are you going to admit that we belong together?”