Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

  Table of Contents

  Fires of Delight

  Copyright

  1. Escape into Danger

  2. Turn of the Screw

  3. Change of Plans

  4. Obsession

  5. Voodoo

  6. Eye of the Beholder

  7. Strange Nectar

  8. A Cross in the Sand

  9. Showdown

  10. Bound for Glory

  11. Two Worlds in One

  12. Troubled Hearth

  13. Longchamps and the Molines

  14. Bastille

  15. Invitation to Versailles

  16. Walpurgisnacht

  17. Sign on Satin

  18. Tuileries

  19. 69 Rue St. Denis

  20. Night and Day

  21. The Worst of All Possible Worlds

  22. A Fateful Lunch

  23. Into the Fire

  24. Sanctuary Deferred

  25. Tower

  26. A Favor Repaid

  27. Glory

  28. A Last Gambit

  29. Home

  More from Vanessa Royall

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  Fires of Delight

  Vanessa Royall

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1986 by M.T. Hinkemeyer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition September 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-414-1

  More from Vanessa Royall

  Come Faith, Come Fire

  Flames of Desire

  Firebrand’s Woman

  Seize the Dawn

  Wild Wind Westward

  The Passionate and the Proud

  Certain of the historical events depicted or referred to in this story have been compressed in time for fictional purposes, in particular the years between the American and French revolutions. Those monumental uprisings of the human spirit, born of a common desire for liberty yet dissimilar in their specifics, provide the background for the ongoing story of Selena MacPherson, heroine of Flames of Desire. I want to thank the many readers who have written to me, requesting a sequel to that book. And I hope the long wait for Fires of Delight will prove to have been worthwhile.

  V.R.

  I

  Escape into Danger

  Selena MacPherson’s cell in the Battery fortress was eight feet wide, six feet deep, and just about six feet from damp stone floor to dripping stone ceiling. If she stood on tiptoe, the top of her head came within a few inches of the mortar-chinked rocks. Moisture seeped slowly through the walls too—the cell was below water level in New York harbor—coating the stones with a dewlike film. With a fingertip, she traced the American revolutionary motto, Don’t tread on me! The brave words stood out clearly for a moment, but then the constantly seeping dampness oozed forth to blot them out.

  Selena, cold, wet, and alone, was waiting to be interrogated by British Lieutenant Clay Oakley on suspicion that she had aided and abetted the cause of the revolution and the armies of George Washington in their war to throw off the colonial yoke.

  Oakley’s suspicion was well-founded.

  “You are never defeated unless you believe it,” said Selena aloud, steeling herself against the coming ordeal with the favorite expression of her beloved Royce Campbell. Oakley was sure to question her about Royce, who had won dashing reputation and a small fortune running guns and ammunition through the British naval blockade to Washington and his men. She and Royce were both exiles from their native Scotland, she a nobleman’s daughter, he a scion of the fabled Highlands clan. In the eyes of the government of His Majesty, George III, they were less than outlaws. Selena had seen likenesses of herself on handbills affixed to the walls of New York. DEAD OR ALIVE, these notices proclaimed. ONE THOUSAND POUND STERLING REWARD!

  Quite an honor, indeed, for a young woman who had fled Scotland years before, penniless and condemned, her father dead at the hands of a crown assassin, her ancestral home, Coldstream Castle, seized by the English monarch.

  “My enemies make me strong,” she murmured in self-encouragement. Because of the fate that had befallen her father and family, she had come to detest all hereditary monarchs with a pure, savage fire, a peerless, driving emotion which had drawn her instinctively toward the Colonial cause.

  And which had landed her, now, in a British dungeon.

  An iron door clanged open at the far end of the taper-lit corridor outside her cell, hurried footsteps sounded on the stones, and Lance Corporal Phineas Bonwit appeared outside Selena’s iron-barred door. A grinning, towheaded Yorkshire lout, he brought her thrice-daily rations of black bread and barley porridge, and escorted her for an hour each afternoon to the walled-in cubicle known as the exercise yard, where he alternately leered and ogled as she trudged back and forth in her gray, sacklike prison garment.

  “The lieutenant’s a’ready t’ go t’ work on ye now, missy,” Bonwit said, in the thick accents of his homeland. “Pray put on this blindfold, eh? I’ll have t’ be takin’ ye to ’im.”

  He unlocked her cell door and handed her a stinking strip of coarse woolen cloth, which she reluctantly placed over her eyes and tied behind her head, cringing inwardly as she did so. She had been permitted only one visitor thus far, a charitable churchwoman given to calling upon the ill and imprisoned, and who had left Selena a small chunk of lye soap, a towel, and—wonder of wonders—a brush that the prisoner had used to groom her long, shining blond hair. Those locks were made for tiaras, not rags, but Selena had already known the best and the worst of life. She’d learned how to endure degradation without relinquishing a belief in a better life, a better time for which—she was sure—all humans yearned. Even Corporal Bonwit, who now grasped her elbow, propelling her forcefully into the darkness. If there is a way to rescue me, she thought, Royce will find it. Had he not, in the past, fashioned a hundred ploys and ruses with which to outfox the clever British? Had he not, more than once, cheated death itself?

  Yet this hope brought small warmth and less succor. Even if Royce guessed that Oakley had brought her to the Battery fortress, he would have to cross water in order to reach her, scale stone walls, overpower dozens of English guards and—still more difficult—find her cell. She didn’t even know exactly where in the vast stronghold she was being kept: the blindfold, always worn outside her cell, prevented any chance of her getting her bearings.

  “Word t’ the wise, missy,” offered the corporal as he pushed her along, “best t’ tell Lieutenant Oakley what he wants t’ know right off. Save y’self the sufferin’ an’ the pain. Nobody can beat it anyway. They all talk in the end. I seen it happen time an’ again with my very own eyes.”

  I shall tell him nothing, vowed Selena, with an attempt at bravery that was not totally reassuring. Because of her association with Royce and, through him, with revolutionary espionage in New York, she knew a great deal of information that Oakley would find valuable. The problem was that she did not know what he knew, or what had been happening in the outside world since her arrest.

  It was incredible how suddenly the borders of her world had changed. Having received word through a friend, New York businessman Gilbertus Penrod, that Oakley’s a
gents were on their trail, she and Royce had slipped out of the city and fled on horseback to Jamaica Bay on the south coast of Long Island. There Royce’s great black ship, the Selena, rode at anchor, with its majestic, towering masts, its three tier of cannon that had as much firepower as any ship in the British navy, and, atop the mainmast, that cavalier swath of Campbell plaid, Royce’s flag. But just as Selena and her betrothed had reached the water’s edge, urging their mounts into the cold surf, they had been attacked, set upon and separated, by Oakley’s dragoons. Selena had last glimpsed Royce clinging to the boarding ladder of his ship, one arm stretched out to her, in promise more than in farewell, his face a mask of horror and disbelief.

  Until we meet again, she vowed, fighting back tears of loss behind the blindfold. She could not now permit herself to remember his long, hard body, nor how it had felt to hold him, to know his limitless stallion’s power. And she would weaken, too, if she thought now of his touch upon her, or of her fingers on him, on his body or tangled at midnight in his black, wild hair. The magic of the emotions he evoked would forever be mysterious: how his dark, unyielding eyes so quickly softened when she gave herself to him, how tender were the kisses of his strong, almost arrogant mouth.

  Selena could not let herself think of those wonders, so instead, despite the blindfold, she concentrated, counting her steps, remembering the sensations of this passage through darkness. Sudden perceptions of empty air beside her meant that she was being taken past other cells along the corridor. She counted eight of these before she and Bonwit reached the iron door. She knew that there were other prisoners in the fortress with her, but conversation was forbidden under pain of the lash. Then the corporal turned her toward the left. Twenty-four steps. Up a staircase, thirteen steps. Straight ahead for a hundred and ten paces, then up another flight of stairs. She smelled sea air and sensed natural light rather than the torches of the corridor. Bonwit hurried her along now, fifty paces, maybe a few more. He stopped her, swung open a door, and pushed her, not urgently, into a room.

  “Here she be, Lieutenant,” Bonwit said obsequiously, “just as ye ordered. Ye wish me t’ remain?”

  “No.” The voice was deep and resonant, but cold as ice. “No, just remove her blindfold and withdraw.”

  Bonwit did as he was commanded. Selena blinked in the sudden light and stifled a gasp. She had heard much about Lieutenant Clay Oakley, chief of British military intelligence in America, had heard of his cunning and cruelty and fanatical devotion to his monarch. But the sight of the man was even more disconcerting, and she understood why he usually remained out of sight, acting through his network of agents. His head was abnormally large, an effect enhanced by total baldness, although he could not have been more than thirty years old. She wondered momentarily if he had been in a fire, because he had neither eyebrows nor lashes. Large, colorless, frightening eyes studied her as she stared at him, and his unusually small mouth twisted strangely beneath a bushy red mustache that appeared to be pasted onto his upper lip. She realized that he was smiling.

  “You look startled, Selena,” he said, addressing her in a parody of courteous familiarity, his voice at once limpid and quietly terrifying. “Don’t be. I know you are partial to a man with a visage more appealing to the female eye, but I think you may find me worthy in other respects.”

  Oakley was seated at a small writing table on which Selena spied a stack of blank, cream-colored parchment, several quill pens laid in a neat row, and a small glass fountain of India-blue ink. Slowly, deliberately, as if he were enjoying himself, the lieutenant stood up so that she could take a closer look at him. He was not overly tall, perhaps six feet without the thick-heeled boots he wore, but his body was massive. His shoulders bulged beneath the fine fabric of his red-coated officer’s uniform with its fringed epaulets and gold braid. His waist tapered to a wide, black shining leather belt. And the muscles of his powerful thighs bulged alarmingly in tight white breeches.

  “You do not know the man who can best me,” he said, again with that tiny, twisted smile.

  The two of them stood there facing each other, the slim, fair young woman, whose wide, slightly slanted violet eyes could not hide a hint of defiance even under these circumstances, and the seemingly self-assured officer whose strength was as apparent as the brutal intelligence flickering in his immense eyes. Those eyes, and the mind behind them, would not miss much, if anything. Selena could not imagine a more intimidating interrogator.

  She was puzzled, however. This room was no torture chamber. The only furnishings were Oakley’s table and chair. A large, rectangular skylight admitted flooding warmth and shafts of sunlight that sparkled on the highly polished oaken floor. The walls were hung with—she counted quickly—about twenty fine, framed paintings and portraits, among which she recognized the small-eyed, heavily jowled visage of George III. The paintings, mainly English landscapes and hunting scenes, were reverently, beautifully done, soft-hued and evocative. Clearly the artist loved England as much as she herself appreciated the sere, stark moors of her homeland and the wild Highlands that rolled on to the north.

  “I see that you have an eye for good art,” Oakley said, not without respect. “I accept the compliment of your interest.”

  “You have chosen the work of good artists.”

  “Thank you once again,” Oakley said. “I am the artist.”

  Astonished, Selena glanced once again at the massed paintings. This time she noted, too, the nature of the wall on which they hung, grainy and soft-looking. Cork! she realized. How unusual!

  Then Oakley sagged into his chair and withdrew from his pocket a handkerchief of white silk, inhaling from it. Selena caught the strong scent of an astringent eau-de-cologne and she understood. This huge beast into whose clutches she had fallen had some sort of respiratory ailment. Cork was believed to filter the air; cologne was considered a specific in cases of asthma.

  Indeed, the mere effort of standing for a moment seemed to have affected the officer. “Let us proceed,” he said, wheezing slightly and dipping a quill point into the fountain of ink. Preparing to write, he fixed her with a merciless, baleful stare. “Today we shall have but a preliminary interrogation. I abjure you to answer my questions with the utmost truth. Your answers will be examined diligently for their veracity. If I find that you have lied or engaged in conscious obfuscation, we shall have a second appointment tomorrow morning in far less pleasant surroundings, the walls of which will be equipped not to enhance my comfort but to mute your screams.”

  Selena started. He meant every word of it. This strange man, who respected beauty but who was himself so ugly in feature, held his life in a balance of frigid intellect and private passion, characteristics of the most remorseless fanatic. Oakley combined the disparate aspects of beauty and beast.

  “Your name?” he asked quietly.

  Selena gave it and he wrote it down.

  There followed a series of colorless questions as the lieutenant sought the basic facts of Selena’s life. Even as she answered, she was trying to prepare herself for the dangerous questions that were sure to come. Once, while taking her to the exercise yard, Corporal Bonwit had said something about “heading home soon.” Had he meant returning to England? And if so, did that mean the British were winning the war? Or losing it?

  “Now,” he said, lifting his eyes from the parchment and looking at her, “is it not true that your father, Lord Seamus MacPherson, was executed for treason against His Majesty?”

  “No. He was assassinated. By an agent of military intelligence. Like you.”

  The memory of her father’s death was burned into every fiber of Selena’s being; she would carry it with her beyond the grave. The two of them, father and daughter, had fled Coldstream Castle one step ahead of Darius McGrover, special agent to the King. They had found refuge in a stone hut in far-off Kinlochbervie, a fishing village on the coast of northern Scotland by the tumbling seas of the North Minch. But McGrover pursued them there. And Selena had been forced
to watch, bound and gagged, while her father’s throat was cut.

  “Ah!” replied Oakley, with his fey smile. “You are referring to my predecessor here in America. And wasn’t his body recently found near the luxurious Battery Park home you shared until recently with your former husband, Lord Sean Bloodwell?”

  Selena fought for control of her emotions. Oakley’s question upset her in several ways. First, it was she who had killed McGrover, avenging her father’s death by severing the assassin’s windpipe in the cellar of her own home and watching the frothy black blood of his evil life bubble away. Although she called it vengeance, the law had other eyes. Second, mere mention of Sean’s name was painful to her. She had married him years earlier, after hearing news that Royce Campbell was dead. And she had grown to love Sean too. But Royce’s reappearance, alive and well in America, had changed everything. Sean had sensed it, saw it, and permitted her to go. He had always known of her depthless, awesome bond to the Highlands warrior, had understood with the grace of his clear mind and honest heart that fettered love led to nothing but unhappiness. Finally, Sean had been a Loyalist, devoted to king and crown, in reward for which he had been elevated to the peerage. Their lives had taken startlingly different paths, which Selena simultaneously accepted and regretted, because theirs had been a genuine affection.

  “I am waiting for your answer, Selena,” Oakley said, pressing the silk handkerchief to his shapeless fold of a nose.

  “I don’t know anything of McGrover’s fate,” she replied, “except that if he is truly dead I am not sorry.”

  Oakley laughed, a liquid, gurgling sound. “We shall, in time, learn what you know. Truth has a way of surfacing. Tell me, how does it feel to know your former husband possesses the legitimacy and honor you yourself so deeply covet?”

  The man had an uncanny knack for sensing weakness! More than anything except Royce, Selena desired to reclaim Coldstream Castle, her rightful home. On countless nights she had dreamed of the as yet unimaginable day on which she would ride into the hills of her beloved Scotland, see great bonfires of greeting blazing on those hills, see Coldstream looming on the cliffs above the North Sea. And there were times beyond number when she had thrilled to think of herself riding through the castle’s mighty gate, beneath the keystone in the arch that read Anno Domini 1152, with her people cheering all around. Someday, somehow, she and Royce would return to Scotland in triumph, but that time seemed far away, a glimmering wisp of hope to a prisoner in a fortress in America.