Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

  “I don’t know,” Selena said.

  She saw Oakley nod to the hooded man, who was standing behind her. She sensed a shiver in the air as the whip was drawn back, and braced herself for the blow. A governess had switched her once with a willow branch for purloining a specially baked holiday plum pie, complete with brandy, rum, and exotic bananas. She had eaten several pounds of the masterpiece all by herself and, in order to hide the evidence, had fed the rest to her favorite pets: a rat terrier named Spike, Boris the brood sow, and a tame skunk called Mitzi. After that, plum pudding reminded her of pain, but even so the switching hadn’t hurt as much as the stomachache.

  She knew this was going to be far, far worse.

  “Wait,” said Oakley, whose bald head seemed to glow in the light of the coals from the hearth. “Tear away her dress.”

  “No,” Selena pleaded.

  “Are you prepared to answer my questions then?”

  “I don’t know anything—”

  She felt the rough hands of the hooded man at her collar.

  Then the stone doorway slid open and a British soldier stepped into the room. He was excited, stumbling as he hastened toward Lieutenant Oakley who turned, somewhat irritably, toward the newcomer. “What is it?” Oakley demanded.

  “Lieutenant, sir. Great news. We’ve just captured Erasmus Ward! The men are bringing him up from the water now.”

  Selena recalled the little rowboat she’d seen in the harbor. Erasmus Ward. No wonder the soldier seemed so pleased. Ward, a shy, scrawny little man, had forsaken his silversmith’s trade to become the war’s most illustrious spy since Nathan Hale. Religiously devout, uncommonly brave, and gifted with an encyclopedic memory, Ward had made use of his small stature and pale unobtrusiveness to cross battle lines disguised as a peddler, to enter British encampments posing as a beggar, to deliver urgent communiques between Washington and Lafayette. His gift was that, although people saw him come and go, they did not notice him. It was Ward who had lit the lanterns in Boston’s old North Church on the night of Paul Revere’s ride. It was Ward who had actually signed on as a cook and camp helper in the baggage train of British General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, thus providing Benedict Arnold with information concerning Burgoyne’s plans, ensuring a Colonial victory at Saratoga. Selena had caught a glimpse of Erasmus Ward just once, a legend out of the night, in the parlor of Gilbertus Penrod’s New York mansion. Most people thought Penrod, a dealer in gems, furs, and fabrics, was loyal to the crown. They would have changed their minds quickly had they seen Erasmus Ward, Royce Campbell, Alexander Hamilton, and the Comte de Vergennes in the Penrod drawing room.

  While Selena’s heart plummeted at the news of Ward’s capture, Lieutenant Clay Oakley could not conceal his delight. “Are you certain it is he?” Oakley demanded of the soldier. “So many times we’ve thought him ours, but always he gets away.”

  “No, sir. It’s Ward all right, and we have him in chains up above.”

  Oakley thought things over for a moment, then looked at Selena. “I do not wish to be rude,” he told her, “but a more deserving guest has arrived to take your place. We must postpone our conversation for the time being. Bonwit,” he ordered the corporal, “cut Selena down and return her to her cell. You,” he commanded the soldier, “bring Ward here immediately.”

  Selena felt the rope slacken. The muscles of her body began slowly to recover from the awful stretching. Her legs were numb. Needles and pins lanced through her arms as blood began to circulate again. Bonwit grabbed her shoulders and eased her toward the doorway.

  “Do not forget, Selena,” Oakley called after her, “I am not finished with you yet.”

  She did not turn to answer.

  “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord,” exclaimed the corporal, as he led her away from the Room of Doom, “’tis a lucky star ye been born beneath, I vow.”

  Selena was relieved for the moment, her immediate danger having receded, but she found no comfort in the situation. Because now another human being would suffer in her place, poor little Erasmus Ward, her confederate. And since Ward possessed so much information that Oakley needed, the ugly lieutenant would spare no effort, show no mercy.

  “We got t’ put on yuh blindfold,” Phineas Bonwit remembered, digging it out of his pocket. Selena had no choice but to obey, but before the rag was in place she saw Erasmus Ward himself, being dragged past her by a squad of eager redcoats. Ward was barefoot, shirtless, with irons around his wrists and ankles. The soldiers hadn’t bothered to blindfold him, so eager were they to get him to the interrogation chamber. Selena sent the little man a glance of recognition and sympathy as he was flung past her, and was startled to see not only that he seemed to know who she was, but also that his eyes were calm and clear. He seemed absolutely unafraid, as if he’d known all along that this dark day would finally come and that he was a match for it.

  Around his neck, on a gold chain, was a small golden cross. Some pattern or design had been etched into the shining metal, but Selena could not see what it was.

  Corporal Bonwit locked Selena into her damp, clammy cell, but lingered outside the iron-barred door. She sat down on her “bunk,” two planks nailed together and suspended from the wall by a couple of rusty chains.

  “Yes?” she asked, feeling his eyes on her.

  “Ye know,” he faltered, ducking his head absurdly, “if you was…if you was t’ be a little bit nice t’ me, might be I kin ’elp ye out. Not outta the prison, oh, no, but I kin get ye extra rations…”

  Selena had a very good idea what this clumsy dolt meant by being “a little bit nice.” She didn’t know whether to laugh at him or damn his soul. Before she did either, however, she realized that this gangly half-wit might somehow prove to be of use, if only she could devise a plan to flee the fortress.

  “You’re very kind, corporal,” she told him, offering what she hoped was a convincing smile, “but I’m…I’m very, very tired and upset just now. Perhaps later—”

  Even in the torchlit corridor, she could see him beaming from thick earlobe to thick earlobe in awestruck anticipation.

  “I understand!” he said. “An’ I believe I kin sneak ye a cup o’ tea right now. I’ll go an’ see.”

  After Bonwit had gone rattling off down the corridor, the point of his belted sword clanking on the stone walls, Selena lay down on the planks, thinking and trying to plan. My entire life has led me to this moment, she reflected, which was not exactly a sanguine thought. But she was somewhat cheered by the knowledge that she’d survived high peril and beaten long odds before: fleeing Scotland and Darius McGrover in the hold of a rat-infested freighter; surviving abduction by a cynical British procurer, Captain Jack, and escaping from the palace of the Indian maharajah Jack had sold her to; finding Royce Campbell again after believing him to be dead of the plague.

  Fortune, don’t turn on me now, Selena prayed. But then she thought, No, it was not fortune entirely, it was myself as well, never giving up, remembering who I am and where I come from. And Scotland, an ocean away, came to her when she summoned it, and she set it, like a beautiful jewel, between her violet eyes and the oozing wet stone. From the hard little village of Kinlochbervie, where her father lay buried in a hut of stone, to the dark, smoky lochs in the Highlands, to the honey-drenched moors, to fabled Edinburgh and its ancient aura, finally south to Coldstream, she saw it all, held it to herself for strength and hope, pure and fair and never to be tarnished.

  Yes, she had always carried Scotland in her soul, when the days beat down her spirit, when the nights were dark.

  And now another night was falling. Corporal Bonwit did not return with the tea he’d promised, nor even with the usual evening ration of bread and porridge. Eventually, in spite of a fearful, impotent agony over the fate of Erasmus Ward, a clutching emptiness in Selena’s belly made her aware of the time. Bonwit was almost always punctual in his ministrations; something in the fortress was amiss. Even the prisoners in other cells along the corridor began to break the ru
le of silence, to wonder in quizzical hisses exactly what was happening. Selena was about to tell them that Ward had been captured, but held her tongue. The news was too demoralizing, especially for this already cheerless dungeon.

  At last, the iron door at the far end of the corridor was flung open with a metallic clash. Selena heard Oakley’s deep voice, with a breathless rasp, saying: “Throw the bloody traitor into the cell down at the end.” He sounded angry. Selena hoped his choler meant that Erasmus Ward had borne up under interrogation.

  Then she gasped in horror as two redcoats dragged the diminutive spy in front of her cell and stopped, one of them unlocking the iron-barred door to the empty cell across the corridor. They had been pulling him along by his heels, leaving a wide trailing streak of blood that glistened darkly on the torchlit stones of the prison floor. Erasmus Ward was quite unconscious, bleeding slowly from a slack mouth, bleeding from countless lacerations all over his body. Except for the little cross on the chain around his neck, the spy was naked.

  The soldiers dragged him into the cell opposite Selena, and Clay Oakley appeared before her. He was breathing heavily. Broad, flushed face and shining pate gave his head the aspect of a monstrous tuber. He gestured toward the cell in which Ward had been deposited.

  “Did you glimpse the handiwork, Selena?” he asked. “Unless you decide to talk, such will be your fate on the morrow.”

  She lifted her chin and glared at him, but said nothing. She was trying to think of a way to find out how much Oakley had learned from Erasmus Ward.

  Inadvertently, he gave her a clue. “Pity the man had so little endurance,” Oakley said. “With a fine, healthy young person like you, I expect things will be different.”

  Oakley wouldn’t need to question me if Erasmus has already told him what he wants to know, she realized. The lieutenant, whose nature she was beginning to decipher, was, for all his menace, a creature of intelligence and strategy rather than random violence. For him, inflicting harm on his victims was only a tool, a means to a great end: the information he must have to serve his master well. But Oakley was utterly ruthless in that he would never shrink from the most terrible measures, to which the battered body of Erasmus Ward attested. Oakley was a perfectionist who would leave nothing undone, no task incomplete, no circle unclosed in the fine, cold whorls of his mind. In this, Selena realized, Oakley was more dangerous even than Darius McGrover, who had killed her father. McGrover’s passionate nature, his hatred, his conceit: they had been weaknesses. Oakley seemed to have no such weaknesses: he was much more formidable. Selena understood that his very body, muscled by untold hours of struggle, was a triumph of will over the respiratory trouble that afflicted him.

  “What are you going to do with Mr. Ward?” she asked the lieutenant, as the two redcoats stepped out of the cell and locked the barred door.

  Oakley shrugged. “If he lives, I shall question him again.”

  “If he lives—” said Selena in horror. “Won’t you please get him a doctor? At least give him a blanket. Here,” she added, turning and snatching her own threadbare covering from her bunk, “give him mine.”

  “As you wish.” Oakley took the blanket and tossed it through the bars of Ward’s cell, where it landed haphazardly upon the spy’s brutalized body, which Selena glimpsed dimly. He was lying on the planks; at least they hadn’t left him on the wet floor.

  “I would prefer to chat further with you now, Selena,” Oakley said in farewell, “but I have been called to headquarters for a conference. Sleep well.”

  With that, he and the two soldiers left. After they had departed, Selena called softly to Erasmus Ward, trying to rouse him. She did not succeed. Once or twice he seemed to stir, saying “no, no,” but that was all. She said a silent prayer in his behalf; it was all she could do.

  Presently, Phineas Bonwit appeared with the evening rations. He was accompanied, to Selena’s surprise, by a priest. She had been raised as a Scots Presbyterian, but her own wild nature and her association with Royce Campbell, whose faith, if any, was ancient and pagan and wild, had not exactly enhanced religious impulses. I’ll have time for heaven later on, she sometimes thought, putting the whole matter out of her mind. But now she recalled that Erasmus Ward was a passionately devout believer, and she was glad that someone had thought to provide for his soul in this hour of need.

  But who? It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to Oakley.

  Corporal Bonwit, lugging a bucketful of water and a black kettle half-filled with lukewarm porridge, brought the cowled, cassocked servant of God to Ward’s cell. Placing his burdens on the floor in front of Selena’s door, Bonwit turned, fumbled with the keys at his belt, and unlocked the spy’s cell.

  “No…” Erasmus moaned.

  The priest stood in the dark, grimy corridor, waiting for the corporal to wrench open the iron door. Selena, peering at him from behind her own bars, sensed something familiar in the set of his shoulders, the slightly stooped manner in which he carried himself. She shifted her position slightly, trying to get a look at his face in the shadow of the cowl, and he turned toward her.

  It was no priest. It was Gilbertus Penrod, gem merchant and primary financial supporter of the Colonial cause. He was the man who had warned Royce and Selena that Oakley was after them. Selena’s spirits leapt and soared. Was Penrod’s appearance here part of a scheme to rescue Ward and her? The merchant’s warning glance sobered Selena, however, and when Bonwit stepped aside, permitting Penrod entry into Ward’s cell, her appearance was only that of a hungry prisoner awaiting her dollop of gruel.

  “Sorry, Reverend, but I got t’ lock ye in wi’ ’im,” Bonwit told Penrod.

  “Good Lord, man! Do you think this poor wretch can escape?” Penrod shot back. “What have you done to him? He needs immediate medical attention.”

  Selena saw the horrified expression on the merchant’s handsome, angular features.

  “Sorry, Reverend, orders,” replied Bonwit sheepishly, relocking the door. “Ye say wha’ever prayers ye want, an’ I’ll be back when I finish feedin’ the prisoners.”

  Penrod bent over Erasmus Ward, taking his wrist and feeling for a pulse. Selena realized that even Phineas Bonwit might find such behavior unusual for a clergyman, and sought to distract him. “I thought you were going to bring me tea!” she said, feigning a pout and handing her bowl out through the bars of the cell.

  He ladled a double helping of porridge into it and winked at her conspiratorially. “Sorry,” he said. “Our whole detachment was prowlin’ the streets of New York fer the past hours.” He leaned close to her and whispered, “There’s a fearsome spy loose an’ we got t’ catch ’im.”

  “Oh, my! How dangerous! You must be so brave. Who is it?”

  “Ye musta heard o’ ’im. Practically everybody has. Bloke named Campbell.”

  “No, I don’t believe I have,” Selena said.

  “We’re a’goin’ lookin’ fer him t’night as well. There’s two thousand pounds sterling on his head.”

  Selena was annoyed—and amused at herself for being annoyed—that George III considered Royce to be twice as valuable as she.

  “But I thought you were coming to see me tonight?” she teased, tilting her head and giving him the full effect of her violet eyes.

  She’d discovered their power early when, just turned thirteen, she decided she wanted to be kissed by Eric McCullough. Eric seemed nothing now, but then Royce was far in the future, his existence unimagined. And Eric McCullough was the most dashing man in Berwick and Roxburgh provinces combined, all of twenty years old and, moreover, betrothed to Jessica McEdgar. Selena had loathed Jessica McEdgar. The feeling was mutual because Jessica, an older woman of seventeen, scorned Selena as a “silly child” and a “failed flirt.” But that was before Selena used her eyes, and the tilt of her head and—if the truth be known—a tactical lifting of her blooming breasts to lure Eric McCullough into a public kiss at the Berwick harvest festival. Jessica was still furious about it four years lat
er, even though she was Mrs. McCullough by then, and had cut Selena dead at the Edinburgh Christmas ball the night Selena met Royce Campbell.

  And now Selena trapped Phineas Bonwit with her eyes.

  “I reckon I don’t need two thousand pounds sterling,” he said huskily. “I’ll try an’ get t’ ye later on.”

  A plan had begun to take shape in Selena’s mind, and she hoped that Gilbertus Penrod’s presence here, and Royce’s rumored appearance in New York, meant that she would have a chance of escaping. Bonwit had gone down the corridor to ladle mush and fill water mugs, and Selena waited to have a word with Penrod. He had thrown back the cowl. He bent disconsolately over the savaged body of the war’s master spy, and his friend.

  “I’m afraid he’s going,” Penrod whispered to Selena. “Not even medicine can save him now.”

  “Are you sure? Isn’t there something…?”

  Penrod shook his head. He tucked the blanket tightly around Ward’s poor body. Then, as Selena looked on, he unfastened the gold chain and cross from the man’s neck and tightened his hand around them.

  “Guard!” he called loudly, stepping to the barred door. “Guard, I’m finished here. Let me out. Selena,” he added in a whisper, “I must try to speak to you alone. Can you think of something?”

  Bonwit was already shambling down the corridor, jangling his ring of keys.

  “Please, corporal, I would like to talk to the priest,” Selena said, as Bonwit permitted Penrod to leave Ward’s cell.

  “What about?” the lout asked suspiciously.

  “I want to…I want to make my confession.”

  “Confession? Then let me go try an’ fetch Lieutenant Oakley.”

  “Not that kind of confession.” She gave him a telling look. “My sins,” she said.

  A light of understanding glowed in his dull eyes.

  “Ah! I see. I don’t know if it’s allowed though.”

  “Come now, my man,” interjected Penrod, who had replaced the cowl and did look quite like a monk. “The poor girl needs the comfort of the Lord in a place like this. Would you want to go to your reward without having the opportunity to put your soul in order?”