Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

  That huge carriage in which he rode was rather toadlike in the midst of this sea of jeering people.

  “We have the baker and the baker’s wife…”

  “It is the end of the world,” said Francesca again. “I shall never see my William in this life.”

  “Hush,” replied Selena, passing on the advice that had sustained her in so many a dark hour: “The sky begins here. You are never defeated unless you believe it.”

  “What if the mob has invaded my home?” fretted Martha. “All things are possible now.”

  Presently, Selena grew warm in the coach and removed her greatcoat, laying it on the seat beside her. It was only twelve miles to Paris, but progress was slow because of the milling throng, which would grow enormously once they reached the city. She leaned out the window and saw that the royal vehicle was reasonably well-protected. Lafayette rode beside it on one side, and Royce on the other.

  Royce Campbell, guarding a tyrant! Selena had never dreamed that she would witness such a thing. Well, it was his life, wasn’t it? If he had changed so greatly that he would do such a thing—or rather, if he had not changed at all—so be it.

  No, she decided, in the next moment, I can’t accept that, I just can’t.

  He turned then, swiveling in the saddle, and saw her watching him. Before she could withdraw back inside the coach, he had slowed his horse and was dropping back. When his horse came abreast of Selena’s carriage, he gave her a friendly, if casual, smile of greeting. It was as if they had never meant anything to each other at all!

  “Selena,” he said, peering into the coach at Francesca and Martha Marguerite, “I presume you’re safe?”

  “That I am,” she replied. She wanted at least to thank him for the piece of plaid he’d left on her pillow, but the presence of the other two women made her cautious. As it was, both Francesca and Madame LaRouche were staring admiringly at Royce. He looked just as splendid as always—perhaps more so in a white uniform and a blue jacket, with a white-plumed hat to which he had affixed, hypocritically, the cockade—and he seemed not to have aged a day since she’d last seen him in New York.

  “When we reach the Tuileries,” he told her, “leave your coach and come with me.”

  Beside her, Selena felt the princess grow tense.

  “She is to remain with me,” Francesca told Royce. “It is all planned.”

  “Your Highness,” said Royce, civilly but emphatically, “the mademoiselle and I have much to discuss.”

  Selena was somewhat astonished that Royce knew Francesca—the girl had spoken to him quite objectively, superior to subordinate—but no doubt his position in the royal entourage made him privy to a lot of things.

  “I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, sir,” she replied coldly, “but not today.”

  He laughed. “Come now, Selena. I feel that you may be confused about certain things.”

  “Perhaps I am. But my friend has asked that I remain with her during this unpleasantness, and I have agreed.”

  “Who is that?” whispered Martha Marguerite suspiciously.

  “I know what is troubling you, Selena,” said Royce then, in his direct way, his eyes locked on hers. “You feel that I am on the, well, the wrong side of things, don’t you?”

  “That, sir, is your affair.”

  “Sir? Sir? Are matters that bad between us?”

  After thinking and worrying about him all night, after those suspicions about him which had begun when she’d found the pouch of jewels in the cabinet in their New York hideaway, Selena could not restrain herself. Neither Francesca’s nor Martha’s presence was sufficient to stop her tongue. “Once,” she declared, “you seemed to have a place in your heart for the downtrodden and suffering of the world—”

  “I did—” he started to interrupt.

  “—but that is gone now, I can see full well. Look at them,” she added, pointing at the dozens of poor men and women who had come near the coach to witness this exchange between lofty cavalier and fine lady. “See how they hunger! See the poor clothes they wear, even in this chill.”

  Royce shrugged. “Walking will warm them,” he said.

  “Hah! And they shall eat cake too.”

  “It seems to me, Selena, that your current situation is not unduly bereft of comfort. A coach of your own, horsemen—”

  “Who is that man?” hissed Martha Marguerite. “I say, he is rather splendid.”

  Francesca may have agreed, but she did not want to lose her friend to Royce.

  “Look, Selena,” said Royce, laughing again, “I think you must prove your concern by making a sacrifice for the good of the citizenry…”

  Before she could stop him—before she had fully realized just what he was up to—Royce leaned down from his horse, reached in through the open window of the coach, and grabbed her greatcoat.

  “Wait!” she cried, trying to snatch it back.

  But he held it in the air, inspecting it. “Fine workmanship,” he declared. “It would keep a chill from the bones too.”

  Then he looked around, scanning the faces of the poor who trudged alongside his horse. “Here, citizen!” he cried expansively.

  And tossed the coat down to a woman marching along there!

  No, it was not a woman. The recipient of this largesse was another of those men in disguise, who had fomented and executed the march upon Versailles. Selena saw his arms go up to grab the coat, caught a glimpse of an intense, captivating, familiar face, and saw the man move off and melt into the crowd.

  Pierre Sorbante!

  “Good Lord, what have you done!” Selena cried.

  Royce looked perplexed. “You spoke of suffering,” he said. “You spoke of chill and hunger and the heart. Don’t you feel better for having donated something of yours to the cause of human comfort?”

  Was he mocking her or not? She couldn’t be sure. Angry words came to her lips, but she called them back, smiling instead. All right, so be it. His secret treasure was gone now, and good riddance. The irony, in fact, was just too good not to savor. His own ill-gotten plunder, unbeknownst to him, had gone to the unfortunate of the world after all.

  “I hope you know what you’ve done,” she said, still smiling. “I look forward to telling you sometime.”

  “Ah! That means you will come away with me when we reach the Tuileries.”

  “No, it does not.”

  “We shall see.” He touched the upswept brim of his plumed hat, touched his spurs lightly to the stallion’s flanks, and rejoined Lafayette at the royal carriage.

  “Who was that?” asked Francesca and Martha Marguerite in unison.

  “A man named Royce Campbell. I used to know him.”

  Royce’s departure, not to mention their somewhat contentious exchange, had left a sudden, empty feeling in her breast, as if some subtle but sinister power had hollowed her out and gone away.

  “Campbell?” wondered Martha Marguerite. Too late, Selena remembered that Madame LaRouche knew of the lost love, the one who was supposed to lie buried beneath the sands of La Tortue. “The same Campbell? My God, yes! He was at the ball last night!”

  Selena saw in the older woman’s face, not curiosity that Royce should have turned up here in Paris very much alive, but a fear that her favorite, Jean Beaumain, Selena’s betrothed, might be betrayed.

  “Is that Monsieur Campbell something special to you?” Francesca was asking.

  Before Selena was able to explain, Martha spilled the beans. “It seems that they were lovers once,” she sniffed, patting the young girl’s hand, as if this portentous information must be imparted maternally. “But Selena has now promised to marry someone else.”

  The princess’s eyes sparkled dramatically as she regarded Selena with new respect. “Oh, my goodness, two suitors!” she exclaimed. “How marvelous!”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” replied Selena.

  All Paris went wild at the arrival of the captive King. Oh, there were cogent, even plausible reasons adv
anced by Louis XVI to explain his return from Versailles to the Tuileries. He was, he claimed, a “part of the revolution now, at one with the people.” From now on, his minions proclaimed, he would “put the cause of the people first.” Reforms would be made. The decisions of the National Assembly would become the law of the land. Things would “get better.”

  That was what the royal ministers said. In truth, the King was in desperate straits and everyone knew it, from the most eminent crowned heads of Europe to the raggedy waifs in Parisian alleys. News that Louis was a veritable prisoner in the Tuileries swept like wildfire through the courts of Europe, and conservatives of the monarchistic persuasion immediately began schemes to aid or rescue him.

  When the King’s procession finally threaded through the mobs of Paris and pulled into the courtyard in front of the palace, no one believed—save, for a time, the King himself—that he might, somehow, take control of events.

  Selena climbed down from her carriage, aided by Hugo. He and Sebastian were acting almost lordly now, having spent the night at one royal residence and been escorted onto the grounds of another. Princess Francesca took Selena by the hand and led her to the royal coach, from which the King, Marie Antoinette, and their children were descending. The entire scene was a human maelstrom, skittish, fretful horses, anguished functionaries, cold, dispassionate politicians, nervous guardsmen, and the howling, numberless mob outside the gates.

  “Aunt Marie,” said Francesca, unceremoniously presenting Selena, “this is my friend. I want her to stay here with us.”

  “Oh, no, Your Majesty, I couldn’t,” said Selena.

  The Queen did not seem to hear either of them, but hurried into the palace with the dauphin and his sister.

  Louis paid no attention to the two young women, either. With one terrified glance at the mob, some of whose members were screaming for his blood, he also hastened into the sanctuary of the Tuileries.

  “What am I to do?” wailed Martha Marguerite.

  “Hugo and Sebastian will take us home,” said Selena. “Francesca, you stay here. You’ll be safe. I’ll come and see you tomorrow, I promise.”

  “No—”

  “Do as she says, Your Highness!”

  It was Royce on horseback. He looked down at them for a moment, then leaned from his saddle and put his arm around Selena’s waist. She saw a glint of white teeth as he smiled, felt his long, strong fingers close about her ribcage. Then she was whirling in the air, coming to rest behind him on the horse.

  “Where are you taking her?” Martha Marguerite demanded fearfully.

  “To my apartments,” he replied, wheeling the stallion expertly in the crowded quarters. “Sixty-nine Rue St. Denis. She’ll be safe. Your Highness, I’ll have her here for you to see tomorrow. Madame LaRouche, don’t be concerned.

  Martha emitted something like a wail of woe and consternation, but to no avail. Royce Campbell, with Selena on the horse with him, was gone from the courtyard, off through the gates, and free in the city of Paris.

  Free too, that day, of the burden of vengeance that he had borne so long, Jean Beaumain docked the Liberté at Le Havre. Leaving Rafael in charge of his ship, he immediately booked passage on a riverboat up the Seine to Paris. With him he carried a heavy wooden box, but it was no weight at all. It was lighter than air. All the world was light for him this day, and filled with promise. News had it that the accursed monarchy was in its last gasps. He had a sweet journey to make, a son to see for the first time, and a woman to marry and hold, once again, in his arms.

  19

  69 Rue St. Denis

  Charging on horseback through the streets of the city, clinging to Royce, Selena rehearsed everything that she would say when they were alone. She would keep her distance. She would be cool. She would demand—no, she would ask—for explanations. Why had he concealed the jewels in New York? Why had he consorted with the smuggler, LaValle? Why had he left a false grave? Why had he reverted to his previous, ignoble behavior and beliefs? Why—?

  But for a long, long time, she asked no questions at all.

  His apartments were on the second floor of an old but elegant building overlooking the Seine. Dismounting hurriedly, as if there were little time left in life, Royce put his hands around her waist and swung her down from the stallion. He did not set her down on the cobblestones, however, but swept her into his arms and carried her, two steps at a time, to his lodgings. He did not set her down there either, but kicked the door shut behind them and transported her through a series of airy rooms to his bedchamber. It was, then and in retrospect, the greatest journey of her life.

  He put her down upon the bed, not ungently, and for a moment she lay there stunned, her senses dazzled by what she knew was going to happen, by what she wanted with all her heart to happen. Already he was pulling off his boots, tearing off his uniform, gazing down at her with stark, sharp longing in his eyes.

  “Can we talk?” she heard herself asking.

  “Yes, but not with words,” he said, and stripped her bare.

  She was too dazed, as he hovered momentarily over her, to appreciate fully all that lay in store, knowing only that she wanted him. Nothing mattered but that, not jewels nor graves nor worlds. They cried out together as he entered her and she took him unto herself. The familiar, unforgotten shape of him inside her roused Selena instantly to primitive, atavistic frenzy. She drew up her slender legs on either side of him, so as to have him even more deeply, closed herself around him and began to rock her body in time with him. The first pale patterns of rose-colored heat stirred in her then, and as she gave herself, slowly, religiously, cunningly, the heat spread throughout her body. With each of his powerful, deliberate strokes, currents of insidious voluptuousness ran up into her belly, down along her tender, living thighs. They knew each other so thoroughly, so well, that thrust and clutch of flesh, expertly given and just as expertly received, blotted out all the world save that of sensation. He knew just how to stroke her, and she to grasp him, release, and grasp him again. Currents of ecstasy lanced down her legs to her toes, up her body, into her arms, and to her hands which he had pinioned with his own upon the pillows. Then Selena sensed herself approaching the great brink, that which in French is called “the little death,” and she was coming up, coming up to the precipice, which cannot be accurately designated because one is either on this side of the gulf or on the other. But she was there, and suddenly the heat, which was of themselves and which had spread throughout her body, came flashing back to its source, up her legs and down her arms, through her breasts and belly, down, and then it was there, there, there, and they pulsed gorgeously together as of old.

  “I thought you were dead,” she gasped, a long time afterwards, lying beside him, each caressing the other in the savory, lingering enchantment of afterglow.

  “I thought you were.”

  She braced herself on an elbow and looked into his eyes. “You did?”

  “Of course. Or I would have come for you. I tried. I scoured the Caribbean for word of you. Finally, one of my men came back from Port-de-Paix with word that you had been killed in a fire there. The same fire that ended a man I knew. His name was LaValle.”

  “Ah, your friend the smuggler,” she said disapprovingly.

  Royce grinned. “He had his uses to me.”

  “Doesn’t everyone? And I thought you were gone forever.” She told him of the graves on the island of La Tortue, and of the cross with its swath of plaid and the name Campbell scratched on the wood. She told him of the ancient village woman who’d described him so well.

  “Yes, I was there,” he said. “I buried my men there, after our sea battle with the HMS Prince William. But whyever did you think that a pagan like me would be content to lie beneath a cross?”

  Now Selena knew why she’d thought something had been wrong, out of place, about that cross.

  “Yet your name was on it,” she said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “How did you come to search La Tortu
e? How did you get there?”

  Selena was silent for a moment. The answers to those questions would require mention of Jean Beaumain. So bedazed was she by Royce’s nearness to her, so utterly shaken by the pleasure of the love they’d just made, that she had not the will to tell him of Jean just yet.

  “All I know,” she said, “is that when I saw that grave, the world went black for a long time.”

  “And for me as well, when I heard about the fire.”

  “I guess it is best not to give too much credit to the tales of Haitians,” said Selena, only half in jest.

  She bent to kiss his smooth, bronze breast, and then looked up into his eyes. She saw renewed desire in them, both his and her own reflected need. Wordlessly, she turned in the bed and lay on her side next to him, their bodies reversed on the rumpled sheets and blankets. With one hand, she cupped the taut, finely veined, essence-making gourd of him, and with the other stroked and squeezed his long, thick staff. It trembled beneath her ministrations, and she trembled at its sweet and powerful perfection. Only minutes before, she had called forth from it, evoked in it, all the pleasure it could bear, and now, without thinking, she took it into her kiss, running her tongue again and again around its smooth, majestic circumference. It was then, too, that she felt him parting her legs, felt his lips and tongue upon her fevered thighs, and after a delicious pause as long as time, felt his kiss upon that part of her, sorcerered to ecstasy by his magic again.

  The only sadness was that, finally, it had to end when flesh could bear no more.

  But they ended it together, and there was great joy in that.

  “My God, darling,” sighed Selena, when she was again in his arms, kissing him, his taste on her lips, hers on his. “My God, think of the time we’ve lost.”

  “But what we’ve just shared makes up for it.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Not really. There is all the joy we might have had.”