Doc was the sailor who had sent the ointment for Elene’s feet. Already the wizened little man was coming forward with a box that must contain the tools of his adopted trade. The others of their small group were gathering around also, the two actresses exclaiming in sympathy as they ran their fingers over Durant’s shoulders while Flora Mazent picked up his sword as if holding a sacred relic.
Elene held her ground. “I … I think I should see that the bandaging is done properly. I feel responsible.”
“It may be you are indeed responsible,” Ryan said, his voice grating. “That is one of the things we will talk about.”
He dropped the point of his sword and caught her arm with his free hand, turning her toward the entrance to his cabin. She pulled back against his hold. “I have nothing to talk to you about.”
“Your mistake, chère. Will you come, or shall I carry you off over my shoulder?”
“You think the others will let you?”
“I think they may, as long as I have this.” He hefted his sword.
Elene looked from the dark hardness of his face to the blade he held. “How enchanting,” she said in forced sarcasm, “the conqueror claiming his spoils. Again.”
“If you like.”
It was not his threat that decided her. It was, rather, the somber expression on his face as he accepted her strictures. He had been forced into a fight for his life because of her. It was possible that she owed him an explanation. With a last scathing glance, she swung from him, moving in the direction he indicated.
She was supremely conscious of him behind her, of his height and size and raw male strength that had so recently been on display. Her footsteps were swift as she made her way into the common room and beyond it to the cabin they shared. In that small, enclosed space, she waded among the boxes and trunks of his captured booty before she turned to face him. He kicked the door shut, then walked to fling his sword down on the table where it landed with a dissonant clang. Turning, he folded his hands across his chest and braced one hip on the table as he stared at her.
“Just how does it come about,” he asked in tones deceptive in their quietness, “that I am accused of taking advantage of a defenseless woman?”
She controlled a shiver, and forced herself to meet his cold blue eyes. “That was Durant’s charge, not mine.”
“He must have got the idea somehow, from someone. Who else but you?”
“From himself. He finds it inconceivable that I could go from being his bride-to-be to becoming your mistress in a matter of days without coercion. So do I, for that matter.”
“You would prefer to be his bride again, all pure and unsullied?”
“You needn’t jeer!”
“That isn’t an answer. Did he suggest that the wedding proceed after all?”
She looked away over his shoulder. “What if he did? It’s impossible; I can see that. Things would never be the same.”
“But you would like for them to be.” The accusation was like a whiplash. He had sensed something secretive about her, something that grew day by day. This was the explanation, he was convinced of it.
She would not give him the satisfaction of hearing her deny it. “I would like to be secure. No more, no less.”
“The only people who are truly secure are the dead.”
Annoyance flared up in her. “What do you know of it?” she demanded. “You’re a man, able to make your own way, a terrible and fearsome privateer who frightens women and children and shopkeepers. You’re strong enough to take what you want and dare anyone to stop you!”
A hard light appeared in his eyes. “Are you by any chance accusing me of stealing?”
“What do you call all this,” she asked, waving at the boxes around her, “if not stolen goods?”
“Merchandise.” That single word had the weight of a stone.
“Books, I suppose? If you expect me to be taken in like poor Josie, you will have to try harder.”
“I am a merchant. I buy, sell, and trade. In New Orleans, I have a warehouse—”
“Full of stolen goods!”
“Filled with goods taken under letters of marque, along with furs and wheat from the Illinois country,” he said in contained fury. “There would be more of the last, and less privateering, if the Spanish would cease interfering in honest trade. No matter. The English ship was fair game.”
“What if it had been a French ship? Would you have taken it?”
His silence was her answer.
“You see? You have no loyalties.”
“I am loyal to my own, to my friends and my land—”
“Land? You? Hah!”
“My land, yes; I am also a planter, if I must prove my respectability. But I was speaking of the only land to which I acknowledge duty or fidelity, and that is Louisiana.”
“Yes, yes, and I’m sure that will impress the Spanish when you take the wrong ship and they decide to hang you.”
“The Spanish at New Orleans have no interest in the welfare of their colony of Louisiana, no interest in anything except what may benefit Spain a world away.”
“All that doesn’t matter if you’re dead!”
He stood watching her, admiring the color indignation had brought to her face and the way her breasts rose and fell under her gown, hearing the echoes of her words in his mind. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth for the picture she made and the concern she had expressed without realizing it. “I’m not dead yet. I’m very much alive. More alive than is comfortable at this moment.”
She could see, in the smooth fit of his breeches decreed by fashion, precisely what he meant. She looked away from that proof to his damp shirt that clung to his shoulders and the muscles of his upper arms, the corded strength of his forearms where his sleeves were rolled back, the dew of perspiration that gilded his skin. The sheer virility of him, the sense of force inside him, a force she had seen amply demonstrated so short a time ago, was all at once overpowering in the small cabin.
“I want you,” he said, the words quiet, wondering.
They set off a heated response that began somewhere in Elene’s chest and spread quickly downward, though at the same time spiraling in dizzy swirls upward into her brain. She met his gaze, and was snared in its relentless blue light.
He swung from her in an abrupt movement, and knelt to release the lid of a trunk. “Would you like to see my misbegotten gains? Shall I drape you in their richness and sparkle before I ravish you?”
“That will not be necessary—” she began in cold hauteur, then stopped.
The trunk was filled with books of all sizes from the tiniest fat volume to fit a pocket to great folios containing curious illustrations. They were packed one against the other as closely as they would fit, a collection of fascinating age and variety, the gleanings from a marvelous library. Some connoisseur of such works was going to be sorely disappointed when they failed to arrive.
Elene gestured at the other boxes and trunks around her. “All these are books?”
“They are in short supply in New Orleans.”
“A need you mean to fill?”
“When I have taken my choice.”
She moved to the bunk and dropped down upon it. She watched him, the way he picked up a book of poems then set it back down, with care, with appreciation, with a certain reluctance. It was borne in upon her once more with stunning effect how little she knew him, how impossible it was to judge him.
He closed the trunk lid and moved to take a place beside her. “Would you have preferred ropes of pearls and sapphires the size of robins’ eggs?”
Would she in truth? She shook her head without looking at him.
“I would,” he whispered, reaching for her. “I’d like to see you wearing nothing else, and search for your sweetness and heat among the cold and tasteless gems. But I also desire you unadorned.”
It was a ravishment indeed, though only of the senses. Her body responded to him in wild fervor that had nothing to do with her w
ill. The undulations of pleasure that rippled over her at his touch were both a delight and a scourge. Mindlessly she gave herself, and took the joy and the surpassing strength, the rampaging ardor and quicksilver glory he had to give, and was amazed, in the outer reaches of her mind when she had leisure to notice, that the exchange seemed weighted in her favor.
9
THEY CAME IN SIGHT of the coast of Louisiana, a low, blue shape on the horizon that turned slowly brown and green, the best part of a week later. It had been a tedious passage beset by calms, particularly during the long stretch while they skirted the island of Cuba. They did not try for an immediate landfall, however, but turned more westerly. They sailed past the myriad of outlets for the Mississippi River where the muddy yellow water poured into the green gulf to turn it brown, including the east pass which led to the inspection post of La Balise, and from there over a hundred miles up the main river channel to New Orleans.
It appeared that Ryan, for all his talk of being a respectable merchant, did not boldly drop anchor before the Spanish city at the end of his voyages. It was his habit instead, he said, to make his landfall in a secluded inlet known as Barataria Bay. From there, he moved through the intricate systems of bayous and waterways of the delta country to the back door of New Orleans. His cargoes were stored in a makeshift warehouse on the beach until he could send after them or else sell them to his business associates who would see to their transport into the city themselves. The maneuver, so he claimed, was to avoid the endless delays of Spanish bureaucracy, not to mention the bribes demanded by the corrupt port officials. He refused to submit himself to either on principle, because of the attempt of Governor Salcedo to strangle trade with the Americans.
Ryan pointed out that he was not alone in his use of the bay. It had become an informal entry port for other so-called privateers. There was no formal organization among them, however. They came and went as they pleased, and respected each other’s property partially because it was the way of the sea, partially because to do otherwise could be exceedingly dangerous.
The refugees from Saint-Domingue lined the rail of the Sea Spirit to watch the land grow closer. They were jubilant over the end of the voyage, and yet also subdued. There was no way of knowing what awaited them on shore; where they would live, how they would occupy themselves or, for some, what they would have to do to maintain life. The time spent sailing across the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Mexico had, until now, been a hiatus, a journey suspended between their rescue and their future. They had thought of little beyond some means of making the endless sun-filled days and starlit nights pass. Now the future was upon them.
Elene was aware of trepidation, but also recognized within herself slow-growing elation. Ahead was a new country, a fresh start. Everything would be different, the sights, the smells, the customs, the people. What she would make of it would be up to her alone.
Overhead circled great flocks of gulls, their wings white against the bank of gray clouds that lay in the southwest. Their piercing cries sounded like a cross between irate scolding and desperate pleas. Nearer in toward shore, a large brown pelican flapped in ponderous dignity on a parallel course with the narrow beach. The low-lying land exuded the smells of mud, decaying marsh plants and fish, a rich and fecund miasma that beckoned even as it repelled.
“Faugh!” Hermine, standing beside Elene, exclaimed with a comical grimace. “What an odor.”
“It isn’t so bad.”
The smell of land came and went on the changing gusts of the rising wind. Overhead, the ship’s sails flapped and billowed in fitful bursts. The gowns of the two women were flattened against their bodies while their skirt hems fluttered behind them.
Hermine reached up to hold the knot of her hennaed hair in place at her nape. “I’d rather smell stale face paint, cheap rooms, and the dung of horses on the streets any day. This wilderness terrifies me as well as offending my sensitive nose.”
“Nonsense,” Elene teased, “that isn’t wilderness you smell, it’s our dinner cooking in the galley.”
“Don’t let Cook hear you or he’ll feed us fish every meal until we step off the ship. Since I must breathe, let me stand close enough to smell your perfume. I’ve been meaning to tell you how lovely it is for days.”
Elene thanked her. It was not the first comment she had received on her perfume, but was perhaps the most frank. Hearing it spoken of still made her self-conscious, as if she had been caught in some misdeed.
“I would love to have some like it, if you don’t mind telling me what it’s called and where to get it.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t available.”
Hermine shrugged. “Ah, well, if you would rather not say, that’s your right.”
“It isn’t that.” Elene’s tone was apologetic.
“Then if you would just tell me which perfumer in Paris makes it, when next I’m there I will—”
“It doesn’t come from Paris.”
“Are you sure?” Hermine said, frowning. “It has the same richness, the same true essence.”
“I’m very sure,” Elene answered, and went on to tell the actress how she came to have it. On impulse she added, “I am thinking of making it, with Devota’s help of course, when I’m established in New Orleans.”
“Are you? How marvelous! Will you open a parfumerie? If so, I shall be your first customer.”
Elene gave a light laugh at the instant enthusiasm. “You almost make me feel the venture will be a success.”
“Naturally it will be. With such a fragrance, how can it fail?”
Elene sent the other woman a quick look, but there was nothing in her piquant face to indicate she meant anything more than a compliment to the scent. She relaxed. “The first bottle I make is yours.”
The actress turned toward Flora Mazent who was sitting nearby with her maid Germaine beside her. “Did you hear? Elene is going to make her perfume!”
“That’s nice.” Flora looked up with a brief smile. She stared at them with indecision in her face, as if she was thinking of joining them there by the railing. After a moment, she lowered her lashes, returning her attention to the needlework in her lap.
Hermine looked at Elene with a raised brow and a shake of her head. There was something in Flora’s attitude that was near aloofness, as if she preferred her own company, even considering it superior, instead of being merely shy. It almost seemed she looked down on Hermine and Josie and even, perhaps, Elene. Since she spurned the overtures of Madame Tusard also it was difficult to be sure. However, no amount of coaxing could draw her out of her self-imposed solitude, and most of the passengers had ceased to try.
The refugees had come to know each other well. Thrown together under perilous circumstances and then left with time on their hands, they had turned to each other for distraction as well as comfort. There had been talk and talk and more talk. They all knew the details of M’sieur Mazent’s gastric disturbances and his daughter Flora’s terrible experiences at a boarding school on Martinique where she was forced to kneel on peas for hours and have her hands slapped with a ruler for failing to speak above a whisper. Madame Tusard had entertained them with vivid descriptions of her female ailments, and they had all expressed their amazement over an incident a few years earlier when M’sieur Tusard had been suspected, unfairly of course, of falsifying records and embezzling funds. Josie had made her dissatisfaction with her ingénue parts on the stage well known, and they had been privy on several occasions to the flaring quarrels, followed by private reconciliations, between Hermine and Morven.
None of these matters took precedence in interest over the ongoing drama of Elene’s relationship with Bayard. There had been much speculation about it, Elene knew; she could tell by the avid interest aroused whenever Durant and the two of them happened to be in the same room together. Durant had deflected it somewhat, however, by avoiding all appearance of interest in Elene. He either concentrated on Serephine who had nursed him during the first days of his injury, or e
lse sought the company of the gentlemen of the group. As his arm, as well as the slash on his face, healed in the salubrious sea air, he had made a particular friend of Mazent who, as a fellow planter, could be assumed to have much in common. It was not at all unusual to see the two of them walking the decks in close conversation while Flora trailed along behind, snatching glances at Durant, flushing a splotchy red and quietly preening whenever he happened to notice her existence.
Relations among the group were not always cordial. Morven and Madame Tusard carried on verbal warfare over everything from who would lead them all in to dinner to what songs would be sung under the stars. Josie took offense at some remarks of the island official’s wife and, for her own sake as well as to champion Morven, kept up a running dispute with Madame Tusard over the placement of their individual chairs under the awning. Madame Tusard was jealous of the attention her Claude paid Josie and any other woman, not excluding Serephine, and the shrill registration of her distress had reverberated throughout the ship on more than one occasion. Devota and the Mazent’s woman, Germaine, had words over the use of the English bathing tub and also the sole smoothing iron on the ship, one that belonged to Hermine. Flora bothered no one, but did become upset one afternoon when the sailor whom she had been watching for some time dared to wink at her.
Such contretemps were no more than to be expected, perhaps, given the close quarters and strained tempers of them all. The camaraderie of shared misfortune, shared terror, was stronger and more lasting. As the ship neared the bay where they would leave it, there were many vows to keep in touch, to gather together again soon. They were sincere at the time, however unlikely it might be that they would be kept.
They scudded into Barataria Bay on the edge of the storm that threatened. Dropping anchor, they stripped their yards of canvas, cleared the decks, and battened the hatches to sit it out.
The schooner pitched and tossed with the wind and waves. Overhead the thunder grumbled, sounding ten times more menacing because they were closed in below decks. Lightning crackled, striking into the water. The anchor chains sang with the tension against them. The ship’s timbers groaned like something being torn apart while still alive. The rain, when it came, was in wind-driven sheets that lashed the decks like huge wet whips.
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