“M’sieur, mam’zelle,” Denise called from where she had stepped out onto the gallery.
It was time. The men were coming. Ravel was first through the door, with Anya behind him and Marcel, hastily closing the breech of his rifle, behind them. They moved down the railing, where the light from the sitting room would not silhouette them as such perfect targets.
There was only one man. The other had stayed with the slaves. He came on up the middle of the drive from the quarters, his head lifted as he caught the movement on the upper gallery.
Ravel lifted his voice, calling, “Hold it right there, friend!”
The man shied like a horse finding a snake under his feet. His rifle boomed as he dropped into a crouch and scurried toward the trees.
The bullet buzzed overhead with the sound of an angry wasp. Besides Anya, Ravel raised his rifle and fired. She did the same. The twin shots exploded. Dirt was kicked up between the feet of the man on the drive. Something plucked at the sleeve of his shirt so that he yelled a curse and dropped his rifle. Ducking, weaving, he gained the cover of the trees and went crashing back toward the quarters. Seconds later, there came the sound of running hoofbeats.
“Let’s go after them!” Marcel said, ready to head for the stairs.
Ravel shook his head. “We would never catch them; besides, they are just hired hands. It’s the boss I want. But we have a few things to take care of here first.”
A few things, such as releasing and calming the slaves, containing the gin fire so that it did not spread to the roofs of the outbuildings, the quarters, or the main house, and burying the dead. They worked through the hours of the night into the dawn.
Ravel was everywhere, cutting the ropes that made a cordon of the slaves, hoisting a crying child to his shoulder the better for it to find its mother, organizing the men into a bucket brigade to get water to the buildings most in danger, beating out flames with a wet burlap sack.
Anya treated cuts and burns, passed out sugar lumps to the youngest and most frightened children, set the oldest ones who were getting in the way to watching for sparks in the dried grass and undergrowth, and sent a delegation of older men to see to the bodies in the big house. With several of the women, she went to tend to the man left trussed up with suspenders behind the gin. He was gone. All that was left was the twisted suspenders lying in the grass to show that he had worked his way free and fled.
It was only as dawn was streaking the sky, and the gin was reduced to a pile of smoking black beams and gray ash dotted with a few red embers, that Anya and Ravel made their way back to the house. They pulled themselves step by weary step up the back stairs and across the gallery to the sitting room. Inside, they started toward a settee to sit down, then looked down at themselves and decided against it. Covered with dirt and soot, their faces gray with fatigue and smeared with smoke-grime, they looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the ridiculousness of their appearance that triggered their mirth, but beneath that was the exhilaration of having cheated death and destruction, and the sheer pleasure of breathing, feeling, living.
Denise found them moments later as they gasped with laughter, leaning weakly upon each other in the middle of the sitting room. She put her hands on her hips and cleared her throat. “When you two are finished,” she said as they turned toward her, “there’s water heatin’ and tubs waitin’ for the both of you.”
For Anya, it was heaven to lie in the water and feel its silken heat against her parched and bruised skin, to breathe the scented steam and allow the muscles clenched tight throughout her body to slowly relax. There were sore places everywhere and small burns she could not remember receiving. Her hair was singed in places around her face, and the clothes that lay heaped on the floor where she had stepped out of them had so many holes burned into them that it looked as if they had made a feast for moths.
But as the labor and pain and distress of the last hours melted away from her and her brain rested quiescent, the same harrowing questions rose to the surface to haunt her. Who was the boss? Who had tried to kill Ravel, and her? But most of all, why?
It had to be someone who knew or suspected that Ravel was at Beau Refuge, that much was obvious. Celestine and Madame Rosa might have begun to guess he was there, but they were naturally above suspicion. She did not think Gaspard and Murray were quite so perspicacious. In any case, Gaspard was far too fastidious to stoop to such a thing, even if he had a reason for it, and Murray had no real grudge against Ravel either, despite the duel. Even if Murray were afraid to meet him, he would be too concerned with the obligations due his honor to ever jeopardize it by such an act.
There was Emile, of course. Jean’s younger brother was something of an unknown quantity after his years in Paris, still, if he was at all like Jean, he would have far too much reverence for life to treat it so lightly. If he had, perhaps, conceived a belated urge to avenge the death of his brother, she thought it more likely he would find some pretext for a duel himself rather than resort to hired killers.
But whom did that leave? Someone who had gotten wind of Ravel’s presence through the servants’ grapevine? It might have happened that the news was out, but wasn’t it too much of a coincidence to suppose that anyone who had heard would also have reason to want him dead?
Her own involvement in the danger she put down to sheerest accident. She had seen the thugs and they had thought it best that she didn’t live to talk about it, just as they had tried to silence Denise and Marcel. The ransacking of the big house and the other depredations had probably not been part of the original plan, but had sprung from the fact that the men thought her out of the way.
What did that leave, then? She could think of nothing else. It was a question she must discuss with Ravel.
That he could have thought she might have some connection with such a plot against him still incensed her. But that someone had tried to take advantage of what she had done to Ravel, the vulnerability that she had caused, was even more enraging. It had been the trick of a coward and a cold-blooded killer. She despised the very idea, and wished there were some way of making Ravel realize it.
An opportunity to try came within the hour. She was sitting on a chaise lounge before the fire, drying her long tresses, when she heard footsteps. They came from outside on the gallery, and she thought from the measured tread that it was Ravel. Her first thought was of some new problem. She glanced down at her dressing gown of white flannel trimmed with lace-edged batiste flounces. It could hardly be called alluring, being much more concealing than most ball gowns. She rose to her feet and moved to the French doors, stepping outside.
He was standing with his hands braced on the railing and his head turned away from her, staring toward where the remains of the cotton gin sent lazy spirals of smoke into the sky. His hair was damp and curling and the clothing he wore, though clean, was of the rough material issued to the field hands. It made no difference. The square set of his shoulders and angle of his head marked him as one who was his own man and, indefinably, regardless of the accident of birth and her own prejudices, a gentleman.
He turned his head and the morning sun molded the angles of his face in golden light, glowing in his eyes. A slow, heart-wrenching smile curved his lips.
“Is — something wrong?” she asked, suddenly breathless.
He shook his head. “I was just looking one more time to be sure the fire had not broken out before I leave.”
“Leave?” She had known he would go, but not so soon.
“I have to go back to New Orleans, you must know that.”
“You could rest first. Surely a few more hours can’t matter?”
She moved toward him, and he caught his breath. The sun, striking through the white garment she wore, outlined her body in a lambent glow, giving her a look both angelic and seductive. He felt a slow ache twisting in his belly, and though he wanted to look away, could not force himself to do it. He stood as if mesmerized as she came closer, and in his head there was a faint
and dizzy singing.
When he did not speak, she moistened her lips, disturbed by something in the air, and also a deep warmth she felt rising inside her. “I suppose I should go, too; Madame Rosa must be told what has happened. We could travel together.”
“It might be best if I went alone.”
A clouded look came into her blue eyes. “Of course, if you prefer it. I can’t blame you, after all. I — know it’s a little late, but will you accept my apology?”
She reached out to touch his hand where it rested on the railing, and that gentle contact burned him more fiercely than any ember. The morning breeze caught the ends of her hair, wafting them toward him like fine and fragile tethers. He felt the folds at the hem of her dressing gown brushing his trousers legs, smelled the fresh and heady scent of her. They were delicate enticements, nearly as potent as the sweet curve of her lips, and his memories.
“For what?” he asked, his voice deep, wryly self-derisive. “It’s been my pleasure.”
Ravel put his hands on her arms, drawing her closer until she was pressed against him, her soft curves and hollows molding to the hardness of his form. He closed his arms around her, pressing her against him. As she stood quiescent in his embrace, he rested his cheek for a moment upon the silken center parting of her hair. He was taking advantage of her remorse and weariness, the stunned effect caused by the fear and violent death of the night just past. He knew it, but could not help himself. There had been so much death, of friends, of hope, of promise. He needed to hold her, to seek in her something he had found nowhere else, the reaffirmation of life. Just once more, just once.
His arms enclosed her like iron bands, an unbreakable hold. Anya made no attempt to free herself. Beneath the soft material that covered her from throat to ankles, she wore nothing. Her awareness of her naked state was acute, giving her a feeling of seductive vulnerability. She wanted him. That desire was as deep and undeniable as it was unlikely. Where it came from she could only guess; perhaps from emotions long dormant that had been awakened by this man, from the fierce joy of having cheated death, and something more that was too close to the quick to be examined.
There was a comforting Tightness in leaning on his strength, feeling it surrounding, supporting her. For the moment that was something she needed with an edge of desperation, that she wanted as a shield against the problems that hovered around her, against her fears, her mistakes. There was in the passion that joined man and woman a great and unexpected boon. It was forgetfulness.
He drew back, searching her face, questioning. She stared up at him, her eyes wide in her pale face. She had nearly killed this man. But he was alive, they were both alive.
They moved as one, turning toward the open French door that led to her bedchamber. Inside, her bed loomed large with its carved mahogany posts and elaborate headboard and tester by Mallard, its high, soft mattress and white lace drawnwork coverlet. It was too pristine, too virginal. The chaise with its graceful rolled back and pale green silk brocade upholstery beckoned.
Anya sat down upon it, lying back, shifting to give him room. He did not take it, but instead knelt beside her. The flannel dressing gown she wore, held only by a pearl button looped by a braided frog of white silk at the throat and another between the breasts, fell open to reveal the long length of her legs. They shone with an opalescent gleam in the firelight, and he put his hand upon a slender thigh, smoothing, brushing aside the soft folds of material to trace upward to the curve of her hip. His face absorbed, his concentration upon what he was doing, he slipped free the loops that held the dressing gown closed and spread the edges wide.
Her breasts were like carved alabaster, blue veined, coral-rose tipped, perfect in their symmetry. He cupped them in his hands, leaning to taste their sweet essence, brushing his lips down the fragrant valley between them, before trailing lower across her abdomen in a path that meandered, sliding over the narrow, inward curves of her waist, circling, finding the softly cushioned mound at the apex of her thighs. Gently, with generosity that was near reverence, he sought the wellspring of her most exquisite pleasure, tracing with warm lips and gentle adhesion to that ultimate source.
She was beguiled, caught in such a maelstrom of desire and aching yearning that she felt naked in soul as in body, without protection, stripped of subterfuge. There was magic and a hint of possessiveness in his touch, and for the moment she had no wish to deny either. Her hand had a faint tremor as she closed her fingers upon his shoulder, kneading the muscles, awash in sensations so vivid with pleasure that they carried an intimation of anguish.
Melting, she was dissolving in liquid heat deep inside. She had no will, no strength, no purpose beyond this joining. Her blood ran scalding in her veins, and acid tears gathered under her lashes. His caresses deepened. Frantic need beat up into her mind and she clutched at him, her nails biting into his shoulders.
With a lingering caress, he left her. She heard the quiet slide of his clothing as he removed it and dropped it to the floor. The side of the chaise gave as he joined her upon it; then he was covering her, his legs hard and faintly rough with curling hair as his knee pressed between hers. She felt a probing, then his strong and careful entry.
So great was the relief and the pleasure that a long shudder rippled over her and she gave a gasping cry. Mindlessly, with her eyes tightly closed, she rose against him. The force of the passion that gripped her was astonishing, embarrassing, and with eyes tightly closed, she turned her head from side to side. For long moments he catered to her need, surging, receding, filling her again and again.
His movements slowed, ceased. His voice deep, throbbing, he said, “Anya, look at me.”
The words came to her as if from a great distance, a plea and a command. The effort to comply was great, not the least because it warred with her own shamed reluctance. Slowly her lashes lifted. Her eyes were dark, half-blind as she stared up at him.
In his face was concern and leashed desire and something so near love that it could serve as an excellent counterfeit. There was in addition something more, a sureness that carried benediction for them both. She caught her breath as the sense of desperation that had gripped her eased, faded away, leaving only her great and enveloping need. She smoothed her hands along the corded muscles of his arms and the flat planes of his chest, enjoying with a deep and heretofore unknown sensuousness the faint grating of the coating of hair, the firm resilience of his skin, the board-hardness of his abdomen and belly just above the point where their two bodies were coupled.
Her gaze had followed her questing hands. She looked back up, her features soft with surprise and grace though her eyes were still slumberous. He lowered his head and took her lips. His arms trembling with strain, he began slowly to thrust into her again. Anya, a small sound deep in her throat, rose to encompass him, taking him deep within her, holding as if she would never let him go. With mingled breaths and taut sinews they strove.
It was a conflagration, rich, warm, consuming. It took them into its fiery heart, drawing them deeper and deeper still. Gladly they plunged, seeking surcease, repletion, the supreme consummation.
Instead, they found glory, intangible, ephemeral, beyond price, the perfect completion.
11
ANYA AND RAVEL LEFT for New Orleans within the hour. They did not travel separately; after what had taken place between them, the possibility was not even mentioned again.
Their behavior was most circumspect in front of the servants. Ravel waited for her downstairs and gave her his arm out to the carriage. He helped her inside and got in after her, taking the opposite seat with his back to the horses. They pulled away from the house to the cries of good-by from half the people from the quarters, most of whom, on learning that the horses and carriage had been ordered, had found some excuse to ease up toward the main house. It seemed they wanted to get a good look in the daylight at the man their mistress had been keeping locked in the gin, the man who had done so much the night before to prevent their being carrie
d off and to save Beau Refuge from burning.
Anya thought Ravel bore with the inspection, the craning necks and hoarse whispers, with commendable restraint. He seemed hardly aware of it, his attention turned inward as if grappling with some private problem. He returned the waves with a brief smile, his posture in his seat relaxed and yet slightly aloof. It was only as the miles churned away beneath the wheels of the carriage and his withdrawn attitude remained the same that she realized it was not a pose.
By slow degrees, the warmth she had felt in his arms began to cool. It seemed there would be no private acknowledgment of what they had shared. It must have meant little to him if he could dismiss it so readily. She swallowed on a hard knot in her throat and gathered the tatters of her own dignity around her, turning her head to stare out the window. There was little to see except stretches of fields lying fallow under the weak February sun, interspersed with thick woods floored with the dark green spikes of palmetto and hung with vines showing tender new growth.
As they neared New Orleans, Anya suggested that Ravel direct the driver Solon to his lodgings, or wherever he wished to stop. He inclined his head in silent agreement and did as she indicated. The carriage wound through the city, pulling up finally at a commodious house on Esplanade Street.
Fairly new, an acquisition since Ravel’s rise to prosperity, it was of two stories, built of brick covered with cream plaster, and finished with graceful window arches and Ionic columns that gave it the look of a Roman villa. Set back under a pair of oaks, it was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence and had a formal front garden with paths outlined with box shrubs and planted with massed beds filled at the moment with pansies in full bloom.
The carriage came to a halt before the gate of the fence. Ravel turned to Anya. “I would be grateful if you would come inside for a moment. I would like to present you to my mother.”
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