by Nancy Morse
When he struggled to form words, she told him, “A simple nod will do.”
He managed an affirmative shake of the head.
Satisfied that she’d made her point, she sent him sprawling with a backwards shove. Her fangs retracted as she cast a sneer down at him. Delving into her pocket, she withdrew a picayune and tossed it down to him. “Go get a drink. I think you need it,” she taunted, and turned and walked away.
Her mood was growing darker by the minute, caused first by Nicholas alternating between insane arrogance and little-boy-lost, and then the American displaying an appalling lack of manners. If he hadn’t stunk so badly of whiskey, she might have dragged him behind one of the market stalls and drained every ounce of blood from his body. She was inclined to agree with Sabine who regarded the Americans as uncivilized. From what Sabine told her, even the duels they fought were barbaric. Not content to answer a challenge with a pistol, they often faced one another with squirrel rifles. The code of honor that was the lifeblood of Creole society and which hung in the sultry air like the refrain of a song was unknown to them.
Her spirits lifted when she thought of Stede, although she could not help but feel a twinge of guilt over the manner in which she had secured his love. Well, no matter, she thought, dismissing her culpable actions. I did, after all, save his life.
At the French market the Choctaws sat in silence on their blankets beside their trinkets, and the fishmongers fought for the attention of the servants who converged upon the stalls each day with empty baskets. Pru filled her basket with vegetables and spices for Babette’s cooking pot and was on her way out when she bumped into Delphine.
The Creole woman drew back.
Pru presumed it was due to the color of her skin, more strikingly pale in the daylight than when lit by candlelight as it had been that night at Stede’s house. “Delphine, how good it is to see you.” She stared straight into her eyes, holding her gaze for several long moments before releasing it. “I won’t keep you. I’m sure you’re eager to get back to the house to prepare the evening meal for Stede. He is well, I take it?”
“I do not know,” Delphine replied.
Pru sensed something amiss in the almost imperceptible hesitation in her tone. Looking down at the basket on the woman’s arm, she remarked, “That does not look like enough food to feed a man with a healthy appetite.”
“It is enough for me.”
“Only you?” Pru inquired, her eyes narrowing. “What about Stede?”
“He is gone.”
The word ricocheted off Pru’s brain like the crack of a dueling pistol. “Gone? Where?”
“Where he always goes. To the island.”
Pru laughed, a little nervously. Of course, she thought with a measure of relief. No doubt he went to Grand Terre to put his pirating venture back into action. “When did he leave?”
“Three days ago.”
Three days, without a word to her? She felt a dull thud of panic and fought to keep it from infiltrating her voice. “Did he say when he would be back?”
Delphine shook her head.
Drawing in a breath, telling herself that there was nothing to worry about, Pru ventured, “What about Marie?”
“Marie went with him.”
“I—I beg your pardon?” she stammered.
“When I went to his room to tell him dinner was ready, they were drinking wine and laughing. They left together the next morning.”
Bewildered, Pru mumbled a vague “Good day,” and left.
She was unaware of the cacophony of sounds rising all around her as she made her way back along the levee and past the mud puddle where she’d last seen the rude American. At the Place d’Armes most of the crowd had dispersed, with only a few revelers milling about to celebrate the American takeover. Her steps quickened until she was running. The hood fell back from her head, and her hair flew out behind her in a wave as thoughts converged on her like a swarm of angry bees. What was she to make of this latest turn of events? Was it her wine that Stede drank? And if it was, why hadn’t he come to her to profess his love? Well, she huffed on a desperate note, almost out of breath, she would get to the bottom of this.
Chapter 22
It was a two-day journey by barge and pirogue through the twisting bayous and marshes to Grand Terre. When at last the pirogue thudded against the shore, Pru paid the transport fee and got out, glad to have her feet again on solid ground. The breeze was stiff and tinged with salt. Waves foamed behind her as she made her way along the sandy beach in the direction the boatman pointed. All around her was a Garden of Eden of lush oaks, palm trees and blue-green lagoons. Oleanders scented the air and brown pelicans flapped their wings to the drumbeat of the roaring surf.
As she approached the two story house facing the open Gulf, she heard music drifting on the wind and a familiar voice crooning in English.
“I stepped aboard my rolling ship
beneath the morning sun
And rode the waves for fortune’s gold
until the evening come
But where was love, no friend to me,
My life felt doomed to fail
Until I met my one true love
A dark-eyed quadroon girl.”
The music was unaccomplished, unlike the majesty of Nicholas’s music, yet the haunting song beckoned. Like a whisper draws one closer, she moved toward it, and in a distant part of her mind she thought this must be what it’s like for the moth unable to resist the temptation of the flame.
A she rounded the corner of the house, her footsteps came to a halt in the sand. There was Stede, lying lazily in a red-clothed hammock strung between two banana trees, strumming a mandolin, the rhythmic cadence of his voice soft, lazy and lusty. Pru smiled and was about to call to him when a movement caught her eye. Someone was lying beside him in the hammock. A dark-haired girl raised herself up from his side and rolled on top of him, silencing the song with a lingering kiss on the lips. It was Marie.
The mandolin dropped to the sand as his arms went around her, hugging her close and kissing her back with ardor.
Pru’s astute sense of hearing picked up the words he whispered against the girl’s mouth. Words of love.
A gull screamed overhead.
Pru staggered back.
One true love. A dark-eyed quadroon girl.
The words of the song rumbled like thunder in her mind. He loves another, came to her with the force of a sudden blow. Her stomach heaved, and she fought down the bile that threatened to spill from her mouth. This couldn’t be happening. Anger curdled in her throat. Inside, she howled with rage. How vile to long for the love of a man who loved someone else. She turned and ran.
The sand flew up from under her footsteps as she raced toward the beach. From out of a thatch of saw palmettos a figure emerged. Without stopping, she thrust out her arm and with the flat of her palm to his chest knocked him out of the way. The wind blew her hair in her face. Hot tears stung her eyes. She had to get away. She had to get off this island. But how? The boatman who had brought her here had disappeared into the marshes by now.
Nothing was as important to her as getting away. Nothing. Not Stede nor the love she would never have from him. She ran blindly, her eyesight hazed by tears, focusing all her energy on escaping the heartache that lay on every palm frond and in every grain of sand of this accursed island.
As she ran something strange began to happen. She felt it first in her fingertips, a dull sensation that spread to her arms. Looking down, she screamed to find that her arms had taken the form of wings, with thin membranes for fingers and webbing stretched between them. She stumbled as her legs grew shorter. Dark brown fur sprouted in patches and spread across her whole body. Her ears lengthened, and her nose flattened until it was just a nub with a flap over it. Her whole body was a mass of vibrations steering her toward the shore. With the water within sight, she rose into the air, higher and higher, wings flapping, weaving and diving. The island receded behind foam and salt spray as
the little brown bat winged its way over the water.
Across an evening sky of pale violet the small creature, scarcely noticeable in the dim yellow light from the lamp posts, flitted through the mean and narrow city streets and over the spacious gardens of the Vieux Carrè. Turning a lampless corner, it came to rest in the branches of the Spanish lime tree in the courtyard of the slope-roofed house on Rue Bourbon.
Her first awareness was of the melodic strains of the violoncello wafting through the tall French windows. Like awakening from a deep sleep, she was unsure in those first few moments if she was indeed awake or trapped in a dream. She reached up absently to sweep away a leafy branch that brushed her cheek. The leaves rustled all around her, and peering out into the darkness, she gasped to see the second-floor gallery at eye level. A glance downward revealed the ground far below. Dear God, she thought with a start, how did she wind up in the tree?
It took some doing to shimmy along the branch upon which she was perched and carefully climb her way down, going from limb to limb, and finally sliding to the ground with both arms wrapped around the trunk. She would never look at that old lime tree in the same way, she grumbled to herself as her footsteps clicked on the flagstones.
She came to a stop, staring mutely at the house as the first patter of raindrops fell against her face. Dazed and confused, her mind teeming with questions, she opened the door and went inside.
The music stopped.
“Pruddy, is that you?” her papa’s voice called from the parlor.
“Yes, Papa.” She fought for a level tone.
“We have been waiting for you.”
We? Pru closed her eyes in anguish. Why did Nicholas have to be here? Wishing the night would swallow her up, she took a deep breath and opened the double doors to the parlor.
“Did you hear it, Pruddy? Nicholas has created the most wonderful piece.”
“Yes,” she said dully. “I heard it on my way in. It’s too disturbing. It won’t sell.”
She didn’t catch the look her papa and Nicholas exchanged as she went to the decanter. With hands that shook she poured herself a glass of sherry.
“That’s not very charitable of you,” James said.
Downing the sherry, she turned to face them. Her thick lashes almost brushed her pale cheeks when she lowered her lids and said distractedly, “I’m sorry, Papa.”
“Pruddy, are you all right? You look like you’ve just fallen out of a tree, for goodness sake.”
If only he knew how accurate his observation was, she thought, aghast. “Why Papa, I don’t know what you mean.”
Nicholas rose and came toward her. “I think he means this,” he said, plucking a twig from her disheveled hair and casting a look down at her torn and soiled dress.
She shrank away from him. “That’s absurd. What would I be doing in a tree?”
He gave her a sly smile before turning away.
“You’re looking a bit ill,” James said.
With a wave of the hand she dismissed his concern. “I drank from someone infused with too much absinthe. I didn’t realize it in time. It has given me a dreadful headache. I think I’ll go to bed now. I’ll be fine in the morning.”
“Yes dear, a good night’s sleep is just what you need.”
He seemed to be satisfied with her explanation, although a hasty peek at Nicholas revealed a skeptical smirk on that handsome face.
***
“Absinthe? Really, Prudence. Do you expect me to believe that you could not detect it on your victim before you drank?”
Staring out the rain-splattered window at nothing in particular, she said dully, “I don’t expect you to believe anything. And I don’t recall inviting you to my room.”
“Nevertheless,” he said with a sigh, “I’m here.”
He moved smoothly across the room to stand beside her at the window. Drawing aside the velvet drape with one finger, he looked out at the glow of crystal chandeliers shining through the tall windows of the Spanish houses lining the street. He tilted his head toward her and sniffed her hair. She smelled of the night wind and the sea. “You must have been very angry.”
She looked at him. There was an ethereal quality in the sensual line of his mouth, the straight nose and elegant jaw, the dark hair falling in silken locks over his forehead, and those lashes, longer and thicker than hers. He was so utterly and appallingly beautiful that at times it was almost possible to forget what a scoundrel he could be. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it is only when we are at our most volatile that we are able to transform. It must be nature’s way of assuring that we don’t transform indiscriminately. Do you want to tell me about it?”
She hesitated.
He gave her a knowing smile. “You didn’t climb up a tree for your own amusement. You flew there.”
She drew in a heavy sigh and walked to the bed and sat down on the edge with great care, as if unsure of the mere act of sitting. She searched for words to explain what she herself did not understand. “It was the strangest thing. I was running, and then, all of a sudden…” She stopped, uncertain, and looked at him helplessly.
“It began in the fingertips,” he suggested.
“Yes.”
He moved toward her with feral grace. “It spread to your arms and then to your legs.”
“Yes, yes,” she breathed, scarcely able to contain her disbelief. “That’s exactly it.”
“It’s not as if you can feel the wings growing or the fur sprouting or the ears lengthening,” he said. “It’s more like something you sense happening from somewhere deep down inside. You hate it, yet you can’t stop it. You have no real memory of what transpires after that, how you get from one place to another, only that you somehow arrive at your destination. Well, not in a tree, perhaps. But you’ll get the hang of it. The thing is the transformation only happens when the anger builds so strongly that it manifests itself in this way. I gave up trying to figure it out centuries ago.”
“And the wolf?”
“Ah, now that’s a little different. Whenever I have transformed into lup, as we call it in my native Romania, it was out of irrational anger, yes, but more out of a need for revenge, sometimes against another, sometimes against life itself. Vengeance, blind, terrible vengeance drives that transformation. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, and I have tried to control it, really I have. But some things are out of my control, like the need for blood, and my love for you.” He gave a quick little laugh at the sharp look she slanted up at him. “Yes, I know, you think me incapable of love, vile monster that I am, but I do love. Many things, in fact. I love the sound of the cathedral bells in the morning. I love the smell of chicory and the sweet taste of strawberries. I love the music I make that lifts me from the wretched depths of my reality to a place where I can almost believe that anything is possible.” The feather mattress sagged when he sat down beside her. “And I love you sweet Prudence. More than I thought I could love any other being. And for that I am paying a terrible price.”
She turned her head and looked into his green eyes. “How so?”
“Every time you scoff at my love or reject me it’s like a stake driven to the core of my heart. Only this stake does not end my existence. It deepens the agony and prolongs the ache.”
Oh yes, she knew that feeling. Seeing Stede with his arms around another woman and professing his love felt like a stake to her heart, driven so deep that in mere moments her faith in love was destroyed as surely as Nicholas had destroyed her mortality all those years ago.
“And the mist?” she ventured.
“Standard power for a vampire, requiring more practice than innate ability. Appearing as a small cloud or a wisp of fog has its distinct advantages, although one is vulnerable to wind currents, and it’s somewhat taxing to switch between mist and corporeal form. I use it primarily as a means of infiltration. It came in handy when I rescued your pirate from the Spanish fortress.”
He watched her carefully as
he spoke and saw the wince in her eyes, an indication that he had struck a sensitive nerve. “I take it all did not go well with your pirate.”
She jumped to her feet and glared at him. “You know it did not. It went exactly as you planned when you sent Marie to him. You knew he would fall in love with her.”
“You give me too much credit,” he protested.
“You’re right about that,” she said. “I do give you too much credit. For having any honor. There’s no honor in you.”
“Do you really think I can control people falling in love? If your pirate fell in love with Marie, it was not of my doing.”
“But you sent her to him.”
“Yes. But only because I thought you might not want him if you found him dallying with another woman. I had no idea it would be him who would not want—” His words stopped abruptly when he saw the warning look flash in her eyes. “Are you certain he is in love with the girl?”
She answered stiffly, “Quite.” Caught in a web of despair, she was heartbroken to the core and angry beyond endurance.
He fell back on the mattress, fingers laced behind his head. “Well,” he said, watching her carefully, “I can’t imagine how it happened. Except that people do tend to fall in love.”
He noticed instantly the change in her demeanor. The eyes that had flashed heat at him only moments ago now could not look his way. He knew guilt when he saw it. “Be reasonable, Prudence.”
“Am I not being reasonable?” she asked, even though she knew she was not. As devious and heartless as he was, he was not to blame for this. No, something had gone wrong with the love potion. She felt his steady, impatient stare. “All right,” she relented, “so you had nothing to do with it.”
“Thanks for that, at least.” He rose from the bed. The candles in the sconces flickered as he strode across the room. At the door he paused to look back at her. “You deserve better than him.”
