Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  “You seem,” Félicité said, looking around her, “to have thought of everything.”

  “I tried.”

  “I could have made do with a sail tent like all the others. This wasn’t really necessary, not just for me.”

  “It is not,” he said deliberately, “just for you.”

  She swung to stare at him. “You mean—”

  “I mean I will be staying here with you.”

  “How could I have ever thought otherwise?” she said, her smile brittle. “I must have my guard with me at all times.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was so nice of you to warn me in advance. I might have made only one pallet!”

  “My mistake,” he said, his green eyes holding hers for an interminable moment. Then, turning, he ducked through the door and strode away.

  Félicité built a fire, and while it was burning down to coals on which to roast the shoulder of pork that was apportioned to Morgan and herself — the men who brought it being in no doubt about where he would sleep — sought to bring some order to the hut. She positioned the table and stools, found an empty crate to use to store the cooking utensils, and made pegs to hang their clothing. That done, she turned to the problem of the sleeping arrangement.

  There was no way, short of putting the table in the center of the sand floor and angling a folded coverlet on either side, to place the bedding without having both pallets together. It crossed her mind that Morgan might have planned it that way, then she dismissed the idea. He was not so devious; if he meant to reestablish intimacy between them, he would have said so.

  Or would he? Once he had used her concern for her father to force her to an appearance of friendliness with the Spanish, an appearance that might have become genuine if other events had not intruded.

  No, she would not think such things. How could she be so ridiculous? Morgan McCormack wanted nothing from her. He might at times feel some stirring of desire, but nothing he could not suppress with a little effort, nothing that wasn’t easily explained by their unnatural situation and his isolation from contact with other women. What did it matter, after all, if he was troubled by her nearness? Let him be. She should be delighted to think that he might suffer some inconvenience. He deserved it, didn’t he?

  With stiff movements, she unrolled the coverlets against the back wall of the hut. Twitching them straight, smoothing out the wrinkles, she turned her back and vowed to think of it no more.

  The roast pork was perfuming the air, the lantern was casting an oblong glow into the darkness, and the table was set with two plates, two daggers, and a clutch of small brown finger bananas when Morgan returned. Félicité sat not far from the doorway on the trunk of a palm tree blown down by some long-ago storm. She had been watching the dark sea, listening to the wash of the surf. She looked up as he appeared out of the blue-blackness, and without a word went before him into the hut.

  She sliced the pork and filled the plates, placing one in front of Morgan. Even as she did so, she was acutely conscious of the implacable domesticity of the act. The damp darkness outside, the bright freshness and comforting aroma of food within were in stark contrast to the drunken revelries of the pirate crews on their sandy beach not so far away. The bed coverlets in the wall shadow invited, or so it seemed from the manner in which Morgan’s green glances were drawn to them. For Félicité, his presence seemed to fill the hut, crowding out all else.

  There was nothing to do when they had eaten except wipe out their plates with sand, rinse them, and put them away. It had been a long day and a tiring one. They might as well go to bed.

  Morgan stepped outside to con the heavens. In his absence Félicité turned out the lantern and quickly undressed, then lay down, taking the pallet nearest the wall. Once she was still, it seemed as if the earth were moving, as if she were still on the ship. The effect was more pronounced when she closed her eyes, and she kept them wide with an effort. Beyond the doorway, the moon, soft and enormous, two-thirds full, was rising out of the sea. It shed its cool, burnished light over the sand, outlining Morgan where he stood, glinting silver on the linen of his shirt and catching dark copper gleams in his hair.

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the unlighted hut, then walked off in the direction of the beach, where the men were beginning to whoop and yell as they swilled rum around a trio of salt-licked driftwood fires. After a few minutes, he returned, mug in hand. Taking a seat on the fallen palm, he drank, then drank again.

  The moon was hidden behind the bluff when he came to bed. He stumbled over a stool and flung the crablike monster from him with an oath. He stripped off his clothes, dropping them on the floor, then threw himself down on the pallet.

  Félicité, listening intently in the darkness, managed to roll out of his way. She came up against the back wall, and it shuddered, rattling under the impact. Morgan turned on his side, and one flailing arm fell across her waist. His grip tightened, drawing her to him, molding her to the curve of his body. Burying his face in her hair, he released a deep sigh. The next instant, stertorously, he slept.

  Dawn, pale and opalescent, filtered into the thatched structure. Félicité stirred and opened her eyes. She lay in Morgan’s arms, her limbs intertwined with his, her head resting on his arm. The warmth of his body encompassed her, a pleasant defense against the early-morning coolness of the wind that brushed into their shelter, rustling the drying fronds.

  By raising her gaze, she could see his face as he slept. Strong, brown, firmly molded, it was shadowed with the stubble of his beard. His lashes made a thick line across his lids, and among the dark arches of his brows there were individual hairs with the wiry texture and color of copper. At the corners of his eyes were the fine, radiating lines of a man used to watching far horizons. Closed, invulnerable, there was nothing in the sculpted planes of his face to show what he felt or thought, or why he had turned to her again and again in the dark, drawing her to him when she sought to put distance between them.

  It was not so much fear or even reluctance that made her wary. She did not trust the stir of her own emotions, the sense of quiescent desire, waiting for a certain moment, a certain timbre of voice, the silken slide of a certain touch. Félicité lowered her lashes, her considering brown gaze drifting over the turn of his shoulder, and the slack muscles of his arm that lay across her, and down the hard plane of his chest with its light furring of hair that narrowed to a dark line as it inched down his belly. What would happen, she wondered, if she allowed the tips of her fingers to take that same path, if she moved closer against him so that—

  No. She was a fool even to think such a thing. Why should she invite the caresses of a man who cared nothing for her beyond the passion of the moment? A man who took her under duress, then let her go with scarce a backward glance when he tired of her? She could not bind him to her with chains of physical love. It was foolish of her to wish to try.

  Slowly, so as not to wake him, Félicité turned to her back. She reached out with one foot to gain purchase, moving her shoulders, trying to slip from under the weight of his confining arm. As he stirred, she went still.

  He brought his knee up, turning so it lay across her thigh. For a moment she thought he would raise his arm, but he shifted it instead so his hand lay between her breasts, the lax fingers lightly cupping one rose-tipped mound. When he was quiet once more, his lips were just brushing the smooth curve of her shoulder.

  She drew a quiet breath, half of annoyance, half of disturbed senses, then let it out again. She allowed the dragging minutes to tick past until she thought he was settled in slumber. Carefully then, she eased her shoulders over the pallet. His hand trailed limply from one breast to the other. At that point he stirred once more, his fingers tightening, the muscles of his leg tensing until she was held immobile.

  She turned her head sharply in suspicion, and was in time to see his eyelids quiver, as if just snapping shut. She lay still, sorely tempted to let matters rest as they were to see how he would proceed. T
he thought was so insidious, so entrancing, that she caught her breath.

  In sudden decision, her fingers flew up to snatch his hand from her, flinging it off. She rolled from his grasp in a fluid movement that brought her up on her knees. Reaching for the coverlet, she jerked it from under him to haul across her lap.

  “Wake up, you vile, grinning jackanapes!”

  He gave a heartrending groan. “Be still, woman. My head feels as if it had the devil’s own smithy inside it.”

  “Good! That’s what you deserve for soaking yourself in rum before you come to bed!”

  “That I did is something for which you should be grateful. I don’t think you would have liked it if I had come sober.” Catching the edge of the other coverlet, he rolled, wrapping it around him as he faced the wall.

  She glared at his back in frustration. “That’s something you’ll never know, isn’t it?”

  He whipped back to face her, his emerald eyes dark. “Take care, Félicité. I am sober enough now, and more, to venture any gale.”

  She shook back her hair in cold rage. “Take care yourself, Morgan McCormack. Lay one finger on me in the bright light of this day, and I’ll cut it off for you!”

  “It might be worth the loss,” he said, uncoiling from the coverlet, coming to a sitting position, “to see if you are as I remember.”

  His intention was reflected in stark pain in his eyes. As he lunged, she hurled herself backward, scrambling for the crate that held the knives. He caught her waist just as her forearm hit the edge of the box, turning it over with a muffled jangle onto the sand of the floor. The point of her shoulder struck the shifting grittiness, then Morgan loomed above her, his shoulders blotting out the light, his mouth coming down upon hers with bruising strength. Above her head, her groping fingers closed around the handle of a dagger.

  And then his lips were warm and sweet, their pressure ravishingly gentle. He tasted the honey of her own, exploring the moist corners, and as they parted in languorous acceptance, sank deeper. Her senses expanded, and she knew a soft and glowing lassitude. She lifted a hand to place it on his shoulder and felt the weight of the knife lying forgotten in her grasp.

  She stiffened. His mouth clung to hers a moment longer before he raised his head. His eyes were jade-dark as he stared down at her, and from their depths welled derision that was directed as much at himself as at her. Félicité’s grip tightened on the knife, and with painful deliberation she pressed the point to the brown column of his throat.

  “Release me,” she said, her voice a husk of sound.

  He smiled with a slow and tantalizing curving of his lips, but neither moved nor spoke.

  She increased the pressure until the point indented the skin. Realizing that her left hand lay against his back, she lifted it, spreading the fingers, holding them wide. Still, he did not let her go, but hovered, an overpowering, intensely masculine presence above her.

  Suddenly a drop of bright scarlet formed at the point of the dagger, hanging like a jewel from the tip. Revulsion gripped Félicité, and with a small cry, she jerked the knife away, sending it flying to clatter among the pots.

  “Sweet Félicité” Morgan said on a ragged-laugh. “You are going to have to make up your mind what you want.”

  Without waiting for an answer, with no sign of expecting one soon, he flexed the long muscles of his arms and pushed away from her. He caught up his breeches, and with them in one hand, surged to his feet in a plunge for the doorway and the beach beyond.

  Like a released spring, she came to her knees, calling after him in taut rage, “And what about you?”

  He halted, turning back, magnificently naked in the orange-red glow of the rising sun, with the look of an Adam cast in bronze. He smiled with twin red sparks like devil gleams in his green eyes. “Oh,” he said, “I have already decided!”

  Félicité would like to have stayed alone in the hut, lying on her pallet, staring at the thatched underside of the roof, mulling over her wayward feelings. She was allowed no such respite. Morgan returned from his sea-swim looking vital, virile, and self-satisfied, and with a raging appetite. While he rummaged for leftover pork and sea biscuits, he spoke over his shoulder, his eyes averted from the pallet. They needed to quarter the palm forest for fresh fruits and vegetables. It would be better if they went early, before the others arose. By the middle of the morning, he wanted to be back to set the men to work. If he didn’t, there was no telling when they would get started, or how much trouble the hungover, short-tempered, ill-humored sons of Satan would stir up if they weren’t driven to more productive labor.

  There was more reason for haste. The longer the ships sat out of water for repairs and careening, the greater the odds of being spotted either by another corsair or by the frigates of the ever-patrolling Spanish guarda de costas whose job it was to make pirating unprofitable, if not downright dangerous.

  Félicité tried to insist that she could manage the foraging alone; Morgan would not hear of it. To begin with, she wasn’t familiar with many of the tropical fruits and vegetables. Then there was the possibility she might meet some member of the three crews on an isolated trail. For the moment they were enough in awe of Morgan not to approach, as long as he was near. If she was alone, the tale might be different. Since her bout with Valcour, she had become in some sense a challenge to the manhood of the seamen, as well as an object of desire. That there was an element of danger in pursuing her, far from making them sheer off, only added to her luster. There was not a sailor among them who did not ache to tame her, even if he had to shut her mouth permanently when it was done to avoid Morgan’s certain revenge.

  Carrying a pot each, and Morgan with a wooden bucket dangling by its rope handle from his fingers, they ventured into the tangled growth of the forest. They crossed and recrossed the meandering stream, little more than a creek, that came out on the east side of the cove. Palm trees leaned over them, and the fronds of great tree ferns brushed their faces. Thick vines with splotches of yellow on their virulent green leaves twisted up the trees, looking like strangling snakes. There were flowers everywhere, the brilliant red and soft fuchsia of hibiscus, the pink and white of oleander, and the bright, flaring orange of flame trees. Low bushes of unnamed varieties, covered with yellow and white blossoms, sprawled everywhere, while blooming vines soared to the tops of trees. Even the limbs of the branches that met overhead were laden with strange-looking leathery leaves from which grew flowers of exotic beauty that filled the air with intoxicating perfume.

  As gaudy as the flowers were the birds, great squawking parrots and smaller birds with beaks as big as they were, and tiny darting hummingbirds as contrary as they were delicate. Pigeons, the remnants of some long-ago colony established by the former tenants of the island, roosted in the trees, making standing under one a danger, and here and there scuttled a small chicken that Morgan called a pintada.

  Once a wild hog, frightened out of a shaded hollow, charged them. Before they could react, a litter of ten or more piglets burst from the other side of the thicket, squealing in dudgeon as they went. If it had been a boar, they could have been in danger. As it was, between relief and sympathy, they did not have the heart to chase down the sow and her family.

  They found a damp gully thick with plantains, their dark-green leaves like enormous arrowheads shining in the sun. Nearby was manioc, also called cassava. Improper preparation of either could lead to digestive disaster, Félicité knew, but Morgan seemed to have no qualms about showing her how to go about it. For more in the way of vegetables, they robbed the centers of cabbage palms and from others took their meaty hearts. Fruits they discovered in abundance, ripening, falling on the ground. So easy was it to fill their baskets that it soon became plain they could live there for a lifetime without danger of starvation.

  Félicité glanced once at Morgan striding along beside her, carrying the heaviest of their burdens, standing aside to hold a tree branch as she passed. The thought occurred to her that this was the way
Eden must have been before the fall. If they had been alone, she and the man with her, without danger of invasion from the outside world, would they take off their clothes and disport themselves like Adam and Eve, free and untrammeled by past sins and misdeeds?

  She looked quickly away, and saw before her the limestone outcropping of the bluff. Morgan stopped, searching the towering face of the rise with its gullies and vegetation-choked draws. An animal path led upward like a well-trodden road, becoming lost as it crossed the blinding-white calcareous rock.

  “Come, there’s something I want to show you.”

  He led her over the animal path, then diverged to drop down onto a track like a series of descending terraces to the narrow shingle of beach that fronted the clifflike face of the bluff. Standing back at the water’s edge, he pointed upward. “Look up there. See it?”

  She squinted against the sun’s glare. Halfway up was a dark shadow, an indentation in the rock. Above the sound of the surf that boomed behind them, foaming at the foot of the bluff not far away, she called, “Is it a cave?”

  He nodded. “It can also be your bathing chamber, Mademoiselle Lafargue, if you don’t mind sharing it with a few bats.”

  “What?” she cried.

  “There is a pool of fresh water, a natural cistern, inside.”

  She turned to him, her eyes shining. “When can we try it?”

  “Not now,” he answered without commenting on her choice of pronoun, though a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, “We need to get back. Perhaps this evening, though, after our work is done.”

  It was a long day. The men toiled in the tropical glare, their skin shining with perspiration. They snarled and they cursed, but they performed prodigious feats of labor under Morgan’s lashing tongue. Captain Bonhomme, nursing an aching head, fell to with the rest, and was soon roaring out a chantey to make the work go easier as with the others he hauled and pulled, pushed and shoved. Only the wounded were exempt, among them Valcour. He lay brooding under a sail awning, watching the bent brown backs of the others with a sneer on his thin lips and ordering the cabinboy, every time he passed with the bucket of rum and water, to refill his glass.