Lewrie pegged his note where Pollock was sure to find it, then impatiently drew out his pocket watch to check the time. His dinner appointment was two hours off, and the tea leaves had steeped, so he poured himself a fresh, bracing cup and forced himself to sit down and sip it, fretting over just how he would frame his questions, how subtle he’d have to be. If Charité knew the people who financed the piracy, did she know more than she let on about their business, too?
“Damme!” Lewrie muttered of a sudden. “My cundums!”
He’d have to rush back to his set of rooms and fetch them, now they were fresh-washed and lightly oiled, before… with luck…
All dozen? he fretted; I bloody hope so!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He had been forced to pace and stew in front of the restaurant she had named, de Russy’s, for Charité had been coquettishly and coyly late, but more than worth the wait once she had turned a corner and had sashayed up to him, her tiny parasol spinning flirtatiously and her blue eyes aglow with both impishness and delight. As intriguing as she was when garbed as a young gentleman, when properly gowned as a young lady, she was a vision of femininity.
Dinner had taken the better part of two hours, with light and mostly innocent and inconsequential conversation, though Lewrie did get a chance to suggest that he wasn’t long for New Orleans, if Pollock had his way. She had expressed regrets over that news, but her innuendos promised both a grand send-off on his trading expedition and a hearty welcome upon his swift return. Hidden meanings crossed her features, along with half-lidded girlish innocence, mixed with part sultry seductress, and delayed wanton abandon, making him squirm on his chair.
He trusted to her taste, let her have her head when it came to the menu that Charité almost knew by heart. A thin and tepid celery broth had resulted, just right for a warmish tropical day; then a zesty crabmeat rémoulade, followed by a palate-cleansing mixed green salad, fresh from the Lake Pontchartrain garden plots. That had gotten them ready for grilled shrimps as big as his thumbs, and lemony seafood crêpes that contained a meaty fish mélange and sauce that was heavenly from the first hot bite to the last cooled forkful. Lastly had come a syrupy sweet trifle sort of pudding, lush with local oranges. So many wild oranges grew thereabouts (so he was amusingly told) that the local farmers fed most of them to their hogs… which made for a succulent Sunday ham!
“My last fine meal, aussi, cher Alain,” she sadly imparted, “for I must leave the city and go visit my papa and maman upcountry. I hope I do not have to stay as long as Easter, but certainly I should be back about the time you come back from the wild Indians… if they do not scalp you, n’est-ce pas?” She giggled, then quickly went serious, reaching her fingertips to touch the back of Lewrie’s hand. “I will pray earnestly that they do not… for you have such a fine head of hair, mon cher. And the savages have such horrid habits when it comes to shearing White people… of their hair and their… other things, hein?” she teased with a fetching blush and grin. “I do believe I would miss them all… equally. Oh là, l’addition. Will you take care of it, cher? Then, we shall go for a stroll. It will be good for your liver.”
“Nothing wrong with my liver, Charité,” Lewrie had said, claiming intimacy with the use of her Christian name in public; to which she made no prim objections.
“Oh, you English… you do not understand how important one’s health depends on la digestion and proper care for one’s liver!” she teased. “Look at your John Bull… so choleric and pasty-fat… so full of nothing but roast beef and beer! No wonder he is always so red in the face, hein?”
“A long walk, did you intend, then?” Lewrie had wondered aloud.
“Oh, lazy-bones!” Charité fondly teased him. “If not a long stroll, you have another healthful exercise in mind, peut-être? “
“Hmmm,” he leered.
“Oh, oui!” Charité squealed. “Plus vite, plus fort, mon étalon!” And Lewrie gladly obliged, picking up his pace and slamming his groin against her firm and springy young buttocks. The taut bed-ropes supporting the mattress groaned and skreaked, the wooden bedstead parrot-squawked at its joins, and Lewrie himself groaned, panted, and uttered triumphal steer-like grunts as he thrust as she commanded: harder and faster … certainly not deeper, for he was already sheathed up to the hilt in her upraised, kneeling body. Charité clawed the pillows, the sheets, face pressed into a pillow now and then when her pleasure made her squawl out loud, shudder, then writhe and thrust back against him like a maddened serpent, grunting and lowing like a heifer being taken by a rutting bull, her grunting a counterpoint to his that increased in fury and urgency ‘til…
“Ah-ahh!” she screamed. “I go, I go so… mon Dieu!”
A moment later, it was Lewrie who threw back his head, roaring incoherently as he burst in her like a flaming carcass-shell, jerkily thrusting through the last melting moments ’til he had to rock back on his heels and gasp for air, dragging her back with him, his grasp firm on her soft, sweaty-cool hips. Charité, still sobbing with ecstacy but as if in need of yet even more, shuffled back to him quickly on palms and knees, to half squat, splayed wide across his lap, rocking up and down to either side, petulant-sounding to milk the last frissons of sensation from him, to keep him pressed hard against her innermost flesh. He slid his hands up to cup her breasts from behind, wrap his arms about her, and hold her close to his heaving chest. Her arms took hold of his to keep him there, her head weakly lolling on his chest.
“Formidable … so formidable, mon amour,” she barely croaked.
“You are indeed, sweet’un,” he responded, muttering huskily in her damp mane of hair, some of which stuck to his mouth. “Vraiment!”
“You have lied to me,” she accused, suddenly.
“Hah?” Lewrie gawped, stiffening in shock.
“You can speak French… when you care to.” Charité chuckled.
“Only enough to get in trouble, dear,” he laughed, greatly relieved that her plaint was harmless. To further distract her, he slid a hand down her sleek stomach and belly to her thatch, playfully twining his forefinger in her love-matted hair, flirting even lower round her clitoris, where his member was still sheathed inside her, making her roll her head, moan, and giggle.
“I am split… I am ruined, forever,” Charité vowed in a weak whisper. “Zut!” she cursed a second later, as Lewrie limply slithered from her at last. Matter-of-factly, without shame, she flung herself forward to the headboard and piled pillows, rolled over face upwards, and swiped her damp hair from her forehead, with her fine, slim legs still wide apart, knees slightly raised as if welcoming another romp before sunset or suppertime.
Lewrie shuffled forward to recline alongside her, admitting to himself that he might not be the “All-Night-In” Corinthian he had been in his wilder twenties… After four blissful bouts he was just about utterly spent, and a longish nap wouldn’t exactly go amiss. He snaked an arm under her neck and about her shoulders, getting no closer for a bit, as they lay there and genteelly “glowed”… perspired… on the nearly soaking sheets.
“You will miss me among the savages, mon Alain?” she pressed at last, rolling to her side to face him, propped up with a hand under her head.
“Desperately, ma chérie,” he earnestly, nigh honestly vowed, rolling his head to look at her and seeing her impish expression. “And you? Et vous?”
“Et tu, Alain,” Charité amusedly insisted. “Not the impersonal vous, but the intimate tu, mon étalon.” She stroked a hand over his hot chest, a fingertip circling his near-side nipple.
“Your stallion, hey?” He chuckled, feeling risible after all as she teased.
“Ah, oui. The stallion le plus puissant. You spoil me for … After you, the most powerful, what man could ever compare, mon amour?” Charité said, frowning for a second and lowering her eyes as if she had said the wrong thing, had come close to reminding him that other lovers had existed, would exist in the future.
“Then I’d best hurry back to N
ew Orleans before you run across a better,” Lewrie suggested, tongue-in-cheek. “So we can have days and days like this. Days and nights… early mornings, the crack of dawn?”
“Oh la, I tempt you so much, you would surrender all your other lovers for me, Alain?” she asked, trying to be light, but with a slight edginess in her voice, as if his reply actually mattered.
“Hah! What other lovers?” he barked with laughter. “Damme, if you haven’t spoiled me, d’ye know. If I had one, or a round dozen, a ‘wife’ in ev’ry port, I’d toss ’em all off a cliff, aye. Charité, you are sans pareil. Lovely, passionate… abandoned. Maddening! There, ye see? Another French phrase. We keep this up, I’ll parler …”
She rolled half atop him, embraced him, twined with him and bestowed a dozen fond kisses to reward such gallantry.
“Oh, pooh!” she said after suddenly breaking away, pouting very prettily and desirably. “It would all end in tears. I could not have an Anglais lover! You are not even Catholique! A heretic, Protestant… ‘Bloody,’ born and bred to kill the French, and Catholics? Never, not in a thousand years, could you be acceptable. What Papa and Maman would say… my brothers!”
“Well, don’t they say that ‘love conquers all’?” Lewrie jested.
“Oh, we marry, and I am disinherited?” Charité huffed, though still pressed against him, up on her elbows. “I must go to a British seaport as your kept woman, your wife… when you admit that you cannot even keep yourself? Zut, putain!”
“Well, nobody said…” Lewrie began, daunted by her intensity.
“And then you give me babies,” Charité further fantasised, one hand flying in objection as if swatting flies, “and after a few, I am the fat, dull matrone and you take your pleasures elsewhere, hein? I become hideous to you? Non! I wish never to be a matrone! No matter how grand the man, there is so much more to life, certain! I wish to do more with my life than marry, breed, and die anonymously, Alain.”
“Well, I think you’re famous,” he essayed, much confused.
“Even so…” Charité said, her heat evaporating as she turned pensive and lay down atop him again, her head on his shoulder and her voice muffled against his neck. “I would have your babies, Alain. I would be your belle amie. Just so long as I am the only one!” she concluded, with a mock-fierce nip at his earlobe. “And when you are among the Indians, you do not take a lover there!”
“Well, I might be more among the Yankee Doodles than Indians,” Lewrie said, yelping as if really nipped and playfully wrestling with her ’til he had her under his weight, her wrists pinned by his hands.
“Oh, they are even worse!” she snarled, wriggling and thrashing.
“How fair could they be, in their homespun junk, and all muddy barefeet?” Lewrie snickered, feeling even more risible as she squirmed most fetchingly under him, belly to belly, even pinioned as she was. “You wouldn’t trust me out of your sight, would you? Would you? I thought so. You’d have me clerking for Pollock, here in New Orelans. All ink blots and smudges on my nose, in a countinghouse, instead of adventuring.”
“No, you can have your adventures, Alain,” she insisted. “Just so you come back to me… often. Always,” she softly, fondly, added.
“But what could I do to earn a living, if I don’t go venturing for Panton, Leslie?” Lewrie innocently asked, thinking it about time to try to dredge some information from her.
“I told you, cher, Learn the river trade from your adventures, prove yourself, then… meet with those wealthy men I mentioned, who wish to own their own ships before the Americans control all the shipping trade,” Charité reiterated, turning still between his thighs. “If you wish to begin at once, I could introduce you to Monsieur Maurepas, the banker, He is in touch with… oh, zut alors! Putain! I cannot. You must go upriver, I must go to my parents’ plantations. It will be weeks and weeks before I could introduce you properly.”
There’s a name t’conjure with! Lewrie silently exulted, to hear one of Pollock’s suspicions almost confirmed.
“Though, he is … many of his associates,” Charité hemmed and hawed, writhing beneath him as if spurred more by dread than pleasure. “They are proud Creoles, Alain, tu comprends? French Creoles, who hate the Spanish subjugation and wish to be a part of la belle France once more. France is strong, and Spain is weak, and they believe that someone must save them, before the Americans… or you ‘Bloodies’ eat us up!” she spelled out for him, though turning the traditional epithet for Englishmen to a joke, instead of a taunt. “You must be careful in your dealings with them, mon coeur, before one of them spins out some fanciful dream about revolution against Spain. Oh, how do you English say, to…” she asked, frustrated.
“‘Take it with a grain of salt,’ d’ye mean, love?” He chuckled. “D’ye mean that, one… or a lot of’em… might want me to smuggle arms? Start a Louisiana Navy? Turn privateer, or some such, and take Spanish prizes? Bein’ a former naval officer might tempt ’em?”
Damme, that was knacky of me! he quietly chortled; Perhaps I can do ‘subtle’!
“Oui, with the grain of salt, vraiment,” Charité quickly agreed.
“But you’re happy enough under the Spanish?” he further asked.
“Mon amour, I am most happy this moment, under you!” she teased with a coquettish stirring under him. “Mais non, the Spanish… such a horrible set of tyrants. And so bad for trade as well! Everyone I talk to says so. Papa, Monsieur Maurepas, our factors … If I were a man, I would be tempted to do something rash. To rid Louisiana of any taint of Spain… even their idioms!”
“When I met you, you came close to being a man,” Lewrie pointed out. “Though… thank God you aren’t. Most surely aren’t!” he said, sliding down her so he could kiss her nipples and circle her areolae on the tip of his tongue.
She knows more than she wants t’tell me, Lewrie furiously schemed; Her papa’s in on it, I’ll wager, maybe even her brothers. Damme… have I already met ’em, two nights ago? They were all so alike, and…
“Oh la, Alain,” Charité said, sounding as if she was mournfully wailing in exasperation at men’s folly, “I fear, if someone gave you a chance to fight, do what you were trained for, you would leap for joy, and turn… pirate, if you thought it would be grand adventure. And, paid enough! Men… mon Dieu!” she spat in a flouncing huff.
“Something in what ye say, Charité darlin’,” he frankly seemed to confess, breaking off his teasing ministrations to look her in the eyes. “I never did get many opportunities to… swashbuckle. Boring blockade work in all weathers… paper wars and ink smuts? Boresome. Hellish-boresome, most of my undistinguished naval career was. But I doubt I’d really do anything that damn fool.”
“Bon!” she approved with some heat. “Good!”
“Not ’til they promised I’d be an Admiral,” Lewrie cagily japed. “Not ’til it looked like it’d succeed. Look at John Paul Jones, that Yankee Doodle. Catherine the Great of Russia made him an Admiral over her whole fleet! Why, there’s been dozens of ambitious Royal Navy men, taken service under foreign colours, some with the Admiralty’s connivance and blessings, too, who didn’t look like they’d ever make senior Post-Captain in their own service.
“The Swedes even made me an offer… not much of one, but,” he added with a deprecatory shrug, suddenly inspired to feel her out even farther. “Not a command, actually—not a ship of my own. Arsenal clerking, counting cannon barrels or some such. I turned ’em down and tried for merchant service… where I’d at least be at sea,” he lied.
“You would be tempted,” Charité stated, peering closely at him, not in the expected disapproval at such insanity that she had evinced just moments before, but in a speculative, calculating… weighing of his sentiment, with the faintest hint of a smile touching the corners of her mouth and eyes… as if he’d said or done something clever.
“Well, if they threw you in,” he japed, shrugging again and forcing an inane grin onto his phyz to quash her slightest suspicions.
>
“Oh, la! Oh, zut alors, mon chou!” Charité suddenly snapped as she turned forceful in her attempts to slide out from underneath him. “The hour! It is growing dark, and I must go!”
“Oh, damme, no!” Lewrie said with a crushed groan. “Surely you could stay for a little longer, darlin’. Just a quarter hour more?” he entreated, gone all pleading puppy-eyed. He sat up, though, rocked on his heels once more as she lithely sprang down from the high bedstead au naturel, as boldly bare as she’d been born, fetching her discarded chemise off the back of a nearby chair and wriggling it down over her head. Damme, we were almost there, too! he thought; This close to …
“Lace me up, cher?” she asked, clapping her undone bustier to her chest, perkily, impishly smiling. “I must be home, quickly.”
“What if I won’t?” Lewrie pretended to pout.
“Then I must walk home as undone as a whore, and I will blame you for it, mon chou,” she threatened. “And there will be two dozen challenges to duels slipped under your door,” she added, cocking her head at the doorway to his set of rooms.
“Well, as we said in the Navy…’Growl you may, but go you must.’ Damme!” he cried, springing naked off the bed. He seized her, burying his face in the hollow of her neck. “I simply cannot get enough of you, me girl!”
“Nor I you, cher Alain,” she conceded, “but… I leave in the morning, you go upriver in a few more days, so we must part sometime. Only for a little while, mon amour, I promise! How do you say, that a parting is … something-something?” she crooned, embracing him with her fingers caressing his head and his hair against her as if to give comfort. “A short absence…”
“‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’” Lewrie recited, lifting his head to swing her length against his nudity. “I’ll make you a new’un t’go along with that, too. ‘Brief partings make rencontres all the sweeter … and urgent yearnings, the passion even fiercer.’ Hmm?”
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