Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  It all began at dinner.

  “How’s my little girl?” Sean exuded, coming into the dining room, grabbing Davina, and tossing her into the air. She giggled and wriggled and shrieked, delighted to see him again.

  “I thought you were going to stay out at Montauk at least a week?” he said to Selena.

  Traudl nervously wadded her napkin into a ball. Sean noticed and frowned, curious.

  “We were,” Selena said quickly, “but that stupid war changed our plans, and I thought it best…”

  She had planned how to handle this matter. She would describe how the slain Ludford was found in the hotel, and how she had decided to return home, lest something happen to them, too. But she had not counted on Traudl’s participation. The poor girl, usually so reticent, had borne more than she was meant by nature to bear. She had also rehearsed her little speech, and once she began there was no stopping her.

  “Oh, Mister Sean,” Traudl blurted, “there was terrible things a-happenin’ out there by the seashore.” She was practically in tears; her surge of confession carried with it an overflow of emotion.

  “Go ahead, Traudl,” Sean said gently.

  “Sir, sir I got to…got to quit…”Traudl stammered.

  Sean gave Selena a measuring look. “Why?”

  “Because…because…I’d rather not say. Could you…write me a good letter of recommendation, please?”

  “Of course, Traudl. But I wish to know your reasons. Now, tell me.”

  Again, Traudl couldn’t quite face it. In tears, she had begun to blubber.

  “Would you prefer that this be done in private?”

  The girl was about to say yes, but Selena did not care for the idea.

  “If Traudl gives a reason, it will be done right here. And right now.”

  Sean nodded in reluctant agreement. “All right, Traudl. That’s the way it will be. Tell us.”

  Her words were a bit hard to understand, the syllables lost in the sobs, but the essence came through clearly.

  “There was a man,” Traudl explained. “In Montauk. Mrs. Bloodwell…” She met Selena’s eyes then, her own wavering a little, but her chin held high in Christian rectitude.

  “All right, Traudl, leave the table,” Sean ordered. He was very calm. “Have one of the servants fix you a tray. You may leave in the morning. I shall arrange for recompense and have your letter prepared.”

  Dinner was very bleak. Davina’s chattering sounded like a small, silvery bell in the bottom of a coal pit. Later, Sean drew Selena into his study.

  “Since you didn’t deny the charge, I presume it’s accurate.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  “That’s something, anyway. Who was it?”

  “Royce Campbell.”

  Sean nodded. He didn’t even seem particularly surprised.

  “I was not unfaithful.”

  “You needn’t go into that. It is the least of the problems we face now. And I never believed you would be unfaithful, not in the physical sense. Your own word means too much to you for that.”

  Slowly, he arose from his chair, and began to pace back and forth across the room, thinking of something.

  “What was Royce doing there?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Ludford is dead. Royce did it, didn’t he? Were you involved?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Selena, were you…have you ever been involved in this rebel business?”

  After a moment, she nodded, and began to speak.

  “Stop! I don’t want to hear it! You have no idea how dangerous things have become. I’m involved, too, although not in the way you might anticipate. And now I have to save you from this mess.”

  “Save me?”

  “Do you understand to what extent you’ve compromised us? Both of us? Selena, you’ve broken your word. You’ve let us down.”

  He was more sad than angry, and his concern gnawed at her. “It was…it was something I…had to do.”

  “I see.” Although he didn’t see at all.

  “Perhaps I cannot be anyone but who I am. Perhaps none of us can. What else can one be true to? It might be wrong even to try to deny our own natures.”

  “I doubt that,” he said, a bit cynically. “Not if it will save one’s skin. Which is the issue with us right now. I may have been honored by the King, but that won’t protect us forever.”

  The moments passed, and neither of them spoke, or even looked at each other.

  “Selena,” he said at length, “I believe I can save you. You have no idea how far things have gone. I did what I thought I had to do, as you will learn, and things were done over which I had no control. You may not understand, even when you find out, but I had no idea of your involvement…”

  Save her? What was he talking about?

  “…but I am going to make two conditions, and you will disregard them at your peril.” He did not wait to see if she would accept the conditions, and he did not permit her to question them. “First, you must give up your shop and public life. It is not a question of propriety. It is a question of survival. You must play the meek wife, and remain at home. Second, you must never again, under any guise or pretext, see Royce Campbell. I am not even referring to a romantic meeting. Nothing of the sort. Although, to be honest, I could not bear that. No, I am referring to something that concerns the fate of your lovely neck.”

  “What?” she asked, her voice husky. “Please.” Her mind was on the spy network, and the message she had carried. “I have a right to know.”

  He shook his head. “Selena, I suppose you thought that I might reconsider one day, and come to your way of thinking about this war. I know Dick thought I would. But that is not going to happen. I have charted the course of my life, and I mean to be true to it. Do you understand?”

  Selena nodded.

  “Had I known what I now know of your involvement with the rebels, I might have acted differently. I might have tried to think of some other way to deal with the situation. But you must understand that I not only felt used and betrayed, I sensed great danger. And who would not have? When I learned of the spy network that had been set up right under my nose, within my very company, I acted. I had to act, or else be vulnerable to the charge that I was a willing accomplice. I went to Lord Howe myself, and to Ludford. Now, because of Ludford’s death, Bailey is handling the affair.”

  Selena might have been able to piece together the implications of his words, but she was too stunned to think clearly.

  “Dick Weddington is under arrest Selena. They are even now interrogating him at the fort. You had best pray—and pray very hard—that he is as true a friend to you as he seemed…” His voice faltered, and he walked to the window, shaking his head in helpless dismay. “God, I truly did not know they would apply torture to him. Not here in America. And to think I was the one who turned him in…”

  Selena went over to him and put her arms around him.

  “The mere murmur of your name on his parched lips, Selena, and you will be done for. There will be nothing I can do to protect you then.”

  “But why…why are they treating him in such a beastly manner?”

  “It is more than interrogation, Selena. It is vengeance and celebration combined. He was not only the master spy who had eluded them for so long, he was also a member of the nobility. Thus it is as if he betrayed Great Britain doubly, and now they are making him suffer for recompense.”

  Selena thought of her father, and the Rob Roys. British policy had not changed.

  “And he was harbor master and merchant as well,” Sean was saying, “respectable positions which they feel he has dishonored…”

  Selena could only weep. Each long day thereafter was agony for her, agony made greater by knowing that, whatever her own sufferings, they were an immeasurably small fraction of the tortures being inflicted on Dick Weddington. Sometimes she would go out onto the front terrace and look down the Hudson and into the harbor, and she was almost certain that she
could hear Dick screaming. During the night, sleep refused to come. The rush of events since her trip to Montauk recapitulated itself in her mind, a sequence of events that seemed to point toward certain disaster: the meeting with Royce, Ludford’s death, Traudl seeing Selena on the porch, Traudl’s confession to Sean, Sean himself.

  He did not ask again about Royce Campbell, but Sean was hurt, and Selena grieved because he suffered. Tossing in her bed at night, Selena tried to put her life, her love, into perspective. I do love Sean, she thought, heartsick. But something is no longer what it was when we set out on our journey…

  That tiny, relentless voice came back to question her.

  Do you feel as you do simply because Royce has been gone so long, and is more exciting, whereas you have been married to Sean and know him well? Do you love danger and adventure more than domesticity? Come now, young lady, and face the truth: you love in Royce what you have always indulged in yourself, willfulness and independence. Yes, and rebellion, too. And see what such desires have brought you, once again.

  Selena wept. “That’s not true, that’s not true,” she whispered.

  Beside her, Sean stirred, but did not awaken. Oh, if she could only decide, and then choose! But it was all so intertwined and heartbreaking. On the Montauk beach, joined with Royce in a communion of body and soul, rapture and danger, everything had seemed so clear. Now, when she saw how Sean was trying to protect her—protect her from the consequences of having broken her promise to him—she felt her insides come apart.

  And the mission she had undertaken had borne no fruit. The information about Lord Howe’s movements, which she had carried to Royce, had been too late to be of any use. Howe had landed along the Chesapeake even as Selena was telling Royce that he would do so. In a desultory but eventually effective manner, Howe occupied Philadelphia, hitherto the wellspring and citadel of rebellion, and Washington’s gallant attack at Germantown was a complete failure. Upon hearing the news, Selena’s spirit flickered slightly: She wondered where Alexander Hamilton had been during the battle, and how he might remove himself from responsibility for the loss. Thinking of him reminded her of how she had bested Veronica Blakemore, and of the latter’s vow of revenge.

  Sean could not help but notice her lingering malaise, and he did his best to shore her up. But he had plenty of worries himself. He had provided the information by which Weddington came to be arrested, true enough. But he had not known at the time that his wife might be arrested in her turn. Once, in a moment of doubt, he halfheartedly suggested that they try to leave the city, suspicious though it would look.

  “I’ll never run again,” Selena snapped.

  Brave words, or foolish ones?

  Certainly they did not seem brave in the cobblestone courtyard in front of the prison guardhouse. Nor did Selena feel at all brave, seated beneath the scaffold of new timber erected for the event. It was an event. Rows of wooden benches, neatly aligned, filled the courtyard itself. Formations of straight-backed, high-hatted troopers, their boots and buckles polished to perfection, awaited the execution with dull, soldierly patience. All along the walls of the fort stood the drummers, rigidly at attention, eyes staring directly forward, as if at nothing, as if they themselves were already dead, and merely bore back from the land of darkness the rhythm of sorrow and implacability, that maddening rattle of the drums.

  And on the walls, and beyond the walls, in lampposts, hanging from windows of nearby buildings, clinging to the roofs and chimneys, waited the crowd, eager for the show to begin. The rabble, Selena thought recalling Hamilton’s mistrustful description of the common people. Perhaps he was right.

  The benches in the courtyard were reserved for military officials and for people of rank. Except for a few late arrivals, or those delayed by the milling crowd outside the gates of the fort, all the benches were filled. An expectant hum rose from the audience. The men were in uniforms or formal morning clothes; the women were bright in their Sunday best. With sadness, Selena noticed a few of the women wearing gowns from La Marinda. That she herself should have created dresses that were to be worn on a day such as this…

  Gilbertus and Samantha Penrod were seated just behind the Bloodwells, and—bitter burden—Veronica Blakemore, the adventuress, was one row ahead of them, a bit off to one side of the bench. Veronica had no escort with her, but it was common knowledge that she had taken up with Lord Bailey, successor to Ludford. He was busy at the scaffold now, making last-minute arrangements for the execution, and would likely join her after the ritual was concluded.

  Suddenly the drums ceased. It happened so abruptly that Selena started, as if someone had grabbed her from behind. Sean put his hand on her arm.

  “All right?” he whispered.

  She nodded, and closed her mouth tight, so that her lips would not tremble.

  The iron door of the guardhouse clanged open and the condemned man was hurried along the few paces to the scaffold stairs, two men ahead of him, two men behind. They had almost to carry him up the steps, and Selena fought to hold back a moan as she saw what they had done to him. It hardly seemed Dick Weddington anymore, just a staggering, panting form that might once have been human. She saw the tortured twist of his mouth. Sean had told her. Manacled, his legs in irons, and no longer able to endure the torment, Dick had tried to commit suicide by biting off his own tongue, hoping to bleed to death. But he had been discovered. After that, a wooden block was placed in his mouth, like a horse’s bit.

  Now, with his escort, he reached the platform. He swayed unsteadily. One of the guards caught him before he toppled. Then he looked up at the beam and the noose rope which dangled from it. The crowd on the benches in the courtyard remained reasonably decorous, but Dick’s glance at the noose served to release the tension elsewhere. A great sound, somewhere between a how! and a hoot of derision, went up from the spectators beyond the walls. Then, as if dazed, Dick looked down at the people directly below. He seemed to recover a bit seeing the familiar faces. He gave no sign of greeting, but he met the eyes of many. He seemed to study Sean, then passed him by. Selena met his eyes momentarily. He looked directly at her, asking nothing, regretting nothing. Within her heart she lamented unbearably the suffering and death of this bright young man, whose father had held her own in high regard. The moment ended. He looked away. And she knew that in one sense he had been successful: somehow, he had not revealed her name.

  Lord Bailey mounted the steps, then, followed by the hangman himself, a massively built man in black, wearing the black hood of his profession. Once again, the sight set the rabble to howling, quieted when Lord Bailey lifted his arm.

  There was a moment of silence as they settled, waiting for the action to begin.

  “By order of the offices of His Most Gracious Majesty, George the Third,” Bailey intoned, projecting his voice out over the multitude, “we here assembled shall witness the execution of Richard Allen Weddington, lawfully convicted of treason against King, Crown, and Country.”

  He paused a moment to let the weight of his words sink in. The hangman, meanwhile, sprang the trap a time or two and gave a good yank on the rope. It held his weight and snapped back. The crowd sighed.

  “Do you affirm that you are, indeed, Richard Allen Weddington?” he asked Dick.

  “I am.” The voice was clear, extraordinarily strong considering the torment to which he had been subjected. He put his last strength into the effort.

  “We shall proceed.”

  Guards moved Dick onto the trapdoor in the floor of the scaffold’s platform. He did not resist. Instead, he seemed to be trying to stand a bit straighter, to meet the situation with whatever dignity he could command. It was considerable. The people, watching him, broke off yet another blood howl, becoming strangely silent. It would happen now, they knew. Death. They might cheer later, in a paroxysm of relief that, this time, death had passed them by. A collective shudder of the soul. But now they were silent as if each person there present for one moment could not hold off the know
ledge of his own mortality.

  Bailey nodded, and the hangman stepped forward, slipped the noose over Dick’s head, and adjusted the knot so that his neck would break quickly at the drop, sparing him the further torment of slow suffocation……

  Selena watched the hangman in a daze. A hangman had saved her before. Was there, this time, no hope?

  Satisfied, the executioner stepped back onto the corner of the platform and placed his hand on the lever that would spring the trap.

  Dick stood straight facing out onto New York harbor. He had a clear view of the harbor, the Narrows, and the open sea beyond. There are worse things to look upon, for the last time in your life. The eyes of the living were upon him. His own eyes were upon the distance, the future, perhaps, which in moments his spirit would know, and into which it would disappear. Suddenly—Selena felt it before she saw it—Dick’s eyes began to glow. Something like a smile tried to curl his wounded mouth.

  “According to the custom of the English-speaking peoples,” Bailey was intoning, “according to the principles we all hold dear, the condemned man shall, if he wishes, have the right to say his final words on this earth. Do you choose to exercise this right?” he asked, facing Dick.

  “I do,” Dick said, lowering his eyes from the harbor to the crowd below. He looked at Selena again, that glow still in his eyes. She shivered. It was as if he had some unearthly knowledge that none of them could share, and yet at the same time he seemed almost amused.

  “They’ve tormented him to madness, poor fellow,” Sean whispered. “I hope this is over soon.”

  Veronica, grinning broadly, turned to face Selena.

  I’ll see you in hell, she told Blakemore with her eyes. One way or another. She felt a light touch on her elbow, and half-turned. Gilbertus Penrod was telling her to hold on. It will be over soon. We will endure.