Fires of Delight (38 page)

But for a long, long time, she asked no questions at all.

His apartments were on the second floor of an old but elegant building overlooking the Seine. Dismounting hurriedly, as if there were little time left in life, Royce put his hands around her waist and swung her down from the stallion. He did not set her down on the cobblestones, however, but swept her into his arms and carried her, two steps at a time, to his lodgings. He did not set her down there either, but kicked the door shut behind them and transported her through a series of airy rooms to his bedchamber. It was, then and in retrospect, the greatest journey of her life.

He put her down upon the bed, not ungently, and for a moment she lay there stunned, her senses dazzled by what she knew was going to happen, by what she wanted with all her heart to happen. Already he was pulling off his boots, tearing off his uniform, gazing down at her with stark, sharp longing in his eyes.

“Can we talk?” she heard herself asking.

“Yes, but not with words,” he said, and stripped her bare.

She was too dazed, as he hovered momentarily over her, to appreciate fully all that lay in store, knowing only that she wanted him. Nothing mattered but that, not jewels nor graves nor worlds. They cried out together as he entered her and she took him unto herself. The familiar, unforgotten shape of him inside her roused Selena instantly to primitive, atavistic frenzy. She drew up her slender legs on either side of him, so as to have him even more
deeply, closed herself around him and began to rock her body in time with him. The first pale patterns of rose-colored heat stirred in her then, and as she gave herself, slowly, religiously, cunningly, the heat spread throughout her body. With each of his powerful, deliberate strokes, currents of insidious voluptuousness ran up into her belly, down along her tender, living thighs. They knew each other so thoroughly, so well, that thrust and clutch of flesh, expertly given and just as expertly received, blotted out all the world save that of sensation. He knew just how to stroke her, and she to grasp him, release, and grasp him again. Currents of ecstasy lanced down her legs to her toes, up her body, into her arms, and to her hands which he had pinioned with his own upon the pillows. Then Selena sensed herself approaching the great brink, that which in French is called “the little death,” and she was coming up, coming up to the precipice, which cannot be accurately designated because one is either on this side of the gulf or on the other. But she was there, and suddenly the heat, which was of themselves and which had spread throughout her body, came flashing back to its source, up her legs and down her arms, through her breasts and belly, down, and then it was there, there,
there
, and they pulsed gorgeously together as of old.

“I thought you were dead,” she gasped, a long time afterwards, lying beside him, each caressing the other in the savory, lingering enchantment of afterglow.

“I thought you were.”

She braced herself on an elbow and looked into his eyes. “You
did?
”

“Of course. Or I would have come for you. I tried. I scoured the Caribbean for word of you. Finally, one of my men came back from Port-de-Paix with word that you had been killed in a fire there. The same fire that ended a man I knew. His name was LaValle.”

“Ah, your friend the
smuggler
,” she said disapprovingly.

Royce grinned. “He had his uses to me.”

“Doesn’t everyone? And I thought you were gone forever.” She told him of the graves on the island of La Tortue, and of the cross with its swath of plaid and the name Campbell scratched on the wood. She told him of the ancient village woman who’d described him so well.

“Yes, I was there,” he said. “I buried my men there, after our
sea battle with the HMS
Prince William
. But whyever did you think that a pagan like me would be content to lie beneath a cross?”

Now Selena knew why she’d thought something had been wrong, out of place, about that cross.

“Yet your
name
was on it,” she said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“How did you come to search La Tortue? How did you get there?”

Selena was silent for a moment. The answers to those questions would require mention of Jean Beaumain. So bedazed was she by Royce’s nearness to her, so utterly shaken by the pleasure of the love they’d just made, that she had not the will to tell him of Jean just yet.

“All I know,” she said, “is that when I saw that grave, the world went black for a long time.”

“And for me as well, when I heard about the fire.”

“I guess it is best not to give too much credit to the tales of Haitians,” said Selena, only half in jest.

She bent to kiss his smooth, bronze breast, and then looked up into his eyes. She saw renewed desire in them, both his and her own reflected need. Wordlessly, she turned in the bed and lay on her side next to him, their bodies reversed on the rumpled sheets and blankets. With one hand, she cupped the taut, finely veined, essence-making gourd of him, and with the other stroked and squeezed his long, thick staff. It trembled beneath her ministrations, and she trembled at its sweet and powerful perfection. Only minutes before, she had called forth from it, evoked in it, all the pleasure it could bear, and now, without thinking, she took it into her kiss, running her tongue again and again around its smooth, majestic circumference. It was then, too, that she felt him parting her legs, felt his lips and tongue upon her fevered thighs, and after a delicious pause as long as time, felt his kiss upon that part of her, sorcerered to ecstasy by his magic again.

The only sadness was that, finally, it had to end when flesh could bear no more.

But they ended it together, and there was great joy in that.

“My God, darling,” sighed Selena, when she was again in his arms, kissing him, his taste on her lips, hers on his. “My God, think of the time we’ve lost.”

“But what we’ve just shared makes up for it.”

“No, it doesn’t. Not really. There is all the joy we might have had.”

“But will have now.”

“But will have now,” she agreed, “and always.”

The word
always
brought her partway back to her senses. Jean Beaumain. The revolutionary tumult of Paris. An uncertain future.

Well, now was as good a time as any. “Darling,” she said softly.

“Hmmm?” His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep.

“Darling, how did you come to be so much favored by their majesties?”

His eyes snapped open. He was alert, if not on guard. “What do you mean?”

“It puzzles me, that’s all. In America, you were at the forefront of those who fought for independence against George III. You and Erasmus Ward—”

“Yes, and I see that you still wear his cross.”

“As I will always. But in America, you stood with Ward and Gilbertus Penrod and Washington himself. And now you seem to be in league with the most corrupt elements of the monarchy and the nobility. And it is said”—her tone sharpened—“that you were Marie Antoinette’s lover?”

“Is that what they say?” he asked, laughing lazily, almost with pleasure at the thought. “My, my.”

“Royce, this is serious!”

“My dear, I believe you’re jealous.”

“Is it true?”

“A gentleman would never answer that question, whatever the answer.”

“You’re playing with me. I have to know.”

“Why?”

“Because”—
go ahead
, she thought—“because I have to know if you’re still the man I used to know.”

He looked at her with a playful, half-mocking expression, then got slowly out of bed and strode naked to a huge mirror hung upon the wardrobe door. He examined his reflection carefully for a time, turning this way and that. Then he came back and joined her in bed again.

“Yes, I believe I’m the same man,” he said. “Perhaps a tad older, but—”

“That’s
not
what I mean!”

“Selena,” he laughed, “what on earth
do
you mean? Of course I’m the same man.”

“I don’t think so. No one who would risk his life for one revolution founded upon the human spirit would play turnabout and, in another such revolution, support the causes of repression.”

“Why not?” asked Royce, still in that easy, teasing way. “In both cases, I saw my opportunities and I took them.”

“
What?
” she cried, scarcely able to believe the underlying cynicism that marked his response.

“So did you,” he added. “How much did you get for that pouch of jewels and sovereigns I left with you in New York?”

Her stunned look was his answer.

“I assume you sold or bartered them. No poor girl gets invited to Versailles in the company of the nobility you claim to deplore. Did you buy yourself a position? Or perhaps you still
have
the pouch?”

Cleverly, he had turned the issue against her.

“I became friends with Madame LaRouche in Haiti,” said Selena in her own defense. “The question is, how did
you
come by those stones? They were obviously taken from rings and brooches—”

“Is that right?”

He was patronizing her! “All right,” she told him, anger flashing, “I’ll tell you what happened. I kept the jewels safe all the time. I sewed them into the lining of a coat. Which
you
, on the way here from Versailles,
gave away
to a radical named Pierre Sorbante, who was disguised as one of those women demonstrators!”

He looked at her for a long time, his eyes unreadable. “Well,” he said finally, “easy come, easy go. There’s more where those came from, I guess.”

“Is that all you have to say!”

“For the time being, love. Lie down quietly now. I want to have you again.”

And she did, and he did, and for a while it was wonderful again.

But their secret garden had a thorn in it.

Across the river, at the exact moment Royce and Selena brought each other once again to those heights they always scaled so effortlessly, Jean Beaumain, still lugging his wooden box, knocked on the door of the LaRouche mansion. He could see that refurbishment had been going on, but had apparently been broken off, since no workmen were about.

A young man in faded livery—it was Hugo—answered the door.

“Madame LaRouche, please?”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Jean Beaumain.”

“Do you know her?”

“Very well, my man. Just go summon her, please.”

Hugo complied, and in a minute Martha Marguerite came to the door. “Oh, Jean, Jean.” Their embrace was energetic and heartfelt. “Jean, come in. Things are at a terrible point…”

“Selena? Is Selena here?”

Her eyes told him that something was wrong, and he had barely the courage to face whatever it was.
Nothing
could have happened to his darling! It would be the end of the world if she had died, especially now that he had achieved his dream and evened the score with Chamorro.

But what Martha had to tell him, about the miscarriage and about Royce Campbell, was almost worse than if she had indeed told him that Selena was dead.

He listened. He had neither words nor tears. His face grew dark, and a light in his eyes went out forever.

“Where is she now?” he asked dully. “Where did the rogue take her?”

Martha did not remember what address Royce had given, only that it had been someplace in Paris. She summoned Hugo and Sebastian.

“I don’t remember the house number,” Sebastian said. “Somewhere in the Rue St. Denis, as I recall.”

Hugo nodded in corroboration.

“I shall rest for the night,” Jean Beaumain decided, “although
I do not think that I will be able to sleep.” He sat wearily down upon the wooden box he carried. “In days to come, I shall search the Rue St. Denis from one end to the other, building by building, cellar by cellar, house by house.”

A new burden of vengeance rested unwanted upon his broad shoulders, a malevolent bird that pecked into his flesh, sought and found the sweet meat of his beating heart.

Never before had Selena lost herself so utterly in the tumult of passion. All that afternoon and into amber-tinted twilight she held Royce to herself, within herself, drifting from pleasure to pleasure, until their flesh could no longer rise to satisfy the appetite for pleasure. Yet when he finally withdrew from her, she cried out with regret at the sudden emptiness.

He got out of bed and began to dress.

“Where are you going?”

“Where are
we
going. Come along. To eat, to drink. I have no servants here. It has been a bit…dangerous for me. There are those who know the King made me
vicomte
, and those with titles are rather
persona non grata
in most parts of the city.”

She looked alarmed.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just dress. I will find a place that is safe.”

They left his residence. First, he took the stallion to a stable and gave a handful of coins to the proprietor, a choleric, one-eyed humpback who ogled Selena shamelessly.

“Feed and water the animal,” Royce ordered. “Give him a rubdown. Perhaps I’ll return tomorrow. Perhaps not. You can handle it?”

“Hay I have,” muttered the troglodyte insolently, running the coins through his dirty, stubby fingers, “but money none.”

Royce reached into his pocket and added a franc note to the coins. “Now you do,” he said. “Mind, see carefully to the beast.”

Then he and Selena set out down the street in gathering darkness. Walking with her arm in his, Selena could not help but remember that, on just such a night as this, they had been parted in New York. That would not happen tonight. She also realized how hungry she was.

“I have heard there is no food in Paris,” she worried.

“There is, though. One must know where to find it, and have the money to buy it.”

“And you do not care that others are starving?”

He was silent for a long time. She could not see his expression. When he spoke, his voice was as nonchalant as it had been earlier, when he’d learned that he’d given away his jewels to a rebel. “Life is unfair, and I guess I can’t do much about it.”

You could
, she thought, with an ache in her heart. But she was
with
him, and for the time being she permitted her love to override the nature of the differences between them.