Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (152 page)

At first his muscles were tense, but slowly, as the pain receded and the strokes of her fingertips remained light and soothing, he relaxed. Almost beneath her eyes, the slow oozing of blood ceased and the fevered redness began to fade from the long stripes. She touched salve to his ear and scalp, then leaned across him to reach the lid he had placed on his knee. The rounded curve of one breast brushed against his shoulder.

He came erect as if she had touched him with hot iron, moving quickly out of reach. Startled, she sent him a wide glance, then bent to pick up the lid, which had clattered to the floor. With leisurely movements, she fitted the lid back on the box.

He stared at her for long moments, his green eyes narrowed. In the silence they could hear the sloshing of the water in the bath, the creaking of the ship as it drove over the seas, and the hissing of the waves that foamed against her hull.

“I wonder,” Morgan said quietly, “if this magic salve would affect bruises.”

“It’s doubtful, I would say.” She moved as if to turn away.

He stepped toward her then, stretching his hand to twitch the box from her hand. “It seems best to take no chances. It would be a pity if such a lovely face was marred, and then I noticed earlier that you have more marks at your waist and thighs.”

“There’s no need—” Félicité began.

“Oh, but there is,” he interrupted. “How can I neglect you after you have taken such good care of me?”

She did not like the look in his eyes. She held out her hand for the jar. “I can do it myself.”

“No, no, why should you? It will be an honor — and a pleasure — to tend you. I think it will be best, all things considered, if you lie down.”

It seemed senseless to argue. Not only would it serve to make him more determined, but it would point up the fact that she was not as sanguine about their cabin arrangement as he appeared to be. She loosened the coverlet around her and, stepping in front of him, lay down, still wrapped in its folds. Leaning on one elbow, she presented one side of her face.

He knelt beside the bunk. Removing the lid, he rubbed hard fingers across the salve and applied it to her cheek, smoothing it carefully over the smooth curve and along the blue-veined fragility of her jawbone. With the tip of one finger, he tilted her chin, studying the other cheek, touching the ointment to a knuckle graze beside her lip. He shifted then, moving farther along the bunk. His long fingers flicked the coverlet aside, exposing the pale and slender length of her body. Apparently unmoved, he dipped once more into the salve.

Félicité drew in her breath as his warm touch found the scratch below her breasts, the turn of his wrist just grazing one mound as he bent to his work. He shifted then to her waist, kneading, massaging. His ministrations glided lower over the pearl-like sheen of the rounded curve of her hip and thigh. She knew the beginning of a perilous lassitude brought forth by the sureness of his hand upon her. Her eyelids felt heavy, and there was the stirring of almost forgotten sensation in the lower part of her body.

Abruptly his hand was still, resting on the tender turn of her hip. Félicité, with vast effort, brought her gaze to Morgan’s face. He was staring at her in frozen concentration, as if locked in some violent inner struggle, unable to move. She felt her breathing cease, felt the clamoring surge in the beat of her heart, though she could no more stir than the man crouched over her.

From the deck above them came a roaring boom as the mainsail spilled wind and filled again. Morgan glanced up, then got stiffly to his feet. Moving toward the chest where his clothing had been transferred, he said, “It sounds as if the wind has veered, and for my sins I am now the sailing master of the ship. I had best go and order the sail reset.”

He left the cabin moments later, and though Félicité lay staring into the lantern-lit dimness until the early morning hours, he did not return.

It was just as well. She needed the time alone to think, to worry at the edges of the unseen future. What could it hold for her as long as she plunged over the seas on a pirate ship commanded by a drunkard Frenchman while under the uncertain protection of a turncoat Irishman? What would happen to her if the Black Stallion was taken by stronger corsairs or crippled in the water by a prize with more fight in it than expected? In the first case she would doubtless be passed among the new crew, and in the second, she must hang with the others when the captured pirates reached land.

And what if the Spanish guarda de costas, some of O’Reilly’s captains, or else ships from the other Spanish possessions sailing these waters to discourage piracy and smuggling should sight them? Would they blow them out of the water, sending them all to the bottom in splinter-torn death, or, failing that, have them shot like vermin?

For Morgan, a renegade mercenary who had stolen a Spanish ship from the port of New Orleans, there might well be an end of special ferocity. Could she share it? Would they permit that boon, if she claimed him then, if at no other time, as her own most faithless and dishonored beloved?

It was midmorning when Félicité came on deck. The brisk breeze that snapped the Black Stallion’s pennant molded the fullness of Morgan’s overlarge linen shirt to the proud thrusts of her breasts and sent long, curling strands of honey-colored hair flying around her. She paused, ignoring the sly glances cast in her direction, searching with her eyes for Morgan. He stood at the railing on the poop in close conversation with Juan Sebastian Unzaga.

Seeing her, he broke off, then, with a curt aside, left the Spaniard and came toward her.

“If I remember correctly you threatened once to send Bast out chasing smugglers. This is something of a switch, isn’t it?” As a greeting it was not bad, she thought — impersonal, safe, with possibilities for further conversation.

“As it happens, he was tired of the inaction, and of the cold shoulders, in New Orleans.”

“He never seemed the kind to relinquish his role as a Spanish grandee’s son adventuring in the army.”

“People are capable of infinite shifts and surprises,” he said, slanting her an emerald stare.

It was not so safe then, this topic. She tried again. “What of your manservant, Pepe? I haven’t seen him on the ship.”

“He is useless on the water, much to his mortification. The only thing that consoled him at being left behind was the letter of recommendation I gave him to present to O’Reilly, who was in need of a majordomo when I left.”

“Pepe has moved up in the world, then,” she commented.

The only reply she received was a short nod. She cast about for another subject. The French captain was far gone in rum, she had learned from the cabinboy, a defense against disappointment and the indignity of having his cabin turned into a sickroom. Valcour was feverish, but well enough to be profanely certain he was dying, and to demand as much attention as possible for his difficult demise. Félicité mentioned these two pieces of information.

Morgan nodded. “We could hear Valcour yelling from up here. I suppose you are glad that you didn’t succeed in killing him?”

“I’m not so sure,” she returned. “He murdered Ashanti, if you will remember, and mutilated her horribly.”

“Don’t think about it.”

She shook her head. “There is so much to forget.”

“There may be more yet,” he said brusquely and turned to call out an order. The quiet crack of his voice sent men running to haul at the braces.

“Where are we bound?” she asked when he had turned back.

“I neither know nor care. The captain set our present course; I only hold to it.”

“You must have some idea.”

“In general, we trend toward the Windward Passage. More than likely we go to see what pickings can be had there.”

He swung to see that the job he had ordered had been completed to his satisfaction, casting a hard eye over the set of the canvas above them. As he turned back to her the wind ruffled his hair with a thousand sun-shot red-brown gleams.

“Why did you cut your hair?” she asked without thinking.

“Convenience on a windy deck, since I am not fond of stocking caps or the tarred pigtails most seamen wear. And for the same reason the Macedonians under Alexander the Great were shorn, to give no handhold to an enemy in close fighting.”

She tilted her head to one side. “It becomes you, for some reason. I wonder how I would look with short locks.”

“Like a grubby street urchin,” he answered, unsmiling.

“If by that you mean less female, then that might be a good thing.”

He flicked a look over her. “I doubt anything would achieve that. In my opinion, to cut so much as a lovelock would be a sacrilege.”

“What of my convenience — and safety in a close fight?” The memory of Valcour’s hand wrenching at her hair the night before made her pugnacious.

He gazed down at her, his green eyes shadowed before he gave an abrupt nod. “Do whatever you will. The decision, like the hair, is yours.”

When next he saw her, her hair no longer blew free but was close to her head. His face darkened to a scowl, then, as she came nearer, his mouth relaxed, curving in a slow smile. She had not cut it. Instead, she had plaited fat golden braids and wound them like a coronet around her head, fastening the ends with lengths of hemp pulled from a frayed rope. The effect was cooler and somewhat majestic, though not enough to discourage the stares that followed her where ever she went. There was nothing she could do about that, she realized without vanity, not so long as she remained the only woman on the seas.

The hot, blindingly bright days wore on. With little to do, Félicité wandered the ship, finally establishing a spot on the forecastle deck as her own where she could sit and watch the waves, the silver flash of flying fish, or the dorsal fins of the dolphins that sometimes raced ahead of their bow. She learned that Morgan had a supply of books in the captain’s cabin and persuaded the cabinboy to bring them out to her. Thereafter, she was to be found in the shade of an awning rigged from a spare sail, trying to keep the constant wind from fluttering the pages as she read. Often she was aware that some member of the crew pretended to a task that would take him near enough to glance under her canvas protection. They devoured her slender form with their eyes, raking over its curves so finely outlined by her men’s attire. In the main, she ignored them, though there was one hatchet-faced Britisher with close-set eyes and an oily, insinuating smile that disturbed her.

Morgan gave her no cause for complaint. He seldom came to bed before the early hours of the morning. If she addressed him, his reply was short and sharp-edged. The second time she offered to put salve on his back, he snapped at her and slammed out of the cabin to sleep the entire night on the open deck.

Usually he was gone by the time she awoke in the morning, though once or twice he overslept. On those occasions, she lay watching him as he splashed water over his face. Once she had stretched, lifting her arms, raising her breasts from the concealment of the coverlet. It had not been deliberate, not at first, not until she heard the swift intake of Morgan’s breath. Then she had arched her back, sighing.

Before the mirror of the washstand, Morgan had exclaimed with a soft oath, then used the linen toweling to staunch the flow of flood from the cut on his chin. Ill-tempered and driven, he had flung down his silver-handled razor and wiped away the soap, leaving one side of his face still stubbled as he fled the cabin.

They were three days out when Félicité, catching sight of Bast lounging at ease, summoned him to her canvas shelter with a quiet hail.

“I vow you have been avoiding me,” she accused him as he drew near. “Sit down and tell me why.”

“Not so, Mademoiselle Félicité,” he said, though he did not smile at her sally.

“Then why have you not spoken to me?”

“There is a certain etiquette in these matters.”

“Surely we have passed the point of formality,” she protested.

“Not so long as you share Morgan’s cabin and he is still my commanding officer.”

“The first, yes, that may be true. As for commanding, you are no longer in the army. Morgan is only the sailing master. He orders the set of the sails, nothing more. You are in all else his equal, are you not?” She studied him, at a loss to account for the constraint she sensed in the Spaniard.

He did not quite meet her eyes. “That — must be so, mademoiselle. I hadn’t thought of it.”

“Hadn’t thought of it? I am persuaded that for most it would be the most important consideration, short of easy riches.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Wouldn’t you? Why did you turn to piracy, then? You need not say it was to come in search of me,” she rallied him, “for I warn you I won’t believe it.”

“I have never been so happy as when I saw you alive and well; you must believe me when I say this, mademoiselle!”

“Very well, if I must, but that doesn’t tell me why you came.” In discovering Bast’s reasons she might also come nearer the truth about Morgan’s.

“Who can say?” he answered, looking out over the waves. “Call it — an impulse, if you will. A — a necessity. You must excuse me, now. I have duties to perform.”

She stared after him in perplexity. His strained manner and evasiveness were disturbing. Was he disappointed that she had fallen back under Morgan’s protection so quickly? She doubted that was the reason, for the manner in which it had come about was not unknown to the crew, not on so small a vessel. If he was reasonable he could not blame her. Did her masculine dress upset him, then? His brief glance had held in its Latin depths the same glint of admiration she had seen in New Orleans. What then was there in her situation aboard the Black Stallion, or his own, to cause such a change in him?