Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (155 page)

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. The 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.

By the time the sun started coasting down the sky, Félicité had prepared boiled cabbage palm, steamed plantains, and flat cakes made from the sawdust-like flour of the manioc baked on a flat stone before the fire. Served with a few slices of the roast pig left from the day before, it made a meal she was not ashamed of.

Morgan seemed to find it more than adequate. He wolfed down his portion and looked around hopefully for more. It was not surprising. He had worked as hard as any and harder than most. Several times during the day Félicité had glanced toward the ships drawn up in the cove, picking out his broad-shouldered form with his scarred back from the rest.

She had noticed in the last days on the ship, and here on the island also, that Morgan enjoyed physical labor, doing something with his hands. In many ways he seemed more in his proper element here, freed of the constraint of a uniform and the endless niggling details and petty restrictions that were the lot of a Spanish officer. It was a pity, she thought, that he had been unable to turn such thrusting energy into some worthwhile endeavor. For instance, the estate he had envisioned on the grant of land promised to him. O’Reilly had made a mistake in not keeping to his promise. Such men as Morgan McCormack would do much to make Louisiana the productive colony that it needed to be, should be.

What use was it to repine? Morgan had lost his land, and she had lost her home. There was nothing for them but this island and the sea and an uncertain future. She looked up to find Morgan watching her, a serious light in his green eyes.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I was wondering what you mean to do — later, I mean, when you are finished with all this.” She waved a hand at the ships in the harbor.

“Do? Why should I do anything?”

“You can’t go on like this forever.”

“Why not?”

“Because you aren’t likely to live that long!” she snapped, irritated by his deliberate obtuseness.

“Why should I not make my fortune by sacking English capitals? Like Iberville, who nearly bankrupted the Hudson Bay Trading Company by destroying Port Nelson and Fort William Henry, to say nothing of dozens of other English fishing villages in North America, before he became the respected founder of the fair city of New Orleans. If he can live so exciting and honored a life, and die in his bed, why not it?”

“He may have died in his bed, but he was put there by a tropical fever before he reached thirty-five, not something you would wish to emulate, I hope. But at least he had his country to back him and to accept his allegiance. To my knowledge, you have none. From whence, then, will come your honors?”

“Most likely the first country I tender a bribe,” he answered with easy cynicism. “What piques my curiosity, my sweet, is why you are so concerned.”

“That must be obvious,” she countered. “For the moment my future is linked with yours.”

“So it is. You are my messmate, my bedmate, my woman — as far as the other men know or can tell. If you are unhappy with the arrangement, there is Bast over there proudly grieving. Or perhaps you would prefer the good captain? He has the undoubted advantage of being one of your countrymen.”