Authors: Vanessa Royall
Fires of Delight
13. Longchamps and the Molines
21. The Worst of All Possible Worlds
Vanessa Royall
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1986 by M.T. Hinkemeyer
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email
[email protected]
First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-414-1
Certain of the historical events depicted or referred to in this story have been compressed in time for fictional purposes, in particular the years between the American and French revolutions. Those monumental uprisings of the human spirit, born of a common desire for liberty yet dissimilar in their specifics, provide the background for the ongoing story of Selena MacPherson, heroine of
Flames of Desire
. I want to thank the many readers who have written to me, requesting a sequel to that book. And I hope the long wait for
Fires of Delight
will prove to have been worthwhile.
V.R
.
Escape into Danger
Selena MacPherson’s cell in the Battery fortress was eight feet wide, six feet deep, and just about six feet from damp stone floor to dripping stone ceiling. If she stood on tiptoe, the top of her head came within a few inches of the mortar-chinked rocks. Moisture seeped slowly through the walls too—the cell was below water level in New York harbor—coating the stones with a dewlike film. With a fingertip, she traced the American revolutionary motto,
Don’t tread on me!
The brave words stood out clearly for a moment, but then the constantly seeping dampness oozed forth to blot them out.
Selena, cold, wet, and alone, was waiting to be interrogated by British Lieutenant Clay Oakley on suspicion that she had aided and abetted the cause of the revolution and the armies of George Washington in their war to throw off the colonial yoke.
Oakley’s suspicion was well-founded.
“You are never defeated unless you believe it,” said Selena aloud, steeling herself against the coming ordeal with the favorite expression of her beloved Royce Campbell. Oakley was sure to question her about Royce, who had won dashing reputation and a small fortune running guns and ammunition through the British naval blockade to Washington and his men. She and Royce were both exiles from their native Scotland, she a nobleman’s daughter, he a scion of the fabled Highlands clan. In the eyes of the government of His Majesty, George III, they were less than outlaws. Selena had seen likenesses of herself on handbills affixed to the walls of New York.
DEAD OR ALIVE
, these notices proclaimed.
ONE THOUSAND POUND STERLING REWARD!
Quite an honor, indeed, for a young woman who had fled Scotland years before, penniless and condemned, her father dead at the hands of a crown assassin, her ancestral home, Coldstream Castle, seized by the English monarch.
“My enemies make me strong,” she murmured in self-encouragement. Because of the fate that had befallen her father and family, she had come to detest all hereditary monarchs with a pure, savage fire, a peerless, driving emotion which had drawn her instinctively toward the Colonial cause.
And which had landed her, now, in a British dungeon.
An iron door clanged open at the far end of the taper-lit corridor outside her cell, hurried footsteps sounded on the stones, and Lance Corporal Phineas Bonwit appeared outside Selena’s iron-barred door. A grinning, towheaded Yorkshire lout, he brought her thrice-daily rations of black bread and barley porridge, and escorted her for an hour each afternoon to the walled-in cubicle known as the exercise yard, where he alternately leered and ogled as she trudged back and forth in her gray, sacklike prison garment.
“The lieutenant’s a’ready t’ go t’ work on ye now, missy,” Bonwit said, in the thick accents of his homeland. “Pray put on this blindfold, eh? I’ll have t’ be takin’ ye to ’im.”
He unlocked her cell door and handed her a stinking strip of coarse woolen cloth, which she reluctantly placed over her eyes and tied behind her head, cringing inwardly as she did so. She had been permitted only one visitor thus far, a charitable churchwoman given to calling upon the ill and imprisoned, and who had left Selena a small chunk of lye soap, a towel, and—wonder of wonders—a brush that the prisoner had used to groom her long, shining blond hair. Those locks were made for tiaras, not rags, but Selena had already known the best and the worst of life. She’d learned how to endure degradation without relinquishing a belief in a better life, a better time for which—she was sure—all humans yearned. Even Corporal Bonwit, who now grasped her elbow, propelling her forcefully into the darkness.
If there is a way to rescue me
, she thought,
Royce will find it. Had he not, in the past, fashioned a hundred ploys and ruses with which to outfox the clever British? Had he not, more than once, cheated death itself?
Yet this hope brought small warmth and less succor. Even if Royce guessed that Oakley had brought her to the Battery fortress, he would have to cross water in order to reach her, scale stone walls, overpower dozens of English guards and—still more difficult—find her cell. She didn’t even know exactly where in the
vast stronghold she was being kept: the blindfold, always worn outside her cell, prevented any chance of her getting her bearings.
“Word t’ the wise, missy,” offered the corporal as he pushed her along, “best t’ tell Lieutenant Oakley what he wants t’ know right off. Save y’self the sufferin’ an’ the pain. Nobody can beat it anyway. They all talk in the end. I seen it happen time an’ again with my very own eyes.”
I shall tell him nothing
, vowed Selena, with an attempt at bravery that was not totally reassuring. Because of her association with Royce and, through him, with revolutionary espionage in New York, she knew a great deal of information that Oakley would find valuable. The problem was that she did not know what
he
knew, or what had been happening in the outside world since her arrest.
It was incredible how suddenly the borders of her world had changed. Having received word through a friend, New York businessman Gilbertus Penrod, that Oakley’s agents were on their trail, she and Royce had slipped out of the city and fled on horseback to Jamaica Bay on the south coast of Long Island. There Royce’s great black ship, the
Selena
, rode at anchor, with its majestic, towering masts, its three tier of cannon that had as much firepower as any ship in the British navy, and, atop the mainmast, that cavalier swath of Campbell plaid, Royce’s flag. But just as Selena and her betrothed had reached the water’s edge, urging their mounts into the cold surf, they had been attacked, set upon and separated, by Oakley’s dragoons. Selena had last glimpsed Royce clinging to the boarding ladder of his ship, one arm stretched out to her, in promise more than in farewell, his face a mask of horror and disbelief.
Until we meet again
, she vowed, fighting back tears of loss behind the blindfold. She could not now permit herself to remember his long, hard body, nor how it had felt to hold him, to know his limitless stallion’s power. And she would weaken, too, if she thought now of his touch upon her, or of her fingers on him, on his body or tangled at midnight in his black, wild hair. The magic of the emotions he evoked would forever be mysterious: how his dark, unyielding eyes so quickly softened when she gave herself to him, how tender were the kisses of his strong, almost arrogant mouth.
Selena could not let herself think of those wonders, so instead,
despite the blindfold, she concentrated, counting her steps, remembering the sensations of this passage through darkness. Sudden perceptions of empty air beside her meant that she was being taken past other cells along the corridor. She counted eight of these before she and Bonwit reached the iron door. She knew that there were other prisoners in the fortress with her, but conversation was forbidden under pain of the lash. Then the corporal turned her toward the left. Twenty-four steps. Up a staircase, thirteen steps. Straight ahead for a hundred and ten paces, then up another flight of stairs. She smelled sea air and sensed natural light rather than the torches of the corridor. Bonwit hurried her along now, fifty paces, maybe a few more. He stopped her, swung open a door, and pushed her, not urgently, into a room.
“Here she be, Lieutenant,” Bonwit said obsequiously, “just as ye ordered. Ye wish me t’ remain?”
“No.” The voice was deep and resonant, but cold as ice. “No, just remove her blindfold and withdraw.”
Bonwit did as he was commanded. Selena blinked in the sudden light and stifled a gasp. She had heard much about Lieutenant Clay Oakley, chief of British military intelligence in America, had heard of his cunning and cruelty and fanatical devotion to his monarch. But the sight of the man was even more disconcerting, and she understood why he usually remained out of sight, acting through his network of agents. His head was abnormally large, an effect enhanced by total baldness, although he could not have been more than thirty years old. She wondered momentarily if he had been in a fire, because he had neither eyebrows nor lashes. Large, colorless, frightening eyes studied her as she stared at him, and his unusually small mouth twisted strangely beneath a bushy red mustache that appeared to be pasted onto his upper lip. She realized that he was smiling.
“You look startled, Selena,” he said, addressing her in a parody of courteous familiarity, his voice at once limpid and quietly terrifying. “Don’t be. I know you are partial to a man with a visage more appealing to the female eye, but I think you may find me worthy in other respects.”
Oakley was seated at a small writing table on which Selena spied a stack of blank, cream-colored parchment, several quill pens laid in a neat row, and a small glass fountain of India-blue ink. Slowly, deliberately, as if he were enjoying himself, the lieutenant
stood up so that she could take a closer look at him. He was not overly tall, perhaps six feet without the thick-heeled boots he wore, but his body was massive. His shoulders bulged beneath the fine fabric of his red-coated officer’s uniform with its fringed epaulets and gold braid. His waist tapered to a wide, black shining leather belt. And the muscles of his powerful thighs bulged alarmingly in tight white breeches.
“You do not know the man who can best me,” he said, again with that tiny, twisted smile.
The two of them stood there facing each other, the slim, fair young woman, whose wide, slightly slanted violet eyes could not hide a hint of defiance even under these circumstances, and the seemingly self-assured officer whose strength was as apparent as the brutal intelligence flickering in his immense eyes. Those eyes, and the mind behind them, would not miss much, if anything. Selena could not imagine a more intimidating interrogator.
She was puzzled, however. This room was no torture chamber. The only furnishings were Oakley’s table and chair. A large, rectangular skylight admitted flooding warmth and shafts of sunlight that sparkled on the highly polished oaken floor. The walls were hung with—she counted quickly—about twenty fine, framed paintings and portraits, among which she recognized the small-eyed, heavily jowled visage of George III. The paintings, mainly English landscapes and hunting scenes, were reverently, beautifully done, soft-hued and evocative. Clearly the artist loved England as much as she herself appreciated the sere, stark moors of her homeland and the wild Highlands that rolled on to the north.
