Fires of Delight (19 page)

He stepped back from the doorway and Selena saw the enraged Haitian villagers advancing upon the building.

“They’re going to kill me!” he cried, slamming and barring the door. “They’ve already killed a British soldier.”

“Why?”

“Because I was in league with Campbell, you fool! And Campbell—whom they do not know—brought the British in his wake, and now three of their people are dead. That bald British officer tortured them to find out where Campbell had sailed to. Of course, the victims did not know.”

Angry howls, increasing in intensity, rose outside the store.

“Why didn’t the British torture
you?”
Selena asked.

“Because I
hid,”
he snapped. “And I doubt that those crazed people outside are going to give me much credit for it. They blame me for what’s happened.”

Selena’s thoughts turned to her own safety, but not before she had registered the troubling information that, yet again, Royce had been involved in the kind of dangerous, sinister transaction which had been his forte in the old days, and which had colored his name in the ports of the seven seas.

She and the man heard a dull
thunk
on the thatched roof of the store. Then they heard a slow, crackling hiss.

“They’ve set us afire!” He pulled a small derringer from his boot. “If they get us,” he said, “fire will seem preferable to their ways of pain. I prefer a bullet.” He gestured toward Selena with the pistol. “You?”

The grass roof had flared fully now. Already heat and smoke
were filling the store. The sounds of the people outside were inhuman. Perhaps the man was right, but…

“No,” she said.

“Suit yourself.” He put the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The shot from such a weapon was not sufficiently powerful to blow a man’s head off, but it was deadly enough. The man’s head jerked forward, then back, and he slumped to the dirt floor as if he’d been struck a knockout blow in a prizefight. A bit of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth and his eyes blinked spasmodically.

Selena bent over him. Flames were licking at the walls of the store now, and she knew that she had to get out before the fiery thatch collapsed upon her. The derringer had fallen on the floor next to the man. She picked it up. Useless for anything now! It was a one-shot weapon.

“
Ahh!
” he said, looking at her. His features were contorted and his eyes were fading. There was surprisingly little devastation, only that thin trickle at the corner of the man’s mouth, a bit more blood pooling in his left ear.

“Why did you have to do that?” she asked helplessly, bending over him and cradling his head in her hands. As she did so, Erasmus Ward’s cross came out from beneath the top of her dress and hung down.

With his last flicker of life and knowledge, the man’s eyes widened.

“Sorbontay!”
he gasped.

And died.

Selena had no time to contemplate either the word or his death, because a section of burning roof collapsed. She leaped away from the flames and headed toward the door. Throwing aside the bar with which it had been secured, she dashed outside to be seized immediately by three enraged Haitian men. They howled in triumph as they grabbed her, an exultation that was only slightly lessened when they determined that the man in the store was dead.

“Wait!” cried Selena. “Please!” But they dragged her to the center of the square where their kinfolk lay dead, and one of the men produced a long, curved, evil-looking blade.

I’m going to die
, thought Selena.
I’m really going to die
…

At a time like this, it was said that a person’s past life flashed before her eyes. All that Selena could remember, though, was her sixth or seventh birthday, when she’d received two kittens, one black and the other white, from her mother. She’d named them Yin and Yang.

The blade flashed, slicing Selena’s dress from throat to hem and leaving a bloody slash no wider than the mark of a pencil from her Adam’s apple to her abdomen.

The crowd howled in glee.

Then little Campanale and the men from the sloop raced into the square, waving and shouting. The man with the knife hesitated. Selena pulled her dress closed, feeling the burning wound of the blade.

Campanale began to speak excitedly, angrily, in the dialect of the region. Several times he mentioned Jean Beaumain.

The man with the knife stepped away from Selena with an embarrassed expression on his swarthy face. The rest of the crowd moved back as well. Campanale walked over and inspected the damage done to Selena.

“It is fortunate,” he quavered, in his falsetto tones, “that Jean Beaumain’s name is respected by these people.” He took her hand. “Come, let us go.”

Yolanda and Martha Marguerite were not especially pleased to witness Selena’s return to Hidden Harbor, but the older woman was solicitous about the knife wound. She provided an ointment and maternal advice as Selena applied the stinging white salve.

“Rub it thoroughly but carefully into the cut,” she said. “It should help heal the wound in a matter of days. How fortunate you were not more seriously hurt.”

“I would have been, I assure you. At least now I know that I can trust Campanale anyway.”

Martha did not respond to that assumption.

Selena told of the European man who had been in the village.

“Yes, that is—was—LaValle. He had a most unsavory reputation. It was said that he operated a smuggling business out of Port-de-Paix. The natives tolerated him because, in addition to his clandestine affairs, he brought trade to the village and its inhabitants.

This time it was Selena who did not respond. She was thinking
that if Royce had had dealings with LaValle, he too must be involved in business that was less than upright. The thought saddened her greatly, because now she could no longer try to deny the possibility that her betrothed had never really changed his stripes at all. Was Royce, at his core, still the unprincipled adventurer and opportunist of old?

No, I won’t believe it!
she declared to herself.

And yet…

“Does the word ‘sorbontay’ mean anything to you?” she asked Martha Marguerite.

“Why, no, I don’t believe so, my dear. Should it?”

“I guess not,” Selena replied. “It doesn’t mean anything to me, either.”

Yet two men, two very different men, Ward and LaValle, were dead. And both of them had spoken the same dying word.

“Well, the way things have turned out, I must proceed with my plan to investigate Yolanda’s quarters.”

Martha Marguerite once again promised her cooperation, and on the appointed day she withdrew hastily from table—Jean had not returned from Cuba and the three women were lunching by themselves—complaining of internal distress. A short time later, as Yolanda speculated with Selena about the nature of Martha’s malady, a servant brought news that the older woman was calling for the Haitian girl’s aid.

Yolanda excused herself with a smile of satisfaction, and went to minister to Martha Marguerite.

Tension mounted within Selena, but she forced herself to appear calm, finished the crab-and-lobster casserole she’d been eating, and even called for a small bunch of grapes and some Madeira. Finally, she motioned the servants to clear the table, got up, and started toward the rose room. When she was certain that no one observed her, she doubled back, slipped out the front door, and walked along the veranda to the west wing of the sprawling, gracious house. Whether by accident or plan, Selena and Yolanda lived at opposite ends of Hidden Harbor.

Yolanda’s quarters opened onto a small garden similar to the one that Selena enjoyed. Glancing about, Selena swung over the veranda’s railing and dropped into the grassy garden. While her own was well-tended, however, the bushes and flowers here had been allowed to grow wild, creating the effect of a miniature wilderness.
The air was hot and still beneath great, wet, hanging leaves, and Selena began to perspire immediately.

One second later she was as cold as a North Sea stone.

Something was sliding toward her through the grass.

Selena had assumed that the Haitian beauty would take some precautions to protect her rooms from trespass—she had equipped herself to deal with locks, if necessary—but a serpent was something else entirely. Lifting her skirts, she dashed toward the flagstones outside Yolanda’s French doors, pressing herself against the glass and wood.

She could not see the snake itself—the grass was too high—but she did see the blades of grass ripple and shiver as the serpent changed directions and came toward the French doors.

Oh, Lord, now what?
Selena thought. The damn things had poor eyesight. But they hunted unerringly by scent alone.

And now she remembered Rafael telling her about snakes being used in plots of vengeance, the scent of a piece of clothing…

Had Yolanda done something like that? Had she taken an article of Selena’s apparel and trained a serpent to strike?

Then Selena saw the snake’s hooded head rear up over the top of the grass, swiveling this way and that in eerie menace, looking for her, seeking the scent.

Just get inside!
she told herself, as the serpent, goldish-black and ugly, lewd in its peculiarly glistening thickness, slithered up onto the flagstones.

Prepared to break a pane of glass if need be, Selena tried the handle on the French doors. It moved. The door swung open. Selena slid inside. The snake, coiling and uncoiling, edged sideways over the flagstones and struck at the glass with its jagged yellow fangs.

The glass did not break, but the serpent was there, as if on guard.

Selena, just on the verge of abandoning this entire mission and getting out of there while she was still able, turned away from the French doors. What she saw in the room struck her motionless. This was not a bedchamber at all, but rather some form of depraved, savage chapel. Two of the walls were black, two red, and thick red draperies obliterated most of the forest-heavy daylight A low, black table, much like an altar, stood on the floor in the center of the room. Seven black candles burned thereon, illuminating
what appeared to be a glittering black pillar made of terra-cotta, or something similar. Facets of the pillar gleamed and wavered as the candles burned and, peering more closely, Selena realized that the artifact was larger at its top than its base, an unmistakable, contoured shape of the male phallus.

Then Selena became aware, too, of Yolanda’s singular scent throughout the room. Musky, insinuating and perverse, the fragrance seemed to close around her. It was as if a living thing, shapeless and insubstantial but undeniably
there
, were tempting her flesh toward unspeakable sins. Selena felt a glowing rush in her loins, and there was a sudden, vacant place where her heart had been. Writhing images of Royce, of Jean Beaumain, of Sean Bloodwell and all the men she had ever known swarmed in her mind, and she realized that she was panting as if in the high throes of stark, unholy lust.

Only the bizarre, disgustingly familiar lumps on the altar, spaced evenly at the base of the black pillar, kept Selena from throwing herself down on one of the many low couches in the room, there to stroke and flail at the burning root of need.

Curiosity, horrible as its object proved to be, impelled her to reject desire. She stepped forward, farther away from the serpent whose forked tongue hissed on the glass, and knelt before the altar for a closer look.

Thirty eyes stared back at her. Thirty dull zombie eyes in fifteen shrunken heads.

One of them had belonged, a short time ago, to LaValle of Port-de-Paix.

Choking down her gorge, trembling, Selena glanced at the others. Jean Beaumain had been gone now for several weeks, and…

But his face was not among these men and women who had come, by God knew what misfortune, into the devilishly skilled hands of Yolanda Fee. Their skin was uniformly wrinkled like the outsides of dried, brown apples, and their hair was as lustreless as their eyes. Yet it was possible, even by candlelight, to see that most of the men had been attractive in life, and that the women had been beautiful. They may, indeed, have been Yolanda’s lovers and rivals. For a dark, fleeting moment, Selena imagined her own little head resting upon this evil altar.

Abruptly, she got to her feet, forcing herself to think. Yes, she was here all right, but what of use had she learned?

That Yolanda was a witch?

Selena had already been told.

That she commanded access to unspeakable secrets?

Selena saw no reason to doubt.

That she was, at last, consummately dangerous?

Selena believed.

You’re here to find that pouch of wealth
, she reminded herself. So, forcing back the loathing evoked by the altar, and the concupiscence elicited by the mocking scent, Selena began a search. The couches revealed nothing except the fact that given their unusual shapes, each had been designed to facilitate a different position in the physiological symphony of love. The altar she had already inspected. Even the walls and floors appeared to conceal nothing, although Selena was afraid that her tap-tap-tapping could be heard throughout the house. She ran her hands over every inch of drapery fabric, again with no result.

Then in the gloom at the room’s innermost wall, Selena found what at first appeared to be another curtain, but which, when pushed aside, revealed a drawing room of conventional design, the furniture somewhat heavy but well-made, the furnishings and paintings unremarkable, common. There was a bedroom adjoining this chamber, with everything neat and predictable, including a big brass four-poster with an embroidered silk canopy atop. Either Yolanda Fee sheltered two very different people in her one devil’s bait of a body, or she was very adept at showing whichever nature she chose to whom she chose.

Selena began to wonder how much Jean Beaumain himself really knew about his mistress. The short walk from the primitive chapel to these spacious, European-style rooms would have taken a civilization twenty thousand years to traverse.

And then Selena entered the combined wardrobe and dressing room.