Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (158 page)

His voice was low and hurried. He flicked a look at Morgan. The other man sent them a hard stare, then leaned close to hear Isabella as she spoke over the increasing noise.

“I don’t know,” she began.

“Please, the time grows short.”

Her lips curved in a smile of determined gaiety. “But the night has only begun.”

“I wasn’t speaking of this night only—” He stopped, closing his mouth in a tight line, though the look of pleading did not fade from his eyes.

How uncomplicated he was, and how faithful. Did he fear that she and Morgan would be reconciled before he could make his declaration? He need not. The possibility was remote. But why should she not allow him to speak? There could be no harm in it.

“Very well,” she said, “later.”

Before a half hour had passed, the food was gone, down to the last crisp curl of pork skin. While the rum punch made another round, a jew’s harp, a squeeze box, and a fiddle were brought out. A man from the Prudence danced a hornpipe as his shipmates bellowed the words. A jig followed, and then a quadrille and a gavotte. The seamen pulled the women to their feet and whirled them over the sand. Dipping and swaying, laughing, staggering, they kept time to the music.

The inky waves pounded on the shore as the tide came in, sending salt spray toward them in a fine mist. The stars sifted down, hanging just above the sea as if caught in a netting of cloud. The fires burned down to red embers over which small devil flames played. The shadows of the palm forest darkened, becoming impenetrable, and the dark crowned heads of the trees rearing toward the sky were silhouetted, blackness upon blackness. Gradually, the crowd about the table grew thinner as men and women drifted into the woods. The sound of muttered voices and small panting cries echoed on the wind.

Then from the sea rose the glittering edge of a silver disc. The water took on a lighter, more turquoise tint, and the sky softened to gray. By small jerks visible to the naked eye, the great, round, full moon leaped upward. It threw down a glaring track along which waves rolled, and silvered the world with brightness so hard and blazing that the dimmest printed folio could be read with ease.

There were only a few couples left at the table. They gazed at each other with drunken ardor, or else were locked together with cohesive mouths hungrily agape. Turning toward the head of the table, Félicité saw with a small sense of shock that Captain Bonhomme sat alone, nursing a mug of rum and staring with brooding eyes at the rising moon. Morgan and Isabella were gone.

Félicité drew her feet under her, preparing to rise. Bast came quickly erect, putting a hand under her elbow to help her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I — I don’t know. Shall we walk?”

“If you like.”

He fell into step beside her, retaining a light grasp on her arm. Under the circumstances, the beach seemed to offer the least chance of embarrassing encounters. By common consent, they turned in that direction. Bast shifted to walk nearest the water’s edge, touching his fingers to her arm once more. The wind ruffled his hair, fluttering the ribbon of his queue, and slapped his shirt collar against his cheek. It sent the ends of Félicité’s hair flying and billowed her skirts so that she was forced to keep one hand on them to hold them down.

The cove where the ships were hove to had a shape like a sickle. On the two curving points at either end, the palm forest grew almost to the water’s edge, blocking the view of the beach farther along the island. The thatched hut shared by Félicité and Morgan was near the western end of the half circle. Almost by instinct, Félicité glanced toward it as they passed, but it sat dark and still and, to all appearances, empty. They took a narrow path that cut across the westernmost point of the cove, passing under the bent and twisted shape of sea pine. Before them lay the long stretch of open beach, shining pale gold with the light of the moon.

In the shadow of that thin band of forest, Bast halted, his fingers tightening on Félicité’s arm so that she stopped beside him. “Querida, my dearest one,” he said. “Once I asked you to come to me unwed. That was a grievous mistake, perhaps the most terrible I have made in my life. I should have offered you my heart, my life, my lands that will come to me from my father, in short, everything that I am, I have, or ever hope to own, and with it, my name. I beg you to forgive me for the omission, and to accept it now.”

What had she expected? A declaration of love to soothe her shattered vanity? An expression of desire that she could not answer in kind, but might, if he were gentle and caring, have agreed to assuage on this night with Morgan and Isabella somewhere on the island together? She should have known it would not be so simple.

“Oh, Bast,” she said. “It’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible. When we leave here we can return to New Orleans—”

“Return to New Orleans! It cannot be.”

“Why? Is it because you fear how people will behave toward you? I assure you they understand now, since you left so soon after your father’s death, that what you had done, your association with a Spanish officer, was for his sake. They honor you for your sacrifice, even if it was in vain.”

She stared at him, wishing she could see his features more clearly there in the moving shadows. “If that is true, I can only be thankful, and indebted to you for telling me of it. But soon enough they will learn that I am with this band of pirates, a corsair’s woman. What will they say then? And what will they say of Juan Sebastian Unzaga, a Spanish officer turned renegade? If you return you will be arrested on sight.”

It was a long moment before he spoke, and then his voice held a tone of reluctance, as though there were arguments to be presented for his case if he cared to use them. “Yes — I suppose you are right. We could go to Havana then, and from there take ship for Spain.”

“But surely even there you will be a wanted man?”

“My father is not without influence at court.” He made a careless gesture with one hand. “Something may be done to clear my name.”

A frown drew Félicité’s brows together. He was taking a most cavalier attitude toward his career as a buccaneer. “Bast,” she said slowly, “I don’t think you realize—”

“But I do. I realize I love you, Félicité, that I want you as my wife. Whatever it takes to have you, to pluck you from this damnable coil in which you are caught, I am ready to do.”

It seemed so remote, this future that he was suggesting, like a dream that could not possibly come true. The only reality was the island and the sea and the ships that waited. What more was there? What more could there ever be?

She turned from him, walking once more so that he had either to hold her by force, release her, or walk with her. He chose the latter course, falling into step beside her.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head so that her hair streamed like a gold curtain behind her.

“I do,” he said. “Only put yourself in my hands and I will arrange everything.”

“What of Morgan?”

“What of him? You owe him nothing, since he has not even seen fit to tell you—”

“To tell me what?” she demanded, her voice taut. “The things you have said? He did offer marriage once, and I refused.”

He caught her arm, swinging her to face him there on the empty stretch of moon-silvered sand. “And what of love, Félicité? Has he offered you love, as I do?”

She shook her head, and the anguish was plain to see in her velvet-brown eyes there in the warm white light of the moon. He caught her close with a soft groan, holding her against him.

“Ah, Félicité, forgive me.”

There was comfort in his arms, but nothing more. “That, yes,” she whispered, “but I cannot marry you. You deserve better.”

“Better? Such a thing cannot be.”

“It can. You deserve someone who can love you in return.”

“And you, Félicité, what do you deserve?”

He kissed her then, a passionless caress, a reverent touch of his firm lips accompanied by the brush of his mustache.

He drew back, his eyes bright, his mouth curving in a smile. “So long have I wanted to do that—” He stiffened, swinging his head to stare along the shore.

A man and a woman were just stepping from the shadows of the forest’s edge perhaps a hundred yards away. The woman was a dark wraith in colorless clothing, marked by the pale gleam of her shoulders and face; the man’s shirt shone with refracted light, while his hair that ruffled in the wind gleamed like old copper coins.

Morgan came toward them over the sands, while Isabella stood where he had left her. After a moment La Paloma picked up her skirts and followed behind him. The urge to run swept in upon Félicité, though it was not caused by fear of what he would do so much as it was by the transparency of her pain at his defection. Hard upon that knowledge came anger that she would let herself be so bemused, so dependent upon his continued attention, whatever form it took.

Morgan’s strides were long and quick; by the time Bast had turned, squaring his shoulders, he was upon them.

“Hold on,” Bast began with an uplifted hand.

“Hold on and be damned! What is the meaning of this?” Morgan set his hands on his hips as he demanded an answer.

“I resent both your tone and your attitude,” the Spaniard said with a proud lift of his head.

“Do you?” Morgan said sarcastically. “I thought you, Bast, of all the men on this island, could be trusted!”

“Trusted? To what end? To hold your place for you?”

“Trusted to treat Félicité as the lady she is, instead of like a common—”

“Take care!” Bast exclaimed. “You are on no very firm ground there yourself. Any treatment she receives from me must be better than she has had from you.”

As Morgan stared at him, Isabella glided to where they stood then, taking Morgan’s arm, curling her fingers around it as though she would restrain him. The Spanish-Irish noblewoman glanced from one to the other, her brows lifted in inquiry. “What is the matter?”

When no one answered, she looked to Félicité, saying with great directness, “Are they quarreling over you?”

It was Bast who answered. “It would seem so, yes. Morgan objects to my being here with her, and with reason, since I have taken the opportunity to ask her to be my wife.”

“You what?” Morgan demanded.

“You heard me.”

“So I did,” Morgan ground out. “Tell me, when will the nuptials be held? Who will perform them, and where, since there is neither priest nor chapel on this island?”

“I explained—”

“I can just imagine,” Morgan snapped, cutting across his words.

Bast frowned. “No, I didn’t mean that the way you think.”

“Then how did you mean it? I think you had better tell me.”

“Of course,” Bast said, and inclined his head as if the suggestion had been an order.

“If you will excuse us, ladies,” Morgan said, and with a curt nod toward the deserted beach behind him, swung from them. Bast fell into step beside him, and they moved away, their words drifting back, indistinguishable, blown on the wind.

Félicité lifted a brow, her considering gaze on Morgan’s broad back. There was something here she did not understand, something perhaps she was not meant to understand.

“Well,” Isabella said, “congratulations.”

Félicité turned to the other woman. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“To have two such men fighting over you is quite an honor.”

“To some, possibly; not to me.”

“Ah, you have a preference then. Why could you not have said so and saved ill feeling between them?”

“How do you know I did not?” Félicité said, her tone tart.

“When a woman has been firm enough in her answer, a suitor no longer clings to hope. Unless a woman is promiscuous, enjoying the personal attentions of two men at once, this is the wisest course.”

“You speak from the height of great experience with keeping lovers apart, I suppose?”

“As it happens, yes.”

The woman’s air of superiority was unendurable. “I would not have thought, in your present occupation, that many occasions for disappointing the men whose attention you attract would arise.”

La Paloma’s eyes gleamed more like those of a hawk than of a dove. “Let me give you a bit of advice, my dear young woman. It is never intelligent to judge from appearances.”

“You do mean something by that, I expect?”

“Oh yes, several things.”

Félicité’s nerves were so tightly stretched she wanted to scream. Instead, she retreated into frozen politeness. “Tell me about them.”

“To begin with, my position aboard the ship in the harbor is not what you think. It is an amusement only, this voyage, because of a friend whom I knew when I was younger. In a fit of whimsy, she named her ship of women after me, and it pleased me to make her — if you will excuse the expression — maiden journey with her.”

“How — interesting,” Félicité commented, her disbelief patent.

Isabella’s lips tightened. “Then there is the matter of Morgan. It was naive of you to concoct this little drama for his delectation. You will find he despises such subterfuges.”

“You think I planned that he should see me with Bast? Nothing was further from my mind! I did not even know you and he were there!”