Fires of Delight (16 page)

He appeared to be suspended in midair, levitating, unsupported by anything that Selena could see.

Kneeling outside the circle of candles, naked and oiled herself, her eyes closed and her hands pressed together as if in prayer, was Yolanda Fee. Her lips moved from time to time, and when they did Selena noted that Jean would rise in delight, that his maleness throbbed as if he were being teased and stroked.

Yolanda was making love to him as if with her mind alone, the two of them lost utterly in some strange trance beyond Selena’s ken. Jean’s delight went on and on—possibly, if conscious, he could not have borne the bliss—and Yolanda began to writhe in ecstasy herself.

Transfixed and astounded, Selena could not tear herself away from the preternaturally gorgeous woman and the man upon whom she worked in a way so unfathomable, from the wonder of her sorcery.

Finally, Yolanda cried out, and Jean Beaumain cried out, and from his body erupted tide after tide after tide, which, as he settled to the blanketed earth, Yolanda Fee crept forward to consume.

Selena fled.

Yolanda was waiting for her inside the rose bedroom.

She was loosely clothed in a wrap of green silk. Her hair hung limp and wet around her triumphant face. She smelled strongly of strange perfume, and of Jean.

“I was just…outside…” Selena faltered, wondering what secret passage Yolanda could have taken to come so quickly here from the temple of delights.

“I know where you were,” the other said. “But it does not matter. What did you see?”

Selena sought words.

Yolanda smiled. “You saw only what you wished to see, what you wished to see in your own imagination.”

“But out there—”

“Out here?” asked Yolanda, stepping toward the French doors and leading Selena once again into the garden and down the flagstone path. “Out here? What?”

They came to the part of the path where the veil of vines and leaves seemed to hide the temple beyond. Yolanda moved the leaves aside…to reveal nothing but more leaves, more vines, and impenetrable undergrowth that ran on into the jungle of St. Crique Isle.

“You must be very careful of what you allow into your mind,” advised Yolanda helpfully, as she took Selena back inside the rose room. Selena sank down upon the bed, her senses spinning disorientedly, her usually clear mind in a turmoil of wonder.

“I want you to know,” said Yolanda, not at all threateningly, “that Jean is mine.”

“I love someone else…” Selena began. “I do not desire—”

“Ah. But he desires
you
.” With that, she knelt down beside the bed and took Selena’s hands in her own. “Listen,” she said fervently, as if she were Selena’s sister, “we must be friends. We must fight together.”

“Fight? Against whom?”

“Why, Martha Marguerite of course. She is insanely jealous of Jean. She will destroy both of us, if she can. Did you see that ring she wears?”

Selena managed a nod.

“It is the source of her powers. Somehow she must be divested of that ring. Will you help me?”

Selena remembered how Martha Marguerite had warned her against Yolanda’s black magic. “If I can,” she temporized. “But I don’t see
how
I can.”

“Leave it to me,” replied the other woman, with a sloe-eyed grimace that might have been a smile. “You help me when I ask it of you, and I shall do all in my power to speed you to your lover.”

“But I intend to go to him anyway, as soon as possible.”

“Yes, but do you know that Jean will seek to keep you here?”

“No, of course he won’t—”

Yolanda nodded soberly, knowingly. “Believe me. You must. Jean will attempt to keep you here, and Martha Marguerite, outraged at his attentions to you, will seek to destroy you. I have seen it—”

“You’ve
seen
it? Like a vision?”

“My power is not so great as Martha’s—because she possesses the ring—but I have managed to learn a few things. Trust me and be my friend, and all will be well with you.”

Yolanda stood up, moved to the door, and turned.

“Why do you wear that talisman around your neck?” she asked.

“This cross? It was given to me. I treasure it.”

Yolanda seemed doubtful. “You mean it is not a source of power?”

“What? No. Just a remembrance.”

Yolanda remained dubious. “But just trust me,” she said, going out.

And leaving Selena uncertain about whether she could trust anyone at all.

A musky whiff of savage scent, and the spilled smell of Jean Beaumain, hung in the air.

The initial flurry of hospitality extended to Selena at Hidden Harbor fairly overwhelmed her. A seamstress appeared to take her measurements—aboard the
Liberté
she’d regained the weight lost in prison—and to give her a gown to wear to dinner. A houseboy, dark, shy and soft-spoken, knocked on the door to ask, in French, if her quarters were adequate. Did she need more towels, pillows, linen? She did not; the rose room was equipped to meet the needs of the most demanding queen. And a servant appeared with tea, brandy, and a tray of biscuits and sweets.

Yet, while Selena appreciated the attention, she realized that the constant flow of servants posed a problem: how ought she to conceal the pouch of jewels?

Temporarily, she had hidden her inexplicable cache beneath the mattress, but that would not suffice for long. Who knew how many times a day they changed the beds in this white palace?

She looked around the rose room, thinking it over, calculating. The walls were solid plaster; the wardrobe was stark and empty; there were no bureaus or drawers. At length, she buried the pouch among the roots of a potted rubber plant, surreptitiously discarding the excess soil in the garden.

As darkness began to fall and the time to dine drew near, she took another long bath, groomed herself, and put on the dress
that the seamstress had brought her. It was satin, sleek and shiny, and had about it the voluptuous feel of a living thing. It was black, which displeased her. The color of mourning. But when she saw in the mirror how it set off her golden hair and the deep tan she’d acquired at sea, Selena felt better.

At least until, again, she began to experience the nervous, burning, needful sensations of physical arousal.

Pulling off the garment, looking, she found again inside the hem that mysterious, embroidered eye.

And thought immediately of Martha Marguerite’s ring.

Perhaps Yolanda, for all her strange ways, was right about the power possessed by the older woman.

She’d just decided to wear one of her own makeshift creations, damn it all, when there was a subdued rapping at her door.

Martha Marguerite entered, with a slippery white silk gown draped over her arm.

“Wear this to dinner,” the woman said, handing Selena the gown. “And don’t be alarmed. It is much in fashion at Versailles.”

Court of the French king, Louis XVI. Selena was impressed.

Martha Marguerite withdrew. Selena instantly inspected the hem, found neither mark nor symbol, and slipped on the dress.

And knew why Martha had expected her to be alarmed.

A tight-fitting, floor-length garment, it exposed a bit of her hips, all of her back, her left shoulder and left breast. She blushed even as she looked at herself in the mirror, reddening in face, throat, and all the way down to her bare breast, where her nipple stood at attention.

I can’t wear this!
she was thinking, when Jean Beaumain knocked and entered simultaneously.

“Jean!” she cried, covering herself with her hands.

He smiled. “When in Rome, Selena. Come, let’s go to dinner. And let us humor Martha. She wants tonight to seem as if we were among the nobles of Paris. Her one dream is to be among them again, as she was when she was young.”

Selena continued to balk.

“Come now,” he persisted. “She herself will be in a dress similar to yours.”

“When in Rome…” Selena repeated, steeling her nerve and following him out of the rose room. At least this dress did not elicit those dastardly sensations of arousal.

Also, to her surprise, she began to feel almost comfortable in the garment, and proud of her body.

Moments later, entering the dining room, she felt something else entirely. Already seated at the banquet table was Yolanda Fee. Her dress was identical to Selena’s!

The two women stared at one another in considerable hostility.

Also at the table, seated between Louis and Rafael, was Martha Marguerite, who had on a demure lavender creation, which covered her from throat to wrist, from clavicle to ankle.

The woman is toying with Yolanda and me
, Selena realized.

Veiling her discomfiture, acutely conscious of male eyes, she took her seat at the table on Jean’s right. Yolanda sat opposite him, brooding and remote. Only her great black eyes were alive.

“The light and the dark,” exuded Martha Marguerite, with a theatrical gesture toward the two young ladies. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

None of the men disagreed.

A servant came forward to pour champagne, and as Selena accepted the toast that Jean made in her behalf—“to a brave girl whose visit here we honor tonight”—she noted that her hand was a bit unsteady from tension. So was Yolanda’s, however, and Selena was secretly pleased, even though her opinion of Martha Marguerite had declined. It seemed the older woman was deliberately provoking some sort of confrontation.

Yet nothing like that happened.

The dinner proceeded from lobster bisque to roast peacock to turtle steak and tubers, from champagne to white wine to red, and a vastly pleasant, eminently civilized air filled the candlelit dining chamber. Rafael was somewhat taciturn by nature, but Louis possessed a quick, if somewhat bluff, sense of humor, and regaled them with tales of his boyhood in Brittany. He’d been the youngest of thirteen living children—eight others had died at birth or shortly thereafter—and it had been the dream of his parents to have at least one of their offspring enter the religious life.

“I protested,” he related, “but in the end they shipped me off to the local monastery. I was ten years old, but big for my age, and I had heard a great many stories from my older brothers. I decided the only way to escape my fate was to seem unworthy of it, so I sought out my confessor. ‘I have committed sins of the flesh,’ I said. He was somewhat alarmed, given my years, and inquired
about what these sins had been. Very penitently, I related everything my brothers had ever told me! I was expelled that very afternoon.”

“Ah, home!” sighed Martha Marguerite, after the laughter had subsided. “What I would not give to return!”

It was a feeling that Selena could understand.

“Why don’t you go back?” she asked, thinking there might be some dangerous or complicated reason that prevented such a trip.

“I shall, when Jean is ready to take me there. You did promise, didn’t you, Jean?”

Beaumain ducked his head and admitted that he had.

“But,” he said to Selena, “I don’t want to return myself until I settle with Chamorro and bring my trophies to throw upon the gates of the King’s palace. I want his majesty to regard well how an honest peasant deals with the savage cruelties of the rich and titled.”

“From what I have heard,” offered Rafael, “his majesty may soon learn precisely that from many quarters. France is becoming, more and more, a revolutionary tinderbox that will make the American war seem but an afternoon’s promenade.”

“Come, come,” said Martha soothingly, tolerantly, twirling a goblet of red wine in her long fingers. “The great majority of the people love their king. I realize that they do not much revere his queen, the Austrian, Marie Antoinette, but it is the stability of the upper order that has kept our beloved France ascendant for hundreds of years—”

“It is the nobility which is tearing France apart,” said Rafael. “The nobility and the clergy. Privilege,
pfffftt!
” he declared. “I tell you, the people will not bear it much longer.”

“Ah, but if you had had the life I enjoyed,” Martha went on as if she hadn’t even heard him, as if his opinions—the sincerity of which Selena could not doubt—did not matter, “you would think differently. Gracious, I see it as if it were before my very eyes, that great house of my father’s on the right bank of the Seine. It was five stories high with dormers beneath the steep, slanting slate roof. How I loved to go up there as a child and look out over Paris, and see the boats on the river, and Notre Dame! There is no sight like it in all the world. Summers we spent at our château in Côte d’Or.”

“Does your family still own these homes?” Selena inquired.

“Of course, my dear. And that is why I want Jean to take me back. If my dear husband Hugo had not died while building Hidden Harbor, I expect I would be in France right now.”

“You had better return soon then and see to your property,” commented Rafael. “When the tornado of revolution touches down on French soil, I suspect many nobles will be quickly relieved of such properties.”

“Never,” maintained Martha Marguerite, with a bit less assurance than she’d shown thus far. “But all the more reason for Jean to take me back soon. Jean?”

Beaumain smiled noncommittally.

Selena glanced at him, then looked past him toward Yolanda, who had said nothing whatever during the course of the meal. She held her tongue now as well, but Selena had noted that whenever Martha spoke of going back to France with Jean, the Haitian beauty showed a combination of anger and distress. Her large eyes widened in moody alarm; her dusky breast swelled with great, anxious inhalations.

Something else too: At every reference, no matter how casual, to Jean’s putative departure, the candles on the table seemed to blaze more brightly.

Testing a theory that was taking shape in her mind, Selena said: “Jean, I think it would be sweet of you to take Martha back to her home.”

Yolanda widened her eyes, scowling.

Again, the candlelight leapt.

It was as if Yolanda’s emotions were sent forth from her body into the very air with the power to touch and alter the state of surrounding objects.

“My own problem,” she said hastily, changing the subject, “is to find my friend, Royce Campbell. I hope I shall be able to do that soon.”