Fires of Delight (22 page)

There was only one span of time for each living soul, and to lose whom you most loved during your time was the most terrible thing that could befall.

Oh, yes, did Selena not know it!

Finally, when they had sailed almost all the way around La Tortue, Selena came down from the crow’s nest. She had not given up, but she was immensely sad and disspirited. Jean Beaumain was standing at the ship’s railing, scanning the coastline through his spyglass.

“We might as well go back to Hidden Harbor,” she said.

“Perhaps not just yet,” he answered, handing her the glass. “Don’t jump to conclusions, but I’ve seen something that might warrant investigation.”

She looked toward shore. At first she saw nothing but the beach sweeping up to a palm-fringed thicket, with a small village in the distance. Then a flutter of colored cloth caught her eyes, many pieces of cloth attached to wooden stakes that stuck out of the earth. No, they were not merely stakes: they were makeshift crosses.

And the rags affixed to them were scraps of plaid.

Campbell plaid?

“Oh, no—”

“Do you want to go ashore and have a look?” Jean asked.

“I…yes. That is, I don’t—”

She didn’t know if she could face it.

Jean understood. “You ought to know for sure,” he said. “I’ll go for you.”

Jean anchored the
Liberté
and rowed the dinghy a few hundred yards to the beach. She saw him inspecting the eerie little graveyard beneath the palm trees, and then he was out of sight for a time among the trees. When he reappeared, he waved to her, then rowed back to the ship.

She watched his approach from the railing, and when she saw the half-worried, half-sympathetic expression on his face, she guessed that her worst fears had been realized.

“Selena,” he said, still in the dinghy, looking up at her, “perhaps for your…for your peace of mind in the future, you should come ashore.”

Stifling her sobs, already too numb to feel the full flood of grief, she clambered down the rope ladder and got into the little boat. Jean said nothing as he bent to the oars, taking her on a journey so short that it seemed to last forever.

Nine crosses stood in the sand, each bearing a tiny flutter of Campbell plaid, each bearing the initials of the man who lay beneath. The men who had died during the
Selena’s
battle with the
Prince William
lay here. And on one of the crosses, scratched deeply into the wood, was the word “Campbell.”

This is how it ends
, Selena thought, kneeling down upon the sand before the cross.
This is how it…

Then she noticed an old woman watching her from the shadows of the surrounding foliage. Cronelike and withered, she regarded Selena with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

Jean Beaumain brought the woman over to Royce’s grave. “This is Lodie,” he said, “who comes from the nearby village. I went there to find out what had happened. She speaks only dialect, but you may ask her anything. I’ll translate.”

At first, Selena could think of nothing to say, so stupefied was she by the overwhelming fact of death. Finally, the necessary
questions came, and Jean conveyed in a low, tender voice the responses given by old Lodie.

A black ship with snow-white sails had appeared offshore. The sails were tattered and the ship had great jagged rents in her hull. (Here Lodie gesticulated energetically with her wrinkled hands, describing the awful proportions of the holes.) Several small boats came ashore from the ship, and sailors carried the bodies of nine dead men up beneath the trees. Graves were dug. (At this point old Lodie jerked and groaned as if she were shoveling earth.) The bodies were placed inside the graves, crosses made, names and initials scratched into the soft wood. Lastly a flag from the ship was torn apart, a piece of the flag affixed to each cross. That was all. The men went back to the ship and it sailed away.

“Ask her,” said Selena, “if she saw the bodies clearly.”

Lodie appeared somewhat miffed when Jean conveyed this question, as if her word were not believed.

“She says that she saw it all,” he told Selena. “She says she was right here, as close to the bodies as she is to you.”

“Then tell her what Royce looked like,” she went on, biting her lip before giving her own description. When she gave his great height, which Jean translated into dialect, Lodie reached her hand up over her head and nodded. When Selena spoke of Royce’s broad, powerful shoulders and deep chest, Lodie nodded and slapped herself vigorously, swiveling her shoulders to show that she had seen the mighty man to whom Selena referred. Hair? Lodie touched Jean’s blond locks and shook her head, then pointed to her own black eyebrows.

Selena tried to think of more questions to ask, questions that Lodie could not answer, any question that might give her the hope of Royce’s continued existence.

But there were no such questions, and no such answers.

“Face it, Selena,” said Jean, coming over to her and putting his arm around her waist. “I’m sorry.”

Then the full knowledge, the complete force of death came down around her, and she fell prostrate on the sand in which the flag-marked cross was standing. She could not help herself, nor stop herself, howling her grief to the cross and the sand, the wind and the sun and the sea. Never before, not even when she’d seen her father killed, had Selena felt so devastated, so helpless. So alone. Wailing, shouting unintelligible syllables, now defiant, now
despairing, she alternately cursed God and mourned herself. It was not
right
that this cross should stand here; it was not
right
that Royce Campbell, wild Highlands pagan, should lie beneath this sand. And she began to claw at the very sand itself, throwing great fistfuls of sand into the air, where it came down into her hair and upon her body. To Lodie, it seemed that the crazy golden-haired woman was trying to defile grave and torment spirit of the dead. She fled. And Selena, in her grief, was all alone…

Not so.

Presently, she felt Jean Beaumain’s arms around her. With difficulty, he stilled her flailing hands and drew her to her feet.

“It can’t be…” she was shrieking.

“Selena,” he said, holding her closely and crooning. “Selena. There, there. If Royce could see you now, what do you think he would do? Eh? What do you think he would say?”

Jean’s question brought the image of Royce to Selena. What would Royce do, say, if he saw her carrying on like this?

He would doubtless draw back from her a bit, and give her an ironic look. There would be a trace of amusement flickering at the corners of his mouth. And after a moment, perhaps after permitting himself a faintly mocking censurious scowl, he would say as he had when catching her, fighting and naked, on the New York docks:
“Is this any way for a Scottish lady to carry on?”

And he would tell her now:
“You are never defeated unless you believe it”

“I guess I almost believed it this time,” Selena murmured, trying to stop her sobs and dry her tears.

“What?” asked Jean Beaumain, who hadn’t caught her words.

“Nothing. I’m sorry you had to see me like this.”

“Let’s go back to the ship,” he said, “or do you want to say a prayer?”

Selena shook her head. “I’m not sure he’d want that. The way in which I remember him will be more important.”

That night, sailing back toward Hidden Harbor, Selena went up on deck in the black, moonless, star-blasted night, and there in memory she blessed and worshiped Royce Campbell, whom she had loved as no other.
I will choose one memory
, she thought.
I will take, from among all the times we shared, one soaring moment, and it shall be my prayer and my memorial

The time they had made love aboard the
Highlander
, made love as Selena had vaguely heard, uncertainly imagined it could be made, and which was called forbidden on all the fearful pulpits of Europe. It was a sweet, lingering speech of flesh itself, in which Royce had given her long, aching instruction. It was more than mere treasure, it was transcendence, transport to a strange new world. Ripples of indescribable softness washed again and again and forever upon the walls of her soul, until blood as well as flesh found tongue. Tender waves spread behind the horizons of her lidded eyes, driven gently by her cry, and proudly rocked the easy boats that lay embanked in touchless time.

The salt taste of him had been as welcome as the world.

The taste of herself on his lips had been communion.

“I’ll always love you,” she said softly to the black sky, in which the stars seemed embedded like jewels in stone.

The
Liberté
reached Hidden Harbor shortly after dawn. Jean Beaumain and the others were surprised—and a little apprehensive—when they saw how quickly Selena left the ship and stormed up the dock toward the house. Jean, concerned for her, had first watched from the shadows as she’d stood on deck gazing into the sky. He’d been fearful, after witnessing her spectacular outburst of graveside grief, that she might again give way. And twice he had looked briefly into her cabin during the night. Once she’d been sewing a piece of fabric over that little gold cross she always wore. The next time he’d checked, Selena seemed to be jabbing at her hand with a quill. Very strange.

So Jean was worried, and he trotted up the dock after her. “Selena, hold up. What’s your hurry—?”

She neither turned to answer him nor slackened her pace. In moments, she was on the veranda, then across it, pushing open the door.

Selena heard him call, and she heard his footsteps on the dock as he hurried to catch up with her. But just now, she had neither the time nor the inclination to explain anything to anybody. Because, at last, she understood everything, and she must strike before it was too late.

Dimly aware that Jean Beaumain, Rafael, Louis, and some of the other men were behind her, Selena charged through the central part of the house, and turned down the wide corridor that led to Yolanda Fee’s quarters. If she proved to be right in her divinations—she was acting on the basis of intuition, not logic—then all would be well.

But if she were wrong…

“I’m not wrong!” she said, reaching Yolanda’s door and grabbing the metal, European-style handle.

It scorched her skin. She cried out and jerked her hand away.

But undaunted and without hesitation, she seized the handle with her other hand, her left hand, on which she had, in ink, marked herself with a tiny, five-pointed star.

This time all went well. Her theory regarding Yolanda’s powers appeared to be correct. The doorhandle was cool to her touch. The door opened, offering Jean and the sailors, who hurried toward Selena, a side of Yolanda that they had not seen before.

She was on her knees, naked, crouching in front of the little altar, dipping something over and over into a miniature cauldron, in which a dark liquid frothed and sputtered. On the altar stood the glittering pillar of phallus, the circle of shrunken heads, seven candles burning low, and a wire cage in which a blackish-gold serpent writhed and roiled. So intent was Yolanda on her work that she had not noticed how close the snake was to the candle flames. The room was as it had been when Selena had first entered it, with black and red walls and the suggestively shaped couches scattered about. On three of these lay men, some of the Haitian manservants, in various stages of unconsciousness and undress, rendered thus by Yolanda’s sensuality or potions, or both. She had spent an energetic evening.

“My God!” breathed Jean.

Yolanda turned, offering in the process a view of Campanale’s head, which she was in the process of treating. It was only half-shrunken as yet; the open eyes and mouth seemed to implore help in a battle that was already lost.

Before Yolanda, lean and splendid in her high-breasted beauty, could intervene, Selena crossed swiftly to the French doors, throwing them open, and also moving the heavy draperies away from the windows. On the afternoon of her previous visit there, the room had been obscured in gloom, but now the full light of dawn flooded in. Yolanda’s room was like the set in an horrific stage play. Thin, lugubrious curtains hung floor to ceiling from the walls. By removing these, along with the couches and the altar, she could readily restore her chamber to its ordinary appearance.

But it was too late to do so now.

“Yolanda!” cried Jean Beaumain. “What is the meaning of this?”

“You trusting fool,” the Haitian beauty sneered, getting to her feet. “Did you think, merely to have you, that I would give up the
ways of my ancestors? And do you think, now, that I will permit this interloper”—she pointed a long-nailed finger in Selena’s direction—“to steal you from me? I would have
you
dead first!”

Having said that, she sprang at Selena who, unready for the assault, fell to the floor beneath the other woman. The two of them grappled fiercely there, and before the men could even move to pull them apart, Yolanda’s razor-sharp talons closed around Selena’s throat.

“You are going to die!” Yolanda gritted threateningly, “for I have negated the mark of your power!”

Her eyes sought the cross around Selena’s neck, and widened in alarm when she saw that it was concealed by a cloth. Then Selena moved her star-marked hand. Yolanda saw it, jerked as if slapped, and involuntarily loosened her grip. Gathering all her strength, Selena fought, writhing, twisting, and threw the other woman away. Yolanda rolled across the floor, striking and upsetting the altar. Candles fell, flaming, and the wire cage confining the serpent snapped open. The creature, maddened by incarceration and proximity to fire, caught a whiff of Yolanda’s unmistakable scent and struck toward it with the force of a hurled javelin, burying its yellow fangs in her proud left breast.

She was dead before Selena could get to her feet, before Jean and his men could extinguish the burning candles.

Yolanda’s Haitian lovers dozed on, oblivious.

The toppled phallus glittered in the light of dawn.

From St. Crique to Bermuda, from Bermuda to the Azores, and now from the Azores toward the Canary Islands. The
Liberté
and her passengers were on their way to France.