Fires of Delight (45 page)

Just before the coach pulled out, a messenger rushed up and handed the driver a thick, wax-sealed envelope. It had been sent by the naval officer on the Dover pier, and in it were several pages containing the names of all those who had entered the port during the preceding twenty-four hours.
Campbell, Mrs. Campbell, Colette (sister of Mrs. Campbell)
were the final entries on the last page.

The envelope was addressed to Colonel Clay Oakley, Military Intelligence, London.

There was not much opportunity for conversation in the coach, which the three travelers shared with a cigar-smoking tobacco merchant and two raucous, jubilant sailors on leave who ogled the women boldly until they noticed Royce staring at them. Francesca sighed deeply, repeatedly, as the journey progressed, her excitement mounting. By the time the stage reached London, shortly after dark, she was beside herself with excitement. Selena did not blame her one bit.

Once in London, Royce hired a horse-drawn hack.

“Buckingham Palace,” he said authoritatively.

“I wonder if they shall permit me to enter,” worried the princess. “What if they turn me away? I wonder if William is in residence there now?”

Selena patted her hand. Royce smiled. “Have no fear,” he said. “We shall take you right to the front door.”

“You shall enter with me!” Francesca decided.

Royce and Selena exchanged glances. “No, I think not,” said Selena. “We have our own affairs to manage.”

She and Royce needed to be alone and plan what to do next. They were, after all, both outlaws in the eyes of the crown; it was dangerous for them to be in England at all. His chances of achieving a pardon through the good offices of Louis XVI had vanished when his espionage activities in France had been uncovered; she was still considered a traitor to the throne and a spy to boot.

“But I simply cannot let you go off, not after what you have done for me,” protested Francesca.

“Oh, I’m certain we shall meet again,” Royce told her reassuringly. “You needn’t go to any trouble on our account. In fact, you don’t even have to mention us.”

“Umgaublich!”
cried the princess. “Unbelievable!”

“Truly, it would be for the best,” Selena said, hoping she sounded casual and modest. “We have had enough excitement and attention. All we want now is to pursue our private lives.”

“I don’t think I understand,” said the princess dubiously.

Selena herself did not feel that it was possible for Francesca
not
to mention those who had helped her flee France. She just hoped that she and Royce would be able to leave London before any connections were made, any inquiries pursued. Everything had gone so smoothly since the departure from Paris that she had
almost begun to hope again.
Even plagues have to end sometime, don’t they? Well, so do exile and bad luck
.

Then the palace loomed ahead of them, huge and broad and stolid, but looking somehow smaller than she remembered it as a child. There were torches evenly spaced atop the walls surrounding Buckingham, and soldiers on guard at the gate. Their boots and buttons gleamed even in the fiery light. The men themselves were impassive, incredibly dignified, cold as stone. Selena gave way to apprehension for a moment, then remembered how impressive her jailor, Corporal Phineas Bonwit, had looked in uniform, yet what a dull, common lout he really had been. These guards were men, that was all. She relaxed.

Francesca, however, did not. “Oh, I just hope William is here!” she fretted. “I have never met his family. It was all supposed to have happened so formally, so properly. Are you sure his letter, which you read in Paris, was not really just a gentle message of farewell?”

“I’m sure,” said Selena.

“Any man who’d turn you down,” added Royce, “would be a fool of the first order.”

His words boosted her confidence instantly. She prepared to get out of the cab.

A high-hatted guard strolled insolently toward the vehicle. “Move along there,” he admonished the hack driver. “It’s not allowed to stop in front of the palace.”

“But I have a passenger,” the driver bleated cravenly.

“Bah! No one who comes here arrives in a flea-ridden junk like yours!”

Then Royce stepped down from the cab and addressed the guard. “Captain,” he said, having noted the man’s bars of rank, “how would you like a promotion?”

His manner of speaking, the deep voice and the authority in it, had an instantaneous effect.

“Sir?” asked the guard.

Francesca was getting down from the cab. (Selena thought it wise to remain inside, out of sight.)

“Here,” said Royce, “is the Princess Francesca of Austria, betrothed of Prince William. She has just arrived from France, having managed to elude the revolutionary demon there…”

The guard stared at Francesca, then bowed.

“You will take her inside immediately. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir. Yes,
sir!”

His mission completed, Royce got quickly back into the hack. “Be off,” he ordered the driver. He did not wish to remain there for the inevitable questions.

“The better part of valor,” he said to Selena as the driver cracked his whip and the cab rolled away from the palace. Then he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

“We’ve done our part for love today,” he said.

“Not yet. Not quite,” Selena murmured.

Royce smiled. “Driver,” he called. “Take us to a good hotel.”

“You want something expensive?” the man asked over his shoulder.

“Just a nearby place with good food and good beds will be fine.”

“Ah!” said the driver, urging the cab’s horse into a hasty trot.

Princess Francesca’s stunning appearance at Buckingham Palace produced a welcome that was as dramatic as anything she might have imagined in her wildest, happiest dreams. Prince William was there and he embraced her and embraced her again, unable to restrain his rapture. Every member of the huge royal family gathered to see her, to hear her tale. She had arrived, quite truly, as a heroine. Even the gouty old King, George III, roused himself from his bed and came down to have a look at her. Once, in celebration of her sixteenth name day, she’d drunk a glass of schnapps. The feeling she received in William’s embrace was quite like that. No, it was better.

The only thing to mar her arrival—and it was just a silly little thing of no consequence—was the momentary appearance of an ugly, bald, hulking, monstrously muscled officer who wheezed disquietingly as, with the permission of George III, he drew her aside for a moment of conversation. He held a piece of paper in his hairless hand.

“Your Highness,” he said respectfully, “when you entered at Dover, did you give your name as ‘Colette’?”

“Yes.”

She had never seen a smile, nor a mustache, quite like his.

“Thank you,” he said. “That is all I need to know.”

Selena pressed Royce’s hand to her lips and kissed the small, scarred indentation left by Jean Beaumain’s sword. She kissed all down the length of his arm, across his chest, down along his belly, and kissed also the healing scar at his lower abdomen. They were in bed, a good bed in a lamplit room in a good hotel in London.

“Does it pain you still?” she asked huskily.

“What are you talking about?” he gasped. “I cannot feel a thing.”

“Ah, but you prevaricate, my darling,” smiled Selena, “or do my eyes deceive me?”

She took him into her hands then, kneeling above him, one hand caressing slowly, remorselessly, up and down, up and down, the other circling and teasing and squeezing. He began to move beneath her, a powerful, involuntary, undulating rhythm. She inhaled audibly, closed her eyes, and threw her head back at the very thought of it.

“Lie down with me, Selena,” he pleaded, bucking within the slip-slipping grasp of her flowing fingers. “I must have you.”

“And you shall. If you promise not to move.”

“What?”

“I have you again, after so long a time. I do not wish to be responsible for opening your wound. You must not move.”

“How can I not? I—”

“Be still and I will show you.”

In one sweet symphony of motion, Selena mounted and slid down upon him, crying out as his great shape pressed upward into her. She could feel everything, the swelling staff, the ridge of vein along its underside, the sudden, blunt rim of corona, the delicate cleft below the tip, which so often her tongue had teased.

“Oh, God. Selena—”

“Don’t move,” she commanded again. “I will do for both of us.”

She began, with exquisite slowness, to rock back and forth upon him, back and forth and up and down, using her body as a velvet glove, pressing him ever more deeply into her, pressing herself against him, feeling his pleasure and her own. She was satisfied with this for a time, smiling as rapture darkened his face and dulled his eyes with ecstasy and love.

But there came a time when this was not enough, insufficient, when flesh began to beg for more. And although she had promised herself, vowed to herself, that she would ride slow as time across the highlands of delight, the demands of her body rose up to overthrow resolve and will. She did not know—and very soon she did not care—just when her own will had slipped out of her control, but she was leaping and twisting and plunging, her body, her head, her flashing golden hair, all.

Then he began to move, once, twice, thrice, all but casting her off.

He stopped.

She stopped.

They waited.

Then it came.

They were silent and still in commingled, closed-eyed wonder, but every cell in their melded, mesmerized bodies screamed in holy joy.

“I told you not to move,” she scolded him later, lying in his arms. The lamp had gone out and the room was very dark.

“I’m sorry. Give me another chance.”

“Soon,” she sighed.

“How soon?”

“Quite.”

“Before dawn?”

“I don’t want dawn to come.”

Thought of the morrow sobered them both a bit.

“I expect we had better leave London as soon as possible,” he said. “We can go to the Highlands for a time. We will be safe with my clan. There we can determine if there is any chance of getting Coldstream back for you. If not, we may wish to return to America.
We’re welcome there. I have berthed the
Selena
in Bremerhaven.”

It sounded as good a plan as any, besides which they would be together. “I’d like to try to see my adopted daughter, Davina, before we leave here though,” Selena said.

“If you think Lord Bloodwell can be trusted not to turn us in.”

“He won’t. I spoke to him in Paris.”

“All right,” Royce said. “It is agreed. Our good times are just beginning.”

“I’ll remember today always,” replied Selena.

The words touched a chord in her memory. Happy times. Good days. Those were the things that sustained one during times of darkness and distress. She heard her father’s words again:
“Pick a special day. One that warmed you so much and in a manner so fine; the heat of it can reach across the years
…”

Selena thought back across the years. She was about four or five, playing in the summer garden at Coldstream, building out of vines and sticks, grass and flowers, her own miniature castle. For hours she had worked away at that castle, the tiny girl she had once been, and then—she couldn’t remember exactly—something had happened. The wonderful structure was torn down, destroyed, or perhaps it fell in upon itself. In response to her cries and tears, her father had rushed out into the garden, viewed the disaster, and pronounced it less than the ultimate tragedy it seemed. And for the rest of that lost, golden afternoon, he sat beside her in the warm grass, with the perfume of flowers in the air, and together they built a new castle, of love as well as grass, that reached up to where he said the sky began.
“Right here, Selena,”
he had said, touching the castle top.
“Can you touch it? This is where the sky begins.”

“Yes,” she had answered.

“Remember this, and remember Coldstream. Think of it now. Not as it looks when you ride down toward it out of the Lammermuir hills, but the way it looks when you come up to it from the sea, with the clouds moving in the sky beyond, and Coldstream riding against the sky like a great ship
…”

“Darling, you’re crying!” said Royce.

“Good tears, though. Pay them no mind and love me again,”

“Put out the lamp first.”

“Why?”

“Because I have something in mind for you.”

“I think that sounds delicious,” said Selena, slipping out of bed and blowing out the light. But when, in complete darkness, she returned to bed, Royce was not there.

“Darling?”

“Lie down,” he commanded. “Lie down and don’t move. It is my turn to tease you now.”

“I don’t want to be teased. I want to be—”

“And you shall. But only when I decide it is time. I must, however, add one proviso to sweeten the stakes. You may cry out if you wish, but you must not move, no matter what happens. Or else I shall stop.”

“Stop? Stop what?”

“You’ll see. Lie down.”

Shuddering with anticipation, Selena did as she was bidden. She could feel Royce’s presence there in the darkness, very near, but she was unprepared when he suddenly bent to her bare breasts, kissing one nipple and gently caressing the other. She gasped, barely suppressing an impulse to thrust herself upward, reach out her arms and hold him to her.

Suddenly, just when Selena thought she could bear no more, Royce withdrew, laughing softly in the darkness.

“Midnight, and all’s well,” he said.

“Come. Do it again. I cannot wait.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you can, if you want more…”

Then he began again, this time kissing her belly, and it was all she could do to keep from moving, writhing. On and on, he pressed and retreated there in the lingering, lambent darkness, igniting tiny bonfires of delight all over her naked, burning body. Everywhere he kissed her, everywhere, until Selena felt a trembling in the pillars on which the earth was founded. The soft, knowing flick of his tongue, when it came, sent her entire body into unspeakable spasms of splendor, shattering her to such an extent that her senses became disoriented. Her lips were dry, her fingers numb. Velvet darkness hung like a veil over her eyes. Even the air hung heavy with the scent of a familiar perfume.