Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (154 page)

The two ships floated side by side, rising and falling on the swells. Captain Bonhomme, finally sober enough to stand, consulted with Morgan over what should be done. Damage to both ships was not inconsiderable. It was doubtful that the snow would bring much as a prize in her present condition. It was necessary, however, to get something out of her if only to pay for the repairs to the brigantine.

Making port was advisable as soon as possible, prize or no. The Black Stallion would be a sitting duck until the ship’s carpenter had given her the once-over; she not only had broken yards and spars, and a great hole in the starboard side, but the mizzenmast was cracked and would scarcely hold its sail in a zephyr, much less a gusting wind.

Valcour was for ignoring damage and attending first to matters at hand. He wanted to heat an iron spike and apply it to the soles of the bluff and bearded New England captain’s feet. The purpose was ostensibly to persuade the man to reveal the hiding place of the supposed valuables. In reality, Valcour craved a vent for his rage at being summarily, relieved of command. The crew credited Morgan with saving their ship and their miserable skins, no less, snatching victory from the sure defeat Murat had engineered. A diversion to turn their minds from their frustration might return their favor to him. Also, as if it would erase the error of judgment of which he had been guilty, he called for the scuttling of the snow with all hands on board, after the treasure had been discovered, of course.

The other two men ignored Valcour’s ranting. If Captain Bonhomme had no objections, Morgan said, he knew a small island not too far distant where there was a sheltered cove. The place also had plenty of fresh water from a running stream, and a supply of pork, or did the last time he was there. They could put in for the ten days to two weeks it would take for repairs on both ships. While they were at it, they could also careen the Black Stallion and scrape the barnacles off her bottom. From the way she handled, it must have been a while since it was done. With everything in order, they could set sail without fear of being caught by a frigate or some other tall ship of superior firepower while they were too unhandy to outsail or outrun her.

It was agreed. They sewed the dead, two from the brigantine and four from the snow, into their pallets and slipped them overboard. Then they upped anchor, raised their jury-rigged sails, and moved off on a south-southwesterly course. Four days later they limped into the island harbor, and with a collective sigh of relief from all hands, ran down their anchor chains.

It had no name, this miniature paradise. Less than twelve miles long and six wide, it rose to a rocky bluff 140 feet in height at the west end, and sloped down until it ran flat at the east. The bluff was of limestone. It was honeycombed with fissures and caves, and from it ran the sweet springs that poured into the stream and made the island habitable. On the north side where the cove bit into the land there were signs, the foundations of houses and the rotting timbers of a rudimentary wharf, that people had lived there at one time. Now only gulls and terns greeted their arrival, wheeling against the brassy blue of the sky, their cries echoing over the sparkling sea with shrill loneliness.

They spent the remainder of the day unloading the ships, ferrying the boxes, barrels, and bundles to shore, with the longboats of both vessels plying back and forth. They spread out along the beach, the crews of the Raven, the Black Stallion, and the Prudence separating into groups. There was not overmuch mingling, even among the wounded tended by the Lascar from the Raven, men who might have been expected to commiserate with each other.

Tents were raised with spare sails and the trunks of saplings. The cooking pots and tin plates from the ship’s galleys were parceled out, and a detail of men shouldering muskets went into the wood to look for wild boar. Within the hour, a pair of shots were heard. The men reappeared minutes later bearing a hog of over two hundred pounds hanging from a pole carried over their shoulders. There was more than enough meat to give the encampment of near a hundred men their fill of pork.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, Morgan detached two men and set them to clearing a space at the edge of the woods some distance along the curving beach from the others. When they were done, they started on a hut, building it with four walls and a conical roof striped with poles to which were tied the long and heavy fronds of thatch palms.

“Come try your new abode, Mademoiselle Lafargue,” he invited when they were done.

He had given no sign until that moment it was for her, and Félicité had not dared hope. Flashing him a look of irritated gratitude, she moved to the open doorway and stepped inside.

It was not large, being less than four of her paces wide one way and three the other. At a squeeze there might be room enough for a small table and chair near the front door and a pallet in the back corner. Still, it was snug and private, and fresh with the scent of newly cut greenery. The breezes blew gently in at the door, and overhead the leaves of the arching palms made a soft and soothing rustling, while at the side a thorny bougainvillea had been left to trail its brilliant scarlet, paper-thin masses of flowers over the roof.

A shadow fell across the doorway. Morgan, with his arms full, ducked his head to step inside. He carried a small table that he sat on its legs before he turned to toss what looked like a pair of coverlets wrapped around a bundle of clothing over against one wall. There was no time to question him. Close upon his heels came a seaman with a pair of stools and a lantern, and following him was another with a collection of cooking implements and plates. They put down their burdens and then, at an easy word from Morgan, swung around to take themselves elsewhere.

“You seem,” Félicité said, looking around her, “to have thought of everything.”

“I tried.”

“I could have made do with a sail tent like all the others. This wasn’t really necessary, not just for me.”

“It is not,” he said deliberately, “just for you.”

She swung to stare at him. “You mean—”

“I mean I will be staying here with you.”

“How could I have ever thought otherwise?” she said, her smile brittle. “I must have my guard with me at all times.”

“Yes.”

“It was so nice of you to warn me in advance. I might have made only one pallet!”

“My mistake,” he said, his green eyes holding hers for an interminable moment. Then, turning, he ducked through the door and strode away.

Félicité built a fire, and while it was burning down to coals on which to roast the shoulder of pork that was apportioned to Morgan and herself — the men who brought it being in no doubt about where he would sleep — sought to bring some order to the hut. She positioned the table and stools, found an empty crate to use to store the cooking utensils, and made pegs to hang their clothing. That done, she turned to the problem of the sleeping arrangement.

There was no way, short of putting the table in the center of the sand floor and angling a folded coverlet on either side, to place the bedding without having both pallets together. It crossed her mind that Morgan might have planned it that way, then she dismissed the idea. He was not so devious; if he meant to reestablish intimacy between them, he would have said so.

Or would he? Once he had used her concern for her father to force her to an appearance of friendliness with the Spanish, an appearance that might have become genuine if other events had not intruded.

No, she would not think such things. How could she be so ridiculous? Morgan McCormack wanted nothing from her. He might at times feel some stirring of desire, but nothing he could not suppress with a little effort, nothing that wasn’t easily explained by their unnatural situation and his isolation from contact with other women. What did it matter, after all, if he was troubled by her nearness? Let him be. She should be delighted to think that he might suffer some inconvenience. He deserved it, didn’t he?

With stiff movements, she unrolled the coverlets against the back wall of the hut. Twitching them straight, smoothing out the wrinkles, she turned her back and vowed to think of it no more.

The roast pork was perfuming the air, the lantern was casting an oblong glow into the darkness, and the table was set with two plates, two daggers, and a clutch of small brown finger bananas when Morgan returned. Félicité sat not far from the doorway on the trunk of a palm tree blown down by some long-ago storm. She had been watching the dark sea, listening to the wash of the surf. She looked up as he appeared out of the blue-blackness, and without a word went before him into the hut.

She sliced the pork and filled the plates, placing one in front of Morgan. Even as she did so, she was acutely conscious of the implacable domesticity of the act. The damp darkness outside, the bright freshness and comforting aroma of food within were in stark contrast to the drunken revelries of the pirate crews on their sandy beach not so far away. The bed coverlets in the wall shadow invited, or so it seemed from the manner in which Morgan’s green glances were drawn to them. For Félicité, his presence seemed to fill the hut, crowding out all else.

There was nothing to do when they had eaten except wipe out their plates with sand, rinse them, and put them away. It had been a long day and a tiring one. They might as well go to bed.

Morgan stepped outside to con the heavens. In his absence Félicité turned out the lantern and quickly undressed, then lay down, taking the pallet nearest the wall. Once she was still, it seemed as if the earth were moving, as if she were still on the ship. The effect was more pronounced when she closed her eyes, and she kept them wide with an effort. Beyond the doorway, the moon, soft and enormous, two-thirds full, was rising out of the sea. It shed its cool, burnished light over the sand, outlining Morgan where he stood, glinting silver on the linen of his shirt and catching dark copper gleams in his hair.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the unlighted hut, then walked off in the direction of the beach, where the men were beginning to whoop and yell as they swilled rum around a trio of salt-licked driftwood fires. After a few minutes, he returned, mug in hand. Taking a seat on the fallen palm, he drank, then drank again.

The moon was hidden behind the bluff when he came to bed. He stumbled over a stool and flung the crablike monster from him with an oath. He stripped off his clothes, dropping them on the floor, then threw himself down on the pallet.

Félicité, listening intently in the darkness, managed to roll out of his way. She came up against the back wall, and it shuddered, rattling under the impact. Morgan turned on his side, and one flailing arm fell across her waist. His grip tightened, drawing her to him, molding her to the curve of his body. Burying his face in her hair, he released a deep sigh. The next instant, stertorously, he slept.

Dawn, pale and opalescent, filtered into the thatched structure. Félicité stirred and opened her eyes. She lay in Morgan’s arms, her limbs intertwined with his, her head resting on his arm. The warmth of his body encompassed her, a pleasant defense against the early-morning coolness of the wind that brushed into their shelter, rustling the drying fronds.

By raising her gaze, she could see his face as he slept. Strong, brown, firmly molded, it was shadowed with the stubble of his beard. His lashes made a thick line across his lids, and among the dark arches of his brows there were individual hairs with the wiry texture and color of copper. At the corners of his eyes were the fine, radiating lines of a man used to watching far horizons. Closed, invulnerable, there was nothing in the sculpted planes of his face to show what he felt or thought, or why he had turned to her again and again in the dark, drawing her to him when she sought to put distance between them.

It was not so much fear or even reluctance that made her wary. She did not trust the stir of her own emotions, the sense of quiescent desire, waiting for a certain moment, a certain timbre of voice, the silken slide of a certain touch. Félicité lowered her lashes, her considering brown gaze drifting over the turn of his shoulder, and the slack muscles of his arm that lay across her, and down the hard plane of his chest with its light furring of hair that narrowed to a dark line as it inched down his belly. What would happen, she wondered, if she allowed the tips of her fingers to take that same path, if she moved closer against him so that—

No. She was a fool even to think such a thing. Why should she invite the caresses of a man who cared nothing for her beyond the passion of the moment? A man who took her under duress, then let her go with scarce a backward glance when he tired of her? She could not bind him to her with chains of physical love. It was foolish of her to wish to try.

Slowly, so as not to wake him, Félicité turned to her back. She reached out with one foot to gain purchase, moving her shoulders, trying to slip from under the weight of his confining arm. As he stirred, she went still.

He brought his knee up, turning so it lay across her thigh. For a moment she thought he would raise his arm, but he shifted it instead so his hand lay between her breasts, the lax fingers lightly cupping one rose-tipped mound. When he was quiet once more, his lips were just brushing the smooth curve of her shoulder.

She drew a quiet breath, half of annoyance, half of disturbed senses, then let it out again. She allowed the dragging minutes to tick past until she thought he was settled in slumber. Carefully then, she eased her shoulders over the pallet. His hand trailed limply from one breast to the other. At that point he stirred once more, his fingers tightening, the muscles of his leg tensing until she was held immobile.