Unholy Fire (29 page)

When we were facing one another, she loosened her shift. I watched it fall away. Except for the silk embroidered band around her neck, and the matching bands on her wrists, she stood naked before me.

Untying the belt of General Hooker's robe, she slid it down over my shoulders. I began to run my fingers through her thick hair, kissing the tendrils, and inhaling the scent of honeysuckle as her lips caressed the nipples of my chest, and slowly began to move lower. At the same time, the tips of her fingers grazed my thighs, and I felt a violent surge of desire.

With great tenderness, she began to kiss the scars that crisscrossed my belly. For the first time since I was wounded, I felt the shame of that disfigurement start to ebb away. A moment later she took me into her mouth.

The needles of raw sensation were so intense that I had to pull her head away, not wanting this time with her to be over too quickly. Raising Amelie to her feet, I stroked her pear-shaped breasts before picking her up and placing her on the bed. Lying together, we kissed for a long time. I had never felt so alive.

Suddenly, I was inside her. She gently wrapped her slender arms and legs around me, and our bodies began to move as one. Her fingertips seemed everywhere at once, now tracing my neck and shoulders, a moment later my inner thighs. The edge of my desire swept away every trace of reserve or control. I was falling. As I exploded within her, my cheek happened to come to rest over her breast. While my own heart was pounding like I had just run a race, hers was beating slow and constant.

It was a shock to discover that as wondrous as each moment had been for me, she had been in a different place, perhaps an unreachable place, cloistered from the raw passion she had aroused in me. At the same time, she seemed to take pleasure in the act of giving me so much joy. As our bodies parted, she cocked her head to the side in a glance of momentary appraisal. Seeing the total satiation in my face, she smiled.

Something occurred to me at that moment and I laughed out loud.

“What is it?” she asked, confused.

“This is so crazy,” I said.

“What is crazy?”

“I came here to question you about the murder.”

“Yes, I know,” she whispered, her face solemn in front of mine. “And I am telling you the truth when I say that I do not know who killed Anya.”

“I believe you,” I said, wanting it to be true, but by no means sure.

Perhaps, it will sound jaded, but at that moment I was too happy to even care. I fell asleep in Amelie's arms, my fingers stroking her hair.

In my dream I was back at Ball's Bluff. It was the same hideous nightmare I had endured so many times in the year since the battle. I again saw Johnny Harpswell at the moment the Confederate bullet ruined his handsome face, with the force of it taking him over the gunwhale of the rowboat. Only one thing was different. When I reached out for him as he went over, this time I was able to grab him around the shoulders and drag him back.

“I have you, Johnny!” I screamed.

I came awake to Amelie's gentle voice crooning in my ear.

“You are with me now,” she said, her warm breast soft against my cheek.

Afterward, she brought me a glass of icy water from the trunk room. The coal fire had gone out by then, and it was cold enough to see our breath in the light of the candle. It wavered as she lifted the covers to rejoin me in bed. Then she burrowed in next to me under the massive feather tick.

“Go to sleep,” she murmured quietly, and I did.

When I awoke next, it was to the moaning complaint of the wind as it whistled through the chimney. All the candles in the room had burned out, but there was a misty, diffused light coming from the windows. Without waking Amelie, I got out of the bed and went over to the nearest dormer. There were several inches of snow on the windowsill, and it was still coming hard.

I wasn't sure whether the packet boats would be running down to Falmouth in the morning, but even then I knew that I needed to take Amelie back down there with me. I believed her when she told me she didn't know who killed Anya Hagel. At the same time, I was certain she had information that would shed light on the murder, perhaps without even knowing it. Fully aware of my own limitations, I knew I wasn't the person to uncover that information or fit it into the other pieces of the puzzle. With the feelings I had for her, I was also reluctant to probe her relationship with Hawkinshield. My hope was that Val would have recovered enough to take over again by the time we reached Falmouth. I silently prayed once more that his neck wasn't broken.

Shivering with cold, I returned to the bed. Amelie was lying on her side, her right cheek resting on the palm of her hand like a little girl. Under the comforter, her knees were drawn up, almost touching her stomach. I felt a rush of tenderness toward her that was as intense as any emotion I had ever experienced. She stirred awake when I slipped back under the covers. Her eyes were like two dark moons in the murky light.

“What would you like me to call you?” she asked.

I remembered that she had only read my name once off the identity card.

“My name is John,” I said, “but Kit is the name I grew up with. That's what most people call me.”

“I would like to call you by the same name you cried out in the night,” she murmured softly. “Johnny.”

I liked it. By then she could have called me anything, and I would have liked it. I stared into her eyes for a long time.

“I want to help you, Amelie,” I said, finally.

“Help me?” she said, with a sigh of resignation, as if she had heard the line before.

“Help you leave this life.”

“Don't say that. You do not understand,” she said.

“I understand.”

“Do not try to be noble for me,” she said. “There is no point.”

“I'm not trying to be noble,” I said. The next words came out by themselves. “I think I love you, Amelie.”

“You don't know anything about me,” she said harshly.

“I already know the worst,” I said.

Her eyes rose slowly toward mine and stayed there.

“I was once the kind of girl you might have fallen in love with, Johnny … not now. Do not pretend that I am.”

“I'm not pretending,” I said.

“This is not a fairy tale,” she said, putting her hand to my cheek, “and the truth is all I have left. I will not lie to please you. Find another whore to play that game for you if you must.”

“It is not a game. I love you, Amelie.”

Her guttural laugh was filled with contempt.

“Like so many other young soldiers I've known, you are merely in love with the romantic notion of falling in love. It is a fantasy … a delusion.”

“I loved you from the moment I first saw you,” I said, knowing even then how callow the words must have sounded to her.

“Tell me why,” she demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me what you feel for me … aside from my having given you physical gratification.”

“That's part of it.… But it's everything else, too.… I've never been so happy in my whole life as I am right now. I don't want this night to ever end.”

Her frown slowly disappeared. She tousled my hair with her fingers.

“You are easily impressed, Johnny.”

“And everything is suddenly beautiful,” I said next.

“Everything?” she repeated, arching her eyebrows as if I was a lunatic.

“Yes, everything … even that pile of coal over there,” I said, pointing to the hod next to the fireplace.

“At the moment it looks beautiful to me, too,” she said with a shiver.

“Everything will be beautiful as long as you're with me,” I said.

Was it genuine pleasure I saw in her eyes then?

“So you fell in love with me the first moment you saw me,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Perhaps you are in love then.”

“All I know is … you're the only woman I've ever met who made me feel this way.”

“How many other women have you known like this?”

“None,” I said. “But that doesn't matter. I know my heart.”

She lay in my arms without moving.

“I read once that if two people love one another enough they become immortal, like the wind and the stars,” she said.

“Perhaps we shall not die then,” I whispered, kissing her again.

We made love a second time. This time I tried very hard to do everything she had done so expertly with her mouth and delicate fingers the first time. At first she didn't seem to know how to respond. Her heartbeat remained slow and steady, her body as taut as a coiled spring. When I was kissing her lips again, she seemed to fight herself for one long moment and then returned it with an unexpected hunger.

A parade of vivid images are still etched in my mind of what came next; the rain of kisses on her eyes and mouth and throat, my fingertips stroking her nipples and lower spine, while my tongue roved to every part of her body. Finally, I savored her slick abundance, which to me had the same earthy taste as an opiate. I lost track of time.

Suddenly, I felt a tremor go through her, followed by another. Her stomach contracted, and she came alive in my arms. She seemed to offer herself totally to me, with a yearning strength that matched my own. I could feel her heart racing in time with mine until finally she cried out as if in agony.

Whether it was from pain or pleasure, I do not know, but when I raised my face from hers, Amelie was weeping. She was clinging to me so hard that her fingernails had cut deeply into my shoulders. I held her until the tears stopped.

“Tu as touché mon coeur,” she whispered.

Our lips were almost touching.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You touched my heart, Johnny,” she said, her eyes huge against my own.

Later, we slept again.

I woke to discover that dawn had crept into the room through the dormer window. When I heard the sound of hard rain drumming against the tin roof on the side porch, I knew that the packet boats would be running again later that morning down to Falmouth.

As I lay there bathed in her warmth, I thought my happiness would never end. I could still smell the juices of her body on mine. I had never felt more alive. That was when I happened to glance at her left hand, which was lying palm up on the pillow.

In the course of our lovemaking, the silk and lace band around her left wrist had come unbuttoned, and I could see the edge of what appeared to be a deeply furrowed line on the surface of the skin beneath it. When I gently slid the band free, I saw two hideous scars there, each about two inches long, both across the vein.

Trying not to wake her, I released the pearl button that held the other band in place. The right wrist had a single scar track, also across the vein. She came awake as I was staring at it. For a moment there was a look of terror in her eyes at what I had seen. She twisted away for a moment and then stopped. I felt the sting of tears at the thought that she could have done such a thing to herself. She lay without moving for several minutes.

“Do not ask about it,” she said, finally.

“I haven't asked,” I said. “But …”

“Every whore has a story, didn't you know that?” she said, her words echoing those of Lieutenant Mahoney. Of course her refusal to explain the scars on her wrists just made me want to know the reason more.

“If you ask me, Johnny, I will tell you to leave right now,” she said, with iron in her voice.

“I don't want to know about the past … only the future,” I lied.

There was a knock at the door. I got up from the bed and walked over to unlock it. The old woman came into the room again, this time with a bucket of steaming water. She poured it into Amelie's pitcher and bowl, went to the fireplace to stoke the coal fire, and left without a word. When I rejoined Amelie in the bed, she was staring straight ahead, her eyes dark and mysterious.

“Amelie … I love you even more now,” I said, moving to embrace her.

She pulled away from me.

“Do not ever try to be noble for me. I have been a whore now for almost two years. I have done things you could not even imagine … unspeakable things. And I have only myself to blame. No one else.”

Something pressed hard against my heart. For the first time in my short life, I began to consider what love really was. When she got up to wash, I lay there listening to the rain hammering on the tin roof, wondering what would happen to us.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Amelie became furious when I asked her to accompany me back to Falmouth. It took me almost an hour to convince her to go with me. I tried to explain that her life was in danger from the man who had murdered Anya … that he probably knew where she lived and worked, and at some point would come after her.

“I am not afraid,” she replied.

I then told her that if she didn't come with me, Val Burdette would order someone else from the Provost Marshal's Office to arrest her as a material witness and bring her down anyway.

“There are important men who would find it in their interest to prevent that from happening,” she said.

It was only when I told her about Thomas and Daniel Beecham, and what had been done to them after they had the courage to report the discovery of Anya's body, that she began to listen.

“I will go with you,” she said, when I finished telling their story.

I sent one of her servants back to the Provost Marshal's Office with a letter for Ted Connell, Val's deputy in the Prosecution Division. It included a short message to be wired to Val, telling him that I had found our witness and would soon be on my way back. I also told Ted to arrange passage for us on the next packet boat leaving for Falmouth, adding that because of my fears for her safety, he should secure a private stateroom for us if at all possible.

We were having breakfast downstairs in the dining room when someone knocked at the front door. The old woman went to answer it, returning a minute later to whisper something to Amelie.