Fires of Delight by Vanessa Royall Page A

his due…which she had decided he was not going to get anyway.
    “I heard about Erasmus Ward,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
    “We are going to miss him. Do you support the revolution?”
    He laughed in reply, blowing a thick, perfect ring of blue smoke, which rose to the curved ceiling of the cabin and melted into the dark timbers.
    “No. I admire the Americans for their combative spirit, as much as I loathe the British for their contemptuous arrogance. But I am a man without politics. Selena, I’m forgetting my manners. You oughtn’t to be standing. Here, take my chair. Or take a seat on the hammock.”
    He half-rose, but she waved him down. “I’m fine. I’ll just”—she wandered over to the map table—“walk around…”
    The last thing she wanted to do was get trapped in that hammock!
    “How can a person be without politics in times like these?” she asked. “Have you declared a plague on both their houses? You’re French, aren’t you? How do you feel about your own country?”
    “France? She means nothing to me. She is simply the place where I was born.”
    “But…but your country has given us so much…General Lafayette, for example, who came to us in our hour of darkest need. And Comte de Grasse, who is sailing now from Haiti to aid Washington at Yorktown.”
    “Ah, Haiti!” Beaumain said lovingly.
    “You are familiar with it?”
    “That is where I make my home. Off the coast, that is. I own an island. St. Crique.”
    “You own an island?”
    He laughed. “I took it for myself and so far no one has managedto get me off. But as for your Lafayette and de Grasse and the others, I spit on them!” He seemed genuinely angry. Selena was surprised. He did not appear to be a man easy to anger. “I despise them,” he continued, puffing his cigar furiously now. “They are of the nobility that is destroying France.”
    Selena thought of this luxurious ship, and looked about the well-appointed cabin. “I would think,” she observed, “that you are no stranger to the finer life yourself.”
    Jean Beaumain laughed again, but bitterly this time. “Not quite,” he said. “I was born the son of a fisherman on the coast of the province of Côtes du Nord, hard by the English Channel. In our part of the country, everyone obeyed a certain vicomte , whose name is Chamorro”—the intensity with which he spoke this name sent shivers through Selena—“and woe betide him who did not. One had to pay him fifty percent of whatever one earned. You could not hold a job, not even the lowest, stinking sort of job, without his approval. A man could not even marry without his permission because, you see, the nobility in France are in league with the clergy. They have you nailed down and shut up tight from the moment of your birth until you are laid in the ground. It is a common practice, or did you know, for the clergy not to bury the dead until a grave tax has been paid.”
    “My God!” exclaimed Selena. Even when Scotland suffered under the British yoke, things had not been that horrendous. “But you are here, free—” she began.
    They were interrupted by the steward, who entered with a steaming kettle of succulent beef stew and a bucket containing a jeroboam of champagne. He set it on the small dining table, also laying out glasses of cut crystal, fine bone china, heavy silver.
    “Let us partake, Selena,” Beaumain said, seating her.
    Be careful , Selena warned herself. Perhaps he is simply putting you off your guard with his talk —interesting though it was to her. Or maybe there was a drug in the food or the wine.
    No, hardly the wine. Before her eyes, the steward uncorked the wine with a resounding pop, poured some into both glasses, and withdrew.
    Beaumain himself ladled stew onto Selena’s plate, then onto his own, and began to eat with relish.
    So did she. From the first mouthful, all other considerations were subjugated to an overwhelming, resurgent hunger. Thebread, hardtack, and cheese that