He had been forced to pace and stew in front of the restaurant she had named, de Russy's, for Charite had been coquettishly and coyly late, but more than worth the wait once she had turned a corner and had sashayed up to him, her tiny parasol spinning flirtatiously and her blue eyes aglow with both impishness and delight. As intriguing as she was when garbed as a young gentleman, when properly gowned as a young lady, she was a vision of femininity.
Dinner had taken the better part of two hours, with light and mostly innocent and inconsequential conversation, though Lewrie did get a chance to suggest that he wasn't long for New Orleans, if Pollock had his way. She had expressed regrets over that news, but her innuendos promised both a grand send-off on his trading expedition and a hearty welcome upon his swift return. Hidden meanings crossed her features, along with half-lidded girlish innocence, mixed with part sultry seductress, and delayed wanton abandon, making him squirm on his chair.
He trusted to her taste, let her have her head when it came to the menu that Charite almost knew by heart. A thin and tepid celery broth had resulted, just right for a warmish tropical day; then a zesty crabmeat remoulade, followed by a palate-cleansing mixed green salad, fresh from the Lake Pontchartrain garden plots. That had gotten them ready for grilled shrimps as big as his thumbs, and lemony seafood crepes that contained a meaty fish melange and sauce that was heavenly from the first hot bite to the last cooled forkful. Lastly had come a syrupy sweet trifle sort of pudding, lush with local oranges. So many wild oranges grew thereabouts (so he was amusingly told) that the local farmers fed most of them to their hogs… which made for a succulent Sunday ham!
"My last fine meal, aussi, cher Alain," she sadly imparted, "for I must leave the city and go visit my papa and maman upcountry. I hope I do not have to stay as long as Easter, but certainly I should be back about the time you come back from the wild Indians… if they do not scalp you, n 'est-ce pas!"' She giggled, then quickly went serious, reaching her fingertips to touch the back of Lewrie's hand. "I will pray earnestly that they do not… for you have such a fine head of hair, mon cher. And the savages have such horrid habits when it comes to shearing White people… of their hair and their… other things, hein?" she teased with a fetching blush and grin. "I do believe I would miss them all… equally. Oh la, l'addition. Will you take care of it, cher? Then, we shall go for a stroll. It will be good for your liver."
"Nothing wrong with my liver, Charite," Lewrie had said, claiming intimacy with the use of her Christian name in public; to which she made no prim objections.
"Oh, you English… you do not understand how important one's health depends on la digestion and proper care for one's liver!" she teased. "Look at your John Bull… so choleric and pasty-fat… so full of nothing but roast beef and beer\ No wonder he is always so red in the face, hein?"
"A long walk, did you intend, then?" Lewrie had wondered aloud.
"Oh, lazy-bones!" Charite fondly teased him. "If not a long stroll, you have another healthful exercise in mind,peut-etre?"
"Hmmm," he leered.
"Oh, oui!" Charite squealed. "Plus vite, plus fort, mon etalon!" And Lewrie gladly obliged, picking up his pace and slamming his groin against her firm and springy young buttocks. The taut bed-ropes supporting the mattress groaned and skreaked, the wooden bedstead parrot-squawked at its joins, and Lewrie himself groaned, panted, and uttered triumphal steer-like grunts as he thrust as she commanded: harder and faster… certainly not deeper, for he was already sheathed up to the hilt in her upraised, kneeling body. Charite clawed the pillows, the sheets, face pressed into a pillow now and then when her pleasure made her squawl out loud, shudder, then writhe and thrust back against him like a maddened serpent, grunting and lowing like a
heifer being taken by a rutting bull, her grunting a counterpoint to his that increased in fury and urgency 'til…
"Ah-ahh!" she screamed. "I go, I go so… mon Dieu!"
A moment later, it was Lewrie who threw back his head, roaring incoherently as he burst in her like a flaming carcass-shell, jerkily thrusting through the last melting moments 'til he had to rock back on his heels and gasp for air, dragging her back with him, his grasp firm on her soft, sweaty-cool hips. Charite, still sobbing with ecstacy but as if in need of yet even more, shuffled back to him quickly on palms and knees, to half squat, splayed wide across his lap, rocking up and down to either side, petulant-sounding to milk the last frissons of sensation from him, to keep him pressed hard against her innermost flesh. He slid his hands up to cup her breasts from behind, wrap his arms about her, and hold her close to his heaving chest. Her arms took hold of his to keep him there, her head weakly lolling on his chest. Formidable… so formidable, mon amour," she barely croaked.
"You are indeed, sweet'un," he responded, muttering huskily in her damp mane of hair, some of which stuck to his mouth. "Vraiment!"
"You have lied to me," she accused, suddenly.
"Hah?" Lewrie gawped, stiffening in shock.
"You can speak French… when you care to." Charite chuckled.
"Only enough to get in trouble, dear," he laughed, greatly relieved that her plaint was harmless. To further distract her, he slid a hand down her sleek stomach and belly to her thatch, playfully twining his forefinger in her love-matted hair, flirting even lower round her clitoris, where his member was still sheathed inside her, making her roll her head, moan, and giggle.
"I am split… I am ruined, forever," Charite vowed in a weak whisper. "Zut!" she cursed a second later, as Lewrie limply slithered from her at last. Matter-of-factly, without shame, she flung herself forward to the headboard and piled pillows, rolled over face upwards, and swiped her damp hair from her forehead, with her fine, slim legs still wide apart, knees slightly raised as if welcoming another romp before sunset or suppertime.
Lewrie shuffled forward to recline alongside her, admitting to himself that he might not be the "All-Night-In" Corinthian he had been in his wilder twenties… After four blissful bouts he was just about utterly spent, and a longish nap wouldn't exactly go amiss. He snaked an arm under her neck and about her shoulders, getting no closer for a bit, as they lay there and genteelly "glowed"… perspired… on the nearly soaking sheets.
"You will miss me among the savages, mon Alain?" she pressed at last, rolling to her side to face him, propped up with a hand under her head.
"Desperately, ma cherie," he earnestly, nigh honestly vowed, rolling his head to look at her and seeing her impish expression. "And you? Et vous?"
"Et tu, Alain," Charite amusedly insisted. "Not the impersonal vous, but the intimate tu, mon etalon." She stroked a hand over his hot chest, a fingertip circling his near-side nipple.
"Your stallion, hey?" He chuckled, feeling risible after all as she teased.
"Ah, oui. The stallion le plus puissant. You spoil me for… After you, the most powerful, what man could ever compare, mon amour?" Charite said, frowning for a second and lowering her eyes as if she had said the wrong thing, had come close to reminding him that other lovers had existed, would exist in the future.
"Then I'd best hurry back to New Orleans before you run across a better," Lewrie suggested, tongue-in-cheek. "So we can have days and days like this. Days and nights… early mornings, the crack of dawn?"
"Oh la, I tempt you so much, you would surrender all your other lovers for me, Alain?" she asked, trying to be light, but with a slight edginess in her voice, as if his reply actually mattered.
"Hah! What other lovers?" he barked with laughter. "Damme, if you haven't spoiled me, d'ye know. If I had one, or a round dozen, a 'wife' in ev'ry port, I'd toss 'em all off a cliff, aye. Charite, you are sans pareil. Lovely, passionate… abandoned. Maddening! There, ye see? Another French phrase. We keep this up, I'll parler …"
She rolled half atop him, embraced him, twined with him and bestowed a dozen fond kisses to reward such gallantry.
"Oh, pooh!" she said after suddenly breaking away, pouting very prettily and desirably. "It would all end in tears. I could not have an Anglais lover! You are not even Catholique! A heretic, Protestant… 'Bloody,' born and bred to kill the French, and Catholics? Never, not in a thousand years, could you be acceptable. What Papa and Maman would say… my brothers!"
"Well, don't they say that 'love conquers all'?" Lewrie jested.
"Oh, we marry, and I am disinherited?" Charite huffed, though still pressed against him, up on her elbows. "I must go to a British seaport as your kept woman, your wife… when you admit that you cannot even keep yourself? Zut, putain!"
"Well, nobody said…" Lewrie began, daunted by her intensity.
"And then you give me babies," Charite further fantasised, one hand flying in objection as if swatting flies, "and after a few, I am the fat, dull matrone and you take your pleasures elsewhere, kein? I become hideous to you? Non! I wish never to be a matrone! No matter how grand the man, there is so much more to life, certain! I wish to do more with my life than marry, breed, and die anonymously, Alain."
"Well, /think you're famous," he essayed, much confused.
"Even so… " Charite said, her heat evaporating as she turned pensive and lay down atop him again, her head on his shoulder and her voice muffled against his neck. "I would have your babies, Alain. I would be your belle amie. Just so long as I am the only one!" she concluded, with a mock-fierce nip at his earlobe. "And when you are among the Indians, you do not take a lover there!"
"Well, I might be more among the Yankee Doodles than Indians," Lewrie said, yelping as if really nipped and playfully wrestling with her 'til he had her under his weight, her wrists pinned by his hands.
"Oh, they are even worse!" she snarled, wriggling and thrashing.
"How fair could they be, in their homespun junk, and all muddy barefeet?" Lewrie snickered, feeling even more risible as she squirmed most fetchingly under him, belly to belly, even pinioned as she was. "You wouldn't trust me out of your sight, would you? Would you? I thought so. You'd have me clerking for Pollock, here in New Orelans. All ink blots and smudges on my nose, in a countinghouse, instead of adventuring."
"No, you can have your adventures, Alain," she insisted. "Just so you come back to me… often. Always," she softly, fondly, added.
"But what could I do to earn a living, if I don't go venturing for Panton, Leslie?" Lewrie innocently asked, thinking it about time to try to dredge some information from her.
"I told you, cher, Learn the river trade from your adventures, prove yourself, then… meet with those wealthy men I mentioned, who wish to own their own ships before the Americans control all the shipping trade," Charite reiterated, turning still between his thighs. "If you wish to begin at once, I could introduce you to Monsieur Maurepas, the banker, He is in touch with… oh, im alors! Putain! I cannot. You must go upriver, I must go to my parents' plantations. It will be weeks and weeks before I could introduce you properly."
There's a name t'conjure with! Lewrie silently exulted, to hear one of Pollock's suspicions almost confirmed.
"Though, he is… many of his associates," Charite hemmed and hawed, writhing beneath him as if spurred more by dread than pleasure. "They are proud Creoles, Alain, tu comprends F French Creoles, who hate the Spanish subjugation and wish to be a part of la belle France once more. France is strong, and Spain is weak, and they believe that someone must save them, before the Americans… or you 'Bloodies' eat us up!" she spelled out for him, though turning the traditional epithet for Englishmen to a joke, instead of a taunt. "You must be careful in your dealings with them, mon coeur, before one of them spins out some fanciful dream about revolution against Spain. Oh, how do you English say, to… " she asked, frustrated.
"'Take it with a grain of salt,' d'ye mean, love?" He chuckled. "D'ye mean that, one… or a lot of 'em… might want me to smuggle arms? Start a Louisiana Navy? Turn privateer, or some such, and take Spanish prizes? Bein' a former naval officer might tempt 'em?"
Damme, that was knacky of me! he quietly chortled; Perhaps I can do subtle'!
"Oui, with the grain of salt, vraiment," Charite quickly agreed.
"But you're happy enough under the Spanish?" he further asked.
"Mon amour, I am most happy this moment, under you!" she teased with a coquettish stirring under him. "Mais non, the Spanish… such a horrible set of tyrants. And so bad for trade as well! Everyone I talk to says so. Papa, Monsieur Maurepas, our factors… If I were a man, /would be tempted to do something rash. To rid Louisiana of any taint of Spain… even their id-10ms!
"When I met you, you came close to being a man," Lewrie pointed out. "Though… thank God you aren't. Most surely aren't!" he said, sliding down her so he could kiss her nipples and circle her areolae on the tip of his tongue.
She knows more than she wants t'tell me, Lewrie furiously schemed; Her papa's in on it, I'll wager, maybe even her brothers. Damme… have I already met 'em, two nights ago? They were aliso alike, and…
"Oh la, Alain," Charite said, sounding as if she was mournfully wailing in exasperation at men's folly, "I fear, if someone gave you a chance to fight, do what you were trained for, you would leap for joy, and turn… pirate, if you thought it would be grand adventure. And, paid enough! Men… mon Dieu!" she spat in a flouncing huff.
"Something in what ye say, Charite darlin'," he frankly seemed to confess, breaking off his teasing ministrations to look her in the eyes. "I never did get many opportunities to… swashbuckle. Boring blockade work in all weathers… paper wars and ink smuts? Boresome. Hellish-boresome, most of my undistinguished naval career was. But I doubt I'd really do anything that damn fool."
"Bon!" she approved with some heat. "Good!"
"Not 'til they promised I'd be an Admiral," Lewrie cagily japed. "Not 'til it looked like it'd succeed. Look at John Paul Jones, that Yankee Doodle. Catherine the Great of Russia made him an Admiral over her whole fleet! Why, there's been dozens of ambitious Royal Navy men, taken service under foreign colours, some with the Admiralty's connivance and blessings, too, who didn't look like they'd ever make senior Post-Captain in their own service.
"The Swedes even made me an offer… not much of one, but," he added with a deprecatory shrug, suddenly inspired to feel her out even farther. "Not a command, actually-not a ship of my own. Arsenal clerking, counting cannon barrels or some such. I turned 'em down and tried for merchant service… where I'd at least be at sea, " he lied.
"You would be tempted," Charite stated, peering closely at him, not in the expected disapproval at such insanity that she had evinced just moments before, but in a speculative, calculating… weighing of his sentiment, with the faintest hint of a smile touching the corners of her mouth and eyes… as if he'd said or done something clever.
"Well, if they threw you in," he japed, shrugging again and forcing an inane grin onto his phyz to quash her slightest suspicions.
"Oh, la! Oh, zut alors, mon chou!" Charite suddenly snapped as she turned forceful in her attempts to slide out from underneath him. "The hour! It is growing dark, and I must go!"
"Oh, damme, no!" Lewrie said with a crushed groan. "Surely you could stay for a little longer, darlin'. Just a quarter hour more?" he entreated, gone all pleading puppy-eyed. He sat up, though, rocked on his heels once more as she lithely sprang down from the high bedstead au naturel, as boldly bare as she'd been born, fetching her discarded chemise off the back of a nearby chair and wriggling it down over her head. Damme, we were almost there, too! he thought; This close to…
"Lace me up, cher?" she asked, clapping her undone bustier to her chest, perkily, impishly smiling. "I must be home, quickly."
"What if I won't?" Lewrie pretended to pout.
"Then I must walk home as undone as a whore, and I will blame you for it, mon chou, " she threatened. "And there will be two dozen challenges to duels slipped under your door," she added, cocking her head at the doorway to his set of rooms.
"Well, as we said in the Navy… 'Growl you may, but go you must.' Damme!" he cried, springing naked off the bed. He seized her, burying his face in the hollow of her neck. "I simply cannot get enough of you, me girl!"
"Nor I you, cher Alain," she conceded, "but… I leave in the morning, you go upriver in a few more days, so we must part sometime. Only for a little while, mon amour, I promise! How do you say, that a parting is… something-something?" she crooned, embracing him with her fingers caressing his head and his hair against her as if to give comfort. "A short absence…"
" 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' " Lewrie recited, lifting his head to swing her length against his nudity. "I'll make you a new'un t'go along with that, too. 'Brief partings make rencontres all the sweeter… and urgent yearnings, the passion even fiercer.' Hmm?"
"You just made that up?"
"Aye."
"You are a rare Englishman… with the romantic soul of a true Frenchman," Charite admiringly declared. "Are you certain you weren't born French?"
"Quickened in Holland, but born in London. Son of a penniless rogue and a disinherited heiress, dammit all." Lewrie snickered.
"No matter, mon Anglais," Charite said, wide-eyed and serious, all but biting her trembling lips as she bestowed the sweetest little kiss on his mouth, "for…je t'aime, Alain mon chou. Je t'aime!"
"Darlin'!" Lewrie gasped, stunned right down to his curling toes by her sudden declaration of love; not intimate fondness, but her true love. Wondering what the Devil to do with it, but…!
When in doubt, lie like Blades, Lewrie told himself; It surely won't cost me much, and she might even halfway believe it!
"Je t'aime, aussi, ma cherie … ma petite biche," he growled in reply, his forehead pressed to hers. "You darlin' little doe-deer, I adore you, too. Ev'ry lovely inch of you."
Well, that seemed t'make her happy, he thought as they embraced even tighter. And, despite her protestations, it did lead to a frantic tumble back onto his bed, and one more glorious, feverishly passionate romp, spare cundums, her expensive chemise, the lateness of the hour, her family, or society's expectations bedamned.
Oh, make him happy, Charite told herself at the same time; Men! So easy to entrance… and enlist! He will aid us. Forme. And it will be pleasurable for both of us. And he is so adorable, I think I truly am falling in love! Well, perhaps I could.
It was well past seven in the evening when he handed her down to the street and walked her the short block from Bourbon Street, up Rue Ste. Anne to Rue Dauphine, where she insisted that they must part at last. Now, on public view, their behaviour had to be most circumspect and formally courteous. Lewrie gallantly doffed his hat and swept it across his chest, was just about to make a "leg" in conge, she about to drop him a brief curtsy and elegant incline of her head in parting as well, when it suddenly struck him that he still hadn't plumbed the matter of her address. He'd had other things on his mind.
"When I return and wish to see you again, how do I reach you?" he asked suddenly. "Where do I send my best regards?"
"To… Mademoiselle Charite," she seemed to stumble for a moment before resuming her gay, coquettish airs. "Write me at La Maison Gayoso. Twenty-Six, Rue Dauphine."
"Not Mademoiselle Bonsecours?" Lewrie pressed, hat in hand and shamming amiable, fond confusion.
"Our concierge will see that I get it," Charite attempted to explain, for one brief instant almost snippish with him, before relaxing into her customary air of flirtatiousness. "My parents and family… for now, mon chou, for only a while longer, just my given name, please? Until you are well settled in New Orleans, n'est-ce pas ?"
"Well," he quibbled, shuffling from one foot to another.
"And you will keep your lodgings while you are upriver, Alain?" she asked with a disarming smile. "When I return, I may write to you there?"
"No, I'll…" Lewrie flummoxed, considering that he would most-like never see her again, that his secret doings would be finished by the time she got back to the city; then hit upon a sudden inspiration. "When I come back, I expect t'be much richer, and I'll take a grander appartement, not a low, single room. Where I may 'entertain' you in proper splendour, and… discreet privacy, hmm? Oh! You could pick it for me! Choose it and help me furnish it to our, ah… our mutual satisfaction?" he said with the suitable anticipatory leer. "Try the Panton, Leslie offices first, though, and I'll come running."
Aye, feather a nest, he smugly thought; women just adore that.
"Je t'adore!" Charite cooed under her breath, her eyes glowing under the brim of her fashionable bonnet, and the parasol carried over her shoulder spinning in delight. "But of course, I shall be more than happy to help. And I shall be distraught every day that we are apart, Alain, mon coeur. 'Til then, though, alas," she said with a tremble of her lip and a forlorn hitch of her shoulders and a heartfelt gulp in her voice. "Au revoir, mon cher Alain! Trust that I do love you… madly!"
"And I you, Charite… as mad as a Hatter, as a March Hare!" he declared. "English sayings… I'll explain them all to you, soon."
"You will have to!" She chuckled. "Soon. Le plus tot possible, mon amour … as soon as possible, my love. Again, au revoir!"
A slim hand gloved in lace net almost reached out for him, but she remembered her distinguished place in Creole society-in public at least!-and dropped him a slow and graceful curtsy, that elegant incline of her head, then she was gone in a trice, rising and spinning away down Dauphine without a backward glance, as if all their fervent day had never transpired.
Lewrie shrugged to himself and turned away as well, clapping his hat back on his head and fiddling with his sword-cane. He walked a few paces back down Rue Ste. Anne as if to return to his rooms or to head for the part of town where the most eateries were located… but then paused, theatrically felt his waist-coat pockets as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to lean his head round the corner, once he'd almost assured himself that no one was watching him. A few lamplighters were sluggishly making the rounds with their ladders and port fires, igniting the entire hundred (some scoffed and said only eighty) publicly funded streetlights of which New Orleans could boast. In the entryways, above the high stoops of shops and houses, private lanterns were already lit and feebly glowing, throwing little pools of light and even deeper skeins of darkness. But he could pick her out by the pale colour of her gown, the flounces on her hat, the now-furled parasol in her hands, as she flitted from one illuminated pool to the next…
A moment later, and she'd melted away into an iron-gated entryway of a blank-walled building. Close enough, Lewrie decided, thinking that his sauntering past the place would blow the gaffe. He would recognise the building again, counted it off as the twelfth from his corner, on the north side of Rue Dauphine, and from the look of the place at his acute viewing angle, it would most likely turn out to be one of the many walled-courtyard appartement houses. No more than three storeys above the street, but with spacious sets of rooms on all four sides to face the central courtyard. Eight appartements or twelve? he speculated, seeing no sign of commercial establishments on the ground floor. With their own stabling out back, it'd be even fewer, he deduced.
Ste. Anne began on the east side of the Place d'Armes, the main city square by the riverbank; Rue St. Pierre ran down its west side, so… how did they number their houses? Outward from the centre, the lowest numbers starting on those two streets, or from Rue de l'Arsenal on the east straight to the west? No matter, he thought with a sniff; She 'd said number 26. Unless she 's been lying like a dog right from the start!
He shrugged again and drew out his pocket watch. It was nearly eight! Long past time for him to hare back to the Panton, Leslie Company warehouse offices and catch up with Mr. Pollock, to see what he'd learned today, and proudly impart to him what he had garnered. A growl from his innards warned Lewrie that it was long past suppertime, too. Frankly, he suddenly felt ravenously famished, now that the most important items of his activities list were done, and he had only the idle Spanish to fret about.
Play-acting and fucking! Lewrie happily pondered as he strolled along, clacking his cane on the pavement; Both damn' good for buildin' an appetite, ha ha! Lewrie, you sly dog!
Down Ste. Anne to cross Bourbon Street, then down to Rue Royale, headed for Rue Charles, where he thought he might take a little amble in the Place d'Armes before diving into the commercial jumble round Levee Road, where it was darker, poorer-lit, and the streets narrower, filthier, and nigh abandoned at this hour.
The first two thin and muffled shots, the twiggish crack! crack! made him slam to a stop, head swivelling to track the confusing echoes that swirled from God knew where-closer to the river, or westward down Royale? A third crack! and by God that was a shot, quickly followed by a chorus of harsh shouts and the discharge of a weapon and a keen whine of a ricochet off brick! Definitely westward down Rue Royale, near St. Pierre or Toulouse!
Lewrie took a hesitant step in that direction, recognising the shouts as being made by English speakers. His men from Proteus or some of Pollock's men? Instinct made him reach under his coat and pull out one of his double-barrelled Manton pistols, then spurred him to turn in the direction of the commotion.
The fourth thin crack! was much closer; so was the musket ball that droned past his ear and spanged off a wrought-iron balcony pillar with a departing harpy's howl inches from where he'd stood dithering but an eyeblink before!
The fifth shot forced him to throw his body flat in one of the 'tween-lamp pools of gloom!