Fires of Delight (34 page)

Selena had been informed that the ball was to take place in something called the Hall of Mirrors. She’d been looking forward to seeing it, particularly in the light of Martha’s constant, awefilled comments regarding the wonder of the place. But even so, she was stunned by its breathtaking, magnificent immensity. This spacious grandeur, like Versailles itself, or Notre Dame, was a monument to genius and beauty. The other side of this wondrous coin, however, was the starving mob outside. The best of all possible worlds, she thought, would be one in which splendor was not created at the expense of humanity.

A large, festive crowd had already assembled in the hall, men and women alike garbed in clothing the cost of which would have sustained a peasant family for ten years. Selena had never seen such a display of personal ostentation. Louis XVI and his Queen passed through the bowing men and curtsying women, and mounted twin thrones at one end of the hall. A steward stepped discreetly in front of Captaine Pinot-Noir, halting his rather lurching progress, and Selena released his arm. She found herself standing in a small group of noblewomen, who were smiling and hissing to one another.

“I have heard that the Queen’s new lover is here tonight!” tittered one. “Has anyone seen him?”

“No,” answered one of her companions, “but I managed to catch a bit of chatter between my maidservant and the girl who attends Madame de Golier. The King has a new lover too.”

This announcement interested everyone in the little clique, and they leaned toward the speaker for further news.

“Yes, she is a Scots girl, quite beautiful.”

“Probably quite common,” sniffed one of the women.

Selena touched her shoulder and smiled at the woman when she turned.

“Aye, I’ve ’eard she’s common enou’,” Selena said sweetly, “but ’tis known there be none t’ compare wi’ ’er in mastery o’ men.”

The little gaggle of gossipers, with their powdered faces and high-piled hair, stared at Selena for an instant, then turned away in angry embarrassment.

“Pray, tell me when ye see the Scot,” added Selena in the thickest brogue she could muster, “I want t’ ’ave a look m’self.”

A steward stepped up next to Selena just as the King and Queen were getting settled on their thrones.

“Mademoiselle Selena,” he whispered, with a kind of pleasant confidentiality, “His Majesty must first receive several dignitaries, but he will join you in his residence thereafter. I shall escort you. Meet me in perhaps ten minutes at the far entrance to the hall.”

Selena nodded, and he went away.

Then the King clapped his hands. A liveried majordomo swung open mighty doors at the main entrance and proclaimed in a booming voice:

“My lords and ladies, the Duke and Duchess of Westphalia!”

Two rather small people entered the Hall of Mirrors, crossed to the twin thrones and made their obeisances.

“The King wishes to shore up his relationships with European nobility,” a bewigged, middle-aged bystander whispered sarcastically, “so that if he must go into exile, one country or another will harbor him.”

Exile?
thought Selena. So Louis
was
, deep down, aware of the current danger.

Princess Francesca joined Selena then. “Maybe I should leave right now?” she whispered. “No one will notice.”

The girl appeared quite ready to make the attempt. Selena thought fast. “Listen,” she said, “go to my chamber and wait for me there. No one will suspect a thing.”

“How excellent!” Francesca cried. “It will be completely unexpected.” She hurried off.

That will protect her for the time being
, Selena thought.

“The Count and Countess of Venice!” intoned the majordomo.

“The Marquis and Marchessa of Alsace!

“The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire!

“Lord Sean Bloodwell of the British Foreign Office!”

Selena’s heart jumped to her throat as her former husband, blond as ever, erect, in ruddy good health and smiling slightly, crossed the hall and bowed to their majesties. He was quite popular here, Selena realized, because a spontaneous, good-hearted ripple of applause welcomed him.
Of course
, she thought.
I should have expected him to be here
. Had not the King mentioned that Sean Bloodwell had assured him of English protection in the event of full-scale revolution?

Sean exchanged a few pleasantries with King and Queen, then
stepped away from the thrones. Selena attempted to catch his eye—she wanted, at the very least, to say hello to him. Of all the people in the world, he would be pleased to know that she was safe. And perhaps—just perhaps—he would arrange for her to meet with Davina at least once. Oh, certainly he would.

But he did not look her way, nor even sense her presence. Selena recalled, once more, the mystic pronouncements of Davi the Dravidian regarding the voices of the heart, the secret means of communication by which lovers speak, by which they sense each other’s presences. Such a communion no longer existed between Sean Bloodwell and her. True, theirs had not been a union founded on passionate attachment, but it made Selena sad anyway to think that a gulf lay between them.

Still, she
would
speak to him, and she began to move through the assemblage in his direction.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” cried the majordomo.

“Ah, here comes Marie Antoinette’s latest favorite,” a woman whispered smirkingly.

“The Vicomte Royce Campbell!”

Selena was moving toward Sean Bloodwell, preparing words of greeting. She
heard
Royce’s name announced, but for a moment it did not truly register in her mind. She kept on walking toward Sean for a few more paces. Then the reality of the announcement, of the name, gathered force and came crashing into her consciousness. Royce Campbell, who was dead and buried beneath a wooden cross on the isle of La Tortue half a world away, had just been introduced into the Hall of Mirrors.

She was not breathing, her heart was not beating. Every cell in her body burned as she spun dreamlike, in slow motion, for a thousand years toward the entrance. As she turned, there in a thin, poised pirouette of time, his name reverberated in her ears.

Royce!

Royce!

Royce!

And reflected in those multiple mirrors of wonder on the walls, image upon image upon image, striding like a king reborn, like a brilliant dark god come to earth for a night, was

Royce!

Royce!

Royce!

And then it happened, that mystical flicker of the heart that Davi had told of. There in the great hall, where fully three hundred people were watching him approach the monarchs, Royce Campbell’s eyes narrowed slightly. He made a quick, reflexive movement, lifting his head slightly, like the keenest of animals noting a minute change in the wind, aware without knowing how or why of a tremor in the heart of time.

And instantly, his eyes found Selena in the crowd.

During that instant, when their eyes met and touched and held, the earth ceased to spin, the moon to glow, the wind to move about Versailles. Paris was gone from the face of the earth, and London too, and Prague. France was gone, England lost, America no more. There were no millions dreaming in the night or awaiting the dawn. There was no mob at the gates of this palace, no king, no queen, no courtiers within. There was only a memory of Coldstream Castle, and of the Highlands. The dream-haunted ghost of a wolf shimmered suddenly in the air, too fleet for the mirrors to catch him, and disappeared.

In that instant, there were only Royce Campbell and Selena MacPherson.

No others.

In order to reach the thrones, Royce had to pass within the reach of Selena’s hand. She wanted—she actually tried—to reach out and touch him, but between her brain’s command and her body’s response intervened a barrier as impervious as iron. He was alive, that was certain, which meant that her understanding and acceptance of the past had to be discarded.
All right, I’ll discard it
. But it wasn’t that simple. No mere act of will could temper the shocking realization that he
was
alive, so she stood there, stunned and motionless.

He passed so close to her that she could feel the heat of his body, the movement of his breath in the air.

But after that first instinctive, preternatural meeting of their eyes, he did not look her way again.

Even worse, he did not seem to want to!

Selena was too numb just yet even to be miserable about it. That would come later. Misery has plenty of time. It waits around forever, choosing propitious moments of depression and chagrin to make its full force more damaging.

Besides, the tide of life and activity had begun again. People turned to watch in salacious curiosity as Royce Campbell approached the monarchs and bowed. They wanted to see how much aplomb he could maintain while confronting his lover and the man he was, apparently, cuckolding. It was not every day that any man put the cuckold’s horns upon a king after all, and the court, which was at least as much a theater as it was real life, savored a delicious scene.

Selena had, of course, read Shakespeare. But until this moment, the concept of the world-as-a stage had held merely symbolic meaning for her. This time the meaning was heartbreakingly direct. It was no mere actress, but the Queen of France who offered Royce her hand for the kissing. It was no thespian, either, but a Bourbon dynast whose hand also accepted Royce’s kiss of fealty.

It was just this obeisant ritual that roused Selena from her daze and brought her back to reality.

What on earth was Royce doing? What had
happened
to him?

Had all of her efforts availed nothing? Had all of her influence gone for naught?

When she’d met him, he’d been an opportunistic adventurer. But their relationship had deepened both of them, and he had taken from her the spirit and fire of her essentially individualistic nature, which was also his, and added to his personality her concern for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. Selena’s heart truly went out to the exiled and the dispossessed, because she had been both. And she had come to believe, by Royce’s energetic participation in American revolutionary espionage, that his essential heart had begun to beat as one with hers.

But now she remembered the jewels and sovereigns in the lining of her greatcoat right here in Versailles.

(She also recalled that Francesca had gone to her suite.)

And Selena recollected the curious tale of Royce’s having dealt with the smuggler, LaValle, in Haiti.

Not to mention that Royce was now the King’s friend, the Queen’s lover,
and
a
vicomte
. There were only two ways to become a
vicomte
. A man might be born one; that is, he might inherit the title. Or he might—and this was very rare—be given a title by a monarch in return for some great deed. That would hardly include bedding the monarch’s queen, would it? Unless the
French court was even more depraved than Mirabeau and Sorbante believed it to be.

Selena also recalled a story, probably apocryphal, about the Englishwoman who importuned the king in her scoundrel son’s behalf: “Please, milord, make him a gentleman,” she’d begged.

“I regret that I cannot make your fool of a son a gentleman,” the king had responded. “But I
can
make him a lord if it pleases you.”

Royce Campbell was no fool. He had a French title.

The question was: how had he won it?

Or earned it?

Although the realization caught at her heart, Selena could not entirely discredit the possibility that Royce had gone back to his old opportunistic, self-aggrandizing ways.

Royce stepped back from the thrones, careful not to turn away from King and Queen. He was immediately surrounded by a herd of frothy females. Louis XVI clapped his hands. The orchestra, which had been awaiting his pleasure, began to tune up for the dancing that would follow. A platoon of stewards bearing trays laden with champagne began to circulate among the crowd. Selena remembered that it was time for her to leave for her assignation with the King. But she could see that he was still seated on his throne, conversing earnestly with a Royal Guard officer. Absentmindedly, she took a glass of wine from a floating tray and just stood there, moving now a little left, now a little right, trying to keep her eyes on Royce’s face.

He was laughing and chatting with the admiring women.

He did not look her way, or even seem to remember that he’d seen her.

Selena, who’d always tried to be honest with herself, came to this conclusion:
He doesn’t want to know you at all!

So much for Davi the Dravidian and his theories about the mysterious communications of lovers.

The delirious whirl she’d experienced upon seeing him again had been entirely personal.
His
reaction, into which she’d read so much, had been mere surprise. She was just one woman out of his past, a woman he hadn’t expected to see again, a woman he obviously did not wish to see now. Why take up one’s time with a quite-often-difficult Scots exile, however beautiful, when one could have for the taking a much more complaisant queen?

In the mind of an opportunistic adventurer, there wouldn’t even be the trouble of a choice.

Still, Selena could not but remember, all too realistically, the sweet frenzy of their thousand and one intertwined comminglings, the incomparable feeling of possession when she had him inside her, the bucking surge of flesh upon flesh, and the ultimate moment when he became still upon her but throbbed inside her with tide after tide of his juice.

Oh God
, she thought, bereft.

He was laughing with the women.

The King was being helped down from his throne.

Soon it would be time for Selena’s next act upon this world’s stage.

“Hello, Selena,” said Sean Bloodwell, appearing before her. He touched his glass to hers. “My surprise at seeing you here—I noticed you right away, of course—is outweighed only by my joy.”

She tried to tear her eyes away from Royce Campbell and succeeded, but not before Sean saw both the glance and the cost of her effort. His smile was sad but understanding.