Prisoner of Desire (27 page)

Moving with the quick reflexes and easy strength of the great hunting cat, El Tigre, for which he had been named, Ravel vaulted over the railing, springing down upon the other man. The pair went sprawling in the dirt of the wagon drive. There was a grunted curse, the sound of bone crunching under bone. The man with the rifle lay still.

Ravel crouched over him an instant, waiting, then rose with animal grace. He moved to the open end of the building, angling to one side for the cover of the wall. He looked out, quartering the night that was colored orange with flames, searching it with his eyes. The only thing that moved nearby was the branches of the trees whipped by the hot vortex of the fire, though there was a stirring further down the road.

Anya joined him. Keeping her voice low, she said, “The others?”

“It seems they were so sure of us they left only one guard while they went on to other things, like rounding up the slaves.”

Slave stealing was common, though it was more usual for them to be enticed away one at a time, with promises of freedom, than to be taken at gunpoint. The demand, and the price, was high in Texas, and the border was no great distance away.

“Do you think they heard the guard call out?”

“We won’t wait to find out.” Returning to the fallen man, Ravel scooped up the rifle, then caught Anya’s hand and started back down the wagon drive.

Anya took a few steps. Feeling the hot blast of the fire, seeing the yellow flames, she stopped. “That guard, he’s still alive. We can’t leave him.”

Ravel gave her a straight glance. He did not bother to remind her that the man would have killed them both. Turning back, he went with swift economy of movement to strip off the guards greasy suspenders and bind his arms behind his back. He made a gag with the handkerchief he took from his own pocket and tied it in place with a piece of the man’s shirt, then grabbed an arm and began to drag the unconscious guard toward the rear entrance to the gin.

The wind was roaring down the wagon drive, carrying with it billows of smoke filled with fragments of burning ash and soot. The heat was so intense that it parched the skin of their faces and seemed to sear its way into their lungs. Overhead, there were small rivers of fire flowing along the rafters of the unsealed roof. There was a humming, thumping noise in the gin machinery as the upper gears and main drum absorbed the heat. The fire rumbled and crackled and spat. Through the open doorway of the room they had left, they could see that the bed had burst into flames and there was smoke seeping up through the cracks in the floor.

It was the regularity of the thumping sound in the machinery that drew Anya’s attention. At first she could see nothing in the smoke-filled inferno that the gin had become. Then she saw a movement at the back of the platform running down the side. She stopped.

There were two people lying bound and gagged there, one of them kicking at the upright beams that held the machinery. It was Marcel and Denise.

Ravel and Anya were beside them in an instant. Ravel tore the gag out of Marcel’s mouth, while Anya did the same for Denise. The manservant croaked out, “My pocket — knife.”

Flaming bits of wood were raining down all around them by the time the ropes were cut and enough circulation restored that Marcel and Denise could stumble out of the gin. It was as well that the rear entrance of the long building was deserted. They made no attempt at concealment, but threw themselves headlong into the night, not stopping until they had reached the deep shadows under a live oak tree. They let the guard fall to the ground and bent over, drawing deep breaths to the depths of their lungs of the blessedly cool and untainted night air.

When he was able, Marcel told them what had taken place. The man they called the boss had come in his carriage. He had not stepped down, but called the leader of the men out to him. His orders given, he had turned around and driven away back toward New Orleans. The men had immediately tied up Marcel and Denise, then gone to round up the slaves in the quarters, making ready to haul them away while the hours of dark still lasted. The men had carried the two house servants out to the gin; they were the ones most likely to be able to identify them, they said, so they would burn with their mistress and her prisoner. The gin had been fired and a single man left on watch while the others loaded the slaves in the wagons and ransacked the house.

The thought of the people she had worked with and cared for so long, the older ones, the children and babies, being hauled away like so many head of cattle made Anya feel ill. Almost to herself, she said, “We have to stop them!”

Ravel turned his gaze toward her and slowly she lifted her lashes to meet it. He wondered if she realized the plea that lay deep in her eyes. He gave a hard nod. “We will need other weapons.”

“Everything is at the main house under lock and key — unless they have already been taken.” The hunting rifles and handguns that had belonged to her father were prized goods, easy to sell in New Orleans. The muskets and silver-chased fowling pieces, relics scorned by the crooks who infested Gallatin Street, might have been left behind.

“Cane knives?”

“Yes. They are in the tool shed, but it’s locked.”

“Let’s see,” Ravel said, his teeth gleaming white in the tight grin that lighted his smoke-grayed face.

A short time later, Ravel and Marcel had armed themselves with the cane knives, the long, wide-bladed, and lethally sharp knives used for cutting cane and also for clearing underbrush. Denise had taken a hoe for protection until she could get her hands on a butcher knife from the kitchen. Anya had seized on a short-handled sledgehammer since she had always hated the vicious-looking cane knives. With the greatest stealth, they circled wide around the slave quarters, coming up on the rear of the big house. Denise left them there, moving with the silence of her Indian ancestors to the separate kitchen building. She returned just as quietly a few moments later, carrying a knife with a blade that had been sharpened so many times it was as thin as a stiletto.

Standing concealed among the fig and pomegranate trees in the back garden, they watched the shadows of the men against the lamplight as they crossed from room to room in front of the upstairs French doors. There appeared to be only two of them. That meant two were still down at the quarters. A harnessed wagon belonging to Beau Refuge stood on the drive at the end of the walk leading from the back gallery of the house. In it were several bulky sacks. The sight of them, with their implication of leisurely picking and choosing among her possessions while she herself was supposedly roasting in the gin fire, made Anya’s blood beat high in her veins. Her grip on the hammer she held tightened.

For long moments there was no sign of movement from the upper floor. The men must have carried their depredations toward the front of the house, where the salon and Madame Rosa’s bedchamber were located. His voice low, Ravel said, “Now.”

They moved swiftly toward the back stairs that led from the ground floor to the upper gallery, giving access through the French doors to the main rooms. The doors leading into the middle room, the sitting room, stood open. One by one they eased inside. Ravel crossed to station himself to the left of the doorway opening from the sitting room into the dining room at the center of the house.

Anya took the right side, opposite Ravel, and grasped her hammer with both hands. Denise moved quietly to stand in the doorway leading to Celestine’s bedchamber on the left. Marcel flattened himself against the wall, merging into the shadows of the corner farthest from the small lamp that burned on a side table, a position giving him a view into the dining room.

The men must return through the sitting room to reach the back stairs that gave access to the waiting wagon. To do that, they would have to come through the door Anya and Ravel guarded. The minutes inched past. Thumps and jolts and the sounds of doors and drawers being opened and shut could be heard. The men were in no hurry. It seemed an eternity before the manservant made a brief, warning gesture.

Footsteps. They were firm and heavy, as if the man who approached was burdened. A faint shadow, cast by lamplight from the dining room, crossed the threshold. Anya lifted her hammer, brought it down.

Before it landed, the hammer struck a glancing blow on the butt of the rifle Ravel was swinging toward the back of the man’s head. The double blow of hammer and rifle, neither solid, still sent the man staggering to fall on his face. He dropped the bag he carried. A silver sugar bowl spewed from it across the floor, whirling like a top.

From the dining room, the second man yelled, dropping his bag. He pulled a pistol from his coat pocket. Ravel spun, reversing his rifle, fanning the hammer to cock and fire in one smooth motion. The second man was thrown backward by the blast of the shot. Dark gray powder smoke blossomed in the room.

The first man had been no more than stunned. Even as the shot rang out, he picked himself up and sprinted for the door. Marcel ran forward, swinging his cane knife in a shining arc toward the juncture where the man’s head and shoulder came together. It struck, sank in. The man screamed and tumbled headfirst out onto the gallery, to lie in a fast-spreading pool of blood.

Denise gave the dying man a meager glance then stepped further into the room where she had been concealed. She emerged a moment later with a rifle in each hand. “Look what I found.”

The weapons had been propped against the bed, apparently left while the men turned out the drawers of a dressing table, then forgotten in their search for spoils. Ravel took one in exchange for his that must be reloaded and Anya accepted the other, while Marcel knelt to search through the pockets of the two dead men for ammunition. The sound of the shot would draw the other thugs, and they must be ready.

“M’sieur, mam’zelle,” Denise called from where she had stepped out onto the gallery.

It was time. The men were coming. Ravel was first through the door, with Anya behind him and Marcel, hastily closing the breech of his rifle, behind them. They moved down the railing, where the light from the sitting room would not silhouette them as such perfect targets.

There was only one man. The other had stayed with the slaves. He came on up the middle of the drive from the quarters, his head lifted as he caught the movement on the upper gallery.

Ravel lifted his voice, calling, “Hold it right there, friend!”

The man shied like a horse finding a snake under his feet. His rifle boomed as he dropped into a crouch and scurried toward the trees.

The bullet buzzed overhead with the sound of an angry wasp. Besides Anya, Ravel raised his rifle and fired. She did the same. The twin shots exploded. Dirt was kicked up between the feet of the man on the drive. Something plucked at the sleeve of his shirt so that he yelled a curse and dropped his rifle. Ducking, weaving, he gained the cover of the trees and went crashing back toward the quarters. Seconds later, there came the sound of running hoofbeats.

“Let’s go after them!” Marcel said, ready to head for the stairs.

Ravel shook his head. “We would never catch them; besides, they are just hired hands. It’s the boss I want. But we have a few things to take care of here first.”

A few things, such as releasing and calming the slaves, containing the gin fire so that it did not spread to the roofs of the outbuildings, the quarters, or the main house, and burying the dead. They worked through the hours of the night into the dawn.

Ravel was everywhere, cutting the ropes that made a cordon of the slaves, hoisting a crying child to his shoulder the better for it to find its mother, organizing the men into a bucket brigade to get water to the buildings most in danger, beating out flames with a wet burlap sack.

Anya treated cuts and burns, passed out sugar lumps to the youngest and most frightened children, set the oldest ones who were getting in the way to watching for sparks in the dried grass and undergrowth, and sent a delegation of older men to see to the bodies in the big house. With several of the women, she went to tend to the man left trussed up with suspenders behind the gin. He was gone. All that was left was the twisted suspenders lying in the grass to show that he had worked his way free and fled.

It was only as dawn was streaking the sky, and the gin was reduced to a pile of smoking black beams and gray ash dotted with a few red embers, that Anya and Ravel made their way back to the house. They pulled themselves step by weary step up the back stairs and across the gallery to the sitting room. Inside, they started toward a settee to sit down, then looked down at themselves and decided against it. Covered with dirt and soot, their faces gray with fatigue and smeared with smoke-grime, they looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the ridiculousness of their appearance that triggered their mirth, but beneath that was the exhilaration of having cheated death and destruction, and the sheer pleasure of breathing, feeling, living.

Denise found them moments later as they gasped with laughter, leaning weakly upon each other in the middle of the sitting room. She put her hands on her hips and cleared her throat. “When you two are finished,” she said as they turned toward her, “there’s water heatin’ and tubs waitin’ for the both of you.”

For Anya, it was heaven to lie in the water and feel its silken heat against her parched and bruised skin, to breathe the scented steam and allow the muscles clenched tight throughout her body to slowly relax. There were sore places everywhere and small burns she could not remember receiving. Her hair was singed in places around her face, and the clothes that lay heaped on the floor where she had stepped out of them had so many holes burned into them that it looked as if they had made a feast for moths.