Free Sweet Piracy by Jennifer Blake

“Victor and I are seldom so merry.”
    Victor Rochefort looked up. “Did I hear my name?”
    “I was telling Madame Delacroix how charming we find her family,” the Marquis said with his slow smile.
    “Yes,” Victor agreed. “Indeed, yes.”
    As sometimes happened in the summer months in that southern latitude, the afternoon brought another storm near the same hour as the day before. The master and mistress of Beau Repos refused to allow their guests to think of leaving in the downpour.
    Rochefort demurred, saying he and Victor had trespassed too long on their hospitality. But M’sieur Delacroix would not have it so.
    Victor took a chair on the gallery where they had congregated to watch the rain fall in silver streams from the overhanging roof. “Give over, Jean. You know you don’t want to go, and it might be disastrous to suffer a wetting when you’ve only just got your strength back.”
    This hint of illness brought glances of polite and not so polite inquiry from half those within earshot. The Marquis appeared blind to their promptings, favoring his cousin with so stern a look that Victor seemed sunk with remorse for at least a half moment. An instant later Rochefort was in the thick of a complicated wager concerning which of the two rivulets of water inching across the gallery floor from blown rain would reach the house wall first.
    It was evening before the last carriage rolled away along the muddy levee road. The rain had lifted to reveal a cool, purple twilight. The rest of the family scattered to their various chambers and occupations, Caroline was left alone to listen to the chorus of frogs and insects and the plaintive call of a lonely whippoorwill away in the woods beyond the cane field.
    It was seldom she achieved a moment to herself. She savored it, relaxing in a fan-backed rattan chair, letting her hands lie idle in her lap.
    The serenity she craved was elusive. There was a disturbance in the back of her mind, something she could not quite put her finger on.
    She did not think it involved their visitors this day. She might feel a twinge of self-pity at not being an active participant in such gatherings, but she thought she had too much strength of character to let it trouble her unduly. In any case, she could have taken a more active part had she wished. She was no downtrodden drudge. As a relative by marriage to the family, she enjoyed certain privileges denied most women in her position. She was accepted at the family table, included in most invitations, and given a greater than average freedom concerning working hours and habits. True, Madame Delacroix was often capricious in her remembrance of the relationship, treating her as an employee scarcely worth her wage one moment and loading her with the responsibilities of blood kin the next. A case in point was the sea voyage to bring Amélie home.
    Caroline shook her head. She had promised herself she would not recall the incident of the privateer again. Memory of it recurred too frequently of late for her comfort. She found herself at odd times wondering if she had inflicted much damage on the Captain of the Black Eagle . Try as she might, she had been able to hear no news, either on board the prize ship as it was being brought into port, or later. He had apparently disappeared from the face of the earth. Of course, within weeks of the capture of the British merchantman, a treaty had been signed at Ghent, the war finished. Letters of marque and reprisal would have been made useless at the stroke of a pen. There would have been no more need for the Black Eagle or its Captain to roam the seas.
    The most peculiar thing was that she could no longer bring the features of the privateer into focus in her mind’s eye. She saw him merely as a tall, bearded, faceless figure somehow larger than life, touched with immortality. Perhaps because the ball from her pistol had seemed to incapacitate him so little, she could not feature him as being dead.
    So much