Fires of Delight Read Online Free PDF Page A

but lingered outside the iron-barred door. She sat down on her “bunk,” two planks nailed together and suspended from the wall by a couple of rusty chains.
    “Yes?” she asked, feeling his eyes on her.
    “Ye know,” he faltered, ducking his head absurdly, “if you was…if you was t’ be a little bit nice t’ me, might be I kin ’elp ye out. Not outta the prison, oh, no, but I kin get ye extra rations…”
    Selena had a very good idea what this clumsy dolt meant by being “a little bit nice.” She didn’t know whether to laugh at him or damn his soul. Before she did either, however, she realized that this gangly half-wit might somehow prove to be of use, if only she could devise a plan to flee the fortress.
    “You’re very kind, corporal,” she told him, offering what she hoped was a convincing smile, “but I’m…I’m very, very tired and upset just now. Perhaps later—”
    Even in the torchlit corridor, she could see him beaming from thick earlobe to thick earlobe in awestruck anticipation.
    “I under stand! ” he said. “An’ I believe I kin sneak ye a cup o’ tea right now. I’ll go an’ see.”
    After Bonwit had gone rattling off down the corridor, the pointof his belted sword clanking on the stone walls, Selena lay down on the planks, thinking and trying to plan. My entire life has led me to this moment , she reflected, which was not exactly a sanguine thought. But she was somewhat cheered by the knowledge that she’d survived high peril and beaten long odds before: fleeing Scotland and Darius McGrover in the hold of a rat-infested freighter; surviving abduction by a cynical British procurer, Captain Jack, and escaping from the palace of the Indian maharajah Jack had sold her to; finding Royce Campbell again after believing him to be dead of the plague.
    Fortune, don’t turn on me now , Selena prayed. But then she thought, No, it was not fortune entirely, it was myself as well, never giving up, remembering who I am and where I come from . And Scotland, an ocean away, came to her when she summoned it, and she set it, like a beautiful jewel, between her violet eyes and the oozing wet stone. From the hard little village of Kinlochbervie, where her father lay buried in a hut of stone, to the dark, smoky lochs in the Highlands, to the honey-drenched moors, to fabled Edinburgh and its ancient aura, finally south to Coldstream, she saw it all, held it to herself for strength and hope, pure and fair and never to be tarnished.
    Yes, she had always carried Scotland in her soul, when the days beat down her spirit, when the nights were dark.
    And now another night was falling. Corporal Bonwit did not return with the tea he’d promised, nor even with the usual evening ration of bread and porridge. Eventually, in spite of a fearful, impotent agony over the fate of Erasmus Ward, a clutching emptiness in Selena’s belly made her aware of the time. Bonwit was almost always punctual in his ministrations; something in the fortress was amiss. Even the prisoners in other cells along the corridor began to break the rule of silence, to wonder in quizzical hisses exactly what was happening. Selena was about to tell them that Ward had been captured, but held her tongue. The news was too demoralizing, especially for this already cheerless dungeon.
    At last, the iron door at the far end of the corridor was flung open with a metallic clash. Selena heard Oakley’s deep voice, with a breathless rasp, saying: “Throw the bloody traitor into the cell down at the end.” He sounded angry. Selena hoped his choler meant that Erasmus Ward had borne up under interrogation.
    Then she gasped in horror as two redcoats dragged the diminutivespy in front of her cell and stopped, one of them unlocking the iron-barred door to the empty cell across the corridor. They had been pulling him along by his heels, leaving a wide trailing streak of blood that glistened darkly on the torchlit stones of the prison floor. Erasmus Ward was