Fires of Delight Read Online Free PDF

quite unconscious, bleeding slowly from a slack mouth, bleeding from countless lacerations all over his body. Except for the little cross on the chain around his neck, the spy was naked.
    The soldiers dragged him into the cell opposite Selena, and Clay Oakley appeared before her. He was breathing heavily. Broad, flushed face and shining pate gave his head the aspect of a monstrous tuber. He gestured toward the cell in which Ward had been deposited.
    “Did you glimpse the handiwork, Selena?” he asked. “Unless you decide to talk, such will be your fate on the morrow.”
    She lifted her chin and glared at him, but said nothing. She was trying to think of a way to find out how much Oakley had learned from Erasmus Ward.
    Inadvertently, he gave her a clue. “Pity the man had so little endurance,” Oakley said. “With a fine, healthy young person like you, I expect things will be different.”
    Oakley wouldn’t need to question me if Erasmus has already told him what he wants to know , she realized. The lieutenant, whose nature she was beginning to decipher, was, for all his menace, a creature of intelligence and strategy rather than random violence. For him, inflicting harm on his victims was only a tool, a means to a great end: the information he must have to serve his master well. But Oakley was utterly ruthless in that he would never shrink from the most terrible measures, to which the battered body of Erasmus Ward attested. Oakley was a perfectionist who would leave nothing undone, no task incomplete, no circle unclosed in the fine, cold whorls of his mind. In this, Selena realized, Oakley was more dangerous even than Darius McGrover, who had killed her father. McGrover’s passionate nature, his hatred, his conceit: they had been weaknesses. Oakley seemed to have no such weaknesses: he was much more formidable. Selena understood that his very body, muscled by untold hours of struggle, was a triumph of will over the respiratory trouble that afflicted him.
    “What are you going to do with Mr. Ward?” she asked thelieutenant, as the two redcoats stepped out of the cell and locked the barred door.
    Oakley shrugged. “If he lives, I shall question him again.”
    “If he lives—” said Selena in horror. “Won’t you please get him a doctor? At least give him a blanket. Here,” she added, turning and snatching her own threadbare covering from her bunk, “give him mine.”
    “As you wish.” Oakley took the blanket and tossed it through the bars of Ward’s cell, where it landed haphazardly upon the spy’s brutalized body, which Selena glimpsed dimly. He was lying on the planks; at least they hadn’t left him on the wet floor.
    “I would prefer to chat further with you now, Selena,” Oakley said in farewell, “but I have been called to headquarters for a conference. Sleep well.”
    With that, he and the two soldiers left. After they had departed, Selena called softly to Erasmus Ward, trying to rouse him. She did not succeed. Once or twice he seemed to stir, saying “no, no,” but that was all. She said a silent prayer in his behalf; it was all she could do.
    Presently, Phineas Bonwit appeared with the evening rations. He was accompanied, to Selena’s surprise, by a priest. She had been raised as a Scots Presbyterian, but her own wild nature and her association with Royce Campbell, whose faith, if any, was ancient and pagan and wild, had not exactly enhanced religious impulses. I’ll have time for heaven later on , she sometimes thought, putting the whole matter out of her mind. But now she recalled that Erasmus Ward was a passionately devout believer, and she was glad that someone had thought to provide for his soul in this hour of need.
    But who? It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to Oakley.
    Corporal Bonwit, lugging a bucketful of water and a black kettle half-filled with lukewarm porridge, brought the cowled, cassocked servant of God to Ward’s cell. Placing his burdens on the floor in front of