to her chest, perkily, impishly smiling. 'I must be home, quickly.'
'What if I won't?' Lewrie pretended to pout.
'Then I must walk home as undone as a whore, and I will blame you for it, mon chou, ' she threatened. 'And there will be two dozen challenges to duels slipped under your door,' she added, cocking her head at the doorway to his set of rooms.
'Well, as we said in the Navy… 'Growl you may, but go you must.' Damme!' he cried, springing naked off the bed. He seized her, burying his face in the hollow of her neck. 'I simply cannot get enough of you, me girl!'
'Nor I you, cher Alain,' she conceded, 'but… I leave in the morning, you go upriver in a few more days, so we must part sometime. Only for a little while, mon amour, I promise! How do you say, that a parting is… something-something?' she crooned, embracing him with her fingers caressing his head and his hair against her as if to give comfort. 'A short absence…'
' 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,' ' Lewrie recited, lifting his head to swing her length against his nudity. 'I'll make you a new'un t'go along with that, too. 'Brief partings make rencontres all the sweeter… and urgent yearnings, the passion even fiercer.' Hmm?'
'You just made that up?'
'Aye.'
'You are a rare Englishman… with the romantic soul of a true Frenchman,' Charite admiringly declared. 'Are you certain you weren't born French?'
'Quickened in Holland, but born in London. Son of a penniless rogue and a disinherited heiress, dammit all.' Lewrie snickered.
'No matter, mon Anglais,' Charite said, wide-eyed and serious, all but biting her trembling lips as she bestowed the sweetest little kiss on his mouth, 'for…je t'aime, Alain mon chou. Je t'aime!'
'Darlin'!' Lewrie gasped, stunned right down to his curling toes by her sudden declaration of love; not intimate fondness, but her true love. Wondering what the Devil to do with it, but…!
When in doubt, lie like Blades, Lewrie told himself; It surely won't cost me much, and she might even halfway believe it!
'Je t'aime, aussi, ma cherie … ma petite biche,' he growled in reply, his forehead pressed to hers. 'You darlin' little doe-deer, I adore you, too. Ev'ry lovely inch of you.'
Well, that seemed t'make her happy, he thought as they embraced even tighter. And, despite her protestations, it did lead to a frantic tumble back onto his bed, and one more glorious, feverishly passionate romp, spare cundums, her expensive chemise, the lateness of the hour, her family, or society's expectations bedamned.
Oh, make him happy, Charite told herself at the same time; Men! So easy to entrance… and enlist! He will aid us. Forme. And it will be pleasurable for both of us. And he is so adorable, I think I truly am falling in love! Well, perhaps I could.
It was well past seven in the evening when he handed her down to the street and walked her the short block from Bourbon Street, up Rue Ste. Anne to Rue Dauphine, where she insisted that they must part at last. Now, on public view, their behaviour had to be most circumspect and formally courteous. Lewrie gallantly doffed his hat and swept it across his chest, was just about to make a 'leg' in conge, she about to drop him a brief curtsy and elegant incline of her head in parting as well, when it suddenly struck him that he still hadn't plumbed the matter of her address. He'd had other things on his mind.
'When I return and wish to see you again, how do I reach you?' he asked suddenly. 'Where do I send my best regards?'
'To… Mademoiselle Charite,' she seemed to stumble for a moment before resuming her gay, coquettish airs. 'Write me at La Maison Gayoso. Twenty-Six, Rue Dauphine.'
'Not Mademoiselle Bonsecours?' Lewrie pressed, hat in hand and shamming amiable, fond confusion.
'Our concierge will see that I get it,' Charite attempted to explain, for one brief instant almost snippish with him, before relaxing into her customary air of flirtatiousness. 'My parents and family… for now, mon chou, for only a while longer, just my given name, please? Until you are well settled in New Orleans, n'est-ce pas ?'
'Well,' he quibbled, shuffling from one foot to another.
'And you will keep your lodgings while you are upriver, Alain?' she asked with a disarming smile. 'When I return, I may write to you there?'
'No, I'll…' Lewrie flummoxed, considering that he would most-like never see her again, that his secret doings would be finished by the time she got back to the city; then hit upon a sudden inspiration. 'When I come back, I expect t'be much richer, and I'll take a grander appartement, not a low, single room. Where I may 'entertain' you in proper splendour, and… discreet privacy, hmm? Oh! You could pick it for me! Choose it and help me furnish it to our, ah… our mutual satisfaction?' he said with the suitable anticipatory leer. 'Try the Panton, Leslie offices first, though, and I'll come running.'
Aye, feather a nest, he smugly thought; women just adore that.
'Je t'adore!' Charite cooed under her breath, her eyes glowing under the brim of her fashionable bonnet, and the parasol carried over her shoulder spinning in delight. 'But of course, I shall be more than happy to help. And I shall be distraught every day that we are apart, Alain, mon coeur. 'Til then, though, alas,' she said with a tremble of her lip and a forlorn hitch of her shoulders and a heartfelt gulp in her voice. 'Au revoir, mon cher Alain! Trust that I do love you… madly!'
'And I you, Charite… as mad as a Hatter, as a March Hare!' he declared. 'English sayings… I'll explain them all to you, soon.'
'You will have to!' She chuckled. 'Soon. Le plus tot possible, mon amour … as soon as possible, my love. Again, au revoir!'
A slim hand gloved in lace net almost reached out for him, but she remembered her distinguished place in Creole society-in public at least!-and dropped him a slow and graceful curtsy, that elegant incline of her head, then she was gone in a trice, rising and spinning away down Dauphine without a backward glance, as if all their fervent day had never transpired.
Lewrie shrugged to himself and turned away as well, clapping his hat back on his head and fiddling with his sword-cane. He walked a few paces back down Rue Ste. Anne as if to return to his rooms or to head for the part of town where the most eateries were located… but then paused, theatrically felt his waist-coat pockets as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to lean his head round the corner, once he'd almost assured himself that no one was watching him. A few lamplighters were sluggishly making the rounds with their ladders and port fires, igniting the entire hundred (some scoffed and said only eighty) publicly funded streetlights of which New Orleans could boast. In the entryways, above the high stoops of shops and houses, private lanterns were already lit and feebly glowing, throwing little pools of light and even deeper skeins of darkness. But he could pick her out by the pale colour of her gown, the flounces on her hat, the now-furled parasol in her hands, as she flitted from one illuminated pool to the next…
A moment later, and she'd melted away into an iron-gated entryway of a blank-walled building. Close enough, Lewrie decided, thinking that his sauntering past the place would blow the gaffe. He would recognise the building again, counted it off as the twelfth from his corner, on the north side of Rue Dauphine, and from the look of the place at his acute viewing angle, it would most likely turn out to be one of the many walled-courtyard appartement houses. No more than three storeys above the street, but with spacious sets of rooms on all four sides to face the central courtyard. Eight appartements or twelve? he speculated, seeing
