"Do those lovely creatures include handsome boys as well?" She glanced down at de Fontenay, his long curls lying tangled across his delicate shoulders.
Jacques drank thoughtfully from his tankard. "Mademoiselle, there is something of beauty in all God's work. What can a man know of wine if he samples only one vineyard?"
"A woman might say, Jacques, it depends on whether you prefer flowers, or wine."
"Touche, Mademoiselle. But some of us have a taste for all of life. Our years here are so brief."
As she stood beside him, she became conscious again of the short-barreled flintlock—borrowed from Winston's sea chest, without his knowing it—she had secreted in the waist of her petticoat, just below her low-cut bodice. Now it seemed so foolish. Why had Hugh painted Jacques as erratic and dangerous? Could it be because the old boucanier had managed to better him in that pistol duel they once had, and he'd never quite lived it down? Maybe that was why he never seemed to get around to explaining what really happened that time.
"Then perhaps you'll tell me how many of those years you spent hunting." She abruptly turned and gestured toward the hazy shoreline across the bay. Seen through the smoke of the boucan below, Hispaniola's forests seemed endless, impenetrable. "Over there, on the big island?"
"Ah, Mademoiselle, thinking back now it seems like forever. Perhaps it was almost that long." He laughed genially, then glanced toward Winston, standing at the other end of the platform, and called out, "Anglais, shall we tell your lovely mademoiselle something about the way we lived back in the old days?"
"You can tell her anything you please, Jacques, just take care it's true." Winston was studying the fleet of ships in the bay below. "Remember this is our evening for straight talk."
"Then I will try not to make it sound too romantic." Jacques chuckled and turned back. "Since the Anglais insists I must be precise, I should begin by admitting it was a somewhat difficult existence. Mademoiselle. We’d go afield for weeks at a time, usually six or eight of us together in a party— to protect ourselves should we blunder across some of the Spaniards' lancers, cavalry who roamed the island trying to be rid of us. In truth, we scarcely knew where we would bed down from one day to the next. . . ."
Winston was only half listening as he studied the musket- men in the yard below. There seemed to be a restlessness, perhaps even a tension, about them. Was it the boucan? The bother of the smoke? Or was it something more? Some treachery in the making? He told himself to stay alert, that this was no time to be lulled by Jacques's famed courtliness. It could have been a big mistake not to bring Atiba, in spite of Jacques's demand he be left.