Prisoner of Desire by Jennifer Blake Page B

when all possibility of his reaching the dueling ground in time is safely over.”
    “You must take care. Its true he is a gentleman, and yet — not entirely.”
    “What a snob you are,” she said, a smile rising in her eyes.
    “You understand what I say?”
    She sobered. “Yes, I understand. And I will take care.”
    Later, when the two men had gone, when the water had been brought and heated and the cuts on the back of Ravel’s head cleaned, neatly stitched, and bandaged once more, Anya sent the housekeeper and her son who had helped her away, then sat down beside Ravel.
    Time passed. The sky was overcast and brooding with the threat of more rain, still the light increased until the lamp was no longer needed. Anya got up and blew it out, moving it back to its table. Returning to the chair beside the bed, she noticed the dried blood still crusting the side of Ravel’s face, the edges of his hair, and his neck. It was unsightly, and probably uncomfortable. For something to do, as much as anything else, she brought a basin of water and a cloth and, perching on the side of the bed, began to wash away the blood with gentle strokes. The service, she told herself, was one she would have performed for an injured animal. There was no contradiction in her impulse to make an enemy more comfortable.
    His skin, though browned by the sun, was olive in tint, the legacy of his French and Spanish lineage. As she smoothed the cloth over it, she allowed her mind to wander to other aspects of his heritage.
    La famille, family background, family honor, the purity of the bloodlines, was the major concern of most of the older Creole women. Many of them claimed descent from the sixty filles à la cassette, the casket girls, so called because they had brought with them to Louisiana their trousseaus, given to them by the Company of the Indies, in a small trunk or casket. These girls, most of them orphans of good family, had been carefully chosen as brides for men of character among the early colonists. Their reputations for piety and charity, and as faithful wives and nurturing mothers, were admirable, and had remained so through the years.
    But before the filles à la cassette had come the correction girls, women rounded up from the prisons and correction houses of France to be sent out to Louisiana against their wills as wives in order to prevent the men from running in the woods after the Indian women. These correction girls had been troublemakers from the beginning, reluctant to work, contentious, avaricious, often immoral, and anxious for one thing only, a chance to return to France. It was a drollery often pointed out that while the casket girls had been extremely fecund, founding innumerable families, most of the correction girls, by some strange coincidence, seemed to have been barren; few in Louisiana traced their lineage to these first women to arrive.
    Ravel Duralde, or rather his father, was one of the few.
    This was not the only source of the feeling that Ravel was not quite what he should be. There was also the fact that his father, before his death, had belonged to the cult of the Romantics. The elder Duralde had left the church to become a freethinker, and had spent his time writing novels peopled by ghosts and strange ethereal women. His labors had barely sufficed to keep him in pen nibs, and so he had taken his wife and children into the country, forcing them to live in a crumbling ruin of a house on the charity of his old friend M’sieur Girod, the same man who had been father to Jean, Anya’s fiancé.
    It was on the Girod plantation that Ravel and Jean had become friends, a friendship that had continued even after Ravel’s father had died and his widow, rather than staying on as she was urged to do, had returned with her son to New Orleans. Ravel’s mother, a woman of practical Spanish blood, had not declined gently into perpetual widowhood as was the custom. As a final sign of the lack of breeding in the family, she