“And I thought the South was always warm.” Ricky examined her hands. “Whoever,” she remarked pleasantly, “took my hand lotion better return it. The consequences might not be very attractive.”
“Are you sure you packed it this morning?” Val asked.
“But of—“ Her fingers went to her mouth. “I wonder if I did? I’ve just got to have some. We’ll drive to town tomorrow and get a bottle.”
“Thirty miles or so for one bottle of gooey stuff,” Val protested.
“Good idea.” Rupert stood with his back to me fireplace as if there really were a flame or two within its black emptiness. “I’ve some papers mat LeReur wants to see. Then there’re our boxes at the freight station to arrange transportation for, and we’ll have to see about getting a newspaper and—”
“Make a list,” murmured his brother.
Rupert dropped down upon the wide arm of Ricky’s chair and with her only too willing aid set to work. Val eyed them drowsily. Rupert and Ricky—or to give her her very formal name in full—Richanda Anne, were “Red”
Ralestones, possessing the thin, three-cornered faces, the dark mahogany hair, the sharply defined cheekbones which had been the mark of the family as far back in history as portraits or written descriptions existed. The “Red”
Ralestones were marked also by height and a suppleness of body and movement. The men had been fine swordsmen, the ladies noted beauties. But they were also cursed, Val remembered vividly, with uncertain tempers.
Rupert had schooled himself to the point where his emotions were mastered by his will. But Val had seen Ricky enjoy full tantrums, and the last occasion was not so long ago that the scene had become misty in his memory.
Generous to the point of self-beggary, loyal to a fault, and incurably romantic, that was a “Red” Ralestone.
Val himself was a “Black” Ralestone, which was a very different thing. They were a new growth on the family tree. a growth which appeared after the Ralestones had been exiled to colonial America. His black hair, his long, dark face of no particular beauty marked with straight, black brows set in a perpetual frown—that was the sign of a “Black” Ralestone. They were as strong-willed as the “Reds,” but their anger could be controlled to icy rage.
“Now that you have spent the monthly income,” Val suggested as Rupert added up a long column of minute figures scrawled across the first page of his pocket notebook, “let’s really get away from economics for one evening. The surroundings suggest something more romantic than dollars and cents. After all, when did a pirate ever show a saving disposition? Would the first Roderick—”
“The Roderick who brought home the Luck?” Ricky laughed. “But he brought home a fortune, too, didn’t he, Rupert?”
Her brother relit his pipe. “Yes, but a great many lords came home from the Crusades with their pockets filled. Sir Roderick de la Stone thought the Luck worth his entire estate even after he was made Baron Ralestone.”
Ricky shivered delicately. “Not altogether nice people, those ancestors of ours,” she observed.
“No,” Val grinned. “By rights this room should be full of ghosts instead of the beat of just one. How many Ralestones died violently? Seven or eight, wasn’t it?”
“But the ones who died in England should haunt Lome,” argued Ricky, half seriously.
“Well then, that sort of confines us to the crews of the ships our great-great-great-grandfather scuttled,” her brother replied.
“Rupert,” Ricky turned and asked impulsively, “do you really believe in the Luck?”
Rupert looked up at the empty niche. “I don’t know— No, I don’t. Not the way that Roderick and Richard and all the rest did. But something that has seven hundred years of history behind it—that means a lot.”
“ ‘Then did he take up ye sword fashioned by ye devilish art of ye East from two fine blades found in ye tomb,’ “ Val quoted from the record of Brother Anselm, the friar who had accompanied Sir Roderick on his crusading. “Do you suppose that that part’s true? Could the Luck have been made from two other swords found in an old tomb?”
“Not impossible. The Saracens were master metal workers. Look at the Damascus blades.”
“It all sounds like a fairy-tale,” commented Ricky. “A sword with magic powers beaten out of two other swords found in a tomb. And the whole thing done under the direction of an Arab astrologer,”
“You’ve got to admit,” broke in Val, “that Sir Roderick had luck after it was given to him. He came home a wealthy man and he died a Baron. And his descendants even survived the Wars of the Roses when four-fifths of the great English families were wiped out.”
“ ‘And fortune continued to smile,’ “ Rupert took up the story, “ ‘until a certain wild Miles Ralestone staked the Luck of his house on the turn of a card—and lost.’ “
“O-o-oh!” Ricky squirmed forward in her chair. “Now comes the pirate. Tell us that, Rupert.”
“You know the story by heart now,” he objected.
“We never heard it here, where some of it really happened. Tell it, please, Rupert!”
“In your second childhood?” he asked.
“Not out of my first yet,” she answered promptly.
“Pretty please, Rupert.”
“Miles Ralestone, Marquess of Lome,” he began, “rode with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. He was a notorious gambler, a loose liver, and a cynic. And he even threw the family Luck across the gaming table.”
“’The Luck went from him who did it no honor,’ “ Val repeated slowly. “I read that in that old letter among your papers, Rupert.”
“Yes, the Luck went from him. He survived Marston Moor; he survived the death of his royal master, Charles the First, on the scaffold. He lived long enough to witness the return of the Stuarts to England. But the Luck was gone, and with it the good fortune of his line. Rupert, his son, was but a penniless hanger-on at the royal court; the manor of Lome a fire-gutted wreckage.
“Rupert followed James Stuart from England when that monarch became a fugitive to escape the wrath of his subjects. And the Marquess of Lome sank to the role of pot-house bully in the back lanes of Paris.”
“And then?” prompted Val.
“And then a miracle occurred. Rupert was employed by his master on a secret mission to London, and there the Luck came again into his hands. Perhaps by murder. But he died miserably enough of a heavy cold got by lying in a ditch to escape Dutch William’s soldiers.”
“ ‘So is this perilous Luck come again into our hands. Then did I persevere to mend the fortunes of my house.’ That’s what Rupert’s son Richard wrote about the Luck,” Ricky recalled. “Richard, me first pirate.”
“He did a good job of fortune mending,” commented Val dryly. “Married one of the wealthiest of the French king’s wards and sailed for the French West Indies all in a fortnight. Turned pirate with the approval of the French and took to lifting the cargoes of other pirates.”
“I’ll bet that most of his success was due to the Lady Richanda,” observed Ricky. “She sailed with him dressed in man’s clothes. Remember that miniature of her that we saw in New York, the one in the museum? All me ‘Black’ Ralestones are supposed to look like her. Hear that, Val?”
“At least it was the Lady Richanda who persuaded her husband to settle ashore,” said Rupert. “She was personally acquainted with Bienville and Iberville who were proposing to rule the Mississippi valley for France by building a city near the mouth of the river. And ‘Black Dick,’ the pirate, obtained a grant of land lying along Lake Borgne and this bayou. Although the city was not begun until 1724, this house was started in 1710 by workmen imported from England.
“The house of an exile,” Rupert continued slowly. “Richard Ralestone was born in England, but he left there in his tenth year. In spite of the price on his head, he crept back to Devon in 1709 to see Lome for the last time. And it was from the rude sketches he made of ruined Lome that Pirate’s Haven was planned.”
“Why, we saw those sketches!” Ricky’s eyes shone with excitement. “Do you remember, Val?”
Her brother nodded. “Must have cost him plenty to do it,” he replied. “Richard had an immense personal fortune of his own gained from piracy, and he spared no expense in building. The larger part of the stone in these walls was brought straight from Europe, just as they later brought the paving blocks for the streets of New Orleans. When he had done—and the place was five years a-building because of Indian troubles and other disturbances—he settled down to live in feudal state. Some of his former seamen rallied around him as a guard, and he imported blacks from the islands to work his indigo fields.