Prisoner of Desire Read Free

had long ago been taken. While on a tour of the countryside by steamboat, however, Nathan chanced to sit in on a poker game. When he rose from the table, he was the owner of six hundred acres of prime delta land less than three hours’ traveling time from New Orleans, along with 173 slaves and a house named Beau Refuge. His pleasure was short-lived. By the time he took possession of his land, his wife was ill with a fever, and died soon afterward.
    Being a practical man and a sensual one, Anya’s father had, when his period of mourning was over, looked about him for a woman who would make a home for him and be a mother to his young daughter. He settled on Marie-Rose Hautrive, whom he called Rosa, a young woman past the freshness of first youth at twenty-two and still unmarried. He courted her in the teeth of the opposition of her family: he had wealth, but to the French Creoles la famille was all-important, and what could one know of the family of a blue-eyed Américain from so barbarous a place as Boston?
    Plump and placid, too placid to attract suitors less determined, Madame Rosa had been a perfect stepmother. She gave Anya love and warmth and wrapped her in the luxurious comfort of her massive bosom and the home she made for Anya and her father. She sometimes complained gently of Anya’s conduct as she was growing up, but never scolded, and certainly never attempted to discipline her. Her tactics stemmed from indolence in part, but also from an innate shrewdness. Anya’s loss of her mother and doting grandparents at the same time that she was uprooted from her familiar home in Virginia had left her prey to violent nightmares. The indulgence she received because of them, combined with being treated like a small princess by the slaves who had come with the plantation her father had won, had make her willful and wild. Madame Rosa soothed her fears and gave her security. She did her best to make her a biddable young lady, and had succeeded well enough until the deaths of the two men closest to Anya, those of Jean and of her father.
    Nathan Hamilton died of injuries after a fall from a horse just two months after the death of Anya’s fiancé. The double tragedy propelled Anya into a fierce rebellion. She was only eighteen, and it seemed that her life was over. If living and loving could come to an end so soon and for so slight a reason, then it would be as well to use the hours allowed precisely as one pleased. If such terrible things could happen to people who followed all the stifling rules dictated by the church and society, while men like Ravel Duralde, who had killed her Jean, went blithely on their way flouting every canon of decency, then what good was conforming? She would do so no longer.
    And so she had discarded her petticoats and sidesaddle to ride astride over her father’s plantation in a long, divided skirt of soft leather worn with a man’s shirt and broad-brimmed hat. She read books and periodicals on farming methods and, when she found her father’s overseer unwilling to listen to her ideas for improvements, fired him and took on the job of running the plantation herself. Sometimes she argued with the men who were her neighbors about the theories of breeding horses and swine, a subject a lady should know nothing of, much less speak about in mixed company. She learned to swim with the slave children, braving the treacherous currents of the river, and could not understand why drowning was thought preferable for a female to engaging in such an activity. She tended the ills of the plantation slaves, male as well as female, helping the elderly woman who served as nurse to set limbs and sew up cuts, as well as deliver babies and aid the women who had attempted to rid themselves of unwanted children. And she listened to the hair-raising tales of the shifts of love and desire, hate and assault that took place in the slave quarters after dark. The female slaves taught her a number of interesting facts, in