The other stalwart young fellows had no problem with that.

"If not, quel dommage," Charite continued, "and you must quell your eagerness 'til the next voyage. Remember, Rubio, hastening the day of rejoining La Belle France, and throwing off the Spanish tyrrany, comes first, last, and always. Before our petty amusements."

She blew teasingly at his ear, swept off his overly ornate hat, and tousled his romantically long, dark locks, then gave the embarrassed young fellow a quick and "sisterly" peck on the cheek… with a tiny flick of her tongue tip to tantalise before almost skipping away from him. "Ah, regardez… the boat, at last!"

Don Rubio Monaster bashfully grinned, though following her every movement with downcast but lustful eyes; unsure, again, whether he'd been gulled by her… or slyly encouraged.

But for their mutual scheme, Don Rubio might have been shunned by her family. His father had been a grandee Spaniard sent to administrate the territory. Though a true Castilian of noble hidalgo blood never tainted by Moor or Marrano, whose sires had held titles since the Reconquista in the 1400s, his father had been so impoverished that a wilderness post's salary had been welcomed. Spanish overlord or not, his father had managed to wed a proud and exalted French Creole lady, heir to vast acreages upriver from the city, and had seen to it that the old French deeds of her family, the Bergrands, had become legitimate Spanish land grants.

Not so smart, though, to avoid taking the field against a Chickasaw uprising up near Natchez, where his noble father had been slain. Since then, the Bergrands had moulded him into more of a Creole than a Don, more a Jacobin than a Royalist after the French Revolution, too.