They were a breed unto themselves, these women of the South, Zach thought, watching her. All fluff and flutter on the outside and indomitable, stubborn willpower on the inside, like a drift of soft, sweetly scented wisteria blossoms hiding a bedrock of pure granite. And again he thought of Emmanuelle de Beauvais. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t hide either her strength, or her abilities and intelligence—didn’t hide what she was—beneath an assumption of yielding softness. He thought she’d probably had a rough time of it, growing up around here.
“An affecting spectacle, is it not?” said a languid, cultured voice that spoke in English; not the English of the South, or even of the north Atlantic seaboard where Zach had grown up, but the Queen’s English, the English of Eton and Oxford and Ascot. “Sweet maidenhood, ministering tenderly to the needs of a nation’s wounded heroes.”
Zach shifted to face the man who’d come in through the front door, left open to the hot, humid air and all the smells of a city built near the tropics. He was a slim man, probably in his early thirties, of no more than medium height; a man with an insolent way of walking as languid as his voice.
“You must be Dr. Yardley,” said Zach, pushing away from the entrance of the ward and going to stand in the flagged hall.
“So the Yankees have decided to investigate our little murder, have they?” The man took off his broad-brimmed felt hat and swiped one forearm across his damp brow. He had straight, dark blond hair he wore long to frame his face. It was an unusual face, pale of skin and fine-boned, yet so sharply featured one could easily surmise the shape and appearance of the skull beneath. He studied Zach through badly bloodshot hazel eyes shadowed by dark circles. Whatever this man had spent last night doing, it hadn’t involved much sleep. “I need coffee,” he said with a sigh. “I always require at least three cups to get me going in the morning, and so far I’ve only had two.”
“And your patients?”
The man paused, his jaw hardening for a moment before relaxing into a tight smile. “If I know our very competent Madame de Beauvais, she has already seen to my patients. She would have made a fine doctor . . . if she’d been born a man, of course.”
They sat at a rusting green wrought-iron table in the shade of the big Chinaball tree that dominated the hospital’s brick-walled courtyard, and drank rich dark coffee lightened with hot milk. Around them, chickens scratched for grain among the moss-covered paving stones, and linens hung limply in the sultry air. “Madame de Beauvais tells me the hospital is failing,” said Zach, the scent of chicory coffee warm and aromatic in his nostrils. “Is it?”
“Oh, yes. Badly.” The Englishman took a swallow of his coffee and grimaced. “Too few patients of the paying variety. Santerre was always far too generous with his talents and attentions, and Emmanuelle is no better.”
“He sounds like a good man.”
“Oh, he was . . . if you consider being giving the definition of good. He was also opinionated, irritable, and proud.”
“Know why anyone would want to kill him?”
Yardley leaned back in his chair in an arrogant pose. “Really, Major. I thought I’d just saved you the trouble of asking that question. Proud, opinionated, irritable men do tend to rack up more than their share of enemies, don’t they?”
Zach took a slow sip of his coffee. “Did he quarrel with anyone in particular recently?”
“Recently? As in the last two hours?” The Englishman gave him a broad smile. Santerre had been dead these sixteen hours or more. “Not to my knowledge.”
“How well did you get along with him?”
Yardley’s mug hit the rusty tabletop with a thump as he leaned forward to punch the air between them with one thin finger. “Oh, no. You’re not pinning this one on me. I spent yesterday evening with an old, dear friend.”
“Old, dear friends are often willing to lie for one another.”
Again, that smile, the smile that meant nothing. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? Isn’t it convenient?”
From the street just visible through the arch of the carriageway came the rumble of a carrier’s cart and the shrill chant of a hawker, crying, “I got ripe melons, uhhuh.”
“So why did you leave England?” asked Zach.
The smile never slipped. “I didn’t like the climate.”
Zach nodded toward the giant green leaves of the elephant ears beside them, the rich humus beneath it steaming in the torrid heat. “You like this, do you?”
The Englishman laughed. This time, the amusement was real. “I grew up in India. The heat doesn’t bother me.”
“Still, one wouldn’t expect to find you associated with a French hospital here.”
“Ah, you’ve been talking to our dear Madame de Beauvais, who has little but contempt for any doctor not trained in Paris or Montpellier. As it happens, I’m not nearly as vigorous in my approach to treatment as most of your Yankee doctors. And Santerre wasn’t as radical as our Emmanuelle. She thinks mercury is a poison, and believes diseases are caused by these peculiar little organisms that are so tiny, no one can see them.”
“Animalcules,” Zach said quietly.
“Good God.” The Englishman sat forward, both hands on his cup, his eyes opening wide in an exaggeration of astonishment. “What do you know about animalcules?”
“I’m provost marshal, remember? One of my jobs is to try to keep this city from suffering its annual summer outbreak of yellow fever.”
“And you think you can accomplish that by flushing gutters and emptying privies, do you? Not that I’m complaining, mind you. This city might be a lot less fun since you Yankees set your righteous black boots to our collective necks, but I must admit, it does smell considerably better.”
Zach gave the English doctor a slow, tight smile. “And there’s been no outbreak of yellow fever.”
Yardley waved one slim white hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Coincidence. And luck, for you. Only the hearty survive long enough to actually settle in this city, and they still die at a rate of up to twenty percent a year. How many of your boys in blue do you think would make it through a full-blown yellow-fever epidemic?”
“Unlike most of the other residents of this city, I’m hoping I don’t find out.”
Yardley laughed. It was open knowledge that the people of New Orleans were almost disappointed that the nearly annual epidemic had failed to appear that year. Everyone knew strangers always died in far greater numbers than residents, and they’d been counting on the Yellow Jack to rid them of their unwanted masters—or at least to make them suffer grievously for their conquest.
Zach ran his thumb and index finger up the sides of his mug, his attention seemingly centered on the movement of his hand. “So why out of all the hospitals that used to operate in this notoriously insalubrious city did you happen to end up with visiting privileges at this one?”
“Ah. That was because of Philippe. Philippe was”— Zach glanced up as the Englishman paused, the tip of his tongue pressed to his front teeth, his thoughts wandering where Zach couldn’t begin to guess—“Philippe was a particular friend of mine.”
“And Henri Santerre?”
Yardley met Zach’s gaze, and held it. “We were colleagues, but not friends. I honestly don’t know who would have wanted to kill him, or why. He seemed an open, straightforward sort of fellow. If he had secrets, they were well kept. I didn’t know them.”
Zach stood up, the metal legs of his chair scraping across the uneven paving stones. “And even if you did, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”
Yardley let his head fall back, his tongue, once again, tucking up by his teeth. “I think a man is entitled to his secrets. Don’t you?”
“Not if it leads to murder.”
Zach was turning away when the Englishman’s voice stopped him. “What’s it to you, anyway, Major Provost Marshal? With all you’ve got to do, why should you care if one old Creole doctor gets sent to his grave a year or two early?”
Zach paused to
swing slowly back around. “It happened on my watch. That makes it my business.”
The prominent bones in the Englishman’s jaw bunched beneath the skin in silent amusement. “But that’s not what’s making you care, Major.”
Zach knew the Englishman didn’t really expect an answer, and he made no attempt to give one as he turned to leave. But the sardonic tones of the other man’s raised voice followed Zach through the dark musty brick tunnel of the carriageway. “It’s a pity you met the good Dr. Santerre only after his death, Major. The two of you would have got on well together.”
Emmanuelle stood just inside the door of what had been her husband’s bedroom for the last ten years of their marriage.
She was in the garçonnière, that range of small rooms opening onto the gallery that ran along the second and third stories of the kitchen wing. In the tall, narrow house on the rue Dumaine, the kitchen wing had been built at the side of the lot line, rather than at the rear, and was separated from the main house by only a flight of steps. It was to these rooms that the sons of a family would be moved once they passed the age of thirteen or fourteen, so that they might come and go at night as they pleased. Most people thought Philippe had kept a room out here so that he wouldn’t awaken Emmanuelle if he should happen to return late at night from visiting a sick patient. But the truth was, Philippe had slept here always—when he slept at home.
She had come into this room only once since Philippe’s death, with Rose, to pack away those few things Emmanuelle specifically wished to save for Dominic. The rest of Philippe’s possessions she had left as they were. Now she paused in the doorway, struck by how strong his presence here still was, his riding crop still lying where he’d tossed it carelessly on the bureau beside his pipe, a small, brown leather-bound book lying open on the floor beside his bed, his very scent hanging faint but distinguishable in the air, so that she had to wrap her arms around her waist and hug herself. Philippe might be dead, but it didn’t lessen her sense that she was intruding. Although she was afraid not of what she might find, but of what might be missing.
She should have come last night, she thought, feeling her heart begin to thump hard and fast, her stomach roiling with a resurgence of fear. She’d known the truth even then, she realized, only she hadn’t wanted to admit it. As if by not coming to look, she could somehow make it not true.
One arm still riding low at her waist, Emmanuelle forced herself to cross the short distance to the big old cedar armoire where she knew Philippe had kept his more personal possessions. This time, she didn’t allow herself to hesitate, but grasped the key and turned it swiftly, the wide doors creaking on their hinges as they swung open toward her. His scent was stronger here, mingling with the pungent odor of hashish and vetiver and dust and other scents she didn’t want to identify.
She knew exactly what she was looking for, for she had seen it on the cabinet’s lower shelf when she’d gone through Philippe’s things after his death. It was a box of burnished oak, some eighteen inches long and not quite as wide, that opened on brass hinges to reveal a vampire-killing kit, furnished with a vial of holy water, a wooden cross and stake, and a small crossbow complete with four miniature silver-tipped wooden bolts. It was the sort of bizarre curiosity that had always delighted Philippe, and had been given to him on his last birthday by Claire’s brother, Antoine La Touche.
Now, only the faint outline of a rectangle impressed in the dust of the shelf showed where it had once rested.
CHAPTER SIX
Her breath catching in her throat, Emmanuelle sank down onto the woven summer mat covering the room’s cypress floorboards. For one, hideous moment, terror swamped her, beat against her ears like the roar of a deafening wind, drying her mouth and stealing her sense. She had sent Dominic on ahead to his grandparents’ stately mansion on Esplanade Avenue; he was probably there already, she thought, waiting for her. She told herself she needed to move. And still she stayed, one clenched hand gripping the edge of the open armoire door.
The creak of boards on the gallery brought her head around. A shadow darkened the room’s single, small window, then materialized at the open doorway. “Rose.” Emmanuelle surged to her feet, her gaze locking with the black woman’s. “You know it’s gone?”
The other woman nodded. “I came up here looking for it, just as soon as I heard exactly what they took out of Dr. Santerre’s chest.”
Emmanuelle didn’t bother asking how Rose had heard about the small, silver-tipped wooden crossbow bolt. This might be a city of almost 170,000 people, but it still functioned like a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, sometimes even before they knew it themselves.
“How many people you think know about that oak box, hmm?” Rose asked.
Emmanuelle brushed a stray wisp of hair off her hot, damp forehead, and realized with an odd sense of detachment that she was drenched with sweat. “Philippe was fascinated by it. He could have shown it to anyone.” And anyone who knew Philippe well, she thought, would know where he kept that sort of thing.
The two women stared at each other, silently acknowledging all the horrible implications of their discovery. That whoever had lain in wait for Emmanuelle and Henri Santerre had been here, in this house, without their knowledge. That he had stolen his murder weapon from here. That he knew them—obviously knew them well.
“You got more trouble than you know,” Rose said as Emmanuelle closed the armoire doors and drove the lock home with a click “There’s a Yankee major standing across the street right now, studying this house like he knows we got something to hide.”
Picking up her skirts, Emmanuelle ran along the open wooden gallery to the doors to Dominic’s room, then quickly cut across it to her own room at the front of the house. The windows’ heavy green velvet drapes had been taken down for the summer, leaving only long, flat panels of open lacework that Emmanuelle was careful not to disturb as she looked down at the rue Dumaine below.
Zachary Cooper stood on the brick banquette across the street, one shoulder propped against a post, his arms crossed at his chest, the brim of his black felt hat tipped low.
“Mon Dieu,” she said under her breath, as if he could hear her from such a distance. “It’s the one I told you about, the provost marshal.”
Rose came to stand beside her. “Hmmm,” said Rose, her gaze fixed on the man across the street. “He looks dangerous.” She paused thoughtfully. “Attractive, but dangerous.” She swung around as Emmanuelle turned from the window to snatch up her black widow’s hat and gloves from where she’d tossed them on her daybed. “You going to tell him about Michie Philippe’s vampire-killing kit?”
“Tell him what, exactly? That the murder weapon was a crossbow given by one of my dearest friends to my dead husband?” Emmanuelle eased the hat over the upswept knot of her hair, but she was careful this time not to tie the ribbons. Tying frayed them, and since the war, ribbons were hard to find, especially in black. “They’d hang both Antoine La Touche and me faster than you can say William Mumford.”
Rose followed Emmanuelle out into the hall as she jerked on her gloves. “And did you never think,” said the black woman, stopping at the head of the stairs, her elbows bent wide, her hands bracketing her slim hips in the posture she inevitably assumed when she was agitated, “that you might be wrong about that Yankee? That telling him what you know just might help him catch the one who did do the killing? Someone who must have been in this very house, maybe while you were sleeping in your bed, and that child of yours in his. You like thinking about that? What you going to do about that?”
Pausing at the base of the stairs, Emmanuelle met the woman’s dark, worried gaze. “I’m going to lock the doors at night,” she said, and let herself out into the hot, midday sun.
Zach stood where he was and let Madame de Beauvais walk up to him, the full black skirts of her widow’s weeds swirling about her as she stopped abruptly in the flag-paved street before him, her head tipping back so that the harsh midday sun shon
e full on her face. She looked pale, her features pinched as if with fear, and that both surprised and intrigued him. She didn’t scare easily, this petite woman with the fierce dark eyes and admirable sangfroid and a mysterious, dangerous allure.
“What are you doing here, at my house?” she demanded, staring at him.
He straightened slowly, letting a cold smile touch his lips, a smile that was a lie, because already he could feel his blood racing, burning; the effect this woman had on him was that powerful. Powerful and damnably unwanted. “I thought you said you were visiting your son’s grandparents this afternoon.”
“I am. And I’m already late.”
“We can talk on the way.” He stepped off the banquette, into the street beside her.
A cart with high wooden sides rattled past, wheels rumbling over the uneven stones. She continued staring at him for a moment, her breath coming hard and fast as she fought what she obviously knew was a useless urge to spit back at him, But I have no desire to walk with you, monsieur. It was a small, silent battle she waged within herself, and she won it, as he’d known she would. She was a woman of strong passions, Madame de Beauvais, and she worked very hard at keeping those passions under control. But sometimes . . . sometimes, he thought, those passions must run away with her.
Midnight Confessions Page 5