Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

From where they stood on the back gallery of Henri Santerre’s town house, Zach could see the dimly lit interior of the dining room and the front parlor beyond. You could tell there was a war on, he thought, just by looking at the people gathered here tonight. There were somberly clad women of every age, but noticeably few men, and those who had come were either old, or crippled, or very young. Some cast angry glances toward the gallery, but most were doing their best to ignore the two officers in blue uniforms who stood there.

  Hamish bit the tip off a cigar and stuck it between his teeth. “Found someone who could speak German, did you?”

  Zach nodded, his gaze narrowing as he watched a tall, gaunt man on crutches lean forward to whisper something in the ear of a striking, dusky haired woman with an elegant, diminutive figure and a mouth that was too big, too provocatively sensual for her aristocratic, fine-boned face. Madame de Beauvais. “The gatekeeper’s name is Kessler,” Zach said, his gaze fixed on the woman. “He came here two years ago from Prussia, and he’s as efficient as a German can be. He says the only people through those gates in the three hours before Santerre and Madame de Beauvais were a couple of old black men come to make repairs on their master’s family crypt, and I think he knows what he’s talking about.”

  Hamish grunted, and patted his uniform in search of a light. “Our friend with the crossbow must have climbed over the wall. So much for the theory that he used a crossbow because of some physical weakness.”

  Zach fished a container of safety matches from his coat and lit one. “Find out anything about that silver-tipped bolt?”

  “Not a blessed thing.” Hamish puffed on his cigar, one hand coming up to shield the flame from the breeze. The aromatic smoke billowed around them. “But I am learning enough about this city to make it hard for me to believe it was ever a part of the United States. All that voodoo and hoodoo, gris-gris and ju ju and love beads . . . makes me glad I’m a good Presbyterian, so I don’t take any stock in that shit.”

  Zach stared thoughtfully into the night. He’d felt it himself, the strangeness of this city full of sights and smells and traditions at once foreign and evocative, but he found it seductive, not repellent. “No vampire killers?”

  “Nope. I’ve got some men looking into the people from the hospital, but they haven’t turned up much yet, either.”

  Zach nodded toward the dining room. “Who’s the man on crutches?”

  Hamish swung about to follow Zach’s gaze. “Ah. That’s the neighborhood war hero.” Hamish fished out his notebook and flipped it open. “Antoine La Touche. He lost the leg after Pea Ridge. It’s his sister who volunteers at the Hospital de Santerre.”

  “Claire La Touche.” Zach’s eyes narrowed as he searched the still crowded rooms within. “She’s not here?”

  “They say she’s no’ very fond of wakes.” Hamish grinned. “Which I can understand, mind you, except that if I were her, I think I’d come anyway, just to keep the others from talking about me. They do love to talk about one another, don’t they?”

  A mosquito whined near Zach’s ear, and he batted at it absently with one hand. “I don’t see Dr. Yardley, either.”

  “The Englishman?” Hamish’s teeth tightened their grip on his cigar. “He was here, but not for long. After he left, they talked about him, too. For at least twenty minutes.”

  Zach shifted so he could see his friend’s face more clearly. “And?”

  Hamish’s mustaches twitched. “It seems he doesn’t care for women, if you get the drift of what I’m saying? Or at least, that’s what they all think. But then, they don’t like the English much, around here. Or the Scots, for that matter,” he added, his voice turning disgruntled.

  Zach ducked his head to hide a smile that faded all too quickly. She was laughing now, Madame de Beauvais. Discreetly, of course, but in obviously easy camaraderie with the one-legged man beside her. “What do they say about her?” Zach asked suddenly. “About Madame de Beauvais?”

  Hamish scrubbed one hand across his face. “Not a lot. I think they’re a bit afraid of her, actually. Don’t know what to make of her. As if she weren’t really one of them.”

  “She’s not.”

  “Huh?” Hamish’s face went blank with a lack of comprehension. “She’s French.”

  “That’s right.” Straightening, Zach pushed away from the railing, toward the open doors to the dining room. Inside, Madame de Beauvais paused beside the table, one hand arrested in the act of bringing a sherry glass to her lips. Across the distance that separated them, her gaze met his, and he wasn’t surprised to see the edges of her lips lift in a slow, taunting smile that seemed to say, Come catch me, if you can. He knew she was afraid of what he might learn about her, but she wasn’t afraid of him. What she played with him was a sophisticated kind of game, cerebral, sensual, and dangerous. “She’s French, all right,” he said absently. “But they’re not. Not anymore. They haven’t been for almost sixty years now. Even if they don’t like to admit it.”

  “You still think she’s involved in all this in some way?”

  Zach nodded. “I know it. And I’m going to prove it.”

  “It’s not healthy,” she said to him, her eyes sparkling with a hostile challenge as he walked up to her. “This habit you men have, of smoking cigars and pipes and cheroots. It can kill you as surely as any bullet or sword.”

  “Are you concerned about my health, madame?” He paused beside her, close enough that the tip of his saber thrust against her full black skirts. “I’m flattered.”

  Her lips were still smiling, sultry and faintly contemptuous, but he could see that her breathing had quickened, the rise and fall of her high, rounded breasts fluttering the narrow line of black lace on the bodice of her mourning gown. “Have you ever seen the lungs of a man who smokes?” she asked. “A healthy lung is pink with blood. Plump. Moist. But your friend’s lungs, now, they’d be brown and shriveled and dry, if you were to cut him open and look at him. After he was dead, of course.”

  The image she conjured up was both startling and slightly nauseous, but he managed to dredge up a smile every bit as nasty as her own. “That a fact? No wonder he can’t run more than half a block without puffing like a steam engine.”

  She surprised him by laughing, a short, quick laugh of genuine amusement that lit up her face and gave him, briefly, a beguiling glimpse at another side of this intriguing woman, a side he hadn’t seen before.

  “You do it deliberately, don’t you,” he said suddenly.

  “Do what, monsieur?”

  “Keep people at a distance. Make them think you’re strange.”

  All trace of laughter drained from her face. She looked both more vulnerable and less sure of herself than he’d ever seen her, although no less attractive. “I am strange.”

  He shook his head. “You’re different. That doesn’t make you strange.”

  “It does to most people.” Their gazes met and held, and the moment became something intimate and personal and vaguely disturbing. He didn’t want this between them, this silent understanding, this startling recognition of affinity and innate connection.

  He looked away first, nodding to where Antoine La Touche now sat in quiet conversation with Henri Santerre’s sister, Miss Elise. “I’m told they’re an old family, the La Touches. Old and respected. But neither as old nor as wealthy as the de Beauvaises.”

  “You’ve been asking questions about us, monsieur.”

  “I’ve had a busy afternoon.”

  “And what have you learned?”

  “Well, let’s see. I’ve learned that Dr. Jacques Maret arrived in New Orleans from France in eighteen forty-eight.” A gaunt black man, stoop-shouldered with age, walked past, carrying a tray of sherry glasses. Zach snagged one with a murmur of thanks. “The date is significant,” he continued, “it being the year of abortive revolutions all over Europe.”

  She lifted her glass as if in a toast. “Echoes of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.”

  “It mus
t have been an interesting marriage, your parents’,” he said, raising his own glass. The sherry was cool and dry and easy going down. “Interesting, and unusual—a Parisian revolutionary and the grand-daughter of a Burgundian count who lost his head on the guillotine.”

  She sipped her sherry, her gaze showing him only mild inquiry.

  “And which are you, madame,” he asked, when she said nothing, “the aristocrat, or the revolutionary?”

  The wine had wet her lips, making them look even fuller, softer. In the dim light, her eyes were huge. “I am both. And neither.” She turned to set aside her glass. “And what does any of this have to do with Henri Santerre’s murder?” She glanced up, sideways, at him. “Hmm, monsieur?”

  He met the challenge in her eyes and threw it right back at her. “I also looked into those medical schools you were telling me about—the French and the American. Most of the doctors who used to be associated with them have joined the Confederate medical corps, but the few I could find didn’t seem to be aware of any significant quarrels between Dr. Santerre and his colleagues.”

  She raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated show of surprise. “Did you really expect them to tell you?”

  “Maybe. What exactly was Santerre working on when he died?”

  She gave a slow shrug that looked casual, but wasn’t. “He’s been writing papers against phlebotomy—the practice of bleeding—for years now. But with the shortage of medicines caused by your blockade of our ports, he was spending more and more of his time investigating the curative properties of local plants.”

  “Local plants?”

  “That’s right. There’s an old African who lives out in the swamps, a man they call Papa John. Most people know him as a voodoo king, but he has also made quite a study of native medicines. Henri used to visit him.”

  Zach took a long, slow sip of his sherry, his gaze fixed on her beautiful face, so calm, so deceitful. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Again, that shrug. “I thought it might help.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to help me. You want me to go away and leave you alone. What are you hoping? That this Papa John will—how do you say it?—put the gris-gris on me?”

  She gave a low laugh. “Perhaps.” The smile faded. “They say he can read minds. And foresee the future.”

  “Have you ever been to him?”

  Her hand crept up to touch the widow’s brooch she wore at her neck, then fluttered away, as if the gesture had been unconscious and she’d only just realized what she had done. “I don’t want to know my future,” she said, her cheekbones standing out stark in the delicate, flawless beauty of her face. “No one could ever foresee the whole, and to know only a part . . . that could be a dangerous thing.”

  “He must not have told Henri Santerre his future. Or didn’t Santerre believe in it?”

  “He believed,” she said softly. “Henri didn’t believe in much, but he believed in Papa John.”

  “I can stay longer, if you think it necessary,” Hamish offered as they left the wake together some fifteen minutes later.

  Zach shook his head. “I think we’ve learned everything we’re going to learn here. Besides . . .” They passed through the town house’s tunnel-like carriageway, their footsteps echoing queerly, then paused for a moment on the brick banquette. The moist heat of the night enveloped them with the mingling scents of the city, sweet magnolia and jasmine overlaying the subtle odors of decay and stagnant water and damp, fecund earth. “We need to give them a chance to talk about us.”

  Hamish’s laugh rang out in the dark street as he turned away, up Burgundy Street toward Canal and the mansions Uptown, where they all, like their general, lived in confiscated luxury. But Zach continued on, toward the river with its groggeries and pool halls and brothels, where men of all colors and nations congregated and drank, and information was plentiful, and cheap.

  The worst of the drinking holes were on the waterfront, but there were taverns and licensed gambling dens scattered throughout the old quarter, particularly on the streets running parallel to the river, streets like Bourbon and Royal, where the business establishments tended to be concentrated. He had just crossed the rue Dauphine when he saw a knot of some five or six soldiers clustered near the banquette about halfway down the block, their blue uniforms looking almost black in the lamplight, their voices loud and movements clumsy with alcohol. As he drew nearer, he realized they had formed a ring around a man, a middle-aged colored man dressed in the neat, single-breasted suit and stovepipe hat of a successful businessman.

  One of the soldiers—a big, burly sergeant with a flowing blond beard and a broad Ohio accent— thumped the colored man on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. “You think you’re as good as a white man, do you, boy?” said the soldier, leaning in close, “jist because some massa set your grandmammy free after gettin’ one of his bastards on her? You think that gives you the right to dress in these fancy clothes, just like a white man? You think that gives you the right to walk on the sidewalk like a white man, and not even bother to get outta the way when a real white man’s trying to get past you?”

  The colored man held himself very still, his face dark and impassive in the dim light. There were more than eleven thousand of them in this city, the gens de couleur libres—free people of color, many of whom had been free for generations. They tended to be both educated and skilled, accomplished tradesmen, or landholders with plantations and slaves of their own.

  The sergeant gave the man another shove. “I’m talkin’ to you, darky.”

  “Je suis désolé, monsieur,” said the colored man, his voice deep and educated, his Parisian accent flawless. “Je ne comprends pas.”

  “Let him go,” Zach said, his voice ringing out loud and sharp in the otherwise empty street, his hand on his saber.

  The soldiers swung about, their faces slack and flushed with drink. “Well, look what we got us here,” said the sergeant. The others dropped back as he took a step forward, swaggering with his insolence. “A nigger-lovin’ officer.”

  A mean smile pulled at the sergeant’s mouth. Zach could hear the man’s heavy breathing, smell the stink of alcohol and sweat and hate rolling off him. He saw the man’s fists clench, but he didn’t really expect him to throw a punch. Not at an officer.

  The attack when it came was slow and clumsy. Zach blocked the wide right hook easily with his left arm, his own right fist curling up to smash, hard, into the sergeant’s nose. Bone and cartilage crumpled, spewing blood over the man’s chin and chest. Howling with pain, the big man stumbled back, both hands flying up to his bloodied face. For one, tense instant, the soldiers with him stood as if frozen. Then they threw themselves at Zach.

  Two of them, Zach figured, he could have fought off with his fists and his feet—maybe even three. But there were six of them. And when he considered that a soldier could be executed for attacking an officer, he suspected they weren’t likely to let him live to see them court-martialed.

  A swift kick caught one of the men in the face and sent him staggering back into another, which bought Zach enough time to bring his saber singing from its scabbard. He thought they’d run then, but they were too drunk, or too stupid, to realize that the confrontation had just turned against them.

  The man Zach had kicked rushed back at him with a snarl, spewing bloody spittle and scrabbling for the Colt at his belt. Zach’s saber caught him in the neck, half-taking the man’s head off, and got a second in the gut on the backswing, opening up a killing gash that sent blood spraying through the air.

  Their eyes wide with shock and fear, three of the remaining men turned to run. A sound from behind brought Zach whirling around, and he jerked his blade from the dying soldier’s body just as the sergeant lunged forward again, lamplight flashing on the blade of the bowie knife clutched in his fist. Over the pounding of his own blood, loud in his ears, Zach could hear the sound of running feet. Hamish, he thought absently. But the big New Yorker was still
too far away. His teeth bared in a grim smile, Zach took a step back, his arm coming up to send the curving edge of his sword singing through the air at the blond sergeant’s face. But the ballast-paved street was slick with blood, and as his foot came down, Zach felt his boot heel slip sideways, throwing him off balance.

  He caught himself almost at once, but not before he felt the man’s knife slice through the flesh of his side, cutting deep. Swearing, Zach thrust his saber forward like a bayonet, swift and hard enough to send the tip of his blade clean through the other man’s chest and out his back.

  “Shit,” Zach said, and jerked his saber from the dead man’s body.

  “Gawd.” Hamish turned in a slow circle, his head shaking as he took in the crumpled bodies, the blood splashed from the flagged street up onto the brick banquette and beyond, to the stucco walls of the nearest houses. “I leave you alone for two minutes and you turn the neighborhood into an abattoir.”

  Zach leaned over to wipe his bloodstained blade on one of the dead men’s uniforms. “You took your own sweet time getting here.”

  “Your estimate was too generous,” said a woman’s calm, familiar voice. “He can’t run even half a block.”

  Zach straightened. The colored man the soldiers had been harassing had disappeared. The good people who lived in the tall, narrow town houses rising up from the brick banquettes on either side of the rue Conti had peeked through their shuttered windows, seen the carnage taking place in their normally quiet street, and withdrawn with hushed whispers to their back rooms. But Madame de Beauvais, on her way to check on some patient at the hospital, he supposed, had heard the fight and run toward it, not away.

  He shoved his saber into its scabbard with a quiet hiss of well-tended metal and swung to face her. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  She was moving from one still body to the next, checking them with quiet efficiency. “Was it necessary to kill them all?”

  It wasn’t pretty, what his sword had done to those men. He wished she didn’t need to see it. But then, if she’d tended men wounded in battle, he’d no doubt she’d seen worse. “I didn’t kill all of them,” he said, still breathing heavily. “Three of them ran away.”