He swung away, his chest lifting with a quickly indrawn breath, his vision a blur of somber stone walls and lacy ironwork and star-spangled night sky as his head fell back and he eased his eyes shut against the rage of desire pulsing through him.
“I can see myself home from here,” she said.
“No. I’ll see you home,” he said. But he didn’t touch her. And as soon as she reached her doorway he left her there, and he didn’t look back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two days later, Zach was riding through the old quarter, on his way from the mint out to the New Basin Canal, when he heard the lilting, taunting refrain of “The Bonny Blue Flag” being sung by a voice so sweet and clear that it might have belonged to an angel—if that angel were a partisan of the rebellious Confederate States of America.
They were always doing it—the schoolboys and the women of New Orleans—singing patriotic Confederate songs and setting up a cheer for the Confederate president. It seemed to Zach a harmless enough venting of the local population’s feelings of frustration and rebelliousness. But lately Ben Butler had been coming down hard on such expressions of native discontent and disloyalty. He’d even gone so far as to levy fines on schools whose pupils were caught doodling pictures of the Confederate flag in their copybooks.
“Where the devil is that coming from?” demanded Zach’s sergeant, slewing around in his saddle, his narrowed, angry gaze searching the brick facades of the deserted, boarded-up warehouses lining that part of the street.
A tousled, curly blond head peeking around a pile of half-broken barrels caught Zach’s attention. “Ride on ahead with the men, Sergeant,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
It was an easy enough thing, to ride in a wide arc and come up behind the barrels. The boy, perched precariously near the top of the pile, had his attention fixed on the small troop of Union soldiers passing in the street ahead of him. He was a tall lad, although not all that old, Zach decided, judging from that choirboy voice. His knickerbockers and jacket looked worn but of good quality and, beneath the smudges he’d doubtless acquired that morning, clean. This was no street urchin.
“I could send you to prison for singing that song,” said Zach, reining in behind the boy. “You know that, don’t you?”
The boy swung around, vivid blue eyes going wide, his small Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed convulsively. “I’m not afraid of you,” said Dominic de Beauvais.
“Then why are you thinking about running?” Zach asked when the boy’s eyes slid sideways, as if evaluating the distance to the ground and the time it would take him to make it to the nearest corner.
Dominic’s gaze flew back to Zach’s face. “When I grow up, I’m going to go off to war and kill lots and lots of Yankees,” the boy said, his nostrils flaring wide with fear and determined bravado.
Zach laid one forearm along his pommel and leaned into it. “I don’t think your mama would like that.”
A muscle jumped along the boy’s tightly clenched jaw. “You think my maman doesn’t hate Yankees? She does. They killed my papa.”
“I think your maman doesn’t like killing.”
“She makes an exception for Yankees.”
Zach thought about the strain on the young widow’s face as she went from one dead Union soldier to the next on the rue Conti. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly.
The boy’s chin jerked up. “You going to put me in prison?”
“Well . . .” Zach’s horse moved restlessly beneath him as he visibly took his time thinking about it. “I’ll let you go this time,” he said at last. “But I’d better not hear you singing that song again.”
“Hurrah for Jeff Davis and Beauregard!” shouted Emmanuelle de Beauvais’s son, and he leaped from his barrel to land crouched on the flagstones below. Coming up with a bound, he took off running toward the mouth of a narrow, garbage-strewn alley.
Zach watched him go, then turned the bay’s head toward the New Basin Canal.
Emmanuelle studied her son’s tight, strained face as he dipped his spoon in his gumbo and brought it with studied care to his mouth.
“I hear you had a run-in with a Yankee officer this morning,” she said after watching him for a few minutes. “Down near the wharves.” She’d heard the story from the old Italian man who pushed his cart of fresh fruits through the streets of the Quarter every day. She didn’t know all the details, but what she’d heard had been enough to make her stomach clench with dread.
Dominic looked up, his eyebrows twitching together more out of resignation than surprise. People were always carrying tales of his activities to his mother. That was life in the Quarter. “I was singing ‘The Bonny Blue Flag,’ ” he said, his chin coming up.
“Oh, Dominic. Be careful.”
Dominic’s spoon hit the edge of his bowl with a clatter. “You think that Yankee scared me? He didn’t. I hate the Yankees. Every last one. They’re murdering, thieving scum.”
“Dominic,” said Emmanuelle, leaning forward, her own meal forgotten. “Listen to me. You can’t make assumptions about a man’s character—you can’t hate him—just because of the color of the coat he wears.”
Dominic stared at her with wide, accusing eyes. “You hate the Yankees. When that woman from Baton Rouge was telling you about how a Union patrol smashed her furniture and ripped up her clothes and stole her silver, you said the Yankees were hateful, despicable monsters. You said you wished the earth would open up and swallow every bluecoat in the South.”
Emmanuelle sat very still. “I didn’t know you heard me say those things.” She wondered what else Dominic had heard, if he’d also heard the woman crying about her fifteen-year-old daughter, who’d been raped so brutally and repeatedly by those same Union soldiers that she hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence since then. “I was angry, Dominic. Sometimes people say things in anger they don’t really mean. Things they shouldn’t.”
Dominic stared at her long and hard. “You mean you don’t hate the Yankees?”
It would have been easy enough to simply say no. But she had always tried very, very hard not to lie to her son. “It’s wrong to hate someone you don’t know,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Wrong to jump to conclusions about who and what they are, based only on something like the color of their uniform. It’s like making assumptions about people based on the color of their skin, or what church they go to, or whether they’re a man or a woman.”
Dominic looked at her with wide, troubled blue eyes. “But it’s wrong, isn’t it, what the Yankees are doing to us?”
“Yes. I think it is.”
“Then they’re bad people, aren’t they?”
Emmanuelle let out her breath in a long sigh. “I wish it were that simple.” She started to take another mouthful of gumbo, then changed her mind. “If you’re finished, go wash your face and get your hat. Your grand-mère is expecting me, and I don’t want to be late.”
Dominic pushed back his chair and hopped up. “Can I take my blowgun?”
“Yes, yes. Just hurry.”
Its nose twitching in nervous excitement, the squirrel crept down the trunk of one of a line of pecan trees fronting the fence of an old raised cottage on Esplanade Avenue. Halfway down the trunk, the squirrel stopped, its ears back, its head turning as it anxiously scanned the sun-warmed expanse of grass below. It was young yet, that squirrel, Emmanuelle thought, smiling to herself as she watched it; too young and inexperienced to know that danger can come not only on four feline paws. Danger can also come in the form of little boys with hollowed pipes of bamboo and pockets full of Chinaball berries.
“You aim that blowgun at anything other than that fence, mon fils,” she said softly, “and you’ll spend next week painting the railings on every gallery around the courtyard.”
“Ah, Maman,” whined Dominic, but he subtly shifted his aim so that the dried little berry smacked into a knot in the fence post with an accuracy that sent Dominic war-whooping up the wide, tree-lined avenue
, and the chattering squirrel bounding back into the leafy branches overhead.
Walking up the banquette after her son, Emmanuelle knew a moment of disquiet. They were common enough boyhood toys, blowguns, fashioned after the Choctaw furze guns still sold around Jackson Square for a picayune apiece by half-naked, bronze-skinned men wrapped in blankets. And like all things associated with growing up male in southern Louisiana, they had been embraced by Dominic with an enthusiasm that disturbed his mother.
“It’s who he is,” Philippe had said to her once, not long before he died, when she was complaining about Dominic’s passion for what she called blood sports. “Hunting, fishing, riding—that’s what life is about down here. Especially for a planter. He needs to learn to love it.”
“He already loves it.”
“And you think that’s bad?” Philippe had asked, a deep line of concern appearing between his vivid, handsome eyes as he’d frowned. “Dominic may not be precisely who you dreamed he would be, but he’s who he wants to be.” He took Emmanuelle’s hand in his, something he rarely did anymore, and squeezed it once, almost apologetically, before letting it go again. “You and I have never fit in our worlds, Emmanuelle, and it has brought us nothing but grief. But by some alchemy of genetics, Dominic does fit. Effortlessly. Joyously. Let him have that joy.”
She’d smiled at him, feeling both humbled and a bit sad for all that had been lost between them. “Wise Philippe,” she’d said.
And so she had left her son his rifle and his bowie knife and his blowgun. But she adamantly refused to allow him to shoot at anything he didn’t intend to eat. He might never become a scholar or a doctor, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t grow up with a profound respect for life.
“Maman,” he called now, one arm wrapping around the gate post guarding the entrance to the de Beauvaises’ stately drive as he swung to face her. “We’re late. Again. There’s beaucoup people here already.”
It was the day of Marie Thérèse’s sewing meeting, and for some reason Emmanuelle couldn’t begin to define, she had decided to attend to help sew shirts and knit socks for the prisoners of war, just like the dutiful daughter-in-law and proper widow she was not. Oh, no; the woman Emmanuelle was had walked through the warm, jasmine-scented night with a man who was her enemy, who was the enemy of her nation. She had pressed herself against that man’s body and lost herself in the hungry heat of his kiss. And even now, when she thought about it, she felt not guilt, but a shameless, breath-stealing desire for more.
“Maman,” called Dominic.
“I’m coming,” she called, and quickened her step.
Less than an hour later, Emmanuelle found herself heartily regretting her uncharacteristic decision to attend. Sitting beside Claire La Touche on the linen-covered sofa between the tall guillotine windows of Marie Thérèse’s drawing room, Emmanuelle swore softly to herself as she struggled to fit together the pieces of the shirt she’d been allocated to sew.
“Bah,” she said under her breath, then threw a quick glance across the room to where Marie Thérèse was blessedly busy supervising two middle-aged women scraping lint. “Something’s not right.”
“Alors.” Claire leaned forward to peer suspiciously at the half-sewn shirt in Emmanuelle’s lap. “Look what you’re doing, Emmanuelle. You’re putting the placket in backward.”
Emmanuelle sat back in disgust. “I knew there was a reason I never came to these things before.”
Laughing softly, Claire lifted the half-sewn shirt from Emmanuelle’s slack grasp. “So why did you come?” She, too, glanced toward Marie Thérèse. “It won’t make her like you any better, you know, even if you were as good at sewing as you are at doctoring. Which,” she added as she frowned down at the mess Emmanuelle had made, “you are not.”
“I came because . . .” She broke off, finding it impossible to explain to Claire, of all people, how lonely she’d been lately. Although perhaps lonely wasn’t quite the right word, she decided; what she felt was isolated and dangerously disconnected from what should have been her life. “I suppose I came because I never have.” She looked around the room at the score or more women who filled Marie Thérèse’s large drawing room. At least half wore some form of mourning, if not for a husband or son, then for a brother, or father, or cousin. “It didn’t seem right.”
“You do enough already,” Claire said, her head bowed as she concentrated on ripping out Emmanuelle’s mistake.
“So do you.”
Claire glanced up, the pupils of her soft gray eyes dilated unnaturally, almost frighteningly wide. “But for a different reason, mmmm?” she said.
“Claire—” Emmanuelle began, just as a stocky, crisply uniformed maid carrying a coffee service entered the room, followed by Baptiste bearing a heavy silver tray loaded with sandwiches and small cakes.
“Eh, bien.” Marie Thérèse clapped her hands as if she were a director on a stage set. “Emmanuelle? You will pour. And Claire will assist you. Hmmm?”
Some five minutes later, Emmanuelle was still pouring coffee when Claire dropped the plate she’d been holding, and started to scream.
Zach was on the banks of the New Basin Canal dealing with a confiscated load of smuggled salt that had been headed toward Confederate troops across the lake, when a young corporal, red in the face and dripping with sweat, ran up to him and saluted sharply. “Major Cooper, sir?”
Zach looked at the corporal over the pink, sweating bald head of the barge’s indignant owner, who was hopping from one foot to the other and screeching, over and over again, “You can’t do this! I have a permit signed by General Butler himself!”
“What is it, soldier?”
“A message from Captain Fletcher, sir,” said the corporal, gasping for breath. He was very young, this corporal, young enough that his voice hadn’t finished changing yet, and only a few stray wisps of downy soft ash blond hair adorned his unshaven red cheeks. “He says to tell you there’s been another murder, sir.”
“Can’t he deal with it himself?”
The corporal shook his head vehemently, his slightly protuberant pale eyes bulging out even farther. “No, sir. He said you’d want to be there. He said to tell you it’s a woman this time, sir. A young Creole woman.”
Emmanuelle. Oh, God, not Emmanuelle. A gut-wrenching surge of horror and fury and guilt tore through Zach’s being. It shouldn’t have happened again. He shouldn’t have let it happen again. He could feel the sun bearing down blazing and white hot on his shoulders, feel the heat sucking the air from his lungs so that he found it impossible to breathe. There was a roaring in his ears, a burning in his chest. Then he breathed again and heard his own voice saying, hoarsely, and as if from a great distance, “Her name. What’s her name?”
“Claire, sir. The captain said to tell you the woman’s name is Claire La Touche. He thinks she’s been poisoned, sir. He’s there now.”
Zach found he had to put out one hand to grip the side of the barge and steady himself. “Where?”
“Some big house on Esplanade Avenue, sir. Belongs to one of those old Frenchie families with the fancy names. De . . . de . . .” The boy looked stricken. “De something.” He shook his head hopelessly. “Captain Fletcher said you’d know it, sir.”
“De Beauvais,” said Zach, his gaze fixed on the egret rising slow and pristine white from the murky green waters of the canal.
“That’s it, sir. De Beauvais.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Emmanuelle stood alone on the rear gallery of the house on Esplanade Avenue, her hands gripping the railing, her gaze fixed on the garden awash now in the golden light of coming evening. A pair of blue jays flitted playfully through the lower branches of the big water oak near the kitchen. She listened to the sound of their chirruping, so sweet and bright and misplaced, and realized she was more deeply, profoundly afraid than she had ever been in her life.
She could not begin to understand what was happening, who was doing this to the people she loved. But there cou
ld be no doubt, she knew, that Claire’s death was linked to that dark night of terror in St. Louis Cemetery. And she knew, too, that it wasn’t over.
Zach gazed down at the golden-haired woman lying on a linen-covered sofa between two tall guillotine windows on the street side of Marie Thérèse de Beauvais’s front parlor. Both windows had been thrown open, but even this late in the day the air was hot, the lace curtains hanging limp and motionless. The atmosphere was so close, he found it hard to breathe, so that he was painfully aware of the lifting of his chest, drawing each breath deep into his lungs.
She shouldn’t have died. She’d been a vital, caring young woman, and she shouldn’t have had to die like this, in a frothing, screaming agony. He felt a dangerous rage burning within him. Rage and guilt and fear, because he knew—he knew that if he couldn’t find this killer and stop him, it was going to happen again. And again, and again.
“What time?” he asked, not looking up when Hamish came to stand beside him.
The big New Yorker let out his breath in a long sigh. “A couple of hours ago, according to Emmanuelle de Beauvais.”
Zach brought his head around to stare at the captain. “She’s here?”
Hamish was looking hot and sweaty and troubled. “Out the back. She was with the lady when she died.”
Zach let his gaze drift around the parlor, with its piles of half-sewn shirts strewn in hastily discarded heaps amid abandoned coffee cups and half-eaten slices of ginger cake. “Looks like there were a lot of people here.”
“It was a sewing meeting. The old lady holds one every month, to sew shirts and scrape lint for the boys in gray on Ship Island.” Hamish paused, his chin flattening against his chest as he gazed down at the dead woman’s face. “It’s no’ looking good, I can tell you. I don’t like it when the bodies start to pile up. You keep glancing around, wondering who’s going to be next.”
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