“Not much fun anymore, is it?” Zach hunkered down on his heels beside the dead woman. “What makes you think it’s poison?”
Hamish scrubbed a hand across his face. “That would be Madame de Beauvais’s diagnosis.”
“Get her.”
Zach was standing by the open pocket doors to the back parlor when she came in, alone. She looked pale and shaken but admirably, unbelievably composed. What did it take, he wondered, all his old doubts and suspicions flowing back; what did it take to rattle this woman?
Something of his thoughts must have shown in his expression, for she met his hard stare without flinching and threw it right back at him. “Don’t say it.”
He strolled toward her, his gaze fixed on the delicate features of her face. He knew an overwhelming need to put some distance between them, to distance this death-haunted parlor from that dangerous, disastrous moment in the shadows of the Cabildo. “Don’t say what?” He paused in front of her, his thumbs hooking in his sword belt. “That you seem to make it a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or that an uncomfortable number of your friends are turning up dead?”
Her chest jerked as she sucked in a quick breath of air, and he found himself almost—almost—regretting the harshness of his words. “Tell me what happened,” he said.
He watched as she laced the fingers of her hands together and let them fall against her skirts, stark black framing pale, soft flesh that beckoned him to touch, to offer comfort he couldn’t give. “We were helping with the refreshments when Claire . . .” Her voice broke, so that she had to swallow, hard. “She went into convulsions. I tried to help her upstairs, but it was too late. I think her heart stopped.”
He glanced around at the litter of cups and plates. “No one else became ill?”
“No.”
He brought his gaze back to her face. “You were the one handing out the food and drink, were you?”
Her nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. If Claire was poisoned, it wasn’t anything she ate here.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“When we were sitting together earlier, on the sofa, I noticed her eyes. The pupils were dilated.”
He walked over to stare down at Claire’s still, pale face. Someone had closed her eyes. “Did anyone else notice?”
“No. But an autopsy would show it. Poisons often take several hours before they start to work, but then they can kill quite quickly.” She hesitated. “I think it might be tansy.”
He looked up. “Tansy?”
“It’s a plant that grows wild around here. The leaves and stem contain an oil that is used to kill intestinal worms, or to . . .” She hesitated, and he knew by the way her gaze drifted away from him that she was amending what she’d been about to say. “To help with certain women’s problems.”
“So why is she dead?”
“Small doses can be helpful, but more will kill. It doesn’t take much. Even seven or eight drops of the concentrated oil can bring on convulsions.” She paused. “It’s possible she took it deliberately, and simply took too much.”
Zach met her narrow, worried gaze. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
The sound of loud voices in the hall brought them both around. There was a scuffle of feet, then a youthful voice with a Boston twang sang out, “Here now, you can’t go in there. Captain Fletcher! Sir, you can’t go in there—”
Antoine La Touche appeared in the arched entrance from the hall, a tall, gaunt figure gripping the braces of his crutches so tightly that the knuckles of his hands showed white as he went suddenly, painfully still. Behind him, a wide-eyed private threw a questioning look at Zach, but Zach only shook his head.
“Mon Dieu. Antoine.” She crossed the room, the silk of her mourning gown swishing faintly as she went to touch the man’s cheek and bury her face against his chest in a giving and taking of comfort that flicked Zach—unexpectedly, inexcusably—on the raw.
La Touche brought one arm around her, his hand splaying against her shoulder, gripping her tightly as he sucked in a deep breath that shuddered his entire frame. “Alors,” he whispered. “It’s true.” He held her for a moment, his eyes squeezing shut. Then with slow, awkward steps, the tips of his crutches thumping hollowly across the floor, he went to stand beside the sofa, his chin against his chest as he stared down at his sister.
“I want to take her home,” he said after a moment. “Now.”
“I’m afraid you can’t do that, sir,” said Hamish, appearing in the entrance from the hall, the scared-looking private hard at his heels. “Not just yet.”
La Touche swung around, one crutch flinging out wildly to catch his weight. “She’s my sister, you bastard.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we’ll be needing to do a full postmortem on the body.”
A bead of sweat formed on the Creole’s temple to roll slowly down his pale, tight cheek. “A what?” he demanded, his nostrils flaring wide.
It was Madame de Beauvais who stepped forward to lay a gentle hand on his sleeve. “It’s a medical examination, Antoine. It’s needed to understand exactly what killed her.”
Antoine looked wildly from the widow, to Hamish, to Zach. “No.” His head shook from side to side. “You’re not cutting her, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hamish. “But under the circumstances, there’s no choice.”
“If it would make you feel better,” said the widow, her hand still on the Creole’s arm, “I can go to the army hospital and stay with her while it’s done.”
“Oh no you can’t,” said Zach.
She swung to face him. “If it’s because I’m a woman, I assure you, you needn’t worry. I’ve attended autopsies before.”
Zach stared down at the petite, incredibly capable and fiercely determined woman before him. Just the thought of watching a postmortem made him feel slightly nauseous, yet he knew she’d not only watched them before, she’d performed them. “No,” he said, “it’s not because you’re a woman.”
“Then why?” she demanded, her eyes wide and accusing in a way that made the sharp bones of her face stand out stark, beautiful.
He had to force himself to look away from her, to where what was left of Claire La Touche lay on Marie Thérèse de Beauvais’s summer dressed sofa. “Because you’re a suspect.”
By seven o’clock the next morning, the sun was already so hot, Zach could feel his shirt sticking to his back when he turned off Basin Street and passed through the open gates of St. Louis Cemetery. The German gatekeeper, Kessler, waved and shouted, Guten Morgen. Zach nodded, and kept walking.
The Santerre family crypt was at the far end of the allée in which Henri Santerre had been killed by a crossbow bolt less than a week ago. The pile of flowers left by his mourners made a bright splash of discordant color against the stark, sun-drenched white of the line of tombs and the rusting black iron of their gates. But as he drew nearer, Zach could see that most of the blooms had already been ruined by the heat, faded yellow and red petals shriveling into brown.
He stood before the tomb, hat in hand, and let his gaze drift down the row of crypts and along the high, whitewashed cemetery wall. He kept having this feeling that he was missing something, something that might have prevented Claire La Touche from being given enough poison to steal her life. Two deaths so close together, yet with such different ways of killing and such very different victims: an old man, a doctor, shot through the heart with a miniature crossbow bolt designed to kill vampires, and a beautiful young aristocratic woman, who died in agony.
What’s the matter, Captain? At a loss? Have your precious logic and fine mind failed you again?
Zach spun about in a circle, the vivid blue of the Southern sky swirling with sepulchral white, his fingers tightening hard enough to crush the black felt in his hands. Two years ago, at an army fort on the edge of nowhere, someone had started killing. The victims had ranged in
age from the very old to the heartrendingly young, their ways of death varied and unrelated. He hadn’t been a provost marshal then, only a cocky young cavalry captain, fascinated by puzzles and perhaps a bit proud of his ability to solve them. The murders hadn’t been his responsibility, but they had intrigued him, and so he had looked for a link, sifted through the clues, never realizing until it was too late— too late for Rachel, too late for all the others—that the victims and their ways of death had been deliberately chosen at random to confuse him, to toy with him, to punish him.
But this was different. He told himself this was different. These killings weren’t random. He eased his hat back on his head, the brim pulled low against the glare of the sun, and turned to leave. Claire La Touche and Henri Santerre did have something in common. Two things, that he could see: the Hospital de Santerre, and a close association with Emmanuelle de Beauvais. And maybe something else that he was missing.
He arrived at the Hospital de Santerre to find the entrance crowded with howling children and hot, ragged women who glared at him in sweaty, stony-faced silence.
“Remember,” Madame de Beauvais was saying to a sad-eyed woman in black who balanced a pale girl of five or six on one hip. “She needs greens—even young dandelion leaves, if that’s all you can find. And eat some yourself.”
His spurs scraped the flagging of the entry, and Madame de Beauvais looked up, her gaze meeting his. He saw her breath catch, her eyes widening with some emotion he could not name before narrowing down in a wary hostility that was both unmistakable and fierce.
“Now is not a good time, Major,” she said, and would have turned away if he hadn’t stopped her by saying, “Now.”
A towheaded little boy wearing a long shirt and nothing else wrapped his arms around Zach’s leg and began to wail. “Two questions,” Zach said, reaching down to peel the baby off his leg. He handed the screaming child to a tall, impossibly thin woman with faded, copper-colored hair and a careworn face who looked as if she’d set him on fire with the loathing in her eyes, if she could. “Two questions. That’s all.”
Except for the screaming baby, an unnatural silence had fallen over the room. They were all staring at him, women and children alike, their hatred of him and his uniform a palpable thing in the air. They all knew he had no need to ask; the authority of the Union army in this city was as absolute as the despotic reign of any tyrant. He waited.
Emmanuelle de Beauvais gazed at him a moment longer, then swung about to lead him past Henri Santerre’s old office to the courtyard beyond. “Ask,” she said, going to stand behind the rusting iron table, her hands gripping her elbows close to her midriff, her face set in hard lines.
The atmosphere in the shady green courtyard was cool and sweet, a calm oasis in a city of sweltering heat and noise. He shut the door against the renewed uproar behind him. “Who are all those people?”
“Every Tuesday and Thursday, we offer free consultations to the families of men away at war. And to their widows and orphans.”
“We?” He leaned his shoulder blades against the door behind him, one hand resting by habit on the hilt of his sword in a way that drew her attention. “I didn’t see Yardley.”
She brought her gaze back to his face. “He’ll be here. He does far more than he would like you to think.”
“Why?”
“Why does he do it, or why does he like to act as if he doesn’t?”
“Of course I can understand why he does it,” Zach said, pushing away from the door.
“Can you?” She flattened her palms on the table in front of her and leaned into them, her gaze on him narrowed and hostile. “Did you recognize the tall, redheaded woman with the little boy?”
“No. Should I have?”
“Her name is Mary Anne Cahill. She had an eighteen-year-old son who was taken prisoner and froze to death last winter at Camp Douglas in Chicago. But her husband, Paddy, is still alive, with the army in Virginia, and because of him, your General Ben Butler confiscated her house and put it up for auction. It wasn’t much, just a little shotgun on Annunciation, but it was hers. The man who bought it offered to rent it back to her, but of course she couldn’t afford what he was asking, so he threw her and her baby out into the street. His name was Butler, too. Andrew Butler. And the men who threw her out were sent by the provost marshal. You.”
Zach tightened his jaw. Even before Lincoln’s Confiscation Act, Butler had been seizing the property and possessions of the people of New Orleans. Now that his actions had official sanction, his rapacity knew almost no bounds. Lately, he’d helped himself to so much old family silver that people had taken to calling him “Spoons” Butler.
“Do you never think what becomes of them,” said Madame de Beauvais, her features pinched with emotion, “the women and children you throw out in the streets? Some have families that take them in, but others, like Mary Cahill, are sleeping in the parks and other public places. I don’t know what they’ll do when winter comes. I offered her one of the rooms in the garçonnière, but she’s a proud woman, and she refused to take it.”
He went to stand beside the fountain in the center of the courtyard, his gaze on the quick flickers of gold weaving in and out among the lilies. He hated the Confiscation Act, hated what it did to families, hated what it made him do. It was alien to everything he believed in, alien to everything he was fighting for, alien to everything he’d always thought his country stood for. But there was good being done here, too. He kept telling himself that the good outweighed the bad, even if it didn’t justify it. “Rose told me you think slavery is wrong,” he said, looking over his shoulder at her.
Her throaty voice quivered with passion. “It’s worse than wrong. It’s an abomination.”
“Then if you feel that way, how can you support the Confederacy?”
She pushed away from the table and came around to stand before him, a strong, vital woman so tiny, she had to tip back her head to look up at him. “In New England,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she searched his face, “children as young as five work in factories for twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week, for pennies. Pennies. Yet you support the United States government that allows that.”
“It’s not the same. Those children aren’t slaves.”
“No, they’re not. But the industrial economy of the North depends upon their cheap labor, just as the agrarian economy of the South depends on slaves. Both are wrong. Yet you are fighting to end one abuse while ignoring the other.”
He thought about the grim brick buildings that had stood—that still stood—on the outskirts of the Rhode Island town where he’d grown up, and the children, hollow-eyed with exhaustion and pale from lack of sunlight, who disappeared into them every day, before dawn. They didn’t normally live long, those factory children. The few who did survive long enough to breed inevitably ended up sending their own children, in time, to tend the machines that spewed out the goods that made the wealthy of the town wealthier. Yet it was their choice . . . in a sense.
“There is more to slavery than the exploitation of labor,” he said softly, “and you know it.”
“Yes,” she said, her gaze still locked with his.
“And yet you don’t think the dignity of millions of human beings worth fighting for?”
“Worth striving for, always. But worth killing for? No. I don’t think anything justifies war.” She drew her open hand through the air in a wide arc. “Look around you. Look at that room in there, full of crying children and grieving women. Go upstairs and look at the shattered and maimed bodies of their men. Look in any cemetery across the South—and the North. War doesn’t solve problems, monsieur, it creates them.”
“So you would have slavery continue? Simply to avoid the cost of a war to end it?”
She shook her head. “This war isn’t about slavery and you know it. If it were, your President Lincoln would have issued a proclamation freeing all the slaves as soon as the war broke out. Yet we’ve been at war for well over
a year now, and it still hasn’t happened.”
“It will.”
She suddenly looked very, very tired. “It would have happened, anyway,” she said, the anger draining from her voice. “In five years, maybe ten. Slavery is a dying institution the world over. One nation after another has outlawed it, without war. But this war . . . the anger, and resentment, and hatred it has spawned will last a hundred years or more into the future.”
A silence stretched out between them, a silence filled with the melodic trickling of the fountain and the thrumming awareness of the depth and power of the emotion running between them. In the distance, a sick child began to wail, and she turned her head toward the sound. “You must excuse me, Major,” she said, her chest lifting as she sucked in a quick, deep breath. “I have work to do.”
She would have pushed past him then, to the door, but he stopped her by saying, “You haven’t answered my questions yet.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She swung slowly to face him again. “What questions, Major?”
“That night in the cemetery, when Henri Santerre was shot, did you see anyone else there?”
“You already asked me that. I told you, I saw no one.”
“According to the gatekeeper, two black men were tending their master’s family crypt in the cemetery that night. You didn’t see them?”
She shook her head. “No. But it’s a large cemetery, and the tombs are high enough to hide a man even one row over.” She gripped her elbows in her hands, hugging them close. “That’s one question, monsieur. What’s the other?”
A breeze stirred up, rustling the leaves of the Chinaball tree overhead with enough force to loosen a bunch of the tree’s green berries and send them tumbling to the paving stones below. He stooped to pick them up; small and hard, they lay in his palm. They were poisonous, the berries of the Chinaball tree, as poisonous as the oil of common tansy.
“I wanted to know if you could think of anything,” he said, “anything at all that Claire La Touche and Henri Santerre had in common with each other besides this hospital. It doesn’t need to make any sense. It could be something as obscure as an interest in the opera, or being born on the same day.”
Midnight Confessions Page 13