Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “Get in, quickly,” said Major Zachary Cooper. He held out his hand as if to help her to the granite carriage block that rose above the rain-filled street, but his face was hard, his eyes hidden behind the lowered brim of his officer’s hat.

  Emmanuelle stared at him, her arms tightening around the boots she held clutched to her chest. Rain ran down her face, dripped off the edges of her black widow’s bonnet. Even more than she wanted the beckoning shelter and warmth and safety of that hack, she wanted this man to stay away from her. “Thank you, but no,” she said, and kept walking.

  His voice came after her, raised above the roar of water. “Goddamn it, madame. Even if there weren’t a murderer loose in this city, you could damn well drown simply trying to walk out here. Will you get in the carriage?”

  Rain pounded on her head, ran down the inside of her collar to trickle over bare flesh and make her feel cold, but she kept walking. She thought he would get back in his hack and drive away. She listened for the grinding sound of carriage wheels churning through the quagmire of a street. Instead, she heard footsteps on the wooden gunwale behind her. Strong fingers closed around her arm just above the elbow, swinging her around to look up at his dark, set face.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I arrived at Claire’s wake to be told you’d gone off alone, after all that’s happened.”

  Thunder rumbled, distant at first, then again, louder, closer. The rain poured. “I was visiting a sick patient.”

  He leaned into her, the rain sloshing off the brim of his hat. “So why won’t you get in the hack?”

  “You know why.” She pushed past him, toward the canal. The water in the street was cold and thick with mud. Tucking her shoes under one arm, she lifted her skirts and petticoats higher, painfully aware of her bare, mud-streaked ankles and feet, and the man behind her, watching her. She had just reached the grassy bank of the canal when he said, “I know about Philippe and Claire.”

  She spun around so quickly, she almost dropped one of her shoes in the canal and had to scramble to catch it, the hem of her gown plopping into the mud when she let it go. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her arms crossing in front of her as she hugged her shoes tight.

  “Yes, you do.” He walked up to her. Lightning ripped across the sky in great jagged tears of white that showed her the hard planes of his face and the glitter of slow-burning anger in his eyes. Thunder crashed. “You lied to me. Again.”

  She started to say she hadn’t lied, but that was mere quibbling, and she knew it. “What does it matter? Philippe is dead.”

  “It matters because you wasted my time.”

  “Time that could have been better employed throwing widows and orphans out of their homes, or confiscating the wealth men have worked their entire lives to build?”

  “Don’t start on that again.” Big and angry and vaguely threatening, he leaned into her. “I asked you who Claire La Touche was fucking, and you said you didn’t know.”

  His words were crude, bare of all embellishment. But then, there had never been any pretense of polite social artifice between them. “What is it you think?” she demanded, the rain falling cold and harsh against her upturned face. “That I killed Claire for fucking Philippe?” She gave a low, mirthless huff of what was meant to be derisive laughter. “Half of New Orleans fucked Philippe.”

  “Is that why you didn’t?”

  She stared at him through the falling rain. She had said too much, had allowed this conversation to become too explicit, too personal. Turning on her heel, she began to walk along the bank of the canal toward the bridge, the grass wet and cold beneath her bare feet.

  “Goddamn it, Emmanuelle,” he yelled after her. “If it mattered so little to you, then why the hell did you go at him with a scalpel?”

  That stopped her, as he’d surely known it would. She turned slowly this time, her voice kept steady with an effort. “I was angry,” she said, then added, “besides, I didn’t exactly go after him with it.”

  She watched, perplexed, as a shadow of amusement deepened the rugged slashes that bracketed his mouth. She wondered if he even realized he’d called her by her first name, and decided he didn’t. “What did you do?” he said. “Exactly?”

  In spite of herself, in spite of everything, she found herself almost smiling back at him through the driving rain. “I waved the blade in front of him and expressed a desire to cut off a certain relevant portion of his anatomy.”

  He walked right up to her, the smile fading from his face to be replaced by an intense, probing expression. “Did you know someone informed on Philippe last May? Betrayed his mission?”

  She felt a chill run down her spine, steal her breath. “I didn’t know for certain,” she said, her gaze locking with his, “but I suspected it. It seemed too much a coincidence, what happened.” She paused, trying to read his face, trying to understand this man and what he thought of her. “Are you going to accuse me of that, as well?”

  He shook his head. “The scalpel is more your style.” He squinted up at the roiling clouds above. Rain ran down his cheeks, turned the dark blue of his uniform to black. “Now, will you get in the carriage?”

  “No.”

  He let out his breath in a puff of exasperation and turned away from her. She thought he would leave her then, leave her to the rain and the dangerous darkness and all the demons of the night, but he swung around again, one hand gripping the hilt of his sword, the other slashing through the rain-filled night between them in a gesture of anger and impatience. “Don’t you understand what’s happening here?” he demanded, leaning into her. “One by one, the people associated with the Hospital de Santerre are being killed—first Philippe, then Henri Santerre, and now Claire La Touche. That only leaves you and Yardley—unless whoever’s doing this plans to start on the nurses, too, in which case Hans Spears and Rudolph and all the others are in danger, as well.”

  A silence opened up between them, a silence filled with the battering rhythm of the rain and the pounding of her own heart. “I live with the threat of death every day,” she said slowly. “Every time I treat a patient who has typhus, or yellow fever, or even the influenza, there’s a chance I could sicken from it.”

  He stared at her, his jaw set, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick breath. “I never questioned your courage. Just your sense.”

  If Emmanuelle had one vanity, it was her sense—her mind, her intelligence. When the men of her world tried to justify all the laws and customs that kept women uneducated, that curtailed their ability to control their own property, that denied them the right to vote and gave a man the power to beat his wife, it was the supposed weakness of the female mind even more than the weakness of the female body that was used as an excuse. Anger flared within her, hot and bright. Blinded by rain and wet hair and rage, she whirled away from him. But she was far closer to the edge of the canal than she’d realized, and the grass beneath her bare feet was slippery with rain and mud. As she came down on it, her right foot shot out from under her, lurching her sideways. She threw out her arms to catch her balance, and one of her shoes went flying through the air like a missile to land far down the steep grassy bank, almost at the water’s edge.

  “Mon Dieu,” she said, twisting around to stare at it as Zach Cooper leaped forward to grab her by the shoulders and keep her from slipping any farther. “My shoe.”

  His hands ran down her arms to tighten and lift her up, swinging her around to set her higher up the bank. “Stay here,” he said, letting her go. “I’ll get it.”

  “No.” She touched his arm, stopping him as he turned away. “It’s not worth it. You might fall in.”

  He looked back at her over his shoulder, the creases in his cheeks deepening into a devil-dark smile. “It’s not that deep. I can swim, you know.”

  The wind gusted around them, whipped at the frayed ribbons of her widow’s bonnet, snatched at the ends of his officer’s cape. “I’m not worried about you drowning, Major
.” She had to shout to be heard above the roar of the wind, and the rain, and the runoff shooting into the canal. “I am worried about what would be in that water with you. You are familiar with the theory of animalcules, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am.”

  She blinked the water out of her eyes. “Then you understand why you don’t want to go swimming in that canal. It’s a cesspool of filth and disease. And your wound is still open.”

  “I won’t fall in,” he said, and moved away from her.

  She stood on the top of the bank, her remaining boot clutched to her chest, and watched as he worked his way down the slope, toward the water’s edge. He slipped once, his long, lean body jackknifing sideways as he caught himself on his outflung hand, and she bit her lip. For all his casual talk, he was being careful; she could tell by the way he kept eyeing the water sweeping past, foul with sewage from the city’s drains and all the refuse washed into the canal by the storm.

  He had reached the water now. He was leaning forward, his hand closing over the heel of her ankle boot, when she saw an uprooted elderberry sapling that had been caught up in the runoff and was now hurtling down the canal. She shouted a warning that was lost in the howl of the wind and the roar of the rain. In the grip of an eddy, the sapling spun around, its outflung branches sweeping the bank to knock the major’s legs from beneath him and pitch him headfirst into the canal with a splash that sent water flying up into the air. When it cleared, all she could see was his officer’s hat with its crossed golden sabers and cocky ostrich feathers swirling away on the crest of a thick, yellow-brown wave.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The canal was not deep. The major’s head disappeared for but an instant, then he shot out of the water, streaming mud and curses.

  “Mon Dieu.” Emmanuelle scrambled down the bank toward him as he slogged out of the canal and up onto the bank, his boot heels making sucking noises in the mud.

  “Be careful,” he said, hacking and spitting as if he’d swallowed some of the canal, which he probably had. “Because if you go in, I’m not going in again after you.”

  She slid to a halt beside him, then took a quick step back. Foul-smelling water dripped off the ends of his dark hair and ran in little rivulets from the hem of his coat. Leaning over, he tried to squeeze out the limp bullion fringe of his sash, lifted his saber on its hook, and swore again.

  “You lost your hat,” she said, one hand pressed against her lips to hold back the laughter that bubbled inside of her, threatening to erupt.

  His head came up. Slowly, he straightened. Lightning flashed, showing her a face so streaked with mud, the whites of his eyes seemed to glow. Then he thrust one slime-coated arm aloft as if in mock triumph, and she saw he still held her muddy ankle boot gripped tight. “But I have your shoe,” he said, and she could control herself no longer.

  Laughter gurgled up, warm and wonderful, and she let it come, great ungenteel whoops that mingled with his own rich, deep laughter. She laughed so hard, she had to wrap one arm around her stomach to keep it from hurting, and still she laughed. Then their gazes caught and held, and the laughter quieted as lips parted, and breath hitched.

  “Now, will you get in the hack?” he said, his gaze still locked with hers.

  She got in the hack.

  The door to the bathing room was unlatched, so that it rocked gently on its hinges when she knocked at it some three quarters of an hour later. “Monsieur?” she called, balancing the tray she held on one hip. She’d shown him here, to the room beside Philippe’s bedroom, then gone away to get out of her own wet dress, and look in on Dominic, and gather what she needed to rebandage the major’s side.

  “You can come in,” he said, and she pushed open the door to find him standing beside the sink, his sword in his hand. He was naked except for the white swath of the towel he had wrapped around his hips, his bare back and shoulders still gleaming with moisture from the shower. He looked up when she entered, and something leaped in his eyes at the sight of her, something that made her wish she had taken the time to put up her hair again and change into something more proper than a thin summer peignoir.

  He eased his saber back into its scabbard, his gaze following her as she went to set the tray on the small painted chest of drawers beside the sink. “Nice room,” he said, nodding toward the walls of floor-to-ceiling glazed Portuguese tiles, the deep copper tub, the innovative upright copper and oilcloth shower.

  “Philippe had it put in.” She picked up the small pad of cloth she’d brought, and soaked it with carbolic acid. Some of the liquid spilled from the dark glass bottle onto the tray, and she realized her hands were shaking. She put the bottle down with a clatter. “You can sit there,” she said, nodding toward the high, padded, benchlike table that stood in the center of the room.

  “What’s it for, exactly?” he said, balancing his hips on the edge.

  “Massages.”

  He looked up at her, his eyes narrowing. “Philippe was somewhat of a hedonist, I take it.”

  “There were a few of the seven deadly sins he didn’t indulge in,” she said, bending over his wound. “But not many.” The knife slash looked surprisingly healthy, she thought, and had healed far more than she would have expected, in just a few days. “You’re lucky you didn’t pull out your stitches,” she said, laying the pad against the wound. “And you’ll be luckier still if this wound doesn’t putrefy.”

  He sucked in a quick, startled breath that shivered the smooth, warm flesh beneath her hand. “Jesus Christ. What is that stuff?”

  “An aseptic,” she said casually, although it was, in truth, a radical theory, the idea that this acid could kill animalcules and prevent sepsis.

  “It feels like you poured raw turpentine on me.”

  “It has much the same effect. I also want to put a dressing of marshmallow on it.” She started to turn away, then paused, swinging back to meet his hard, inquiring glaze. “There’s something you should perhaps know, monsieur,” she said quickly, before she could change her mind.

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone was in my house last night. I don’t know who. I heard a strange sound, and when I went to investigate, I found the front door unbolted.”

  He sat very still. “You’re certain it hadn’t been left unlocked?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been very careful to lock everything since . . . since this all began. Rose has thrown out everything in the kitchen. She thinks someone was trying to poison us.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have any idea who it could have been?”

  “No.” She went to prepare the dressing for his wound. “Do you believe me?” she asked, her back to him.

  “Tell me what happened last spring,” he said quietly. “The argument between Claire and Philippe and Yardley.”

  She turned slowly, the dressing held half-forgotten in her hand, and stared at him.

  “Tell me,” he said again, his gaze locked with hers, his eyes dark and compelling.

  “All right.” She went to apply the dressing against his wound, her head bent over her task, his darkly naked leg lying close against her side. She couldn’t look at him and say these things to him. “There’s a small room at the back of the hospital, beyond the kitchen, where we perform our dissections. I was there, studying the musculature of an upper arm, when I heard them shouting.”

  “Claire and Yardley?”

  “Yes. Hold this,” she said. His hand came down over hers. She was aware of the calloused strength of his touch, the warmth of his flesh. Then she eased her fingers away and reached for the roll of bandages. “I didn’t pay much attention at first, but they were in Henri’s office, and with the windows to the courtyard open, anyone could have heard them.” She eased the roll of bandaging around his side, soft white gauze against hard male flesh. “I went to warn them.”

  “With the scalpel still in your hand?”

  “Yes.” She glanced u
p to find his fierce, questioning eyes upon her, then looked away. “But not intentionally.” Slowly, she brought the bandage around his leanly muscled ribs a second time. Rain filled the silence of the night around them. The candle flickered, casting golden light and warm shadows over the tiled walls. “Until I got closer I didn’t even realize what they were talking about.”

  “Did you know about Claire before that?” he asked, lifting his arm as she came around his side.

  “I didn’t know she was involved with Philippe, if that’s what you mean. But I knew the way she was with men, yes. She’d had a series of affairs, much as a man might do. All deliberately brief, casual. I’m sure when she began it, she expected her interlude with Philippe to be the same.”

  “Only it wasn’t?”

  “No. She fell in love with him.” Emmanuelle tied off the bandage and took a step back, her gaze meeting his as she straightened. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a long building crescendo of violence underscored by the pounding of the rain. She wondered when it had happened, when they had reached such a level of intimacy that they could speak so freely of such things, of love and passion between men and women. That she could move so naturally around him, with her hair drying into a tumble of soft, loose curls down her back and the candlelight gleaming warm and golden on his naked flesh.

  “You didn’t hold that against her?”

  “That she loved him?” Emmanuelle sucked in a quick breath that shuddered her chest and startled her, for she hadn’t expected it all to still hurt so badly. “How could I?” she said, her lips twisting into an ironic smile. “After all, I fell in love with Philippe myself, when I was her age.”

  “But you didn’t like her sleeping with him.”

  “No.” Her chest burned, her throat closing with emotion, and she turned away to busy herself with tidying the tray and putting the lid back on the jar of salve. “No, I didn’t.”