“No.”
He could feel her trembling now in his grip, little betraying tremors of all the emotions she was trying to keep bottled up inside her. “Yes, he did.”
She pulled against him, but when he refused to let her go she went still in his grasp. “Eh bien,” she said, her gaze on his face fierce and proud. “He did. Philippe liked to play games. When we were first married, I . . . played with him.”
“What else did he do to you?”
The westering sun cast a golden light through the green leaves of the willow, illuminating her face with a kind of glow. Her lips parted and he waited, his heart pounding, the blood thundering through his veins. “What else?” he said again.
A strange smile curled her lips. “Nothing I didn’t agree to. Does that shock you, monsieur? Hmmm? Disgust you?”
“No.”
She stared up at him, her chin and cheek still cradled in his hand, her eyes huge as she searched his face. Her hair was coming down, dark heavy locks that lay against the white flesh of her slender neck and curled against her full, high breasts. “What, then?” she asked, her voice husky. “Does it excite you?”
Her body was warm against his, the delicate skin of her face unbelievably soft beneath his touch, her scent sweet and musky and damnably evocative. He could feel his desire for her flaring up hot and bright, pulsing through him until his heart was pounding and his breath coming hard and fast. He had sought to intimidate her, with his size and his strength, and she had responded by seducing him with the essence of her femininity. It was the age-old dance of male advance and female retreat, a game he’d thought to play for his advantage, to use against her. Instead, he’d fallen victim to the power of the attraction between them and the surge of his own desires.
He wanted to bear her down onto the fecund earth and take her with swift, savage lust. He wanted to rip away the discreet high bodice of her plain mourning gown and luxuriate in the sight of sunlight warm and golden on the smooth flesh of her bare, beautiful breasts. He wanted to ruck up her full skirts and dig his fingers into her naked hips and wrap her long, slim legs around his waist. He wanted to touch her, kiss her, everywhere. He wanted her, and so great was the power of that wanting that if her son hadn’t been at the end of the pier, his shrimp net unfurling with practiced ease as he sent it spinning out over the water, Zach would have taken her here and now, in the iridescent green light beneath the willow, where anyone might have come along and seen.
“Damn you,” he whispered, his grip on her tightening, the urge to cover her soft, full mouth with his almost overwhelming. Instead, he let her go and swung away.
She stopped him by touching her fingertips to the cuff of his uniform, her hand jerking back when he spun to face her again. “I did not betray my husband,” she said, her voice calm, and such was the strength of his own passions that it took him a moment to remember that this was, after all, what they had been discussing. “Philippe and I lived separate lives for years. The only things we shared were our work at the hospital, and Dominic. There was unhappiness between us, yes; unhappiness and anger and resentment. Yet as much as I am relieved to be free of my marriage, Philippe was still, in some way I can’t even understand myself, a friend. I mourn his death, and I would never, ever have deliberately caused it—even if he had been the only one to die on that night, which he was not.”
He took a step that brought him up close to her again, although he was careful, this time, not to touch her. “You’re still hiding something,” he said, his gaze hard on her face.
She sucked in a quick breath in a way that parted her lips and lifted her breasts and damned near broke the fragile control he had on his raging instincts. “I hide many things, monsieur,” she said. “We all do.”
“But what you’re hiding could get you killed.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” he said, and walked away from her to where his horse grazed unconcernedly in the slanting golden light of the fading day.
That night, Zach took a glass and a bottle of brandy out onto the gallery that ran along the second floor of the Uptown house General Butler had appropriated for the use of his officers. The evening was blessedly mild, the air scented with the blossoms of the moonflowers and angel’s trumpets and honeysuckle glowing pale white from out of the darkness. Pouring himself a drink, Zach left the bottle on a weathered wooden table beside the door and went to stand with his forearms resting on the cast-iron balustrade, one boot hooked on the lower railing as he stared out over the shadowy garden below.
The night was cool and sweet, but he still had a heat in him, a heat that kept building, hotter and hotter, every time he saw her, every time he touched her. One day soon, he thought, if he wasn’t careful, he was going to bear her down and take her the way a man takes a woman he’s hungry for, with a desperate intensity just short of violence. The image made him shudder, and he swore softly to himself and drained the brandy in his glass.
He was reaching for the bottle again when a creak of wooden boards in the darkness brought his head up. The open doorway from the hall filled with a tall, broad-shouldered figure silhouetted against the lamp shine behind him.
“Want a drink?” Zach said, splashing brandy into his glass.
“Not unless that’s Scotch you’ve got in that bottle,” said Hamish, coming to toss his hat on the table with a sigh that spoke of long hours spent beneath a hot Southern sun. “It was a woman, all right,” he said, scrubbing his hands across his face. “A Frenchwoman. I’ve been out to Bayou Crevé, talking to the lieutenant of the patrol she met with.”
Zach paused with his drink suspended halfway to his lips, his hand gripping the glass so hard, he wondered it didn’t shatter. “She?”
“The woman who betrayed Philippe de Beauvais. She was wearing a heavy veil, the lieutenant says, but there was no missing her accent. She drove herself out to their camp in a neat little one-horse shay, told them what they needed to know, then went away without giving her name.”
“And he simply let her go without asking any questions?”
Hamish stretched his neck and lifted his chin as he smoothed the line of his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “I gather she was a haughty one, decked out in taffeta and pearls, with the grand manner of a duchess and a tongue like vinegar, and him nothing but a raw college boy from Philadelphia. He didn’t dare try to stop her.”
Zach stared out at the rooftops looming dark and silent beneath the stars. “So it could have been Claire La Touche.”
“Aye. Or it could have been Madame de Beauvais.”
He took a sip of brandy that burned all the way down to the fire within him. “She says she didn’t do it.”
“Aye,” said Hamish again, his eyes glittering with brittle amusement. “Just like she said she didn’t know the name of the man who was buggering Claire La Touche, or who gave that nasty little vampire kit to her husband for his birthday. She’s no’ exactly wed to the truth.”
Zach took a longer, slower sip of his drink. “But why not admit this? At least to us.”
“Secrets are hard to keep. And long after we’re gone, she’s still gonna have to live in this place.”
Zach swung around to rest his lower back against the balustrade, his elbows propped on the railing behind him. A palmetto bug buzzed through the air to flop around in the shadows near the doorway, and Zach watched it idly, the brandy glass cradled in his curled palm. “And Philippe de Beauvais? Do we know for certain he’s dead?”
“Weeell . . . not exactly,” said Hamish, propping a shoulder against one of the elegant round columns supporting the gallery’s roof. “According to the lieutenant, they buried two men, one black, one white. Buried them right there in the swamp, where they fell.”
Zach glanced up in surprise. “Why not bring them back to New Orleans?”
“A couple of dead Confederates?” The palmetto bug was crawling across the floorboards now, and Hamish watched it anxiously.
“In this heat? What do you think?”
“And the German?” said Zach. “Hans Spears? How did he get away from an entire Union patrol with a minié ball in his foot?”
Hamish shrugged. “Luck, I suppose. That and more guts than most have got, hiding out with a bloody foot in a swamp full of hungry alligators.”
Zach brought his glass up to his lips. “This lieutenant, what made him think the white man they buried out there was Philippe de Beauvais?”
“His papers.”
Zach swung his head to look at his friend. “No one actually identified him?”
“No.”
“So it could have been someone else.”
“Aye.” Hamish blinked. “Although I thought Hans Spears told you there were only the three of them, that night.”
Zach pushed away from the railing, his boot coming down to squash the palmetto bug with an audible crunch that made Hamish wince. “What do you think? That Emmanuelle de Beauvais is the only one lying to us?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On a balmy Monday evening, Zach took the mule car up Esplanade Avenue to the white, two-story Greek Revival house of Jean-Lambert and Marie Thérèse de Beauvais.
He was shown into the front parlor by the same dignified elderly black man he remembered from the night of Claire La Touche’s death. Pausing just inside the wide parlor doors, Zach let his gaze drift over the room’s linen-draped chairs and polished rosewood tables backed by exquisite falls of lace at the windows. All the disorder and associated unpleasantness he remembered from that night had vanished along with Claire La Touche’s corpse. It seemed strange to realize that anyone looking at the room, now, would never know of the violent death this elegant parlor had witnessed.
“I’ll tell Madame de Beauvais you’re here,” said the man, setting Zach’s hat on a low table and bowing himself out.
The distant sound of a child’s voice drew Zach across the room to one of the long, high windows overlooking the side yard where Dominic lay, flat on his back in the sunlit grass. As Zach watched, the boy disappeared beneath the leap of a liver-colored hound that began to yap in enthusiastic counterpoint to Dominic’s laughter as they rolled over and over, boy and dog, a tangle of paws and torn trousers and close-cropped golden curls. The boy’s mother was nowhere in sight.
“My grandson tells me you’re a deft hand at crabbing,” said a heavily accented voice.
Zach turned to find himself the subject of intense scrutiny by the woman who stood just inside the doorway. Marie Thérèse was unusually tall, taller by far than Emmanuelle de Beauvais, although so fine-boned and thin, the impression was still one of fragile elegance given a severe edge by the unrelieved black of her mourning gown. She was an attractive woman, more handsome than beautiful, her face lean and sharp-featured, her silver hair worn in an elegant chignon beneath a black lace cap. If there was any hostility in the coldly intelligent gray eyes that studied him, Zach thought, it was carefully hidden. She might hate the Union soldiers occupying her city as much as anyone, but she was a shrewd, wealthy woman who knew the power of a provost marshal. She would not deliberately antagonize him.
“Your grandson is a good teacher,” Zach said, wondering as he came away from the window just how much Dominic had told his formidable grandmother about that outing to the lake.
She extended her hand in a gracious gesture toward a chair near the parlor’s elaborately carved and gilded harp. “Please, have a seat, and tell me how I may be of assistance to you.”
“I thought you might be able to help me answer a few questions,” Zach said.
The delicately arched eyebrows rose in a polite expression of surprise. “Questions?” she said, sinking with quiet grace to sit at one end of a sofa.
“About the deaths of Claire La Touche and Henri Santerre.”
“Claire and Henri? But . . .” She paused. “Surely the two matters aren’t related?”
“I think they might be.”
She lifted one shoulder in a genteel shrug. “Dr. Santerre was an associate of my son, monsieur. I’m afraid I myself was barely acquainted with the man.”
“But you knew Mademoiselle La Touche.”
“Bien sûr. Her mother is my husband’s second cousin.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”
The question seemed to trouble her, although she hid it well, her hands clenching together in her lap but an instant before she relaxed them. “No. I can’t imagine who would do such a thing. She was a sweet child.”
Zach leaned forward in his seat. “Was she?”
The look she gave him was fixed and hard. “You must not believe everything you are told, Major.”
He glanced up as a stout, middle-aged black woman appeared in the doorway, a heavy silver tray with a steaming cafetière and a pitcher of hot milk in her arms. It was Madame de Beauvais herself who poured the thick, rich coffee together with the milk into porcelain cups so thin and delicate, Zach could see through the rim when he lifted his to the light. He waited until the black woman had withdrawn from the room, then said, “Tell me about your son.”
A small, sad smile touched Marie Thérèse’s lips. “Which one, Major? I bore four sons.”
“Philippe.”
“Ah, Philippe,” she said on a bittersweet exhalation of breath. “A brilliant, bright star destined to die young.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to see him dead?”
Raising her cup to her lips, Marie Thérèse took a delicate sip of the café au lait. “My son died a hero’s death, Major.”
“And did you never think that someone might have betrayed him?”
For a moment, she froze, the cup suspended in midair. “I take it you’re telling me he was betrayed,” she said with admirable sangfroid. She lowered the cup to her lap, her head bowing for a moment. When she looked up again, her face was still carefully wiped of all emotion. “By whom?”
“We don’t know exactly.”
“It was a woman, wasn’t it?” Her cup rattled in its saucer, and she set it aside, rising quickly to go stand and look out the side window, the full black silk skirt of her mourning gown brushing the lace panel so that it swayed lightly back and forth.
“I’d rather not comment.”
“You don’t need to, Major,” she said, her back held straight and taut. “My son was not happy in his marriage. As men will do, he sought consolation elsewhere.”
“With whom, exactly?”
“I wouldn’t know. That’s a question you should ask of his widow.”
“She knew?”
“That my son was unfaithful to her?” Marie Thérèse turned from the window, her mouth held in a tight, bitter twist. “Oh, yes. She knew.”
Zach rose from his seat, the coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He thrust it aside. “Tell me, madame, what do you think of your daughter-in-law?”
“What do I think of her?” Marie Thérèse sucked her upper lip behind the lower in an expression that was inimitably French. “She was my son’s choice.”
“But not one you approved of?”
Her face hardened as if touched by an old, angry memory. “He might have selected from any of New Orleans’s oldest and finest families. Instead, he took to wife the daughter of a poor doctor.”
“A poor doctor who had married the descendant of a French comte,” said Zach softly.
“Ah, yes. The mother was well-born enough— although the family lost everything in the Revolution, of course. But the father . . .” Again, that light shrug. “Pure petty bourgeoisie. Did you know he was a revolutionary? It’s why they were forced to leave France.”
“That scandalizes you, does it?”
Marie Thérèse came to stand in the center of the room, her hands loosely linked to lie against the black skirts she wore in memory of her dead son. “Perhaps it does much to explain some of my daughter-in-law’s more . . . shall we say, unorthodox behavior?”
“Such as her ambition to bec
ome a doctor herself?”
“That, too.”
From outside came the sound of Dominic’s voice, raised in a familiar greeting. Zach didn’t need to look out the window to know that Emmanuelle de Beauvais had arrived. He could feel her nearness, like a breathless hum in the air. “Do you think she was a good wife to your son?” he asked, although he already knew the answer this woman would give him.
“Men with good wives do not seek consolation elsewhere.” Turning, Marie Thérèse went to where the cafetière rested on a round table. “May I offer you some more coffee?”
Zach lifted his hat from the table near the door. “Thank you, but no. I was just leaving.” He could hear her now, Emmanuelle, on the front gallery outside, her voice light, relaxed, as she spoke in easy French with her son.
“You must be a very busy man, Major,” said Marie Thérèse. If she were aware of her daughter-in-law’s approach, she gave no sign. “Yet you seem to be devoting a great deal of time to this unpleasantness of ours.”
Zach stood with his hat in his hand, every fiber of his being tuned to the woman just out of sight in the entry. He could hear the old butler saying, “She’s in the parlor, Miss Emmanuelle, with a visitor.”
“Two murders are bad enough.” Zach tightened his grip on his hat. “I wouldn’t want to see a third.”
“If she’s with a visitor, I won’t disturb her,” said that husky female voice in the hall.
“Mais non,” came the old man’s reply. “She said she wished you to join them.”
“Surely that is unlikely?” said Marie Thérèse. “A third death.”
Zach shook his head. “As long as the murderer remains undetected, I’m afraid it is very likely. Those who kill once and get away with it often kill again.”
A step in the hall brought Zach around to face the door, and it occurred to him as he felt himself tensing in anticipation that Marie Thérèse had deliberately delayed his departure, that she had been as aware as he of her daughter-in-law’s approach, that she had wanted them to meet. Wanted to watch them meet.
Midnight Confessions Page 21