Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  Emmanuelle de Beauvais appeared in the doorway, her hands gripping the knob of the black umbrella she carried against the threat of coming rain. She had her thick dark hair swept up beneath a black widow’s bonnet, its long untied ribbons swirling around her when she drew up short, her lips parting on a quick breath, the pupils of her eyes dilating in the dimness of the room so that they might have been black, too. She brought with her the scents of the garden and the promise of warm rain and that hint of musky spice that was all her own. And he knew as he stared at her that everything he felt for her, from intense awareness through hot-blooded lust to that quiet, almost spiritual connection he’d known with her from the beginning but would never understand—all must be writ there, in every inch of his being, for anyone to read.

  “Madame,” he said, bowing with a formal politeness made a mockery by the heat of the blood pulsing through his veins and an inescapable rush of images, memories of the swell of her naked breast warm beneath his palm, the sweet taste of her mouth opening beneath the insistent pressure of his.

  She inclined her head with equal formality. “Major.” She threw a quick glance at her dead husband’s mother. “If I am disturbing you, I can simply take Dominic—”

  “No,” said Zach. “I was just leaving.” Turning to the older woman, he added, “Thank you for your time, madame.”

  “I’m sorry I could not have been of more assistance,” she said, her brows drawing together in a concerned frown as if she really meant it.

  And it occurred to Zach as he settled his hat on his head and turned to leave that they were all acting, the three of them, as if each had been assigned parts in some bizarre play where nothing was as it seemed, and every line might be a lie.

  Emmanuelle went to the parlor’s guillotine windows and watched Zach Cooper walk down the broad front steps of her in-laws’ house, his head tipping back as he squinted up at the thick banks of clouds building overhead.

  “Why was he here?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at the woman who still stood near the wide doorway, her face set in disapproving lines.

  Marie Thérèse stared at her a moment, then shrugged. “He wished to know some details of the evening of Claire’s death. I must say, he does seem genuinely intent on catching the person responsible. I wonder if he’ll succeed?”

  “I don’t think he has much to go on,” Emmanuelle said, her attention caught once more by the man who now paused with one hand on the gate, the brim of his dark officer’s hat lifting as he turned in answer to Dominic’s shout.

  “Dominic tells me this major accompanied you on your expedition to the lake.”

  Emmanuelle watched her son race across the lawn toward the front gate, the dog bounding at his heels. That day at the lake, after their tense confrontation about the crossbow, Zach Cooper had gone down to the shore to help Dominic pull in his shrimp net. They’d got into a furious argument then, her son and the Yankee major, about the North and the South, and the war. But it had ended with the major showing Dominic his cavalry saber, and Emmanuelle watching them with her head resting on her bent knees as she tried to understand how the possibility of a grudging friendship between this man and her son could both disquiet her and please her at the same time.

  “Dominic hates Yankees,” said Marie Thérèse in a voice that brought Emmanuelle around to face her. “They killed his father.”

  “I am trying to raise my son without prejudice and hatred,” Emmanuelle said with deliberate calm. “Without even my own prejudices and hatreds.”

  A quiver of disdain passed over Marie Thérèse’s features. “Is that what this is about? Love thy enemy? Hmmm?” She took a step forward, her voice dropping, her hands coming up to flash through the air in a swift, angry gesture. “It doesn’t look good, Emmanuelle. It doesn’t look good at all. A Yankee? And you less than three months widowed.”

  A few days ago, Emmanuelle would have denied the implications. She would have denied, even to herself, the dangerous drift of the tenor of her reaction to this tall, dark-haired man with the deadly cavalry saber and hated Yankee uniform. Now she simply said, “I have never believed in allowing a preoccupation with appearances to dictate how I live my life. You know that.”

  “Oh, I know.” Marie Thérèse gripped the high back of the chair beside her with ringed, claw-like hands. “You admit, then, that you have feelings for this man?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The older woman shook her head. “You didn’t need to. And what of Dominic, hmm? What will become of my grandson and his ties to Beau Lac if you marry a Yankee?”

  Emmanuelle let out a sharp laugh. “Do you honestly think I would marry again? After what I went through with Philippe?”

  A dangerous flare of anger gleamed in the depths of Marie Thérèse’s crystal-gray eyes. “How dare you? How dare you say such a thing, especially to me?”

  Emmanuelle held herself very still. “We both know what Philippe was like. Why should we pretend else-wise between ourselves?”

  The anger spread, contorting Marie Thérèse’s features, pulling at her mouth, making her look older than she was, old and bitter. “You made Philippe into the husband he was. You.”

  “No.” Emmanuelle shook her head, her grip tightening around the umbrella she still held in her hands. From the front of the house came the quick tramp of a boy’s feet, racing up the porch steps, and the sharp disappointed yap of a dog. “You might be able to convince yourself of that, but I know the truth. And so do you, deep in your heart.”

  “I know Philippe’s father—”

  “Philippe was not his father,” said Emmanuelle, turning to go. “He never was.”

  “He could have been. With the right wife.”

  “Perhaps. We’ll never know, will we?”

  She had almost reached the doorway when Marie Thérèse’s voice stopped her. “Did you know someone had betrayed Philippe to that Union patrol on the Bayou Crevé?”

  Emmanuelle swung slowly back around, conscious of Dominic’s nearness, of the happy chatter of his voice as he spoke to Leon, the old black butler. “So that’s the reason Major Cooper was here,” she said softly. “Because of Philippe.”

  “Why?” The anger faded from the other woman’s face, leaving only strain and a fierce kind of sadness. “What has Philippe to do with Claire’s death?”

  Maybe nothing, maybe everything, Emmanuelle thought, her own anger draining out of her. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Marie Thérèse kept her fierce gaze on Emmanuelle’s face. “Was it you? Did you betray my son to those Yankees?”

  There was a pain in Emmanuelle’s chest, a pain that had been building and building for days now, beneath all the fear and worries that troubled her. Because while she might not have betrayed Philippe herself, she couldn’t help but feel that she was somehow responsible for what had happened to him. She could never have changed what he was, but perhaps if she’d been a better wife she might have saved him, saved him from himself. “And if I said no,” she asked his mother softly, “would you believe me?”

  The other woman swung away, one hand coming up to shade her face as if the dim light filtering through the lace panels at the windows suddenly hurt her eyes. “Dominic keeps asking when we go to Beau Lac.”

  “I know.” Usually, Dominic spent months there every summer, riding through the fields, fishing the lake and bayous, learning to maneuver a pirogue through the swamps. But this year, Emmanuelle couldn’t bear the thought of letting him out of her sight. Too many people in her life were dying.

  “It would mean much to Jean-Lambert,” Marie Thérèse was saying, “to be able to go there now, and to have the boy with him.”

  “I don’t think it’s safe for either you or Dominic to stay at Beau Lac right now. The Bayou Crevé might be under Union control, but the Rangers make constant raids in the area.”

  Marie Thérèse turned to regard her steadily. “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “When the Yankee r
eprisals fall on innocents, yes.”

  “People are saying our troops may launch an offensive to retake Baton Rouge.”

  Emmanuelle let out her breath in a long, troubled sigh. Too many people were dying everywhere. “Then pity the women and children of Baton Rouge,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Two days later, Emmanuelle stepped out onto the shotgun house’s narrow back stoop and stared up at the night sky. Thick clouds hung low over the city, dark thunderheads that shut out the moon and the stars and piled up one on top of the other, holding in the heat of the vanished day and crackling with lightning and promising a downpour that didn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. Just like the baby she was here to deliver.

  Her legs felt suddenly shaky and she sat down for a moment on the edge of the porch, her head tipping back against a weathered wooden post. In another few hours, it would be morning. Emmanuelle had been here, in this small house in the poor, riverfront part of the city people had taken to calling the Irish Channel, for the better part of twenty-four hours now. And if the woman laboring in there in her narrow iron bed didn’t give birth soon, she would die.

  As a licensed midwife, delivering babies was one of the few medical activities Emmanuelle could legally do, although these days it was typically only the poor and the more recent immigrants who called in midwives. Those who considered themselves progressive or affluent usually sent their women to the hospitals, where doctors often went straight from handling corpses to examining new mothers, never bothering to wash their own hands in between and then wondering why their female patients sickened and died at such alarming rates. Of course, there were few in New Orleans who could afford such a luxury now, and most of the city’s doctors were away in the war, anyway.

  An agonized scream rent the air, followed by a child’s panicked voice, shouting, “Dhia. Miss Emmanuelle! Oh, come quick, do.”

  Sighing, Emmanuelle drew the hot, still air deep into her lungs, pushed up from the step, and went back inside.

  The rising sun was sending pale streaks of orange and gold shooting across the heavy underbelly of the clouds when Emmanuelle left the narrow house in the mean lane near Tchoupitoulas Street and turned toward the rail line and home. Around her, the city still slept, the early morning quiet disturbed only by the clatter of a milk cart rattling through the narrow streets and the dark, distant silhouette of a vendeuse, her body swaying with inimitable grace, a basket balanced on her head as she made her way to market with the produce of some outlying farm. The rain had never come.

  It felt good to walk, Emmanuelle thought, good to draw the morning air deep into her being, good to behold the wonder of a newly unfolding day. She hadn’t slept for a night and a day, and still she smiled. She’d been part of a miracle tonight, for in the quiet hour just before dawn the child had come at last, big and brawny and screaming with lusty indignation, but healthy, blessedly healthy. And the mother would be all right, too; Emmanuelle had left her trembling with exhaustion, but radiant with joy and triumph as she gazed down at the new son in her arms.

  As Emmanuelle walked, the light grew stronger, showing her the gray threat of clouds still hovering overhead and the boarded-up remnant of a glass window on the side wall of the grocery store at the corner ahead. She found that her heart had begun to beat faster, her skin tingling with a prickle of foreboding. This was a rough neighborhood, but she had walked these streets dozens of times at all hours of the day and night, and never until today had she felt unsafe.

  She quickened her step, her gaze scanning the silent shops and sagging houses, every nerve in her body seemingly aquiver. The sound of a step brought her head whipping around, her fear leaping like a live thing within her, but the rutted lane stretched out behind her empty except for a mud-streaked pig rooting about in the slimy mud of the gutter and a skinny calico cat that blinked at her from a nearby stoop and made her feel vaguely foolish.

  “Bonjour, ma petite chat,” she said with a shaky smile, and kept walking.

  She was tired. The sense of elation and the exhilaration it brought had worn off, leaving only a profound exhaustion that went beyond the last twenty-four hours. It wasn’t like her, this attack of nerves, this feeling of weakness and vulnerability. Turning the corner by the boarded-up grocery, she tightened her grip on the medical bag she carried in her left hand, an umbrella in her right. Behind her, the pig squealed, and she glanced back again, quickly, before she could stop herself. When she swung around again, a man stood in front of her.

  She sucked in a quick, startled gasp of air. He was just above average in height, with a threadbare, stained drab coat and torn, spotted cotton shirt worn open at the neck. Only the bowie knife he held clutched in one grimy fist looked new, its blade gleaming bright and sharp in the cool dawn light.

  “You’ve been following me,” Emmanuelle said, her voice coming out raspy, her gaze fixed on the knife.

  “Huh,” grunted the man. He had a full, untrimmed, reddish-blond beard that covered most of his face and blended into the ragged hair hanging down beneath a beat-up old black slouch hat. The flesh above the beard was slack and grayish with the unhealthy tinge of an opium addict, his eyes wild, the pupils tiny pinpricks in glassy circles of gray. “It’s waitin’ a night and a day for you, I’ve been.”

  “Waiting for me?” Emmanuelle glanced beyond him. Like the lane she had just left, this street was deserted, a churned expanse of drying mud between tumble-down shacks and wretched tenements and weed-choked stoops bathed in a pale, harsh light. “I’ve a few dollars with me, and there’s morphine in the bag. You can take both, but please leave me the medical instruments.”

  “Oi, I’ll take your money, and the morphine, too. But it’s no’ why I’m here.”

  From the sagging roof of the boarded-up shop beside them came the call of a starling, pure and sweet in the thin morning air. “And why would that be?” Emmanuelle asked, her terrified gaze fixed on the knife held fast in the man’s fist.

  “It’s no’ anythin’ personal, you understand?” For an instant, his gaze darted toward the opening of the lane behind her, his nostrils flaring in alarm at the distant sound of a horse’s hooves striking softly in the mud.

  Emmanuelle’s grip tightened convulsively around the leather handles of her bag, the seams biting into her palm.

  “I never kilt a Frenchwoman afore,” said the Irishman, his gaze coming back to her face, his hand flashing up, lunging toward her breast, the knife cutting through the air, the blade winking wicked and lethal in the light of the rising sun.

  Emmanuelle screamed, a full-throated, calculated scream, as she brought her medical bag swinging up between them. The bag was heavy, its impact with the Irishman’s wrist hard enough to jar her arm and send the knife spinning out of his grip. He howled in surprise and pain, his head turning as his startled gaze followed the arc made by the knife.

  “Bâtard,” she shouted, bringing her umbrella down on his head. “Assassin.” She hit him again on the side of the head. “Aidez-moi. Help me. Someone, please,” she called, remembering belatedly to switch to English as she hit him again.

  From somewhere up ahead came the sound of a shutter being thrown back. The hoofbeats thundered into a canter that came nearer. A man shouted.

  The Irishman hunkered down, one crooked elbow coming up to protect his head from her umbrella as he reached for the knife that lay up against the store wall. Emmanuelle hit him in the face with her medical bag, sending him flying back to land on his rump with his hands splayed out behind him. “Son of a bitch,” he swore, staring up at her, a trickle of blood running from one nostril, his eyes widening as his gaze shifted to something behind her.

  She tried to hit him again, but he scrabbled backward out of her reach. “You’re barmy, lady,” he said over his shoulder as he rolled onto his knees and shoved himself, stumbling, up onto his feet. “No wonder they want you dead.”

  “Who?” she cried. “Who wants me dead?” But he was already running, the ta
ils of his old drab coat streaming out behind him, his big broken boots clumsy on the rotting boards of the gunwale that served as a sidewalk here.

  Emmanuelle stayed where she was, her bag and umbrella gripped tight, her heart pounding in her chest, her entire body quivering with fear and anger and reaction.

  She heard running footsteps behind her, but before she could turn, a man brushed past her, a man she realized with a jolt was a Union soldier. Then a warm, strong hand fell on her shoulder, drawing her around, and she found herself staring at a dark blue uniform with twin rows of eagle-faced brass buttons.

  “Emmanuelle,” said Zach Cooper. “Are you all right?” Beside them, a big bay horse moved restlessly, its reins dragging in the drying mud of the street, its navy saddle blanket emblazoned with bold gold letters that spelled U.S. CAVALRY.

  Zach gripped her other shoulder, almost shaking her. “Did he hurt you?”

  She felt suddenly as if she hadn’t breathed in a year, and sucked the river-scented air deep into her lungs with a gasp. “I’m all right.” She gazed up at him, at the fierce angles of cheekbone and jaw, and knew an uncharacteristic surge of weakness, an almost overwhelming urge to throw herself against that hated blue uniform and feel the wonder of his arms tightening around her. Except that she was a widow, and he was a Union officer who half-suspected her of murder, and they were on a public street, a street filling with the banging of doors being thrown open and the sound of men’s and women’s voices raised in excited inquiry. Holding herself rigidly erect, her teeth set against the uncontrollable shudders starting to rip through her, Emmanuelle took a step back. “What are you doing here?”

  He let his hands fall from her shoulders. “I’ve had troopers watching you around the clock.” He glanced beyond her, toward the end of the street where the Irishman and the soldier chasing him had both disappeared. “I was on my way to the camp out at Carrollton, and thought I’d swing by and see if you were still here. I rode up to the cottage just as you screamed.”