Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that you can’t take anything for granted. Not when your life is at stake.”

  “You don’t understand.” She knelt naked before him, her hands coming up between them, pressed together as if in prayer. “Philippe might have flirted with death and danger—he might even have done things that most people would find shocking and decadent— but he would never deliberately take a life, not like this. I’ve seen him weep with grief over a patient’s death, and suffer another’s pain as if it were his own. Besides . . .” She paused, and the silence in the room filled with the drumming of the rain on the roof overhead and the rush of water as the gutters began to overflow. “Philippe would have no reason to kill me.”

  He gazed at her so long and hard, she felt a shiver of apprehension mingling with a resurgent echo of excitement. “Wouldn’t he, Emmanuelle? You’re the only one who really knows the answer to that question.”

  She thought he would ask her then about the other men she’d had in her life, the other men she’d taken between her legs during all those long, angry, frustrating years while Philippe amused himself elsewhere. That other one, Hamish Fletcher, would have asked. But Zach Cooper didn’t. He simply reached out to catch her by the shoulders and draw her hard up against his naked body and take her mouth in a kiss full of hunger and passion and a leashed kind of violence that brought her to a state of instant, shivering want.

  And afterward, she realized he had asked, in his own way. And she thought she had probably given him an answer, of sorts.

  He left her in the pale light of the dying night, slipped softly from her bed to assemble his clothes and begin quietly to dress. She lay unmoving in the darkness, not letting him know she was awake, not letting him know she watched him. She watched him pull on his dark blue trousers, his fine officer’s shirt, his coat with its double rows of brass buttons and major’s shoulder straps. She watched him, and wondered how they’d come to the easy familiarity of this moment, how he’d come to be here, in the darkened bedroom of a woman he’d once half-suspected of murder. How she’d come to be lying here, naked, watching this enemy buckle his sword belt, and feeling not hatred and revulsion, but a dangerous yearning of the heart.

  One hand steadying his scabbard at his side, he bent to kiss her cheek, his lips soft, his breath warm against her skin as he whispered, “I need to go. Don’t get up.”

  Her hand crept around his neck, holding him to her for one brief, heart-wrenching moment. She closed her eyes, her face buried in the warm curve of his shoulder. He smelled of the night and himself and the hot, intimate things they’d done together in her bed, and she felt a welling rush of great sadness, knew again that unwanted urge to hold him close, hold him in her life forever.

  “I’m scheduled to meet with General Butler today,” he said, his lips traveling over her jaw, her ear, “and I’m not sure when I’ll be free. Can I see you on Sunday?”

  She turned her head, her lips finding his, her mouth opening beneath his in a long, deep kiss that ended slowly, his lips coming back to hers, again and again, as if reluctant to draw away. She’d already made arrangements to go with Rose and Dominic to Congo Square on Sunday, but even if she hadn’t, her answer would have been the same.

  “I can’t do this again,” she whispered, her arm still wrapped around his neck, holding him close.

  He knelt on the floor beside her bed, both hands coming up to bracket her face as he stared at her. “We don’t need to do this again.”

  “But we will. You know we will.”

  He smiled, that lopsided bad-boy smile that clutched treacherously at her heart. “I won’t deny I want you.” He didn’t say it—he didn’t say he loved her, but it was there, in the dark warmth of his eyes, in the sensual curve of his smile, in the softness of his touch as he smoothed the tangled hair from her face. And then he did say it, with a calm certainty that took her breath. “I love you.”

  “No.” She pressed her fingers against his lips. “Don’t.”

  He nibbled at her fingers, pressed a kiss to her palm, light kisses, but his eyes had narrowed, his face hardened. “Don’t love you, or don’t say it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not love, what we did tonight.”

  “What do you think it was? Lust?” He speared his fingers through the hair at the side of her face, holding her head steady when she would have looked away and forcing her to meet his merciless, steady gaze. “It might be lust, what you feel when I do this—” His free hand swept down to close over her bare breast with a fierce suddenness that made her gasp. He leaned into her, his lips almost but not quite touching hers, his eyes flashing with a raw and ragged anger. “But don’t you presume to think you know what I feel.”

  He let her go and stood up with an abruptness that almost made her cry out. Then he turned on his heel and left her there, in the lonely darkness of her room. It was what she wanted, or what she’d thought she wanted. But it didn’t stop her from turning her face into her pillow once she heard the front door close behind him.

  She wanted to weep, weep like she hadn’t wept in years. But all that came was a shuddering sense of loss and a painful, tearing confusion.

  The next day, the sun came out scalding hot and golden in a clear blue sky, and the rain-soaked city steamed.

  By early afternoon, the heat in General Butler’s office was intense, the thick, unmoving air rank with the smell of men’s sweat and wet wool mingling with stale smoke and fresh spittle as some half a dozen fidgety men in heavy blue uniforms puffed on cigars or squirted tobacco juice at overflowing brass spittoons. “Now,” said the general, sifting through the pile of papers on his desk, “on the matter of this Mrs. Eugenia Phillips, arrested for laughing at our dead—”

  “Sir,” interrupted Zach. By now, they’d been going over confiscation orders and arrest orders for four hours, and Zach had been standing the entire time. He was feeling short-tempered and hungry and uncomfortable, with drops of perspiration rolling down his spine and his wet shirt sticking to his skin. “As I understand it, the woman was holding a children’s birthday party on her balcony at the time the incident took place. She wasn’t even aware that there was a funeral procession passing in the street below.”

  From his desk beside the open window, the general looked up, a faint flush suffusing his cheeks. “Are you aware, Major, that this woman was arrested in Washington and charged with espionage?”

  It was Hamish who answered. “Yes, sir. We looked into that. She was released.” The big New Yorker flicked a quick glance at Zach, then away. Hamish was sorely aggrieved about something today, and Zach knew better than to make the mistake of thinking it was just the heat.

  “Huh,” said the general. Beside him, the little colored boy Butler used to wave his fan dozed. Butler poked the child with the toe of one boot, and the boy straightened with a jerk and began to flap the palmetto fan vigorously back and forth. “The woman is obviously disloyal. When I offered her the opportunity to apologize for this disgraceful incident, she refused. She says since no offense was intended, no apology should be required.”

  “General,” said Zach quietly, “the woman has nine children.”

  “Whom she is no doubt training to spit on Union officers. They’ll be better off without her.” Dipping his pen into the inkwell, Butler signed the document before him with a quick, irritated scratch. “Her status is to be reduced to that of a common woman of the streets.”

  Zach felt a peculiar, hollow sensation, deep in his gut. “But sir, that means—”

  “I know what it means, Major. If these Rebel women wish to act like whores, I am more than ready to oblige by arranging to have them treated as such. She is to be sent to Ship Island until further notice.” He looked up, his mismatched eyes somehow managing to focus on Zach for one, angry moment. “Is that clear, Major?”

  “Yes, sir.” Privately, Zach thought the severity of the woman’s sentence had less to do with the imagined insult to t
he dead lieutenant than with the fact that she was Jewish, and that her husband was well-known around Washington as a better lawyer than the general. But this time Zach kept his opinion to himself.

  “What are you, the new, self-appointed defender of Southern womanhood, or what?” demanded Hamish when they left headquarters some half hour later. “First you interrupt the Big Man, then you argue with him. If you’re not careful, you’re going to find yourself sent back to your old regiment, all right. As a private. Major.”

  It was never a good sign when Hamish called him by his rank. Zach sighed. “Got something you want to say to me, Captain?”

  Hamish’s mustaches twitched violently back and forth. “Say to you? What would I have to say to you, Major? After all, you’re the one who had me order a watch on a certain lady who lives in Dumaine Street. It’s not like you didn’t know the lad was out there. And who am I to question the wisdom or ethics or anything else of what you do. Major.”

  Zach let out his breath in a long sigh. “How are you coming with those poison books?”

  Hamish sniffed. “I didn’t see any names that rang a bell, but there were some doctors on the list. I set a couple of soldiers to looking into them, to see what their connections to the Hospital de Santerre might be. But I’m not expecting much.”

  “I’ve been thinking about riding out toward Bayou Sauvage,” said Zach. “Have another chat with Papa John.” He didn’t look at Hamish when he said it. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do if the big New Yorker took it into his head to come along.

  The worry was unneeded. Hamish had had enough of bayous and gators and the old Haitian’s uncanny prescience. “You do that,” he said, jerking the kelpi hat he always wore down lower on his forehead. “Maybe that old voodoo king can give you something that’ll help you keep that prick of yours in your trousers, where it belongs.”

  “Jesus,” said Zach, the muscles in his jaw tightening as he worked hard to bite down on his anger. “I’m not going out there to discuss my prick.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you ought to think about it. That lady is bad news, and don’t you be forgetting it. Major.”

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Zach reined in his big bay in the shadow of an old cypress tree that grew with its roots reaching up like gnarled knees from out of the heavy black waters at the edge of the bayou. The waning of the day had brought no relief from either the heat or the humidity. It was like trying to breathe through a wet towel, just being out in the moist, hot air. Sometimes he felt as if the air here were smothering him, that he was drawing more water than oxygen into his lungs. A man could drown just trying to breathe out here.

  Around him, the swamp was alive with sound, the whirl of insects and the croak of frogs so big, the Creoles used hounds to hunt the old wararrons and ate their legs with no more thought than a New Englander might give to feasting on a turkey. Zach thought for a moment he could hear a dog howling, way off in the woods, but it might have been some bird. He swung out of the saddle, his leg stiff from the ride and the long day and the lack of sleep the night before. It took all his concentration to minimize his limp as he crossed the clearing to the mushroom-shaped hut with the thatched roof and ladderlike steps and tall black man in a frilled white dress shirt who smiled as Zach drew closer and said, “I was wonderin’ when you’d be back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “You know why I’ve come?” said Zach, his head falling back as he stared up at the tattooed face of the man who stood in the hut’s open doorway.

  “Mmm. I know. But do you?”

  Until now, Zach would have said he was here to talk about poisons. Instead, he found himself saying, “Tell me about Philippe de Beauvais.”

  “Every man is a complicated set of virtues and weaknesses, inconsistencies and contradictions,” said Papa John. “What do you want me to tell you about Philippe?”

  “Was he capable of killing?”

  The old man came down the steps, his movements still as graceful and effortless as a hunter on the prowl. “Why? Because he was fascinated by pain and death? Or because he kept shrunken heads, and liked to tie up his lovers with silken cords and titillate them with little leather whips?” At the base of the steps, he stopped, his head cocking to one side as he studied Zach with an intensity Zach found disconcerting. “What if I told you Philippe de Beauvais freed every slave on the small plantation given him by his grandfather, and would have tried to do the same at Beau Lac if he’d lived to inherit it? What would you say then?”

  “I’d say the war will free all the slaves.”

  Papa John waved one weathered hand through the air in a gesture vaguely reminiscent of a conjurer. “So everyone keeps saying. But the war’s been going on for a long time now, and the woman who washed that shirt you’re wearing is still a slave, isn’t she? Only difference is, now she’s slaving for the Yankees.”

  Taking off his hat, Zach swiped one forearm across his hot forehead. It bothered him that Butler had taken over the slaves of the houses he’d seized with the same predatory attitude he’d shown toward items of fine furniture—or silverware. But Zach was still wearing the shirt. “From what I understand,” he said, carefully readjusting his plumed officer’s hat, “de Beauvais was shot in the head. If he did survive, the wound could have deranged him.”

  Papa John opened his eyes in a meaningless stare. “I have heard of men so altered by head wounds that they could kill. Kill even their best friends and their loving wives.”

  “I didn’t know de Beauvais had a loving wife,” Zach said dryly. He was beginning to realize that whatever he was looking for, it didn’t seem very probable that he was going to find it here. Like an enigma out of a child’s fairy tale, Papa John just kept answering a question with a question.

  “Tell me this, Major,” said the black man, walking over to a sunny patch of ground where a scattering of herbs grew in a wild confusion of parsley and rue, oregano and fleabane. “Have you found the woman who betrayed him to your Yankee patrol?”

  Zach stayed where he was, at the base of the steep steps leading up to the hut. Papa John hadn’t invited him in today, and Zach found himself wondering why. “You know we haven’t.”

  Stooping, the old man began to gather handfuls of some pale, sharply serrated leaves that released a pungent, vaguely unpleasant odor into the air. “You think with blinders on,” he said, his attention all for the plants at his feet. “Blinders formed by your own preconceived notions and prejudices.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Straightening slowly, Papa John looked over at Zach, and laughed. “I think maybe you need to figure that out for yourself.”

  Zach drew in a slow, even breath. “Who in this city might be capable of extracting strychnine from plants? Antoine La Touche? Or how about Charles Yardley?”

  The handfuls of leaves dangling at his side, Papa John walked back to where Zach still stood at the base of the steps. “I see you didn’t bring your friend Captain Fletcher with you this time. Is it because you didn’t want him to hear what I might have to say?”

  Zach met the man’s gaze, and smiled his meanest smile. “You aren’t exactly saying much.” He started to turn away, then stopped. A breeze had come up, blowing hot and heavy with moisture from off the bayou. “You know,” he said, glancing back at the man who still stood at the base of the ladderlike steps, “from what I hear, most people would have considered Henri Santerre your friend. Yet instead of helping me find whoever was responsible for his death, you act as if I were your enemy.”

  A hard, brittle light shone in the old man’s eyes. “There are black men fighting and dying on both sides of this war, Major. Both sides. Why you assume I’m on your side? Because now your president is talking about freeing all black men? And then what, hmmm? What will become of them, all those ex-slaves, with no jobs, and no one to look after them when they’re old and sick?”

  “At least they’ll be free.”

  “Will they? I
don’t think so. Someday, maybe. But not for a long, long time. And the longer this war lasts, the more that’s destroyed, the more people are hurt, the more hatred that’s stirred up, the worse things are going to be.”

  “Sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better.”

  From the open door above them came the barest whisper of a sound, like an involuntary movement quickly stilled. It might have been the white cat, except that Zach could see the cat stalking a lizard or some such thing over near the edge of the clearing.

  Papa John didn’t even bother to look up. “Tell me, Major,” he said, fixing Zach with a hard, challenging stare, “how you think those Yankee shippers up North got to be so rich, hmmm? Running the triangular trade between New England and Africa and the Caribbean, trading in sugar and rum and slaves, that’s how. Why, up until a few years ago, they still had slaves in New York, and in Connecticut, too. Yet you think that because the people down here in Louisiana own slaves now, and you Yankees no longer do, that you’re somehow better than them? More moral, more righteous?” He leaned in closer, close enough that Zach could see the yellow of his eyes and each faded blue tattoo line on his face. “This war might seem like an easy answer to your guilt, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m on your side.”

  “I get your point,” Zach said, and swung away. He was gathering his horse’s reins when the old man’s deep, melodic voice stopped him.

  “Hey, Major.”

  Zach looked over to see Papa John standing once more in the open doorway of his house.

  “Watch your back,” he said. “You hear?”

  “Why?” Zach asked, his eyes narrowing as he squinted into the lowering sun. “Why warn me?”

  The old man’s lined, tattooed face broke into an unexpectedly broad smile. “Emmanuelle’s a friend of mine.”

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re here?” demanded Hamish. Doing a quick sidestep, he managed to avoid being trampled by a handful of Negro boys practicing raquettes, only to almost crash headlong into a rickety wooden stall selling gumbo filé, instead.