In the pale light of early morning, the big house on Esplanade Avenue was a thing of fancy, white Doric pillars soaring toward the sky, high front steps reaching out with elaborately cast-iron railings flaring wide as if in welcome. But Emmanuelle didn’t climb them. Skirting the side of the house, she made her way down the narrow brick alley edged with rosemary to a small side garden hidden away near the stables.
Jean-Lambert was there, where she knew he would be at this time of day. By nine o’clock, the sun would have risen golden bright and savage in the sky, and it would have become too hot for an old man to tend his garden. It was a labor of love, this garden, with its neat hedging of dark green dwarf box backed by silver catmint blooming purple and exuberant, its swags of climbing roses festooned above a riot of lilies and zinnias and carefully tended parterres of herbs. He rose early every morning, just for the sheer joy of being in it.
Her step on the path brought his head around for, crippled as he was, there was nothing wrong with either his sight or his hearing. He straightened slowly, a pair of secateurs in one hand, a basket filled with baby pink roses hanging by its handle over the arm that also gripped his cane.
“Papère,” she said, standing on tiptoe to brush a kiss against his cheek, for he was tall, almost as tall as Philippe had been. “I need to talk to you.”
His vivid blue eyes narrowed as he searched her face. “What is it, child?”
“I want you to take Dominic to Beau Lac.”
“And you come all the way out here so early, for this?” He swung back to snip off a lily and lay it carefully in his basket. “Two months now, I’ve been wanting to take Dominic to Beau Lac. You said it was too dangerous.”
“I still think it’s dangerous.”
He selected another lily, then cast her a sideways glance. “So what changed your mind?”
Emmanuelle let out her breath in a long, trembling sigh. “I’m afraid someone might try to kill him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Dominic?” Jean-Lambert’s voice was sharp, his eyes haunted with a fear she’d never seen in him before. Most people thought of him as an astute businessman, a successful planter, but the truth was, Jean-Lambert’s world began and ended in the small person of his grandson. “Who? Who would want to hurt Dominic? And why?”
“I don’t know.” For a moment, Emmanuelle wondered if she’d made a mistake, mentioning her fears, for Jean-Lambert was old, and not well. Yet if she were to trust him to keep Dominic safe, Jean-Lambert needed to be told. “I don’t even know for certain that he is in danger.” She ran her hand along the feathery tops of the catmint at her side, the soft leaves tickling her palm. “I don’t understand why any of this is happening.”
“Hmmm.” He shifted awkwardly, his weight on his cane, and stooped to cut a spray of Queen Anne’s lace. “You didn’t tell me someone tried to kill you the other day,” he said, his attention all for the flowers beneath his hand. “In the Irish Channel.”
Her hand tightened over the catmint, then released it. “How did you know about that?”
He glanced at her over his shoulder, and she saw a faint sparkle of amusement mingling with the concern in those intense blue eyes. “This is still a very small town, at heart.”
She wondered what else he’d heard, if he’d heard about the incident near Congo Square, or the many hours a certain Yankee major had spent in the darkened house on the rue Dumaine. She’d often wondered, in the past, how much Jean-Lambert knew about the things his son, Philippe, did. The things she did.
He snipped another zinnia. “What makes you think Dominic is threatened?”
“It’s just . . .” She ran one hand up and down her other arm, feeling oddly chilled, although the sun was already up bright and hot. It was as if she could feel a cordon of darkness and danger, wrapping around her, tighter and tighter, threatening everyone she loved. “Too many people around me are dying.”
“That Union major—the provost marshal—he doesn’t have any ideas as to what’s behind it all?”
“No.”
“Does he think Dominic might be threatened?”
“I don’t know—he hasn’t said. But I need to know my son is safe.”
Jean-Lambert rested his secateurs in the basket on his arm and turned slowly to face her. “And what about you, my child? Will you come to Beau Lac with us?”
“You know I can’t. My work is here.”
“You can’t help people if you’re dead.”
Emmanuelle returned his gaze steadily. “As long as I can keep the Hospital de Santerre open, I will. I must. Besides, they’ve detailed a soldier to watch me. I’ll be all right.”
“Hmmm.” He lifted his head, his eyes narrowing as he stared toward the lower gallery where their black woman, Celeste, was setting a table for breakfast. “I still think it would be better if you came with us.”
“I promise I’ll be careful.”
He cast her a speculative sideways glance. “I can’t change your mind?”
Emmanuelle smiled. “You know you can’t.”
Jean-Lambert let out a low laugh. “Oh, I know it. Come,” he said, motioning her closer. “I see my breakfast is ready. You can help me up the stairs.” He paused to glance around in some confusion. “I just need to find my secateurs.”
“They’re in your basket, Papère.”
“Ah.” He glanced down, a faint flush touching his weathered cheeks. “So they are. It’s hell to get old.”
Emmanuelle looped her arm through his and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “The alternative isn’t so attractive, either.”
He let out a short, startled bark of laughter. “It isn’t, is it?” He took an unsteady step, his weight leaning heavily against her. “Come, my child. Come have some café au lait, and tell me all about this Irishman you bested with a medical bag and an umbrella.”
That afternoon, Emmanuelle was in the storeroom, checking the hospital’s dwindling supplies, when Charles Yardley threw open the door with enough force to send it banging against the wall.
“What the bloody hell have you done with my patient?” he demanded, standing on the threshold, a dark, disheveled figure silhouetted against the harsh midday sun.
Emmanuelle spun about so fast, she almost dropped the tray of lint she’d been holding. “Oh. You startled me.”
“The woman with the ulcerated leg,” he said, taking two steps into the room. “What have you done with her?”
Now that she was no longer staring into the bright light, Emmanuelle could see him better, and what she saw took her breath. Charles Yardley had always cultivated a rakish air of nonchalance in his appearance, but the effect had been deliberate, controlled. Never had she seen him looking like this, his shirt collar stained yellow with sweat, his coat rumpled, his normally slicked-back blond hair sticking out at odd angles around a pale, haggard face. “Mon Dieu, Charles. You look terrible. When was the last time you slept?”
He passed a distracted hand across his eyes. “A couple of days ago, I think. I don’t know.” He fixed her with a hard, belligerent stare. “But the woman with the—”
“You discharged her,” Emmanuelle said gently, setting aside the tray. “Saturday night. You came in late and you looked at her. She told you she wanted to go home, and you said she could. Don’t you remember?”
He leaned back against the nearest wall, his eyes squeezing shut. “Oh, God,” he said on a harsh expulsion of breath, both hands coming up to cover his face. “How could I forget?”
She touched her fingers to his coat sleeve, a brief contact gone almost before it happened. “Charles? What is it?”
He dragged his hands down his face until they covered only his nose and mouth, and stared at her with wild, bloodshot eyes. “Have I ever struck you as fanciful? Overimaginative? Delusional?”
“Hardly. You’re probably the most prosaic, cynical person I’ve ever met.” She gave him a wry smile. “Why? What is it?”
“It’s just that lately . . .”
He pushed away from the wall, his hands dropping, and gave his shoulders a shake, as if to wake himself. “No. Never mind.”
“Tell me. Something’s obviously bothering you.”
He fixed her with an intense, challenging stare. “I keep thinking someone’s watching me. There. Now you can laugh.”
Emmanuelle felt a cold whisper of fear touch her heart. “Have you actually seen someone?”
“No. If I had, I wouldn’t feel like such a bloody idiot, now would I?” He took a quick turn around the room. “It’s just this . . . feeling I keep getting. It . . . it raises the hair on the back of my neck.” He let out a sharp laugh. “I always thought that was a ridiculous expression, but it does happen, you know.” He shot her a quick, defensive look.
“I know.”
“Lately, I find myself looking over my shoulder every time I walk down the bloody street. And when I’m home alone, I spend all night getting up to check that the door is locked, and peering out the windows. It’s like I know someone is out there. I can’t see him, but he’s there.” He went to stare out the open door, his face tense, strained. “I’ve even taken to leaving a light burning all night, like some bloody woman.”
“Have you done anything about it?”
He swung his head to look at her over his shoulder. “Aside from not closing my eyes, and spending very little time at home alone, what can I do?”
“You could talk to the provost marshal.”
“Ha.” The laugh was hollow, derisive. “And have him think I’ve gone bloody bonkers? Not bloody likely.”
“Listen, Charles.” She took a step toward him, then stopped, her hands twisting together before her. “Henri and Claire are already dead, and someone tried to kill me the other day, in the Irish Channel. If you really are being watched, you can’t just try to pretend it isn’t happening.”
In the unforgiving glare of the sun, his face looked white, drawn. “What are you saying?” he whispered. “That someone is targeting us? Trying to kill us all? Who?”
“I don’t know.”
His hands fell on her shoulders, almost shaking her. “You must have some idea.”
She held herself very still. “Zachary Cooper thinks it might be Philippe.”
He dropped his hands and took a step back, almost staggering, a strange twist of terror contorting his features. “Philippe? But . . . Philippe is dead.”
“Charles, please.” She started to reach out to him, then stopped. Too much lay between them, too many bad memories, too many hard feelings, for her to touch him, comfort him, now. “Go see Cooper. Talk to him.”
He raked his hands through his hair, combing it back from his face, a strange kind of shudder quivering through him. “All right,” he said, his head falling back as he met her gaze. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it this afternoon.” A wan ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Now, would you tell me what patients I do still have?”
She did reach out to him, then, her hand closing over his in a quick squeeze. “Go see Cooper. And then go home and get some sleep.”
“I’ve made a list,” said General Benjamin Butler, tossing a sheet of paper across the desk at Zach. “I want one of your men stationed in each of these churches next Sunday. If these preachers”—the general stabbed an angry finger down on his list, causing the paper to skitter across the polished mahogany—“fail to follow my orders and include the President of the United States in their weekly blessings, then I want the churches closed and the clergymen arrested.”
“They’re claiming freedom of conscience, sir,” said Zach, picking up the list. “Instead of the required prayer, the congregations are being given a few minutes of silence to pray for whomever and whatever they wish.”
“Including the triumph of the Confederacy,” snapped Butler.
“Well, they’re not allowed to do it out loud.”
“Huh. Once they’re arrested,” continued Butler, puffing on his cigar as he shuffled through his pile of papers again, “I want them sent to the military prison in New York. That ought to keep them out of trouble for the rest of the war.”
And teach them not to try to defy the Beast of New Orleans, thought Zach, scanning the names in his hand, although he didn’t say it. “I don’t see Father Mullen on this list,” he did say, looking up in surprise. The seventy-year-old priest of St. Patrick’s had probably defied Butler with more fire and gumption than anyone in the city.
Butler glanced up, his back teeth chomped down on his cigar, holding it in place as he smiled around it. “I like the Irish. Now . . .” He lifted another long list of names, the smile gone. “The editors of these newspapers . . .”
It was close onto five o’clock by the time Zach left the general’s office. He was walking down the broad stone steps of headquarters when a soldier came running up behind him. “Major Cooper, sir.”
Zach swung around.
“There was a man here to see you while you were with the general, sir. He said it was important, but you know how the general doesn’t like to be interrupted. . . .” The soldier fidgeted and looked sideways.
Zach hid a smile. “What’d this man want?”
“I don’t know, sir. He wouldn’t say. He was a queer-looking fellow. An Englishman, from the sound of him. He said he was a doctor, but he didn’t look—”
“Dr. Charles Yardley?” Zach said sharply.
“Yes, sir. That’s what he said his name was, sir.”
“What time was this?”
“About two or three hours ago. He said to tell you he was going home. Mumbled something about taking a nap.”
That morning, the sky had been a brilliant, fairy-land blue, but by the time Zach left headquarters, the afternoon storm was already starting to roll in, massive black thunderheads pushed by a hot wind that scuttled dry magnolia leaves across brick paving and rattled the fronds of the banana trees.
Dr. Charles Yardley rented a small Creole cottage in the Fauberg Tremé, a square house that fronted directly onto the banquette and was raised only two steps above it. They were much of a type, these Creole cottages one saw scattered throughout the old city, a commonsense, straightforward kind of building with stucco walls and high end gables and four square, symmetrical rooms arranged so that one led into the other without any need for a hall. The front entrance was a French door with glass above and solid panels below, flanked by vertical board shutters. There were strap-hinged shutters on all the front windows, and except for the ones on the entry door, they were all closed, although this was the time of day when most homeowners threw them open in search of a cooling river breeze.
Knocking on the front door, Zach was surprised to find the panel swinging inward three or four inches beneath his touch. “Dr. Yardley?” he called, the hinges creaking as he pushed the door open another foot or two into shadowy darkness.
The silence in the house was complete. From the street outside came the high-pitched chant of a child, Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock, ho, and the clip-clop of a tired horse pulling a rattling wagon down the rutted lane. Someone, somewhere, was playing a fiddle. But inside the cottage, there was no movement, no life, only the fluttering of a piece of paper as the breeze from the open door caught its edge and sent it spinning to the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The front door opened directly into a small square room with high glass-fronted bookcases covering most of the walls and a round Regency table littered with more books and scattered piles of papers. Stooping to pick up the fallen sheet, Zach found himself staring at a half-written letter bearing today’s date and beginning, Dear Mother and Agnes . . . Zach tucked the letter beneath the bottle of brandy that stood with an empty glass near a chair pulled back and left partly askew. It struck Zach as both unexpected and strangely touching, the image it provoked, of Charles Yardley sitting here in the gathering dusk, dutifully penning a letter to the family he’d left behind in England.
“Dr. Yardley?” Zach called again. Beyond the light thrown by the op
en door, the house lay in near darkness, the closed shutters excluding all but thin slats of daylight. In the doorway leading into the adjoining front room, Zach paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom and found himself looking at a parlor. Unlike most of the parlors in New Orleans, this one wore no “summer dress.” The heavy velvet drapes still hung at the windows, no cool cotton covers hid the dark satin of the room’s sofa and chairs, no gossamer balloons of tulle swathed the gilt gasoliers overhead.
At first, Zach thought he was asleep, the man who lay stretched out on the burgundy and navy striped sofa that stood at a right angle to the empty hearth. He lay quite still, one hand flopped over the edge of the sofa to curl against a plush velvet pillow that had slipped onto the Turkey carpet, his head tipped back at an odd angle against another pillow, this one of embroidered silk.
The heat in the house was oppressive. Zach could feel his wet shirt sticking to his back, a trickle of sweat beginning to bead and roll down one cheek. He walked over to one of the front windows and opened it to throw back the shutters, letting a gust of wind and the scent of coming rain into the room. He stood there for a moment, one hand gripping the open window, his breath coming hard and fast with an old fear. Then he turned back into the room to go crouch beside Dr. Charles Yardley, and try to decide what had killed him.
“Damned if I know,” said Hamish, squatting down beside the dead Englishman an hour or so later. By then, the rain had come and gone, a quick cloudburst that did nothing to ease the heat and only left the city steaming. “Could be poison, although it does’t exactly look like he suffered, does it?” The big New Yorker leaned forward to sniff experimentally “He’s been drinking.”
“French brandy,” said Zach, one shoulder propped against the wall beside the empty fireplace, his thumbs hooked on the leather of his sword belt. It was almost dark by now. The drapes at the windows had been closed against the prying gaze of the curious, leaving the room lit only by the intersecting circles of light thrown by a couple of oil lamps. “It’s on the table in the other room,” he said by way of explanation when Hamish glanced up.
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