Iron Lace

by Lorena Dureau

  As they walked back to the town house Miguel kept a firm grip on Monique’s arm, as though half afraid she might try to slip away from him even then. By the time they had reached the town house, however, the annoyance he had felt earlier had subsided somewhat. After all, it was true what he had said to Padre Sebastian in the girl’s defense. She was really still so young and naive. She simply didn’t realize the consequences of some of her impulsive actions.

  How smooth and sensuous that little arm felt! Here was a skin that invited caresses. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help thinking that the rest of her body must be like that, too. If she had been any other woman but his ward, he would have permitted the desire he felt for her to continue to mount unchecked, anticipating with delight the moment when he could at last share it with her in a paroxysm of delight in each other’s arms; but quickly he quenched his thoughts with the cold water of reality. Why let a passion that could never be slaked go on building up within him?

  Deliberately he reminded himself how soft and small that same arm was… how fragile and vulnerable. Even as he released it he noted how a red ring still marked the spot where he had held her so tightly. Above all, he didn’t want to see her hurt— not by anyone, not even himself. He must try to be more patient with her, less emotional. He couldn’t bear it when those disturbing gray eyes of hers looked at him with such contempt. Sadly he recognized that with each passing day his little ward’s opinion of him mattered far more than he cared to admit even to himself.

  Chapter Eight

  Much to the chagrin of her unhappy charges, Mlle. Arthemise Baudier was a martial-looking matron who took her post very seriously. A tall, angular woman with bulging eyes, beak nose, and firmly set jaw, the middle-aged spinster had long since resigned herself to being a governess for life, so she practiced her profession with the utmost zeal.

  After a long talk behind closed doors with the head of the Chausson household, Mlle. Baudier had sallied forth with an uncompromising resolve to obey to the letter Vidal’s instructions concerning the education of his wards. Actually, she was so overzealous that even Vidal had to tone her down a bit on several occasions.

  There was the time he had asked Mlle. Baudier to send for the dressmaker to make the girls some new gowns and had suggested discreetly that she see to it that the necklines not be cut too low. The conscientious governess had immediately ordered chin-high yokes of white lawn added to all the girls’ dresses. The shrieks of protest had so filled the house that Vidal had rushed up the stairs two at a time to see what was happening.

  “She’s trying to suffocate us in mosquito netting!” wailed Monique indignantly. She stood in the center of the room, draped in white lawn and green-striped cotton, amid a sea of multicolored bolts of cloth, while Celeste stood beside her draped in flowered muslin, looking equally woebegone.

  Vidal was utterly bewildered to find himself suddenly confronted by a tangled maze of female flip-pantries instead of a sinister adversary waiting to meet his half-drawn sword. He listened awkwardly to the reason for the young girls’ noisy rebellion, flushing all the while beneath his smooth olive complexion as he tried to straighten out the problem as quickly as possible so he could be gone from that confusing world of muslins and lace that he had so unwittingly invaded.

  “But you said to cover them up more, senor,” the governess explained defensively, while the poor dressmaker, in peril of swallowing her mouthful of pins, continued to stare in dismay at Vidal’s tall, imposing figure standing there before her with his hand still on his sword hilt.

  From the expression on the girls’ tear-streaked faces, they gave the impression that their virtue had been about to be violated instead of protected.

  “I… I only meant a… an extra ruffle or two perhaps,” he faltered. “I don’t know how to explain… but I’m sure you can think of something appropriate that will meet with my cousins’ approval and yet not be too… too provocative…” He searched for the right phrases, while the women gaped at him in silence, offering little assistance. “Something stylish, you understand… yet decent…” His voice trailed off lamely. Quickly he backed himself out the door.

  A couple of days later Vidal made one of those impromptu visits of his to Mlle. Baudier’s classes. The governess was in the middle of teaching Celeste some new chords on the guitar as he entered. Celeste had taken readily to the string instruments and was progressing with surprising rapidity in the mastery of them. The young girl especially seemed to like the Spanish guitar that Vidal had bought for them.

  “Ah, Mlle. Baudier and my lovely little cousins,” he greeted them with a trifle less formality than he customarily addressed them. “And how goes the music lesson today?”

  He had just returned from his morning rounds about town and was especially striking in his rust-colored frock coat and black leather riding boots that rose up smartly to cover the knees of his sleek nankeen breeches.

  “Our little Celeste is doing splendidly with the guitar.” The governess beamed as she looked up from where she was putting the young girl’s slim fingers into the correct position on the strings for the next chord. “Monique, on the other hand, seems to prefer the mandolin,” she added with a smile, although it was evident that her pet was little Celeste, whom she found more docile and studious than her restless elder charge.

  Vidal cast a curious glance over to where his more troublesome ward sat with a mandolin lying listlessly in her lap. She looked cool and fresh in her soft flowered muslin with tiny rosebuds spilling generously over her long flowing skirts and an upstanding ruffle discreetly veiling the low sweep of her décolletage.

  “The thought occurred to me as I rode back home just now that my cousins here might like to learn some of the dance steps that are popular around Europe right now,” he offered.

  The girls immediately perked up at the mention of dancing.

  “If Mlle. Baudier will play a cotillion for us, I’ll show you the way it’s being done these days,” he suggested.

  Celeste quickly handed the guitar to her governess and rose eagerly to put herself at Vidal’s disposal as a partner. Just the thought of dancing with her handsome guardian brought an excited flush to her delicately chiseled features.

  “Better yet, the quadrille!” exclaimed Monique, setting aside her mandolin and also rising with a new surge of energy.

  “Of course, you know whichever you do, it should be with at least a set of four couples,” began Vidal, who had already taken Celeste’s outstretched hand into his. “Let’s see how you do the two-hand turn,” he invited the delighted young girl.

  Mlle. Baudier struck up an appropriate tune, and Celeste let him swing her around in a two-hand turn, her bright skirts of jonquil-flowered muslin swirling along to the rhythm.

  “Fine! Fine!” declared Vidal approvingly. “And now you, Monica, let’s see if you can do as well as your sister just did.”

  He caught the tiny dimpled hands that Monique hesitantly extended toward him. They felt softer, fleshier, than Celeste’s slimmer ones had been. There was a sensuousness about them that made him want to squeeze tighter…

  Not to be outdone by her younger sister, Monique whirled around with her guardian in a two-hand turn that sent her full skirts flying in a cloud of rosebuds. “Very good!” came Vidal’s cry of approval. “Now, if this were a quadrille, and you had to go into a ladies’ chain, which hand would you offer the lady opposite you to pass her?”

  Monique stood there for a second, finding it difficult to think while her hand still rested in his.

  “Why, the right one, of course,” she finally replied and extended her hand daintily in the direction of the imaginary girl across from her.

  “Correct. And then which hand would you give to the man opposite you?”

  “The left.”

  “Good,” approved Vidal. “And now another turn in place with your partner, right?” he caught both her hands and whirled her around once more.

  Monique’s breath was coming mo
re rapidly now, but she knew it was more from the fact that her guardian was holding her hands than because of the turns. In spite of herself, she couldn’t help admiring the sinewy grace of those long, athletic limbs as the smooth, clinging breeches encasing his thighs set off to advantage the fascinating ripple of the muscles beneath them.

  Celeste was applauding merrily. “Oh, please, Cousin Miguel, let me do the turns again!” she begged excitedly.

  Almost reluctantly Monique yielded her guardian to her sister, but she continued to watch him through veiled eyes while he caught the younger girl’s hand and repeated the steps with her. Afterward, he proceeded to show them other geometrical patterns for both the cotillion and the quadrille, which he told them were in vogue in Europe at that moment.

  Monique found herself looking forward to her turn with her agile guardian. That aroma of lavender and tobacco that she had come to associate with his nearness… the feel of his hands holding hers tightly as he whirled her around… it all left her giddy, as though she had been imbibing too much wine.

  When finally, after another half hour or so, Vidal brought his impromptu dancing lesson to a close, his tireless wards seemed to be bounding with more energy than when they had begun. Despite their protests, however, he insisted that he should withdraw and allow them to go on with their more serious studies of Spanish and French grammar which still had to be hurdled that day, urging them to put some of their revived energies into their forthcoming language lessons.

  As Monique watched her guardian walk across the room to the exit, admiring the disturbing rhythm of those fascinating thighs once more, she found herself thinking how different things had seemed between them when they had been dancing together. The memory of his presence lingered. There was something about that proximity that always disconcerted her. It was so difficult to tell what her guardian was really like. Every time she thought she knew, he’d say or do something so completely unexpected…

  That afternoon, for the first time, Monique paid a little more attention than usual to her Spanish lesson. Perhaps if she learned more about Miguel Vidal’s language, she could understand him a little better, too.

  Chapter Nine

  Monique and Celeste had been getting ready all day. Since early that morning, they had had the upstairs maid running in and out of their room keeping the coals hot in the brazier for the curling iron.

  Every time the door opened or closed, snatches of girlish giggles could be heard, and there was such an air of excitement in the household that Mlle. Baudier had finally agreed to suspend classes for that day so the girls could devote themselves entirely to their elaborate preparations for what was to be their first outing to a real theatrical performance.

  Grandmother Chausson sent up two large tortoiseshell combs for them to use with the full-sized black lace mantillas that Cousin Miguel had brought them from Spain. Despite Monique’s momentary resistance to wearing something so “unpatriotic” as a typically Spanish headdress to the performance, once she saw how elegant and ladylike the graceful black lace mantilla made her look, she offered no further objections.

  Vidal had dressed in his royal-blue silk frock coat and breeches, tastefully trimmed with a silver and blue brocade vest and his finest white cravat and cuffs. Then he had gone down to enjoy a glass of wine with Grandmother Chausson in the parlor while he waited for his cousins to finish getting ready.

  Five-thirty in the afternoon seemed like an unusually early hour to him for a theatrical performance, but Grandmother Chausson had explained that many of the theatergoers liked to finish out the night—sometimes until dawn—at the festivities offered on the ground floor of the theater itself or the nearby Condé Ballroom.

  Since the city’s first and only theater was only a few blocks away and it was still daylight, Vidal planned to walk there but to return in the carriage.

  Celeste was the first to emerge from her “cocoon”. She entered the parlor blushing with pleasure as Vidal and her grandmother duly greeted her with exclamations over how lovely she looked in her bouffant gown of pale pink muslin trimmed with a deep rose velvet sash streaming down the back from the bustle of her generous overskirt. With her honey-colored hair caught up high to support the curved comb and long black lace veil draped over it, the girl seemed to have turned into a woman overnight.

  When Vidal and Grandmother Chausson asked for Monique, however, Celeste suddenly lost her newly acquired aplomb. She explained uncomfortably that her sister had had a last-minute idea. “She should be down shortly,” the young girl assured them uneasily.

  At that moment Monique appeared at the head of the staircase. Grandmother Chausson let out a little cry of amazement, but Vidal was absolutely speechless, as they both stared at the voluptuous little figure in the long flowing white gown, relieved only by the black lace mantilla, slowly descending, wraithlike, toward them.

  “My God! But the child has gone daft!” exclaimed Aimee Chausson in dismay.

  Vidal, however, could only stare in dumbfounded fascination at the way the thin silk gown, free now of the usual side and back padding and layers of starched petticoats, cascaded gently over the sensuously rounded body beneath it, caressing every curve and indentation as it undulated to the girl’s rhythmic movements.

  “Don’t you like it?” She smiled, quite pleased by the attention her entrance had won from all of them. “It looks Grecian, doesn’t it? It’s so classic! They say this is the latest style in France these days.”

  “Merciful God in heaven! You might as well be naked!” gasped her grandmother. “You can see everything!”

  “Monica… if you don’t want to give your grandmother a heart attack, you’d better go right back upstairs and put on your tournure or cul or whatever you call it,” advised Vidal, finding his voice at last.

  “And your petticoats, too!” snapped Grandmother Chausson quickly.

  “But it’s so warm tonight,” Monique protested, obviously disappointed. Celeste was standing to one side grinning away with an “I-told-you-so” look dancing in her soft brown eyes.

  Just then Mlle. Baudier came dashing down the stairs, her usual implacable calm completely gone and her eyes popping out of her head more than ever.

  “I assure you, I have nothing to do with this!” she exclaimed as she spotted Monique standing in the parlor still indignantly trying to defend her dubious efforts to be the vanguard of high fashion in New Orleans. “Only ten minutes ago I checked the girls, and they were all ready to leave, dressed the way any decent woman going out on the street should be. I can’t imagine what came over the child…”

  “I tell you this is the latest fashion,” insisted Monique, her cheeks coloring with frustration and embarrassment. “It’s called the Greek Revival—the return to classicism. I read about it in one of the journals the dressmaker brought with her.”

  Vidal was smiling condescendingly at her now. “My dear cousin, I’m sure you mean well,” he conceded, “but I’m afraid New Orleans isn’t ready yet for such an extreme mode.” He was beginning to see more humor in the situation now than scandal. “I’m afraid such a style really is beginning to gain some popularity in Europe,” he assured the skeptical elderly ladies.

  “No respectable woman would ever go out on the streets without her padding or petticoats,” insisted Grandmother Chausson emphatically, while Mlle. Baudier nodded in agreement. “It simply wouldn’t be decent for a female to show off the natural shape of her body like that in public! What is this world coming to, anyway?”

  Monique was silent now, but it was evident she was still bristling beneath that drooping surface. It was only after the repeated urgings of her inappreciative audience and Vidal’s firm stand that she couldn’t go to the theater until she was dressed properly that the young girl finally acquiesced. Reluctantly she allowed Mlle. Baudier to lead her back upstairs.

  As for Vidal, he poured himself another glass of wine and sat back down in the parlor to wait for his imaginative little ward to repair her toilette, wh
ile he continued making occasional comments to help soothe poor Grandmother Chausson’s ruffled nerves.

  But between the sips of wine and those soothing phrases, Miguel was anything but calm himself. He knew it wasn’t the liqueur warming his blood and swelling the desire in him at that moment as he savored the memory of how the soft white silk of Monique’s loosely hanging gown had marked all the more the firm roundness of those high young breasts and the tantalizing outline of those softly curved thighs and buttocks in motion. Try as he would, he couldn’t stop wondering how it might feel to have those magnificent young breasts pulsating in his hands and those softly undulating hips stirring passionately beneath him. Qué barbaridad! It was becoming increasingly difficult to continue thinking of Monique Chausson as nothing more than a capricious child. Her actions might be immature at times, but his impetuous little ward had certainly looked every inch a woman as she had come down those stairs that night, and he could no longer deny that he wanted her with every fiber of his being.

  Chapter Ten

  Miguel Vidal slumped back in the box that the Baron de Carondelet had so graciously permitted him to use for the evening in the Salle de Comédie. He had resigned himself to a dull couple of hours. There was only one actor in the cast from the Cap-Français, and the leading lady, a rather attractive quadroon whom Monique recognized as a milliner around town, wasn’t too bad in her part, but the rest of the performers were rank amateurs.

  Fortunately, however, from the way his young wards’ eyes were glowing in their flushed faces, it was evident they were quite fascinated by everything they saw and were in no mood to criticize anything. After all, thought Vidal, it shouldn’t take much to please them. The year-old theater they were attending was not simply the only one in New Orleans, it was also the city’s first.

  It was hard for him to realize sometimes just how sheltered and unsophisticated the girls’ lives had been until now. Despite their lack of discipline in certain things, they had really lived so little. He had to keep reminding himself that only a few blocks away lay vast stretches of untamed wilderness and that little Monique and Celeste were seeing a theatrical performance for the first time in their lives that night.