For an endless moment, their gazes locked. Finally, Anjele drew a breath and murmured, "I think you'd better go now. Thank you for bringing my clothes."
He nodded and moved from the caressing web of the willow tree. He took a few steps, then turned to sweep her with a thoughtful gaze, his dark eyes twinkling with secret mirth. "You don't have to cross the bayou off your list of places you'd like to visit, Miss Sinclair. Next time you want to go there, let me know."
He walked up the grassy bank to disappear over the top.
Anjele felt a strange warmth flowing through her veins that was disturbing.
He had not touched her, yet she felt somehow caressed.
It was a feeling she'd never before experienced... but one she would long remember.
Chapter 4
The pealing of the big iron bell, signaling another day's end at BelleClaire, broke the stillness of the sultry July evening. Slaves and hired hands sighed with relief and began to shuffle from the fields, shoulders stooped in weariness.
Among them was Brett Cody, known only as Gator. As was his way, he walked alone, not joining the grumbling ranks of fellow Cajuns heading for the intricate paths leading into Bayou Perot. He preferred being alone. Companionship led to intimacies he didn't want, questions he wouldn't answer.
Heavy in his thoughts was regret for having left the sea. No matter that New Orleans was a lifetime away from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and his growing-up years in the mysterious Black Bayou. The wild sweetness of the tangled green foliage, combined with the lush fields of cane and cotton and rice, evoked bitter memories he'd thought long buried.
Worse, he mused with furrowed brow, was how his first glimpse of Anjele Sinclair had made him think, for one frozen moment, he was actually looking at Margette. He'd quickly dismissed that painful illusion.
The flame-haired beauty he'd spied among the scrub palmettos bore no resemblance to the petite blond whose memory evoked bitterness, anger. Besides, dainty little Margette would never think of venturing into the wilderness. Hers was a pampered world of luxury wrapped in lace and satin and honeysuckle and magnolias. The only thing about Anjele that reminded him of Margette was the image of yet another wealthy plantation owner's spoiled, bored daughter seeking forbidden excitement.
"Hey, you, Gator."
He glanced around, annoyance mirrored on his sunburned face, but didn't pause, doggedly continuing on his way.
Simona was running between the cane rows to catch up.
"Hey, we got to talk." Panting, she swung into step beside him. "I'm worried about my friend. She not come back to see me."
"Good."
"Hey..." Simona dared poke his shoulder, immediately wishing she hadn't as he stopped walking to glare down at her with dark, scathing eyes. Mustering courage to go on, she gave a helpless shrug and pointed out, "You being rude, Gator, not talking to me. All I do is ask about my friend and how come I have not seen her. It been weeks since she was here."
He bit off the reminder, "She doesn't belong here."
"That's not for you to say." Simona was starting to get mad despite the way he was looking at her. "She been my friend all my life, and who is you to come here and tell us what we can and cannot do? Jus' because your poppa is overseer in the cotton fields don' give you no right to tell me and my friends how to do."
He started walking again.
Simona was indignant at the brusque dismissal and yelled after him, "Hey! How come you not go back where you come from? And yo' poppa, too. I hear from my people in the fields he is one mean man, and he beats the slaves and would beat them, too, if he could, but he knows they stick a knife in his ribs if he do. And you just like him, ain't you?"
He shut out the sound of her shouts and quickened his pace, disappearing into the brush. Furious, he plodded onward, not glancing about as he usually did, ever alert for alligators or water moccasins.
But any creature about would, no doubt, have thought twice before venturing to disturb Brett Cody that evening, for his was the face of a man with fury stirred to near menace. He trembled with rage to be likened to his father, because he knew Leo Cody for the cruel, insensitive man he was. Now he was fueled more than ever to return to the sea but sadly knew it wasn't possible till grinding season ended in January, months away. Elton Sinclair had taken one look at his brawn and promptly pulled him to one side and promised top wages, even a bonus, in return for assurance he'd stay the season. Brett agreed, but only because he felt honor bound to pay off the debts from his mother's sickness and burial. He knew his father damn sure wouldn't bother. Leo spent everything he made on gambling, whiskey, and women. Always had and always would.
He reached his isolated pirogue, a dugout he called home. Uncorking a jug of wine, he took a deep swallow, attempting to wash away the bile. But the memories had been ignited, and there was nothing to do but let them play on his mind.
Raggedly, he allowed himself to drift back to the time when he'd left Black Bayou, after Margette Laubache, an older woman of nearly eighteen, had made him the laughingstock of Mississippi. He'd been a fool to ever let himself get involved with her in the first place, but Lord, what a beauty. There wasn't a man alive who wasn't stirred by the sight of her. Yet he'd admired from afar, well aware he was only a poor Cajun field hand, and she was born into a life of privilege. It was only when word spread of his famed battle with the largest alligator ever seen in Mississippi that Margette took notice of him. She sent by a slave that she wanted to meet the young man who'd bested such a savage creature.
Brett had laughed when he heard that. Everyone was making him out to be some kind of gladiator who'd challenged a wild beast in a fight to the death. The actuality was that the damn thing had crept up on him, and he hadn't had time to think about courage or bravery. He was scared to death and fighting to stay alive in the black, cold water. Never would he forget his burning lungs, screaming for air, as he fought to hold off the snapping jaws of death as the gator rolled him over and over, trying to drown him.
He did not, however, share such private thoughts with Margette when he defied all the rules and met her that night in the wisteria-draped gazebo near the river. He hadn't been able to think of anything except how beautiful she was. He remembered what she was wearing—a white lace gown that dipped low to accentuate large and luscious breasts. She smelled of lilacs, and her flaxen hair hung loose about her heart-shaped face.
That night was the beginning. She summoned him again and again, and before long, she was unbuttoning his shirt to dance her fingers across his chest and marvel over his muscular build—all the while teasing his mouth with her lips. He tried, even then, to tell her he shouldn't be there, that they were courting trouble, but she swore her love and demanded avowal of his, and, bewitched, he didn't hesitate to oblige.
Then came the moonless night when there was no turning back. She asked him to come at midnight, when the world around them was sleeping. She wore only a thin nightgown and robe, which she boldly cast aside before lying on the gazebo floor and pulling him down beside her.
Till then, that summer of his sixteenth year, Brett's few sexual encounters had been with cheap prostitutes in Vicksburg, when he ventured into town on Saturday nights with his friends. The episodes were hurried and devoid of emotion. Margette Laubache was a different story. Wild and wanton, she showed him ways of making love he'd never dreamed about, leaving him spent, exhausted—and charged with a feeling he mistook for immortal love.
As weeks turned into months, they met almost every night. Brett was worn out. Toiling all day in the sun, he had only a few hours to nap in the evening before sneaking into the gazebo to remain till nearly dawn.
When grinding season began, he was forced to work eighteen hours a day. Fires under the boilers making sugar never went out, and laborers were assigned shifts, with three quarters of them constantly at their stations. No man got more than six hours of rest out of twenty-four, and Margette demanded those hours be spent with her.
He was exh
austed, and it showed. His mother thought he was out carousing with his friends and told him it had to stop. After that, he waited till she and his father were asleep before crawling out a window.
She flew into a rage the night she caught him, screaming, "So! It is true, what I have heard. You are sneaking out to meet that girl.
"Look at you," she wailed, tears shining in the glow of the candle she held in her quivering hand. "Thin like a snake, shadows in your eyes. And I have heard the rumors. I know it is all because of the Laubache slut."
"She's not a slut," he defended.
"Eh?" Her brows snapped together. "What you say? She is no slut? Well, what kind of lady sneaks out of her house in the night to meet a man? Slaves gossip, my son, and it is only a matter of time till Laubache hears, as I did. Then there be big trouble, for sure."
Brett decided he might as well tell her. "He's going to hear, anyway, as soon as grinding season is over. That's when she plans to tell him we're going to get married."
At that, she gasped and cried, "You are a bigger fool than I thought if you believe her. Her kind marries her own kind, not a poor boy like you from the gutters of the world."
She began swaying, funny moaning sounds coming from deep in her throat. Afraid she was about to faint, Brett reached out to take the candle as he tried to reassure her, "It will work out. You'll see. She does tell the truth—"
She slapped him, and he cried out, not from pain, but astonishment. It was the first time in his life she had ever struck him.
"Laubache would see you dead first. Never would he allow his daughter to marry a Cajun!"
"She says it doesn't matter," he dared argue, "She swears nothing is going to stop us."
Mavaline Cody threw up her hands and offered a whispered prayer to God to make her son see that he had surely lost his mind. "Where would you take your bride, my son? Here? In the bayou? You think a girl like her would be happy as a Cajun wife?
"Oh, my son, my son." She cried even harder. "Did I raise you to be so blind and stupid?" She sank to the cot beneath the window, lowered her face to her hands, and began to cry.
He had left her then, knowing he had but a few precious hours to spend with Margette—and also aware nothing he said would make any difference, anyway.
Margette had been angry that he was late. He'd tried to tell her about the ugly scene, wanting assurance his mother was wrong, but Margette didn't want to waste time talking. She stripped him of his clothes and cast aside her own, wild with passion.
As the first fingers of dawn clawed at the eastern horizon, they clung together, bodies slick with perspiration. "I've got to have you all the time," she gasped, her tongue circling his ear as she danced her fingers up and down his belly. "I want you in a house, in a real bed, and where I can have you any time I want you. This meeting in the middle of the night, with the mosquitoes and gnats all around, rolling on these hard planks, is terrible.
"And I can't help thinking," she added huskily, "how much better it'll be somewhere else."
He was used to Margette's rambling on about their future, but this night, needled by his mother's grim foreboding, he found himself on edge, alert for any sign she might be right.
"I think I've finally convinced Daddy to buy a house in town," Margette was saying, "so I can use it for the social season, or shopping trips, and what I can do is just tuck you away there for my very own. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Of course, Mammy Lucy would have to be with me when I stayed there. It wouldn't be proper for folks to think I'd stay there alone, but she won't say a word about you being there, because she knows if she did, I'd have her whipped, so—"
Brett sat up so quickly, she fell away from him with a squeal of protest. Anger rising, he cried, "Wait a minute. You said when grinding season was over, we'd be getting married. What the hell are you talking about?"
She sat up, began pulling on her gown as she petulantly explained, "I have to wait till the time is right. We both know Daddy isn't going to like it, and neither is Mommy, but till I can convince them, you can just stay in town, and I'll take care of you."
"And what happens if they never agree?"
"Oh, well." She picked aimlessly at a strand of hair that had tumbled onto his forehead, "We'll be together, anyway, and that's what counts. I mean, you'll have a good life, Brett, and I'll make sure you always have the best of everything. You'll never have to work or do anything—"
"Except keep you properly fucked," he snapped. "What's wrong with you? Are you crazy? It's a wonderful arrangement."
"I'm a free man, Margette, not one of your daddy's breeding bucks." He got up and jerked on his trousers.
It was getting light, and besides, all of a sudden he couldn't get away from her fast enough.
"Wait, Brett. Don't go, please." She threw herself against his chest and clung to him, pleading, "Don't you see? This is the only way for us right now. I'll come into town as often as I can. We can make love all the time."
She began to rain tiny kisses over his face, but he stood motionless, his expression granite. When he did not speak, she took the silence for assent, albeit reluctant. Pressing closer, so her breasts rubbed provocatively against him, she whispered huskily "All you'll ever have to do, my darling, is fill me up with your love." Her hand dropped to his crotch.
He pulled from her grasp. "I'm not for sale, Margette, so why don't you just go pick out one of your daddy's slaves, a nice, big buck for your very own?"
For the second time that night, he was slapped.
Face twisted in a furious grimace, she cried, "Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that? You should be grateful, damn you! I'm offering you a life of luxury." She raised her hand to hit him again, but he caught her wrist and held it.
"No more, Margette."
"Bastard! You're nothing but a—"
"Cajun, right?" he interjected.
"Exactly," she fired back, "and you should be grateful I'd even consider making you such an offer."
"And flattered you thought I was a good enough stud to keep you serviced in privacy, so you could play the role of vestal virgin for the blue-blooded beaux your family approves of. You never had any intention of marrying me."
Her lips curled back in a snarl of contempt as she pushed her face against his, demanding, "And what else would a dirty Cajun be good for? Do you think I'd actually want to marry a swamp rat? That's all you are, you know, you and all your people. You were run out of your own country, because you weren't wanted, and you've bred with the Negroes and the Indians, and—"
"And hypocritical young girls who masquerade as prim and proper ladies by day and romp like wild, wanton whores by night." Disgusted, he shoved her harder than intended.
She fell, yelping with pain as she hit the floor, scraping her elbows. "You'll be sorry, you dirty bastard!"
Her hysterical cries had rung out in the stillness of the dawn as he ran from the gazebo.
Brett shook his head viciously to clear away the painful cobwebs from the past.
Margette had been right.
He had been sorry.
Very sorry, indeed.
Her screams had brought everyone in the house running to see what was going on. She said he had tried to rape her, and he figured the only thing that had saved him from being hunted down and lynched was the question of what she was doing out in the gazebo at such an hour.
Margette's indiscretion, however, had not excused his daring to cross the invisible, forbidden line.
That same day, Haskill Laubache had sent a foreman to the field to summon both Brett and his father to his office.
Grim-faced and obviously fighting to keep from lunging at Brett, Laubache choked out the edict that if either of them were ever seen on his land again, they'd be shot on sight.
Leo went into a rage, for he'd known nothing of his son's involvement with Haskill's daughter. His job paid more than any he'd ever had before, and the working conditions were superior to other plantations. He begged Haskill to
keep him on and make Brett leave, but Haskill stonily refused.
That night, with his mother begging him to stop, Leo had beaten Brett mercilessly.
Brett hadn't lifted a hand to his father, but as he lay on the floor, battered and bloody, he swore out loud he'd never take a licking from him again. "And don't worry," he said spitting blood. "I'm getting out. And I won't be back."
Brett grimaced to think how he'd kept at least a part of his vow. The very next morning, he had left to wander for nearly a year before winding up in Massachusetts to sign on with a whaler ship. Whale oil for lamps was in great demand, and the idea of traveling around the world was intriguing. So, for the next three years he found himself sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans and on into the Arctic Ocean and Bering Strait.
When at last he had returned to America, he wanted to see his mother. He'd never enjoyed a good relationship with his father, but always, he had loved her.
Making his way back to Mississippi and the Black Bayou, he discovered his parents had moved. He kept on searching and finally traced them to Louisiana and Bayou Perot, just in time for his mother's funeral.
His father had dispassionately described her last months. He had taken her to a hospital in New Orleans, where they could do nothing to ease her suffering from some strange malady. When she finally died, Leo couldn't even pay for her casket. Brett hadn't saved anything from his earnings at sea. He'd had no reason, instead throwing his money away in every port they came to, on whiskey and women. But he made up his mind to honor his mother's memory by paying all her bills.
He laid aside the jug of wine, too restless to sit still any longer. He wanted to walk the forest as darkness closed in, to try to escape the invisible clutches of the past.
His father liked it at BelleClair and had progressed to become one of the overseers. He assured Brett that Elton Sinclair had his eye on him for the same kind of promotion. But all Brett wanted was to get the bills paid and then move on. Meanwhile, he kept his distance from his father because he despised him.
Forbidden to Love: An Historical Romance Page 5