Her bridegroom’s days were dedicated to plantation matters. No new overseer had been hired since Kingsley’s departure, and he seemed content to act in that position with the aid of Samson, the work boss, as tall as a barn door and almost as wide, with feet the size of horse troughs and a grin like the sun rising. The two got along well from all appearances, and were often seen riding over the property together.
Christien did take Marguerite up in front of him on his black stallion from time to time, a gesture that thrilled her and benefited her mother. And he continued to play cards with her father, removing the worry that he might return to the gaming dens to escape a household upset by the wedding preparations. He also wrote out the notes inviting his friends to the ceremony and gave careful instructions to the stable hand entrusted with delivering them over the far countryside. Other than that, he listened carefully while she told him that he was to escort her mother into the chapel, as was the custom, and then follow Father Damien’s lead for the remainder of the ceremony. He dutifully accompanied her on a visit to the priest, which included a homily on the responsibilities of married life. Yet there was one important detail on which he remained elusive.
In late afternoon just three days before the wedding, she sought him out where he sat on the upper gallery. “About the gentleman who will act as your best man,” she said as she walked toward him. “You did write to ask someone?”
“I did.”
He sat up with the contraction of lean muscles as he spoke, making as if to rise. She forestalled him with a brief gesture. “But you haven’t heard from him. He hasn’t told you whether he is willing.”
“He is apparently undecided.”
“But you must have someone,” she said in vexation.
Leaning back again, he rested his head on the rolled back of his wicker chair, clasped his hands over his waistcoat buttons and propped his booted feet on the railing. “Don’t fret, chérie,” he said with a smile. “If he can’t be here, another of my friends will take his place.”
Another of the sword masters, he meant. “Your attendant must walk with Marguerite as we all enter the chapel, you know.”
“I’ll see to it he is someone who will look after her.”
That he understood her concern so easily gave her a tight feeling in her chest. A part of it was gratitude, but not all by any means.
He was so very handsome as he sat there smiling up at her, yet it would be a mistake to think him indolent or off guard. His recent activity seemed to have accelerated his convalescence. Latent power lay coiled beneath the starched linen and beige cotton suiting he wore, and the mind that directed it was never quite at rest, had not been, she was almost sure, since he arrived at River’s Edge. Even now, a shading of wariness lingered in the blackness of his eyes, so she felt suddenly that he was not quite so relaxed as he appeared.
“I suppose that will have to do,” she answered, and turned to go.
He reached to catch her hand in a light clasp. She stood quite still, willing her heart to continue its natural rhythm, knowing it was impossible.
“It will be all right, chère,” he said, his voice deeper than before.
She met his gaze, tried a smile, though it was not quite steady at the edges. “Are you quite sure?”
His eyes grew darker and his smile faded to nothing while he searched her face. After a moment, he lifted her hand to his mouth, brushed her knuckles with his warm lips and let her go.
If he had meant to reassure her, the effort was a failure. The disquiet that lived inside her these days seemed to expand, filling her universe.
Back inside the central hall, she went at once to her bedchamber, stepped inside and closed the door. She leaned against it with her eyes tightly shut. Her hand still tingled from the touch of Christian’s lips and she cradled it against her chest. Her knees felt weak, and it was all she could do not to slide down to the floor.
In her mind bloomed the sequence of events that had taken place in his bedchamber, his bed, his arms. Dear heaven, how they haunted her. She had relived them so many times that the least little thing could send her spiraling into the sensations he had roused in her, the exquisite feelings he had drawn from her very being. She had not known she could feel such rampant desire or such need to be close to a man. Nothing in her first marriage had prepared her for it.
These past several nights, she had lain in an agony of need for his touch, his taste. The urge to go to him had grown so strong that she shook with it. Twice, she had risen from her bed and got as far as the door, only to draw back again. She would not appear the love-starved widow, unable to conceal her cravings, nor would she court the mortification of being found out again. Most of all, she could not bear having the glorious magic that had flowed between her and Christien besmirched by exposure to censure and disdain.
The wedding day would arrive soon enough. Afterward would come the wedding night and the three days of seclusion with her new husband. Time enough, then, for passion and naked splendor without hindrance. How strange that she would yearn so for that time when she was marrying a stranger who might have a different goal altogether. She would never have believed it, never. Somehow, she would, must, wait until then.
It was the night of the fifth day after Christien rose from his sick bed that Marguerite’s tormenting specter returned. Reine was not asleep. Sheer exhaustion ensured an hour or two of rest immediately after she crawled between the sheets, but then she woke to stare wide-eyed into the darkness while her thoughts moved in endless circles. Or else she was bathed in perspiration and barely able to breathe because of dreams that fled so quickly she could recall nothing of them except that they were terrifying.
She sat up this night as she heard Chalmette growl. The noise was low in his throat and constant, like a bull saw cutting through a cypress log.
Alarm jangled along her nerves. She flung back the sheet that covered her knees and slid from the bed. Swiftly yet as silently as possible, she moved to the door that connected to the nursery.
Inside, she paused, wishing she had stopped to light a candle. The room was dim because of its tightly closed shutters, the only illumination coming from the faint moon glow through their slats. Though it was designated as a nursery and had the usual rocking chair, doll bed and toys set here and there, it was merely another bedchamber with a large half-tester bed that made a darker shadow against one wall.
Chalmette ceased growling and padded toward her from somewhere near the bed’s foot. He nudged her thigh with his big head. She reached down to trail her fingertips over his lifted ruff as she held her breath, listening.
Nothing.
“Marguerite, chère?” she called out in a strained tone.
Bedcovers rustled. A sleepy voice came out of the darkness. “Maman?”
Relief swept through her. She released the breath she didn’t know she was holding, sought for a normal tone. “Did I wake you? I’m sorry. I thought I heard Chalmette.”
“Yes, but it’s all right. It was the loup-garou. Chalmette scared him away.”
The words, spoken so easily, sent a chill down Reine’s back. “Did he, chère? One moment, then. I…I’ll be back.”
A few strides took her to the hall door. It stood open a few inches, she saw with grim disturbance. Snatching it wide, she sailed through, then paused to stare up and down the dark space.
Nothing moved that she could see. The French doors that opened onto the back gallery were closed, their stacked panes showing as rectangles with feeble moonlight behind them. With quick steps, she moved toward them. The steel rod that barred them hung from its wall hook unsecured. She compressed her lips as she stepped out onto the gallery.
All she could see at first were the gently shifting shadows under the great live oaks as moonlight struck through leaves moved by night wind. She waited, trying for patience as she pressed against the wall behind her.
There. A shape, gray and ghostlike, slowly disconnected from a tree trunk. It eased away in
the direction of the barn, sure-footed and familiar with the way. After a moment, it disappeared into the darkness.
Marguerite’s loup-garou. It was not a werewolf or spirit of any kind, definitely not a figment of childish imagination.
It was a man.
The urge to shout, scream, to raise the alarm, was a sharp ache in her throat. She couldn’t make a sound. Her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth, her heart thundered in her chest.
She was too terrified of just who the loup-garou might turn out to be.
Reine returned to Marguerite and sat with her until she slept again. Leaving the door open between the nursery and her bedchamber, she returned to her bed, but not to sleep. Over and over in her mind, she saw the figure of the man as he faded away from the house. She asked herself time and again what kind of fiend would visit a child’s nursery in the night, careless of the terror he caused. She sought for reasons, and could find only one. She asked herself what she was going to do about it, but could not settle on an answer.
Morning came, and she was still undecided. As the sun rose, however, the problem was wiped from her mind.
The steamboat J. T. Danson, bound for Natchez, pulled into the landing to deliver three hogsheads of rum. It also dropped off a body that its deckhands had pulled from the river a mile or two downstream.
It was Kingsley. The overseer had a slit in his chest, one that exited his back in the manner of a wound caused by a sword thrust. Caught in the same eddy that had rendered up Theodore’s body instead of carrying it downstream, he had been in the water for some time, perhaps even several days.
Reine, watching in sick dismay from the upper gallery as the body was loaded in a wagon and driven toward the cool shelter of the barn, knew one of her unsettling questions from the night before had been answered. The overseer was most definitely not Marguerite’s loup-garou.
The sheriff arrived before noon. Reine’s father received him on the lower gallery with coffee, wine and cakes. All cordiality, he did not wait for the lawman to question him, but explained with regret that Monsieur Kingsley had been released from his position at the plantation some two week before, perhaps a little more. Man to man, and with some reluctance, the reason for his discharge was given. Perhaps he had been despondent over the loss of his position, yes? Or, given the overseer’s temper, he had annoyed the wrong person?
But of course, the sheriff must make the investigation. He should feel quite free to question whomever he liked. Yes, naturally his daughter’s prospective groom, Monsieur Lenoir, would make himself available. The famous sword master and new owner of River’s Edge had sent the man packing, true. One could see, most easily, how Kingsley might have a grudge against Lenoir for it, but what earthly reason could Lenoir have for injuring the dead man?
Ah, so he had died of a sword wound, but what of that? Half the men in the parish owned such weapons. More, the Kaintucks who plied their keelboats up and down the river favored knives easily long enough to make such a wound. It was ridiculous on the face of it, this suspicion. Monsieur Christien Lenoir’s word that he had no involvement must be accepted with the same courtesy as his own. Yes, or that of his son, Paul, for that matter. As for the unfortunate man’s corpse being found close by, well, River’s Edge had been his home. The late Monsieur Kingsley could be put off the place, but no one had the power to remove him from the neighborhood.
There was more in that vein, but it all came to the same thing in the end. The sheriff questioned Christien and Paul, spoke to Alonzo and the other house servants and nosed around the cabins behind the big house. He did not, quite naturally, trouble the ladies of the house as they could have nothing to add to the mystery. After a fruitless few hours, he prepared to depart, though he did not appear completely satisfied with his investigation.
Reine, in her guise as hostess, moved down the steps to the garden gate to bid him farewell. Smiling with every show of ease, she invited the official and his wife to the wedding. He appeared gratified by the offer of hospitality, though uncertain his missus would feel up to the frolic. He would leave Kingsley’s body with them to be buried at their discretion, he said as he stepped into his gig, being that the man belonged on the place, as you might say. Finally, he wheeled away down the drive in a cloud of dust.
Watching him go, Reine feel a shiver run down her spine. Who had killed Kingsley? Her father’s suggestions were plausible. She would like to believe he was right, and the overseer had met his end at knifepoint after the quarrel. That was better than wondering if Christien had resumed his midnight rides as the Night-hawk.
Regardless of how he had died, they would bury Kingsley in the family graveyard with his mother and father. Any man’s death deserved that much respect.
A burial so soon before the wedding. It was not a good omen for marital bliss.
19
The great day arrived in a blaze of summer sunlight. By midmorning, it was stiflingly hot. No sign of a breeze stirred the air. The leaves drooped on the trees. Cicadas sang from their hiding places in the topmost branches, but few birds called. The smells of wood smoke and cooking pork from the fire pits behind the outdoor kitchen hung heavy in the still air, mingling with the scents of baking cakes, caramelizing sugar, chicken and onions frying and coffee roasting. Subdued voices could be heard from the cabins as the field hands had been given a holiday. A sulfurous, waiting quiet enveloped the place, one that made it seem too much trouble to move, almost too much effort to breathe.
Christien’s guests began arriving before midday. None had been in New Orleans, it seemed, but had been sojourning at various plantation houses here and there or along the more salubrious coastal areas. Being early on the scene would allow them time to rest from their travels, then bathe and change their clothing before the wedding. It also gave them an opportunity to visit with the groom and one another.
Reine was on hand to greet these swordsmen and their wives. What a lot of them there were; she was amazed, having gained the impression that Christien had only a handful of acquaintances. Glancing at him as he stood beside her on the steps, introducing his friends as they alighted from their various equipages, she wondered what other surprises he might have in store for her.
The first to arrive was Gavin Blackford, an Englishman judging from his accent. He was blond, quick-spoken and devilish in his humor. He was married to a most soignée lady with the unusual name of Ariadne. Their offspring toddled ahead of them up the front steps, a pair of blond imps, Arthur and David, one boy barely a year old, so still in skirts though definitely male, and another perhaps a year older. Both had the unselfconscious beauty and bounding energy of golden-fleeced lambs.
Hardly had they disappeared upstairs than a cavalcade of three carriages and a wagon appeared. In the first vehicle were Monsieur and Madame Pasquale, carrying small twin girls who were like mirror images of each other, and preceded by a boy with the features of an angel by Michelangelo who appeared near Marguerite’s age. The second carriage held a half dozen boys in their early teens, no two of whom seemed to share looks, parentage or nationality, and had a young gentleman of serious mien cantering alongside as an outrider. A ladies’ maid, nursemaid and tutor occupied the third equipage, while baggage for the large family filled the rear wagon. Monsieur Pasquale, or Nicholas, was as handsome as his son in an Italianate style, and Madame Pasquale, calm and nunlike in a soft gray ensemble, was introduced as Juliette. Their eldest son on horseback, or rather foster son, was Nathaniel, if Reine had it correctly, though his foster siblings all called him Squirrel. The twin babes were Claire and Chloe; the younger boy was Edouard; the tutor, Gaston; the maid, Marie-Therese; and the nursemaid was called ZaZa.
Reine’s head was spinning with names by this time, yet there were still more to come. Monsieur Caid O’Neill appeared in short order, a stalwart, brown-haired gentleman who had emigrated from Eire, so it seemed, though his vivacious wife Lisette was French Creole to her fingertips. Their older children, a boy and a girl, were Sean and C
eleste Amalie, and the babe Lisette cradled in her arms was Marie Rose.
The first arrivals trooped back down the stairs to greet the rest as if it had been years since they had last met instead of the few weeks since the end of the season. They jostled one another on the portico, embracing, talking, laughing and exchanging stories as if they meant never to disperse. They were still there when a pair of glorious carriages were sighted, both lacquered in burgundy and black, with a liveried coachman on the seat and a coat of arms on the door. From these alighted the Conde and Condessa de Lérida, Rio and Lina, a pair dazzling in their warm-hearted sophistication. Behind them came their five children in stair-step ages from about eight to a babe in arms, each with an attendant.
Marguerite, who had joined Reine and Christien on the steps to welcome their guests, was beside herself with excitement over having so many playmates. Long before the advent of the conde and condessa, she was involved in a wild game of chase that seemed to have no beginning, no end and no rules, but involved at least a hundred players, possibly more. The de Lérida children, piling out of the carriages, ran screaming to join the mob while their parents looked on with what seemed relief and resignation. The conde, gathering tutors and nursemaids with no more than a glance from dark, commanding eyes, directed them here and there to keep watch.
“I fear my daughter is the cause of the melee,” Reine said. “Being an only child, she isn’t used to so much excitement.”
“It will do them no harm, I’m sure,” the condessa said with a smile.
“Especially after being cooped up in the carriage for so many miles,” the conde added as if finishing his wife’s thoughts were the most natural thing in the world. “And the respite may do their parents a world of good. We love them devotedly, you understand, but…”
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