by Danice Allen
Chapter Four
Like an unhinged gate, the three-quarter moon hung crooked on the horizon of a black, cloudless sky. Standing on the balcony attached to his apartments at the Hotel St. Louis, Lucien loosely gripped the top rail of the wrought-iron balustrade and looked out over Royal Street below. A low-creeping fog hovered over the gutters, and steam hazed the few closed windows of the adjacent building where the Blue Ribbon Ball was in full swing.
A steady stream of Creole gentlemen trod back and forth along the wooden walkway between the two buildings, judiciously allocating their time between their quadroon mistresses at the Blue Ribbon Ball and their wives, who sat in regal martyrdom at the King’s Ball, taking place inside the Hotel St. Louis’s grandest ballroom. On the periphery of the dancing, the deserted wives gossiped in little groups—like coveys of chattering fowl—and waited for their husbands to return from a “smoking break.”
Cheroots smoldered bright orange in the dark as the men passed between the buildings, the pinpoint of burning embers brightening, then fading like indecisive fireflies. But everyone knew that saving their wives the annoyance of a little smell and smoke from a cheroot was only an excuse for the men to absent themselves from the King’s Ball for the more titillating companionship of their mistresses.
It was a sultry night for early October, and the muddy tang of the Mississippi, mixed with the smell of aromatic tobacco and gutter swill, permeated the turbid atmosphere, making Lucien’s attempt to fill his lungs with fresh air an exercise in futility. A raucous laugh drifted up from a nearby alley, followed by scuffling feet and muted exclamations—another fight.
The social season was in full swing, and everyone from aristocrat to demirep was in high gig. Almost all the “best” families had returned to town from the outlying plantations, where they routinely escaped from the sweltering, disease-infested summer months in the city. Lucien’s family had taken up residence in the Delacroix mansion on Esplanade Avenue just that morning, and he’d received a curtly phrased summons from his father to pay a courtesy call on his mother. Lucien had begged off, promising to meet his mother at the opera that night for the season-opening performance of The Barber of Seville.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see his mother. He loved her, despite her blind devotion to Lucien’s dictatorial father. He loved his father, too, but with reservations.
As a child, Lucien had not readily grasped his importance as heir to Bocage, an honor Jean-Luc Delacroix considered above everything else. Lucien had been an active, sociable child and had a wide circle of playmates, but his best friend was a slave child named Roy.
Up to the age of ten or so, sons of white plantation owners were allowed to play with the slave children when the slaves weren’t busy in the fields or doing some other chore about the estate. Then, when the plantation owner’s son went away to school, the friendships diminished naturally and were eventually forgotten or, if not forgotten, relegated to the past.
Lucien, a fiercely loyal young man, did not forget his friendship with Roy, even when they were both in their early teens and obviously destined for very different futures. His father disapproved of this continuing relationship, although Lucien thought it rather ironic that his father wouldn’t have minded if he were bedding down with some of the female slaves. It was an odd set of rules that Lucien never really understood.
Lucien wasn’t sure he wanted the lifestyle his father was proud to pass on to his eldest son. He questioned Creole tradition and the social protocol of the South. He couldn’t understand why things had to continue being the way they were simply because they’d always been that way.
Infuriated by Lucien’s rebellion against all he held near and dear, Jean-Luc decided to teach his son a lesson. He gave Lucien a final warning to stay away from Roy at the risk of punishment, knowing full well the two young men would disobey him. They went fishing, were caught, then were brought, unrepentant, before Jean-Luc to receive their punishment.
Jean-Luc ordered his son to give Roy twenty lashes with a whip. Horrified, Lucien refused. Jean-Luc explained to his son that if he didn’t mete out the punishment, his friend, Charles Bodine, who happened to be visiting that afternoon, would be glad to do it for him.
Knowing Bodine’s taste for blood, Lucien was forced to whip his friend. When Lucien didn’t put enough twist in his wrist to execute the most painful blow, Bodine stepped in and showed him how to do it right. Lucien was in agony throughout the ordeal, trying to hurt his friend as little as possible, but knowing if he didn’t hurt him quite enough, Bodine would take up the slack with relish.
That afternoon was a turning point for Lucien. He and Roy never spoke to each other again. Lucien learned to hate Bodine and to pity and despise his father. He also learned that he could never be a slave owner.
He stayed away at school, even on holidays, then went to Europe when he graduated and remained till he was thirty. Two years ago, Lucien had returned to New Orleans a changed man. But now he was another kind of embarrassment to his father. True, he no longer questioned slavery and other firmly entrenched ideas Jean-Luc held near and dear to his old-fashioned heart, but his son had turned into a worthless cad. He had no interest in the estate he was going to inherit, and no ambitions beyond wenching and gambling.
Lucien had planned the masquerade months before returning to the States. He knew that nothing had changed in the South, and he knew he couldn’t go back home without trying to make some sort of a difference when he got there. His travels abroad hadn’t changed his views about slavery; they reinforced what he already believed and had learned most painfully that summer day nearly twenty years before. Slavery was wrong. Thus Dandy Delacroix and Le Renard came into being.
Visiting his mother frequently put Lucien in his father’s company as well, and that was always painful. And there was another disadvantage to his mother’s return to town. Now that the frenetic social season had begun, Madame Delacroix would once again belabor the point that he’d let another year pass without selecting a wife from the cream of Creole aristocracy. This year Lucien’s mother was hinting that the virtuous sixteen-year-old Liliane Chevalier would suit her perfectly as a daughter-in-law.
Lucien thought of the doe-eyed, raven-haired Mademoiselle Chevalier, seventeen years his junior—so proper, so passive, her untainted French bloodlines so well-documented in the ancient records kept safe and sound in the guarded vaults of St. Louis Cathedral.
Mademoiselle Chevalier, like so many well-born Creole girls, had been educated by the Ursuline nuns in the morally correct, tight-kneed frigidity of all marriageable women. And it would be her husband’s singular honor to pry apart those maidenly knees to expose his properly unresponsive bride to the shocking sounds and movements attached to matrimonial consummation, all done in the modesty-preserving pitch-black of an unlit bedchamber. Almost never motivated by love, these awkward alliances seemed necessary to produce the requisite pure-blooded heir to a Creole dynasty.
Lucien refused to compromise his life’s happiness by shackling himself in such a sham union. As well, marriage to him would not be fair to any woman—whether or not she was Creole. His subversive activities were far too dangerous to allow him the freedom to commit to a long-term relationship.
He thought of Anne Weston. He hadn’t seen her since the Belvedere docked in New Orleans, but he’d thought about her every day, every night. He’d tried to obliterate her golden image from his mind by paying more frequent visits to his mistress, Micaela, trying to lose himself in an orgy of undiluted sex. But it hadn’t worked. He only wanted Anne more and more.
Sometimes he whiled away an hour or two making up excuses to visit Katherine Grimms. Common sense always prevailed, and the visits were never paid; at least no acknowledged visits. But late at night he sometimes drove his carriage down the street where she lived, pausing across the way and watching Anne’s bedroom window.
Twice he was lucky enough to see her lean out of the opened window, her hair loose and fallin
g over her shoulders. A tree near her window looked as though it could be easily climbed. As each day passed, that tree seemed more and more tempting. Someday he would climb it and enter Anne’s bedroom while she slept. And then…
He dared not imagine further. It would be enough just to look at her. Or perhaps just to kiss her once…
Unexpectedly a cool breeze blew softly against Lucien’s heated skin. He arched his neck and closed his eyes, relishing the freshness, the crispness of it. It reminded him of the mountain wind that blew through Switzerland’s snowy vales into northern France, and of the bracing river wind on the banks of the Thames. It was a taunting whisper of another time, another place.
How he wished he could be himself, as he had been in Europe! How he longed to talk to Anne with nothing between them but the truth! This masquerade was crushing his soul…
There was a knock at the door. Lucien had dismissed his small staff of servants for the night, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. He moved across the shadowy room with the confidence of familiarity and the soundless grace of an athletic man used to maneuvering in the dark. He opened the door a crack.
“Lucien, I know I shouldn’t be here, but—”
Lucien grabbed the man and pulled him into the room, darting his head through the doorway to scan the hall before shutting the door behind him and locking it.
“Christ, Armande, you’re damned right you shouldn’t be here!”
“No one saw me.”
“Are you sure?”
Armande nodded his head. “I was very careful.” He swallowed hard and threw Lucien a beseeching look. “I had to come.”
Lucien observed his friend by the weak light of a single-candle wall sconce just inside the door. Tall and lean with copper-brown skin, dark hair, and hazel eyes, Armande was a free black of mixed blood. He was dressed in a neatly tailored gray suit, as if he’d just come from one of the ticketed balls being held in the public rooms. Sweat trickled down his temples, more from agitation than from the heat, Lucien surmised.
Armande was obviously very upset. Lucien was ready to believe whatever he told him, because Armande was the best spy and, more importantly, the most trusted friend a man could hope for. They’d met in the intellectual society that orbited the university in Paris, where Armande had studied to be a physician. Armande was the son of a quadroon and a wealthy American banker in New Orleans.
In Paris, he and Lucien had become instant comrades, finding their views on slavery to be identical. When Lucien confided his plan to begin underground abolitionist activities when he returned to the United States, Armande wanted to be included.
Armande’s several years in Paris made him seem more French than American, and his accent and the sometimes poetic brevity of his English reflected this Parisian influence.
“What has happened?”
“Bodine. He’s done it again.”
Lucien’s jaw clenched. “What? Rape?”
“Worse. He’s killed all three of the men we’d arranged to transport next week. One of them confided in another slave—trying to convince her to come along, I suspect—a mulatto girl Bodine gives special privileges for tattling on the others.”
Lucien kneaded the tight cords at the back of his neck. “The fool! He knew the terms of our agreement! Didn’t he know the risk he was taking, the danger he was placing himself and the other two men in?”
“He may have been a fool, but he was a brave fool. They all were. Our connection at Belle Fleur saw it all and reported this bad news to me not more than an hour ago. Bodine beat them. He wanted them to tell him where you were planning to rendezvous. He was going to surprise you with a posse of hangmen in place of the slaves. Ever since we took the family of slaves from the Belvedere he has a vendetta against you, Lucien. They wouldn’t tell him where the meeting place was.” Armande’s voice quivered with suppressed anger and emotion. “We can be grateful for that.”
“Gratitude is the least of what I’m feeling right now! I’d like to take Bodine’s whip and layer a few welts on his worthless hide, then string him up with it! Now there will be rampant fear at Belle Fleur. There won’t be another man or woman who’ll dare try for freedom, though that plantation of Bodine’s is the worst hellhole for slaves in the South, I’d wager.”
Armande wiped his brow with a handkerchief he’d pulled from a waistcoat pocket, “Time will dull some of the fear. Because of the cruelty at Belle Fleur, there will be others brave enough to take the chance of escape. So far, you’ve been amazingly adept at moving them out of the state. This is the first … mishap.”
“One too many, Armande.” Lucien sighed deeply and moved to the French doors leading to the balcony, wishing again for the whisper of cool air on his face. Armande stayed behind in the shadows. Silent, pain-filled moments passed.
“Maybe it was a premonition,” Lucien said at last, more to himself than to Armande.
“What, mon ami?”
Lucien turned slightly, throwing Armande a self-derisive and grim smile. “The weather has been hotter than usual for this time of year. I’ve felt smothered all day. I was thinking about … things, when suddenly I imagined I felt a cool breeze. I could smell the mountain air of Switzerland, Armande. I could feel the brisk wind from the Thames. It was eerie. Now I begin to think it was a premonition, a chilling precursor to your grisly news.”
“The Creole, the blacks, we are all superstitious. Probably it was a premonition, but maybe not a bad one.”
Lucien made a scornful noise at the back of his throat. “It sure as hell appears that way to me!”
“No, Lucien. The beatings, they were done yesterday. Maybe this cool breeze—this spiritual transportation to a place where you were happy and serene—maybe it was a good omen. Maybe something good is coming to you, something from the continent.”
Lucien immediately thought of Anne, and his heart lifted, but he ruthlessly dismissed the wistful, foolish surge of hope and made a wry face. “A broad interpretation for the whimsy of river breezes, my friend.”
Armande shrugged and smiled, a purely Gallic gesture. “Perhaps. I’m no fortune-teller. If you want your fortune told, you must visit the voodoo queen.”
Lucien shook his head with resignation. “All I see in the future for me and the South is strife and danger.”
“It will change, mon ami. You will help to bring the changes—slow and sure, like the Mississippi swelling in the spring to overflow the banks. Once they build in power, in momentum, nothing will stop the changes. But until that time comes, you must still keep the secret, you must still wear the mask, you must still play the masquerade.”
Lucien sighed and turned away, staring into the dark night.
“It’s lovely, Anne, but it’s not white.” Reggie peered critically through his spectacles at Anne’s midnight-blue gown.
“You didn’t really expect me to bedeck myself in white like some debutante straight out of the schoolroom, did you, Uncle Reggie? Goodness, I’m twenty-three years old!”
“I only thought it might be more traditional if you first presented yourself to New Orleans society in a coming-out color. I understand all the young ladies make their first social appearance at the opening night of the opera. There will be a veritable sea of white, and probably one little dab of midnight-blue.”
“Good,” said Anne, fastening a gold bracelet over the long white glove that came to the middle of her upper arms. “I shouldn’t wish to be just another fleck of foam in a sea of white. I like being different. And if there are going to be so many young women there, it’s best I wear something that makes me stand out in a crowd. An old spinster like myself must use every possible trick!”
“What nincompoopery!” Katherine’s voice preceded her as she entered the drawing room. “You will always stand out in a crowd, my dear, no matter what you wear. You’re beautiful. You take after my side of the family.”
“You look splendid, Aunt Katherine,” said Anne, eyeing her aunt appreciatively. “You look absolutely
regal in purple.”
“It’s the height and the bosom, I suppose,” agreed Katherine, patting her upswept hair, simply styled as usual to match the austere elegance of her town and opera cape.
“Ahem,” said Reggie, pinkening.
“What is it, Reginald?” said Katherine, turning to observe him as he stood uncomfortably by the mantel, tugging on his mustache. “Oh, yes, of course. You look very nice, too. All men look best in black.”
“Good God, you don’t imagine I was fishing for a compliment, do you?” He shifted from foot to foot, obviously flustered.
“Well, if you weren’t wishing to be noticed and flattered, why were you clearing your throat in that odious manner?”
“If you must be told, I was discreetly objecting to your use of the word bosom in so casual and coarse a fashion, and in mixed company!”
“Lord, you’re a prude, Reginald. Did you think Anne had never heard the word before? Sheltered though you are, you can’t be objecting for your sake, I hope. If you’ve never heard the word bosom spoken in the company of females at your advanced age, Reginald, I pity you.”
“Save your pity, madame,” he said stiffly, thrusting up his nose in a pose of offended dignity. “I cherish and honor the purity of my past no matter how dull you might deem it to be in comparison to your own. Now, shall we go the opera? I trust I won’t be humiliated by your conduct in so public and revered a place as the opera house, will I, ladies?”
Reggie slid a meaningful glance at Anne. He obviously felt he had no influence with Katherine, and, besides, her behavior was probably tolerated by a society who knew her well after twenty years of exposure. But he cared what they thought of Anne, and he believed her debut tonight could determine her acceptance into the more preferable circles.