Louisiana History Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  Hermine, catching Elene’s quick, frowning glance between the actor and herself, gave a lovely, throaty laugh. “The trick is to learn to take no notice of Morven. It isn’t that he’s insincere, just that he has no control when it comes to women, especially those he knows he can’t have.”

  Morven turned a wounded expression upon her. “Angel, how can you?”

  “Easily, since it’s true. I thought it best to warn Elene, my love, so that you don’t get your face slapped quite so soon.”

  Morven shook his head, turning a soulful look on Elene. “She’s a jealous vixen.”

  “Is she?” Elene could not help smiling at his nonsense.

  “I don’t know why I put up with her.”

  “I expect it’s the other way around.”

  “Et tu, Brute? You would join my enemies in ridiculing me?”

  “Women are so heartless,” she mourned with him. “We can’t help ourselves.”

  “I hate clever women.”

  “Oh, dear, have I ruined myself forever?”

  “Quite.”

  “Suppose I promise to come and see you perform in New Orleans — I trust you will be performing?”

  “But of course! In that case, I will love you madly and forever.”

  “Clever indeed,” Hermine said.

  It was Ryan who answered. “Let us hope so. Elene, I believe Madame Tusard is trying to attract your attention.”

  The official’s wife was leaning across the space between the tables. “Mademoiselle Larpent, I think I remember hearing that your father’s house was one of the first burned some days ago. I was wondering how you survived until last night?”

  The woman’s question might have been directed at Elene, but her gaze moved with great suspicion back and forth between her and Ryan. Elene forced a smile. “I would not have survived at all without my maid. After a time, we were lucky enough to find someone to take us in.”

  “Lucky indeed. Who might that have been?”

  Elene told her.

  “An acquaintance of yours, M’sieur Bayard, I think?” the woman said.

  “As it happens, yes.”

  “One concludes that this Favier must have hidden you both.” Françoise Tusard’s eyes were avid, her grip on her spoon so tight the ends of her fingers were white.

  “Yes,” Elene agreed, adding in an attempt to change the subject, “but what of you and your husband?”

  “It’s very nearly too dreadful to relate. We hid for hours in empty salt barrels in a storage shed. I was sure I would suffocate, but the savages moved on to burn and loot another place, thank God. Isn’t that right, Claude?”

  “Yes, chère,” her husband croaked as soon as he had swallowed.

  “Naturally, I don’t mean thank God someone else was attacked, only that we were left unharmed, you understand. I could not wish for anyone to suffer as our next door neighbors did, poor souls. That was the widow Clemenceau and her three daughters. You would not believe what was done to them! Their bodies were found next morning, quite horribly used.”

  The details were ugly, and the woman did not hesitate to describe them. She ended with a shudder. “Of course, that was not the only such incident by any means. You yourself were not subjected to such abuse, one hopes?”

  “It is not a subject I would care to speak of if I had been,” Elene said, her voice cool.

  “Very wise, I’m sure,” the woman said, leaning closer so that she was in danger of falling from her chair, “but were you?”

  “I was not.”

  “Fortunate, very fortunate.” Madame Tusard sat back, her voice flat.

  Elene glanced at Durant who had been following the exchange with taut interest, then to the others at the next table, where Captain Jean and the young actress Josephine Jocelyn were seated with the Mazents. She was in time to catch Josie leaning back in her chair, her breasts thrust forward in an impudent posture that outlined the nipples through the thin fabric of her cheap gown. M’sieur Tusard watched the actress with unblinking eyes, but it was at Ryan that Josie directed her smiles.

  Hermine, following Elene’s gaze, shook her head. “Josie has no control either.”

  Ryan ignored the younger actress’s wiles as he tore a chunk of bread off the loaf beside his soup bowl. He looked at Elene, and amusement flashed bright in his blue eyes. She knew abruptly that he could have taken steps to dampen Morven’s ardor and deflect the interest of Madame Tusard if he had wished. Instead, he had allowed her to fend for herself. No doubt he expected her to discover the true value of his protection with his removal of it.

  It was possible he might discover something himself. Elene turned her head, leaning forward just enough to intercept the stare of the dark-haired actress. Catching Josie’s eyes, she gave the girl a long, cold look as she slowly raised a brow. Josie straightened in her chair, then glanced away to the portholes along the wall before finding her bowl in front of her of great interest. Picking up her spoon, she began to eat.

  Elene, her gray gaze limpid, turned back to Ryan with aplomb. “This gumbo is really quite delicious—”

  The words nearly stuck in her throat. The look on Ryan’s face carried such vivid understanding and smoldering need that she felt her heart leap within her.

  It was M’sieur Mazent, sitting in the chair closest to her at the next table, who rescued her. “The gumbo’s flavor is good, I’ll admit, but it’s a bit heavy on the spice, particularly the pepper. It’ll play havoc with my stomach.”

  “Now, papa,” his daughter murmured.

  Captain Jean was all solicitude, offering to have an omelet made for the planter instead. It was refused with all politeness. As the young man tried to insist, Flora Mazent shook her head with an almost inaudible thank you, meeting his gaze for the merest second. When Captain Jean returned his attention to his own plate, however, she peeped at him from the corner of her eyes, and her pale lips curved in an oddly satisfied smile.

  When the bread pudding that constituted dessert had been consumed to the last buttery crumb, they moved from the common room out onto the deck. There an awning made of a sail had been erected to protect the complexions of the ladies from the sun, and a few chairs brought out and placed beneath it. Straw pallets of the kind used by the sailors for their beds were strewn around the edges as additional seats.

  To Elene, the sun was a wondrous thing. She could not get enough of it after her sojourn in underground darkness. She sat on a pallet of straw and watched its diamond dazzle on the waves, its silver sheen on the billowing white sails above them, its brilliant flashes on the ship’s brass work and mahogany railings. She wished, in sudden wild longing, that she could throw off her clothes and stretch out full length in the glorious flood of light and heat. Instead, she sat sedately with her feet together and her hands clasping her knees to keep her skirts from billowing upward.

  Madame Tusard was holding forth, telling a tale of a woman decapitated by the renegades, as if the horrible things that had taken place on Saint-Domingue had a fascination for her. “What I don’t understand,” she said when she had pronounced the last gory detail, “is why these things had to happen. Why did our slaves turn on us with such savagery when they have never done so elsewhere?”

  “The revolution in France,” her husband said.

  “Yes, perhaps it was the example of the Terror.” It was Hermine who enlarged on the first suggestion.

  “Or it might have been our own example,” Elene said almost to herself.

  Madame Tusard turned on her, her face stiff with affront. “Whatever do you mean?”

  Elene wished she had not spoken, but since she had, she would not back down. “I remember as a child the whispers of some of the things the outlying planters did to their slaves, burying them alive for small crimes, cutting the tendons in the legs of runaways to make them cripples, forcing women into the fields less than an hour after childbirth, to say nothing of the whippings and brandings.”

  “There may have been a few madme
n who did such things,” the planter Mazent conceded, “but what fool would damage valuable slaves any more than a fine horse or a good work mule?”

  “Men who are afraid. The island has always been so isolated, so far from authority or help, and for every white person there were twenty slaves. It was plain a long time before the first uprising that if the slaves ever learned their strength they would be formidable. The planters thought they could keep them in subjection by fear.” She had seen that attitude clearly in her own father. It had been one so ingrained he could not change it, not even for his own daughter.

  “The slaves may have bought their freedom with blood, but what has it got them? More fighting, and more and more.”

  “Under Toussaint—”

  Madame Tusard gave a sniff of contempt. “Don’t speak to me of that man! Who ever heard of a black man governing? It’s ridiculous.”

  “He didn’t do so badly, under the conditions he inherited.”

  “He had to use the whip himself to make his precious followers go back into the fields to earn enough to keep themselves from starving. Isn’t that right, Claude?”

  “Yes, chère.”

  Support for Elene came from an unexpected quarter. Ryan said, “If Toussaint had been left alone, your husband might still have his position at this moment, the others might have their homes, their livelihoods, their lives. It was Napoleon, and his brother-in-law Leclerc, who brought on this last massacre when they reinstated slavery and took Toussaint away to die.”

  “It’s all right for you to talk. You have no money tied up in Saint-Domingue. You have lost nothing except a few livres’ worth of profit on your last cargo, if that much.”

  “Because of it, I can be objective as you cannot.”

  “Objective?” Madame Tusard cried in scorn. “Twenty-five years Claude and I spent on Saint-Domingue, with the exception of a year or two during the worst of the fighting. We lost two dear little boys that we buried in its sand. We have given it our youth, our hopes and dreams. Now what is left? Nothing. Not even the graves of our children.”

  The woman began to cry, rocking slowly back and forth. Her husband Claude patted her shoulder, speaking in low tones to which she replied with sobs. The rest were quiet, lost in their own thoughts.

  They were joined on deck a short time later by Devota and the others who had finished their meal. They came in a chattering group led by Serephine who was saying something in rippling humor over her shoulder to Devota and Germaine, the Mazent girl’s woman.

  The official’s wife stared with red-rimmed eyes at the octoroon who was making her way toward where Durant sat to one side. A moment later, Madame Tusard rose to her feet with ponderous deliberation, obviously removing herself from the presence of the women of color. Her tone conspiratorial, she said, “Would any of you ladies care to join me in a promenade around the deck?”

  Hermine and Josephine appeared not to hear. Flora Mazent was waving at her maid, calling out that she needed a ribbon to hold down her bonnet. Elene, troubled by guilt because she had been the cause of Madame Tusard’s earlier distress, and also reluctant to remain and allow everyone to watch for her reaction as Durant greeted his mistress, forced herself to get up and accompany the official’s wife.

  She should have known it would be a mistake. They were hardly out of hearing before the woman was leaning close, whispering. “That Serephine is Gambier’s kept woman, as I’m sure you know. The very idea of imposing her presence upon us for this voyage! She would have been in no danger if left behind.”

  “She might have been, she is very nearly white,” Elene pointed out in mild contradiction.

  “And gives herself airs because of it. I don’t know how you can bear it, seeing them together, knowing what they were to one another even when your marriage was being planned. You have my admiration for the cool way you are taking it. A woman must hold her head high and pretend she doesn’t care about these things.”

  “I really don’t, you know.”

  Françoise Tusard went on as if Elene had not spoken. “On the other hand, taking another man into your bed is revenge indeed, though I wonder at you flaunting it. Such things are all right for Paris, but attitudes are stricter in the islands, and even more so, I’m told, in the Louisiana colony under Spain. You may find that you have given Durant Gambier cause to withdraw his suit. That cannot be what you want.”

  “Can’t it?”

  “Well, I admit there is much to be said for Ryan Bayard as a man — even I see his appeal at my age — but he cannot compare to a wealthy planter such as Gambier, now can he?”

  “Durant is no longer so wealthy.”

  “I’m happy to see that you are being realistic, but I urge you to move with care or you may find it’s too late to change when we reach New Orleans. A white woman can soon descend to a position such as that of this Serephine, or even that Germaine with the Mazents. She is Mazent’s mistress, you know, has been for years.”

  “Is she?”

  “You find it hard to credit? Scandalous, isn’t it, with his daughter present, poor thing. But I assure you it’s the truth. This Germaine of his is amazingly haughty, too. She is a free woman of color, and has been since before the first revolt, as she will tell you if you dare to call her a slave. I would advise having nothing to do with her, myself. She was most impolite when I only asked her how long she had been with young Flora and her father.”

  “Indeed.”

  The lack of encouragement did nothing to stem the flow of ill comment. From Serephine and Germaine, Madame Tusard went on to criticize the color of Hermine’s hair and the sound of her voice which she considered to have tones reserved for the bedchamber. The way Josie walked came under attack, as well as the way she smiled at the gentlemen.

  “Why, I even caught her making eyes at my Claude! But what can you expect from an actress?”

  Elene, reaching the prow of the ship, paused. When the other woman would have walked on, she made no move.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Françoise Tusard said impatiently. “If you stand there the wind will ruin your coiffure and you will soon have every common seaman on the ship ogling you.”

  Elene touched her braided coronet put up with pins Devota had found for her. “I think I will chance it.”

  “Oh, very well, I will send Durant to you. That should help matters.”

  “No!” Elene cried, but it was too late. The woman was striding away.

  Elene considered taking refuge in Ryan’s cabin, but such a retreat seemed the coward’s way out. She did not care to have Durant think she was either afraid of him or wanted to avoid him. It might even be best to speak to him here in some degree of privacy in order to make it clear that he no longer had a claim upon her.

  She was standing with her face lifted to the sun and wind and her gaze resting on the far horizon when she heard Durant’s footsteps behind her. The nebulous peace she had begun to sense fled, and the tightness in her chest became an ache.

  “It was wise of you to send for me,” he said at her shoulder. “A little longer, and I might have been forced to say things in front of the others that you might find embarrassing.”

  “I didn’t send for you.” She answered without turning.

  He stepped to her side, facing her with his back to the rail. The wind blew his hair forward onto his forehead and flapped the ends of his cravat. He narrowed his eyes against it, eyes that were dark with anger. “I don’t understand you, Elene. Four days ago we were to be married. A few minutes more, and it would have been done. How can you just ignore that? Have you no concern, no interest, in what happened to me?”

  How like him it was to expect her to be absorbed in his adventures. She glanced at the slash across his face. “You were injured, I can see that. Since you are here, I assume you fought your way free. What else is there?”

  “I was struck from behind, felled in my tracks, as I received this.” He touched his face with his fingertips. “If I had been wearing rings, I mig
ht have been minus a few fingers. As it was, I was stripped and left for dead under a pile of corpses. I might still be there if it had not been for Serephine.”

  “Serephine,” she said, her tone dry.

  “She came to search for me. You did nothing, so far as I can see, to discover if I was alive or dead.”

  “I did not see how you could be alive,” she said in protest. “Besides, I was in no position to see about anyone.”

  “You might have shown more joy at finding me among the living last night.”

  “I hardly knew where I was or what I was doing.”

  “What was your excuse this morning? I don’t call your greeting that of a fond fiancée!”

  “I am no longer the girl I was, no longer your bride-to-be,” she cried, facing him. “Everything is different now, can’t you see?”

  “Oh, I see all right.” His voice rasped with pent rage. “You mean to ignore our betrothal. You have found something more to your taste and, just like that, you no longer want to be married.”

  “The wedding was never my choice, you know that.”

  “Maidenly dithering. It would have been different on our wedding night.”

  She gave him a level look. “You are so sure of yourself, aren’t you? Why shouldn’t you be? I don’t suppose Serephine ever complains.”

  His face went blank. “Serephine has nothing to do with this.”

  “Not now, no.”

  “She never did. She will make no difference to the respect and love my wife will receive from me.”

  “But you have no intention of putting her aside, nor did you ever intend it.”

  “Where would she go? How would she live? I have a responsibility to her.”

  “How very convenient.”

  His dark brows drew together. “I don’t intend to discuss it with you. Such an arrangement is not the concern of the wife; she should not know it exists, much less presume to comment.”

  “You mean the wife should not admit she knows, another convenience.”

  “I am not at fault here, Elene, nor is the way I live. You are the one who has formed an improper alliance. You should be happy that I will even consider marrying you after the way you have behaved.”