“You’ll do no such thing,” Adele shrilled. “I know where you’ve been, Edouard. You’ve been with her. Lips that have touched that woman’s shall never kiss my daughter.”
Cami watched the color drain from her father’s ruddy face. His eyes flashed dark and threatening. He took the other two steps in one giant stride until he stood beside his wife, towering over her. Catching her upper arms in his strong grip, he leaned down over her and planted his wide mouth firmly over the thin, narrow line of his wife’s.
Cami’s eyes went wide. She had never seen her parents kiss before. She knew, young as she was, that at some time there had been something between the two of them. She herself was positive proof of that, after all. But for as long as she could recall, her parents had lived apart in separate wings of the big house. Not once had she ever seen her father kiss her mother, nor even touch her hand in passing.
When Edouard finally released his wife, she stumbled away from him, striking out at him with one hand while she wiped furiously at her mouth with the other.
“You terrible… horrible… miserable…”
“What, Adele?” he goaded. “What am I? Put a name to it once and for all. Let’s have this out between us and be done with it. I’m sick to death of your accusations, your suspicions, your cold contempt. Yes, dammit! I kissed another woman while I was in New Orleans! It was the first kiss I’d had in a very long time.”
Shocked by her father’s rough actions and rougher words, Cami glanced toward her mother, who looked like she might faint at any moment. But the rise of her father’s harsh voice drew Cami’s attention immediately back to him.
“Yes, I kissed a woman, and ‘that woman,’ as you call her, has a name and a heart. Fiona is a real, flesh-and-blood, feeling, giving, loving person.” When his wife drew back, ready to strike him again, Edouard caught her arm. “No! You’ll hear me out this time, Adele. Lord, how I hate these scenes, but this has to be. You know as well as I do why I go to Fiona. That slap across my face a bit ago was the most intimacy you’ve shown me since the night our Cami was conceived. I’ve let you put me off and treat me like I was no better than one of the servants all these years, but, dammit, I’m through with being locked out of your chamber, even though you locked me out of your heart long ago. I mean to change all that, starting right now.”
Cami—her heart racing and tears brimming in her eyes—watched as her mother turned to flee. But her father caught his wife in his arms and kissed her again. Then, without another word, Edouard Mazaret scooped up the sobbing, struggling woman and strode inside and up the stairs.
Carol shared Cami’s fear and uncertainty. The two were still joined at the soul as Cami started for the stairs to follow her parents. But a huge, gentle-eyed black woman intercepted her.
“No, chile,” she whispered, taking the weeping girl to her ample bosom. “You come along with me now. I got somethin’ in de kitchen for you—something soft an’ sweet an’ hot from my oven. Don’ you worry yo’ pretty head none over yo’ ma an’ pa. Dey’ll be fine.”
Carol experienced a physical jolt when woman and child vanished suddenly. It was as if she had been torn out of Cami’s body. At that same moment, the fresh paint on the plantation house vanished, too. The swamp closed in again; Elysian Fields fell once more into ruin.
It took Carol several moments to catch her breath. When she could speak again, she demanded of the sphinx-like Choctaw, “What’s happening to me?”
“The same as happened to you long, long ago. But you just now seeing it clear.”
“What about my papa and…” Carol quickly caught herself and corrected her words. “What happened between Edouard and Adele?”
“The same like happens with any man and wife behind closed doors.”
“The Mazarets weren’t like any man and wife,” she said. “Adele hated her husband. But why? Edouard seemed like a gentle man until she pushed him beyond his limits. Imagine not allowing him to kiss his own daughter. Certainly, Cami adored her father.”
Choctaw nodded. “You see good, these people, mam’zelle. That Adele, she a queer one—don’t want her man, but don’t want no other woman to have him neither—not even their own daughter. Bad blood there. Much bad blood!”
Carol shook her head and pulled her coat more closely about her. “I won’t even begin to try to understand how I’m seeing all this. But can’t you tell me at least why?”
“’Cause to prepare you, mam’zelle.”
“Prepare me for what?”
“You see, soon now.”
“I won’t be prepared for anything unless you tell me how all this turned out, Choctaw. What happened to Adele?”
“’Nother seed M’sieur planted that night, but his wife, she don’t want no more baby. When she find out, she go very crazy. She take the buggy out alone in a storm. The levee give way. The buggy gone, the baby gone, Madame Adele, she gone, too, into the river.”
“Oh, my God!” Carol groaned. “What happened to Cami and to Edouard?”
“Look just there.” Again, Choctaw pointed one long finger into the distance.
Carol turned to see the tall-columned mansion draped in funereal bunting. A servant in formal black, his ebony cheeks streaked with tears, stood on the gallery as if expecting callers to pay their respects.
“Who died?” Carol asked.
As if he heard the question, the weeping black servant on the veranda moaned, “De Massa, he gone! And dat pore li’l chile, what’s to become of her?”
The black man turned and went back into the house. Carol followed him, an unseen and uninvited visitor in this house of mourning and despair. Although candles glowed in all the rooms, the place seemed dark and oppressive. The smells of mildew and camphor hung heavy in the humid air. From upstairs came the soft sound of weeping. Carol followed the muffled sound. Fearing what she would find, but knowing she must see for herself, Carol followed the servant into an upstairs chamber. There on the bed lay the body of Edouard Mazaret, looking pale but natural in death.
Carol shifted her gaze to the young woman, gowned in black, who sat with her head bowed, weeping at the bedside. In an eerie flash, she felt herself becoming one with the woman, taking her place to share Camille’s soul.
Camille and Carol were several years older than they had been moments before. Sixteen or there about.
“Mam’zelle Cami?” the servant whispered. “Please, ma’am, don’t cry no mo’. You got to leave right soon fo’ Mulgrove. De Pinards, dey be expectin’ yo’ ‘for’ nightfall.”
“I don’t want to go,” Cami sobbed. “Elysian Fields is my home. I want to stay here.”
“But yo’ papa, he done said with his last breath dat yo’ to go live with his cousins. Dey sent dere boat. It be waitin’ right now fo’ you, down to de dock. Ain’t nothin’ mo’ you can do fo’ yo’ po’ papa here, chile.”
“No! Papa said I should go to New Orleans, to the woman who wears the other gold doubloon.”
The servant made no answer, but leaned over and blew out a candle near the bed. As the flame guttered out, the scene dissolved into a confused rainbow of colors. One minute, Carol felt as if she were tumbling through time and space: in the next she found herself back in the boat, but with the aura of Cami’s sadness still strong in her mind and heart. She had not yet fully separated from the grieving young woman.
“Why do you keep doing that?” Carol demanded of Choctaw in a voice filled with frustration. “What happened to Edouard? What’s going to happen to Cami? Who is the woman in New Orleans?”
“M’sieur Mazaret died of the bad heart back in 1838. Mam’zelle Camille went to her father’s cousins, Morris and Beatrice Pinard, to be raised at Mulgrove Plantation with their own daughter, Lorenna. As for she who wears the other doubloon—in time… in time…”
Carol waited, but the stoic ferryman said no more.
“And that’s all?” she demanded. “End of story?”
She watched him slowly shake his head. “All for
me to tell. The end of the story, mam’zelle, I leave to you.”
“I don’t understand…”
Slowly, Choctaw’s sinewy arm raised, one gnarled finger pointing again. He uttered a single word: “Mulgrove.”
At that moment, the bow of the boat hit the end of a dock. A pair of black hands reached down to grasp Carol’s arms and help her up to the landing.
“Ah swan, Mam’zelle Cami, if yo’ don’ look a fright!” A broad, black face scowled into Carol’s. “You wanna give de mistress palpitations? It’s nigh onto time fo’ de guests to arrive an’ here yo’ is out fishing like yo’ was one of de hands. We best sneak yo’ up de servants’ stairs aroun’ back so Miz Beatrice don’ see yo’ in dat ol’ raggedy frock.”
“But wait…” Carol tried to protest as the stout black mammy tugged at her.
“Ain’t no time to wait,” the woman said, rolling her eyes. “You listen good, chile, an’ do like Maum Zalee tells you. Otherwise, we gonna both be in some kinda pow’ful trouble. Yo’ hear, now?”
Carol looked down at herself and stopped dead in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat. Gone were her slacks and trench coat. As Zalee had said, she was wearing a tattered and dated gown of gray linsey-woolsey with several drooping petticoats underneath. When had she changed? Where were her own clothes?
She glanced back over her shoulder. Choctaw gave her a slight signal that passed for a wave of farewell as he shoved off. Immediately, he was swallowed up in shadows, man and boat vanishing before her eyes. Her heart sank. He’d gone away and left her in this mad place.
“Wait!” she cried.
“Ain’t no time to wait, chile,” the servant insisted. “Yo’jes’ come along with Maum Zalee now. Lordie, lordie, how’m ah ever gone git all dem snarls outta yo’ hair an’ de curls back in it?”
No one they passed as they trudged up the wide lawn seemed the least bit surprised or curious to see Carol Marlowe on the plantation grounds. Zalee smuggled her charge up the narrow servants’ stairs, then breathed a great sigh of relief that they hadn’t run into Morris or Beatrice Pinard along the way.
“Lordie, lordie!” Zalee breathed, big bosom heaving. “Yo’ a caution, honey, an’ have been dese past two year since yo’ come to Mulgrove. But sometimes ah wonder—is ole Zalee up to de task of keepin’ you in tow? You got to give up dese bull-headed, tomboy ways of yours an’ set yo’ pretty self to findin’ a husband. Massa Morris, he tell Miz Beatrice jes’ t’other day, ‘Cousin Cami, she pick her own husband or ah pick one fo’ her.’ An’, honey, he meant right soon now, ah could tell.”
“Never!” Carol actually shrieked the word and stamped her foot at the same time. She felt Cami’s seething rage at the mere thought of someone else choosing a husband for her.
Carol realized suddenly that she was feeling a lot of things foreign to her—emotions and sensations. There was deep resentment toward Morris and Beatrice, two people Carol had yet to meet. There was also a kind of daughterly love toward Zalee that Carol knew Cami had never felt for her own mother, Adele. And most pronounced was a hollow, lonely ache in her heart for her dead father. Was there a man in Camille’s life, Carol wondered, a man she truly loved? Although Carol concentrated very hard, she could feel nothing in Camille Mazaret’s spirit that even approached romantic attachment. Still, she did sense that some shadow of a secret was buried deep in the young woman’s heart, something that Carol had yet to comprehend.
During the next two hours, Carol was scrubbed, brushed, curled, powdered, and trussed to within an inch of her life. When, finally, Zalee and her two young assistants finished their work and the smiling mammy pronounced her charge “fit for the ball,” Carol turned to look at herself in the full-length mirror. She gasped aloud.
Zalee giggled. “Ah knowed ah could do it! You don’ even recognize yo’ own self, do you, honey? Ah could tell under all that river mud there was still a beauty lurking—just a matter of scrubbing yo’ way down to her.”
“A beauty” certainly stared back at Carol from the slightly rippled surface of the old looking glass. A beauty who had been a total stranger until this very day. Carol found herself staring into the brilliant, indigo eyes of Camille Mazaret. Gone was Carol’s recently-cut brown hair, replaced by long, curling tresses of night-black. The young woman in the mirror was shorter than Carol had been—more petite in every way. Her face was perfect to the last feature from her well-shaped mouth, elegant little nose, and sooty lashes to the delicately arched eyebrows below the dramatic widow’s peak high on her forehead.
As she stared at herself—her new self—Camille’s thoughts and personality shoved Carol completely out of the picture. Surprise at her image suddenly faded to be replaced by a strong young will, a determination to find love before she took a husband and so outwit her scheming Cousin Morris.
“You ready, Mam’zelle Cami?” Zalee asked.
Camille gave a quick, resigned nod. “As ready as I’ll ever be for Cousin Morris’s parade of gawking boys.”
“Now, you be nice, honey!” Zalee scolded gently. “Maybe de very one will show up at Mulgrove tonight.”
Cami laughed—a sound as clear and bright as the tinkle of glass wind chimes in a summer breeze, but there was an edge of fatalism to the sound, too. “I wish I could share your optimism, Zalee.” Cami hugged the dear servant, then headed downstairs—head high, back straight, bosom swelled.
Carol had one final, fleeting moment of realizing who she was and the bizarre circumstances she had entered. Then she experienced a moment of severe panic at her predicament. What was she doing here? Why was this happening to her? And Frank! What if he came for her and she had disappeared just like Eileen?
Then familiar harp music floated up from the ballroom below to fill the great house and wipe away any trace of the woman who, such a short time before, had been Carol Marlowe.
No longer did the pitiful little voice have to wail to Cami to come back. Camille Mazaret had returned at last.
Chapter Four
Soft music, crystal chandeliers, the scent of magnolias, eager beaus, and Mademoiselle Camille Mazaret. Everything seemed in perfect tune for the ball that evening at Mulgrove Plantation. Everything, that is, except Cami herself.
Out of step, her mind wandering, Cami muttered an unladylike oath under her breath when her partner stepped on her toes. Her fault, she admitted, still managing to keep the required smile frozen on her face. Only the glassy stare of her bewitching indigo eyes betrayed her boredom, her total frustration with this Creole mating ritual.
For Cami, the whole evening had turned into a dizzying blur of over-eager young males wearing too many smiles and too much pomade, each more determined than the last to convince her what a willing and excellent husband he would make.
Willing, she told herself, to take charge of the vast sugar plantation and the fortune my father left me. Excellent, she added, at pretending sole interest in Edouard Mazaret’s daughter.
Cami had never tried to fool herself. Having inherited her mother’s ebony hair, perfect complexion, and startling eyes, a beauty she might be. Charming she could be, when she chose to use the Mazaret smile and the winning ways handed down to her from her father’s side of the family. Still, she knew that her main attraction was an ill-gotten fortune in gold buried somewhere in the swamps of Elysian Fields.
Rumor had it that Jean Lafitte himself had hidden a king’s ransom somewhere on the Mazaret plantation back around 1815. The gold doubloon Cami wore about her neck—a single piece from the cache her father had unearthed years ago—bore testimony to the fact that the fabled treasure did, in fact, exist. Now, to the victor would go the spoils—Camille Mazaret as a bride, but more importantly, she mused, Lafitte’s long-hidden chests of treasure.
Eagerly and systematically, the plantation families of the parish had sent their sons on this quest, no doubt counting doubloons in their dreams all the while. But so far, no one had captured the key to the gold. That key was Cami’s heart.
/> At the moment, one Gerome Arneau—a head shorter than Cami and far too near-sighted to be graceful on the dance floor—was engaged in trying to win her favor. In the process, he was ruining her best satin slippers with his clumsy, stumbling steps. When finally the dance came to an end, he bowed over Camille’s gloved hand, squeezing her fingers too tightly.
“Mademoiselle, how can I tell you the fullness of my heart at this moment?” He squinted up at her, twitching his thin mustache in something that imitated a love-sick smile.
Cami stifled a yawn. The short, round Gerome, she thought, had more fullness of belly than his heart would ever know. She had counted his repeated returns to the buffet during the evening. Five plates he had devoured with gluttonous delight.
When Gerome finally released Cami’s hand, she stared down in disgust at her white kid glove. Soiled! Gravy, no doubt, or some of the pungent grease from his slicked-down hair.
She sighed and moved away from the dance floor, hoping she could have a few moments to herself. Glancing about the room only reaffirmed an earlier observation. There wasn’t one real man at the ball tonight.
All the plantation owners’ sons were a year or two younger than she, and still, regrettably, acted their age. At eighteen, Cami was older than most Creole maidens. She should have been long-since wed, but her mother’s death in a carriage accident, then her father’s untimely passing a few years later, had kept her in mourning when she should have been entering society. Now, the only eligible bachelors left were bashful boys or culls rejected during earlier seasons. Camille Mazaret had never been one to settle for less than her heart desired. From the cradle, she had been taught by her father to demand the same excellence in others that he expected from her.
She could hear his words ringing in her ears still: “Accept only the very best, Cami dear, be it horseflesh or husband. Always remember you’re a Mazaret. Demand what you deserve.” Then he’d flash that smile of his that could break a heart at fifty paces, chuckle softly, and whisper, “And if they try to pawn off second-best on you, just tell them all to go to the devil!”
Whispers in Time Page 6