Forbidden Affair

by Patti Beckman

  Later that night, Jacquelyn lay on the big canopied bed, too agitated to sleep. From an open window came the perfume of magnolia blossoms and the song of a night bird. On an impulse, she put on slippers and a robe and picked up a flashlight she'd found on the dresser. She went downstairs and quietly let herself out a side door. The full moon had risen above the moss-draped cypress trees at the rim of the swamp and had coated the ruins of Cypress Halls with a silvery patina.

  Brutus came snarling out of the darkness. "It's only me, you ugly monster," she said, trying not to sound nervous. She'd read somewhere that the scent of human fear enraged mean dogs.

  Either she fooled him, or somewhere in the instincts of his murky, vicious brain he had accepted the fact that she belonged there. He sniffed around her for a bit, then slunk off into the darkness again.

  Jacquelyn moved around back of the house to the garden. This vast formal garden covering several acres had once been as much of a showplace as the house itself. She could see that Uncle Luther had already begun restoration here in the garden. The tangled undergrowth had been cleared away. The hedges that bordered the graveled paths had been trimmed. The winding paths took her past lush semitropical growths of palmettoes and Spanish dagger, flowering oleanders and crepe myrtle, the magnolias, azaleas, camellias and lilies.

  A series of terraces led down to a sunken rose garden. Here was the garden's marble statuary, looking like pale ghosts in the shadows. The life-size classical figures were also casualties of time. Venus had been decapitated. The discus thrower lacked an arm. Time and rain had mottled the marble. Some of the statues were almost totally cloaked with vines.

  Beyond this edge of the garden, under a spread of great oaks, was Uncle Luther's carefully tended roque court. Along with his record library of classical music, the game of roque was Uncle Luther's great passion in life. A very distant cousin of lawn croquet, roque, played the way Uncle Luther played it, became a vicious challenge of skill and psychology. Jacquelyn could, with very little imagination, hear those hard rubber balls caroming off the steel banks with the lethal "smack!" of a ricocheting bullet.

  Jacquelyn sat on a stone bench and gazed through the leafy fringes of banana leaves at the outlines of the big house. In that nostalgic setting, childhood memories assailed her. There had been four of them: her brother Gerrard, Jacquelyn, and Austin D'Raulde and his beautiful sister, Natalie. They had been inseparable when they were children. They had played marvelous games of hide-and-seek here in the tangled jungle of the old garden, and they had ventured into the edges of the swamp in search of Jean Laffitte's buried treasure that everyone on the bayou knew for certain had to be around here someplace.

  But the big house had been the real storybook setting for their childish imaginations. They had spent many rainy days on its galleries and exploring the large rooms. The jagged wound left by the Civil War cannonball that had crashed through the ballroom had been material for a hundred imaginary childhood dreams. Gerrard and Austin fought endless duels with willow stick rapiers under the oaks, where, according to Uncle Luther, many real duels had been fought a century ago.

  Natalie, with her vivid imagination, had made up the plots of most of the stories the children had acted out. It was she who had gotten the idea that somewhere hidden in the walls of the mansion was a lost map of the Laffitte treasure, and the search for it had gone on all through their childhood.

  It was Natalie who had seen the ghost of Cypress Halls and had talked the others into some bone-chilling night watches to try to catch sight of it. In their childish fantasies, they had heard plenty of sounds—footsteps, creaking doors, sighs—but only Natalie claimed to have seen the ghostly wraith one night, descending the great spiral stairway. Had it been only a joke, had she been lying for the sheer fun of it, or had the girl really imagined she saw the specter that occupied so many of their games?

  Natalie, whose beauty as a child had been almost unreal! Her hair and eyes were jet black and her skin was as delicate and translucent as the finest, most fragile china. She had an aristocratic nose, a proud tilt to her chin, and sensual lips. As children, Natalie and Jacquelyn had been as close as sisters, loving each other with a deep bond of affection. But when they reached adolescence, an underlying rivalry sprang up between them. It hurt her to see her relationship with her closest friend marred. Why had they grown apart? Had it been some kind of basic female conflict? Was Natalie jealous of Jacquelyn's position in Uncle Luther's household and her claim on Cypress Halls? Or, Jacquelyn asked her own heart with a blush of shame, had the fault been her own—some kind of unconscious teenage jealousy over Natalie's beauty?

  Jacquelyn's thoughts were drawn further into the past. Memories crowded her reverie like turning pages of a yellowed scrapbook. Natalie and her brother, Austin, came from a proud old Creole family that dated back to the first French settlers. But their family plantation house had burned to the ground in the Civil War, and the last few remaining acres of their once vast lands had been sold or mortgaged by their father. They had lived in a modest frame house on the bayou. Their father did some trading and shipping, though he depended mostly on the charity of relatives in New Orleans who were somewhat better off.

  There was rumored to be a streak of insanity in their family. How true that was, Jacquelyn wasn't sure, but she did know their mother had had an incurable mental breakdown and had died in a state institution for the insane. Mr. D'Raulde completed his job of drinking himself to death a few years later. Then Uncle Luther, who had been close to the family, saw that Austin and Natalie were properly raised by Luther's widowed sister-in-law, Perforce.

  Austin and Jacquelyn had always been close. But Natalie was jealous of the fact that Jacquelyn and Gerrard were not as poor as she and Austin were. Jacquelyn's mother, who was Uncle Luther's sister, had married Gus La Salle, a jolly, easygoing Acadian. He operated a store in the bayou settlement near Cypress Halls. Gerrard and Jacquelyn were born in their neat white frame cottage.

  It was when Jacquelyn was six and her brother eight that her parents were killed in a fire that burned their home to the ground. Both children might have perished in that fire, too, but they had been spending the week at Uncle Luther's home, as they often did. From that time on, they remained at Cypress Halls and were raised by Uncle Luther and Hattie.

  As they grew up, Uncle Luther, openly dubious about the efficacy of public school education, made certain they became familiar with his library of books and records. Under the great columns of the neglected mansion, Jacquelyn made lasting friendships with the characters between the covers of Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Ivanhoe, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, Treasure Island and many others. By the time she was in high school, she had progressed to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Thoreau.

  Jacquelyn and Gerrard once made bets as to who could read Jane Eyre by candlelight inside one of the deserted rooms of the main section of Cypress Halls at midnight. Gerrard won. It had been an interesting childhood.

  The children had paired off in natural fashion. Jacquelyn was Austin's girl, and Gerrard and Natalie were childhood sweethearts. When they were grown, they would have a double wedding and go right on living here on the bayou in the shadow of Cypress Halls for the rest of their days.

  But their childhood dreams had met a different fate. Gerrard was destined to leave Natalie, bitter and disillusioned, to seek a new life far away. And as for Austin and Jacquelyn, Scott McCrann was destined to come between them.

  Scott had come into her life when she was still in high school. His father, who had considerable capital, had bought into the shrimping business in the area, acquiring a fleet of shrimp boats. He also bought Glen Oaks, a neighboring antebellum mansion, and had it completely renovated.

  Jacquelyn was to discover an overwhelming love in Scott's arms. But a bitter quarrel had torn them apart. Then Scott had revealed his ruthless streak. His masculine pride wounded, demanding revenge, he had struck back at her by cruelly running her brother out of business. She
had hated Scott ever since.

  Jacquelyn sighed and told herself it was pointless to start thinking about the past. She arose from the garden bench and started back to the north wing of the house. On her way, she again encountered Brutus, who sniffed menacingly in her direction and bared his teeth silently but let her pass. She went quietly to her room and took a sleeping pill.

  The next morning, with daylight streaming through her window and the sound of voices downstairs, the gloom and depression of the night before abated somewhat.

  Jacquelyn dressed in a sundress with a flared skirt. September could be muggy and warm, and she hated the heat. She slipped into a pair of thin-strapped sandals with a small heel. Her stiff joints were loosening up, and the bruises were slowly fading. She felt almost normal, except for an ache in her heart for a past gone forever and a future that was never to be.

  Downstairs, Jacquelyn found Uncle Luther and Austin having breakfast on the terrace.

  "Good morning," she said, smiling.

  "Good morning," Austin said, rising and pulling out a chair for her. His dark eyes roved over her approvingly. It flattered her when a man looked at her like that, but only one man could send a lightning bolt through her with his glance, and he was a man she had learned to hate.

  "I was hoping you would come down in time to join us," Uncle Luther said, rising and bending slightly from the waist in a small, courtly bow.

  "You should have had Hattie call me," Jacquelyn apologized. "I'm not usually this lazy."

  "Oh, you need the rest," Uncle Luther said. "Anyway, you're dressed now and in plenty of time for some of Hattie's delicious strawberry pancakes."

  "I have to drive over to LaMere after breakfast, Jacquelyn," Austin said. "Would you like to go along for the ride?"

  "I'd love to," Jacquelyn said. "Perhaps I can see Aunt Perforce while we are there."

  Austin smiled over his cup of coffee and nodded.

  Jacquelyn found her appetite whetted again by Hattie's great cooking and she devoured a stack of pancakes and a glass of milk.

  She and Uncle Luther chatted casually with Austin, and she realized Uncle Luther was pointedly not pressing her about a decision on remodeling Cypress Halls. For that she was grateful. She still hadn't made up her mind, and last night's reminiscing out in the garden only served to confuse her more about what she should do. Perhaps she should decline Uncle Luther's offer and return to New Orleans immediately, before she had the misfortune to run into Scott. At least now, before she saw him in person again, she had a semblance of her wits about her.

  Thirty minutes later, Jacquelyn and Austin were in the car on the way to the little bayou settlement, LaMere, the nearest community to Cypress Halls.

  "Did you know Uncle Luther has invited a crowd over on Friday for a jambalaya?" Austin asked as they drove along a narrow road atop a levee flanking a bayou.

  "No. He hadn't told me."

  "Yes, a kind of family gathering, I suppose you would say, to welcome you home. Everyone will be there."

  Austin took his eyes from the road and looked directly at her as he had said "everyone." Apprehension streaked through Jacquelyn. "Everyone" would include his sister, Natalie and… Scott McCrann. If Austin was judging her reaction, she wondered if the sudden rush of warmth to her cheeks was very noticeable.

  Jacquelyn became quiet and introspective on the twenty-minute ride to LaMere. The small cluster of frame buildings included a general store, a filling station, a post office, a marine repair shop and a dance hall. She commented, "It hasn't changed much."

  "No reason why it should," Austin replied. "Not much else is needed by the people who live here along the bayou. They trap the nutria, catch the crayfish, get to the dance hall on Saturday night and the little Catholic church on Sunday morning, same as their ancestors have done for the past hundred years or so."

  "It's a way of life—not a bad one, I suspect."

  "There are worse these days," Austin agreed. "I have to go to the post office, then pick up some things for Uncle Luther at the general store. Do you want to go with me or stop off to see Aunt Perforce?"

  "Oh, I'd really like to see her, Austin. Do you mind?"

  "Of course not," Austin said with a touch of disappointment. In spite of the fact that Austin had known for some time that Jacquelyn didn't love him, he seemed never to give up hope that she would someday change her mind.

  He pulled up before a small frame house enclosed by a white picket fence. He reached over and their fingers entwined. "I'll be back in a little while."

  She squeezed his hand fondly. Although she didn't love him in a romantic way, she felt strongly that special closeness they shared. If Scott hadn't come along when he did, Jacquelyn would probably never have known that true love can shake one to her foundations and take one's breath away. Most likely, she would have accepted her relationship with Austin as logically leading to the altar and would be married to him now. If that had happened, life certainly would be much simpler.

  Austin reached over and opened the door for her. She stepped out, entered Aunt Perforce's front yard through the gate and went up to her front door and knocked.

  "Jacquelyn La Salle!" came the high-pitched voice. "Well, I heard you were back at your Uncle Luther's for a visit. Come in, child, come in."

  Aunt Perforce, like the town of LaMere, had changed little. She was as tall and strong as ever, and her glittering black eyes were, if anything, more piercing. Her home had become more cluttered, if that was possible. Aunt Perforce never threw anything away. Consequently, every table and chair was piled high with old newspapers and magazines. Astrology was Aunt Perforce's ruling passion in life. Books on the subject filled many shelves.

  She moved an armful of newspapers from a chair so Jacquelyn could sit. Then she insisted on brewing a cup of alfalfa tea, which she said would be of therapeutic value during Jacquelyn's convalescence.

  "They told me about the terrible accident you had." Aunt Perforce clucked her tongue. "You must be very careful for the next several weeks, Jacquelyn. Your stars are in a critical position. There could be much danger for you."

  Jacquelyn listened to Aunt Perforce with a tolerant inward smile. She forced herself to swallow some of the noxious-tasting concoction her aunt had brewed and looked around at the familiar dusty, cluttered room. How often she had played here with Austin and Natalie! After their mother had been committed to the state institution and their father had died, they had been raised by Aunt Perforce, a distant relative, with Uncle Luther's financial help.

  "How long will you be staying at Cypress Halls, Jacquelyn?" she asked. She arranged herself comfortably in a rocking chair with her cup of tea, which she sipped with unexplained relish.

  "It could be for a while," Jacquelyn admitted. "Uncle Luther has asked me to help him restore Cypress Halls." While she still hadn't decided whether to accept Uncle Luther's offer, Jacquelyn found this a good time to give the prospect a try and see how she felt about it. By admitting the possibility to Aunt Perforce, she was trying it on for size. She rather liked the feel of it.

  "He's quite insane, you know," Aunt Perforce said matter-of-factly, as if the fact were common knowledge. "But he's a Scorpio and they tend to get that way—domineering, ordering everyone about. He made up his mind as a young man he was going to rebuild that old monstrosity, and the devil himself couldn't stand in his way." Aunt Perforce crossed herself.

  Had it been anyone else speaking, Jacquelyn would have taken offense at such an outrageous remark. But she was accustomed to Aunt Perforce's rantings about Uncle Luther and so just smiled indulgently.

  "It's been a lifelong dream of his," Jacquelyn said, "and now he can afford to do it."

  "Yes, I know all about the deal he made," Aunt Perforce said. "And I also know Luther has plans for you to refurbish the old place. So you'll be back here, and, of course, you'll see Scott McCrann again. And there will be trouble between you and Natalie."

  Jacquelyn felt a stinging rush of warmth to her
cheeks. Aunt Perforce could be painfully blunt, and blamed that characteristic on having been born under the sign of Sagittarius.

  "What do you mean, there will be trouble between Natalie and me?"

  "When your brother Gerrard left, Natalie was heartbroken. You know they'd been childhood sweethearts. But then, perhaps on the rebound, she began seeing Scott McCrann. I understand they're having quite a love affair."

  Jacquelyn almost strangled on the words that she forced herself to utter. "What's that to me? I have no interest in Scott anymore."

  "My dear, you may fool yourself, but you can't fool me," Aunt Perforce said confidently. "Don't you think I've spent enough time casting all of your horoscopes? You and Scott were meant for each other. But there is destined to be a great deal of conflict in your relationship before you can work out the differences that divide you."

  "We'll never work out our differences," Jacquelyn said coolly. "It's too late for that. The chasm is too wide."

  "Don't be too sure," Aunt Perforce corrected her. "Why do you think you came back here? I'll tell you. Because strong forces arranged it. You must be careful in your dealings with Natalie and Scott. Fortunately, you are a Capricorn and the Saturn influence makes you reserved and thoughtful and quite capable in practical matters. But you Capri-corns are also capricious when it comes to emotional matters, and that is where trouble could lie…"

  "Don't worry, Aunt Perforce," Jacquelyn said. "I don't plan to see much of Scott. I won't have any reason to. What was between us is over. Dead. Forever."

  "Don't be fooled, Jacquelyn," Aunt Perforce said knowingly. "You can't refurbish Cypress Halls without encountering Scott almost daily. He'll expect you to consult with him regularly, you know."