“Don’t be an ass, Marchand,” he replied coolly, hoping that the scales being played by the music master and his cohorts at the far end of the chamber masked their hostile exchange.
“Ah, then,” Lafayette replied with a mocking air. “I am happy to have some reassurance that you will not pledge any more of my sister’s legacy in the service of foolhardy building schemes outside the carrè de la ville, such as the one I heard bandied about earlier by you and those uncouth Americans drinking absinthe in your back parlor.”
Why, the blackguard actually had been eavesdropping on his conversation with Jeffries and McCullough!
Julien forced himself to ignore his brother-in-law’s latest insult. The sound of chairs scraping along the floor in the next room alerted him that the rest of his guests would soon be descending upon them.
“May I suggest, Marchand,” Julien replied in as pleasant a tone as he could muster, “that you relieve yourself of any anxiety you may have concerning LaCroix family affairs and confine your concerns to the amount of your losses at the horse track?” Unable to curb his ire, he added, “Though you may be my wife’s brother that gives you no special status here at Reverie as far as I’m concerned. If you continue to stir the pot between Adelaide and me, you may find yourself no longer welcomed here as a guest. Now, if you will excuse me.” He strode up the wide, curving staircase with two specific missions in mind—the first of which was to escape Lafayette Marchand’s highly irritating presence.
Etienne LaCroix lay motionless and mute in a darkened room lit only by the pale rays of a harvest moon filtering through the window. Julien cracked open the door and beheld his father, still as a corpse. He was lying alone, as he had for the past year, in a massive four-poster. Its wooden canopy, draped in blue silk brocade, extended from the top of the mahogany headboard over half the bed.
Maisie, the cook’s assistant, was in the process of gathering up the bowl of pureed rice and milk she had been attempting to feed her patient.
“Was he able to eat anything?” Julien whispered to the slave, who had belonged to his family since her birth.
“Not very much, Mr. Julien,” Maisie replied softly with a discouraged nod in the direction of the half-filled bowl she held. “I’ll just take these things downstairs. My Albert’s gonna sit with Mr. Etienne tonight, with everybody else so busy wi’ da party. He’ll be up soon’s I tell him to.”
“Thank you, Maisie,” Julien said. “Tell Albert I greatly appreciate his watching over Father.”
“I surely will, Mr. Julien,” Maisie said, smiling faintly. “You take care now, y’hear?” she added with the easy familiarity of someone who had long ago played pirates and hide-and-go-seek with him on the banks of the Mississippi as it meandered through Reverie’s fertile acreage.
Julien drew up a cane wicker chair beside his father’s bed and stared at the man who had given him life, but very little in the way of parental affection. Etienne LaCroix had ruled his son’s existence with a determination that had left Julien unsure which thoughts were his own and which had been put there by the almighty patriarch. Well, by God, Julien thought, staring at his father’s sallow, sunken cheeks, it’s time for the son and heir to begin making some decisions on his own!
Etienne suddenly opened his eyes, almost as if he had detected Julien’s rebellious frame of mind. The old man’s head remained stationary, but his eyes shifted to stare at Julien with an intensity that was positively unnerving.
“Good evening, sir,” Julien said, addressing his father in the manner he had been taught since he was a child. “I bring you greetings from all your guests downstairs who asked to be remembered to you.”
Etienne continued to stare at Julien, who shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“Father, can you hear me? Blink once if you understand what I just said… that your guests send you their warmest regards.”
He waited. The chamber was filled with the sounds of the ticking clock on the bedside table and the chatter of night locusts buzzing outside the tall windows that opened onto the second-story gallery.
Etienne LaCroix found the energy to blink. Once.
“Yes, you understand me,” he cried, relief flooding over him like water that sluiced through the rice fields downriver.
While part of his brain began to formulate the best way to approach the subject uppermost on his mind, Julien described the colorful scene taking place downstairs. He gave an account of the successful conclusion to this autumn’s cane harvest, the food-laden tables welcoming the fifty-some guests entertained this night at Reverie, as well as the dancers poised to cavort in quadrilles, polkas, and two-step waltzes across the polished cypress floors to the music produced by Monsieur Grammont and his fellow players.
His father kept his lifeless eyes, the color of gray-blue slate, riveted on his son’s.
“And I expect, Father, that the profits this year should exceed any we’ve been privileged to enjoy, which means… ah,” he added delicately, “that warehouse space in New Orleans to store our hogsheads and those of neighboring plantations will be scarce.”
He allowed this statement to hang in the air, hovering above the finely embroidered linen coverlet pulled up to his father’s chin. Once again Julien shifted in the woven reed chair he had drawn up beside his father’s bed.
“You know, Father,” he said, as if a thought had just occurred to him. “It might make quite a lot of sense if we approach… ah… if we inquire of Henri’s… friend, Mademoiselle Fouché… whether she might be willing to trade that property that you and Henri deeded her for something else of equal value. That way we could build a larger warehouse nearer the wharves and—”
Etienne LaCroix’s eyes suddenly widened, and his mouth twisted into a grotesque grimace. His lids began to open and close in rapid succession.
Blink, blink. Blink, blink. Blink, blink.
No! No! No!
Julien stared at his father as his own outrage began to bubble up, a match for the unspoken fury that the titular head of the LaCroix family expressed in a silence so deafening, it roared in Julien’s ears. As usual, Julien thought bitterly, Etienne had to be in control, had to rule with an iron fist, even from the living grave this well-appointed bedroom had become! Not once had his father ever embraced any of his ideas or even complimented him for having them. Not once had the man given any indication that his only son would one day assume the mantle of family leadership.
Julien’s mind was awhirl, his thoughts a seething cauldron of slights, affronts, and contempt that his father had exhibited toward him his entire life! Julien had been forced to swallow his sire’s scorn and utter disregard whenever he’d tried to introduce modern methods or suggested alternative ways to cultivate the LaCroix land in this new age of steam power.
Etienne now narrowed his eyes in a soundless declaration that seemed to his son to seethe with hatred.
Blink, blink! Blink, blink! Blink, blink!
No! You will not undo what Henri and I have done! No! No!
Julien jumped to his feet and stood beside his father’s bed, his hands balled into tight fists. It was all he could do to keep himself from smashing his father’s face—or better yet, yank the soft feather pillow from behind Etienne’s greasy yellowed hair and push its plush linen surface against his father’s nose and mouth.
What did the Canal Street land mean to the man at this stage in his life? The property couldn’t have mattered very much to his father, if he had been willing to allow Henri to deed it over to the slut that his partner had kept on Rampart Street.
Martine.
Julien soundlessly retracted his epithet. Martine Fouché was no slut. She was the most beautiful, voluptuous, entrancing woman he’d ever met, and he now wanted her with the same passion and single-mindedness that he wanted the Canal Street land.
And by God, he would have both!
Martine would eventually see reason, especially if he wooed her—as he ardently wished to do—and gave her property or funds o
f more than the value of her bequest.
“Tomorrow I shall prepare a document that I want you to sign that states you did not intend to deed over that Canal Street land,” he declared, staring down coldly at the helpless shell his father had become. “That at the time you signed the deed and witnessed Henri’s will, you had been dosed with an excess of laudanum and did not know what you were about.”
In response, his father’s hollow cheeks sucked in against his teeth as if he’d tasted the foulest tincture Dr. LeMoyne could dispense. Julien, however, ignored this obvious sign of displeasure and continued in a low voice.
“This statement, signed with your X, shall provide Mademoiselle Fouché with something comparable on Rampart Street, and—”
Blink, blink!
No! You may not void that deed!
Julien realized with sudden dread that Etienne LaCroix would fight until the very moment when he breathed his last. The old tyrant would never do the decent, graceful thing and transfer his empire to the next generation, even if not doing so meant leaving his hard-won legacy in a shambles of idiotic transactions and mismanagement endorsed by that gambling roue, Lafayette Marchand!
“No? You do not wish to sign? Well, dear Father,” he said with bitter resentment. “We shall see about that! One man’s X will appear as good as another’s! I shall have the Canal Street land, and you and Lafayette Marchand won’t be able to do a single thing to stand in my way, you paralytic bastard!”
Before he could complete his tirade, he heard the rustle of silk skirts.
“Dear God in heaven, Julien, how dare you call your poor, sick father a… a—that terrible word you just uttered.”
Julien’s young wife, plump as an overfed partridge, filled the doorway leading to his father’s sickroom. Her face was still pretty, in a dumpling sort of way—all rounded cheeks and clear skin, though the point of her chin now melded into a fold of flesh that slanted toward her lacy collar with no definition of a neck in sight. Her breasts had grown enormously in the year they’d been married, almost in direct proportion to the amount of whipping cream and chocolate éclairs she had consumed voraciously at their dining table. When he made love to his wife—or attempted to—he did his best to whet his appetite by imagining those lolling pillows of flesh to be mounds of freshly churned butterfat, turning to silky cream that he could suck dry.
Much to his amazement, he suddenly felt a stirring in his groin as a result of such licentious thoughts. He turned his back on his father and strode to his wife’s side.
“He’s being difficult as usual,” he said impatiently. “It’s time we stopped treating him as if he were the Etienne LaCroix of old. The man’s unable to speak or think.” He stared at his wife’s enormous taffeta-cloaked bosom. For some reason he yearned to bury himself in its fleshy folds and forget the burdens of running a huge plantation with no true authority at his command.
“Etienne is perfectly lucid,” his wife countered, her shifting eyes communicating her discomfort at the suggestive way in which he was regarding her bodice. “Why were you shouting at your father? The guests might hear.”
“I don’t give a damn about our guests!” Julien said, reaching with his right hand to cup her silk-clad breast in his palm. “I need a drink.”
“Albert can fetch you one,” Adelaide replied stiffly, staring beyond his shoulder as if she were examining the wallpaper on the opposite side of the bedchamber. “He’s downstairs.” Julien gazed at her impassive expression. Partly as an experiment to gauge his wife’s reaction, he provocatively pressed his thumb against the nipple faintly outlined beneath the silken fabric. “Julien!” she protested, her voice edged with anxiety. “Stop this!” She cast a frantic glance at the still form staring at them from the bed. “Your father!”
“Stop?” he asked, palming her other breast with his free hand and ignoring Etienne’s silent, oppressive presence. “Why should I stop? Does this not give you an ounce of pleasure, my dear wife? Or this?” His thumbs massaged his wife’s bodice in rhythmic circles, and he felt himself grow hard beneath his trousers.
“No, it doesn’t,” she retorted, taking a step backward. “Your behavior revolts me!”
“And when I kiss you?” he inquired, the anger he felt toward his father rising like a gulf tide surging up the river. “I’ve been told by certain mademoiselles on the Champs Elysées that I do this quite expertly…” he murmured, pulling her roughly to him in an agony of frustration. His mouth found hers closed and clamped tight against her teeth. Adelaide had rebuffed his polite advances for months now. And polite or not, this evening would only prove to be more of the same—a state of affairs that goaded him to insinuate his tongue between his wife’s lips.
“Julien!” she spat. She pushed hard against his chest, her stout arms galvanized with sudden strength. They broke apart, both panting from exertion. “How dare you!” she said, her massive bosom heaving in indignation.
“And how dare you, madam,” he replied with as much dignity as he could summon under the circumstances. “How dare you close your bedchamber door to your husband all these months! Have you a problem you would like to share with me?” he mocked. “Or perhaps you fear it will be I whose ardor will evaporate, should I see you naked as the unappetizing pig you’ve become!”
“Julien…” she cried, her eyes suddenly welling with tears. “Why are you so angry? Why are you—”
“Angry? Loving? Respectful? Patient?” he asked in quick succession, the heat of barely leashed fury staining his cheeks. “It matters not what face or feeling I present before you, Adelaide. You are no wife to me, and since our dreadful honeymoon, you hold little attraction for me, beyond a mere receptacle for my lust. And now,” he said with loathing, both for her treatment of him since their wedding night, and the humiliation he had long suffered at his father’s hands, “I do not even desire you as that.”
And before Adelaide could respond, the heir to Reverie Plantation bolted past his bride of less than two years, charged down the back stairs, and out the kitchen door. In a blind rage he made his way for the dock. His path was illuminated by the harvest moon that shone down from a clear night sky onto the swiftly flowing water that coursed toward New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.
***
The sensation of bachelor André Duvallon’s hand upon Mrs. Randall McCullough’s back felt sinfully delicious as they whirled around the dance floor.
One-two-three… one-two-three…
Corlis thrilled to the seductive rhythm of the small orchestra playing music for the daring new dance from Vienna, the two-step waltz. Not since her marriage had she been so physically close to an unmarried man in a public place, and she found it delightful, even if the underarms of her pale green gown were sopping wet. If only the dancing could go on forever, she thought dreamily, as her long silk skirts glided gracefully across the surface of the parlor’s polished cypress floors. If only she had met a man like André first…
“Your auburn hair is like fire,” André said softly, glancing at the top of her head with a grave smile as he expertly avoided less agile couples twirling around the converted ballroom. “It’s rather like you, my dear Corlis… full of light and heat and vibrancy.”
At dinner they had agreed to call each other by their first names, although Corlis knew she should never have condescended to André’s bold suggestion. She glanced at his ink-black mane and yearned to tell him how handsome he looked. A light, giddy feeling had taken possession of her, almost as if someone other than the daughter of Elizabeth and Enoch Bell of the Pittsburgh Bells were cavorting at Reverie Plantation’s annual roulaison. Randall and Ian had retired to the side veranda, smoking cigars and talking business as best they could considering the sorry state of their spoken French. For his part, André had been an absolute dear and insisted that he and Corlis converse in English.
The music ceased, and Monsieur Grammont announced that the favorite activity of the sugarcane harvest was indeed about to get under way outside on th
e veranda.
“The taffy pull will commence in five minutes!” the conductor declared, and was greeted by applause and a burst of excited chatter from the crowd.
“Is it acceptable among you Creoles for a distinguished banker to take part in the taffy pull?” Corlis asked laughingly of André, doing her utmost to mask her nervousness at the unexpected warmth and tingling anticipation that continued to flutter in her abdomen.
“Ah, the taffy pull,” André murmured. He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially in her ear. “It provides us with a perfect opportunity to explore the plantation, nest-ce pas?”
Without waiting for her response, André offered Corlis his arm. “If you accept my invitation to take a stroll instead,” he suggested with a mischievous glint in his eye, “it will save those lovely hands of yours from blisters. And besides, we even might find a breath of fresh air in the cool of the oak grove.”
Without replying, she clasped his proffered arm and strolled along with the guests surging past the front door and into the warm evening air. The atmosphere outside was redolent with the scent of pink jasmine blended with a lingering aroma of burning sugar from the cane fields surrounding the house.
As the animated partygoers chose sides for the taffy pull, Corlis and André wandered, unnoticed, down the broad front stairs onto the grass. Initially Corlis hesitated to place her satin slipper on the ground for fear of snakes. However, André appeared unafraid of such encounters and guided her down a gravel path in the direction of one of the garçonnières that were attached to both sides of the main house. These solid brick structures, Corlis had been informed by a servant, who had introduced herself as Maisie, were additions that had been built by Etienne LaCroix to accommodate visiting bachelors so that they would not be tempted to wander down the halls of the mansion where the daughters of the family slept.
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