Julien glanced at the large bed, a duplicate of the beds to be found in sleeping chambers throughout Reverie Plantation. In fact, he and Adelaide had been given an identical one as a wedding present from his father.
“Perhaps… later…” he murmured, pushing from his mind the woeful memory of his wedding night with Adelaide. “For now, I am exquisitely happy to be just where I am—with perhaps this exception.” He moved farther up the chaise. “May I touch you, Martine?” he asked solemnly. She nodded, smiling faintly. His fingers grazed her right breast, and he heard her swift intake of breath. “There? And… there?”
She cupped her hand over his and pressed his fingers more firmly into her own flesh. “No one has ever asked before they touched me, Julien,” she said, and he thought he saw tears prick the corners of her eyes.
“Oh, my darling Martine…” he replied, pulling her lithe golden body into his arms, “I will always ask. I ask because I want you to know how much I desire you… how much I wish to—”
But Martine put a slender finger to his lips to still his words.
“And may I tell you, too, what I desire?” she inquired, gazing intently into his eyes. “Is that permitted as well in this revolutionary relationship you have sworn we are to have, Julien LaCroix?”
Julien was somewhat taken aback by her assertiveness. And then he laughed aloud. She was testing him, testing his sincerity. She probably always would. “And what would you have me do this very second?” he retorted with a mocking smile.
“I would have you take me to bed,” she said simply, pointing to the enormous bed and its lustrous silk hangings. With no warning she leaned forward and began to kiss him with an intensity that swelled like the scent of night-blooming jasmine on a sultry breeze. With the instincts of a jealous man, Julien suspected that the fervor of her embrace was an attempt to blot out memories of other candlelit evenings in this very boudoir.
“And you do not fear the ghost of Henri Girard lurking in this chamber?” he asked soberly. He heard her breath catch and felt her stiffen in his arms.
“Why say such things?” she chided, pulling away from him.
“Perhaps because… I… am… jealous,” he replied ruefully.
Martine looked him squarely in the eyes and declared, “Let us be done with the subject once and for all!”
“I doubt it’s such a simple thing—”
“I would not have entered into this agreement unless I could come to you willingly, Julien. I mourn Henri’s passing—yes,” she said, slipping from his embrace and gliding toward the silken coverlet that she proceeded to pull off the mattress and throw to the floor. “But we will never achieve any type of union if you remain jealous of a ghost!”
Julien was startled by the ferocity of her words—and pleased. He strode swiftly across the room and enfolded her in his arms, pressing her voluptuous form against his chest.
“Do I dare tell you how much I’ve longed for this?” he murmured into her dark hair. “Do I dare reveal how empty this part of my life has been… this linking of bodies?”
“This is all so strange,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around him willingly, “that you should say such things about yourself to me… that you—”
“I know why Henri wanted you to be safe, and why he gave you the land,” Julien interrupted in a low voice as he began to kiss her lips, her cheeks, her ear. “He knew the secret to happiness, too! He knew that by giving freely to you, he would get back a hundredfold.”
Again he felt Martine stiffen in his embrace.
“Please! I beg of you, Julien,” she murmured hoarsely. “Do not compare yourself with Henri! He was a dear, sweet man, but you are totally different from each other. Let us have only two people here in this bedchamber. Just Julien and Martine! It is our only chance for the happiness we both desire.”
“I’m sorry…” he said humbly as she pressed her body hard against his. “I have so much to learn of these things.”
“And so you do,” she whispered seductively, inserting the point of her tongue into his ear. “And I am skilled at teaching you whatever you wish to know.” Her throaty laugh bubbled. “As an example…” She deliberately pressed her torso more firmly against his, moving her hips rhythmically. “This is what can excite a woman, Julien… yes! That’s right! Not wild, unbridled motions that you thought the whores of Paris would find manly.”
“Why, mademoiselle… I am truly shocked,” he said with a mocking smile.
“It is an art to slowly heat both partners to the boiling point,” she persisted, reaching between them and guiding his hand to lightly stroke her. “So few men realize that…” she whispered as her hips continued to undulate slowly, building to a torturous tempo that drove Julien nearly mad with longing.
“Oh… Martine,” he said softly. “Is it your belief, then, that if a man takes time to stir his partner’s fires… he will be repaid in full measure?”
“But of course!” She playfully brushed his hands aside to allow her own gentle exploration. “You feel it already, do you not, Julien? You are an apt pupil, monsieur,” she added in a mischievous tone of voice.
And then they fell effortlessly upon the wide expanse of mattress. Slowly, and with agonizing deliberation, they removed each other’s clothing, article by article, until they lay naked in the golden light cast by the flickering tapers overhead.
Martine stretched out next to him on her side, her head cradled in the palm of her hand. The long, slender fingers of her free hand played delicately up and down his torso, wandering dangerously close to his groin, where his desire for her was ferociously evident. Her long nails sent delicious chills to the very base of his spine. He longed to smother the length of her with his own body, but something in her manner, in the entire direction that their union seemed to be heading, stayed his actions. Instead, he allowed her the freedom and the time to make her own explorations of his skin, his contours… the very essence of his physical self. And in doing so, he learned much about her tender sensibilities… her generosity of spirit… the way in which she gave, as well as received.
And then, to his joy and amazement, she began kissing him on the same spots where her hands had been lightly caressing him. Excited currents coursed through him like the surging, flowing waters he encountered on the frantic trip downriver to New Orleans.
In one gloriously fluid movement, she was hovering above him, a golden-skinned angel with long, glistening hair that gathered like a ring of black fire about her shoulders and singed the voluptuous curve of her breasts. With touching dignity she seized the object of her desire and placed it at the entrance of her most secret self. “May I?” she asked quietly, her mesmerizing caramel-colored eyes staring boldly into his own.
He reached up, placing his palms on either side of her narrow waist above hips that flared in perfect proportion to her magnificent, full breasts. Slowly, confidently, he pulled her toward his pelvis. He inhaled deeply of her warm scent.
“Jesu!” she cried, closing her eyes as she sank on top of him and flung her arms around his shoulders. “There are things, dearest Julien, you have mastered brilliantly.”
“You are the inventive one,” he protested softly. “I never did… exactly this… before in my life.”
“No, cher? Neither have I. Not precisely… this.”
And then the river on which they sailed ebbed and flowed in rhythmic swells, like the spring tides along the Delta—strong and unstoppable—until the moon rose. Not the full harvest moon, but nearly so. Shafts of golden light played across their tangled bodies lying contentedly in a bed that had been carved by skilled black craftsmen for the pleasures of their white masters.
As for Julien and Martine, they were oblivious to all but the sound of each other’s breathing and their serene drift toward sleep.
Chapter 14
March 12
Without warning, a motorcycle backfired on Common Street.
“Whoa!” Corlis cried, harshly jolted back to the present.
Julien and Martine—in bed!
Corlis seriously began to wonder if she was becoming some sort of paranormal Peeping Thomasina!
She raised her eyes and absorbed the sight of the deserted warehouse’s gloomy interior. Then she glanced down at her hand. In it she held a half-eaten praline. The candy’s sweetish aroma was the last thing she remembered before the onslaught of the panorama at Reverie Plantation and the intimate scene that had transpired in Martine’s little cottage on Rampart Street.
How could she have witnessed all that? How would she know about the most personal thoughts and emotions belonging to people who lived more than a century ago? Even her ancestress Corlis Bell McCullough herself wouldn’t have been privy to the secrets she had seen.
Corlis was shaken, and not a little aroused, by the memory of the passionate lovemaking. Except for King’s brief kiss in the courtyard of his house, it had been a long time since she had been touched intimately by a man. Furthermore, she hadn’t merely seen these visions in the French Quarter and upriver, she’d inhaled them. The smell of burning sugarcane fields came back to her in a rush.
Scent!
Bubbling molasses. Lilies. Incense. Mold and decay.
What if a particular fragrance or aroma had the power to trigger deeply ingrained memories in people linked by family ties and through associations originating in the distant past?
Corlis suddenly recalled a book that her mother had given her once for Christmas. It had been titled Aromatherapy and the Mind. To be polite, Corlis had glanced at it and later stored the volume on her shelf as yet one more example of a gift that her mother would have preferred someone give her. In the preface, however, Corlis vaguely recalled the author postulating that “scent offered a direct route to the unconscious.” The question was: whose unconscious?
A dozen images collided in her mind’s eye of a house that recalled Gone with the Wind, a heavy-set woman in frothy crinolines sobbing on a quilted mattress, and a beautiful quadroon with come-hither eyes, languidly stretched out on a blood-red chaise longue.
Corlis shook her head. A dust-laden shaft of light illuminated the wooden door that opened on to Common Street. Normal life was taking place just outside the building, so how had all this happened to her? And for what purpose? To what end? What if the explanation for all this was nothing more complicated than that she was going out of her mind?
She suddenly made a beeline for the warehouse exit. Flinging open the door, she stood on the sidewalk in the descending March dusk, enormously grateful for the sight of ordinary motor traffic. She leaned weakly against the exterior of the brick building, reassured somewhat by its feeling of solidity, and gave concentrated thought to the possible causes of such out-of-body experiences.
She knew Aunt Marge would ask rhetorically: What do various pieces of evidence have in common?
Cautiously, Corlis raised the praline to her nostrils and inhaled, as she had earlier. The smell of exhaust from the cars going by overwhelmed the candy’s distinctive sweetish aroma. She was grateful when the world around her remained in place. Yet something had happened to her inside that warehouse! The book that her mother had given her said that one’s sense of smell, of all the five senses, had the greatest power to stir the memory, stimulate one’s feelings, or create a mood. What had happened to her this time went far beyond that!
She set off down Common Street toward her car, mulling over each bizarre experience she’d encountered since December. She dug into her shoulder bag for her car keys and recalled with growing amazement that these connections to the past had not always been linked to her having skipped a meal, as she’d first surmised.
It all got back to scent!
To be sure, the powerful whiffs of incense during Daphne Duvallon’s wedding at Saint Louis Cathedral had seemingly produced a pair of unhappy newlyweds whom Corlis now deduced had been Julien LaCroix and Adelaide Marchand. Then, on the morning she’d put a vase of stargazer lilies on the coffee table next to her couch, she’d suddenly found herself in Henri Girard’s flower-decked parlor, where the poor man was laid out in a mahogany coffin in the presence of Ian Jeffries and her very own McCullough ancestors!
She began to tick off the other instances where individual aromas had triggered these bizarre “trips.”
The faint odor of natural gas had assaulted her inside the Canal Street buildings on the day that King had given her a private tour. The next thing she knew, in the glow of a gaslit chandelier, Julien was storming down the staircase of Martine Fouché’s elegant new town house.
And, of course, it had been the musty smell of the old map showing New Orleans in l838 that had whisked her to the dusty wharves on the banks of the Mississippi where a three-masted ship returned the LaCroixs from their honeymoon in France.
Corlis punched her car’s clicker and was overwhelmed by an increasingly familiar stab of anxiety. Her heart was thumping erratically in her chest, and her palms felt clammy. Although she prided herself on her self-sufficiency, she was forced to admit that these visions had simply gotten too much for her to cope with alone.
She slipped behind the steering wheel, rested her forehead on its curving surface, and took a deep, unsteady breath. King had been remarkably empathetic, but she felt foolish revealing any more of this crazy stuff to him. Especially since he was her key source in the ongoing story at WJAZ.
If she told her boss, Andy Zamora, about seeing visions, he’d probably put her on psychiatric disability. And if Aunt Marge learned about this, the veteran reporter would be prompted to fly to New Orleans to check things out for herself—a risky proposition for an octogenarian. As for Corlis’s parents, they were both utterly useless in a situation like this.
Suddenly the name Dylan Fouché popped into her thoughts, the dropped-out Jesuit priest King had told her about. The man who dabbled in ghostbusting and clearing buildings of unwanted “entities.” Although Dylan Fouché didn’t know it yet, he was already part of this strange saga. And besides, Corlis considered with a surge of hope, the former Father Fouché was the only person she could imagine who might possibly possess the tools that could get her out of this jam.
Just then her cell phone vibrated.
“Oh, pul-eeze!” she groaned out loud, recognizing the telephone number displayed on the tiny screen. She was ten minutes late for her taped interview with King and his preservation guerrillas.
***
Fortunately, and despite her tardy arrival, the recording session at the Preservation Resource Center went smoothly. Once concluded, Virgil and Manny efficiently packed up their television equipment in the deserted office while Corlis and King returned various pieces of office furniture to their proper positions around the reception room.
“Well… do you think you can use any of that?” King asked expectantly, pointing to Virgil’s camcorder.
“Andy Zamora’s gonna love your statement about being willing to lie down in front of Grover Jeffries’s bulldozers to save those buildings,” she teased. Corlis was fairly confident her boss at WJAZ would eventually put this segment on the air. She’d proposed a three-part package that would lay out for the viewers various sides in the controversy brewing over plans to downgrade the zoning of part of the historic district in the Canal Street area. It would also fairly report the tug-of-war between jobs created by tourism and the pull of historic landmarks, versus jobs created by construction projects.
King gave her a knowing look. “A lot of people in this town would appreciate it if a big ol’ bulldozer flattened me into the swamp,” he said dryly. He glanced at his watch. “Well, Ace, it’s just after eight. Feel like grabbing a bite?” With a wink in Corlis’s direction, he turned to the television crew. “You guys wanna join us?”
“We’re not off the clock till ten,” replied Manny with regret.
“Besides, we just got pinged,” Virgil added, clicking off his cell. “Some woman has accused the head of the police Anti-Corruption Committee of accepting a bribe. Zamora wants us
just to grab a sound bite of her making the charge from her front stoop.”
“Now, isn’t that nice?” deadpanned Corlis.
“This is N’awlings, sugar,” observed King with a droll smile.
Virgil hoisted his tripod onto his broad shoulder and said to Corlis, “When we go back to the station later tonight, I’ll have it all digitized with the other stuff we’ve shot on this story. It’ll be ready in the editing bay whenever you need it, okay, boss?”
Corlis nodded and turned to look at King as Virgil and Manny headed out the door. She was hungry. And she was worried.
“Let’s eat,” she proposed.
“Are you actually saying you’ll have dinner with me?”
“Under certain conditions, the rules say it’s okay. It’ll be a business dinner in a public setting. I’ve a few more things I’d like to ask you about.”
King’s lips spread into an engaging grin that contained the barest hint of the conquering hero.
“Ever been to Galatoire’s?” he inquired.
“Always wanted to, but never quite got there.” It was embarrassing to admit that she’d never indulged herself at one of New Orleans’s most iconic landmark restaurants.
“Well, you will tonight,” he said, glancing at his watch again.
“Do you think we can get in? It’s always packed when I go by there.”
“Oh, we’ll get in.”
“Okay…” she replied, not sounding convinced. Then she blurted, “Can we ask Dylan Fouché to join us?”
“Dylan Fouché?” King replied, surprised. Then he gazed at her narrowly. “Okay, Miz Reporter. Out with it! What’s going on? Is this piece you’re doing going to make us preservationists look like a bunch of wackos?”
“No, no!” Corlis protested. “My wanting to meet Dylan isn’t about the Selwyn buildings… Well, I mean, it’s not about the controversy. I just thought tonight might be a good opportunity for you to… ah… introduce me to your friend.” She shrugged, hoping to appear nonchalant. “I might even do a profile on him sometime.”
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