“I’d be most obliged if you’d tell him I was here and that I have something important to discuss with him, Mr. Bates.”
Bates glanced curiously at her flushed face but merely nodded. “I surely will, ma’am.”
“Would you be so good as to ask him to return home immediately?”
“Yes ma’am,” Bates said respectfully.
Corlis stalked past the stable owner and onto Common Street, heading in the direction of Julia Street, seething with fury.
Randall McCullough had promised his wife that he would retrieve her sapphire necklace and earrings from the pawnbroker on Girod Street just as soon as he received the last payment for his services from the building consortium. What a shock it had been—not ten minutes earlier—to be standing a few doors away in Chez Annette’s having a hem measured for the first new dress she’d purchased in more than a year, and to see a perfect stranger waltz into the dress shop wearing the very jewelry her husband had promised on a Bible he would soon return to her!
The question was, had he lied to her and sold the jewelry out-and-out to finance Jeffries & McCullough while the project was still being constructed? Or had he gifted some fancy woman whose charms he had purchased at the brothel that he and Ian were known to frequent on Girod Street?
Either way, she was in a murderous rage. As she advanced along the banquette, she nursed her anger by recounting the many instances in which her husband and his partner had behaved like cads.
But if the gossips were correct, they were no better than the almighty Julien LaCroix, whose recent peccadilloes were the talk of the town. Annette Fouché had let it be known that the young heir to Reverie Plantation was living openly, when in town, with her first cousin, the celebrated quadroon Martine Fouché, and that Julien considered Martine a full partner in the Canal Street enterprise. The scandalous pair had moved into elegant new quarters above Annette’s dress shop and adjacent to the commercial enterprise run by two tailors, also Free People of Color, in the same block as the Bates’s Saddlery. Annette even announced, proud as you please, that Martine was expecting a child.
Poor Adelaide LaCroix, Julien’s wife, Corlis sympathized, eyeing the new signage attached to the warehouse’s brick facade. The paint that was barely dry announced the location of the newly constructed warehouse of LaCroix & Company, Exporters of Cotton & Sugarcane.
Corlis paused by an open wooden door leading into the warehouse itself, where hogsheads of sweetly scented sugarcane were piled nearly to the ceiling. Angry voices could be heard inside.
“Jeffries, you are the worst sort of blackguard!” said a very familiar voice. “I was warned to steer clear of you, and I only wish I’d heeded those who attested to your treachery.”
“Such plather is neither here nor there, André,” Ian Jeffries said mildly. “The point is you don’t really have much choice, do you? Either you pledge me the credit for my next project, here and now, or I let Julien and your fancy friends know the truth about your… peculiar friendship with the late, lamented Henri Girard, and the pains you, Girard, and Etienne LaCroix took to cover it all up!”
“And if I reveal to Julien how you hounded poor Henri to take his own life in a base attempt to get your own hands on this land?” André Duvallon retorted.
Corlis stood in the shadows just outside the office. Despite André’s challenging words, she detected a slight tremulousness in his voice.
“Henri is dead and buried,” Ian Jeffries said bluntly. “Even the priest saw nothing amiss at his funeral. Who’d believe you weren’t just trying to cover up your own unnatural, disgusting behavior… loving men! Not a person in the entire French Quarter would want you as their banker if they knew that you and Henri Girard were damnable sodomites! And what would they say if they knew that the pillar of Creole society, Etienne LaCroix, covered your abomination by allowing Henri to pose as Martine Fouché’s patron while he himself had been enjoying her charms for years?”
“How dare you sully Henri’s memory and denigrate the feelings we had for each other,” André shouted. “And how dare you attempt this extortion!”
“Call it what you will,” Ian retorted. “Julien is due back here at any minute. I suggest you write me a bank draft for five thousand dollars before he arrives as I have requested. I’ll call for it later this afternoon.”
“I have had enough of your threats!” André exploded. “I will not do it. Furthermore, I demand satisfaction.”
“A duel?” Ian Jeffries taunted his prey. “How French.” His voice grew cold and even more menacing. “I have no patience with such nonsense. Either you put in writing a guarantee of five thousand dollars made out to Ian Jeffries, Builder, or I shall tell Julien that his trusted financier was the go-between for his adored black whore—who had long lain with LaCroix’s own father—and neither of you ever confessed to it.”
“Why, you—” André began.
Ian chuckled. “Let’s see…” he mused. “Unbeknownst to Julien, his lover Martine’s child, Lisette, is his own half sister. Therefore, Lisette could also be the aunt to Julien’s new bastard… only Julien doesn’t know it! Have I got it right? Family relationships among you French and Negroes can be so complicated.”
Corlis heard herself gasp at the revelation of such incestuous behavior. André, too, appeared blindsided by the viciousness of Ian Jeffries’s attack.
“Surely, man, you will not be thanked for acting the town crier of such intelligence…” André said, sounding shaken.
“Ah… the scandal of it all should keep you Creoles chattering across your courtyards in the carrè de la ville for months!” Ian retorted with a harsh laugh.
“Jeffries, have you no decency at all?” André exclaimed in a voice tinged with despair. “You already tried this vicious blackmail, before Julien returned from his honeymoon,” he added accusingly. “Did you think Etienne, Henri, and I would simply accede to your demands? Your foul behavior is precisely why you Yankees are so hated here. To you, money is God.”
“It is merely business,” Jeffries said, sounding mildly offended.
“Well, whether you acknowledge it or not,” André said with a renewed show of emotion, “you and Randall McCullough have blood on your hands! Henri’s blood.”
A deadly silence fell between the two men. As for Corlis, the memory of a horrifying sight swam before her eyes. Ugly black-and-blue bruises had encircled poor Henri Girard’s neck when she had applied the powder puff to his taut skin, already stiffening with rigor mortis. Randall had convinced her that Henri had killed himself because he knew he would die of an excruciatingly painful liver disease.
“Unless you use your skills with powder and cosmetics, Corlis,” Randall had insisted, “the wretched man will be refused a proper Christian burial in sacred ground by those damnable Catholics.”
Now she knew the truth. Her husband and his partner had obviously been threatening to expose the homosexual relationship between Henri and André as a means of gaining that choice parcel of land. The partners had also threatened to reveal to one and all that the patriarch of Reverie Plantation, Etienne LaCroix, had enjoyed a long, secret liaison with the enigmatic Martine Fouché—and had a daughter by her. It now appeared that Henri Girard had committed suicide by hanging from a beam in the old warehouse to avoid such public disclosure. However, before he took his own life, he had most likely persuaded his partner, Etienne, to join him in signing over land on Canal Street that would provide for the future of Martine and Etienne’s secret child, Lisette—thereby also thwarting an attempted extortion of the parcel by the aggressive newcomers to New Orleans.
Corlis leaned heavily against the warehouse wall and thought back to the oddly insistent behavior of her husband and his partner after Henri’s death. Ian and Randall obviously didn’t dare reveal the role they had played in hounding the poor man until suicide seemed his only alternative. Therefore, the two conspirators had concocted, for Corlis’s benefit, another reason Henri had committed suicide while she—fool
that she was—entertained girlish, romantic notions about the dashing André Duvallon!
It was all too much. Corlis blushed at having fantasized that André felt anything stronger for her than polite friendship. His attentions, she wagered, were merely calculated to discover what dastardly trick Randall McCullough and Ian Jeffries were likely to play next!
Martine… Adelaide… even Corlis herself—the women in this passion play—had merely served as pawns for the grander pageant of men’s lust and driving ambition. And all for this land on Canal Street.
She fought a growing sense of panic. With trembling fingers, she raised her hand to massage her forehead.
Nothing in this blighted city was what it had seemed. She had been lied to and manipulated by her husband, just as surely as had poor André Duvallon. And despite the shattering of the fragile dream that André might have harbored some genuine affection toward her, she pitied him and the stark, sad countenance of Henri Girard, cold in his coffin on the Rue Royale. Etienne LaCroix must have been so angry and shaken by what André had surely revealed to him that it brought on the fit of apoplexy. Unfortunately for the LaCroixs, the patriarch’s malady had silenced any chance Etienne might have had to bring his enormous power to bear against such American upstarts as her husband and his unscrupulous partner.
Corlis thought again of her lost necklace. The man she had married eight years before was as unscrupulous as Ian Jeffries, but he was also a coward. Randall McCullough could be handled, if only she played her cards correctly.
Just then André appeared at the office door. Before Corlis could slip outside, he caught sight of her huddled against the wall. Even in the warehouse’s dim light, she could see the color drain from his face.
“You!” he growled accusingly. “Be gone, damn you!” he hissed, and stormed past her and into Common Street.
Corlis dashed outside into the sweltering sunlight, lifting her skirts above her ankle boots in an effort to speed to André’s side.
“No! Wait! Please, wait!” she cried. She made a grab for his arm, but he shook free of her and stalked on. “André, you must believe me! I knew none of this… I—”
André’s carriage was waiting outside the Bates’s Saddlery. Corlis ran to the vehicle’s opposite side as he hopped aboard and yanked furiously on the reins. Somehow she managed to climb up onto the seat beside him, just as the vehicle careened around the corner and headed for the Lower Garden District, where Corlis knew André, his brother Avery, his sister Margaret, and her husband all lived in a graceful pillared house on Orange Street.
Surprisingly, André neither slowed the horses nor attempted to eject Corlis from the speeding carriage. Instead, he continued to snap his reins smartly against his horse’s rump as the light, two-wheeled carriage sped forward. Corlis found herself grasping his arm and staring up into his frozen countenance.
“Please… please, André,” she begged. “There must be a way to put an end to this treachery. I’ll do anything I can to help you stop Ian and Randall. They’ve stolen from me as well! We shall go to the authorities! Perhaps your fellow bankers would—Slow down! You’ll kill us both!”
However, André Duvallon barely heard the frantic woman at his side. What did it matter if he lived or died, or if his bank failed? he thought with a crushing sense of futility. His life had ceased the night he had discovered Henri dangling from a rope. The ghastly sight told the hideous tale. Henri Girard had leaped off an office chair to escape the cruelty of those grasping, avaricious American devils! He had gone for help, only to return and find Henri’s body cut down and taken to the Rue Royale.
And now André finally understood why the dearest man in all the world had abandoned him to this living hell.
***
At Miss Pearl’s Saddlery, a jazz quintet blared from the small cabaret that adjoined the restaurant. As the band swung into a raucous number, Corlis sat bolt upright in her booth and gazed at the leather rein she was still holding. Her heart pounding, she winced at the sound of laughter and applause that had roused her from—what?
“Hey there, Corlis!” a voice inquired sharply. “What’s going on? Are you asleep or something? Where are Virgil and Manny? I thought WJAZ was treating y’all to dinner?”
“King!” she said, barely above a whisper. “What are you doing here?” She blinked several times, attempting to clear the cobwebs from her brain, and gazed at him across the wooden booth.
“I picked up the message that you’d called,” he said, looking at her speculatively. “I called you back at the station, and the assignment editor said you, Manny, and Virgil had come here to celebrate the broadcast tonight.” He glanced around the restaurant. “Where are the guys?”
“We were supposed to be celebrating, courtesy of Andy Zamora,” she replied with a shaky laugh. “Before we could even sit down, they were dispatched to the airport on some cockamamie story that didn’t need a reporter. I was… ah… just sitting here, waiting for my dinner.”
“You looked like you were hypnotized by that old horse rein. It took me a while to get your attention,” he said with a worried frown. “You sure you weren’t in outer space again?”
“What’re you doing here?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“Thought I’d come tell you in person how good I thought your series was,” King said, regarding her closely. “I watched all three nights.”
“Oh… thanks,” she replied weakly.
While King hailed the waiter to place an order of his own, Corlis stared overhead at the bridle and its dangling reins in an attempt to regain her bearings. Why in blazes had this very space been transformed into a genuine livery stable and then suddenly transformed back again? She reached for her glass of iced tea and took a deep draught.
It had happened again… only this time she was frightened down to the toes of her sling-back pumps! What was poor André Duvallon going to do? she wondered distractedly, peering across the table at King. And furthermore, was this man who had just taken a seat across from her truly a direct descendant through a sibling or paternal cousin of the tortured Monsieur Duvallon?
Whoa, there, Corlis! Better disregard whatever happened when you had a whiff of that bridle rein. Concentrate on the present—pronto!
She was acutely aware that she was sitting, à deux on a Friday night, in one of the most popular watering spots in New Orleans, with the very man Grover Jeffries and Lafayette Marchand claimed was exerting undue influence on her journalistic judgment. She glanced nervously around the restaurant. This was precisely the kind of situation that could cause major trouble for them both, yet somehow all she could think of was how relieved she was to see King again.
“King… you and I haven’t spoken in a few days, but—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I’ve been upriver since Tuesday.” He gazed forthrightly into her eyes and added somberly, “A dear family friend passed away suddenly, and I’ve been trying to help her son get her affairs in order before the funeral tomorrow.”
So that was why there had been such a long silence, Corlis thought, feeling ridiculously giddy. She gazed at his sorrowful features and felt instantly ashamed.
“Oh, King… I’m so sorry,” she replied softly. “Was it someone you were close to?”
King’s expression softened. “Do you remember the day I walked you through the Good Times Shopping Plaza, and I told you about our cook, Emelie?”
Corlis nodded, recalling how King had paused in the midst of their tour and angrily smashed the side of his fist against the concrete wall.
“Oh, no… not the woman you called your black mother?” she cried. She impulsively seized his hand and encased it with both of hers. “Oh, King… how really sad. Had she been ill?”
“I don’t think that Emelie ever adjusted to being displaced from that Creole cottage on Tchoupitoulas Street,” King said slowly. “Last year her memory began to fail, and then she simply lost the will to go on. Her son said that she’d just sit on his porch in an ol
’ rockin’ chair… tears streaming down her face most of the time.”
King’s voice suddenly cracked, and Corlis felt her own throat close. From everything she had surmised about the lack of closeness between King and his parents, Emelie’s death was obviously a bitter loss to him.
“Will your family attend the funeral?” she asked, unsure for what else to say.
“My aunt Bethany would, but she’s down with a bad spring cold, and my grandmother Kingsbury… well, she’s as fragile as Emelie was…” He glanced at their joined hands and gave hers a soft squeeze. Then his blue eyes caught hers. “Would you consider coming to the funeral with me, sugar?” he asked softly. “We can drive across the lake to Covington and stay tonight at an ol’ cabin on some land my family still owns. It’s only about ten miles from there to the Dumas place. I guarantee… it’ll be real Louisiana…”
For an instant she heard the smooth, intimidating voice of Lafayette Marchand in her ears. She pushed the thought from her mind and continued to hold King’s hand between her own. Then she reached up and grazed the fingers of her right hand along King’s jawline.
“Sure, sugar…” she said in a lightly teasing tone of voice that belied her emotion. “I’d be honored to be among Emelie’s mourners.”
***
King waited in the blue Jaguar on Julia Street while Corlis ran up the stairs to her apartment. She filled Cagney Cat’s water dish to its brim, poured a pile of dry kibble into his dish, and did her best to ignore his reproachful stare as she swiftly packed a small overnight bag.
The drive along the twenty-four-mile concrete causeway that stretched across a dark and silent Lake Pontchartrain passed swiftly while King recounted numerous tales about Emelie’s role in the Duvallon household. Corlis listened attentively. Yet, a small voice in the back of her mind continued to fret about the nature of Grover Jeffries’s threats and her boss’s recent edict not to fraternize with King unless the interchange was strictly business—an injunction that she was obviously ignoring.
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