I must find out what happened to Corlis after André’s suicide. Just one more time…
Corlis stared at the crystal decanter, took a deep breath, and removed the stopper. Could she actually bring about one of these sojourns back in time, she wondered, as butterflies began to flutter in her stomach.
She bent over the container, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. Immediately her nostrils began to sting from the concoction’s pungent aroma. How could she possibly give her television viewers an accurate background of the Selwyn buildings if she didn’t know the resolution of the story, or whether the visions she’d experienced depicted historical truth?
I have to know what happened to these people… I have to know… I have to know…
By her second whiff of the enervating drink, Corlis was conscious only of the mixture’s asphyxiating odor of menthol and licorice—a smell so strong, it took her breath away.
Chapter 22
May 22, 1842
I have to know!” Adelaide cried, pointing a trembling finger at a letter lying open on the desk. “Is it true? Did you deliberately choose your father’s own concubine as your mistress?”
Outside the study window the wide veranda was deserted, as were the cane fields that stretched beyond the oak grove where lacy moss hung motionless in the quiescent May air.
“Good God, Adelaide… you’ve been drinking that damnable absinthe again,” Julien said accusingly. His wife reeked of alcohol, and the mere sight of her turned his stomach.
She looked as if she’d slept in the white cotton gown she was wearing. Her pudgy ringlets were unkempt, frizzing unbecomingly around her mottled cheeks. Dark pouches swelled prominently beneath her haggard eyes, and her nose was mottled with tiny broken blood vessels.
Julien had carried his own portmanteau up to the slope-roofed house, while Albert secured the plantation’s steam packet down at the dock. From a second-story window, Adelaide had spotted the boat and was waiting for him on the veranda. She’d followed him into his study, haranguing him at every step. Now he took a seat at his desk, and his gaze settled on the letter that she had opened, breaking its wax seal.
“Well?” she demanded harshly. “At least have the decency to tell the truth! Answer me! Did you deliberately pick your father’s slut as your placèe to publicly humiliate me?”
“I haven’t been in this house two minutes, and you begin to fling your invented insults in my face.” He grabbed the missive from his wife’s hand and placed it on the desktop, where a silver tray holding a crystal decanter three-quarters full of pale green absinthe stood beside two matching cut-crystal tumblers. “And how dare you open a letter from my banker, addressed to me?” he added angrily.
“I! Inventing insults, you say?” Adelaide burst out. “You have been gone from this house for weeks!”
He turned, intending to bolt from the room, but Adelaide’s next words immobilized him.
“Your mother lies dead upstairs from yellow fever, and you—”
“What?” Julien exclaimed, shocked.
“Dead,” she repeated succinctly. “Three days ago she fell ill from the fever. All the slaves ran away when they heard it was yellow jack, and therefore, I had no way to get word to you at your precious warehouse. And now your father is about to breathe his last. Not a servant remains in this house, and yet you chastise me for opening the post!” she screamed shrilly. “You are an imbecile, Julien LaCroix. All lies in wreckage around you, and all you can think—”
Julien’s eyes were riveted on the first paragraph of André Duvallon’s letter. He waved a distracted hand, as if to ward off a pesky fly. Then he began to read again from the top of the page, his lips parted in horrified surprise. André’s sordid account of his relationship with the late Henri Girard was only a precursor to the scandalous revelation that Julien’s father had, in fact, been Martine’s “patron” all those years, and Lisette, his own half sister!
“Julien!” Adelaide broke in sharply. “Look at me! Do you deny that Martine Fouché is the strumpet your father kept on Rampart Street—whom you have now gotten with child?”
Julien looked up, and with a murderous glare, spat out, “Get out of this room! Go! Leave me in peace, you damnable jade!”
“I, a jade?” Adelaide gasped. “You left us! You LaCroixs always leave your white women. Your great-grandfather regularly sated his lust with slave women at the Fouchés’s, upriver. It seems to be a family tradition.”
“You speak like a common guttersnipe,” Julien exclaimed doggedly. “You know nothing of these matters.”
“Oh, you think not?” Adelaide retorted. “I learned at my mother’s knee to turn a blind eye to the outrages that are visited on wives by their husbands! And now André reveals that your father betrayed your mother with your beloved Martine. In case you haven’t sorted it all out, your own progeny by that harlot will be a half sister to the child, Lisette—as are you, my fine cocksman! This is the kind of family that your ambition and lechery have spawned!”
She looked at Julien with an expression of abhorrence so intense, he thought she would surely shoot him had she a pistol in her possession. Shaking his head as if to wake from a living nightmare, Julien turned away from Adelaide and peered at André’s letter.
“It cannot be true…” he murmured. “André sounds as if he intends to—”
“Ah, but it is true, if Martine Fouché is actually your placée?” Adelaide said. “You and your father have unwittingly plowed the same field, monsieur. By now, I assure you Etienne has come to that conclusion, even if you did not—fool that you are.”
A terrible silence descended in the room, unbroken but for the ticking of the grandfather clock that stood in the adjacent hallway.
“But I loved her,” Julien whispered brokenly as he finished reading the letter. “I truly—” He raised his eyes from André’s frantic scrawl and stared at his wife, unseeing. “Martine never told me,” he murmured wonderingly. “All this time, while we were partners during the construction of those buildings… she never told me!”
“What a pity Etienne couldn’t call you out for cuckolding him.” Adelaide laughed with bitter irony. “But then, in his rage over the threats to expose LaCroix, Duvallon, and Girard’s dirty little secrets, his brain’s blood vessels burst,” she taunted, “and rendered him a mute! And of course, neither of you thought to ask your mother or me what we had heard whispered about, did you?”
With a lightning sweep of his hand, Julien brushed the entire silver tray off his desk. In one blinding act of fury, the absinthe sprayed a pale emerald shower onto his wife’s disheveled white dimity dress from neck to hem, staining her long gown the color of rotting limes. The two tumblers shattered in a flurry of glass shards, but the heavy crystal decanter rolled, intact, across the sisal carpet to the other side of the study.
“And now you know the whole, squalid story,” Julien exclaimed harshly, “and you rejoice in my anguish, do you not? You absolutely revel that Martine never revealed that Lisette is my father’s child.”
“All the pieces didn’t fall into place until I read André’s letter,” Adelaide said in a dull monotone, all her passion spent. “I didn’t know for certain that your father had sired a child by some black whore, and I didn’t know, until we returned from France, that the whore he had kept was Martine Fouché.”
“I always suspected that André Duvallon and Henri Girard were… unnaturally fond of each other,” Julien murmured, “but I found them both decent chaps. But I never thought Henri served as the shill for my father’s lust for… Martine,” he concluded softly.
“Or your father… as a shill for Henri’s lust for another man! It worked out so conveniently for everyone,” Adelaide said spitefully.
In an explosion of fury, Julien pounded his fist against the desk and glared at his wife.
“Oh, do spare me your hypocritical rantings!” he shouted. He surveyed Adelaide’s rumpled state with a look of pure loathing. “You’ve spent your entire life
hiding behind your own unnatural appetites—for food and spirits, and I would wager, for foul manipulations by your own hand—for I certainly have never succeeded in stimulating any pleasure in you,” he added caustically.
He was gratified to hear her shocked gasp at his crude accusations. Adelaide’s pale cheeks, as devoid of color as her mother-in-law’s decomposing corpse upstairs, began to stain with streaks of red. After all that had happened between them, he mused absently, there would not—could not be—any reconciliation after this day. He might as well speak his mind and be done with it!
“Let this whole diseased family be damned to hell!” Julien exclaimed.
Adelaide met her husband’s tormented gaze. “Oh, don’t look so injured, Julien,” she declared coolly. “The villain in this piece is, and always has been, your father. He’s been wild with fever these last days and behaved contemptibly to me, even though I was the only one left to nurse him. He is finally dying, too, thank God, if he isn’t already dead. No matter.”
She stooped to pick up the unbroken crystal decanter, still a quarter full of absinthe. Then she faced her husband and declared softly, “One last thing. If I don’t succumb to the fever, in the future I shall make my home with my brother Lafayette, in New Orleans. Eventually he will marry, of course, but he is kind and will shelter me for the rest of my days as a result of what has happened here,” she added with a satisfied air. “Etienne LaCroix is now your problem. I leave the disgusting creature in your care.”
“My God, Adelaide, have you no—?”
However, his sentence remained unfinished as he watched his wife turn away and advance unsteadily toward the study door. She held the neck of the crystal decanter between the fingers of her plump right hand, and in the ensuing silence, the liquor’s opalescent green contents made a faint sloshing sound as she made her exit.
“Good-bye, Julien,” she said pleasantly over her shoulder. “Yellow jack has killed half your slaves, and the healthy ones you’ll have to hunt down. But—” She turned toward him briefly with a mocking smile. “Reverie is finally yours. Perhaps you, the Fouché woman, and your father’s bastard—along with the new babe that the dressmakers in the town whisper is nigh to term—will all make their home here. How delightful for you,” she added with biting sarcasm. “In any case, au revoir. I shall go to my brother in New Orleans on horseback.”
Julien sat stock-still, listening to the sound of Adelaide’s receding steps. He had no notion of how long it was before he again heard her heavy footfall on the stairs and watched her through the open study door make her departure across the front threshold. In her pudgy hand she clasped a carpeted satchel. In a daze, Julien stood and observed through the window the sway of her frothy skirts as she waddled across the veranda and down the path in the direction of the stables. His wife’s enormous derriere bloomed beneath her stiff, corseted waist. The sight of her retreat disgusted him almost as much as the contents of André’s letter lying on his leather-topped desk.
Eventually Julien summoned the energy to climb the grand, curving staircase. The fetid stench filling the air announced that the LaCroix patriarch and his wife were no more. Within an hour Julien had donned gloves and a silk handkerchief to cover his nose and mouth and dug his parents’ graves. In a shallow trench he buried his mother and father in the bedsheets in which they had died. By late afternoon he made his way through the eerily deserted cane fields to the riverbank. His boyhood friend, Albert, was nowhere to be seen. Alone, he fired up the small steam packet Reverie.
Numb with fatigue and shock, he guided the boat downriver at a slow, steady speed, careful to stay at enough distance from the shore to avoid sand bars, and close enough to keep out of the treacherous currents that could swamp the craft in an instant.
Martine hadn’t told him… hadn’t told him… a sorrowful voice repeated in his head.
***
From the moment Corlis Bell McCullough returned from André’s house on Orange Street, she had not donned a corset, or for that matter, left her rooms on Julia Street. Nor had Randall returned home. By late afternoon she had sent Hetty out with her two sons to play at the house of a neighbor child. Somehow the sound of their piping voices made her want to scream.
Corlis opened the bedroom door and like a sleepwalker wandered slowly down the hallway toward the parlor. An unseasonable May rain had been falling in sheets for several hours, but now watery sunlight pierced the thunderheads outside the sitting room windows and glistened on the wrought-iron gallery that hung over the street.
What in the world had been happening since André had shot himself? she wondered. Who had learned of his death by now? Would Randall be arrested if André had left a suicide note somewhere that revealed the whole sordid business? Or perhaps the secret of Ian Jeffries’s financial hooliganism would simply die with the young banker, and she alone would know of the calumny committed by her husband and his partner. André’s ominous prediction echoed in her ears.
Ian Jeffries would not hesitate to do you or your husband bodily harm.
She must find out what was going on! At the very least she should venture over to Girod Street and pawn her last gemstone bracelet for her flight from New Orleans.
Corlis quickly donned a wide-collared, hunter-green jacket and skirt trimmed with black braid. She must appear as if everything were normal, she cautioned herself. She selected a small black bowler hat with feathers to match and pulled on black crocheted gloves. Lastly she seized a lacy black parasol from the umbrella stand near the door and squared her shoulders.
No one must know what I’ve been privy to.
It could mean her own personal safety.
The banquette outside glistened from the recent rain. However, Julia Street had remained a channel of alluvial mud. Several times en route she was forced to press her back against buildings to avoid being showered in muck from a passing carriage.
At Girod Street the pawnbroker leered at her over the counter.
“I’d pay for more than what this bauble’s worth if you’ve a mind for a different exchange,” he said suggestively, fingering her wrist as well as the bracelet in question.
“Sir,” she replied stiffly, “I will take this gem to your competitor across the road if you do not quote me a fair price for it.”
Grudgingly he offered half the bracelet’s value, but she grabbed the gold coins he offered. At least the money was enough to cover an escape from this swamp for herself and the children.
It was close to dusk when Corlis neared the structures that her husband and Ian Jeffries had erected. She eyed the stately row of columns stretching down the entire block and considered the irony that their classic Greek design had come from the minds of such lowly creatures as Randall McCullough and his partner.
Her apprehension turned to a grinding foreboding when she went around to Common Street and cautiously peered into the saddlery. Mr. Bates sat at his desk, unmindful of her presence in the doorway. Adjacent to Bates’s office, she could hear horses pawing the straw in their stalls, but she saw no sign of anyone but the stable boys.
She retraced her steps to Canal Street and stopped a moment to gaze into the shop window of the dressmaker, Annette Fouché. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Julien LaCroix, at a dead run, approaching the front entrance to the town house of Martine Fouché.
“Mr. LaCroix!” She hailed his harried figure. She plastered a smile on her face. “Excuse me, Mr. LaCroix… May I have a word with you for a moment?”
But Julien apparently hadn’t heard her call to him, for he had already disappeared through the front door. Corlis followed in his wake, drawn as if by someone reeling in a fish on Bayou Lacombe She stared, her mouth slightly ajar, as the heir to Reverie Plantation dashed through the large foyer, down a hallway, and took the stairway to Martine’s small gaslit reception hall, two steps at a time. Corlis had just reached a round table where visitors left their calling cards when Julien, on the landing above, began to pound on Martine Fouch�
�’s door.
“Martine!” he shouted. “Let me in! Martine, I demand that you open this door at once!”
In an instant the door did open, but only a crack.
“Hush!” a voice hissed. “Martine’s just fallen asleep!”
“It is five o’clock in the afternoon!” Julien retorted. “I demand—”
“She’s had the baby,” the voice said accusingly. “As I predicted, the minute you left to go upriver—”
Dumbfounded, Corlis gazed up the stairwell at Julien, who applied his shoulder to the door and forced it open.
“Well… what was it?” he asked in a trembling voice that revealed his agitation. “Boy or girl?”
“A boy. We’ve named him Julien… after you,” Althea Fouché announced reproachfully.
“Sweet Jesus!” Julien exploded in bitterness and despair.
“Julien… I-I… thought you’d be pleased,” interposed a voice from farther inside the Fouché apartments.
In the flickering gaslight Corlis could barely make out the shadow of Althea Fouché, who stood blocking Julien’s entry into the flat. Behind her, an open door framed a large ornately carved, canopied plantation bed in the chamber beyond. In the parlor, on a blood-red silk chaise longue, a figure lay supine, poised against an enormous mound of lacy pillows.
“Pleased?” Julien echoed. “Pleased?” he repeated, his voice rising in a wave of angry accusation. He strode into the foyer and slammed the door behind him. Corlis heard a muffled voice say, “Would you two have played me for a fool until the bitter end?”
By this time Corlis had advanced up the stairs to the top of the landing. She could distinctly hear the argument that was raging behind the closed door.
“Julien LaCroix!” Althea cried. “Stop this at once!”
Next Corlis heard the sound of an object being flung against an interior wall.
“Damn you both!” Julien shouted.
“I simply cannot permit this!” Althea declared loudly. “Control yourself. It’s outrageous that you should barge in like this… especially now!”
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