A vendeuse, a mulatto woman in her white tignon and apron, was crying her wares along the banquet. She carried the calas, tout chaud in a covered tray on her head, and stopped with a smile and a curtsy to surrender a packet of them to Marcus as the carriage drew in beside her.
It was an effective dismissal of the subject, and Marcus seemed cheerfully resigned to her refusal as he passed on to other topics for the remainder of the drive.
At last the carriage halted before a narrow building with a wrought iron balcony overhanging the street. The house was a strange mixture of English Georgian and Spanish styles. Unlike most of the Creole dwellings that surrounded it, the lower floor of the two story building was in use, and its main doorway, beneath the Adams fanlight in a cobweb design, opened from it out onto the street, rather than on an interior courtyard. This lower portion was of red brick, while the upper half, behind the balcony, was plastered in white. Not an attractive house, it was in essence a symbol of the marriage between Catherine’s father, a New England banker who had come to New Orleans in the last decade of the 18th century to start one of the first banking ventures in the city, and her pleasure-loving Creole mother. Since the death of Edward Mayfield Catherine and her mother had lived in the house alone, against the earnest advice of their Creole relatives and friends who felt they should have a male relative to lend them protection. Yvonne Mayfield had only laughed, asserting that a half-dozen menservants and four or five maids surely constituted guard enough for anyone. But Catherine had often wondered at the wisdom of the arrangement. Large families with numerous aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-aunts, in addition to brothers and sisters, living under one roof were normal in New Orleans. There would have been much laughter and gaiety, less loneliness for a young girl in such an establishment. There might have been less friction between her mother and herself, less time for her maman to brood upon the passing of the years and the fine lines gathering at the corners of her eyes.
Pitch pine flambeaux burned brightly in their holders at each side of the front door. Their orange light slid over the shining, honey-gold curls piles à la Grecque on her head as she accepted the hand Marcus offered to help her alight. She stood to one side while he assisted Dédé, staring up at the unlighted windows of the upstairs bedrooms. Had her mother retired already? It was not like her to seek her bed so early. Standing before the quiet house with its blind, vapid windows, Catherine acknowledged a moment of uneasiness.
Marcus stepped to the carriage perch to speak to the coachman. With Dédé crowding behind her, Catherine moved toward the door, but it remained obstinately closed instead of swinging open as she expected. All doors in the Vieux Carré were locked at night against the marauding bands of drunken “Kaintocks.” Their greatest pleasure seemed to be the destruction of property. But there should have been a servant on duty to admit her, regardless of the hour. Casting a puzzled frown at the nurse, she lifted her hand to knock.
“Wait, wait, Mam’zelle Catherine. You might wake your maman. She will not be pleased, especially if she is ill. Let me go to the back. I will let you in.”
“What is it? Why is no one about, Dédé?” Catherine asked. The nurse only shook her head, a grim look on her dour face as she turned to walk away.
“Is something wrong?” Marcus asked, strolling up behind her.
“I’m not sure. There are no lights, and the servants have been dismissed — or so it appears.”
“Probably a whim of your mother’s,” Marcus said easily, “but I’ll come in with you all the same.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary—” Catherine trailed off. Only a few weeks before Monsieur and Madame Duralde had returned from a soiree to find their home being ransacked by the river ruffians. Having his sword-cane at his side. Monsieur Duralde had attacked the invaders and had been severely beaten for his bravery. He would be lucky if he ever used his right arm again. Furniture and windows had been smashed and priceless heirlooms taken before the constables of the Garde de Ville had reached the scene and brought the fury of the “Kaintocks” down on themselves. There were other hazards than the “Kaintocks,” other criminals, other dangers. New Orleans had not become known as the most wicked city in the New World for nothing.
The trend of Catherine’s thoughts was broken by sounds from within the house indicating the door was being unbarred. As the panel swung open she pushed into the house with Marcus behind her, forcing the nurse to step back.
“My mother — is she all right?”
“Do not disturb yourself, Mam’zelle. I am certain all is well,” Dédé said soothingly, shielding the candle in her hand from the draft as Marcus closed the door behind him.
Stripping off her lace dancing mitts and dropping them on a small, mirror-topped table in the entrance hall, Catherine turned to Marcus. “I think I will look in on her, if you will excuse me. You will find a drinkable claret in the salon if you don’t mind pouring out for yourself.”
These last words were thrown over her shoulder as she moved toward the broad stairs that rose against one wall.
“I’ll wait,” Marcus agreed, and twirling his beaver hat in his hand, lounged toward the salon.
“No, Mam’zelle Catherine. Allow me,” Dédé said, lifting her skirts in one hand, hurriedly mounting the stairs after Catherine, the candle held high.
“You? Why, Dédé?”
“I — I must—”
“You are keeping something from me. I can feel it,” Catherine said, halting to stare at the set expression on her nurse’s face. Seeing the perspiration gleaming on her upper lip, a prickle of fear ran down Catherine’s spine. She would never forgive herself for leaving her mother alone if anything had happened to her. The two of them disagreed with monotonous regularity on everything from religious observance to fashion, but they were still mother and daughter with the strong blood ties of the Creoles between them.
As she took a deep breath Catherine was aware of Marcus, an interested spectator, standing with his glass in hand in the doorway of the salon below. A part of her mind resented his presence, still she lifted her chin. “Tell me,” she demanded.
But Dédé was silent too long. A soft moan laced with a keening edge of desperation came drifting down from the upper hallway.
Catching up her skirts, Catherine raced up the stairs and along the hall.
“No!” Dédé cried, but it was too late. Catherine had thrust open the door of her mother’s bedchamber to stand panting in the opening.
It was a moment before the two people struggling among the rumpled bedclothes on the canopied bed were aware of the intrusion. They turned ludicrously empty faces toward the growing light as Dédé drew nearer the doorway with her candle.
A musky perfume hung in the air, overlaid with the smell of warm, perspiring bodies and the sour reek of flat champagne coming from the supper tray left standing at the foot of the bed.
Suddenly Marcus gave a smothered shout of laughter from behind Catherine. The sound seemed to release the two figures locked together on the bed. With an inarticulate cry of rage, Yvonne pushed aside her gaping partner. She rolled off the bed, nearly tearing the willow leaf color mosquito baire from its hangings in her haste, snatching up a dressing saque of emerald satin which she clutched to her nakedness as she rose.
“Get out!” she screamed. “You spying, sly little—” Her wild gaze fell on a china carafe standing on the table beside the bed. She picked it up and hurled it at the door, her voice rising in a crescendo of shrill invective, mingling with the shattering sound of glass as the water carafe struck the door, followed by a combing box, a candlestick, and a prayer book.
For an instant Catherine met the wild eyes of the young man cowering in the bed, his aristocratic face stiff with horror and distaste.
“I’m — sorry,” she whispered. Swinging around, she ran, blundering with tears rising in her eyes past Marcus, tripping, nearly falling, on her way down the stairs. The scene she had witnessed, with its aura of mindless striv
ing and feverish passion seemed printed on her mind. The excuse, the dismissed servants and darkened house were abruptly explained. It was not that she was unaware of the fundamental needs of men and women or the duties of the connubial couch. She had spent too many years acting as housekeeper under her mother’s tutelage, caring for their servants in their quarters across the courtyard at the back of the house, treating them in sickbed and childbed, to pretend to ignorance. Still she had never associated such needs and actions with her widowed mother. It seemed a betrayal of her father’s memory, an unnatural adultery. Moreover, the man beside her had been at least twenty years younger than her mother, scarcely older than Catherine herself, and a penniless ne’er-do-well of doubtful breeding, against whom Yvonne Mayfield had warned her daughter several times—
Behind her as she ran Catherine could hear Dédé talking, mouthing soothing phrases as she moved into the bedroom. Let the old nurse calm her mistress, take the brunt of her anger, smooth her outraged sensibilities. It was doubtful anyone else could. Her daughter was not sure she could face her, now — or ever.
The front door yielded easily to her touch. She left it open, swaying in the draft of her passing and the breath of the rising wind.
The freshening breeze was cool on her face as she paused on the sidewalk. She had no idea where to go, knowing only that she could not stay. At a touch on her elbow, she flinched, then turned to face Marcus.
“The carriage is here,” he murmured.
Catherine hesitated no more than an instant before she allowed herself to be handed in. Marcus called an order she did not quite catch to the driver, then the carriage shifted as he climbed in and slammed the door behind him. He sank down beside her, the carriage started with a jerk, and they rolled away down the street.
“How could she?” Catherine whispered, and then as her shock moved into an angry disgust she demanded, “How could she?”
“Why not?” Marcus asked in a conversational tone.
“Why not? Because — Because—”
“Because she is your mother? She is a normal woman, attractive in a mature fashion, and not so mature at that. She can hardly be more than forty-one or forty-two, I would imagine, with all the normal appetites to which she is entitled.”
“Yes, but with that man.”
He shrugged. “Not a prepossessing individual, I’ll agree, but so long as both are willing I see no harm. Their only crime is that they were caught, speaking in a social sense, of course.”
“You have a strange idea of what is permissible,” she said in a cool tone.
“Do I? The most effective weapon society has to keep people in order is ridicule. It stands to reason then that the thing to be avoided at all cost is putting oneself in a — ridiculous — position.”
“According to your reasoning, she is still guilty,” Catherine said.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he agreed. “And her anger and embarrassment were natural reactions.”
“Embarrassment?”
“But of course. How could it be otherwise. People are seldom at their most gracious while standing naked before a clothed audience.”
“You speak from experience, no doubt,” she murmured in a dry tone, a sally she would not have dared at any other time. But somehow this conversation, and the scene that had preceded it, were outside of reality. When he replied to her accusation with a shake of his head and a smile she could not prevent the faint curving of her mouth in response.
“There, that’s better,” he said quietly.
“You are making excuses for my mother,” she said, turning away to stare at the opposite side of the hired vehicle where the cheap brown felt lining was hanging loose above the seat.
His voice held still that timbre of amused tolerance as he agreed. “Reprehensible of me, perhaps, but I rather thought a word of defense was in order.”
Was it? Remembering her mother with her plump, white body gleaming in the candlelight and the damp strands of her black hair clinging to her arms and back, it seemed supremely unnecessary. And yet, hadn’t there been a hint of shame behind the frustrated anger?
Catherine did not want to think about it. Still, Marcus’s calm good sense, though immoral by the standards she had been taught to revere, was having its effect. The incident no longer had the stature of a tragedy.
“I never knew you were so graceless,” she told him.
“How can you accuse me, Mademoiselle Catherine, when you have come away without the benefit of a chaperone?”
With a start she looked around the carriage. It was true. For the first time in her life she was completely alone with a man. Turning her head, she gave Marcus a level stare. “Will it make any difference?”
He replied deliberately. “Not to me, but will it to you?”
There was a questioning in his eyes, such a serious overtone that Catherine stopped to wonder if his question held more than its surface meaning. Her presence in the carriage was the direct result of her mother’s conduct, but would that affect her own? With unseeing eyes she stared out the carriage window at the closed fronts of shops and their hanging signs, creaking back and forth in the wind. The dusty streets seemed more deserted now, the night darker. The lingering pain of disillusionment moved in Catherine’s chest. “It might,” she answered her companion recklessly, her earlier suspicions of this man forgotten. “It very well might.”
Marcus Fitzgerald was an intelligent man. Leaning forward, he took up the bright garments of turquoise, gold and bronze tissue silk lying on the opposite seat and offered the disguise to Catherine with a quizzical smile.
“Well, then?” he asked.
Such delicacy was disarming in itself. Catherine laughed, a strained sound in the quiet. “By all means. It should be — diverting.”
Nearly twenty-five years before, in the year 1786, the Spanish governor, Miro, had decreed that all quadroon women should bind their hair in a kerchief. This kerchief, or tignon, had become the symbol of these beautiful women of mixed blood. They had turned the badge of their class into an article of distinction made of costly and beautiful materials. Though it might have been called a tignon, the kerchief handed Catherine had more in common with a Sultan’s turban. Its folds and poufs were sewn into place so that it slipped easily over her hair with the drops of amber on tiny gold chains, adorning the front, perfectly placed on her forehead to draw forth the amber lights in her brown eyes. Swathed in the voluminous folds of the heavy shawl with its gold braiding and dripping fringe, hidden behind a demi-mask of turquoise velvet, Catherine felt safe enough from discovery as she stepped from the carriage before the new St. Philips Theatre. Now that she was committed to the deception, she was able to put aside apprehension, pushing it from her mind along with everything else that had taken place that evening. A kind of gay defiance carried her forward.
Money changed hands and the driver of the carriage agreed to wait. They entered the theatre through wide double doors and mounted a curved staircase toward the sounds of lilting music, quick moving feet, and laughter.
While Marcus paid a small admission fee Catherine stood quietly watching the dancers moving over the floor of the theatre, and the chaperones in the boxes surrounding it. The curiosity of the two crones taking money at the door was obvious. They did not appear to find anything amiss however, and her confidence rose.
A soft-voiced manservant dressed in a bottle-green tailcoat with fawn pantaloons offered to take her shawl, but Catherine declined with a small shake of her head. Her simple blue muslin gown with its wine stain would have looked awkwardly out of place among the dazzling toilettes of the quadroons as they moved like an enormous kaleidoscope about her. She was used to pale muslins with white predominating at the gatherings of the haut monde. The glittering, shimmering splendor before her was unbelievable. No expenditure of talent, time, or money had been spared. Most of the gowns were in the style made popular by Napoleon’s Josephine, with a graceful but slender skirt falling from a high waist caught just under the bre
asts, and a wide, décolleté neckline. But there any resemblance to the fashions worn at the white assembly ended. Gowns of flame silk, topaz satin, sapphire-blue velvet and shades of every other jewel color graced the dancers. These creations were trimmed with grosgrain rosettes and fluttering ribbons, loveknots of gold and silver gilt braid, with tassels and fringe and crustings of seed pearls, diamante and embroidery — all with embellished turbans to match. For a single moment Catherine knew herself to be eclipsed, and she felt a wistful envy of such lavish adornment. Then she drew herself up. Simplicity. True elegance depended on simplicity, not on superfluous decoration.
After that first overpowering impression Catherine noticed the women themselves with their skin tones ranging from a pale cream through café au lait to a soft golden bronze, their liquid brown eyes slanting audaciously through the slits of their demi-masks. They moved with grace and poise in the arms of their partners. Their partners—
With an abrupt movement Catherine turned away, a warm flush moving over her neck and face. More than one of the gentlemen of the floor was known to her. Few were in costume, many were unmasked. All Creole women lived with the hope that their suitors, or their husbands, were immune to the attraction of the quadroons. It was disquieting to have the identities of those who were not suddenly revealed to her.
She should never have come, she suddenly realized. As Marcus offered his arm she clutched at it, hardly aware of the movement as he drew her closer to his side.
2
“Marcus, mon vieux! Comment ça va?”
Marcus was slow in turning. The man looked harmless enough to Catherine. Short and portly, his rotund figure was covered by a gray domino.
“Why aren’t you masked, my friend?” the newcomer cried. “Behold me! This color is called ‘mist of intrigue.’ Clever, n’est ce pas? I shall start a new vogue.”
“Of a certainty,” Marcus assured him.
“Come, I did not risk apoplexy rushing across the room in order to talk to you, you know, Marcus. Present me at once to this ravishing creature beside you.”
Love and Adventure Collection - Part 1 (Love and Adventure Boxed Sets) Page 47