Chapter Three
We arrived at our house in the midday. By this point the horse was in a bad state and the stable boy took him from me, wordlessly, as I dismounted, clutching my “dead” little doe. The cook heard me and came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Where did you go?”
I ignored her. I tried to paint a tortured grimace upon my visage, but I was far too exhausted. “Leave me in peace with her now,” I shouted at them as I carried her up the stairs to our bed chamber. “Go to the coffin maker if you haven’t already, send for the priest, but let me alone with her now!” Fortunately the police were no longer there so I did not have to deal with them.
Once in the bed chamber I locked the door behind us and closed the drapes. She laid on the bed and I pulled a sheet over her. A shroud. I laid down next to her and held her hand. We exchanged a few words, encouraging each other and comforting each other, and then immediately fell asleep. I couldn’t have slept for long before a persistent knocking at the door awakened me. She lay still as I arose.
I had not given my fiancé a thought up until that moment. “Louisa,” I said flatly. “What do you want?”
“I, I came to give you my condolences,” she said. It was remarkable that she was acknowledging both the existence of Ma Bichette and the grief that her death had logically caused me. “I heard what had happened, that you-” she stopped abruptly, her eyes meeting mine, not condemning me for my actions but expressing genuine concern for my emotional state.
“Have you come to get a firm date for our wedding?” I am ashamed at the way I treated her. Louisa was being very nice to me, very understanding, but I was in no mood for it. We had a plan that had to be set into action. The new moon was just four days away, so that meant between that moment and seven days we had to kill her murderer and eat his heart. It was all a very taxing situation, and all the Christian love that Louisa tried to heal me that day fell far short of it’s goal.
“No, no, of course not. I came to offer my help with the arrangements.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Help? You want to help me bury my mistress?” I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me. “You know that’s who she was, right? You do know what we did, right? You do know she’s the reason I kept delaying our wedding, right?” My ordeal had given me newfound bluntness and I had no intentions of fulfilling my betrothal to Louisa anyway. I saw no reason to pussyfoot around the issue anymore. “Do you know what I did with her? Things you would never do, my dear, things you could never imagine. You and yours wouldn’t let her type come within a hundred yards of your stuffy carriages and cotillions, and yet you come here, after hearing that I have gone completely mad over her, that I’ve ridden off with her corpse into the swamps, and that I’ve come back with her body, and still, still you come here, offering to help me?”
I must have been either a tad too harsh or merely more confrontational than she was used to because tears welled in her eyes. “We are to be married,” she said. “Father told me that it is best to put your sinful past behind you, and I want to help you. I love you.”
“Love? What do you know of love?” It was an accurate accusation. I had not so much as kissed my fiancé. The bulk of my interactions with her had been polite conversation and dancing at the aforementioned cotillions, although in the past year or so I had been neglecting her in favor of Ma Bichette. Louisa’s idea of love must have been shaped by the chaste novels that her mother allowed her to read and I honestly feel like she would not have been able to handle the full forces of my passion that I directed towards Ma Bichette. Louisa was a shy and reticent thing, even then, in her full bloom of youth, and if had I brought Louisa back from the dead she would not had been able to deal with it like Ma Bichette had. And that was not the kind of woman I could love.
“I love you!” Louisa said again.
“You think you love me? Do you know me at all? Because I certainly don’t know you. I knew everything about her, we told each other our secrets and our fears and our desires and our hatreds. I don’t know you at all, Louisa. Oh, I know that you are a pious woman, and that your family has raised you well by the standards of our ridiculous society, that you are instructed well in fortepiano, and that you just cannot wait to have children by my pedigree. But that is it. I know your finely crafted selling points, your prioritized skills and features that have meant to polish you into marriage with a successful man such as myself. I rejected them in favor of Ma Bichette. I loved her, Louisa, I do not love you.”
“But, you will come to love me,” she said. I feel sorry for her now. She wanted what I had promised her when I asked her to marry me-a normal life. At the time I wanted her gone. She was annoying me. I wanted to go lie down and sleep for a while, at least until the coffin was delivered. “Soon we will marry, mon chérie, and-”
I cut her off. An opportunity to advance our plan presented itself. “If you still want to marry me, fine, I will consent. Pick your day. Send your Father over as soon as you can. I will speak with him over the arrangements.”
She smiled. “Yes, mon chérie.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said and slammed the door shut. I carefully locked it behind me. Should anyone come in with the intention to soothe me or perhaps talk me out of holing up with a corpse and discover Ma Bichette still breathing and warm, we would be in for a world of hurt. Not that we weren’t already, but a world of hurt that we hadn’t planned for.
“Soon,” I whispered to her and caressed her back. We had decided that it would be best that she play dead completely, lest someone spy on us. Just the word ‘soon’ could be interrupted ambiguously enough, (say for example that I decided to kill myself. Again.) so I learned in even closer.
“Did you hear her at the door?” I asked.
She didn’t reply immediately. “But we cannot tonight,” she said after a moment of thought. Her voice was small and quiet and I prayed that should any servants be spying on us they would chalk it up to me talking to myself. “Tomorrow night, at the earliest.”
You really can get away with a lot once you’ve gone mad with grief, it turns out. None of the servants were willing to challenge me on my decisions. Ma Bichette had no family to speak of and decorum dictated that since I had “kept” her for so long none of her other customers, no matter how fond of her they had been, would come. Can you imagine how awkward that situation would have been? Never mind pretending that she wasn’t dead anyway, but to receive the men who had flopped her as well, listening to them reminisce on what a fantastic lay she was? Of course they would not have come out and said it, but it would be the underlying sentiment. Theoretically, I have a difficult time imagining a more awkward situation. Naturally, the death of my mistress would not be recognized by my family in any manner either. Just the servants and a few of her acquaintances and friends would attend. It would not be too difficult to conceal the resurrection.
Huh. I just realized that I’ve more or less completely ignored the investigators. They were not police in the same way we define them today. Militia would have been a better word for it. Upon discovery of the body there would have been a ruckus raised by the servants and the militia or police or whatever you would like to call it would be summoned. Honestly, there was not much they could do. Fingerprints, DNA, microscopes, we would all see these things come later. I’m not saying it would be impossible to conduct an investigation, but as much as it pains me to admit it, as much as the injustice of it still sears me, no one really gave a shit about the murder of a litigation attorney’s mixed race mistress. Since I had not told them of my suspicions regarding Monsieur Honore they had concluded that it was a robbery. Certainly I had bought Ma Bichette many lovely things, they reasoned, so without any other suspects as far as the New Orleans Police Force was concerned, Ma Bichette had been killed by an anonymous thief. I am curious if there is still any record of it anywhere. If there is any newspaper clipping in a file or a yellowed handwritten note pertaining
to her murder. Surely someone, somewhere, at some point, must have wondered about what had happened to my dearest most beloved doe.
Ducks and does. I’ve thought of them often in the past two hundred years or so, whenever I see one of the other I always think of her. Me being the duck, obviously. Of course I come across much more ducks than I do deer, so I am constantly reminded of my rash decision even more often than I should be. I asked her once if she did the same thing, this must have been, oh, forty or fifty years ago. She stared at me. “No,” she said in a tone of voice that I was unaccustomed to. It sounded like myself when I was in the throes of my extensional complaints. That unnerved me alone, but she leaned in closer to me. “You sentimental fool,” she hissed at me, “with your talk of innocent does and loyal mallards and an almost eternity in which we have this cyclical and unbalanced dance together. Mon canard, I am not reminded of you when I see some stupid bird begging for bread. I am reminded of you and your stupid, stupid decision when I smile at man, bring him back to my bed, and stifle his screams as I kill him.”
“Now who is being dramatic?” I said to her and she pulled away from me.
But that was all to come later. I tend to skip around a lot.
Monsieur Honore did not dally. Less than an hour after I dismissed Louisa, Bess knocked on my door and in her most respectful and somber tone informed me that my future Father-in-law had arrived. I squeezed Ma Bichette’s hand. We were putting the first phase of our plan into action. I pulled the soft velvet curtain open and a deluge of searing light flooded into the chamber. She was already playing dead, however, and didn’t even flinch when light fell upon her eyes.
“You look better dead than most women do alive,” I whispered in her ear and she smiled a little bit.
“Stop smiling,” I whispered and I leaned in to kiss her. “Stop smiling, stop smiling,” I repeated and she suppressed a giggle. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”
Her face fell blank and her limbs went limp. “Ready,” she said.
I straightened up and brushed some stray flecks of dried mud from my shirt. Ma Bichette and I had deduced that Monsieur Honore was behind her murder. We doubted that he had done it himself, that would have been terribly uncouth, but we believed it to be most likely that he had hired whomever strangled Ma Bichette. I was ready to just lay claim to Monsieur Honore without trial but Ma Bichette wanted to be sure. And what she had suggested did sound like entertaining.
I did not need to apply much in the way of theatrics to play my role in our little tableau. I had acquired over the past day or so a truly impressive thousand yard stare, and as I gazed in the mirror next the door to the hallway I was rather alarmed at my own reflection. Certainly this was not the sophisticated young lawyer I had cultivated myself into over the past twenty-six years or so, this was some exhausted stranger, weary with rue and anxiety.
I descended the stairs to the parlor with an uneven gait. Honestly, there was nothing more I wanted than to crawl back into bed with her and sleep until her funeral, but I reasoned that my drooping eyelids and inattentiveness could be chalked up to grief. Bess emerged from the parlor with a coffee service and passed me on her way to the kitchen. I plopped down on the green and white striped settee opposite Monsieur Honore.
I glared at him. I believed he had murdered Ma Bichette, but I did not want to tip my hand this early in our hunt. He had bristly white hair and a short beard and direly did I feel the impulse to smash the blue blown glass whale oil lamp that sat on the end table against his craggy and dignified face and then set it aflame. However, I did not believe that such a savage act would be covered by my perceived crazed grief. So I stared at him intently, forcing him to make the first move.
He took a long sip of my terribly fancy imported Turkish coffee. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said after a few moments of silence.
I tensed my slack hands into fists at his apparent crocodile tears. I let a few more moments of silence pass between us. The ticking of the ornate brass mantle clock seemed even louder than usual. “Yes,” I said after a moment.
“The loss of a faithful servant is never easy,” he continued. He set the cup down on the saucer and the clink almost made me flinch.
Had I not already decided I was going to kill him the next day I would had made that conclusion anyway at that comment. To suggest that my cherished little doe was nothing more than a servant to quell my carnal needs was vexing beyond measure. However, I just said “No, it is not easy.”
“So you are ready to move on?”
I nodded at his blunt question.
He scooped up some sugar and mixed it in his coffee. “Good. Your behavior has caused my daughter much heartache, both at your hands and the hands of gossip. Would it not cause her more embarrassment and heartache I would have annulled your betrothal months ago.”
I felt like laughing. His serious demeanor about such a trivial issue to me now was akin to the time I had been scolded by my tutor as a boy for using improper Latin gender articles. But the laughter died on my lips the moment he continued.
“I presume you’ve gotten all this unpleasantness out of your system?”
To refer to Ma Bichette’s and my delicate and complex relationship as an unpleasantness rankled me like nothing else had, and to imply that after he had gone and murdered her was just adding insult to murdered lover. “Unpleasantness?” I asked. My voice was low and soft, belying my anger.
“You will, from now on, conduct yourself with decorum,” he said to me. He took another sip of coffee. Ma Bichette had picked the china pattern out. Green with roses and gold trim. I hadn’t even given them much thought before, but at that moment I was acutely aware that she had picked pretty much everything out, even the settee I was sitting on and the noisy clock. She was my wife in everything but name.
“Decorum?” I asked.
Monsieur Honore sighed. “Do not be imprudent. You know full well what I mean.”
“I am afraid I do not,” I said. “Do you not visit the sporting houses as well? Ma Bichette told me her name. Georgine, right? Our indiscretions went to church together. ”
His hand froze in mid air. I had broken a rule of polite society by pointing out that he was being hypocritical. The clock steadily ticked on for a few moments.
“I apologize,” I said. “Please forgive my imprudence.” I had let my emotions get the better of me, yet again. In the past two hundred years I’ve started to reign that in, but it has been a learning process, to say the least. Not that I was worried about embarrassing him or anything, but for our plan to work he had to see her body now.
I might know the names of the mistresses of every man in town but I certainly did not know their faces. Like Ma Bichette, they were hidden away in private homes and never seen in public with their men. Since we doubted that Monsieur Honore had done the deed himself he would not know what Ma Bichette looked like.
But since I had apologized, the same rules that I had broken required that Monsieur Honore forgive me. He arose. “You are not recovered enough to discuss your marriage.”
I arose as well. “Before you go I must ask an indulgence.”
“In regards to what?”
“I would feel better if you could verify that you were not one of her customers,” I said and avoided eye contact. Ma Bichette has assured me that he had not been, this was just our rouse. “I would not be able to marry your daughter, it would be a gross impropriety for me.” Again, a lie. I would not care if Ma Bichette had lain with him or any other man. Nothing she had done before I met her could affect my feelings for her. Things she would do later, well, that is another story.
Yes, it was an odd request, and Monsieur Honore hesitated, but I pressed the issue. I claimed that I could not marry his daughter if such thin walls of nonsense had been compromised. I knew that even if he had, he would lie and said he hadn’t. But in a day or so all of that would be so very irrelevant.
I led him up the stairs. We paused at the door to the
bedroom and I rambled loudly for a while about the potential barbarism about me and my father in law having bedded the same woman as to give Ma Bichette warning that we were coming. I reached out and opened the door.
Quickly I glanced at Ma Bichette. She had rearranged herself since I last saw her; now her arm was hanging off of the bed and her head was angled towards the door. It puts me in mind of La Mort de Marat, which I saw some years later in Brussels, I believe it was. There was even a trace of a smile on her face. I only glanced at her though, then studied Monsieur Honore face.
He seemed relived to not have to lie. It was a look I had seen many times in the courtroom. “No, I have not known her,” he answered. His eyes lingered on her. I wonder if he was taken in by the eerie beauty she had in “death” or if he was just morbidly fascinated with a murder victim. But the longer he drank her in, the better. See what you did, I thought as he looked at her. Remember her face well.
He turned to go. “A shame,” he mumbled under his breath.
How I hated him then. How I hated him for only showing some sort of genuine compassion upon seeing what a beauty she was. Was it only a shame that she had died because she had been beautiful? I looked forward to killing him. My blood began to pound in my ears as I watched him leave our home. I felt an actual blood lust. Well, heart lust. I ached to put my teeth into his meaty, juicy, delectable heart just as much as I had ever wanted to lie with her. I had never tasted a human heart before, of course, but at that moment, as I watched his middle aged frame saddled up and ride off, there was nothing else I wanted more than to dig through all the viscera and bone of his chest like a wild predator. It would be so warm, so moist, so inviting. To put it vulgarly, I was horny for murder.
That caught me unawares. Previously I had imagined myself to be something of a milquetoast. I had never been keen on hunting and I simply abhorred bull baiting and other blood sports. I watched him through the windows, caught between my unease at my newfound predatory instinct and relishing my aforementioned predatory instinct. I was breathing rather quickly and my palms were beginning to sweat. Tomorrow night, I thought. Wait for just a day.
Bess softly asked if I needed anything.
“No,” I said. I fidgeted with the buttons on my shirt, trying to hide my abominable new desire with the busy, soft hands of a lawyer. “I am having the funeral tomorrow,” I said and turned to her. “Here. I will be taking her to be buried at my family’s plot.” More lies. I think Bess knew that was a lie, but I think she knew better than to ask what I was planning to do. Since she lived in the house as well, in the attic, she understood me better.
“I am terribly sorry,” she said. Unlike Monsieur Honore I knew she meant it. “She’s in a better place.”
Such a trite platitude. I nodded though. “Have you sent for the coffin maker?”
“Yesterday, when you were gone, Jean and I thought it best to have that ready when you returned from…wherever you went.”
My thoughts flashed back to that stone house. How surreal it all seemed now, there in my familiar and average home in the daylight, listening to the humdrum background noise of a typical day in the city. I wanted to tell Bess about our adventure in the bayou, just to hear it aloud and confirm to myself that it hadn’t been some bizarre shared hallucination Ma Bichette and I had. I had not grown fangs or sprouted fur or anything as obvious as that. I had died and returned and now I required human flesh regularly, but there are not any outward signs of that. Save for the little v shaped tattoo, Ma Bichette and I are one hundred-percent normal looking.
I stared at my palm. Where the key passed though there was nothing that remained of a scar. I hadn’t had a chance to try out the lock picking skills I had been endowed with yet. Then I remembered what Ma Bichette had promised Alava in exchange for the spell. It would turn out to be the second greatest deal of the past two centuries, eclipsed only by America’s purchase of Alaska.
“Bess,” I called out suddenly and turned around. She had already gone down the hall but quickly reappeared.
“Yes?”
I ran up the stairs and shouted at her from the balcony. “You’re about the same size as her, right?” I peered at her from the railing.
Her face was understandably confused. “Uh, yes,” she answered. I could tell she feared a return of my madness.
I spun some elaborate explanation of Ma Bichette’s unwillingness to be judged before the Lord in costly and fashionable ensemble and instead that she should meet her maker in a humbler dress. I am deft at spinning lies, although I assure you all of the stuff about witches and afterlives is factual. Long story short, I paid Bess three half-eagles, or fifteen dollars (something like two-hundred today), for her second best serving dress, in which I would ‘bury’ Ma Bichette. Considering I legally owned Bess I could have just taken it, but liar and cannibal that I may be, I was not about to bully my servants around. Besides, I was turning her out at the end of the week, and Lord knows freedom is a costly endeavor.
I suppose I try and justify the fact that I was a slave owner with all of these patronizing comments about what a good and just man I was to my servants. I don’t feel unduly terrible about it. That was the reality of the times, and I never beat anyone nor deprived them of any reasonable comforts. Unjust and cruel system that it had been, I was but one man and too preoccupied with my own pursuit of happiness to really and truly concern myself with an institution so powerful that it is still such an issue today that I feel forced to address it in my memoirs. Many social ills exist today, dear reader, and in fact there is more human trafficking now than there was in my time, but I would bet my fortune in real estate and stocks that you are not doing much to change that, either, save for the odd donation via text message or Facebook repost. When that long-awaited Judgment Day arrives finally, the fact that I owned other human beings is not going to be a concern of mine on that tally sheet.
If anything, Ma Bichette was worse. I would be content to wallow about in an untidy house, but since she had been a star attraction at her bordello she had been waited on hand and foot for several years and expected near-perfection from our servants. She was not cruel, but a tardy dinner tray or poorly laundered sheet would provoke a sharp word or two from her. Ma Bichette is a bit of a prima donna naturally anyway, but she holds herself to very high standards and expects others around her to do the same. She was far from unfair though, and more than generous with my money, insisting that the servants eat the same meals we did and have new clothes every other month and that they have plenty of time off in which to visit their families.
Family had always been a weak point with Ma Bichette. Her mother had died of some kind of cancer when she had been in her early teens and she herself could not have children as a result of an enthusiastic abortion. Although she knew who her father was she had never spoken to him, although in her youth her mother had received money to help support her. Years later when he died she slipped back to New Orleans to visit his gravestone and catch a peek at her half brothers and sisters. They, of course, had aged, but she assured me she could still see herself in them. Life is not fair, she had said to me when she returned to our home at the time in the wilderness of Ohio. It had only been the second time I’d seen her openly cry.
Anyway, the dress was a simple affair, dark green cotton with white stripes and simple hemmed edges. It lacked the high waist that was so common at the time, marking it as a functional garment as opposed to a fashionable one. Ideally it would have to be taken in a bit at the waist and let out a bit at the bottom, but there was no time.
“Would you like me to dress her?” Bess asked as she returned from the attic with the dress.
I had to choke back a genuine smile. “No,” I answered, remembering the great many times I had either undressed Ma Bichette or helped her dress. If nothing else I knew my way around women’s clothing. Besides, the regency period of fashion was not nearly as complicated as the later 19th century would prove to be. No stiff corsets or wide petticoats or
ridiculous hoops, just fairly straightforward simple dresses and shawls and jackets.
I instructed Bess to bring up a tray of whatever food was on hand and leave it outside the door. I entered the bedroom, using my finger to undo the lock as opposed to the key. It worked perfectly. Much to my dismay Ma Bichette had clearly grown bored and was flipping through an art book while lying on her stomach.
Quickly I shut the door behind me. “You are supposed to be dead!” I mouthed at her when she looked up at me.
She rolled her eyes and snapped the book shut. I laid the dress on the back of a chair. She sat up and stretched, eyeing the dress with distaste. “Undress me,” she ordered. Not that she needed help, she was just wearing a dressing gown that buttoned in the front. But she knew that I took particular pleasure in it.
I double checked that the door was locked and pulled the curtains tightly shut. In the darkened room I knelt in front of her as she sat on the side of the bed and meticulously unbuttoned the front of her pink dressing gown and then slid it off her perfect body. I was enjoying my familiar ritual but she was understandably distracted.
She leaned closer to me and whispered into my ear. “Did he say anything?”
My delight in my favorite diversion was spoiled at the recollection of Monsieur Honore. “Nothing remarkable,” I answered. I sighed and stood up. “You’re just filthy,” I said and walked into the washroom. I closed the shutters and she followed me.
The large wooden basin was full of clean water, which had sat in the basin since yesterday morning when Ma Bichette had Bess bring it up. Usually Ma Bichette stewed herbs in hot water and then rinsed herself with that, but that would not scrub off the residue and sweat and mud that speckled her soft and dusky skin. She smiled at me, knowing I liked this as well, handed me a bar of English soap and told me to wash her.
“I do not think there is any reason to dwell on it,” she said as I rolled up my sleeves. She kept her voice low.
“On what exactly?” I rubbed the soap against the cloth and dunked it into the tepid water several times.
She paused. “On having to…eat people.” She turned her back to me and pulled her hair aside.
“Oh.” I dunked the cloth in the water again and then brought it to her back. “No, not really. It’s not like we have a choice in the matter.”
“I certainly didn’t,” she said under her breath.
There was silence for a few moments, broken only by the sloshing of the water. She was right. She hadn’t had a choice. But she wasn’t open about her bitterness yet.
Ma Bichette turned to face me. “There is no sense to dwell upon it. That’s the way it is,” she said. She was trying to reassure herself.
I dropped the cloth in the basin. “Mon amour, we are never going to get old. We are never going to get sick or die. We have the rest of the time on Earth to be together. That’s the way it is.” I held her hands in mine, however she still seemed distracted.
“I don’t want to go to Hell,” she said.
“Who does?”
She smiled sadly. “You do, apparently, you made a deal with the Devil for the both of us.”
“That’s not entirely accurate,” I reasoned and started to soap up her unmentionables. “The Devil was never mentioned, only God and Death. Alava did not identify herself as an agent of the Devil. I have no way of knowing from which source she derives her power.”
Ma Bichette laughed. “You couldn’t make a guess?”
“That is not my responsibility.”
I continued to bathe her until I was satisfied that she was back to her perfect self.
“Only bad people, right?” She said after a moment. “We will only target them.”
I nodded. “Yes. There are plenty of them.”
“I love you,” she said. “But-” she left that hang in the air.
I wrapped a towel around her. “Everything will work out, you’ll see.” I did not have any idea what was I was talking about, of course.
Our Blissful Bayou Beginnings Page 2