Bride of a Stranger (Classic Gothics Collection) (11 page)

During the daylight hours it was easy to see that there was no alternative to their arrangement, no other room where he could have slept. But sometimes, when, after lying in bed all day, she could not sleep, she lay beneath the mosquito netting that enclosed both beds together in a gauze prison and her thoughts grew morbid. It seemed that, like some medieval chatelaine, she was being guarded. Justin lay at her feet between her and the door. Whether he guarded her against harm or against escape she could not decide.

Once during the night she had been awakened by a scream. She had sat up, her heart beating fast, uncertain if the sound had been real or a lingering remnant of a dream. At the rustle of her bedclothes Justin awoke.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice vibrant with a quiet strength in the dark.

“I—I thought I heard someone cry out,” she explained, beginning to feel foolish.

They listened together, then just as she opened her mouth to apologize for waking him for nothing the keening scream came again.

Justin chuckled softly. “It’s only a panther down in the swamp,
chére
. Go back to sleep.”

She heard him turn over in his narrow bed, then she lay back on her own pillows, thinking of the gentle endearment he had used and smiled ironically as she remembered her pity, so long ago, for the girls who married men who carried them off to homes in the wilds where alligators roared and panthers shattered the night with their cries. Abruptly she shivered, and, pulling the sheet up to her chin, lay staring wide-eyed into the dark.

They had been married the week before Fat Tuesday. Lent came and went, as did Holy Week and Easter. Then summer was upon them, in fact, if not by the calendar.

“My dear Claire, I don’t care for the way you are looking,” Octavia said one morning. “I have always considered that too much bed rest is not good. For myself, it saps my strength. A month, now, would be enough to put me near the grave! I haven’t liked to suggest that you get up, Justin has been so set against it. But you are weaker than I like, even if it is the fashion, though I must admit you are in looks. Your eyes are bright, and your skin is positively translucent. But I would feel much better if you had a trifle more color. What do you say to a short carriage drive?”

“Oh, I would like that above anything.”

“It is sure to improve your appetite. You needn’t pretend to me. I saw you give your gumbo dinner to Bast. He loves shrimp, of course, but you really must not. He will get fat, and I cannot bear an obese cat.”

“I—all at once I could not eat another mouthful, though it was deliciously seasoned, and I didn’t like to hurt Cook’s feelings.”

“Very commendable, I’m sure, but you need it, and Bast is an excellent mouser and it will make him lazy, though he looks thin enough now, doesn’t he? Come, put on one of your fresh muslins and I will send to the stables to have the carriage brought round.”

By the time Claire was dressed, the carriage was waiting at the front steps; a landau with a new coachman on the box replacing the man who had been killed. Helene and Berthe, hearing of the expedition, had decided to join them, and the four ladies stepped into the carriage. They set out down the drive, a mere track paved with shells and over-hung with moss-draped trees.

“Where are we going?” Claire wanted to know, staring back at the house that looked so cool and comfortable at the top of the slope that led up from the bayou curving around it.

“Just a short drive about the plantation. We won’t be leaving our own roads. I thought you might enjoy seeing the fields, the quarters where our people live, their church, that sort of thing,” Octavia replied.

Claire nodded, agreeing that she would be interested in seeing the outbuildings and the land.

“Are you quite all right, dear?” Berthe asked diffidently. “The motion of the carriage does not bother you? I don’t wish to sound inquisitive, but my maid tells me that your Rachel has let it be known that you are not eating well and sometimes suffer from
des nausées—
the illness of the morning.”

“Not
enceinte
already!” Helene exclaimed. “You need not have hurried so. I have no wish to dandle my grandchildren on my knee.”

“But—I couldn’t be!” Claire said, finding her voice at last.

“Oh, there has been time enough,” Helene assured her, shrugging pettishly. “Personally, I would have thought—but there, that is Justin. No consideration for anyone other than himself. Marcel never considered my feelings.”

“Helene!”

“I do wish you wouldn’t say that, Berthe, really I do,” her sister-in-law told her without removing her gaze from the carriage window.

“Well, my Gerard was always the soul of—”

“Nor prattle of Gerard, always your Gerard, either,” she requested in a strained voice.

Claire paid little attention to their wrangling. What could she say? How could she tell them why it was impossible for her to be pregnant? She could not. And so she remained silent. Let them think what they pleased, she thought, they would find out soon enough.

Sensing, perhaps, a portion of her embarrassment, Octavia intervened with a change of subject, and the other ladies talked of various things, their voices raised slightly above the sound of the wheels.

They rode through a short stretch of forest, then open country began; meadows green with oats where cattle and horses grazed, fields of young corn trembling in the breeze and then rows of sugar cane, mile upon mile, of different heights, some new, just pushing above the black earth, some knee high, and some higher already than a man’s head. The sun beat down, building up the heat inside the carriage, and dust filtered in, a fine grit, settling in the folds of their dresses and on the fine film of perspiration that appeared on their faces.

The road they were traveling appeared to make a wide circle around the perimeter of the plantation. As they began the last loop back toward Sans Songe, the country once again grew thickly wooded and they were grateful for the coolness Several times they crossed small rumbling bridges over the tributaries of the bayou. Trees towered above them that had never felt the bite of an ax, and grape-vines as thick as a man’s wrist reached toward the sun at their tops. Saw briars pushed also toward the light that glimmered high above, light that was denied entrance to the forest floor by the close-knitted tree tops. But beneath that leafy canopy, the ground covered with a thick, sound-deadening coverlet of leaves was fairly clear, the small under-growth shaded out by the intertwined branches above. Here the road was a mere track, wide enough for only one vehicle, with grass and weeds and small saplings trying to grow in the middle between the ruts, sweeping the underside of the carriage as they passed over them.

A thick silence closed around them. In the suffocating stillness, they became aware of the miasma of the swamp, the smell of dankness and stagnant mud.

Suddenly, the carriage was invaded by a swarm of mosquitoes and they slapped at them, crushing them, fanning them out the windows of the fast rolling coach.

“Why in heaven’s name did anyone ever build a road through here?” Claire asked, slapping at a mosquito that had been totally unimpressed by their attempts to evict him.

“It was cut originally so that the laborers could bring the cypress wood for the big house from the swamp. Every board, every joist, was grown right here on our own land and cut, stacked, seasoned, shaped and pegged into place by our own people.”

“Really?” Claire asked with interest, staring at the trees that soared skyward, trees that were, or so it seemed, as old as time, crowded about with the curiously human-looking natural stumps known as cypress knees. Once again the bayou came into view, a deep but narrow stream here, a cut into the flat earth of the forest floor.

“How did they get such huge trees out of the swamp?”

“With oxen teams, often as many as eight in a span. The lumber for the houses in the quarters, the outbuildings, the hospital, jail, copperage, stables, barns, nursery, the church for our people, for everything, right down to the corncribs, was grown here on our land. It gives one a great sense of accomplishment only to look at it all. You will see it on the final part of our drive. We will return through the quarters.”

They rattled on a few minutes more and then Berthe spoke. “Is this where they think the panther roams?”

“So I would imagine.” It was Helene who answered her.

“So close to the house?”

Helene frowned at her as if wondering what in the world had made her bring up such a subject.

“It stands to reason that it must be if we can hear him from the house in the night,” Octavia said shortly.

Claire found herself searching the shadows for the beast, a feeling of fascinated dread gripping her, then she was jerked out of that pastime as the carriage ground to a halt.

“What in the name of Satan?” Helene exclaimed, clutching at the window frame to save herself from an ignominious fall. Berthe squealed and caught Octavia’s arm, then as the other woman shook her off impatiently so that she could thrust her head out the window, she subsided into a corner of the coach with an injured expression on her pale face.

“Oh,” Octavia said, going very still.

“Well?” Helene demanded.

Still Octavia did not speak. There was a sudden flurry of shouts and curses from the driver, the coach bucked, lurching to the side of the narrow road, then the wheels of their carriage scraped those of another. A pair of cream horses pulling a yellow curricle crowded by them.

On the seat was one of the most flamboyant figures Claire had ever seen. She knew instantly who it was. Belle-Marie, Justin’s quadroon mistress. After that one encompassing glance she turned her head, staring hard in front of her, thinking that the woman would pass them by. But the curricle pulled up when its driver was even with the windows of the carriage.

She was the color known as
café au lait
, coffee with milk, a warm cream brown with a luminous quality to her skin. Her cheekbones were high, with a hint of Indian blood, and across them was a flush of color like the blush on a ripe peach. Her brows were winged arches of dark silk and beneath them were sloe-shaped pools of brown. Black hair was pulled back and covered by an orange silk turban boasting a gilt brooch of intricate, far-eastern design, a holder for a white ostrich plume that arched gracefully to fall to eye level, floating as she moved her head. In her ears dangled gold hoops, and her dress of soft peach muslin left her shoulders bare. She was so beautiful, even with her tawdry jewels and barbaric colors, that Claire felt her throat tighten with some difficult emotion that had nothing to do with admiration.

An insolent smile on her lush mouth, Belle-Marie

inclined her head. “I hope I see you well.”

“Yes, of course,” Claire answered, though she was by no means sure that she should dignify this meeting with a reply. Would Justin be angry that she had stopped to bandy words with his mistress? Would it make any difference that it was Belle-Marie who had forced them to stop? Would he be inclined to side with his wife or his mistress in this situation? Claire thought she knew he would support her only if she acted as society expected.

“And how do you fare at Sans Songe, a city girl

from
belle
Nouvelle Orléans?”

“As well, I’m sure, as you.” Claire was unable to

bear that knowing smile.

“Oh, but I am not of New Orleans. You could not know, of course, but I was born on Sans Songe.”

“Indeed?”

“Certainement.
My parents were freed some years

ago.”

Claire saw the implication, that Justin had given

her parents’ freedom to Belle-Marie as a gift.

When she was sure that Claire was not going to comment, the quadroon continued. “I am one with Sans Songe; the swamp was my playground until the age of fifteen. I never worked, for here the children do not labor, though, of course, when I grew older I was given a—position—”

Still Claire did not answer. She could not find a word to say in the face of such effrontery.

“Why does the coachman not drive on?” Helene demanded, suddenly finding her voice. There was an echo of the question in Claire’s own mind.

“You must not blame the man,” Belle-Marie informed them with a careless laugh, “I fear our wheels are locked.”

“Insolent chit! Back your curricle at once so that we may proceed!”

“Oh, I shall, in good time. First there is a thing that is in my heart to say to Madame Leroux—the younger. You see, madame, I have this great fear, me, that Sans Songe is an unhealthy place for you.”