Bride of a Stranger (Classic Gothics Collection) (13 page)

An alarming color had suffused his ordinarily pale face, and an expression of desperation filled his eyes as he tried to force sound, coherent sound, from his open mouth. But all that issued was an ineffectual croak that was so obviously an embarrassment to Marcel that Claire felt his shame and his rage as if it were her own. What was he trying to say? She had no idea, and from the look of sad concern on Anatole’s face, neither did he. But as Marcel’s struggle to voice his thoughts went on and on, she could bear it no longer.

“What is it, Anatole? What does he want?”

The dark servant shook his head. “I do not know madame. For so long a time, after the night he became like this, he would try to speak. No one could understand, not even I. And so he stopped. Now he begins again. It could be that he thinks you, maybe, will understand. You are
sympathique
and, I think, he likes you.”

“I wish I could understand,” she said, staring into Marcel’s eyes, the pain of compassion in her voice. “I only wish I could.”

For one more long moment her father-in-law held her eyes, then abruptly he ceased straining and relaxed against the cushions of his chaise, exhaustion graying his face.

After a moment of silence, Anatole spoke. “I will take him in now. He will wish to rest.”

With Marcel gone, a feeling of strain came between Claire and Edouard, and as soon as she could without seeming too obvious, Claire excused herself and returned to the house.

Darkness had fallen, but it was still nearly an hour to the last meal of the day. Town hours were kept on the plantation, not so much to be fashionable as to take advantage of the cool of the evening. The salon was deserted and the settees, in the light of the girondoles burning on the mantel, had a forlorn look. The Leroux family was not a particularly close one, and the room was seldom used.

Claire was about to pass on through the room to the outside, then around the gallery to her own room, when she heard a sound. It was a woman, a woman crying. She stopped, undecided. It came, she was certain, from Berthe’s room, and though she was reluctant to intrude, she was also reluctant to pass on without concern. She stepped to the door and turned the knob quietly, ready to offer her aid if Berthe had need of it, or to withdraw at once if there did not appear to be anything she could do.

The room was dark, the only light a pale glimmer from the candles behind Claire. At first she could see nothing, then, as her eyes gradually became accustomed to the dimness, she could make out the figure of a woman. She was standing in the center of the floor, her head bowed over an object she held in her hands, while her shoulders shook with her weeping. It was a soft, almost melodious grief, without hope of comfort.

Suddenly, the weeping woman became aware of the light, for she swung around. And Claire drew in her breath as she saw that it was not Berthe. It was Helene, a distraught Helene, clasping the death mask of Berthe’s husband Gerard to her breast.

“Gloat!” she screamed. “Mealy-mouthed prig! You were never woman enough for him, never! You never knew him, not as I did. And for all your outward show, you can never mourn him as I do, or feel his loss—here in your heart—after all these years. And you’re glad. You’re glad, I know it All this—” she flung out her arm to encompass the trophy-filled room. “All this is to mortify me. Deny it how you will. Except this—this travesty of his poor face. Why did you do this to him? Why, except to hurt me?” She pushed the death mask toward Claire.

What faint light there was coming from behind Claire left her face in shadow. It was little wonder, she supposed, that Helene, her eyes filled with tears, should mistake her for Berthe. But what to do about it? Go quietly away, or explain and let her suffer the chagrin of knowing a stranger had witnessed her outburst?

Without a word, Claire swung around, pulled the door to behind her, and fled.

As she went along the gallery nearing her room, she saw a light burning within. Justin would be inside, then. Her hands were still trembling, and her face, she knew must be pale with the shock of her discovery. Her footsteps slowed and she turned toward the railing, leaning against it while she tried to calm herself to present a cool, unmoved front to her husband.

Helene, that arrogant, time-ravaged beauty, had been in love with her husband’s brother, so in love that ten years later she could still weep her heart out over a mask of his dead face. Her husband’s brother, a married man with a son, a man who was shot to death in a duel with his nephew, Helene’s own son!

Did everyone in the house know these terrible facts? If so, it was no wonder they were not particularly close.

As she stood there, she became aware of a distant rumble, like thunder, but much more regular. As it continued, she thought to herself that it sounded like the mutter of drums, such as she had heard often at night coming from Congo Square in New Orleans, where the slaves were permitted to dance to their African rhythms. The incessant beating, in both ceremony and thoughtless pleasure, had often lulled her to sleep.

“Listening to the drums? My girl tells me there is going to be a meeting down along the bayou back in the swamp.”

Octavia stepped out of her darkened room and strolled to join Claire.

“A meeting?” Claire asked, suppressing a start at her sudden appearance.

“Voodoo. It’s their religion, you know, brought with them from Africa. They worship the snake god, the Zombi or Vodu, as he is named. He gives them special powers, or so they believe. One of their legends, from the Dahomeyan tribe, I think, says that man and woman came into the world blind, and that it was the serpent, the Zombi, who gave them sight. Curious, isn’t it? A direct contradiction of our belief that the serpent took away our paradise instead of giving it to us. Unless, of course, you consider that man was better off blind.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I asked,” Octavia stated forthrightly. “They don’t like to talk about it. They have been told repeatedly that their beliefs are wicked and that ours is the only religion. But I am a persistent woman, and eventually they came to the conclusion that I am harmless.” There was irony in her voice.

“You—you know of their
gris-gris
?”

“Certainly. They think they can make things happen by wishing evil or good. And as difficult as it may be to believe, it seems they can. The
gris-gris
they use does little more than symbolize the wish. A real Voodoo—or Voodooienne, the leader, priest or priestess, or what-have-you—doesn’t really need a
gris-gris
. He can merely let it be known that he is contemplating the death of an individual for this or that reason, and the deed is done. The doomed one takes to his bed, and, in a matter of days, is dead. Often it isn’t necessary for a believer of voodoo to know that he is being ‘fixed.’ Any illness is looked upon with deep suspicion, and if he can think of anyone who might have taken him into dislike, he goes immediately to the Voodoo for a darker magic.” She shrugged. “It becomes an endless cycle.”

“Then why do they use the
gris-gris
?”

“As I said, they are symbols, not unlike the cross, the holy water, the bones of the saints, bits of wood and river water, things not intrinsically sacred, but made so by our beliefs. So it is with theirs.”

Claire blinked at such casual heresy. Then as the meaning sank in she said, “Yes.” She could not keep a thoughtful tone from her voice. It was peculiar, finding that someone at Sans Songe knew of voodoo, when she herself had been a victim of the practice. Then she shook her head. What was she thinking of this evening? Why was her mind running on these lines? She knew who was behind the things that had happened to her. It was Belle Marie. It must be.

“Ah well. I’m not sure I understand, myself. I think sometimes that true understanding of these things comes in the blood, or in the mother’s milk. Don’t upset yourself—what was that?”

It was a low noise, a gurgling growl in the throat. They stood listening as it went on and on, coming from Claire’s room. Chill bumps rose on Claire’s arms, and she swallowed hard before turning her eyes toward the older woman.

“I can’t imagine,” she began, but as the timbre rose to an animalistic shriek, Octavia interrupted her.

“Bast!” the older woman cried, hurrying forward to pull open the french windows. Hard on her heels, Claire searched the room with her eyes. There was no sign of Justin as she had expected. There was no one but the great black cat, squirming on the floor with a gelatinous froth dribbling from his mouth.

“Stay back,” Octavia warned. “He doesn’t know what he is doing. He might savage you.”

“What is the matter with him?”

“Convulsions. It could be several things; disease, something he has eaten—”

Suddenly the cat stretched out on his side, shuddering violently. The sound in his throat had died to a whine, his eyes were tightly closed, but his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of pain.

“He—ate my dinner.”

“Your dinner?”

“I was not hungry, and he begged so—”

Abruptly the cat went still and his eyes closed to slits. Octavia put her hand on his side, her fingers sinking into the black velvet of his fur.

“He is still breathing, I think. What is this?”

Her questing fingers had slipped beneath a loop of dirty brown string tied around his neck. As she tugged on it, a tiny bag came into view. Tipping its contents into her hand Octavia murmured, “Sand, a few slivers of bone, a pebble or two, pepper, it appears to be.”

A terrible certainty came over Claire, though she could not have said from where it came or why it should seem so menacing.

“It’s voodoo, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Octavia whispered. “Voodoo.”

 
“WILL YOU COME with me?”

The question, put so abruptly, caught Claire by surprise. “Come with you?”

“To the ceremony in the swamp. If the Voodooienne put the spell on Bast, she can take it off. She ‘crossed’ him, she can ‘uncross’ him, as they say. And she will, I’m sure, for a price.”

“But—but couldn’t you send for her?” Claire asked. The thought of the meeting, so primitive, and far beyond her experience, deep in the swamp, was not by any means attractive to her. She could not imagine herself setting out to find it among the moss-draped trees, along the damp trails.

“It may be too late. I must hurry,” Octavia said, removing her shawl and carefully wrapping it around her pet before picking him up in her arms.

“Wait! Let’s ask Justin.”

“No! He would never give us his escort, not for something like this. And he would try to keep me from going. He thinks it all nonsense, and he thinks me a foolish old woman for crediting them with any kind of power. He would let Bast die! For the love of God, Claire. Don’t stand there. Come on.”

Claire did not like the edge of tightly controlled hysteria that she caught in the older woman’s voice. “Octavia, are you certain?”

“Don’t come then. I will go alone.”

With her face hard, she pushed past Claire toward the door. Claire stared after her. She could not let her go alone, not into the black dangers of the swamp. She did not want to go, but her conscience would not allow her to stay.

“Just a minute,” she called, and snatching up a spencer to cover her arms against the mosquitoes, she hurried after Octavia.

The house and the clear stretch of lawn around it were soon left behind. For a few yards they followed the road curving around the plantation, but when the house was no longer visible behind them, they plunged into the woods, following a small animal trail through the high weeds. Octavia seemed to know where she was going, for she took the lead with a fine unconcern for the possibility of snakes lurking on the path. Briars clawed at their skirts and ankles, and the branches of saplings whipped at their shoulders. Claire developed a stitch in her side, and her breathing grew ragged as her ribs began to throb with a dull ache.

They came to the deep woods where the virgin oaks and gums and ashes over their heads closed out the starlight. In that echoing space the sound of the drums was louder, and mingling with it they could hear sharp cries and the rising crescendo of voices chanting.

By now Octavia was almost running. Claire followed, paying more attention now to where she was putting her feet than to what lay ahead of them. A feeling of deep fatalism gripped her. Committed now to this escapade, there was no use looking back. She pushed her apprehension from her mind, stopped probing the darkness around them, and concentrated on keeping up with Octavia.

The black crevasse of the bayou appeared to their left and they moved along beside its banks in the easier going of the animal trail. Then suddenly there was a glow ahead of them through the trees. The throbbing of the drums seemed to be all around them, mixed with a cacophony of jingling, clashing, and rattling sounds. Then they saw the figures, entranced by the hypnotic beat, the night crowding in upon them, and the leaping flames of the giant fire, as they swayed in a dance from out of the steaming jungles of Africa, a dance out of time.

Octavia and Claire slowed and came to a halt at the edge of the clearing. Beyond the dancers, the fire was reflected in the looping curve of the bayou, and the light it threw skyward illuminated the green of the trees that encircled the open space and washed the stars from the patch of heaven above them. The ground was smooth, beaten flat and hard by the pounding of countless feet.

“If you will stay here,” Octavia whispered, “I will see if I can get a word with the priestess. She will be more likely to do as I ask if you aren’t with me. She doesn’t know you to trust you, and I expect she would be suspicious. I don’t want you to be too mixed up in this. Justin will be angry enough if he discovers that I persuaded you to bear me company.”

It seemed reasonable. Claire nodded.

“Stay back out of sight here, among the trees. I don’t suppose these people, most of whom are our own workers and know you by sight, would dream of harming you under normal circumstances, but they are not normal now. They are drunk with the night and the drums in their blood, besides a generous supply of homemade liquor unless I miss my guess. It is forbidden, of course, but nonetheless evident for all that. At these times passion—runs high. Take care.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t show my face.”

“Good.”

With that single word, the older woman turned and drifted away through the trees just outside the perimeter of the circle. Claire drew back further into the shadows. Then from behind the screen of branches she watched, her heartbeat slowly rising with disbelief.

Most of the people in the clearing were dressed in their work clothes, the women in shapeless dresses and the men in breeches of rough cloth, but with their feet bare. But several of them, those nearest the fire, wore loin cloths of red material, and on their wrists, knees, and ankles, leather thongs strung with bells, beads, and animal teeth. Several shook gourd rattles, and small bags, like the one found on Bast, bounced on their chests. Their skins glistened like ebony with sweat and oil, and the orange light of the fire ran in highlights over them. To one side, three men hunkered over barrels with leather stretched over the top, pounding them with the flat of their hands in a constant rhythm, while a fourth used a pair of thick wooden sticks to hammer a hollowed-out log. Near the fire was a box with holes drilled in the sides for air, a small wire cage holding several half-grown roosters, and a great iron cauldron from which rose clouds of steam.

How long she watched she did not know. Time seemed less than nothing. But then, from the shadows near the bayou, a woman appeared. At once the drums stopped, the people grew still and backed away to the edges of the clearing, leaving her alone in the center.

She was of middle age, a large woman with well-rounded arms and face, clad in a long dress of tent-like proportions in a pure white that seemed to glow. She held up her arms, and a single drum began a slow, measured cadence. She began to move from side to side with a grace surprising in one of her bulk, and with each step the bells on her ankle bracelets made a musical chatter.

A tall, gangling man in a loin cloth ran from one side. He lifted the lid of the box Claire had noticed earlier, and from its depths drew forth a great snake, larger and longer than any she had ever seen. It was as big around as the man’s arm and twice as long as he was tall.

“Le Grande Zombi!”
the man cried out as the serpent coiled himself slowly about his uplifted arm and opened round, black eyes, gazing unwinking around him.

“Le Zombie—”
the crowd breathed.

Claire’s scalp prickled and she swallowed, as the big woman, obviously the high priestess, the Voodooienne, accepted the snake and allowed it to coil along her arm and about her neck and upper body. Crooning as to a baby, she turned and swayed, moving around the circle, gently undulating her massive hips, a rapt look on her face. Gradually the tempo increased, her movements became more vigorous and her eyes grew large with a growing excitement.

Tension built in the crowd. They inched toward the Voodooienne, slowly closing in on her. The woman’s mouth fell open, her eyes became unfocused. Her lips moved, forming a single word, little more than a whisper.

“Power.”

“Power, power, power—she got the power, power, power—” It ran around the circle, a whisper rising to a chant.

Now the woman was jerking, her body shaken by spasms that ran like ripples over her. The great green-black body of the snake seemed larger, more prominent against the white of her dress, and he seemed to be awakening as the frenzy grew in the woman holding him.

Then suddenly, another woman broke through the crowd to the inner circle. A young woman. A woman whose cream-colored skin caught the fire glow, caught it on her arms, her legs, and her shoulders, for she wore nothing more than a single strip of red cloth twisted about her breasts and hips with the free end caught by a small dagger thrust through the material. A rag on the same cloth held her hair that was loose upon her shoulders, back from her face. And she threw back her head to let it swing as wild and free as the dusky goddess it crowned.

With a cruel smile twisting her lips, she placed both hands on the older priestess’ arms and pushed her backward. With a full-throated cry she leaped high, then she began to dance.

“Belle-Marie, she got the power. She stole the power—power—power—”

And it appeared that she had seized it from the big woman. But the frenzy that had possessed the priestess had grown far worse in Belle-Marie, for she was much more wanton, more mercilessly certain of herself, in her voluptuous posturing.

In her whirling dance, she passed close to the cage that held the roosters, and at the cackles and flutters of alarm Belle-Marie paused. With a feline grace, she swooped to flip back the lid and grasp one of the helpless birds by the feet. She flung it high, laughing as it squawked and flapped its wings, then she reached down and dragged the knife from its place. She slashed at the cockerel, nearly cutting off a wing. Again and again she flayed him, splitting his breast, gouging feathers and flesh from his legs. Slowly, his white feathers grew red with blood. Blood spattered Belle Marie’s face, her shoulders, and her breasts where her cloth, freed from the knife pinning it in place, was slipping from her body. Then while the cockerel still lived, she flung it spinning through the air to land in the boiling pot on the fire. Stooping, she seized another bird from the cage.

There was an atmosphere of unrestrained violence, of released hate, and of lust growing about the quadroon.

Claire tasted the sickness rising in her throat and turned her head, only to look back again as a great cry rose from the crowd before her.

She saw Belle-Marie, naked, her body dripping with the blood of the decapitated rooster in her left hand, while she drank from a bowl the blood she had drained. The drums pounded as hands began to reach for the new Voodooienne, hands reaching for power, hands reaching in lust, and through the crowd there swept a wave of madness as scratching, biting, and clawing they fell upon each other.

Claire stumbled back, one hand to her mouth. She could not watch. She had to get away. Where was Octavia? She did not dare call to her for fear that the madness in the clearing would reach out and sweep her into it. In which direction had the older woman gone? From which direction had they come? The horrible things she had seen had left her disoriented. But then, as she heard a soft footfall behind her, it ceased to matter. She ran.

Vines and saw briars turned vicious tore at her hair. Sharp twigs and dead limbs bruised her pounding feet through her thin slippers, while tree roots reached out to trip her. She slipped on the loose leaves that carpeted the ground. A tree branch stung her eye and rasped across her face as she ducked beneath it.

Then from out of the black night behind her there came a whisper of sound past her shoulder. A knife, thrown hard, buried itself with a thud in the great live oak tree ahead of her!

Claire was so startled that she stumbled and fell head-long, catching at the tree for support. Starlight glinted on the blade and gleamed from a hilt that looked like
cloisonné
enamel. She did not wait to be certain. Long before the thought of self-protection had formed in her mind, the hilt was in her hand and she had pulled the blade from the hard, resisting wood.

She turned, at bay, and stood listening, holding her breath that she might hear better. The noise of the voodoo gathering seemed far away, and around her the night stood unnaturally still. Then there came a crackling noise, and Octavia, the wide wings of her peculiar gown rippling around her, broke from the darkness. Claire could not see her face, but her voice held only gentle chiding.