Ciji Ware (4 page)

“Yeah. Sure,” Daphne scoffed. The skycap lingered, his hand resting on the retrieved harp.

“Forget it,” King snapped. “You already got your tip.” The man shrugged again and slunk off in the direction of a flustered elderly woman surrounded by suitcases.

“You told me that Jack had moved to Dallas,” Daphne said, her breath ragged. Her heart was still pounding, and she could actually feel adrenaline thundering through her limbic system like the crescendo of the “William Tell Overture.”

“He lives there, all right,” King said grimly. “Works as a public relations flak for some oil company. Someone obviously tipped him off as to exactly when you were expected to arrive in New Orleans, en route to the wedding.”

“Gee… who could
that
be
?”

Brother and sister exchanged knowing looks.

“Had to be our sainted mama,” King said, with a resigned shake of his head. “She left me a voice mail late this morning saying she wouldn’t be coming to the wedding without a down-on-your-knees apology from both of us for the way we humiliated the entire family at Saint Louis Cathedral—and for everything since.”

“What a surprise,” Daphne replied, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You support me when I refuse to marry a total jerk and Mama hates us for life.”

“
And
I invited Lafayette Marchand to be my best man on Saturday.”

Daphne gazed at her brother in wide-eyed wonder. “Your father? Oh, boy.” She rested her head against the harp case and heaved a sigh. “Jack must be jumping for joy about all of this.” She affected a shrug. “So Mama’s not coming to Natchez. Okay. Maybe it’s for the best.” She patted her harp. “At least we rescued this baby so I’ll still be able to play at your wedding.”

“Too bad you didn’t take up the piccolo, or something sugar,” King noted dryly. “Even on a
good
day, traveling with a harp must be as easy as transporting a howitzer.” Daphne, long the recipient of such attempts at wit, didn’t respond to his quip. “I’m going to take you and your harp in the Ford Explorer we rented in your honor, okay?” he proposed. “We’ll meet up with Corlis and her aunt and they’ll follow us in the Jag. I figured the drive to Natchez’ll probably give you and me our only chance to catch up before wedding madness takes over.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she agreed, nodding. She’d already decided not to mention she’d been kicked out of the orchestra because of her decision to come to the wedding. She didn’t want to put a pall over the proceedings or burden King and Corlis in any way. Instead, they could talk about how pleased she was to have checkmated Jack—and the son-of-a-gun didn’t even know it. She pointed to the harp. “Just let me attach these two little wheels to the bottom of the harp case, here, and away we go.”

***

As any refugee from a hurricane watch knows, the escape route out of New Orleans is due west and then north on an interstate highway that eventually leaves the bayous behind and joins a two-lane road that meanders along the Mississippi through plantation country. Within the hour, the two vehicles were whizzing by grand, pillared mansions glimpsed through verdant arched canopies formed by two-hundred-year-old trees.

“Oh, King… look… there’s Oak Alley.” Daphne glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure Corlis, in the Jaguar behind them, was pointing out the landmark to her elderly relative. “Doesn’t it always knock your socks off?” she murmured, gazing at the double row of ancient oaks that lined the approach to a splendid Greek Revival house with its celebrated twenty-eight columns, fan-lighted doorways, and wide, welcoming verandas.

“Always,” replied King reverentially.

Farther down the road, another stand of massive oaks displayed branches laden with cascades of gossamer gray-green moss. “We couldn’t be anywhere but Louisiana, could we?” Daphne sighed contentedly and settled into the passenger seat. She lowered her window a few inches and inhaled the velvety March air laden with the scents of dogwood and pink jasmine. A mere hint of humidity foretold a stiflingly hot summer a few months away.

By one o’clock, the Jaguar and the Explorer had nosed into the parking lot of a restaurant called South of the Border, located just before the Mississippi state line and renowned for its ten-alarm Bloody Marys, fried green tomatoes smothered with crawfish rémoulade sauce, and drop-dead coconut cake. Arm in arm, Daphne, King, Corlis, and a turban-clad Margery McCullough strolled toward the entrance in the warm noonday sun.

“Daphne, dear,” Corlis’s great aunt said, giving the younger woman’s elbow a gentle squeeze. “I’m so looking forward to hearing you play your harp at the wedding. Corlis tells me you are superb.” The celebrated retired journalist, who looked like a stand-in for the forties gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, beamed in the direction of her great-niece, and declared, “You know, Corlis? Except for you and me, the family you’re marrying into is a damned sight more talented and accomplished than ours, don’t you agree?”

“You’ve got
that
right, Aunt Marge,” Corlis replied, feigning a long face. Tanned and smiling, WJAZ’s star television reporter wore only light makeup and had pulled her shoulder-length brown hair into a ponytail that made her appear a decade younger than her thirty-five years. “Not a game show host in their entire family tree, lucky them!”

Everybody laughed, and Daphne realized that the stomach knot she lived with full-time in New York had begun to untie.

Two hours later, the foursome emerged from the roadhouse after a feast of “fried everything,” as Marge McCullough described their crunchy, corn-battered oysters, crispy fried catfish, and green tomatoes topped with Vidalia onion rings—all lightly dusted in flour, cooked to a spectacular golden brown, and washed down with frosted pitchers of sweetened tea. Groaning in mock misery, Corlis pretended to stagger across the parking lot, beckoning Daphne toward the Explorer.

“Now, it’s my turn to get you to myself,” Corlis said affectionately, patting the passenger seat. “Climb in, girlfriend.” King and Marge McCullough drove ahead in his midnight-blue Jaguar—a reward from his savvy investments in information technology stocks in the mid-nineties.

The bride-to-be looked relaxed and happy, not the ball of nerves Daphne had been on the eve of her ill-fated wedding. Daphne flipped down the visor and peered into the mirror, taking in her shoulder-length, curly blond hair and dark brown eyes with dark smudges beneath the lower lids. Publicity photos showing her with full makeup and good lighting produced a much more dazzling effect. However, at the moment, she looked a far cry from that, she thought, gazing at her New York pallor. Swiftly, she retrieved the lipstick from her purse and applied it generously, rubbing a small amount into her cheekbones in an effort to revive them.

“Let’s spend the next sixty miles debating the merits of ‘Amazing Grace’ versus ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’” Daphne joked, snapping the visor in place. They had settled on the order of music for the ceremony by the time Corlis turned off the main highway and headed toward the wide expanse of river seen in the distance.

“What do you say we take the scenic route through town?” Corlis asked. “I’d love to see a bit of Natchez before it gets dark.”

“Then go straight ahead and turn right on Canal Street,” Daphne directed, and soon they caught sight of the silver-painted bridge that connected Natchez, Mississippi, to the communities of Vidalia and Ferriday on the Louisiana side.

It was nearly four thirty. The sun slanted off the water, turning the Mississippi molten gold.
Lady
Luck
, a paddle-wheeled gambling boat, rested in her permanent berth at the foot of a cliff on whose lofty palisades early settlers found relief from swarming mosquitoes and the heavy, sultry temperatures along the water’s edge. The vessel’s pilothouse glittered with white tracer lights that beckoned gullible tourists, down-on-their-luck Natchezians, and citizens out for a night on the town to try their fortune. A hundred seventy-five years earlier, Natchez-Under-the-Hill, as the streets flanking the waterfront were called, had been a red-light district, full of raucous bars and boarding houses for gamblers, thieves, and ladies of easy virtue. On the bluff above, block after block of pillared, antebellum mansions and splendid churches bore witness to a city “built so the eighteenth and nineteenth-century cotton planters from around these parts could come to town and show off their wealth and piety,” Daphne told Corlis. “In a city of about twenty thousand people, there are still at least sixty antebellum mansions offering house tours around here. Before the War Between the States, there were more millionaires in Natchez than there were in New York City.”

“No wonder King wanted to get married in this place. What a Shangri-La for an architectural historian.”

They turned right off Canal Street onto Franklin. Daphne pointed through the windshield as they passed the intersection at Wall Street. “Right over there stood the old Mansion House Hotel where—supposedly—the duc d’Orléans’s son, Louis-Philippe, danced at a ball in 1798.”

“No kidding? French aristocrats?”

“Yup,” Daphne said with a grin. “That was after he’d hotfooted it out of Europe during the French Revolution following his father’s encounter with
Madame
Guillotine.
Eventually, Robespierre and his cronies were kicked out of power and young Louis-Philippe was invited back to Paris and became the Citizen King in 1830.”

“Man oh man,” Corlis murmured with admiration. “You’re just like your brother. You really know all this stuff.”

Daphne shrugged. “Local lore, drummed into me by my Natchez cousins. Other folks around here insist the young duke wasn’t entertained at the hotel, but at Concord, a big house on the other side of town that burned down. We know, for sure, though, that Louis-Philippe and his entourage reviewed the local garrison while they were here, over near what was once Fort Rosalie.”

“Really? So he and his courtiers hung out in the South till things cooled down in France?”

“Something like that.”

“What happened to the hotel? Urban renewal?”

“No, the Tornado of l840. It blew away half the town, but, luckily, it only flattened a few of the big plantation houses in the outlying areas.”

“If I weren’t getting married tomorrow,” Corlis said wistfully as they passed Stanton Hall, another magnificent pillared home on their left, “I’d love to tour every one of these places. They’re gorgeous.”

“Wait till you see where your reception’s being held,” Daphne replied smugly.

“As a matter of fact, we’d better head over to Monmouth Plantation right now. I need to check out a few things.”

“King told me, driving up today, that you booked it at the last minute. Do you know what a miracle that is? Around here, Monmouth’s reserved for weddings when a girl child is
born
.”

“Some poor guy just died—ten days before he could celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday. We took over his spot.”

“This wedding is meant to be.” Daphne laughed happily, her spirits rising each mile they got closer to Monmouth.

A few minutes later, they steered the Explorer into a sweeping drive that led to a magnificent white mansion with imposing square pillars. The plantation house, now a hotel, perched on a lawn-cloaked hill dotted with magnolia trees and giant, moss-hung oaks. A gargantuan tour bus was just pulling away from the front door. Their timing was perfect, Daphne thought.

“Oh… my stars…” Corlis said softly. “What a wonderful place for a wedding reception.”

“Out back is a huge courtyard and a gorgeous garden beyond, plus a pond and vine-covered trellises, azalea and camellia bushes, not to mention a gazebo—which are very big items around here, by the way,” she confided with a grin. “And statues all over the place. The acres of old orchards and cotton fields have been sold off over the years and turned into Greater Natchez.”

Corlis drove the car to an area marked by a discreet sign indicating visitors’ parking. Stepping onto the gravel, she pronounced happily, “It’s perfect! Trust King to get the architecture right.”

Within minutes, they were greeted by the lady of the manor, Lani Riches, a warm, welcoming woman dressed in trim lime linen slacks and a silk blouse. Ushering them into the front hall, she explained that she and her husband Ron, a California developer, had fallen in love with the derelict mansion twenty years earlier on their first trip to Natchez.

“Ron’s the history buff, and I love the decorative arts. We became obsessed with the idea of restoring this pre-Civil War white elephant to its original splendor.” She led them beyond the magnificent delft-blue foyer into a high-ceilinged double parlor festooned with pale blue silk draperies and matching upholstery. “We’ve been so grateful to King for all the good advice he’s given us over the years,” she said. Daphne’s gaze was immediately drawn to the rear of the large room, which boasted two fireplaces separated by an arch with a fanlight window overhead. Among a scattering of magnificent period mahogany furniture, a small harp of the sort that well-brought-up young ladies played for gentlemen callers stood beside a grand piano.

“This entire place just bowls me over,” Corlis breathed.

“Let me show you the plans we’ve made for your wedding reception,” Lani replied, all business now. “And don’t worry. People on the Pilgrimage tour will be long gone from here tomorrow evening.” Then she addressed Daphne. “Your brother told me you’ll be playing your harp at the church, but you might want to see if you’d like to play ours at the reception. That way, you won’t have to transport yours from First Presbyterian. This one is an antique, but we keep it tuned.”