Ciji Ware (42 page)

At this, Daphne covered her face with her hands and began to cry tears of fury and mortification.

“Stop that at once!” her guardian demanded gruffly. “You’ll cease sniveling like your mother, dry your eyes, and dance one last quadrille with my son, as if nothing has occurred. Then you will withdraw politely from the festivities and be taken home by your mammy and we will not speak of this again.” He addressed Jacques. “And you, sir… I have had about as much of you Frenchies and your damnable insolence as a body can endure.”

And with that, Simon the Elder bid his son take Daphne’s other arm. The trio advanced rapidly toward the columned entrance to Concord—abandoning Jacques René Hébèrt to the shadows and his own smoldering humiliation.

The
night
is
still
young,
ma petite pigeon…
’tis still young…

Chapter 18

Daphne Duvallon reckoned that she had slept curled up next to Sim in the one-room cottage for an hour or more. At least, that was what she desperately
hoped
she had been doing, for she had awakened just now with a clear recollection of having witnessed her namesake naively falling for the oldest line in the world.

You
are
so
beautiful
…
you
are
so
talented
…
come, let me seduce you, my pretty little nincompoop!

She lay quietly beside Sim, who slept peacefully on the daybed, and felt her heart thumping heavily in her chest. What a strange vision—or hallucination or
nightmare
perhaps. She replayed the scenes, blushing at the thought that she had been nearly as naive with Jack Ebert—not to mention Rafe Oberlin when he came on strong with flattery and Veuve Clicquot champagne during her first year at Juilliard. Worst of all, it was positively unnerving to have encountered an eighteenth-century version of her former fiancé Jack Ebert, whose name popped up as Jacques René Hébèrt. Even the French rake’s profession as propagandist to a kingly wannabe eerily echoed Jack’s work as a PR flak for Able Petroleum.

What was it that the French always say, she mused?
Plus
ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they are the same, indeed.

It was insane, she thought worriedly. She had felt certain that these ghostly visitations would cease to plague her now that she had made her momentous decision to escape New York and the intense stress of her life there. But here she was, having just made love… delicious, staggeringly wonderful love, in fact… and then, bingo, she dreamed about
another
Simon Hopkins in
another
century that
another
Daphne had apparently grown to detest because she preferred being wooed by an obvious cad.

It
was
just
a
dream
…

But was it? She wondered what had triggered the little virtual reality show
this
time. Was this latest foray backward in time some sort of warning? Was the Simon Hopkins sleeping next to her everything he seemed to be? Had she made another stupid choice?

The last thing she’d remembered was basking contentedly in Sim’s arms and listening to the birds twittering. An old dancing tune she’d known since childhood had drifted through her thoughts, and then—abracadabra! There she was, watching Daphne Whitaker wake from a nap in an eighteenth-century four-poster in a Natchez house called Concord.

Once again, it had been the surrounding
sounds
of chattering birds and the memory of music that had apparently provoked the extraordinary parallel journey into the lives of people who seemed to have been her ancestors. According to her family tree, Daphne Whitaker was a real person. Her birth and death dates were no doubt a matter of public record. However, these flip-backs couldn’t be chalked up to past life memories—reincarnation—because she didn’t experience these events
as
her namesake. She
witnessed
the other Daphne’s emotions and psychological turmoil rather than experience them herself.

She bit her lip, lost in thought while idly gazing at Simon’s sleeping form. If these events had truly taken place once-upon-a-time, it would seem that their repercussions were somehow still rippling down through the centuries and affecting her life today. Had the other Daphne’s terrible taste in men become part of her
own
DNA?

What a thought!

Daphne was struck, suddenly, by another electrifying notion: what if a person’s major psychological and emotional traits were also handed down from one ancestor to another, just as were brown eyes or curly hair or diabetes? Could it be that some unhappy ancestral memories continue to impact events these many generations later?

There were so many parallels. Both she and her namesake played the harp and had thorny relationships with their mothers, along with serious, unresolved issues of abandonment with their fathers.

And, like Cousin Maddy’s distant forebear, Susannah Whitaker, Maddy had admitted to battles with the “Whitaker blues,” as she’d describe the debilitating despondency she’d endured following the traumatic deaths of her husband Marcus and her son Clay. Was her reaction to those tragedies normal, or was something else at work here?

These thoughts were sobering, and Daphne was determined not to dwell upon them for very long. Her only wish now was for these phantoms from the past to stop appearing in dreams—or in any other fashion.

“You look as if your thoughts are a million miles from here,” Sim said quietly.

Startled, Daphne turned to gaze at her new lover, and couldn’t help smiling. Sim’s bathrobe, which they’d been using as a blanket, had slipped down, and she allowed herself the pleasure of gazing at his bare, muscled chest. A faint stubble shadowed his jaw and highlighted the sharp angle of his cheekbones.

Erotic memories skittered across her mind. She reached over and trailed the backs of her fingers along his cheek.

“No… actually, I was wondering if, somehow—way, way back—you aren’t, in fact, related to the Hopkinses whose plantation was destroyed in that horrible tornado Bailey told us about. It feels so natural to me that you’re here. Or rather, that
I’m
here.”

Sim rose up on one elbow. “What a nice thing to say,” he said softly, capturing her wandering hand. “Wouldn’t it be something if we turned out to be kissing cousins?” He leaned toward Daphne and bussed her on the cheek before flopping on his back once again. They lay quietly beside one another for a long while.

Her instincts told her Sim was a good man. But then, her instincts had been wrong before. She marveled at the roller-coaster afternoon they’d had, and without thinking, she began to laugh.

“What?” Sim demanded, lifting his head off the pillow.

“It just occurred to me,” she said, chuckling. “Mosquitoes can be good things, can’t they? Look what they accomplished.”

Then, for a split second, she thought of the deadly yellow fevers that had felled so many of her Southern ancestors in centuries past. She was grateful she lived in an age when that sort of plague had been banished by modern science, and even a bottle of Bactine could prevent a Mississippi mosquito from doing further harm.

“Absolutely mosquitoes can be good things,” Sim said, nuzzling the base of her throat as if he were a friendly vampire. “Eef it veren’t for zose pesky eensects,” he agreed, doing a fair imitation of Count Dracula, “who knows, my dear, how long eet might have bee-an before I finally lured you eento my caa-stle bed?”

“You
tink
so, do you?” she said, doing her level best to sound like Zsa Zsa Gabor. “Veil, Countess Daphne has some veee-ry een-teresting ideas about vat to do vit zis laf-ly, laf-ly part of you!”

And then she ceased her teasing, and vowed to stop obsessing about a dream. Instead, she set about to show Sim that, once again, the pleasure would be all theirs.

***

Daphne sat in a chair beside the small, round table in the middle of the cottage. Clad again in Sim’s outsized shirt, she watched with unabashed pleasure while he donned his bathrobe. For at least an hour, as they lay in bed, their conversation had been intimate, comfortable, and full of laughter.

“Here,” Sim invited, handing her a glass, “have the last of the lemonade.”

“Thanks,” she said, draining the glass while handing him half a cookie, the remnants of a bag that Sim had produced from the backpack he’d left on the veranda. She gazed at the late afternoon sunshine slanting through the windows and wondered briefly if the little house were truly as isolated as it appeared.

“When does Doctor Gibbs get back?” she wondered aloud.

“Tomorrow,” Sim replied, resuming his seat across from her. “I FedEx-ed him a bunch of bird and landscape color photos to use in his testimony today before the legislative committee up in Jackson. He thought they might help him and his fellow bird lovers show the powers-that-be how irreplaceable these habitats are in and around the Trace.”

“You two have become really good friends in a very short space of time, haven’t you?”

Sim gazed at her thoughtfully. “It’s strange, actually. I’ve been such a loner for ten years, and yet I arrive in Natchez less than a month ago—and you two suddenly appear in my life.” He tweaked her nose lightly. “You, my lovely Daphne, who can play and sing all my favorite tunes… and Bailey, who shares my passion for animals and the environment, not to mention the pleasures of wine, women, and song.”

“Doctor Gibbs?” Daphne asked skeptically.

“He may be in his seventies, but that man likes his mint juleps, right enough, and as for women… sometimes, he cheered louder than I did when you Aphrodites strutted your stuff.”

“You’re kidding!” Daphne laughed at the notion of Bailey Gibbs getting hot and bothered by stiletto heels.

“You better believe it. And he never stops talking about his late wife.” Sim shook his head. “I thought my parents, after nearly forty years of marriage, were pretty cute, but Bailey and Caroline Gibbs must have been something to see.”

Except for her brief stays in Natchez with Maddy and Marcus when she was younger, Daphne realized now that she’d never witnessed a husband and wife enjoying their life partnership. The family atmosphere in the Duvallon household had either been nuclear war or an uneasy truce.

Her head full of disturbing childhood memories, she reached across the table and allowed her thumb to graze the top of Sim’s hand. “Do you still think about your father a lot?”

“I suppose I’ve been thinking about him more than usual now that I’m around Bailey so much,” Sim acknowledged somberly. “Bailey says he’s got his prostate cancer under control at the moment, but I went through all that with my dad. I just hope to hell he gets his wish about protecting this bird sanctuary. A loss in Jackson is bound to demolish his morale, and…”

Sim rose from his chair and gazed out the window at the meadow.

“Do you think he’ll win over the key legislators?” Daphne asked.

Sim heaved a resigned sigh. “I don’t know. I’ve watched these battles go both ways.” He turned to face her. “I’m not some obsessed crusader, you know? I don’t take pictures anymore just to advance some cause.”

“Why
do
you take them, then?” Daphne said, startled. She’d assumed he was an ardent conservationist. “Why go through so much mud and misery if you’re not passionate about saving the environment?”

“Oh, I know full well what’s at stake and I want it saved. And I’m not opposed to my photographs of animals in the wild and what’s left of our wilderness being used to inspire folks to do what they can to protect the planet, but I…” Sim appeared to be searching for the words. “You can burn out really fast, if what you’re trying to do is save the world. And it gets very discouraging to play David against Goliath all the time. I do what I do now to make sense out of my
own
life. I came to the conclusion, after my marriage broke up, that I had to find a way to live so that I wasn’t doing more harm than good. Nature photography and traveling to remote places seem to…
seemed
to,” he corrected himself, “accomplish that goal.”

“Who did you think you were in danger of harming?” Daphne inquired quietly.

“I… I wasn’t harming
anyone
if I stayed out there on my own,” he replied, neatly avoiding her question.

“Wasn’t that choice a little bit tough on your family?”

“I didn’t think about it. Then.”

“And Francesca? After the divorce, was she glad you’d banished yourself to the wilds?”