Ciji Ware (46 page)

“Oh Sim, it’s out of your way to come into town.”

“After the miles I’ll have traveled by Sunday… not a problem.”

And, suddenly, Daphne felt like a grown-up again.

***

Willis McGee’s family lived just off Martin Luther King, Jr. Street, not far from a tire plant. The McGee residence, a batten-board farmer’s cottage that had been added on to over the years, was a neat and tidy house in the predominantly black section of the city. Daphne’s aging silver Jeep barely fit into the driveway next to a battered van marked “The Willis McGee Band—Parties, Weddings—You Pay… We Play!” The telephone number to call for bookings was printed in bold red letters.

The hot June sun beat down on Daphne’s back as she eased the mammoth harp case out of her car. The front door opened and Mrs. McGee welcomed her cordially, as always, and pointed to a side entrance to the garage.

“I’m just feedin’ Willis his lunch. I left the door open, dear,” she said cheerfully. “You jus’ go on out there and make yer’self at home. He’ll be out shortly, and Kendra and Jeanette are due back from the Pig Out any time now. It’ll give you time to set up. Can I bring you a soda or somethin’?”

“No, but thanks,” Daphne replied. “It’ll take me a while to tune the harp.”

“Well, let me know if you change y’mind.”

Daphne nodded her thanks and continued down the path toward the garage. The interior of the converted space was completely covered—floor, walls, and ceiling—in squares of vibrantly colored carpet samples. Willis had glued them on every available surface to create a soundproof space in which to practice and record. A small, electronic mixing board with numerous knobs and dials stood behind a glass wall. Music stands piled high with charts dotted the room, as did a variety of musical instruments, including Jeanette McGee’s drum set.

Daphne unpacked her harp, pulled up a metal folding chair, and began to tune the strings. After ten minutes or so, her glance fell upon a piece of sheet music propped on a music stand nearby. She leaned forward and stared at it intently. The notes were hand drawn—by Willis, she assumed. The notations were extremely complex. Black notes flew like tiny crows across the page.

She reached out and fingered the paper on which the music was written, making a soft tap-tapping sound as she plucked the corner of the page with her thumb. Oddly, it was a familiar sound, a sound that resonated somewhere in a place long forgotten
…
a place where musicians had left their hand-drawn music charts and abandoned their violins and gambolas on velvet-covered chairs in an ornate ballroom. A place where dancers, too, had departed for a late supper, and only a short, squat young man in plum velvet carelessly seized a piece of music off a mahogany music stand, fingering it for a few moments.

Tap… tap… tap…

The man’s thumb continued to pluck at the piece of paper as if in time to unheard music. Without warning he ripped the parchment’s corner. Swiftly, he thrust the torn piece into the hands of his companion—a slender young man with sand-colored hair and dark, furtive eyes.

“No!” Daphne whispered aloud as the gayly carpeted walls of Willis’s studio began to fade to gray. “Not now! Not again…”

Chapter 20

February, 1798

Attendez, Jacques!
Here’s something to write upon,” the Marquis de Vaille declared, indicating the corner of parchment he’d just torn from the conductor’s score. “See if you can find a quill in the study and scribble a note on the back of this. Beg to see the girl one last time. Deuced, if I won’t find a way to thrust it into her hand!” His round face had assumed a leer that journalist Jacques René Hébèrt had often observed when the
aristo
was seriously in his cups. “Quickly, though,” the marquis urged. “I heard her guardian call for their coach.”

As far as Jacques could fathom, the marquis’s principal achievement in life was to have spent many long hours at the gaming tables in Paris with the notorious Italian libertine Casanova. The tipsy nobleman slapped Jacques on the back, irritating him even further. “Be assured,
cher
ami
,” chortled the sot, “you haven’t yet won those thousand francs from me, but I yearn to stand witness to your success
…
that is, if you can somehow devise a way to pierce her maidenhead!”

Jacques slipped into the study unobserved and dashed off the requisite
billet-doux.
Then, the marquis managed a semiprivate farewell with the young
demoiselle
in question at the moment her guardian turned his back to allow a servant to assist him with his cloak.

“
Adieu, ma petite
,” the rotund marquis murmured as he kissed the chit’s hand. His words could barely be heard above the sounds of musicians tuning their instruments inside the ballroom. “Enchanting to make your acquaintance. Your handsome cavalier bids me give you this
…
”

The Marquis de Vaille slipped a folded missive into Daphne Whitaker’s gloved hand and melted into the crowd streaming back into Concord House for another round of dancing. Jacques doubted much would come of it, but for a thousand francs and a handful of diamonds, he was willing to hazard one last try. Discovering the location of Bluff House was an easy task.

As for Daphne Whitaker, the silent journey home seemed to go on forever in a coach crammed with the reproachful Hopkins men—father and son—three unhappy Whitaker sisters, and their melancholy mother.

Several hours later at Bluff House, Daphne sat dressed in her ballroom finery on her narrow bed. In her trembling hand she clutched two objects. She leaned toward the candle’s light and unfolded the piece of music with its message written on the back.

Mon Ange… meet me in your beautiful dress at the edge of the cliff two hours before dawn…

A white silk rosette with dark brown droplets staining its folds lay in her satin lap. Jacques had included the cockade along with the note that the Marquis de Vaille had stealthily slipped into her hand. Daphne’s wide-eyed gaze moved from the
bijou
tendre
, as Jacques had called his love token, to his hurriedly penned note, which she read, once again, from its beginning.

This cockade is stained with the blood of my late, sainted mother. I consign it to your care to prove my honorable intentions, merely to hold you in my arms once more. I pray one day that I can make you my noble bride in this vast, new land.

Ma très chère chérie, never did I dream to meet someone so sympathetique to the wretchedness that has been my lot these last years, someone whom I instantly knew to be the other half of my heart that I thought shattered forever.

Prove to me I am not alone in believing that our meeting is a blessing from God, that we should find each other and give comfort and care in the years to come. I wish only to tell you of my pledge to return, Mon Ange…

Votre Jacques

Tears spilled down Daphne’s cheeks. Jacques’s loving words tapped a wellspring of emotion and need that she been denying to herself since her father’s cruel death. Someone cared for her. Someone else in this lonely world had suffered, as she had, and wished to offer comfort. Jacques would shelter her from the melancholic humors of her mother’s world that had tortured the woman for as long as Daphne could remember.

She carefully slipped the precious note beneath her pillow, doused the candle, and crept downstairs. Bluff House was shadowed and silent, as were the outbuildings that housed the kitchen, the smithy’s shop, and the slave quarters.

She peered through the gloom, searching for a figure to beckon to her. Slowly, she descended the back steps and scanned the lawn that surrounded a large oak tree dripping with clouds of Spanish moss.

“Mon Ange…”
a voice whispered hoarsely. Daphne raised one hand to her breast and could feel her heart leap.
“C’est moi!”

“Jacques!”

Daphne didn’t remember running toward him, or hurling herself into his arms. All she knew was that this French tornado had blown into her life less than six hours earlier and—for the first time in four years—she was able to feel as keenly for the terrible pain and loss
he
had suffered, as for her own piercing bereavement. For once, she could forget the vision of her father floating in Whitaker Creek, and, instead, behold the visage of Jacques Hébèrt between her hands, a man upon whom she could shower her love, care, and concern.

“Ah
… ma
petite
,” he said, crushing her to his chest. “You came!”

“Of course I came!” she whispered fiercely. “I, too, felt you were the other half of
my
shattered heart.”

“Ah
… chère, chère
Daphne,” he murmured, his lips beginning to roam from her cheek to her mouth, to a spot beneath her ear. “Come, my darling
…
we have so little time
…
”

He led her behind the oak and settled her back against its broad bark. Without further conversation, his hot, seeking lips nibbled her skin, searing the flesh on her neck.

“Jacques
…
I—wait! What are you doing?” she cried as he roughly began to nuzzle her earlobes, skillfully removing first one diamond earring, and then the other.

“I am making love,
ma
petite
,” he muttered. And, as if to underscore his claim, his lips moved lower to the base of her neck, licking and nibbling her tender flesh while he unlatched the catch on her diamond necklace. Swiftly, he stowed it in the pocket of his velvet frock coat, along with the ear-bobs. “I must see you naked as God intended you to be.”

Shocked beyond words, Daphne began to struggle, pushing the palms of her hands against his linen-clad chest.

“No!” she cried. “Stop this! I don’t want you to—”

Young, inexperienced, craving affection rather than adult passion, Daphne was stunned when Jacques began to insinuate his hands roughly inside her satin bodice.

“
Reste
tranquille…
relax
…
relax
…
” he mumbled, and when she turned her face away from his voracious kisses, he grasped her shoulders and gave them a sharp shake. Then he seized the front of her gown with both hands and yanked the fabric, splitting the garment’s seams and her underclothing to her waistline. Horrified, Daphne’s hands instinctively flew to cover her breasts. Her attacker grabbed her wrists, clasped both hands behind her back with one hand, and used his other to push her to the ground and hike up her skirts.

Daphne began to scream as a kaleidoscope of terrifying images shot through her brain. Her father lying listless on the bank of Whitaker Creek. Her father, naked, hovering over her terrified mother like a great bird of prey. Her father
…
her father
…
how could anyone be so cruel?

She felt Jacques’s weight pressing down upon the length of her body. Within seconds, however, he went utterly limp, his form becoming heavier still. The next thing she knew, Jacques René Hébèrt rolled off her and lay face up upon the grass, staring at the night sky with glassy eyes. The canopy of leaves and moss overhead became a grotesque umbrella.

“Miz Daphne? Miz Daphne? You all right? Mistah Hopkins, he don’ tol’ me to keep a sharp lookout tonight, and I did. I surely did!”

It was Willis, Mammy’s husband, his large, brown, bare feet planted in the grass beside her head. Dazed and sore, she pulled herself up to a sitting position, her satin skirts askew, her bodice in tatters.

“Mistah Hopkins say they might be two of ’em, and he was surely right! I done run off dat other fat man with
dis
!” he declared triumphantly.

Willis clutched a length of rope in one hand and a piece of wooden board in the other. Swiftly, the avenging giant trussed up Daphne’s attacker—who was just regaining consciousness—and threw him facedown on the turf while Daphne gaped in stunned silence. By this time, several pinpoints of light had begun to converge on the trio under the massive oak tree. Mammy, Daphne’s mother, and a wide-eyed Maddy ran toward them while Daphne buried her face in her hands and began to sob.

“Miz Daphne…” Willis asked hesitantly. “Did he… did he…”

“No,” she said barely above a whisper. “No, no, nooooo
…
”

Her answer ended in a shriek. When her cry died out, she pressed her hands and arms across her violated breast and stared into Willis’s dark eyes. His brows were furrowed with concern. The slave pulled off his homespun shirt and draped it around her trembling shoulders, tying the sleeves to cover her. In full view of her family and servants, Daphne pointed to the front of Jacques’s woolen breeches, the buttons down the front still intact.