Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (37 page)

He shouldn’t have waited so long. He should have sought her
out, in the shops, on the street. What if she’d been waiting for him, wondering
why he didn’t come? Then the image of her angry face when she’d told him to leave
came to him. Or she never wanted to see him again.

Marcel, looking very fine in fawn trousers and chocolate
coat, intruded on his solitude. “Enough of this brooding you’ve been indulging
in, brother. Come out with me to the haberdashery. I need a new top hat, and
now that I think of it, yours is a disgrace. Looks like someone sat on it.”

Yves turned a long face to him.

Marcel dropped the jovial tone and sat down. “This is not
like you, moping around. Nicolette is doing fine. In fact, she’s singing at the
Peppercorn tonight. What’s the matter with you?”

Yves hesitated. “The day you stormed into Magnolias? I’d
just asked Marianne Johnston to marry me.”

“God, Yves. I’m sorry.”

They heard the butler answer a knock at the front door. He
led someone into the parlor, and then his steps came to the study. He knocked
on the door, entered, and handed Marcel a card. “A gentleman to see you, sir.”

“By God, Yves. It’s Adam Johnston.”

No good would come of this, Yves thought. Better he should
have stayed away.

Yves and Marcel joined their guest in the parlor. They did
not invite him to sit or take a glass with them.

“Mr. Johnston,” Marcel said to the cousin who had been his
boyhood friend, his mother’s own nephew.

“Gentlemen.”

Yves observed Adam’s natty striped silk waistcoat and the
softly folded ascot pierced with a pearl stickpin. The man’s fine apparel did
not obscure the ruin of his face, however. Adam had aged in the weeks since the
scene at Magnolias. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed. The mutton-chops he’d
grown did not disguise pale and sunken cheeks. His nose had a pronounced bend
in it.

“How does Miss Johnston do?” Yves couldn’t stop himself from
asking.

Distracted, Adam answered impatiently. “Enjoying the season,
I’m sure.” He turned back to Marcel. “I will be brief. I beg your pardon for
the delay in coming to you. I have been in Baton Rouge for some time.” He set
his hat on the table between the windows and then faced the men squarely. “I
have come to arrange the resolution of your challenge, Mr. Chamard.”

Yves’ torpor left him. “But it was I who broke your nose!”

Adam dipped his head toward Yves. “My memory of that evening
is incomplete, but I believe your brother’s challenge has prior claim.”

Was the man suicidal? He knew what a shot Marcel was.

“Roland Bonheur is my second.”

Marcel raised an eyebrow, and Yves nodded. “My brother will
second me. And the weapon of your choice?”

“Swords.” He picked up his hat from the table. “At dawn,
then.” Adam showed himself out.

“I’ll be damned. I never thought he had it in him,” Yves
said.

“I had come to doubt him, myself.”

Yves leaned against the window and watched Adam stride
across the street. Marcel might actually be more deadly with a sword than a
pistol. Poor fool. “He looks god-awful.”

“Shame will do that to a man.”

And remorse. “You mean to kill him.”

“Most certainly.”

Marianne’s brother. Adam won’t have a chance. “Your papers
are in order? Lucinda and the baby are provided for?”

Marcel turned from the window. “Robichaux and Goldman have
everything in hand. I would appreciate it if you would look after Lucinda for a
time, until she finds someone else. She won’t need money, but I think she and
the babe will be – sad – if I should die tomorrow.”

“Adam is no swordsman. You can’t seriously be thinking you
could lose.”

Marcel’s small smile was grim. “Well, no. But one does remember
one’s mortality at such moments.”

“Swords then. I’ll see to them, then talk to Roland. We’ll
have an early supper, and an early night, you and I.”

Marcel nodded, his preoccupation deepening.

It was not easy, Yves reflected, to contemplate killing a man
weeks after the offense, when one’s passion had cooled. But Yves had no doubt
his brother meant what he said. He would kill Adam Johnston for what he’d done
to their sister.

Adam returned to the Johnston house in the American sector
above Canal Street. The Faubourg Ste. Marie lacked the Old World charm of the
Vieux Carré where the Chamards and the DeBlieuxs had their townhouses, but the
American mansions were modern, grand, and extravagant.

Adam entered the cavernous foyer and handed Annie his hat,
then made his way to his room as quickly as possible. He felt quite furtive,
avoiding his father and Marianne. But neither of them looked at him kindly, and
he did not know how to begin to regain their respect, much less his own. As
soon as his bruises had begun to fade, Adam had left Magnolias. Father had let
him know he’d ruined Marianne’s hope of marrying Yves Chamard, an additional
grievance for him to bear. Unable to endure his father’s disdain nor Marianne’s
disappointment, he’d fled to Baton Rouge.

I beat her. I did it.
This was the refrain of all his days.
He could hardly, even now, believe he could have done such a thing. But he
remembered some of it. He knew he had done it. And yet he loved her. Hopeless
and despairing, he loved her.

Upstairs, he drew paper from the desk and dipped his nib in
the bottle of ink. He didn’t have to ponder. He had been over what he wanted to
say many times. “Dear Father,” he wrote.

When Adam had poured his sorrow, his regret, his contrition
onto the page, he folded the letter and sealed it with wax. He drew another
sheet of the ivory vellum and wrote, “My Dearest Sister.”

This was far harder to write. Losing Marianne’s regard hurt
even more than losing Father’s. He’d always known he somehow did not meet
Father’s measure, but Marianne – for all her spunk, she’d been his devoted,
doting little sister. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he assured her of his
love and of his remorse.

“After what I have done to Nicolette Chamard,” he wrote, “I
can never deserve the prize of marital felicity. But you, Dear Sister, have
every right to the joys of matrimony. I have asked Father to forgive his old
friends the Chamards, all of them, no matter what happens, for any man of honor
would have acted as Marcel and Yves did that night. I do not believe Father
will stand in the way of your happiness if Yves returns to you as he surely
wants to, for beyond a doubt, My Dear, his heart is as constant as yours.”

One more letter to write, the most difficult of all. Adam
wrote her name, then sobbed and dropped his pen, splattering ink across the
creamy paper. He buried his face in his hands, overcome for the thousandth time
with grief and shame.

Adam had not touched liquor since the morning Marianne told
him he had broken Nicolette’s jaw. He would never touch it again. It did not
excuse, him, however. A man who would beat a woman, drunk or not, had no right
to ask for forgiveness. But he must write her. Nicolette must know his heart,
his true repentance, and perhaps in the next life, he would find she had forgiven
him.

He took a clean sheet of paper and began again.
“Mademoiselle Chamard,” he wrote. “Please do not throw this missive in the fire
when you realize it is from me. For the sake of the happy hours we spent
together before I destroyed your trust in me, read on, I beg you.”

When he finished, he propped Father’s and Marianne’s letters
on his desk where they would find them after the duel tomorrow. Nicolette’s
letter he put into his coat pocket. In the morning, he would beg Marcel to
deliver it to her. They had loved each other as brothers, he and Marcel. He
would not refuse this of him.

Adam kept his room until dark, refusing the supper Annie
brought to his door. Dear little Annie. Though everyone else in the house
shunned him, Annie fussed over him like a little mother. There must be
something, here in this room, he could leave her. His eye settled on a Venetian
glass paper weight twinkling in the lamp light. He wrote a note that the carved
glass was Annie’s and added it to the letters.

Without seeing his family, Adam left the house and made his
way along the gas-lit blocks of Canal Street to the edge of the Vieux Carré. At
The Peppercorn, carriages let out the fashionable folk, all eager to see and be
seen at New Orleans’ most fashionable new supper club. The featured entertainer
was Nicolette Chamard. Adam found a small table in the darkest corner as far
from the stage as possible. He would not be seen.

After Yves called on Roland Bonheur to arrange the duel –
weapons, pacing, physician – he left the rooms of Adam’s second a renewed man.
All the torpor and passive inertia of the last weeks fell away. Marcel chose to
fight by the American custom, to the death? Then Marcel would not fight. Yves
would save Marianne’s brother. She would be grateful, and she would forgive him
for that dreadful night in the dining room.

He would claim her and take her away, whether her father
approved or no. Hell, he didn’t care if she approved. He would convince her later.
She was going with him.

Yves knew where to find what he needed. On Rue de Cherbourg,
a tiny, narrow lane off Rampart, was an apothecary of dubious repute. Here
respectable vials of laudanum shared a shelf with mysterious potions the voodoo
used in their secret ceremonies.

Through a filthy window, he could see the crabbed figure of
Monsieur Antoine moving among his elixirs and powders. Yves had not been here
since he was a boy of fifteen. Some of his friends and he had bought laudanum
and taken it back to Marcel’s room to experiment. They’d drunk every drop of
the foul stuff and then slept for two days. The sight of Maman’s tear-stained
face when he finally woke was enough to dissuade him from ever repeating his
dalliance with opium laced alcohol.

A little bell tinkled when Yves entered the dank, stale
shop. He conferred with Monsieur Antoine, explaining exactly what he wanted,
and then left with a cobalt blue vial in his pocket.

In his own room, he fished in the back of the wardrobe for
his sword case. He hadn’t had it out in well over a year, though when he was
still reaching for manhood, he had ardently pursued its use with an esteemed
maître d’armes. Unpracticed of late, he was even so an accomplished swordsman.

Papa, unaware of the coming event, was out for the evening.
Yves joined Marcel for supper in his room. Marcel had used Yves’ absence in the
afternoon to visit his beloved placée Lucinda and their little brown son. Then
he’d returned to the house to write his farewells, just in case, and the five
envelopes on the mantelpiece – for Nicolette, Gabriel, Cleo, Papa, and Yves --
were silent reminders that this was not an ordinary evening. The brothers
talked of this and that, of anything but what mattered.

At ten o’clock, Yves said, “I believe I’d like a glass of
port. Join me. You’ll sleep better.”

Marcel shrugged.

Yves poured from the decanter on the side table with his
back to Marcel, who in any event was not attentive. The contents of the little
blue vial went into Marcel’s glass.

Yves handed the port to his brother. They sipped. “I don’t
believe I care for this port,” Marcel said.

Yves cleared his throat and took a showy sip. “It has an
unusual aftertaste, it’s true. Give it a chance. I think it’s fine.”

Indifferent, Marcel finished his glass and yawned. He’d have
to rise at six in order to meet Adam by dawn, and he was ready for his bed.

Yves put his glass down. “Sleep well,” he said, and closed
the door behind him.

Marianne endured another round of the tiresome gavotte with
a young man who might have been featureless for all the notice she paid him.
She yielded to her father and his new wife in attending the season’s balls, but
she ignored their admonishments to look lively, to put herself forth – to try,
for heaven’s sake, to have a good time.

Her satin gown, yards and yards of silk the color of
champagne, had cost her father more than she’d paid for Luke at the
Forks-of-the-Road in Natchez. He probably thought the dress will catch her a
husband. Indeed, the pale blond silk made the blue of her eyes bluer and set
off the rich chestnut of her hair. But it was just a dress.

Yves did not appear. He had not appeared at any event this
season, not any she had attended. He knew very well where the Johnston house
stood, she thought. He could find her if he chose. He didn’t want to see her.
He did not forgive her for what Adam did. Nor for what Father said about his
sister.

But she herself was innocent of those offenses! Then he took to
heart her father’s banishment, his disallowing of their marriage.

He gave her up too easily.

All her days since the incident in the dining room had been
a swing from one grief to another. She grieved for Adam and raged against him
too. He’d lost everything, it seemed, and had shrunk into himself. Yet he had
done a despicable thing and cost her Yves as well. She could hardly bear the
sight of him.

And mixed with the ache of losing Yves was the indignation
that he had not fought for her. She would run away with him if he’d only come for her.

So she passed through the days of fall hardly tasting the
wines or hearing the waltzes. Always, in the back of her mind, she was
imagining herself finding Yves, taking his lapels in her fists, and . . . what?
Battering him until he loved her again?

The clocks chimed five. The party of Americans and Creoles
had danced the night away and it soon would be dawn. Marianne climbed into the
carriage with her father and his wife for the drive up Canal Street. Once at
home, Father and Marguerite said their goodnights to her and leaned into one
another as newlyweds do on the way up stairs to their bedroom.