The Bride of Texas (52 page)

As soon as Dinah stepped into the parlour with the brandy on a tray, she noticed the mesmerizing effect Lida’s braids had on Étienne. She also noticed the girl’s brother looking at her, but she was used to glances from white boys. As the buggy was leaving, she waited in the shadows on the veranda. Étienne stood there waving, and he was still standing there long after the buggy was just a cloud of dust dissipating in the moonlight. Finally he turned and walked past her into the house. He stopped in the doorway and turned back to her. “Not tonight,” he said softly. “I’m not —” He hesitated. “Not tonight.”

There probably won’t be a little house in Austin, she thought. The Louisiana fiancée will have a different kind of competition now. She sighed
.

Early the next morning Étienne left the house, but he came back before noon and locked himself in his room. That evening Gideon rode off into the setting sun with a letter fixed with a big red seal
.

“No more jassing about for you,” Benjamin teased. They were in the kitchen. “Young massa’s in heat for somebody else.”

“At least I’ll get some rest,” she snapped
.

That night she stayed in the cabin with her family. But the next day — the evening following the afternoon that young Towpelick brought Étienne a letter without a seal on it — Étienne told her, “Come tonight.”

Was he in heat? Was Miss Blue-eyes the cause?

Early in the morning after that fateful afternoon, Étienne appeared at the Toupeliks’ farm with a bouquet. Standing in the doorway, Cyril could see the patch of purple flowers approaching on horseback along the path between the cotton-fields
.

“We have a visitor. I wonder who he is?” he teased Lida, who was on her way back from putting a bucket of fresh milk in the pantry
.

“My husband,” his little sister replied as she passed him. “Look after him while I change!” And she was gone
.

“Who did you say?” he called after her, but she didn’t reply
.

Étienne reined up his horse in front of the house, wished him a good morning, and said, “Is Miss Linda at home?”

“My sister will be right out,” said Cyril. He wondered about asking casually after the girl who combined all the beauties of both worlds, but he couldn’t think of a way. Lida emerged from the house as pretty as a picture in her Sunday best. Étienne climbed down from his horse. He was amazingly nimble for a man with a wooden leg. Cyril now understood what his sister had said
.

“I need to ride out to the Ribordeaux place this afternoon,” Cyril said in an offhand tone next morning, after the Negro had delivered them the letter with the red seal. “Do you have a message I should pass on to somebody?” And he grinned
.

Lida looked him square in the eye. “No, I don’t have a message. But you could take him a letter.”

“Do you want me to check it for mistakes?”

“No, mistakes don’t matter. The more the better.”

He could see how she was playing Étienne. She was far more calculating than she had been back home. She was an exotic blossom for de Ribordeaux. She knew the impact of braids and bows and charming blunders in English. She had stuck the flowers in a pitcher of water and put them on a windowsill decorated with pictures of doves and four-leaf clovers. That was all she could draw, but it was enough
.

She ran off and returned with a letter. It didn’t have a seal, of course, and the stationery came from her father’s supply, brought from the old country. Once every three months, he would write a letter home saying how well they were doing in America
.

“Give him this.”

He made a face at her again and said, “Your husband?” He glanced pointedly at little Deborah, who was playing on the doorstep with the kittens
.

“Just you wait and see!” she hissed. He saw the same fire in her eyes that he had seen when the old veteran had brought her home from Amberice. “That won’t matter at all,” she said. “And you stay out of it!”

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “But I wonder.”

The fire faded from her eyes. “It’s worse for you, Cyril.” She smiled, without a hint of rancour. “And how come you need to ride to the Ribordeaux place today?”

He felt embarrassed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said
.

“Of course you do. I’m not blind. And I wish you well, big brother. But this is Texas —” She laughed and ran back inside
.

He was furious with her, but gradually he calmed down. What if she was right?

The door to the plantation house behind the bougainvillea was opened by Benjamin, though Cyril didn’t know his name yet. “No, massa’s gone to New Orleans this morning. Oh, you mean Massa Étienne? Massa Étienne’s in the summer-house out back.” Benjamin took the letter
.

“I’ll wait for a reply.”

She slipped quietly into the front hall, holding a duster made of rooster feathers as if it were a sceptre. An African princess. She gave him a broad white smile
.

“Good morning, miss,” he said
.

She looked around, but they were alone. She looked into his
eyes. Perhaps he came from a country with black countesses. “You calling me ‘miss’?”

“Well,” he said, “you’re too young for me to call ma’am.”

She laughed, and jiggled the feather duster under her nose. She sneezed
.

“Could I —” he said, “could we meet sometime, miss?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. It depends on —”

“On what?”

A clock chimed the hour, as pleasant as the sound of music in the night. A door opened and the sun cast a limping shadow on the white stone hall floor. The man with the wooden leg was walking through the doorway, reaching out to shake his hand. The princess with the rooster-feather sceptre vanished into the labyrinth of the big house
.

“It was so kind of you to go to the trouble,” the man was saying. “I do appreciate it. But I can’t ask you to —”

Instead of finishing his sentence he ushered Cyril into a room he knew already — the naked goddess on the seashell hanging over the fireplace and, on the walls, portraits of ancestors in lace and velvet and pearls and shiny buckles and gleaming belts, pearl earrings worn by women as pink as dolls, and paintings of fleshy-faced men and women whom the artist had rendered with much less care than their finery. Étienne invited Cyril to sit in a Louis XIV armchair, though Cyril didn’t know this, and opened a carved humidor to offer him a cigar Cyril knew was from Cuba. It was long and fat, with a straw down the centre so the smoke was always fresh, unfiltered by the tobacco which would otherwise have spoiled the taste as the cigar burned down. Mr. Carson smoked the same cigars and offered them to guests as well, though from a more modest humidor
.

“I’ve heard that Mr. Carson has put two servants at your father’s disposal. The manufacture of oil from cotton seeds genuinely
interests us,” Étienne said, broaching a subject he wasn’t the least bit interested in. He asked how soon Mr. Towpelick might be able to set up a similar plant on the de Ribordeaux plantation. The smoke from the two cigars mingled with the fragrance of verbena, which reminded Cyril of the perfume Dinah had been wearing
.

“A month or two, as I said.”

“I’m also interested in your ideas about our system of servitude. True, our opinions differ —” He paused to inhale some smoke and think a bit. “Well, at least we differ in part,” Étienne continued. “Yes, I’d truly enjoy discussing it with you, and other things as well. But next time, have your sister use one of the servants at her disposal. Or have her tell Benjamin to wait for her reply, or have him come for it. That would save you the trouble.”

Another pause. Wisps of pure, unfiltered smoke rose to caress the fleshy cheek on one of the portraits, then drifted across a gloomy canvas where names and dates, written in gold and framed in decorative little boxes, represented the de Ribordeaux family tree
.

“Our mansion was in the Department of the Seine,” Étienne told her. “After St. Bartholomew’s Day my great-grandfather had to leave. He ended up in Louisiana.”

“Miss Hortense had a novel about that,” said Dinah
.

By then, the man with the wooden leg knew that his golden-brown girl could read French. He saw her differently now than he had the first or second time she had come to him. He was no longer giving her orders. She was the one who asked, “Do you want me to, massa?”

One day he said, “I don’t want you to call me massa!”

“What should I call you?”

“Étienne.”

“Massa Étienne?” she said
.

“No! Just Étienne!”

So, from then on, he was Étienne
.

“Our line,” he said, “goes back uninterrupted to the fifteenth century, and there it fades into the dawn of history.”

“Mine fades into the dawn of history too,” she replied, relishing the phrase, “starting with my mother. I don’t know who my father is.”

He was standing in front of the dark canvas with the family tree, the evening sunlight on his handsome, proud, and — she sometimes thought — haughty face. She knew already that he was having strange thoughts about her. After his cousin’s slaves were caught trying to escape she knew she was no longer just a body to warm his bed, no longer even a “servant”. His philosophy was crumbling, but he still couldn’t speak the new words aloud
.

“It was either Hannibal McGuire or Patrick McGuire,” she said, looking at him mischievously. Her power over him was leaking into the cracks in his philosophy. “And, massa —”

“Étienne!”

“Massa Étienne, can you guess which one it was?”

“Your lovely sister, Mademoiselle Linda,” said Étienne awkwardly, “is an extraordinary girl.” By then he knew she was from Moravia, in the Austrian Empire. Back in the parlour with the portraits, Cyril had told him the story of the family’s move to America, changing only a few details. He had failed to mention the baby, but Étienne’s black messenger had sharp eyes
.

“Or should I call her Madame Linda?”

So he knew about the baby
.

“Well, to be precise, you probably should,” said Cyril. “But her husband was killed in a riding accident two months after the wedding. Deborah was born after he died.”

“Deborah,” mused Étienne. “That’s not a Moravian name?”

“She was born in Texas,” said Cyril. “When Linda’s husband was killed, we were all getting ready to come to America anyway.”

“And he believed you?” asked Kapsa.

Cyril gave a bitter laugh. “Lida had him figured out. But nobody had Lida figured out.”

“Because it was ladies’ choice, Mihalotzy went from hand to hand. Every one of them wanted to touch him. There was plenty to touch, too. He was nearly two metres tall. And when he had gone around once, they started him round again, so that Bill Trevellyan — guest of honour at the party along with Schroeder — decided that Czech women were a band of Amazons. The prettier they are, the more terrifying they are, and he started trying to talk Schroeder out of Molly Kakuska. Because even though she came from a highly moral family, she got her hands on Mihalotzy too.

“Well,” Shake went on, nodding to Paidr for a light for his long pipe, “the dance party was a huge success, and they raised plenty of money for the trousers. Enough, in fact, to inspire thievery. A certain Skotas-Kulhawey offered to keep the proceeds for Marticka Lusk, since the women’s dresses had no pockets and Marticka hadn’t brought a purse with her. Skotas-Kulhawey kept the money, all right. He ran off with it that very night, presumably to Russia.”

“Where?” asked Stejskal, horrified.

“That’s right — Russia,” said Shake. “It’s a long story. Some immigrants were having trouble with English. Most of them were farm people and Chicago seemed like a strange place. They started seeing Russia as a Slavic paradise, and a few benighted souls even wrote to the tsar and asked if he’d let them move there. Of course, he didn’t take the trouble to tell them to piss off. Pretty soon there were two camps. The smarter ones began wondering if this idea of a Slavic paradise wasn’t a little far-fetched, since the Poles, who are Slavs too and had lived in
that Slavic paradise, had been treated like savages by the Russians — and don’t forget there were a lot of Poles in Chicago. A man called Tom Plavec, who was a Czech but from some Russian province, escaped to America and said the Russians would make muzhiks out of the Czech Americans if they came, and then they would be serfs again, although not in Austria but in the Slavic paradise. ‘Although Siberia,’ he added, ‘is a wonderful land with lots of forests, even if it’s too cold.’