Ciji Ware (42 page)

For indeed, according to a freshly painted sign overhead, Miss Pearl’s Saddlery, “Home of Fine Louisiana Cuisine,” had unaccountably transformed itself into Bates’s Saddlery—an establishment, so said the sign, that sold all manner of “Horse Tack, Animal Feed, and Wagons by the Day.” The livery stable also boarded horses and provided “Carriages to Gentlemen of Means” who didn’t maintain their own stables in the city.

And standing in the doorway was a flush-faced Corlis Bell McCullough, who appeared mad as a water moccasin, and twice as ready to bite someone!

Chapter 18

May 21, 1842

They’re common
thieves
,
those two!” Corlis Bell McCullough muttered, catching sight of her husband inside the livery stable’s gloomy interior. In addition to the insufferable heat, the heavy atmosphere smelled pungently of animal feed, leather saddles, horse tack, and manure.

Randall was standing halfway up a ladder, supervising several Negro laborers who balanced precariously on scaffolding twenty-five feet above the newly installed brick flooring. The workers were plastering the last area of ceiling space inside the row of buildings that had been bankrolled by Julien LaCroix, André Duvallon, and a consortium of free black tailors and white merchants on land owned by Martine Fouché. Meanwhile David Bates, the new lessee of the saddlery, was proudly leading draft animals into spacious wooden stalls whose floors were lightly dusted with straw.

Corlis wrinkled her nose at the mixture of odors that assaulted her nostrils. Angrily she surveyed the stable’s interior, hoping to confront that scoundrel Ian Jeffries at the same time she gave Randall McCullough a piece of her mind.

She swore by all that was holy that she would
not
be the wife of an out-and-out swindler whose partner was a trickster of the same stripe!

“Why, Mrs. McCullough, what can I do for you?” inquired Mr. Bates genially. “Come to see your husband put the finishing touches on the place, eh?”

Corlis cast her eye heavenward. Randall appeared absorbed in a lengthy discussion with the men on the scaffold and seemed unlikely to break free any time soon. Well, there was no point in creating a public scene, she thought grimly, though the Lord knew that might be the only way to shame Randall into undoing his latest bit of chicanery.

“I’d be most obliged if you’d tell him I was here and that I have something
important
to discuss with him, Mr. Bates.”

Bates glanced curiously at her flushed face but merely nodded. “I surely will, ma’am.”

“Would you be so good as to ask him to return home immediately?”

“Yes ma’am,” Bates said respectfully.

Corlis stalked past the stable owner and onto Common Street, heading in the direction of Julia Street, seething with fury.

Randall McCullough had promised his wife that he would retrieve her sapphire necklace and earrings from the pawnbroker on Girod Street just as soon as he received the last payment for his services from the building consortium. What a shock it had been—not ten minutes earlier—to be standing a few doors away in Chez Annette’s having a hem measured for the first new dress she’d purchased in more than a year, and to see a perfect stranger waltz into the dress shop wearing the very jewelry her husband had promised
on a Bible
he would soon return to her!

The question was, had he lied to her and sold the jewelry out-and-out to finance Jeffries & McCullough while the project was still being constructed? Or had he gifted some fancy woman whose charms he had purchased at the brothel that he and Ian were known to frequent on Girod Street?

Either way, she was in a murderous rage. As she advanced along the
banquette
,
she nursed her anger by recounting the many instances in which her husband and his partner had behaved like cads.

But if the gossips were correct, they were no better than the almighty Julien LaCroix, whose recent peccadilloes were the talk of the town. Annette Fouché had let it be known that the young heir to Reverie Plantation was living openly, when in town, with her first cousin, the celebrated quadroon Martine Fouché, and that Julien considered Martine a full partner in the Canal Street enterprise. The scandalous pair had moved into elegant new quarters above Annette’s dress shop and adjacent to the commercial enterprise run by two tailors, also Free People of Color, in the same block as the Bates’s Saddlery. Annette even announced, proud as you please, that Martine was expecting a child.

Poor Adelaide LaCroix, Julien’s wife, Corlis sympathized, eyeing the new signage attached to the warehouse’s brick facade. The paint that was barely dry announced the location of the newly constructed warehouse of LaCroix & Company, Exporters of Cotton & Sugarcane.

Corlis paused by an open wooden door leading into the warehouse itself, where hogsheads of sweetly scented sugarcane were piled nearly to the ceiling. Angry voices could be heard inside.

“Jeffries, you are the worst sort of blackguard!” said a very familiar voice. “I was warned to steer clear of you, and I only wish I’d heeded those who attested to your treachery.”

“Such plather is neither here nor there, André,” Ian Jeffries said mildly. “The point is you don’t really have much choice, do you? Either you pledge me the credit for my next project, here and now, or I let Julien and your fancy friends know the truth about your… peculiar friendship with the late, lamented Henri Girard, and the pains you, Girard, and Etienne LaCroix took to cover it all up!”

“And if I reveal to Julien how you hounded poor Henri to take his own life in a base attempt to get your
own
hands on this land?” André Duvallon retorted.

Corlis stood in the shadows just outside the office. Despite André’s challenging words, she detected a slight tremulousness in his voice.

“Henri is dead and buried,” Ian Jeffries said bluntly. “Even the priest saw nothing amiss at his funeral. Who’d believe you weren’t just trying to cover up your own unnatural, disgusting behavior… loving
men
!
Not a person in the entire French Quarter would want you as their banker if they knew that you and Henri Girard were damnable
sodomites
!
And what would they say if they knew that the pillar of Creole society, Etienne LaCroix, covered your abomination by allowing Henri to pose as Martine Fouché’s patron while he himself had been enjoying her charms for years?”

“How
dare
you sully Henri’s memory and denigrate the feelings we had for each other,” André shouted. “And how dare you attempt this extortion!”

“Call it what you will,” Ian retorted. “Julien is due back here at any minute. I suggest you write me a bank draft for five thousand dollars before he arrives as I have requested. I’ll call for it later this afternoon.”

“I have had enough of your threats!” André exploded. “I will not do it. Furthermore, I demand satisfaction.”

“A duel?” Ian Jeffries taunted his prey. “How French.” His voice grew cold and even more menacing. “I have no patience with such nonsense. Either you put in writing a guarantee of five thousand dollars made out to Ian Jeffries, Builder, or I shall tell Julien that his trusted financier was the go-between for his adored black whore—who had long lain with LaCroix’s own
father
—and neither of you ever confessed to it.”

“Why, you—” André began.

Ian chuckled. “Let’s see…” he mused. “Unbeknownst to Julien, his lover Martine’s child, Lisette, is his own half
sister
.
Therefore, Lisette could
also
be the aunt to Julien’s new bastard… only Julien doesn’t know it! Have I got it right? Family relationships among you French and Negroes can be
so
complicated.”

Corlis heard herself gasp at the revelation of such incestuous behavior. André, too, appeared blindsided by the viciousness of Ian Jeffries’s attack.

“Surely, man, you will not be thanked for acting the town crier of such intelligence…” André said, sounding shaken.

“Ah… the scandal of it all should keep you Creoles chattering across your courtyards in the
carrè de la ville
for months!” Ian retorted with a harsh laugh.

“Jeffries, have you no decency at
all
?”
André exclaimed in a voice tinged with despair. “You already tried this vicious blackmail, before Julien returned from his honeymoon,” he added accusingly. “Did you think Etienne, Henri, and I would simply accede to your demands? Your foul behavior is precisely why you Yankees are so hated here. To you, money is God.”

“It is merely business,” Jeffries said, sounding mildly offended.

“Well, whether you acknowledge it or not,” André said with a renewed show of emotion, “you and Randall McCullough have blood on your hands! Henri’s blood.”

A deadly silence fell between the two men. As for Corlis, the memory of a horrifying sight swam before her eyes. Ugly black-and-blue bruises had encircled poor Henri Girard’s neck when she had applied the powder puff to his taut skin, already stiffening with rigor mortis. Randall had convinced her that Henri had killed himself because he knew he would die of an excruciatingly painful liver disease.

“Unless you use your skills with powder and cosmetics, Corlis,” Randall had insisted, “the wretched man will be refused a proper Christian burial in sacred ground by those damnable Catholics.”

Now she knew the truth. Her husband and his partner had obviously been threatening to expose the homosexual relationship between Henri and André as a means of gaining that choice parcel of land. The partners had also threatened to reveal to one and all that the patriarch of Reverie Plantation, Etienne LaCroix, had enjoyed a long, secret liaison with the enigmatic Martine Fouché—and had a daughter by her. It now appeared that Henri Girard had committed suicide by hanging from a beam in the old warehouse to avoid such public disclosure. However, before he took his own life, he had most likely persuaded his partner, Etienne, to join him in signing over land on Canal Street that would provide for the future of Martine and Etienne’s secret child, Lisette—thereby
also
thwarting an attempted extortion of the parcel by the aggressive newcomers to New Orleans.

Corlis leaned heavily against the warehouse wall and thought back to the oddly insistent behavior of her husband and his partner after Henri’s death. Ian and Randall obviously didn’t dare reveal the role they had played in hounding the poor man until suicide seemed his only alternative. Therefore, the two conspirators had concocted, for Corlis’s benefit,
another
reason Henri had committed suicide while she—fool that she was—entertained girlish, romantic notions about the dashing André Duvallon!

It was all too much. Corlis blushed at having fantasized that André felt anything stronger for her than polite friendship. His attentions, she wagered, were merely calculated to discover what dastardly trick Randall McCullough and Ian Jeffries were likely to play next!

Martine… Adelaide… even Corlis herself—the women in this passion play—had merely served as pawns for the grander pageant of men’s lust and driving ambition. And all for this land on Canal Street.

She fought a growing sense of panic. With trembling fingers, she raised her hand to massage her forehead.

Nothing
in this blighted city was what it had seemed. She had been lied to and manipulated by her husband, just as surely as had poor André Duvallon. And despite the shattering of the fragile dream that André might have harbored some genuine affection toward her, she pitied him and the stark, sad countenance of Henri Girard, cold in his coffin on the Rue Royale. Etienne LaCroix must have been so angry and shaken by what André had surely revealed to him that it brought on the fit of apoplexy. Unfortunately for the LaCroixs, the patriarch’s malady had silenced any chance Etienne might have had to bring his enormous power to bear against such American upstarts as her husband and his unscrupulous partner.

Corlis thought again of her lost necklace. The man she had married eight years before was as unscrupulous as Ian Jeffries, but he was
also
a coward. Randall McCullough could be handled, if
only
she played her cards correctly.

Just then André appeared at the office door. Before Corlis could slip outside, he caught sight of her huddled against the wall. Even in the warehouse’s dim light, she could see the color drain from his face.

“You!”
he growled accusingly. “Be gone, damn you!” he hissed, and stormed past her and into Common Street.

Corlis dashed outside into the sweltering sunlight, lifting her skirts above her ankle boots in an effort to speed to André’s side.

“No! Wait! Please, wait!” she cried. She made a grab for his arm, but he shook free of her and stalked on. “André, you
must
believe me! I knew none of this… I—”