Ciji Ware (52 page)

Virgil shot her a startled look and shrugged. “Sure, boss lady,” he replied accommodatingly. “But make it half an hour.”

“Will do.”

Corlis dashed across the wide lawn to re-enter the front door just as the final tour of the day departed out the back steps. She was certain that no one saw her slip past the red velvet rope, enter the small room off the front foyer, and quietly close the door. Earlier she’d spied a crystal decanter filled with absinthe standing on a leather-topped desk. Hesitating only a moment, she sat down and gazed apprehensively at the bottle of chartreuse-colored spirits. The guide had said it was a less potent mixture than in the old days, made of green dye, crushed eucalyptus leaves, and anise, whose combined odors closely approximated the lethal liquor brewed in the nineteenth century.

Corlis involuntarily shuddered. The sight of the decanter recalled the vision of André Duvallon lying in green absinthe and dark-red blood.

I must find out what happened to Corlis after André’s suicide. Just one more time…

Corlis stared at the crystal decanter, took a deep breath, and removed the stopper. Could she actually
bring about
one of these sojourns back in time, she wondered, as butterflies began to flutter in her stomach.

She bent over the container, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. Immediately her nostrils began to sting from the concoction’s pungent aroma. How could she possibly give her television viewers an accurate background of the Selwyn buildings if she didn’t know the resolution of the story, or whether the visions she’d experienced depicted historical truth?

I have to know what happened to these people… I have to know… I have to know…

By her second whiff of the enervating drink, Corlis was conscious only of the mixture’s asphyxiating odor of menthol and licorice—a smell so strong, it took her breath away.

Chapter 22

May 22, 1842

I
have
to know!” Adelaide cried, pointing a trembling finger at a letter lying open on the desk. “Is it true? Did you deliberately choose your
father’s
own concubine as your mistress?”

Outside the study window the wide veranda was deserted, as were the cane fields that stretched beyond the oak grove where lacy moss hung motionless in the quiescent May air.

“Good God, Adelaide… you’ve been drinking that damnable absinthe again,” Julien said accusingly. His wife reeked of alcohol, and the mere sight of her turned his stomach.

She looked as if she’d slept in the white cotton gown she was wearing. Her pudgy ringlets were unkempt, frizzing unbecomingly around her mottled cheeks. Dark pouches swelled prominently beneath her haggard eyes, and her nose was mottled with tiny broken blood vessels.

Julien had carried his own portmanteau up to the slope-roofed house, while Albert secured the plantation’s steam packet down at the dock. From a second-story window, Adelaide had spotted the boat and was waiting for him on the veranda. She’d followed him into his study, haranguing him at every step. Now he took a seat at his desk, and his gaze settled on the letter that she had opened, breaking its wax seal.

“Well?” she demanded harshly. “At least have the decency to tell the truth! Answer me! Did you deliberately pick your father’s slut as your
placèe
to publicly humiliate me?”

“I haven’t been in this house two minutes, and you begin to fling your invented insults in my face.” He grabbed the missive from his wife’s hand and placed it on the desktop, where a silver tray holding a crystal decanter three-quarters full of pale green absinthe stood beside two matching cut-crystal tumblers. “And how dare you open a letter from my banker, addressed to me?”
he added angrily.

“I!
Inventing
insults, you say?” Adelaide burst out. “You have been gone from this house for weeks!”

He turned, intending to bolt from the room, but Adelaide’s next words immobilized him.

“Your mother lies dead upstairs from yellow fever, and you—”

“What?”
Julien exclaimed, shocked.

“Dead,” she repeated succinctly. “Three days ago she fell ill from the fever. All the slaves ran away when they heard it was yellow jack, and therefore, I had no way to get word to you at your precious warehouse. And now your father is about to breathe his last. Not a servant remains in this house, and yet you chastise me for opening the
post
!”
she screamed shrilly. “You are an
imbecile
,
Julien LaCroix. All lies in wreckage around you, and all you can think—”

Julien’s eyes were riveted on the first paragraph of André Duvallon’s letter. He waved a distracted hand, as if to ward off a pesky fly. Then he began to read again from the top of the page, his lips parted in horrified surprise. André’s sordid account of his relationship with the late Henri Girard was only a precursor to the scandalous revelation that Julien’s father had, in fact, been Martine’s “patron” all those years, and Lisette, his own half sister!

“Julien!” Adelaide broke in sharply. “Look at me! Do you deny that Martine Fouché is the strumpet your father kept on Rampart Street—whom
you
have now gotten
with child
?”

Julien looked up, and with a murderous glare, spat out, “Get out of this room! Go! Leave me in peace, you damnable jade!”

“I, a jade?” Adelaide gasped. “You left
us
!
You LaCroixs always leave your white women. Your great-grandfather regularly sated his lust with slave women at the Fouchés’s, upriver. It seems to be a family tradition.”

“You speak like a common guttersnipe,” Julien exclaimed doggedly. “You know nothing of these matters.”

“Oh, you think not?” Adelaide retorted. “I learned at my mother’s
knee
to turn a blind eye to the outrages that are visited on wives by their husbands! And now André reveals that your father betrayed your mother with your beloved Martine. In case you haven’t sorted it all out, your own progeny by that harlot will be a half sister to the child, Lisette—as are
you
,
my fine cocksman! This is the kind of
family
that your ambition and lechery have spawned!”

She looked at Julien with an expression of abhorrence so intense, he thought she would surely shoot him had she a pistol in her possession. Shaking his head as if to wake from a living nightmare, Julien turned away from Adelaide and peered at André’s letter.

“It cannot be true…” he murmured. “André sounds as if he intends to—”

“Ah, but it
is
true, if Martine Fouché is actually your
placée
?”
Adelaide said. “You and your father have unwittingly plowed the same field, monsieur. By now, I assure you Etienne has come to that conclusion, even if you did not—fool that you are.”

A terrible silence descended in the room, unbroken but for the ticking of the grandfather clock that stood in the adjacent hallway.

“But I loved her,” Julien whispered brokenly as he finished reading the letter. “I truly—” He raised his eyes from André’s frantic scrawl and stared at his wife, unseeing. “Martine never told me,” he murmured wonderingly. “All this time, while we were partners during the construction of those buildings… she
never told me
!”

“What a pity Etienne couldn’t call you out for cuckolding him.” Adelaide laughed with bitter irony. “But then, in his rage over the threats to expose LaCroix, Duvallon, and Girard’s dirty little secrets, his brain’s blood vessels burst,” she taunted, “and rendered him a mute! And of course, neither of you thought to ask your mother or me what
we
had heard whispered about, did you?”

With a lightning sweep of his hand, Julien brushed the entire silver tray off his desk. In one blinding act of fury, the absinthe sprayed a pale emerald shower onto his wife’s disheveled white dimity dress from neck to hem, staining her long gown the color of rotting limes. The two tumblers shattered in a flurry of glass shards, but the heavy crystal decanter rolled, intact, across the sisal carpet to the other side of the study.

“And now you know the whole, squalid story,” Julien exclaimed harshly, “and you rejoice in my anguish, do you not? You absolutely
revel
that Martine never revealed that Lisette is my father’s child.”

“All the pieces didn’t fall into place until I read André’s letter,” Adelaide said in a dull monotone, all her passion spent. “I didn’t know for certain that your father had sired a child by some black whore, and I didn’t know, until we returned from France, that the whore he had kept was Martine Fouché.”

“I always suspected that André Duvallon and Henri Girard were… unnaturally fond of each other,” Julien murmured, “but I found them both decent chaps. But I never thought Henri served as the shill for my father’s lust for… Martine,” he concluded softly.

“Or your father… as a shill for Henri’s lust for another
man
!
It worked out so conveniently for everyone,” Adelaide said spitefully.

In an explosion of fury, Julien pounded his fist against the desk and glared at his wife.

“Oh, do
spare
me your hypocritical rantings!” he shouted. He surveyed Adelaide’s rumpled state with a look of pure loathing. “You’ve spent your entire life hiding behind your own
unnatural
appetites—for food and spirits, and I would wager, for foul manipulations by your own hand—for I certainly have never succeeded in stimulating any pleasure in you,” he added caustically.

He was gratified to hear her shocked gasp at his crude accusations. Adelaide’s pale cheeks, as devoid of color as her mother-in-law’s decomposing corpse upstairs, began to stain with streaks of red. After all that had happened between them, he mused absently, there would not—
could
not
be—any reconciliation after this day. He might as well speak his mind and be done with it!

“Let this whole diseased family be damned to hell!” Julien exclaimed.

Adelaide met her husband’s tormented gaze. “Oh, don’t look so injured, Julien,” she declared coolly. “The villain in this piece is, and always has been, your father. He’s been wild with fever these last days and behaved contemptibly to me, even though I was the only one left to nurse him. He is
finally
dying, too, thank God, if he isn’t already dead. No matter.”

She stooped to pick up the unbroken crystal decanter, still a quarter full of absinthe. Then she faced her husband and declared softly, “One last thing. If I don’t succumb to the fever, in the future I shall make my home with my brother Lafayette, in New Orleans. Eventually he will marry, of course, but he is kind and will shelter me for the rest of my days as a result of what has happened here,” she added with a satisfied air. “Etienne LaCroix is now your problem. I leave the disgusting creature in your care.”

“My God, Adelaide, have you no—?”

However, his sentence remained unfinished as he watched his wife turn away and advance unsteadily toward the study door. She held the neck of the crystal decanter between the fingers of her plump right hand, and in the ensuing silence, the liquor’s opalescent green contents made a faint sloshing sound as she made her exit.

“Good-bye, Julien,” she said pleasantly over her shoulder. “Yellow jack has killed half your slaves, and the healthy ones you’ll have to hunt down. But—” She turned toward him briefly with a mocking smile. “Reverie is finally yours. Perhaps you, the Fouché woman, and your father’s bastard—along with the new babe that the dressmakers in the town whisper is nigh to term—will
all
make their home here. How delightful for you,” she added with biting sarcasm. “In any case,
au revoir
.
I shall go to my brother in New Orleans on horseback.”

Julien sat stock-still, listening to the sound of Adelaide’s receding steps. He had no notion of how long it was before he again heard her heavy footfall on the stairs and watched her through the open study door make her departure across the front threshold. In her pudgy hand she clasped a carpeted satchel. In a daze, Julien stood and observed through the window the sway of her frothy skirts as she waddled across the veranda and down the path in the direction of the stables. His wife’s enormous derriere bloomed beneath her stiff, corseted waist. The sight of her retreat disgusted him almost as much as the contents of André’s letter lying on his leather-topped desk.

Eventually Julien summoned the energy to climb the grand, curving staircase. The fetid stench filling the air announced that the LaCroix patriarch and his wife were no more. Within an hour Julien had donned gloves and a silk handkerchief to cover his nose and mouth and dug his parents’ graves. In a shallow trench he buried his mother and father in the bedsheets in which they had died. By late afternoon he made his way through the eerily deserted cane fields to the riverbank. His boyhood friend, Albert, was nowhere to be seen. Alone, he fired up the small steam packet
Reverie
.