As twilight fell the rich smell of my mother's gumbo filled the house. It was my favorite dish. My mother was trying to placate me in the only way she knew. There was a knock on the front door. I heard a man's voice speaking to my mother. I recognized it instantly as William Coleman's. Then my mother's dark, deep voice answering him. I opened my bedroom door a crack, enabling me to hear William Coleman say, “Madame, I assure you my intentions are entirely honorable. Your daughter is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I ask only for a chance to see her again. She can send me awayâ”
“I've forbidden her to see you under any circumstances,” my mother said. “You can sail for England any time you wish and leave her ruined. The man who chooses her must be a gentleman from one of the city's established families.”
“Madame, I'm prepared to stay in New Orleans long enough to prove to youâ”
My mother called him a liar. She had made inquiries and learned that he had arrived on a cargo ship that was helping Mr. Fitzpatrick transport the goods in his store to Pensacola, a move that had become necessary because the new governor had ordered all non-Catholic merchants out of New Orleans. William Coleman insisted he had only been a passenger on the cargo ship. He was an official of the British government and had a diplomatic passport. He could stay in New Orleans as long as he pleased.
“Madame, I understand your situation. Mr. Fitzpatrick has explained Rampart Street to me.”
“Then you know the law,” my mother said. “You can't marry my daughter here. And I'll never let you take her away from here unmarried. Go now. If I see you near this house again, I'll ask the authorities for assistance. We people of color are not without influence in this city.”
That evening at supper I forced myself to be cruel. I ate the succulent crabs and shrimp and drank the soup of the gumbo, which never tasted more delicious, without a complimentary word to my mother. I scarcely spoke to her for the rest of the night. The next morning was Sunday. We went to mass at the Church of St. Louis on the Place d'Armes. Louise La Branche and her mother went with us. As we knelt for the consecration and the priest raised the white host and gold chalice containing Christ's body and blood above our heads, I slipped a sealed note into Louise's stubby brown hand. Somehow in my mind it was the right moment to do it, the right way. To defy both my mother and the God who made me a woman of color.
On the way out of the church, while my mother was greeting several friends, I whispered to Louise, “Go to the English store. Give the letter to Mr. Fitzpatrick. If you open it, I'll put a curse on you. Your hair will fall out, then your teeth.” Louise nodded, terrified. Everyone on Rampart Street believed in witchcraft.
The letter was addressed to William Coleman. Its message was brief:
I heard you at the door last night. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 P.M. in Fitzpatrick's store.
FLORA LOPEZ
The following afternoon, I went to my music lesson near the convent on Chartres Street and pretended to feel ill. My teacher permitted me to leave a half-hour early and I met William Coleman at Fitzpatrick's store. The place was full of men packing merchandise into crates. Mr. Coleman was wearing a suit of pure white Madras silk and a mauve waistcoat embroidered with roses. Once more he seemed to be the embodiment of aristocracyâand honorable affection.
“How kind of you to let me see you again,” he said. “It will make my visit to New Orleans a happy memory. I don't envy your future in this city. Too bad your revolution didn't succeed. I hear it was led by a Jew who sounded like an English radical.”
“He was my father,” I said, almost weeping.
William Coleman was enormously distressed. He took an emerald on a gold chain from a tray of jewelry that was being packed and gave it to me. “I seem to cause you nothing but pain,” he said. “Accept this as a token ofâmy regret. In another country we might have become more than friends.”
I refused the gift. I knew my mother would never let me keep it. Mr. Coleman asked me about my father. I told him of his affection for England. “Since I was a child I've lived with descriptions of London in my head,” I said.
William Coleman told me how much he wished he could show me London. He said that men and women could find more happiness there than in any other place on earth. They could also find unhappinessâif they lacked protection and guidance. He took my hand and said I had stirred something in him that he had never felt beforeâa wish to protect as well as to love a woman without any other motive but the reward of her affection. The women he knew in London presumed that he sought them for their wealth and influence because he himself
was not a rich man. They had so disillusioned him he had retired to a government post in the West Indies to escape their mercenary ways. He had been on his way back to London when his ship was rerouted to New Orleans to help Mr. Fitzpatrick. He had resigned himself to marrying one of these London women. Until he saw me.
Everything in my past combined to make his appeal irresistible. “When are you sailing?” I asked.
“Tomorrow at dawn,” he said.
“I'll be there.”
It was still dark when I crept from our white house on Rampart Street, leaving a note on my pillow to explain my resolution and to implore my mother's forgiveness. William was waiting for me on the dock. He had bribed the customs officers, who were conveniently absent. He rushed me aboard and hid me in his tiny cabin. By sunrise, the ship
Delilah
was in mid-river. Soon after we reached the Gulf of Mexico, the captain married us.
On the long voyage to London, William became the lover, the friend, I had dreamed of finding. We read novels and poetry. I taught him French. he perfected my English. We talked of London. It seemed, at times, that I was already there, so vividly did William describe it. He also told me about himself. He had been born poor. His father had been a printer and a drunkard, who started a half-dozen newspapers in the provinces and lost them all. His mother had died when he was three but she had powerful relations in London, men of wealth though not of noble blood. One of these, a merchant and member of Parliament, had paid for William's education at a school in the city and obtained a post for him in the British Treasury Office. But his life in London had been complicated by lack of money. Most of his friends were sons of noblemen and rich merchants. William's only hope of wealth was marriage. But he was determined not to sacrifice his happiness for security. Persisting in this determination, he had quarreled with a wealthy older woman who had wanted to marry him. In
revenge she had slandered him and almost succeeded in driving him from society. His wealthy uncle had arranged for him to retreat to Jamaica, where he had served as comptroller of customs. Now, his purse replenished and his composure regained, he was challenging London to injure his happiness, with me at his side!
William asked only one indulgence of me. He hoped I would agree to keep our marriage a secret for a while. He would need time to explain it to his uncle, who might consider it highly imprudent. I agreed without the least hesitation. By this time I was rapturously, obliviously in love with him. I could not even imagine him telling me a lie.
We spent our first few days in London at an inn. Before long William regained his old rooms on the second floor of a broad-beamed house on Stonecutters Court in the Pall Mall section of the city. A stream of dressmakers and hatters appeared at his summons and set about making me the best-dressed woman in London. Morning gowns and evening dresses in painted satins, soft, lustrous velvets and brocades, all in that year's favorite colorsâapple green, lemon yellow, and pink. There seemed to be no limit to the money William was spending. When I asked him about it, he told me that collector of customs in Jamaica was a very lucrative post; he had received a percentage of the duties paid by every ship that arrived or left the island. Money was no problem; William wanted me to create a sensation when he introduced me to society.
Create a sensation we did, the day we made our first visit to Ranelagh, the most popular pleasure garden in London. The immense rotundaâover five hundred feet in circumferenceâwas illuminated by dozens of chandeliers. Brilliant colors glowed everywhere, from the green ceiling to the gilded boxes. In the center were four enormous black pillars. Around them strolled the social leaders of London, in their laced and ruffled best.
Many of the woman, usually the most extravagantly dressed, were masked. These were nobility, William said, and
in spite of their masks he had no difficulty identifying them. “That's the Duchess of Kingston, Lord Grafton's mistress,” he said. “There's Lord Hervey with his latest friend. Believe it or not, underneath those skirts you'll find a man. There's Lady Buckinghamshire, one of our great gamblers. They call her Faro's Daughter.”
I was amazed by the amount of flesh these ladies displayed. I had protested when William insisted on having my gowns cut quite low. Now I saw gowns that were transparent from waist to shoulder or cut so low that the least intake of breath would seem to have exposed everything. William recited a verse from a satire on Ranelagh in which the ladies were described as “Fair maids who at home in their haste/had left all clothing else but a train.”
At least a dozen times, in our progress around the rotunda, William stopped, made an elaborate bow, and doffed his small, sharp-edged tricorn hat to an acquaintance. Several did not acknowledge his bow, but William seemed unbothered by the rebuffs. He spoke to only one promenader, an army officer in the uniform of the Queen's Guards, Walter Beckford. He was with another soldier, a mere boy, extremely handsome.
“Good evening, Lieutenant. The prodigal has returned. How is our friend Lord Lyttleton and the other members of the club?”
“Well. And who is this gorgeous creature?”
“Her name is Flora Lopez. She's from New Orleans. The daughter of the richest planter in Louisiana. Her father sent her to visit relatives in Paris, but she has decided to see London first.”
“You could not have found a better guide, Mademoiselle,” Lieutenant Beckford said to me.
The boyish soldier with him laughed in a rather snide way. William ignored him and we resumed our promenade. He told me the boy was Beckford's latest love. They were both Williamites. Even when he explained the term to me, I found it almost incomprehensible.
The next night we went to Ranelagh's chief competitor in London's world of pleasure, Vauxhall Gardens, in Lambeth, across the Thames from the main part of the city. Here was a different kind of visual charm, a blending of nature and art. Lights shimmered through the trees, and there were delightful walks bounded by hedges and paved with gravel, ending in pavilions, groves, grottoes, decorated by pillars, statues, and paintings. At the main pavilion an orchestra played and a restaurant served delicious food. But the company at Vauxhall was much different from Ranelagh's. There were few great lords or ladies. London's lower classes felt at home here, and they came wearing their best clothes, usually garish imitations of the nobility's dress.
William sat us at a table near the orchestra and made wry comments on the crowd's bad taste. “You could sit here all night and not see a single person above the level of a cheesemonger,” he said.
“For that slur, Coleman you bastard, I demand satisfaction in Hyde Park at dawn,” said a man's voice behind us.
William leaped to his feet, laughing. “My old friend Lord Madman,” he said. “Why aren't you at Ranelagh?”
Lord Madman looked the part. He had a flaccid mouth, full of uneven teeth, and veined, dissipated eyes that glittered beneath wild tufts of eyebrows.
“Too damned boring, Billy,” drawled Lord Madman. “Besides, you know how I love the people. How do you like this one?”
On his arm was a grinning blond girl in a red taffeta gown. She was obviously drunk.
“âEre, now,” the girl said in a strange accent, “is 'e really a lord?”
“I'm afraid he is,” William said. “His father is known as the good Lord Lyttleton. He is the bad Lord Lyttleton. His friends call him Lord Madman.”
“And who is this, Billy?” asked Lord Lyttleton, eyeing me.
William repeated the lie he had told Lieutenant Beckford
about my wealthy father in Louisiana. “Flora,” he said, “Lord Lyttleton. If he likes you, he'll let you call him Tom.”
“How do you do,” I said, trying to make it clear from the tone of my voice that I did not like Lord Lyttleton.
“I do very well,” Lyttleton said. “But this doxy does not trust me. Can you imagine that? Not trust a man whose father was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ask Coleman here. He was a clerk of the Treasury in the great man's reign. Tell her how he could not count out twenty shillings to make a pound. Which is why he was the good Lord Lyttleton. He hadn't the brains to be anything else!”
“All true,” William said.
“I don't care who âis father was,” the girl said. “'E wants to take me off somewhere but 'e made me promise not to cut 'is purse. 'E's so drunk I'm afraid if I go 'e'll accuse me of liftin' the money 'e lost at Boodles and I'll end up at Newgate on this great lord's testimony.”