Forever

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• Margaret Pemberton
  
• Dedication
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  

Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.

She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers'Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.

FOR JOSEPHINE RICHARDSON

It was night: the hot, sweating and airless night of the deep South. The two girls crouched in the dense undergrowth, the hems of their long skirts wet with mud, foetid with rotting vegetation. They had long since regretted their high-spirited impulse. Now, terrified that movement would lead to discovery, they clung together, their eyes widening and their horror mounting as they witnessed the spectacle taking place in the forest clearing only yards before them.

It was well known in the New Orleans of the early nineteen-hundreds that voodoo rites were rife in the bayous. Sluggish, numberless tributaries of the great Mississippi, the bayous laced the tropical surroundings of the city; were rarely visited places where gigantic trees loomed from stagnant water, their branches draped with Spanish moss, their dense canopy of leaves allowing little light to penetrate.

The bayous were the home of alligators: of eagles: of spiders as big as a man's hand, and of the
voodooiennes
, the Africans who had long lived in New Orleans but had never forgotten their ancient rites.

Seventeen-year-old Leila Derbigny had long suspected that her own maid, Louella, was an initiate into ceremonies that were only whispered about. On certain nights she had seen Louella slip from the servant's quarters and then speedily run away from Sans Souci, the Derbigny plantation house, and into the banana groves beyond.

Whenever Leila questioned her the next day, Louella's black face would be impassive. A year older than Leila, her eyes were centuries old.

‘No, Miss Leila. I ain't been nowhere and don't you go telling your Pa I has been,' she would say, brushing Leila's hair vigorously.

Leila never had. If her father had even the least suspicion that Leila was a participant in the rites he and every other worthy citizen pretended did not exist, she would be immediately dismissed: and Leila was fond of Louella.

Tonight, however, she had been determined to discover the truth of Louella's night-time escapades. Her closest friend, Chantel Gallière, was staying at Sans Souci and Leila had dragged her reluctantly with her in Louella's wake.

At first the way had been easy. The white
tignon
that Louella wore around her dark springy curls guided them like a bobbing lantern. They waited beneath the front gallery until Louella disappeared into the banana grove and then, picking up their skirts, ran in their satin slippered feet across the vastness of Sans Souci's smooth lawns and into the wilderness beyond.

Within minutes Chantel was regretting the escapade. The low flounces of her gown caught on briars and brambles. Her lightly shod feet hurt as they tripped on rocks of petrified palm. The humidity of the tropical night was viscous in its intensity and the thin muslin of her bodice clung to her sweat-soaked skin.

‘Let's go back, Leila. We can't possibly keep up with her.'

Leila pulled impatiently at her friend's hand. ‘They can't be meeting that far away. Perhaps just beyond the banana grove. Come on, Chantel. We might never have another chance.'

The banana fronds hung listlessly above their heads, their knife-blade edges menacing in the darkness. Chantel had no desire to return through the banana grove by herself. Reluctantly she followed as Leila quickened her pace. The banana grove was left behind. Ahead of them loomed the infinite blackness of oak and cypress. A mosquito circled Chantel's head and she struck out at it before it could land on her shoulders or arms and draw blood.

‘Ssssh,' Leila hissed. ‘She'll hear us.'

Chantel doubted it. The forest was alive with noise. Insects whirred incessantly. Nameless creatures scurried in the dense undergrowth. Ivy hung in heavy drifts from the gigantic branches above them, catching in her hair, brushing terrifyingly across her face. She choked back a sob. She should never have come. Her dress was torn and ruined. Her pretty pumps were saturated from the increasingly marshy ground. She wanted to be back in the safety of her big soft bed. To hear the comforting movements of servants. To see the reassuring glow of lamplight.

‘It can't be much further,' Leila panted encouragingly, disentangling her skirt from a riot of dully gleaming honeysuckle.

‘I'm scared, Leila. I want to go home.'

‘We can't,' Leila said, suppressing a note of panic in her voice. ‘We would never find our way back alone. We must keep following Louella.'

Tears sparkled in Chantel's violet-blue eyes. The bayou stank. The forest pressed in on them malignantly. The night pulsed with heat and the sound of cicadas and then with a sound that sent undiluted fear rippling down her spine. The sound of drums.

‘Let's stay here, Leila,' she pleaded. ‘Don't let's go any farther.'

Leila shook her head vehemently. She had come this far. She was going to complete what she had set out to do.

The drum-beats grew louder. There came the sound of tambourines; the rattle of the bones the Black people used in their music. Hardly daring to breathe, Leila inched forward cautiously, crouching low in the lush foliage, tentatively moving overhanging creepers to one side so that they might see.

An oasis of ground was bereft of trees. A large circle of flickering candles illuminated the bodies of fifty or sixty Black people and a handful of
hommes de couleur
. Men neither White nor Black. As the drums increased their rhythm the men and women only yards before them began to dance. Leila could see Louella's white
tignon
flash and whirl, could see that the normally expressionless eyes were brilliant with animation. The dancing grew wilder, terrible in its intensity. This was not the dancing that took place in the Quarter; in the Place Congo. This was something they had never witnessed before. A fevered savagery that held them motionless in terror.

Leila's fingers clutched at Chantel's arm, her breath hoarse in her throat.

‘Can you see? There, behind the drums?'

Chantel's heart leapt and then seemed to cease to beat. Beyond the frenzied dancers, dreadful in the candlelight, rose a makeshift altar. Above it two hideous drawings hung suspended. One a depiction of a contorted snake. The other a human heart. Before it were set out a chalice and a prayer-book. And on it was a human body.

‘Blessed Mary,' Chantel sobbed, crossing herself, her nails digging so deeply into her palms that they broke the flesh.

‘It's a corpse, Chantel. It isn't alive. Look. See how rigid it is.'

Chantel refused to look. She was uncaring as to whether the body was alive or dead. She wanted only to escape from the nightmare around her. To be back at Sans Souci or, better still, to be once more in her own home in the Vieux Carré. To hear the familiar sound of her father climbing the stairs to his room. To hear the large grandfather clock ticking on the stairway.

The drum-beats ceased. The dancers halted. In front of them an enormous, splendidly robed figure stood commandingly, arms held high.

‘It's Valère,' Leila whispered incredulously. Valère. The bald-headed Haitian who served so respectfully in the Gallière household.

Disbelievingly Chantel lifted her head. Her father's servant was hardly recognizable. His nostrils flared. His eyes blazed. He struck terror to the very root of her soul. Her trembling hands found the rosary beads in the pocket of her skirt. Urgently she began to pass them through her shaking fingers.

Valère was chanting prayers. Prayers she had never heard before. Prayers that were not Catholic. Prayers invoking the gods of Africa.

She had to fight to be able to breathe. The pain in her chest was crippling. The blood surged in her ears. Why had they come? Why had they been so foolish?

Majestically Valère moved towards the corpse. Chantel tried to tear her eyes away and found that she could not. Slowly the Haitian circled the lifeless body on the altar and then, in ritualistic grandeur he took a glinting knife and poised it above the corpse's head.

Chantel clenched a fist to her mouth, convinced that she was about to witness a decapitation. The knife arched and the head remained intact. Only hair was shorn, held aloft and then placed in an earthenware jar for all to see. Body hair, too, was removed, and then nails from hands and feet.

‘I'm going to be sick,' Chantel sobbed.

‘Be quiet!'
Leila's grasp on her wrist was like a vice.

A chicken was passed to and fro above the corpse and then several feathers plucked and added to the abomination in the jar. Held high for all to see, the jar was sealed. Leila breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Well, if that's all …' she whispered, grateful to be spared the sight of blood.

To their mystification, Valère then placed the sealed jar high in the boughs of a large oak on the far edge of the clearing.

‘Childs play,' Leila said, relieved it wasn't an execution.

Valère then returned to the corpse and marked a cross on its forehead with powder. Then, slowly and ceremoniously, he removed the shoes, turned the pockets of its jacket inside out, and then let out a wild whoop as the drums began once more to pound and the inexplicable performance was completed.

‘Let's go!' Chantel cried, pulling herself free of Leila's grasp.

‘We'll never find our way back unless we follow Louella.'

‘I don't care! I don't care what happens, but I'm not staying here any longer! Not for another minute!'