Dark Masquerade (3 page)

“That is Darcourt, a thorough-going scamp, but likable enough,” Grand’mere said, following the direction of her gaze. “My son married twice. Bernard and Felix are of the first marriage, Darcourt and Theresa are the children of the second. Theresa you will see later.” There was a shade of contempt in her voice that brought Elizabeth’s head around, but the old lady went on as if she was unaware of her interest. “My son has been dead for some time. Perhaps it is a good thing God does, at times, dispense small mercies.”

As they moved on up the stairs Elizabeth looked back. A scamp he might be, but he was undeniably a handsome one. He was more handsome in his way than Bernard, though it might have been his animation, his obvious enjoyment of life, that gave that impression. There was a great contrast between the two men, not only in their coloring, but also in their faces. Where Bernard was sun bronzed Darcourt was pale, and where Bernard’s mouth was stern with overly firm lines, the other man’s curved with an attractive and faintly sensuous charm.

As they turned the corner around the upper newel post Elizabeth felt oddly reluctant to leave that scene of laughter and comfortable living downstairs. It had been a long time since she had enjoyed either. Deep inside her there was a stirring of longing. She had been a part of a family once. Now she was alone, alone with the responsibility for her small nephew. To belong again, to share the responsibility, to be relieved of worries—the thought was seductive. It was also impossible. Angrily she shook her head, and as she walked on she raised her chin higher in atonement for that moment of weakness.

They passed two small Negro boys scuffling on a long padded bench; these were errand boys stationed in the hall to carry messages and run small errands. Then the two women came to a large bedroom at the front of the house.

Firelight, the only illumination, flickered redly on the hearth, leaving the rest of the room in shadow. Beside the fire a pan of water sat, left from Joseph’s bath, and near it Callie sat rocking slowly back and forth. The sleeping child, clean and replete, lay against her shoulder. His dark hair curled in wispy fineness over his head and his long lashes lay on his plump cheeks. His great-grandmother stood looking down at him, and then she turned away, her face impassive.

At their entrance the figure of a woman glided from the depths of darkness near the great four-poster bed. Her skirts of black taffeta made a whispering rustle and the small gold earrings in her ears caught the yellow gleam of the fire. Obviously a French lady’s maid, she could have been any age from twenty-five to forty. Her narrow eyes skimmed over Elizabeth’s serviceable but unmodish mourning clothes and dismissed them with a tiny derisive movement of her thin lips. She bowed her elaborately dressed head to Grand’mere and set her pale face into deliberately pleasant lines.

“Madame is ready to prepare for bed? If these intruders can be dismissed I will help her. I was certain my mistress could not have ordered this woman and her charge to come here, to her own room, but I could not make this stupid girl who calls herself a house servant attend me, and I would never disturb Madame at supper.”

“Do not fuss, Denise,” Grand’mere said absently. “I must think.”

“But Madame—”

“Be still, I say.”

A silence alive with the offended dignity of the maid, Denise, descended.

Suddenly Grand’mere spoke. “The child must sleep in here with me, of course. This room is one of the largest in the house. His nurse will be able to stay near him at night, and since you, Ellen Marie, will wish to be nearby also, you must have the room beside me. It has a connecting door. Denise sleeps there in the ordinary way, but she can very well have another room, perhaps the one next to the nursery.” The old lady seemed not to hear Denise’s gasp of outrage.

“There is no need for that,” Elizabeth protested, aware of the maid’s inimical glance toward her. “If there is a nursery—”

“There is every need. No child in this family has ever gone to the nursery until he was three at least. It is much safer to have your babies near you. I always did.”

Elizabeth acquiesced, but she thought uncomfortably that it would not make her position any easier to have the household routine disrupted on her account. Then she smiled to herself as she realized that it would not be for her at all but for Joseph.

She stood back as orders were issued and the errand boys in the hall were sent scurrying with instructions. In a very short time a cradle and a trundle bed had been set up in the room, and a light supper had been spread on a table before the fire. The room next door was swept clean of the maid’s possessions, the bed remade, and her own trunks brought up and unpacked. Then a long Julep tub was brought up and placed near the fireplace. It was filled with hot water from a can brought with half-running footsteps and a great deal of subdued giggling from the servant girls. Tactfully Grand’mere went back downstairs, taking Callie with her to have her own meal in the kitchen.

The rest of the family might have had sherry and biscuits for supper, but for Elizabeth the kitchen had conjured up breast of chicken served on a bed of rice with a piquant sauce, new potatoes in their jackets, fresh peas, and for dessert, strawberries with cream over a sponge cake, and an excellent madeira. It was delicious, but Elizabeth hurried through it. She was spurred by the thought of the hot bath waiting, her first since leaving Texas nearly a week and a half before.

She stepped into the tub and lay soaking, feeling the tiredness, the soreness, melting away. The feel of the water was silky against her skin and the pleasant tang of the lavender soap imported from England gave her a feeling of luxurious comfort. It had been some time since scented soap had been a part of her life.

A length of toweling lay on a slipper chair standing between the fireplace and the tub. Elizabeth reached out and dragged the chair away from the fire. She could smell the odor of hot lacquer; the chair was much too good to allow its finish to be blistered from the heat. The other furnishings in the room were equally good. An enormous four poster bed of dark wood with a green canopy and hangings stood against one wall. The cradle at the foot was an exact replica of the larger bed, even to the mosquito netting that was looped inside the canopy. A rosewood washstand and a giant armoire, reaching within inches of the high ceiling, were companion pieces to the bed. But the prie-dieu in the corner had a different look, a Spanish appearance, with its carved rest and padded leather bench. It reminded Elizabeth of the altar at the Spanish mission where Ellen and Felix had knelt, of the sonorous words of the marriage service spoken by the priest, the flickering candles and the heavy scent of flowers and wafted incense. Connected as it was with their deaths, however, it was not a happy memory. Elizabeth shook her head to banish it, but there was no escape. The black crepe of deep mourning hanging over the pictures on the walls, on the mirrors, and even surmounting the windows, was a glaring reminder.

She frowned and stood up suddenly, sloshing the bath water over onto the floor. Exclaiming in annoyance, she reached for the towel and stepped out of the tub, and then she went still as a strange noise came from the connecting room. Unlike the bustle of preparation that had been going on earlier, this had a furtive sound. As she listened it came again, the rustling of cloth or bed covers, and then there was the scrape of a hasty footstep and a muffled thump as the door into the hall was softly closed.

A servant returning to finish some small forgotten job, she tried to tell herself as she hurriedly skimmed into her nightgown and pulled her dressing gown around her. But somehow she could not make herself believe it. A silence had fallen over the house. It had been some time since she had seen the family at the dinner table. Where were they now? Had they come up to bed? She glanced over her shoulder at Joseph sleeping quietly in the cradle. Assured that he was safe, she jerked the belt of her dressing gown in a knot and then walked to the connecting door, turned the knob, and pushed it open.

There was no one there, but then she had not expected there to be, remembering the sound of the closing door. The room was neat, orderly, and apparently unchanged from the way the maids had left it. Or was it? Hadn’t the bed been left turned for the night? But why come back in and make it up again?

The bed looked soft, tempting with its feather mattress and spread of muslin edged with lace. The thought of all the lumpy, smelly mattresses she had endured in the past week came to her, and she felt an almost unendurable weariness. It might be diplomatic, and better-mannered, to wait up to bid her hostess good-night, but she did not know where the old lady had gone or when she would return. The warm fire and the hot bath had made leaden weights of her eyelids, relaxed knotted muscles, and taken the last vestige of her energy.

Slowly she moved forward, caught the spread, and flung it back.

Suddenly she jerked her hand away, a surprised cry catching in her throat. Between the bed pillows of the four-poster bed lay a green preserving jar. Its loose glass lid had fallen open as the spread was removed, and spiders, released from their prison, crawled from the jar, spreading out over the sheet.

Small and large, brown and gray, a dozen or more spiders ran or crept in all directions, their legs casting multiplying shadows in the light of the candle beside the bed. Then over the glass lid a last spider came crawling. Its plump, unwieldy body was a shining black, and on the underside an orange hourglass could just barely be seen.

A black widow!

Disbelief gripped her and she stood staring. Was it some kind of macabre joke? A black widow for a widow in black? Then as a shiver of revulsion rippled over her skin she whipped around and scooped up a wooden handled hairbrush from the washstand. Though she had to lean over the other creeping insects to get to it, she crushed the black widow first, grinding it into the sheet, and then with an anger approaching hysteria she flailed at the others, smashing them with the back of the hairbrush while her hair swung around her face.

“My dear girl, what are you doing?”

With clenched teeth Elizabeth ran down a spider escaping under the fold of the bedspread before she turned.

“Killing spiders!” she said fiercely to the old lady standing in the door. With the back of one hand she pushed her damp hair out of her eyes. “Spiders that someone put in my bed!”

The old lady clutched the door frame, the gaze of her faded brown eyes going to the glass jar nestled between the pillows of the bed. “Spiders?” she echoed.

Then with an effort she seemed to collect herself, though as she came into the room she leaned heavily on the ebony cane in her hand. She reached for the corner of the mattress, tugging at the sheets, but at her action, Callie, who had slipped into the room behind Grand’mere, took the bedclothes from her hand and silently began to strip the bed, folding the corners toward the center to hold any live insects.

“I must get someone up here to sweep down the rails of the bed—” the old lady said to herself vaguely. “No—that will not do, it will be all over the house in a trice.” Without appearing to realize she was speaking aloud she stared hard at Callie. “Give me the jar.”

When she complied, Grand’mere tucked the jar under her arm and turned to Elizabeth. “I would offer you another room, but there is none. There are only eight bedrooms above stairs, counting the little one off the nursery that Denise is occupying. Perhaps if you and your woman inspected this one thoroughly you would feel comfortable enough to sleep here?”

“I—suppose so,” Elizabeth answered, unable to keep her reluctance from her voice.

Grand’mere hesitated. “You may have my bed and I shall sleep in here then.”

But Elizabeth had not missed the hesitation or the older woman’s reluctance to enter the room.

“Oh no. You must not think of it. I—I am persuaded that once we have looked it over carefully, I will be able to sleep easily.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite sure.”

Elizabeth wanted to smile at this polite exchange but did not. Looking down, she saw that her hands were still trembling.

Together she and Callie swept the bed railings, brushed the canopy and shook out the mosquito netting and bed hangings. They beat the mattress and dusted it, and remade the bed with fresh linen smelling of vetiver and a clean bedspread of heavy crochet work. When they were through, Elizabeth was calmer, and so exhausted that she felt she could have slept on the floor.

After blowing out the candle, she lay staring up into the darkness of the canopy, imagining she felt things crawling on her arms and her face. She was fairly certain in her mind that the bed was free of spiders, but she was unable to relax.

Who would do such a thing to her? Had Denise been angry enough at being ousted from her room to take that sort of revenge? But if she had, would she have had time to catch the spiders? No, not unless she had expected to be ousted and had thought to give Elizabeth a disgust of the room so she would refuse to stay in it. But the black widow might have bitten her. Surely Denise, no matter how piqued over the loss of the room, would not go that far?