Dark Masquerade (9 page)

Just before Elizabeth reached the foot of the stairs, Bernard and Celestine came through the front door. Celestine was flushed and laughing, and a trace of humor lingered about Bernard’s mouth.

The other girl looked up and saw Elizabeth standing at the bottom of the stairs. Something like triumph flashed across her face before she asked, “Has the dinner bell rung?”

When Elizabeth told her that it had, Celestine pouted.

“See there,” Bernard told her. “I told you it was near one o’clock. Next time you will believe me.”

“He thinks he is clever because he can tell time by the sun,” Celestine confided to Elizabeth, but from the slant of her eyes Elizabeth could see that she meant to flatter Bernard.

He laughed, but gave no sign that he recognized the compliment. “We will be in the cook’s black books if we are late.”

“That would be a shame, no doubt,” Celestine said as he hurried her up the stairs to freshen up.

“Yes, indeed. If she decides her value as a cook is not properly appreciated, she is capable of burning every dish she cooks for a solid week just to make sure we do appreciate her when she does it right.”

“She wouldn’t dare.”

“No? That is what is known as the tyranny of house servants.”

“Isn’t she afraid you will have her whipped?” Celestine dragged back on the hand pulling her inexorably up the stairs so that she could manage her dress without showing her ankles.

He laughed. “Old Ernestine used to bake gingerbread boys with currant eyes for me. She knows I wouldn’t do such a thing. If I did she might not bake them for my sons. Besides, it would start a war of attrition that I could not win. The upstairs maid would forget to change my bed and dust my room, my valet would shave me with cold water—”

“If he did you would have his head!”

“And on top of that Grand’mere would have a few words to say on cruelty to helpless creatures. I shiver to think of it.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

Their bantering voices faded as they reached the upper hall. To be excluded from the easy camaraderie gave Elizabeth an empty feeling. But even as she acknowledged it, she realized that as long as she had to five with her deception, as long as she had to submerge her true self, then she could never be a part of it. This was one of the penalties she must pay. It might well be, she was beginning to realize, one of the lesser penalties.

Dinner, as the midday meal was called, was the main meal of the day. It was a long repast beginning with a rich seafood soup, and passing through several game and meat courses with vegetable side dishes and wines. It was completed with pastries, a berry cobbler, and three kinds of cake, all topped off with petit noir, black coffee in tiny demitasse cups. It was impossible for the six people gathered around the table laid with a heavy damask cloth, crystal, and silver, to make an impression on the bounty. What became of what was left? Elizabeth wondered. Did it go back to the kitchen for the servants, the fifteen or twenty that she had seen flitting around the house? If not, there would be an appalling amount of waste.

Bernard sat at the head of the table. Elizabeth had been placed on his right, rather grudgingly she felt, but she might have been mistaken. His step-mother sat on his left, Darcourt was beside Elizabeth and Celestine sulked across the table from Darcourt. Grand’mere reigned at the foot of the table.

Grand’mere and Darcourt seemed to be the only ones with an appetite. Celestine picked at her food with pretty gestures while Madame Delacroix paid more attention to her wine glass. Often her gaze rested on Elizabeth, and, though her expression was vacant, Elizabeth felt that the older woman resented her presence.

Hoping to bring a friendlier light to the small black eyes, Elizabeth said, “I met your daughter, Theresa, this morning. She is a very pretty girl. I hope she will be able to join us at the table before too long.”

Alma Delacroix stared, her glass suspended halfway to her mouth. “It is most unlikely,” she said finally in a repressive tone, and then swallowed her wine in a gulp.

“Oh? Is she very ill then? She didn’t appear to be.”

“Appearances can be extremely deceptive.” She allowed her thick white eyelids to fall over her eyes, gazing down at her empty glass.

Elizabeth pressed her lips together, but she had no choice other than to accept the rebuff.

The butler moved quietly around the table, refilling the water and wine glasses, proffering dishes and murmuring a word or two of praise for a particular dish as he offered it. The clink of dishes and rattle of cutlery were loud in the unnatural quiet.

Grand’mere, acting as hostess, made no effort to introduce a topic of discussion or in any way ease the strain. At last Celestine and Darcourt began a desultory conversation about their friends in New Orleans. Though the people they were talking about were strangers, it was better than nothing.

The table had been cleared, the desserts served, and coffee poured before a comment was directed at her again.

“I believe I have found a reliable woman for Joseph,” Grand’mere told her. “A little older than your woman, perhaps, and used to babies. She has had four or five of her own, I forget which, all still living. She has expressed herself as happy to nurse Joseph in addition to her own child. Natural, of course. She has ambitions to serve inside the big house. She has been working in the quarter’s nursery.”

“What?” Elizabeth could not believe it.

“I said—”

“No, I know what you said. But are you really suggesting that I replace Callie?”

“I am. I was quite willing to have her in my room temporarily, but I really prefer to have one of our own people with me. Now that she has proven herself negligent, I have had to move more quickly than I intended. No matter—”

“But it does matter!” Elizabeth said the first thing that entered her head to stop the complacent flow of words. “Callie has not neglected Joseph. It was not her fault that she was unable to protect him.”

“Surely you don’t believe that? Who would strike her? It is ridiculous on the face of it. The lazy chit probably put the baby on the floor to play and then went to sleep. It would not be unnatural after the long trip and her interrupted nights.”

“Joseph could not have gotten out of the room and across the hall.”

“How do you know? He can turn over, can’t he? And pull himself along on his elbows if he sees something he wants?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth was forced to admit. “But it would take hours.”

“Pish and tush.”

“Do you think Callie cut her own head to make it bleed, or struck herself on the back of the head until she was unconscious? And what of my missing documents?”

“She lost them no doubt and was afraid of the consequences, so she took this way out.”

“I refuse to believe it.” Elizabeth’s voice shook with anger that was laced with fear. She was powerless and she knew it. There was little she could do if they decided to pay no heed to her wishes. She could take Joseph and leave the plantation, but it would be a struggle to support herself in such a case, much less a tiny baby. Alone she might find a place as a governess or a seamstress or milliner apprentice, but who would give a woman with a child such a position?

“Nevertheless,” Grand’mere began, but Elizabeth interrupted.

“I cannot allow Joseph’s routine to be upset like that. Callie would give her life for him. They are used to one another, and I trust her completely. If you don’t care to have Callie with you at night then she and Joseph can come into my room. I am not sure but what I would not prefer it, especially after the peculiar things that have happened since I arrived.”

The boldness of this declaration seemed to take the old lady aback, but she recovered swiftly.

“Really, you are very young. You would do well to be advised by older and wiser heads. I have only the child’s safety and comfort in mind. After all, I am his great-grandmother.”

“I appreciate your concern, and I am grateful for it. But though I dislike having to remind you, I am Joseph’s mother.”

Without waiting for a reply Elizabeth stood, dropped her napkin on the table, and walked away. Bernard and Darcourt got to their feet as she rose and stood until she was out of the room. She carried with her the comforting memory of Darcourt’s low voice, “Bravo,” spoken as she passed his chair.

A kind of furious elation carried her up the stairs. Once in her room she called Callie to her and questioned her closely about what had happened. The interview did little good except to strengthen her conviction that Callie was telling the truth. By the time she had satisfied herself, her elation had ebbed away. She warned Callie of what Grand’mere intended to do, gave her strict instructions designed to protect both herself and the baby, and sent her back to Joseph.

She would have liked to hold Joseph herself. It gave her a strange sort of confidence and reassurance. But he was asleep, and after his accident on the stairs that morning she did not want to wake him. Moreover, according to Callie, there was an unwritten law that you do not wake a sleeping child.

She sat beside the window, looking out at the trees beyond the gallery. The woods seemed to press up to the house, giving her the suffocating feeling of being closed in. She recognized vaguely that a part of this sensation was due to a gnawing sense of being trapped in this situation of her own making. And she had not yet been in the house twenty-four hours, she reminded herself grimly.

She heard Grand’mere go into the next room and speak to Callie. They kept their voices low so as not to wake the baby. The last thing Elizabeth wanted was to renew her quarrel with Grand’mere, and yet as long as she stayed in her room she could be forced into it.

Moving quietly, Elizabeth crossed the bedroom and let herself out into the hall. The small errand boy was asleep on his bench, his hands under one cheek, and his bare feet drawn up onto the red velvet upholstery. The doors along the length of the hall were closed. Elizabeth surmised that the other members of the family were indulging in the custom of the siesta, a desirable thing after that enormous meal.

Her soft morocco slippers made little sound on the floor. They were made for wearing in the house, and she thought of going back to change them, but decided against it. The house was growing steadily more oppressive. She could not bear the thought of being forced to contain her temper while she endured another homily from Grand’mere.

Outside the sun was warm, the breeze fresh. Imperceptibly her depression began to lift as she walked. Feeling, perhaps unreasonably, that spying eyes watched her from the house, she stepped into the shadows of the trees and went deeper into their shade. She lost sight of the house, though she knew where it was located. A faint trail snaked through the high grass, and wandering aimlessly, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the clean sweet fragrance of growing things, she followed it. Her footsteps on the thick layer of leaf mold released the smell of decaying vegetation, a not unpleasant smell in the fresh air. Dog-tooth violets hid beneath the leaning stems of last year’s dried weeds. Dark green vines of yellow jasmine with a few lingering yellow trumpets hung from the trees, mingling with the brown vines of wild grape. Some effort had been made to tame the profusion of growth, but it was wilder here than among the oaks on the front lawn. Actually, she thought that the word lawn was a misnomer for the stretch of tree-studded acreage that lay between the house and the dirt road.

In a small clearing she discovered a great, white- blossomed dogwood that spread its branches like an umbrella above her head. It was the largest tree of its kind that she had ever seen.

Somehow the sight of it, so strong, so sure of the rightness of its position, soothed her. The four petals of the white flowers with their brown indentations, symbols of the cross and the nail scars, were calming in their religious significance. She did not pray, and yet the peace of prayer came to her with a measure of certainty, the certainty that what she was doing was for the best. She stood looking at it for a long time, and then she turned back the way she had come. There was no escape from what she was doing. It had to be right.

She was watching the ground, holding her skirts above the snatching brambles, when she became aware of movement on the edge of the trail. A man pushed away from the tree against which he had been leaning and confronted her on the narrow track. She had the impression for a fleeting moment that he had been there some time, watching her. Her earlier feeling of being watched returned to her.

Suppressing a start, she dropped her dress over her ankles and stood with her hands clasped tight as Bernard came toward her.

“It is a nice tree, as trees go,” he drawled, “but I never knew it to be quite so interesting.”

When Elizabeth did not answer he went on. “How do you like our wilderness? Grand’mere wants to clear this area and under plant the larger trees with some kind of shrubs from the Orient. Personally, I like it the way it is.”

“I imagine it would be lovely either way.”

“A diplomatic answer. I am surprised.”

There was a lift to his eyebrows that Elizabeth did not particularly like. Her own tone when she answered him was cool.