Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (9 page)

“It’s so much more complicated than that, Cleo --”

Nicolette’s footsteps. They’d talk of it later.

Nicolette smiled, for which Marcel was grateful. When Nikki
smiled, the world was a fine place. She played mother, pouring coffee, plopping
sugar lumps and dribbling cream into the cups. She was in a fine mood, full of
gossip and deviltry.

Marcel balanced a plate of pralines on his knee. The aroma of
the strong dark brew, the creamy perfection of the pralines like sugared silk
on his tongue – always a pleasure to be in Cleo’s house. Such wonderful
company, these two, Marcel thought sadly even as he laughed and talked. Such
happy times in this parlor. How long would it be before he sat with them again?
And would he be welcome, once he’d put on the uniform?

He couldn’t put it off any longer. He set the pralines on
the table and wiped the sugary crumbs off his pants leg.

“I’m really here to tell you good-bye. For a while,” he
said.

“You’re going home?” Cleo said. “Your father will be
pleased.”

“Only for a day. The next morning, I’m riding out to join
the Confederate forces on the Lafourche.”

The room was silent except for the ticking of his pocket
watch and the pulse in his ears.

“My dear Marcel.” Cleo gazed at him lovingly with her
beautiful brown eyes. “I am sorry you will be in harm’s way. You know that. But
I understand you must do what your conscience dictates.”

He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Thank you, Cleo.”

Nicolette’s clattering cup and saucer interrupted their
tender moment. She stood stiffly, her face flushed and angry.

“Marcel, you put on that uniform, and you are lost to me!”

Her vehemence startled him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Nicolette.”

“I mean it, Marcel. You’re turning your back on your own
kin. Gabriel and me, Maman, too, we’d be slaves working the fields of Toulouse
right now if Tante Josephine had felt like you do.”

Marcel stood up too. “You deliberately refuse to understand.”
His voice was full of righteous rebuke. His determination to accept their
condemnation, if it came to that, evaporated. He
was
the older brother. “The
abolitionists want you to think this is about slavery, and you’re falling for
it! This struggle is for autonomy. For sovereignty. You’re a child if you think
otherwise.”

He saw her fist her hands, but he had to try to explain this
one more time. Patiently, he began, “When Lincoln won the election --”

Nicolette’s eyes flamed at him. She turned on her heel, left
him in mid-sentence, and ran up the stairs. He raised his eyes to the ceiling
as her angry footsteps tapped across the upper hall. Then the slamming of the
door echoed down the staircase.

He’d called her a child. Damn it, he couldn’t watch every
single word coming out of his mouth. He held his palms out to Cleo. “What can I
do?”

“Dearest, Nicolette loves Yves and Gabriel, very much. But
you. Maybe she loves you most of all. That’s why it hurts her so much that you
don’t respect her.”

“I respect her.”

Cleo raised her brows and tipped her head. “Your little
sister, the one you still bring ribbons and bonbons? She’s a grown woman,
Marcel. I don’t think you’ve realized that yet.”

Maybe he hadn’t. But she was so pig-headed. He could explain
the situation to her, the whole war, if she’d just sit still and listen.

“I’ll write to her,” he said, “if you’ll see she doesn’t
throw my letters in the fire without reading them.”

Cleo gave him a sad smile. He knew what she was thinking.
She too wanted him to be like his brother Yves, to renounce the South, to
renounce his own heritage.

They didn’t understand, he told himself yet again.

Marcel bent to kiss Cleo’s cheek. “I love you both.”

Cleo put her hand to his face. “Be safe, son.”

For an understanding of how the world worked, what a young
woman’s place was in that world, Deborah Ann Presswood had romance novels.
She’d escaped from her mother’s unrelenting illness, from a house saturated
with her mother’s misery, by reading. As a girl, she read tales of damsels in
frothy pink gowns and heroes rescuing them from dark castles.

Deborah Ann’s bookish experience further revealed to her
that once a man found the right woman, whatever the obstacles, he made her his and cherished her ever after. Deborah Ann had been
found. Marcel had vowed to marry her, and she would be the sunshine of his
life.

Happy, and convinced happiness lay before her evermore, she
strolled down Rue de Iberville on the way to Madame Celeste’s shop, Mammy
rolling her great girth along behind her.

At the corner, they waited for a gap in the stream of wagons
and horses to cross the street. With an elbow nudge, Mammy whispered, “Look
there, Missy,” and nodded at a regal young woman waiting on the opposite
corner. Her smart linen day gown and the lavender tignon announced she was an
exceptionally well-to-do woman of color.

“Who is she?” she said leaning into Mammy’s ear.

“I tells you later.”

Mid-way across the street, Deborah Ann eyed the woman as they
passed. Tall and slim, the woman’s manner was unhurried and self-possessed. She
had a sensual roll to her walk that made Deborah Ann feel rather cloddish. A
true beauty, with the high yellow complexion of a quadroon. If it weren’t for
the tignon on her head, she wouldn’t have been sure she wasn’t white. Almost as
white as that girl who played and sang, Mademoiselle Nicolette.

Deborah Ann bought her goods and hurried home. Marcel was
coming to supper and she had to be rested.

Lying on the daybed in her room, Deborah Ann wondered if he
would be in his new uniform. So handsome, those tea-colored eyes, that wide
bottom lip. She touched her own lip, remembering the exquisite feathering of
his mouth against hers one afternoon in the arbor. She had only a little
trepidation of the marriage bed. Marcel would be gentle, of course. She didn’t
know much about those physical sensations between men and women, not yet, but
she already felt something, a heated fluttering, when she was near him.

She loved him. She’d make him happy. She’d be all he ever
could want in a wife.

Idly, she watched Mammy tidying the room. Dear Mammy. Since
her mother had died so tragically, Mammy had been the only one to help her in
those delicate moments of womanhood. Whenever Deborah Ann had one of her
spells, female hysteria, Dr. Braun called them, it was Mammy who sat by her
bedside, Mammy who cooled her humors. Father of course would not discuss her
mother’s condition with her, but at such times, Deborah Ann worried that her
mother’s melancholy had begun just like this, with female pain and nervousness.
But Mammy always said, no, you put away that foolishness.

“What about that creole woman you pointed out in the
street?” Deborah Ann asked, yawning. Her family were Americans, not Creoles, but
even a sheltered young woman like herself was aware that the original Creoles
of Spanish and French descent had produced many mixed blood children, the
creoles of Louisiana.

Mammy’s eyes shifted to the fan overhead. “What woman that
be?”

“You know. The one with the lavender tignon.”

“Oh, that woman.”

“What about her?”

Mammy glanced at Deborah Ann, then shifted her eyes up to
the pukha fanning the humid air. “I thought she worth
looking at, that’s all. Don’t see many peoples in the world that pretty.”

Deborah Ann knew Mammy through and through. She was avoiding
her, and that piqued her interest. “You remember what Mother used to say about
you, Mammy?”

Mammy pretended disinterest. “What that, honey?”

“That yours must be a guileless soul because you couldn’t
tell a lie any better than a hound dog. What about that woman on the street?”

Mammy’s resistance seemed to collapse. “Oh, baby, I
shouldn’t ought to have shown her to you. Young ladies like you oughtn’t to
know nothing about girls like that. I’s sorry, Missy.”

Deborah Ann scooted up to sit against the cushions. “You
mean she’s a prostitute? Mammy, I know what prostitutes are.”

Her black eyes rounded in surprise, Mammy said, “How you
know such a thing?”

“At the convent. The nuns were always warning us about being
too free with ourselves. We’d go straight to hell,” she said with a laugh, “but
first we’d spend a life in degradation as depraved prostitutes.”

“Them nuns told you that?” Mammy shook her head.

“So. That woman was a prostitute? She looked very prosperous.”

Mammy again found the fan fascinating. She closed her face,
and Deborah Ann realized there was more.

“What, Mammy? What about her?”

“Don’t know no more about her. She just a fancy creole gal,
that’s all I knows.”

Deborah Ann wrapped her arms around her knees. This was
becoming more intriguing.

“So. Let me guess. She’s a prostitute, but she doesn’t look
depraved or degraded. She’s prosperous, in fact. And very beautiful.” Deborah
Ann paused. “She’s one of those rich men’s plaçées, isn’t she? I’ve heard about
them.”

Mammy humphed. “Seems to me you
know more than you ought to then.”

“That’s it, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t you say?”

Mammy’s chin went up. “I just thought better of telling you 'bout that, but then you already knows it all.”

Deborah Ann laughed. “I’m not a child, Mammy. I know
gentlemen take up with certain kinds of women until they’re married. I’m near
to being a married woman myself, after all.”

Mammy’s face took on a curious expression, but Deborah Ann
dismissed it. Old folks just had a hard time believing it when the young ones
grew up.

A spring rain suddenly splashed the window sills. Mammy
rushed to close the windows, and the subject was dropped.

When Marcel arrived, Deborah Ann was once again the perfect
belle, corseted and curled and perfumed. She waited for his knock and ran to
meet him in the great hall.

Rain beaded his hat and ran in rivulets from his cape. Jebediah the butler took the wet garments and handed Mr.
Chamard a linen towel. Deborah Ann blushed, embarrassed and oddly excited at
watching such an intimacy as seeing Marcel wipe the rain from his face and
neck. He ignored her, and she thought she must have erred, observing this
necessary grooming.

Marcel returned the damp towel to Jebediah.
Then, as if only at that instant becoming aware of her, his gaze swept her from
hemline to hairline. She stood still, basking in his admiration. This is just
how a man should look on his beloved, just how Darcy had looked on Lizzy
Bennett.

He escorted her to the drawing room, her hand warmly held on
his arm. When he lay his hand over hers, she felt claimed. Owned. Her body
actually warmed from physical contact with him.

During supper, Deborah Ann hardly touched her food. All her
awareness was on Marcel. On his beautifully buffed nails as he raised his wine
glass. On his lips as he brought the glass to his mouth. His hair had just been
cut. She could see it by the thin line of white skin behind his ears where the
sun hadn’t yet bronzed him.

Marcel was quite young, really, far from being thirty, yet
he spoke with her father as an equal. Though she did wish he’d spare her a few
words. Not when they spoke of the war, of course, but whenever the topic turned
to society or the latest novels, he might defer to her. She was, after all, to
be his wife.

Why did he not look at her more? She had taken extra pains
with her hair. She looked very fine tonight, she knew she did. She was
accustomed to being complimented by gentlemen. Marcel, too, when he’d first
courted her, had been full of compliments. Lately, he seldom seemed to notice
how well she looked.

He was preoccupied with the war, that was all, she thought.
When they were married, she’d wake up, and he would be in her bed. He would
call her pretty names and touch her hair. And one morning, as they lay in bed
together, she’d tell him she was with child.

Deborah’s mind skittered away from the subject as soon as
she’d thought it. She was fairly sure she knew how child-getting was accomplished,
in spite of the veiled warnings and threats she’d heard at the convent. After
all, she spent her summers at Evermore, the family plantation, and dogs and
cats and horses knew no shame. Even if she didn’t fully understand these
things, however, Marcel would make it happen.

She’d be a good wife, she thought. Sons ran in her family,
after all. She’d had three brothers, before the small pox. Father had four, and
Mother had six! Marcel wouldn’t be sorry he chose her.

But the talk of the war consumed the men, and she wished
they would speak of something else. She might as well be upstairs with her
novels.

“I’ll take the steamer up to Cherleu tomorrow,” Marcel was
saying. “The day after, I’ll put the uniform on and ride west.”

Father nodded. “Mouton will need all the help he can get
keeping the Yanks out of Lafourche.”

Thank God he was an officer, not one of those poor soldiers
Father called cannon fodder. But why didn’t he speak to her? She was the one
who’d miss him!

She wiped her mouth daintily, the picture of serenity, even
if she was boiling with impatience. She pushed her chair back, a little more
roughly than propriety demanded.

Abruptly, as if to make amends for his neglect, Marcel rose
and held the back of her chair. As she excused herself to leave the men to
their port and cigars, Marcel touched her elbow.

“I’ll be with you shortly, Miss Deborah Ann.”

She smiled sweetly. A lady never showed her displeasure.

“Don’t be long, Mr. Chamard,” she murmured.

She waited in the parlor, flipping through a magazine of
last year’s fashions. The longer she waited, the more her doubts surfaced.
Maybe he found her dull. The other gentlemen of the last two seasons had
admired her and sought her company. But they had been mere boys. Marcel was not
a boy. Maybe she was too young for him.