Evil's Niece (22 page)

‘Be careful. We’re the next to go,’ Antoinette agreed. ‘And what choice would we have, but to crawl back to the School, to grovel at Miss Delacroix’s feet? I say we construct a plan that will not only benefit Miss Eve, but cover our own asses as well.’

I studied the redhead with a new respect, for she spoke with a voice of calm in this storm; her loyalty was clear, yet she had no illusions about its consequences. I wished I had more of Antoinette’s allure and Russell’s practicality.

‘I hope you can remain until the ball next week,’ I said. ‘You’re excellent help, and Fanny and I need —’

‘A masked ball is just the place to wreak a little revenge — if we have your permission to wear costumes.’

Toinette had obviously given some thought to this subject before tonight’s confrontation with my husband. ‘I see no reason why you can’t,’ I replied after a moment’s thought. Then I had to smile, sensing these maids craved the dressing-up as much as paying Chapin back.

‘Shall we choose something from that…other woman’s wardrobe? The clothes locked away in the attic?’

My eyes widened further. ‘Oh, my, yes! Won’t
that
be a shock — and with me in that Bo Peep outfit his dear mama probably wore!’

‘Exactly.’ The redhead waxed foxlike. ‘He’ll be too busy hosting his influential friends to raise any sort of ruckus at the ball, since he needs us to keep the tables filled.’

‘And he wouldn’t question
where
those costumes came from either — at least not until afterwards,’ Cleopatra remarked. ‘I like it! It’s time we put his uppity ass in a sling, and hang Judd Schuck’s beside it! They have no right to mistreat you this way, Miss Eve.’

Cinderella was dabbing her eyes with an eyelet handkerchief, looking brighter by the moment. ‘Is there something in a pretty blue for me? With shoes fit for a princess?’

‘I think you’d all look stunning dressed as the royalty Monique named you for,’ I said with a chuckle. ‘That way, I can keep track of you. The house will be awash in a sea of outrageous Mardi Gras costumes, you know. Glorious to behold, but we’ll have no idea who’s behind those elaborate masks.’

The furtive allure of this plan was making my pulse thrum, with only one regret. ‘I don’t suppose Monique will get here though. And she’d be in her element on such a night.’

The three maids glanced at each other. Then Antoinette smiled, with that same intimate bravado she’d shown in the attic. ‘Have you ever known Mistress Monique
not
to have her way?’

With every waking moment of the following week occupied by preparations for the party, I had no time to stew over my personal predicament — and no chance to further incriminate myself, for I saw nothing of Dewel or Monique. It was as though my life had returned to its previous balance, before those two conspirators turned my world upside down with passionate possibilities I’d never dreamed existed.

This tranquility was an illusion, however. Beneath the glasslike smoothness of that oasis pond, the muddy bottom waited to be churned up once again by the strained emotions and revelations of the past week. Chapin and his valet were gone late into the evenings, pandering to political supporters — or so they said. The maids and Mrs Frike laboured like souls possessed, staying out of Chapin’s sight when he was home. I had but one purpose, and that was to hostess the grandest masked ball New Orleans had ever seen — hoping that after the election, my husband would return to his more regulated life of cotton commerce and the Beau Monde Club, and possibly playing mayor, so I could return to my own routine as well.

Things would never be the same, of course. But after this party and the election, I could escape the public eye. I could ponder and pursue a life that fulfilled my emotional and sexual needs — an unheard-of luxury for most Southern ladies, which had become an absolute necessity for me.

So, on the morning before the ball, as I was on a last shopping excursion in the Vieux Carré, I didn’t anticipate seeing Honore Delacroix — and certainly not with Tommy Jon Beaumont! I paused in the doorway of a little bakery, and then ducked into the nearest alley to remain unseen. The headmistress of the School for Domestic Endeavor was plying her wiles as only an experienced demigoddess could do: arrayed in shimmering shades of purple silk, with a matching, peacock-feathered, veiled hat angled coquettishly over her coal-black hair, she was
flirting
with him! Teasing T-Jon with the bending of her gloved finger in a come-hither, which I could only assume was for a kiss.

It was too delicious a scene to miss. I stood against the brick building, in the shade of an ancient magnolia tree, and took note of Miss Delacroix’s technique: how she cajoled him with a low patter I wished I could hear. How she batted those lashes and smiled her artful smile, enticing T-Jon into her web like the spider she was.

While I realised Monique and her man probably saw other lovers, I felt a flush of anger at this public seduction by the virago I’d butted horns with. Was she still soliciting for students? Trying to replace the slaves I’d taken from her?

I wanted to holler a hello to T-Jon, if only to distract him back into the real world, but instinct stopped me. He towered over the headmistress, with his broad shoulders straining at his blue cotton shirt and legs flexing with a superior strength. A mere woman was no match for this fine fellow! Who was I to step in, even though my loyalty to Monique prodded my conscience?

I couldn’t distinguish what was being said, but their voices lowered to a seductive hum. Honore was slowly backing towards a gated courtyard — probably belonging to the apartment in that building’s upper stories. The iron gate swung silently with the pressure of her back, while her smile grew more coaxing. Was she inviting Tommy Jon upstairs for a quick romp? He knew who she was, of course — who didn’t? Sketches of her appeared in all the papers, touting her exemplary training for domestics and her panache for hostessing the most whispered-about receptions in the Vieux Carré.

I held my breath as the pair slipped past the lush oleander foliage, and then the tall Cajun swooped down for a ravenous kiss. Honore’s arms twined around his neck, coaxing him lower to accommodate her lesser height, insinuating her body against his. My pulse was pounding, and my nipples rasped against my corset. Thank God there were no passers-by to notice my arousal — or block my view.

As though Honore felt this deserted area was now her private playground, she spoke in low, urgent tones, gesturing towards the ground…lifting her purple skirts over the tops of her pumps. Tommy Jon knelt, running his hands down her front as she leaned against the brick building. My Lord, she was raising her skirt higher. That hussy wanted a tonguing, right here in broad daylight!

I bit back a moan. My slit quivered with the audacity of it…the delicious sensations I recalled from having Dewel’s tongue lapping at my folds. T-Jon’s response was just as cocky as the proposition he’d received: with practised speed, he ducked under her skirts for a taste of her pussy.

The headmistress was at least modest enough to cover her lover’s head with her clothes, so I had to imagine what was going on between those long, stockinged legs. My knees were knocking with the need this scenario brought on, for I’d gone too long without any attention from Dewel or Monique. I thought it odd that Honore pressed her hands against the sides of his head, but perhaps in her extreme excitement she feared losing her balance, or —

She cried out, but the sound was a startling mixture of smug laughter and vengeance. I stepped forward to watch more closely, sensing that all was not fun and frolic across the street — that Miss Delacroix had lured Monique’s man into a nasty trap hidden beneath her fashionable gown. He began to struggle, but she held him as though intending to — to
suffocate
him?

It was none of my business what these trysters did, but T-Jon’s grunts and struggles convinced me to cross the street. After all, this vile woman had stormed out of my house vowing revenge. She’d be just as angry at Monique for stealing away her maids as she was at me for keeping them. If Miss Delacroix was ambushing a man too polite to fight a woman, I wouldn’t stand for such an unfair advantage! Whatever awaited Beaumont under those gorgeous skirts —

But suddenly the headmistress toppled sideways, screaming as she lost her hold on T-Jon’s head. His French obscenities matched the volume of her appalled outcries…in a voice suddenly lacking its cultured, dulcet overtones. Miss Delacroix landed so hard on the sidewalk, she could’ve been seriously hurt.

She sprang up like a panther, however, and ran at Tommy Jon before he could right himself. Her broad, peacock-plumed hat sat askew and her legendary looks had given way to a beastly grimace. It was now a match of wits and physical strategy, for what the headmistress lacked in size and strength, she made up for with her wrath.

Whatever T-Jon found beneath Honore’s gown had enraged him to the point where he considered her no lady: he grabbed her shoulders and
shook
, making her head bob like a rag doll’s. And then he let go.

The vixen in purple flew backwards again, this time losing her hat — which loosened the dense, dark curls it was pinned to. My eyes widened as that perfectly coifed hair left her head completely — a wig, it was! Tommy Jon stood poised above her, as though to punch her in the face — but he stopped with his fist suspended in midair. Sheer amazement, and then horror, crossed his face as he looked at the woman sprawling on the sidewalk, with her pale blonde hair crushed untidily around her head.

‘
Sacré bleu.
’ He backed away as though a monster lay leering at him. Then he bolted, blindly racing in front of an oncoming carriage. Only the driver’s skill prevented the horses from knocking him to the street and crushing him, before they raced off in a noisy fit of skittishness.

During this commotion, the fallen headmistress collected her hat and wig, doing her damnedest to get out of sight. Crushing the feathered hat to her breast, she glanced around to see if anyone had witnessed her incident. I was clutching a lamp-post, still dismayed by Tommy-Jon’s close call and what had preceded it, when her eyes found mine.

Her dark eyebrows and artfully painted face camouflaged a truth I wasn’t prepared to see: blue eyes paired with that wavy, golden hair, which delivered a punch to my gut that nearly felled me.

Honore Delacroix, the city’s most talked-about headmistress and femme fatale, was none other than Chapin Proffit. My husband.

The carriage ride home was a blur. Thank God Rémy had been parked nearby, and if he’d seen Miss Delacroix’s true identity — or had known it all along — he carried on with his usual dignity. I simply couldn’t have dealt with his questions or consolations.

My thoughts raced back, through seven years of living with this unbelievable secret. While it seemed incredible — the ultimate humiliation — that I hadn’t had the vaguest idea about Chapin’s other life, things were suddenly falling into place. The whiffs of perfume…the times he’d not been where he said he’d be…the ways he’d found to avoid having sex with me, except in total darkness, and usually on occasions of rage or disgust rather than desire.

My husband was not seeing another woman. He
was
the other woman.

And he was far more beautiful than I, or most ladies, could ever hope to be. He had elevated Southern femininity to an art form and lived it to perfection.

How did I explain these things when I got home? Or did I simply swallow my shock — my revulsion — and pretend I didn’t know?

I slumped against the carriage seat, feeling like a hollow, very fragile shell of myself: the wife of the city’s next mayor, if he and his political backers had their way. None of those good old boys from the Beau Monde Club knew of his other identity, of course. Old Money was good at looking the other way, but the city fathers weren’t
that
tolerant!

My immediate impulse was to rush to the
Times-Democrat
office and spill my incredible story. But whom would they believe? Not the distraught woman seeking to dispute Miss Delacroix’s gender and ruin her reputation, checkered though it was. Word would get around town, back to Chapin, and I would quickly be secreted in some asylum, far from New Orleans, to live out the rest of my days in madness and mayhem. No, such a scheme for revenge would only backfire, badly.

But what about the three maids from the School for Domestic Endeavor? Honore had taken them in as young boys, and they’d described themselves as her slaves in a sexual way. Had they recognised Chapin Proffit in his male role and clothing, as head of one of the city’s most respected families?

I thought not. That coal-black wig and those kohled eyebrows made a distracting camouflage. During Miss Delacroix’s home visit, it was their own hides they’d been concerned about, not the hidden identity of the headmistress they’d come to loathe. Had they known Honore was anyone other than a man who lived as a woman — albeit more stunningly than they did — it would’ve come out in our chats. Cinderella couldn’t keep such a secret while living under Chapin’s roof.

But it certainly explained my husband’s silent animosity in their presence, didn’t it? He
had
his favourite pets back, but in his own home where he couldn’t reveal himself to them. Or control them. If the whole situation didn’t betray some of my most basic beliefs about the man I’d married, I could’ve laughed at the anguish Chapin must’ve felt when Monique birched his best boys and he couldn’t do a thing about it — or do it himself!

It also explained Antoinette’s sharp intake of breath when we speculated about the Other Woman’s clothing in the attic…clothing the redhead must’ve recognised as Honore’s, while realising that a bizarre twist of fate had landed the three of them in Chapin Proffit’s Garden District household. The Russell beneath the flirtatious maid uniform was a cool character indeed, to know such a secret and keep it from his two closest friends — to realise he’d been beholden for half his life to a man with a more dubious secret than his own! No wonder Toinette was so set on getting her revenge at the Mardi Gras ball tomorrow night.

Concern about the consequences of the maid’s plan almost choked me. But events were out of my hands, weren’t they? I was betting that ‘niece’, Savanna, was also a young man, too pretty to be accepted by his family. Long before I’d peered through that courtyard gate — before I’d ever heard the Proffit name — forces had been at work, aiming Chapin towards the reckoning he’d eventually face. It wasn’t my fault: he’d brought it all on himself.

So, of course, Dewel knew. Living at the plantation, away from his older half-brother, had protected him from the truth while they were growing up. But Chapin’s feminine tendencies had been obvious enough to Robert E. Lee Proffit that he’d bequeathed the sugar plantation to his truly
male
heir, hadn’t he? It explained Chapin’s complaining that things would be so different had his mama outlived their father, for he’d been Virgilia’s pride and joy despite — or perhaps because of — his empathy for the fairer sex. Nothing was stronger than a mother’s love for her only child.

And nothing drove my husband like the opportunity for profit…which had motivated Honore Delacroix to create herself and her school in the first place: other families had sons well-suited to service careers, or simply too prissy to be tolerated at home. Had the city’s most illustrious headmistress not turned out to be
my
husband, I could have applauded her sense of mission and entrepreneurial spirit — providing career training and friends of like kind for a segment of humanity I’d never dreamed existed.

Now that these details were assuming the neat precision of the formal gardens in back of the mansion, I recalled Dewel’s other allusions over these last few weeks: his assertions that I should’ve been
his
bride. His innate knowledge that I was, for all practical purposes, a sexual novice until he claimed me. He’d alluded to things he knew but couldn’t share, for my own protection…knowing it was only a matter of time before I found out.

Which was the very reason he’d teased that I needed a niece, and sent Monique to hasten his half-brother’s fall. And he wouldn’t have allowed his flirtatious Cajun maid to assist me in the ways of women and men without telling her about Chapin’s talent for living on both sides of the sexual fence.

Being the plucky sort, Monique Picabou went to the School when she knew Honore was out of town, and snatched her personal servants to get this snowball rolling down the mountainside a little faster. While she’d had her fun spanking those sissy maids, she’d gotten far more enjoyment whipping up Chapin’s frustration by making him watch, knowing he couldn’t respond as he wanted to — or quiz her about how much she knew.

Oh, yes, it all added up. But as the carriage turned off Prytania to enter the Proffit driveway, my heart felt leaden. I had been grievously betrayed by the two people I’d come to love most, and they hadn’t shared the one secret I had every right to know.

And now I had to face the consequences of their plotting, alone.

I thanked Rémy as he helped me from the carriage, still not detecting anything different in his demeanour — but then, if he’d always known Chapin doubled as Honore, nothing would feel out-of-balance for him today, would it? He owed me no allegiance, so why would he divulge the shocking knowledge my two dearest friends had kept from me?

I felt so hollow — so incredibly
stupid
— for not figuring out my husband’s double life, that I hurried up to my room with my packages. I couldn’t face Fanny or the other three yet. I needed time alone, to ponder the most disturbing, bewildering,
degrading
discovery of my entire life. My sense of femininity and competence — my very soul — dangled by a fraying thread.

I stepped out to the gallery overlooking the garden, now tranquil in afternoon’s shadow of the massive house. Monique’s cheroots seemed like a very practical prop right now. Something for nervous fingers to clutch when no straws were left.

But I couldn’t bear to think about all the times my seductive Cajun maid had enlightened me with her wiles — and lightened my life with her zany ways. She and Tommy Jon could go on as they had before: they had nothing to lose, now that she’d played her part so well for Dewel. The three of them were probably cavorting at this very moment, knowing I had to face Chapin alone. They’d done a fine job of awakening my passions — making me feel like a desirable woman at last, only to
leave
me when my sexy, sensual dreams got me caught in this nightmare.

What was wrong with me, that Chapin didn’t want my body? That he’d duped me for seven years, never intending to reveal his dual nature?

And why hadn’t I figured this out? Now it made sense, Dewel’s asking why I hadn’t left my husband years ago. He figured I’d notice the telltale signs, if only in Chapin’s lack of interest in sex. The rogue must’ve had many a laugh at my expense, plotting how he’d bring Chapin Proffit’s double life into the public eye and then steal his wife as well.

A pity the symmetry of the garden’s hedges and ornamental plantings no longer soothed me: every time I looked at the fountain, and the bench near the old magnolia, I recalled my frolic with Monique and Tommy Jon, followed by Dewel’s seductive play in the shadows. I saw his blue eyes when I looked at Chapin’s. His touch — just the memory of it — sent shivers of gooseflesh all over my body because he was such a master of my senses, my emotions.

A pity I couldn’t out and out despise him, but his lovemaking and molasses drawl would haunt me forever; the tender perfection every woman wanted, which I could never have.

I drew my thoughts back to the present, wondering how to go about my life now that I knew what I knew. Wondering how I could ever face Chapin without exploding in his face. He had to come home eventually: his big party was tomorrow night. And, meanwhile, the maids and I had to have everything in perfect readiness as though I was the blissfully naive Eve Proffit I’d been when I left for town this morning.

Did Mrs Frike know of his double life?

I thought back over things she’d said, and how she’d acted in his presence — and then recalled Honore’s unannounced home visit. Fanny was appalled to find me chasing Monique around the music room nearly naked, of course — but she’d kept the headmistress from discovering us. And she was clearly offended by Miss Delacroix’s lack of manners, and her attitude towards the three maids. Whereas, she’d always considered Chapin the perfect gentleman and head of the Proffit household, never letting on about any misgivings — although every housekeeper had her opinions of those she served.

No, if Fanny had thought it odd that this Mr Proffit didn’t share a bed with his wife, well, Robert and Virgilia had occupied separate suites too. Even if she found some of Chapin’s tastes a bit effete, I doubted the housekeeper had recognized him in Honore’s scarlet gown. She, like I, had probably assumed the presence of an extramarital woman or two. And she, having served in a Southern household most of her life — for a Proffit who was proud of his illegitimate son — had accepted it as The Way Things Were.

I could not.

But neither could I walk away, for where would I go? Dewel’s plantation would be the first place Chapin looked — and now that the scheming Creole had used me to bring his brother down, I wanted no part of his pretty lies about making me his own woman.

My best strategy, it seemed, was to go along with whatever Antoinette had planned for the ball tomorrow night. She had a level head, and a head start on all these secrets; Cleopatra and Cinderella would play along with whatever she dictated as the party progressed. If I let on about discovering Miss Delacroix’s true identity, my Egyptian queen would be set on her own retribution and my fairy tale princess would dissolve in tears and be useless. Indeed, my silence was golden. But it left me feeling horribly, vulnerably alone.

My role as hostess would keep me occupied greeting guests, while the spotlight would be on Chapin: playing politics would keep us from clashing — although his mama’s Bo Peep costume would surely have its effect! He would know I’d entered the forbidden attic, to choose a costume that would upset him the most when he could do nothing about it.

I opened my armoire and took out the glorious confection of periwinkle taffeta, with those puffy white sleeves that glowed with a light all their own. The shepherdess costume suited the occasion perfectly — for Chapin was a very black sheep indeed! Not only would I be completely disguised to his guests and supporters, but once I made my entrance, Chapin couldn’t order me to change clothes.

As I held the elaborate mask to my face and looked in the mirror, I felt a wave of hope: the shiny-white caricature of a little girl’s face, with its apple cheeks and dimpled, pink-lipped grin, hid
everything
: my identity, my disgust, my…fears for the future. I could never compete with Honore Delacroix, nor did I want to live with her. And we both knew it.

So this mask symbolised my own secret: it hid the Eve Proffit who was scheming her escape. She would appear as the perfect wife and supporter of the party’s golden boy — the hostess who gave the season’s most lavish and talked-about party.

And then she would be gone.