Iron Lace (13 page)

“Your life in New Orleans must be very different,” he said.

“It’s boring in comparison. Much more formal. Both more and less are expected.”

“And you don’t always want to do what’s expected?”

“Oh, I’m more rebellious than you can guess. I’m not supposed to be here at all. I’m supposed to be at home, dutifully searching for a husband. If my father knew I had come to Ti’ Boo’s wedding…”

“Your father didn’t approve?”

“There’s little about me he approves of.”

“Then we have that in common.”

She turned so she could see him. “Do we? But you work with your father, don’t you?”

“Faustin Terrebonne is not my father, not really.”

His profile was strongly masculine, a bold statement against the orange streaked sky. She admired the hook of his nose, the carefully etched width of his lips. His hair curled back from his ears, emphasizing the proud set of his head. “Then who is your father?”

“My real name is Étienne Lafont. I was born in Caminadaville, on Chénière Caminada. Do you know it?”

Her pulse quickened. The coincidence was extraordinary. “Better than you might think. I was on Grand Isle when the hurricane that destroyed the
chénière
struck the coast.”

“Grand Isle wasn’t hit so hard.”

She couldn’t let him make light of what she had suffered. “Maybe not. But if Ti’ Boo’s uncle hadn’t rescued my
mother and me and taken us to his home, I would have died, too.”

He didn’t look at her. “Nearly a thousand died on the
chénière.
All my family was killed. I was washed away by the wave that destroyed our house, and thrown against the remains of someone’s skiff. I clung to it until the worst of the storm died. Somehow I managed to heave myself onto what was left of it before I passed out. When I regained consciousness, I was in a cabin in the swamps. Faustin had been taking supplies to the few survivors. Apparently the skiff washed into the marsh. He found me four days after the hurricane ended.”

“God spared you for something, Étienne.”

“That’s what Zelma, Faustin’s wife, always said. I caught a fever before I could recover and hovered near death for weeks. When I regained consciousness, I learned I was an orphan. Zelma swore that I had been delivered to her because she had never been able to have children of her own. She nursed me back to health. She was truly a second mother to me.”

“Was, Étienne?”

“She died at Eastertime.”

Aurore hugged herself for warmth. She felt bonded to him by the horror they had shared. “But Faustin isn’t a father to you?”

“He’s an old man. His life has been a bitter disappointment. Is your father disappointed by life, too? Or is he only strict and old-fashioned?”

“My father has everything, but nothing he ever wanted. He was nearly killed in the hurricane himself. He was out sailing when it blew in, but he found shelter on the
chénière,
in a church presbytery. He never speaks of it, but even now, when he hears the tolling of a bell, he turns pale.”

Étienne was silent. She was silent, too, thinking of that time. “I should get back to the house,” she said at last.

“Will you save a dance for me?”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

She turned and started back. Halfway there, she looked over her shoulder. Étienne was still staring at the bayou.

Aurore ate dinner sandwiched between two of Ti’ Boo’s cousins, who made sure she tried a bit of this and that until the laces on her corset nearly popped. Afterward, the fiddler fell silent and everyone gathered around as an uncle of Valcour’s gave the
adresse aux mariés,
a kindly lecture on the meaning of marriage. There were sly jokes about Jules’s age, and the fact that by now he could give the address himself, but no one seemed to doubt that Ti’ Boo had made an excellent match.

The music started again. This time the fiddler, who had moved inside, was joined by his brother. A third man played the accordion. Fiddles were common, but an accordion, an instrument that could coax poignant emotion from a mere dance tune, was thought to be a miracle.

Like any well-bred girl of her time, Aurore had been introduced to all the classics. She could play some of the Chopin Études and more than half of Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words” on her father’s Steinway, shipped from New York the very week that Tante Lydia decided her musical education should begin. But this music was as different from the classics as it was from the whistles, horns and cigar-box fiddles of the spasm bands that sometimes performed in front of New Orleans’s theaters and saloons.

The fiddlers sawed at the heartstrings of their audience as surely as they sawed at their instruments. And the man on the
accordion, a handsome young rake with sorrowful eyes, wailed haunting French verses that told of centuries of oppression, of loved ones left behind and families forever parted by the Acadian exile from Nova Scotia.

“Do you like our songs?”

Aurore turned to see that Étienne was standing behind her. “I hope they won’t all be so sad.”

“Not all. But as a people we choose not to forget the wrongs that were done us.”

He sounded so serious that she had to question him. “Why not? What good can it do for you to remain in the past?”

“The past has made us strong. We came to the bayous with nothing, and now they belong to us. The Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, all came to make the bayous theirs, and soon we turned them into Acadians.”

“So you owe your strength to misfortune? You as a person must be stronger than most, Étienne.”

“Stronger?” He shrugged. “More determined?
Oui.
”

“Determined to do what?”

“Find my own place in the world.”

She considered that, along with the unique character of their conversation. Certainly, Étienne’s past must have affected his need to establish himself in the world, but she was surprised he had admitted as much out loud. In her experience, men seldom admitted to having feelings at all.

“Where will that place be?” she asked.

“Not here.”

She wondered why, but before she could find out, she saw that Minette was signaling from across the room. She realized that talking to Étienne where the men were congregating must be a breach of etiquette.

She skirted the edges of what was now a dance floor, arriving on the other side just in time for the wedding march. Ti’ Boo, who appeared flustered but determined, walked around and around the room, her hand clasped in that of her new husband’s. The family followed close behind. When the march ended, the little band swung into a waltz. The floor cleared quickly, and Ti’ Boo and Jules were left to dance alone.

“It’s been a perfect wedding,” Minette said, coming to stand beside Aurore. “But mine will be more perfect.”

Aurore watched Ti’ Boo whirl around the floor, clasped closely to Jules’s chest. Ti’ Boo had always seemed older than her years, and now, despite the ten years that separated her from Jules, she looked every bit his equal. He gazed fondly down at her, and Aurore felt relief, or something very much like it, fill her. “I think they’ll be happy,” she said. “He cares for her.”

“I think he always has. I think he wanted to marry Ti’ Boo when he was a young man, but he was too old for her, and he would have had to wait too many years to win my papa’s approval.”

“Really?”

Minette giggled; the sound was slightly higher-pitched than silver striking crystal. “Does it matter?”

“Oh, you see romance everywhere.”

“I saw you talking to Étienne Terrebonne. I’ve discovered he has a reputation.”

“Does he?”

“He’s a fighter. They say there’s no man for a hundred miles or more who can fight like Étienne.”

Aurore tried to determine from Minette’s tone whether this was considered a good thing. Not too many years had passed since hot-blooded New Orleans gentlemen had routinely
dueled for honor under the massive live oaks of what was now City Park. She wondered if Étienne fought for honor, too. Perhaps it was a way to make up for what was lacking in his life.

“They say he cut off a man’s ear when the man insulted his father,” Minette said.

“I don’t believe it.” Aurore looked across the room and found Étienne. He was standing among some of the other men, but there was a space surrounding him, out of either respect or fear; she couldn’t be sure which. “He seems kind to me.” She searched for a better word. “Understanding.”

“I’ll tell you something else. He has an education, even though he comes from the back of Lafourche. His mother, she was taught by the nuns in Donaldsonville, and then she was a teacher, too, before she married. It’s said she taught him everything she knew, but only when his father was gone from home or asleep from too much whiskey. Faustin doesn’t believe a man should read.”

“That seems a pity.”

“Étienne’s the most handsome man here, don’t you think?”

Aurore found that difficult to answer. Handsome was inaccurate. Some of the other men had features that were more refined, more purely French. But did she measure Étienne by those standards, or by the ones that gave her own eyes pleasure? “He’s easy to look at,” she said.

“I think he could hold a woman and make her feel passion.”

“It wasn’t Étienne’s face you saw in the well, was it?”

“
Mais non.
Sadly not.” Minette didn’t sound sad at all. She sounded young and thoroughly enchanted with herself. Aurore felt a surge of affection. “Then show me your young man.”

Aurore murmured her approval when Minette finally pointed out the youth she believed would be her intended.
Then she commiserated when couples began to join Ti’ Boo and Jules in their waltz and Minette’s secret love asked another girl to dance. Finally she watched as Minette was swept away in the arms of an uncle.

“May I have this waltz?”

She had been so busy soothing Minette that she was surprised to find that Étienne was standing before her. “I’m not sure I dance exactly the way you do,” she warned him. “The music and the step are a little different.”

“You’ll learn quickly.”

She took his hand. His was rough, steady and warm, the hand of a man who does hard labor and loses nothing of his self-respect along the way. He held her at a proper distance and began to waltz her slowly around the room. His hand was even warmer at her waist, and his widespread fingers rested comfortably against her hip. Face-to-face with him, she could analyze exactly what it was about him that she found most appealing. She decided it was his eyes. They were dark, like a winter night when even the occasional glimmer of starlight is an excuse for hope.

“Did you really cut off a man’s ear?” she asked.

Étienne smiled at her. She noted that something inside her seemed connected to his smile. Something had responded, and pleasantly. “So you’ve already learned how stories can be augmented here,” he said.

“Was that one…augmented?”

“Ah, oui. It was only part of an ear.”

She stumbled, but caught herself. “Which part?”

“The part he didn’t need. I left the part he hears with.”

Despite herself, she laughed. “May I ask why?”

“Why I did it? Or why I didn’t carve off more?”

The music ended. They stood together, waiting for the next song. Since the waltz had begun with Ti’ Boo and Jules on the floor alone, they had not yet had an entire dance. “Why do you fight at all? Aren’t there better ways to settle matters?”

“Some men fight for lack of anything better to do. Some fight to avenge old wrongs. Some, new ones.”

“And you?”

“All and none.”

She wondered if she should be afraid of this man. He had risked his own life to save her, but he was also a man too comfortable with violence. He was watching her, as if aware of her thoughts. His gaze was unflinching, but she knew, without understanding how, that he expected her to turn away. She stood her ground. “Well, you’re not fighting now.”

The music began again, a song that was faster-paced and humorous. In a moment she was in Étienne’s arms once more and they were whirling around the floor in a polka. She had to concentrate on her feet. By the time she had mastered the step, the dance had ended. He returned her to the appropriate side of the room and made a polite bow. “Thank you,” she said.

“Pas de quoi.”
He started to leave.

“Étienne?”

He turned back.

“I hope you find everything you’re looking for.”

He seemed surprised. “And you.”

Aurore was swept up for the next dance by an elderly Guilbeau cousin, and then by an endless line of young and old men who wanted the opportunity to dance with Ti’ Boo’s Creole ami. Her older partners instructed her in the traditional Acadian contredanses, and she two-stepped with the younger. She passed Ti’
Boo time and time again. Ti’ Boo danced with every man on the bayou, and Minette danced with nearly as many.

As the evening wore on, she watched for Étienne. Once she saw him partnering a young woman in a square dance, but the rest of the time she didn’t see him in the room.

During a temporary lull in the music, she was sipping punch and gazing discreetly through the crowd when Minette approached her. “It’s too exciting,” Minette whispered. “There’s going to be a fight behind the house. Beside the stables.”

“What is anybody doing out there this time of night?”

“Fighting the roosters.”

Aurore knew cockfighting was common in the area. Indeed, it was common enough in New Orleans, despite efforts to put a halt to it. Albert, Ti’ Boo’s youngest brother, had taken her to the barn to see Valcour’s prize bird, a shiny-feathered red rooster who had valiantly attacked the sides of his cage when Aurore leaned over to peer at him. But she hadn’t known that a fight would be acceptable entertainment at a wedding dance.

“Is it just roosters that are going to fight, or people?” she asked.

“Most certainly people. And I know how we can see it.”

Aurore wasn’t sure she wanted to. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she wanted to miss something so delightfully forbidden. Tomorrow she would be home again, and life wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.