Masquerade (27 page)

"That's true, though there's one thing wrong with what you're saying. You see, the question of Adrienne marrying Brodie was never raised—not by old Emil Jardin, and definitely not by Adrienne."

"Why not? I would have thought—"
 

"You're forgetting the guilt she felt," Nattie broke in. "As far as she was concerned, she was the one who'd killed Dominique. Brodie had merely been the instrument of his death. Considering how much she loved her brother, that alone would've been a heavy load of blame to carry, but she had the added guilt of knowing that the family name had died with Dominique. That's why when she learned she was with child, instead of that knowledge filling her with deep despair, it gave her hope. That's why she wouldn't let her grandfather arrange a marriage for her even though she knew the scandal, the shame, the disgrace she would face by having a child out of wedlock back then."

Remy slowly shook her head. "I can't imagine Emil Jardin agreeing to that—not with his pride, his sense of family honor. However much he may have wanted the family line to continue, he couldn't have tolerated the humiliation of a bastard child continuing it—especially Brodie Donovan's. He did know Brodie was the father, didn't he?"

"He guessed. It wasn't too hard. ..."

 

"This bastard you carry comes from the seed of that
Yanqui,
is this not true?" The glitter of loathing was in his eyes, a loathing born of disgust, a match to the pain that rasped his voice. "The same
Yanqui
who killed my Dominique. It is why he challenged him."

"Non"
Adrienne denied that, her calm like an armor that not even his trembling rage could penetrate as she stood before him in her brother's darkened bedroom, the drapes pulled against a world that continued to go on. The room was exactly as it had been on the afternoon of his death—a change of clothes for dinner neatly laid out on the bed, his shaving things arranged on the bureau, the basin of water kept full and fresh by a servant. The only alteration was the tapers that burned in his memory on the prie-dieu. For it was here that her grandfather came to pray. In the days and weeks since Dominique's death, he had divided his time between this bedroom and the family tomb, isolating himself with his grief and sharing it with no one. And in all this time he'd hardly spoken a word to anyone, sitting in silence at meals, staring at the plate before him, and rarely touching the food on it. "Dominique knew only that I was meeting . . . him in secret." She deliberately avoided referring to Brodie by name, and spoke quickly to make her case. "It matters not who the father is, Grand-père. My child will be born a Jardin and raised a Jardin. He will know no other name, no other past. Through him, our family will live."

"Through a bastard." The words were spoken low, thick with the disgrace inherent in the phrase.

"Non,
Grand-père." She smiled faintly, serenely. "This life that grows within me is God's will. He has taken Dominique from us, and He has given us this life in return." She moved toward him, lifting her hands, but he drew back stiffly. "No one can take Dominique's place— in your heart or mine. I know that. But God in His wisdom has allowed me to conceive this child."

"To punish you for your sins," he said bitterly.

"Non,
Grand-père. It is so I may atone for them," Adrienne replied with a certainty of heart. "My son's origins need never be known. Your friends are aware that we have distant relatives in France. In May, when the fever season approaches, we will sail for France to visit them. After my son is born in November, we can return home ... to raise the baby of a Jardin cousin, orphaned at birth."

And that would be her punishment, her pain —the knowledge that she would forever have to deny to the world and to her own child that she was his mother. It could be no other way. Just as she would have to live the rest of her life knowing she had killed her brother, as surely as if she'd pulled the trigger herself.

A knock at the door broke the thick silence in the room. In response, her grandfather snapped an impatient
"Entrez."

The bedroom door swung open under the push of his black manservant's hand. "Michie Varnier is here," Gros Pierre announced. "I told him you don't want to see no one, but he say he gots to talk to you. He say there's an emergency at the old Clinton plantation."

"See him, Grand-père," Adrienne said, quietly urging him to speak to the man who served as his secretary and assistant, handling the details for the family's many and varied business interests. After Dominique died, her grandfather had ceased to care about any of it and had let the full responsibility fall to Simon Varnier. "You have reason to care about the future. When you think on what I have said, you will see I am right." She held his look an instant longer, then turned and left the room.

"Is you going to see him, Michie Jardin?" the black asked, then added, "He sure was powerful upset."

Emil Jardin gave no sign that he'd heard him, his gaze lost on some distant point. Then he roused himself and nodded absently,
"Oui,
I need to see him."

 

"Finding out about the baby gave old Emil Jardin reason to go on, all right," Nattie declared. "But it was never the reason Adrienne thought she'd given him."

 

"What do you mean?" Remy asked, even as she guessed at the answer.

"I mean he set out to destroy the man who had taken his grandson's life and ruined his granddaughter."

"The Crescent Line." She had a sudden, sinking feeling that she knew how her family had acquired the shipping company.

"You've got it." Nattie pointed a long finger at her in affirmation. " 'Course, it wasn't something he could do overnight. And it wasn't something he could do without placing some money in the right hands—and as successful as Brodie'd become, that meant a considerable amount of money. Her grandfather ended up selling his sugar and cotton plantations to raise it. While he was doing that, he had his man Simon Varnier find out who Brodie was doing business with, both here and abroad, where he was getting his cargo, who was working for him, who he owed, and how much. After a couple months—about the time Adrienne and her Tante ZeeZee left for France—he put his plan in motion."

"And there was nothing Brodie could do to stop him, was there?" Remy mused aloud, recalling the power and influence Emil Jardin had possessed through connections long established.

"At first he didn't even realize what was happening. You've got to remember, he loved Adrienne. He'd taken it hard, losing her that way. For a while he lost interest in everything, including the Crescent Line. When things started to go wrong for him—his captains leaving him to command other ships, his crews going off on shore leave and not coming back, mysterious fires breaking out aboard ships, cargo spoiling on him or getting damaged, the insurance companies hiking the premiums on him—he thought he was having a run of bad luck. Within a year, nobody wanted to sail with him, nobody wanted to ship their goods on his vessels, and nobody wanted to sell to him. And the last was the part that ended up making him suspicious. The others he could understand. People tend to be superstitious; if they thought his ships were jinxed, they'd steer clear of him. But not to sell to him—that didn't make sense. ..."

 

An overcast sky spread a premature gloom over the Vieux Carré, the black clouds hanging low and heavy as Brodie made his way along a narrow street. In the far distance, lightening danced, but the clatter of drays and the street noise masked any faint rumble of thunder. Casting a weather eye at the approaching spring storm, Brodie judged it to be another three or four hours away. He welcomed its coming, wanting a release from the charged tension in the air.

As he neared the corner, he found his steps slowing. He rarely came to the Quarter anymore, not since. ... It still hurt to think of her, to see the places where he'd met her, to remember her smile and the shining black glow of her eyes. A year, and the pain was still as fresh as if it had been yesterday, especially here in the Vieux Carré, where she lived.

He spotted the old blind fiddler at his customary place on the corner. Brodie stopped and almost turned around, not wanting to talk to the black man who had relayed so many messages from her, afraid he wouldn't be able to keep from asking about her. He forced himself to think of the Crescent Line and the trouble it was in—and of his suspicions about its worsening situation, suspicions that it was more than bad luck.

He walked up to the fiddler and dropped a silver dollar in his hat. "How have you been, Cado?"

The old man stiffened at the sound of his voice and stopped playing, something he'd never done before. Startled, Brodie watched as the man bent down and fished around in his hat, then straightened up and held out a silver dollar.

"Your money ain't no good no more, Michie Donovan."

"What the hell are you talking about, Cado?"

Centering on his voice, the black man pushed his hand against Brodie's middle. "Take your money and go. Leave old Cado alone."

For an instant Brodie warred with his anger, torn between ripping the coin from the man's hand and smashing his fist into that cold black face.

"You've turned against me too, have you, Cado?" he muttered, seizing the black man's wrist, taking the silver dollar from his unresisting fingers, and flinging it into the gutter.

When he started to shove past him to cross the street, the old man murmured under his breath, "Four o'clock. The shoemaker's shop on Dumaine."

There was only one shoemaker's shop on Dumaine, a narrow hole-in-the-wall affair. A hand-painted plaque by the door identified the owner as Louis Germaine, F.M.C.—a free man of color. The door was propped open, letting in the heaviness of the storm-laden air. Promptly at four o'clock, Brodie walked into the shop, which was redolent of leather and polish.

An ebony-skinned man in a leather apron sat at a cobbler's bench. When Brodie walked in, he looked up, hesitated, and darted a quick glance at the open doorway, then nodded his head in the direction of a curtained opening in the rear of the shop.

When Brodie approached it, Cado's voice came from behind the thin curtain. "There's some boots on the counter to the right of you. Look 'em over, Michie Donovan, and don't give no sign you can hear old Cado. There's eyes everywhere."

Brodie did as he was told. "What's going on, Cado?"

"You made yourself an enemy," came his low reply. "I knew you'd be coming to old Cado. I been listening and I been hearing. The word's out: a man does business with you and he be finished in this town."

"Who put the word out?" Brodie picked up a boot and pretended to examine it, his fingers digging into the soft leather.

"You mean you ain't got that figured out?"

"I have my suspicions."

"If you're suspicioning old Emil Jardin, you'd be right," Cado said, and Brodie swore under his breath. "Ain't no use in that, Michie Donovan. You got more troubles coming your way. Talk is he bought up the notes on the ships and your house. I figure he's jus' waiting for the right time to say you gotta pay."

Brodie hung his head, knowing Jardin would pick a time when he was certain he couldn't scrape the cash together. "All because that damn bullet had to ricochet/' he murmured to himself, realizing that the bullet had taken away more than Dominique Jardin's life, more than Adrienne from his side. Now it was going to cost him the Crescent Line. A part of him didn't care—and hadn't cared since he'd lost Adrienne.

"I'm suspicioning it's more than that, Michie Donovan. He ain't after you jus' cause you killed his grandson in a duel."

Adrienne. The old man was getting back at him for meeting her in secret, Brodie realized, but he said nothing, feeling too sick inside.

Cado began talking again. "When they come back from France last December, they brought a baby with them, a little boy child. Claimed he didn't have no momma and no papa."

"I heard." Brodie nodded indifferently.

"The house Negroes say Missy Adrienne love that boy like he was her own," Cado declared, then paused for several seconds. "The house Negroes, they say that boy got red hair. Real dark red hair . . . about the color of yours."

In the heartbeat it took for the implication of those words to sink in, Brodie reacted, whipping back the curtain and stepping into the back room to grab the blind man by the collar of his gray shirt. "What're you saying? Speak plain. Is the boy my son?"

"Ain't no one can tell you that for certain sure but Missy Adrienne, her aunt, or Old Emil. It's a fact, though, she was feeling poorly before they left. And when they come back, they didn't have none of their servants with them—gave them all their freedom and left 'em in France. That says to me old Emil didn't want them to come back here and do no talking. Then there's that red hair of his. Where would a Jardin get red hair? If you ask old Cado, there can only be one place—and that's from his daddy."

Brodie loosened his hold on the blind man's collar, never having wanted to believe anything so much in his whole life. "His name," he said thickly. "Do you know it?"

"Jean-Luc Etienne Jardin."

"Jean-Luc. Luc." He liked the sound of that.

But was he his son? The question drove Brodie from the shop and up the street. He turned on Royal and didn't stop until he reached the Jardin home. A cool breeze brought the smell of rain to him as he hesitated briefly, then went directly to the pedestrian gate cut into the tall wooden carriage doors. He opened it and stepped through into the tunnel-like passageway of the
porte cochère.
He moved briskly to the stairs and took them two at a time, then paused at the top. The second-floor gallery was empty, the French doors leading onto it from the house standing open to admit the fresh breeze.

The indistinct murmur of voices came from inside, their tone and texture definitely feminine. Brodie paid no attention to them and listened instead for another sound. When he heard the gurgling laughter of a baby, he followed it to a pair of open doors and walked in.