Prisoner of Desire (2 page)

Anya tasted her lemonade. She refused to look toward the balcony where the Black Knight had stood, fastening her attention instead on the couple beside her.

Murray Nicholls was Celestine’s fiancé. Their courtship had not been a long one, but the betrothal period had been protracted. For once Madame Rosa had risen above her natural indolence to put her foot down. She did not believe in marriage between strangers. Love was an emotion that took time to be recognized and firmly established. It was not a storm of feeling that came like the one of the hurricanes of autumn, leveling everything in its path. They must be patient.

Patient they had certainly been. It was over eight months since Celestine had received her betrothal bracelet, and still there was no talk of a wedding date, though the trousseau, with its dozens of everything from sheets to nightgowns, was almost ready.

To Anya’s eyes, the young pair were well suited. Celestine, like her mother, was dark haired and dark eyed, with a smooth white complexion improved at the moment with white pearl powder, a rounded form and face, and a gentle expression — when she was not concerned for Anya’s good name. She was sweet and sentimental, and required in a husband a man who was soft-spoken and kind, one with a sense of humor to tease her out of her occasional crotchets and gloomy moods. Murray Nicholls appeared to have the proper qualifications, in addition to being the possessor of a good degree of intelligence and reasonable prospects as a clerk in a law office where he was preparing for his own entry into the profession. It was difficult to understand why Madame Rosa was so insistent on delay.

Anya recognized with wry self-knowledge that her own approval stemmed from the fact that Murray reminded her of Jean François Girod. Jean, her own fiancé until his death, had been just that open and fresh of countenance, just that charming and sunny of manner, and he would have been about the same age Murray was now, in his late twenties. Jean might have been a tiny bit slimmer, a bit shorter; he had been scarcely an inch taller than she was herself, though she could not be called petite as she towered nearly three good inches above Celestine, who was of average height. The eyes of the two men were different also; Jean’s had been a deep, velvety brown. Still, the hair was the same, as well as the quick manner and the suppressed air of high spirits.

It has been those same high spirits that had killed Jean. His death had been so senseless; that was the one thing that Anya could not forgive. It had been in a duel, but not some grandiose meeting for the sake of honor. Instead, he had died because of a maudlin and drunken jest.

Jean and five of his friends had been returning from a card game out near Lake Pontchartrain late one night. They had spent long hours sitting around a gaming table in a smoke-filled room, wagering with bored abandon, drinking deep. It had been a night with a full moon and, as they passed by the field with the pair of live oak trees known as the dueling oaks, the moonlight had made such dancing patterns of light and shadow across the grass under the trees that they were entranced. Someone suggested that they match swords, since the stage was so beautifully set for a duel. They piled out of their carriage and drew their weapons in reckless gaity. When the fight was over, two of their number lay dead with their blood staining the grass. One of them had been Jean.

The waltz that was playing came to an end and a contredanse began. Celestine drank the last of her lemonade and glanced at Murray, one slippered toe tapping the floor. Anya reached out to lift the girls’ cup from her hand. “I’ll take care of that; you two enjoy yourselves.”

“Will you be all right?” Murray asked.

“I’ll probably go and doze with Madame Rosa and the rest of the chaperones.”

“Such a waste,” he said with a flashing grin.

“You’re too kind,” she mocked gently. “Go along with you.”

A waiter in uniform appeared with a tray to take the cups. Anya smiled her thanks and he moved silently away again. Still she stood where she was, watching her half-sister and Murray Nicholls dancing among the other gaudily costumed couples. At twenty-five, she was only seven years older than Celestine, but sometimes she felt immeasurably more ancient. Sometimes she even felt older than Madame Rosa.

She glanced over her shoulder toward where her stepmother sat in her box that, with the raised floor, was nearly on a level with the dancers. Attending the older woman was her faithful
cavalier servente
Gaspard Freret. A dapper little man as thin as his chosen lady was stout; a writer of theater and opera reviews and fountainhead of the latest
on-dits,
Gaspard had been looked upon with tolerant amusement by Anya and Celestine for the past several years.

Anya had come to think, however, that he was something more than a nonentity. For one thing, he was a master swordsman and excellent shot, necessary skills for a gentleman in a city where the duello was an institution and a man might receive a challenge at any moment. For another, he seemed to have considerable standing among the city officials and business institutions, and had given Anya excellent counsel on a number of occasions concerning investments. Lately Anya had also begun to suspect that it was on Gaspard’s advice and with his support that Madame Rosa had decreed the delay in the nuptials between her daughter and Murray.

The older pair were dressed as Anthony and Cleopatra, though Madame Rosa as the Egyptian Queen wore the deep black of mourning, doubtless, Anya thought with wry humor, for the death of Caesar. Madame Rosa had not left off her black for as long as Anya could remember, not since the deaths of her twin sons, Anya’s half-brothers, in infancy, certainly not since Anya’s father had died seven years before.

Madame Rosa had been her father’s second wife. Nathan Hamilton’s first, Anya’s mother, had been a planter’s daughter from Virginia. He had met her while traveling from his home in Boston into the South, searching for land on which to establish himself as a businessman-planter. He had found Virginia a closed enclave of proud families living on depleted acreage, but he discovered there the woman he wanted to marry. After the wedding, he tried to make a go of managing a section of land given to the couple by the bride’s father. It had not been profitable. After several years of effort, he finally, against the wishes of his in-laws, sold out and moved on to New Orleans with his wife and five-year-old daughter.

The land along the Mississippi River and its tributaries was rich due to frequent flooding that left the topsoil of the nation’s heartland behind it, but the choicest plots had long ago been taken. While on a tour of the countryside by steamboat, however, Nathan chanced to sit in on a poker game. When he rose from the table, he was the owner of six hundred acres of prime delta land less than three hours’ traveling time from New Orleans, along with 173 slaves and a house named Beau Refuge. His pleasure was short-lived. By the time he took possession of his land, his wife was ill with a fever, and died soon afterward.

Being a practical man and a sensual one, Anya’s father had, when his period of mourning was over, looked about him for a woman who would make a home for him and be a mother to his young daughter. He settled on Marie-Rose Hautrive, whom he called Rosa, a young woman past the freshness of first youth at twenty-two and still unmarried. He courted her in the teeth of the opposition of her family: he had wealth, but to the French Creoles
la famille
was all-important, and what could one know of the family of a blue-eyed
Américain
from so barbarous a place as Boston?

Plump and placid, too placid to attract suitors less determined, Madame Rosa had been a perfect stepmother. She gave Anya love and warmth and wrapped her in the luxurious comfort of her massive bosom and the home she made for Anya and her father. She sometimes complained gently of Anya’s conduct as she was growing up, but never scolded, and certainly never attempted to discipline her. Her tactics stemmed from indolence in part, but also from an innate shrewdness. Anya’s loss of her mother and doting grandparents at the same time that she was uprooted from her familiar home in Virginia had left her prey to violent nightmares. The indulgence she received because of them, combined with being treated like a small princess by the slaves who had come with the plantation her father had won, had make her willful and wild. Madame Rosa soothed her fears and gave her security. She did her best to make her a biddable young lady, and had succeeded well enough until the deaths of the two men closest to Anya, those of Jean and of her father.

Nathan Hamilton died of injuries after a fall from a horse just two months after the death of Anya’s fiancé. The double tragedy propelled Anya into a fierce rebellion. She was only eighteen, and it seemed that her life was over. If living and loving could come to an end so soon and for so slight a reason, then it would be as well to use the hours allowed precisely as one pleased. If such terrible things could happen to people who followed all the stifling rules dictated by the church and society, while men like Ravel Duralde, who had killed her Jean, went blithely on their way flouting every canon of decency, then what good was conforming? She would do so no longer.

And so she had discarded her petticoats and sidesaddle to ride astride over her father’s plantation in a long, divided skirt of soft leather worn with a man’s shirt and broad-brimmed hat. She read books and periodicals on farming methods and, when she found her father’s overseer unwilling to listen to her ideas for improvements, fired him and took on the job of running the plantation herself. Sometimes she argued with the men who were her neighbors about the theories of breeding horses and swine, a subject a lady should know nothing of, much less speak about in mixed company. She learned to swim with the slave children, braving the treacherous currents of the river, and could not understand why drowning was thought preferable for a female to engaging in such an activity. She tended the ills of the plantation slaves, male as well as female, helping the elderly woman who served as nurse to set limbs and sew up cuts, as well as deliver babies and aid the women who had attempted to rid themselves of unwanted children. And she listened to the hair-raising tales of the shifts of love and desire, hate and assault that took place in the slave quarters after dark. The female slaves taught her a number of interesting facts, in addition to several tricks of self-preservation.

While in New Orleans during those years, she had fallen in with a crowd consisting mainly of young married couples, many of them Americans. They were a fast lot who thought it splendid fun to go for moonlight sails on Lake Pontchartrain, visit the cemeteries at midnight where the ghostly mausoleums in plastered brick and white marble shone like cities of the dead, or else drive at a gallop down Gallatin Street on a Saturday night, watching for the ladies of the evening who adorned the balconies and open windows, or who plied their wares on the street. They dared not drive slow on such pilgrimages because of the danger; there was on average a murder every night of the year on that short thoroughfare, and that was counting only the corpses that were discovered. It was an accepted fact that there were many other men who wound up in the river, the only rule of the street being that a man must dispose of his own victims.

With this group of friends Anya had spent a great many nights eating in the finest restaurants of the city, partaking liberally of wine with each of the many courses. Sometimes they would go on to some soiree or ball, or if some other amusement did not appeal, entertain themselves by thinking up ludicrous dares and wagers. Once Anya was persuaded to steal an operatic tenor’s nightcap.

It was the custom for opera companies to arrive in the city for runs lasting three to four weeks. The tenor of the company then in town was flamboyant and vain, with a high opinion of himself as a ladies’ man. He was also known to be more than a little balding. The dare had begun as a joke about the kind of nightgear such a Lothario might wear to hide a tonsorial deficiency always covered while on stage by a wig.

The man was staying at the Pontalba apartments that were then newly finished, the first of their kind in the United States. They were constructed with ornate wrought-iron balconies overlooking Jackson Square, the old Place d’Armes of the French and Spanish regimes. To do the deed, Anya persuaded her coachman to drive under the tenor’s balcony late one night. Dressed in boy’s clothes, she swung to the top of the carriage, then pulled herself up onto the balcony that led to the man’s rooms. It was a warm night, and she depended on his windows to be open. What she had not made allowance for was the possibility that he might not be asleep, or alone in his bed.

Nonplussed, but dauntless, Anya stole into the bedchamber and snatched the nightcap, a splendid affair of velvet and gold lace, from the tenors head while he labored in the throes of passion. Whirling with her prize, she ran for her life.

The tenor bellowed and gave chase. So magnificent was the capacity of the opera stars lungs that his shouts awakened the building. As Anya was driven away at breakneck speed, lying flat on the roof of her carriage, the Pontalba balcony was lined with spectators. She had not, by the grace of God, been recognized, but the story had spread so quickly of the stolen nightcap that at the next performance the poor tenor was laughed from the stage. Anya had felt such guilt for the man’s public embarrassment that she had sharply curtailed such escapades, and finally dropped the company of the married crowd altogether.

Anya glanced back toward the dancers in the theater ballroom. They were growing noisier, the effect of the iced champagne punch being served up along with the lemonade in the refreshment room. This was a public ball for the benefit of one of the city’s many orphanages, with entrance by subscription. As a result, the guest list was less than exclusive, including anyone who might have the price of a ticket. The air of license seemed to be growing as the night advanced. It was not surprising.