Read Sweet Piracy Online

Authors: Jennifer Blake

Sweet Piracy (10 page)

BOOK: Sweet Piracy
13.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Tante Zizi had money of her own from some unnamed source; she could have lived alone. On the entreaties of her nephew, she had come for a visit — and stayed. She and Marie Delacroix were not especially compatible, however. The elderly woman formed the habit of keeping to her rooms, allowing no one to enter without express permission.

Tante Zizi could be extraordinarily sensitive; she could also be thick-skinned when it suited her purpose. Spreading her fan, she began to ply it, her black eyes hard.

“There can be no question of that,” she said. “What must be asked is how?”

“I declare, the means of it has me quite distracted — one cannot force the man to come, after all. And here is Amélie moping about the house like a shadow and Estelle running to look down the road a hundred times a day and changing her gown each time in between.”

Tante Zizi waited until the diatribe ran down of its own accord. “The man cannot be forced to come, but he may be invited, may he not?”

“Would it not look too particular?” Madame Delacroix ventured.

“You will not invite him alone,” the old lady said stringently.

“No, it will be a grand ball!” Estelle exclaimed in rapt enjoyment of the prospect.

“It will be a soirée of perhaps three dozen guests, with dancing and afterward, a supper,” Tante Zizi said firmly. “Mam’zelle Caroline can play—”

“And I—” Amélie inserted.

“If only we could be sure the Marquis is not already engaged for the date we choose.”

“There is one way to be certain. Ask!”

Estelle looked at her great-aunt with bright eyes. “I — that is, Amélie and Mam’zelle Caroline and I — could drive over to Felicity tomorrow to discover if the Marquis and his cousin are free.”

“No,” Tante Zizi said.

“No, no!” her mother cried.

Caroline set her mouth in a firm line. “Under no circumstances will I lend countenance to a visit to an unmarried gentleman in his living quarters. No circumstances whatsoever.”

4
 

PREPARATION FOR THE soirée went on apace. Madame Delacroix’s enthusiasm held while the guest list was drawn up and the invitations written. When the missives were placed in a ribbon-bedecked basket and given into the keeping of a groom to be carried from house to house in the district, Madame took to her bed. Not even the tidings that the Marquis would be delighted to put in an appearance on the night in question could bring more than a feeble smile to her lips. Summoning Caroline, she casually laid the burden of the entertainment on the governess’s shoulders.

Amélie proved unexpectedly helpful. Beneath her quiet exterior she had an intensely practical nature. It was she who organized the maids into a work force which thoroughly cleaned the main reception rooms of the house, cleared the salon of all furniture, and polished the floor with beeswax for dancing.

Caroline concentrated on the menu, relying heavily on the seafood that was in season and fresh vegetables. Her rapport with the huge woman who presided over the kitchen was excellent, and she suffered no qualms over the food the guests would be offered.

Estelle, at her own request, had charge of the decorations. She would tell no one precisely what she had in mind in the way of beautification, but she went daily to the garden to the rear of the house to check on the progress of the blooms under cultivation. The elderly gardener, in expectation of seeing his domain denuded for the party, usually disappeared at the sight of Mam’zelle Estelle. On no account could he be persuaded to tell her which of the blossoms might be expected to be at their peak in a week’s time; this, he said, would be a betrayal.

Estelle grew daily more incensed with the old man and more anxious that the quality of the decorations would not adequately reflect the skill of the person responsible. The afternoon before the day of the dinner party her fears crystallized.

“Mam’zelle! Mam’zelle Caroline, where are you?”

Caroline, finding a few minutes free, had taken five-year-old Mathilde out onto the gallery for a lesson in her letters and the English language. She looked up in expectation of no less than a domestic disaster when Estelle came bursting from the house.

“Mam’zelle, you cannot refuse me, you must not. Say you will come with me to the forest to find the magnolia, the fern, and ivy to make splendid the salon for tomorrow evening.”

“Oh, Estelle, do you really think—”

“But yes, certainly, Mam’zelle. The house will look like the abode of the
gens du peuple
with only a few straggly bouquets. I desire the grand effect, the luxuriance, of much, much greenery. There shall be garlands on the bannisters of the steps, magnificent edifices of flowers in the entrance, sprays of blossom on the fireplaces, and masses of ferns and sweet-smelling boughs in the corners of the salon—”

“My dear girl, we cannot cart the entire outdoors into the house,” Caroline protested.

“But we may bring a little inside to fill out the miserable blooms from the garden?”

“The miserable blooms” included roses, poppies, and lilies, plus the foliage of a number of shrubs. The magnolias could be had by stepping onto the front lawn. This left only ivy for garlands and some species of fern to fill out the garden perennials. It should not be too formidable a task to gather a basket or two of these.

Accordingly, Caroline and Estelle, accompanied by Mathilde, who begged to come, and a groom, set out. For the trip they took a two-wheeled vehicle called a governess cart. It was pulled by a mettlesome bay mare, and loaded with a pair of large split-oak baskets lined with damp cloths and wet Spanish moss.

They had not advanced far before Caroline began to realize she had been overly optimistic. No ordinary greenery would do. No dust-covered, tattered, or otherwise imperfect leaves were to be allowed inside the doors of Beau Repos. Every few feet the groom had to jump down and bring a bough or a twining stem for Estelle’s approval, but of these fully three-quarters were discarded as too imperfect. The tender new leaves of wild grape caught her fancy for a moment, then were rejected as possibly lending a too-bacchanalian air to the proceedings. The leathery green leaves of yellow jasmine were satisfactory, but without the flowers just faded, seemed somehow incomplete.

In the end, Caroline took the reins, allowing the groom to range the woods with his machete while they progressed down the road at a snail’s pace. For a long stretch, sugarcane fields and pasture land intervened, and they moved along at a faster clip with the groom perched on the cart’s tail. Then Estelle espied a track leading beside a split-rail fence back toward the dense growth of the forest.

Caroline, against her better judgment, pulled into the track. She had a feeling they were nearing the end of the Delacroix acreage, though she could not have said with any certainty exactly how far it extended.

The road had a well-traveled look despite the grass that grew to axle height in the middle. Hoof prints were plain in the damp sand, as though riders had passed that way since the last rain. No doubt the road led to the back of the fields they had just passed. Caroline could do no more than guess. When driving out, a thing done only when necessary to get from one place to another, the ladies never ventured from the main road. Horseback riding was looked on as too vigorous an exercise for young ladies and was seldom indulged in by the females of Beau Repos.

The afternoon sun began to lose height, striking down into the avenue cut through the trees. Estelle put up the parasol she had brought, a decorative affair of silk and lace hardly big enough for herself, though she tried to share it with Mathilde. Birdcalls echoed around them, including the musical whistle of a bobwhite. A squirrel, startled by their approach, ran up a tree beside the road and out onto an overhanging limb, chattering angrily.

Mathilde enjoyed that sight, but she was growing fretful at their slow advance. Even at such a crawling pace, they had come further than Caroline had intended, and she was thinking strongly of turning back. Only the sighting of a clump of ferns kept her from acting on this impulse. A few yards further on, a tremendous vine of shiny green smilax caught Estelle’s eye.

The groom was bearing this rather scratchy burden back toward the slow-moving vehicle when beneath the mare’s nose arose a flurry of wings. It was a family of quail, the fluffy baby chicks no bigger than a thumbnail, rising like feathers on the wind, and their parents uttering ear-piercing shrieks as though in pain as they flopped and scuttled through the grass in an effort to lure danger away from their young.

The mare shied, rising in the shafts with a shrill whinny of terror before throwing herself into a headlong gallop! Caroline, her grasp lax as she watched the grooms’ approach, nearly lost the reins. Scrabbling after them, thrown from side to side in the madly jolting cart, she caught a glimpse of the groom as he dropped the smilax and broke into an angling run for the horse’s head. With the reins once more in her hands she found that the fear-maddened animal would not respond to their command.

Mathilde screamed, clutching at Estelle. Estelle grabbed at Mathilde with one hand and Caroline with the other. As she lost her hold on her parasol, she made a sound of half anger, half terror.

For an instant Caroline thought the grooms race won, then as he drew level with the mare’s rippling shoulder, he tripped and fell sprawling. He tried to roll but could not avoid the cart’s wheel. It jounced over his ankle with a sickening thump. The bounce, small though it was, threw the cart off balance so that it slew sideways. Before it could right itself, the right wheel grazed a sapling, then the tail of the cart struck full force into the trunk of a pin oak tree.

Caroline was thrown from the seat to measure her full length in the road, the reins still tightly grasped in her hands. From the floor of the cart came cries and moans. She could not allow the horse to drag the vehicle with its shattered wheel further. Struggling to her feet, she limped to the horse’s head, soothing the fractious, shivering mare until she was quieted. Tying the reins to a tree branch, she moved almost reluctantly to see to Mathilde and Estelle and the groom.

Estelle, her bonnet hanging drunkenly down her back, was just climbing over the tail of the cart as Caroline rounded the side. She turned to help Mathilde, pale with fright but unhurt except for a few splinters, out from under one of the oak baskets.

The groom was not so lucky as the two girls. He lay writhing on the ground, his teeth gritted in pain. One of his legs had an odd boneless appearance below the ankle with the foot turned at an unnatural angle.

Caroline stood for a moment in silent thought after she rose from her inexpert examination of the groom. At last she turned to Estelle. “Jim can’t walk. One of us will have to go for help.”

“Alone?” Estelle asked with a nervous look around at the silent, encroaching woods.

“Someone must stay here with Jim and Mathilde. I’m sure your little sister could not walk all the way back to Beau Repos, at least not in good time.”

“Oh, but Mam’zelle, if we wait—”

“There’s no use making objections,” Caroline said flatly. “If we wait darkness may find us still here. Do you go or do you prefer to stay here? Choose!”

“I — I will go,” Estelle said, then immediately looked doubtful of the wisdom of her decision.

“Don’t tarry,” Caroline advised. She turned her back at once to give Estelle to understand there was no hope of reprieve.

At Estelle’s sudden joyous cry, she swung around. A horseman was bearing down upon them. As he drew nearer Caroline’s first instinctive relief was tempered with dismay. It was Rochefort on a gray gelding. He carried himself with the stiffness associated with anger, and there was a grim look about his mouth.

He swung down from his horse and strode toward them. As he neared, he swept the four of them with a gaze far from cursory. He stared so long at Caroline’s face that she gained the irresistible impression that she must have a smudge on her nose. When he shifted his attention to their groom, she put up her hand to find her fingers stained with blood from a scratch across one cheek.

The Marquis ran his fingers down Jim’s leg in an examination both more expert and thorough than her own. “It’s broken,” he said, rising from a kneeling position. “Serves him right for getting you in this dustup.”

Caroline, annoyed by an attitude toward them that she considered unfeeling in the extreme, stated bluntly, “I was driving.”

BOOK: Sweet Piracy
13.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Insatiable Appetites by Stuart Woods
Tales of the Hood by T K Williams-Nelson
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Rock Springs by Richard Ford
Cleaving by Julie Powell
Vampire in Paradise by Sandra Hill