Sweet Unrest (12 page)

Alex took her unsure silence as assent.

“I shall pick you up in the morning, and you can start the work on my painting.”

During the next few weeks, Alex often came for her early in the morning to take her to the plantation. He would sit near her quietly and watch as she sketched. By lunchtime, he would return Armantine to the Quarter so she could help Jules with the afternoon appointments. It became an almost comfortable routine for her, despite the impossibility of the situation. Jules, of course, was beside himself with anticipation.

One morning late in the summer, the carriage appeared driven by Solomon, one of the Dutilettes’ slaves, but with no Alex. Solomon explained that the young master had something to attend to that morning, yet wanted her to continue working on his painting. The thought of being alone on the grounds of Le Ciel almost made Armantine hesitate, but Jules would not hear of her wasting an opportunity.

They rode in uneasy silence, and when they arrived, Solomon helped her out with a blank expression on his face. She started to walk toward the pond, aware that Solomon was walking behind her. He stayed, watching her silently, as she found her usual place under the oak and set to work with her charcoals. As the morning drew on, she could feel his cold gaze as he watched her from the trees.

She didn’t know how long she’d been working when she felt another presence. At the edge of the clearing stood Alexandre’s sister, Josephine. When their eyes met, Josephine started toward her.

“Miss Lyon!” Josephine called. She waved as she app-roached, a cold smile on her face. She was dressed in the finest silk, her fair hair perfectly tamed into an elaborate chignon, and Armantine suddenly felt self-conscious. She smoothed her own plain cotton skirts and hoped her unruly hair wasn’t standing on end from the humid air.

“Madame.” She stood, keeping her eyes trained to the ground.

“Please sit,” Josephine replied. “I did not mean to interrupt your work.”

Armantine returned to her place on the ground, but instantly wished she had remained standing. Josephine was a small woman, but standing over Armantine, she was imposing.

“I had heard you were here and thought to pay my respects.” The woman’s voice was clear, with the same musical cadence coloring her English as Alexandre’s, but there was no mistaking the ice running through it. “My husband and I were so pleased with the image Mr. Lyon prepared for us. I daresay it was dear of my brother to arrange such a lovely surprise.”

“Yes, madame.” Armantine glanced up but couldn’t quite bring herself to look the woman in the eye. Josephine had the same startling green eyes as her brother, but where Alex’s were warm, alive, his sister’s reminded Armantine of ice. She focused instead on the woman’s delicate, bow-shaped mouth.

“And now I hear you are creating a painting of our lovely pond for him. How delightful.” She didn’t sound at all delighted.

“Yes, madame. Monsieur Jourdain was very eager to take a piece of your beautiful land home with him when he returns to France.” It was not as easy as it should have been for her to slide back into her practiced persona—not after Alex had helped to free her from it. Meek, polite, subservient. She concentrated on these qualities and hoped that she could bring them to the surface.

“I must say,” Josephine continued, her voice a few degrees cooler. “He seems quite taken by your … talents. For a while I thought perhaps my brother was trifling with you. All those trips to the Quarter every week and all. I had worried he might take advantage of your innocence. He’s most likely quite a bit more experienced than you are. He spent some time in Paris, you know. My parents, they worried about him, and so they sent him here.”

Armantine remained silent.

“I am so glad to hear that he wasn’t toying with you in that way. It is a relief, my dear, to see he was simply interested in your services.” She gave the last word a disreputable hiss. “You see, my dear brother is not quite so aware of things as we women are. I worried his affection for you might have been misplaced. Given, you see, where it had no place.”

“No, madame.” Armantine’s cheeks burned with shame as she remembered the way he’d looked at her, placed the gentle kiss in the palm of her hand.

“But you, of course, know your place. Yes?”

“Yes. Yes, madame.” She wanted to escape. To stand and start walking back to the Quarter, to never look back or think of Le Ciel again.

“Of course you do.” Her voice was sweeter now, and her cold green eyes dipped to the sketches scattered around Armantine. “And such a delightful talent. Perhaps you will come back and paint the house when you are done with my brother’s little project. After he has returned to France, perhaps?”

It was everything Jules had wanted. And it was all wrong. “Yes, madame. I’d be delighted to.” Her heart was a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach.

“Wonderful.” Josephine made the word sound like a threat. “I’m glad we have had our little talk,
ma biche
. Enjoy the rest of your day here. I am sure you will have enough sketches to paint from by the end of it.” The meaning of her words was clear to Armantine.

“Yes, madame.”

She watched the graceful swish of Josephine’s silken skirts as the woman walked away. She’d known this would happen and cursed herself for allowing it to. Ever since she’d been rescued by Jules, she’d avoided situations that could make her feel small and inferior. It was her own fault, she knew, that it had happened now. She’d broken all of her own rules going to Le Ciel for Alex, and she’d never felt more humiliated in her entire life.

She knew she should leave, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to move. Yet neither could she find the will to pick up her pencil again, so she sat in silence, taking in everything she could about the scene, the moment. When she walked away from this place, she knew she would be walking away from Alex as well.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky when he finally appeared. Silently he walked to her, his beautiful mouth twisted into an angry line. Silently he sat next to her and stared out over the water.

“I am sorry I was not here,” he said finally. “She should not have spoken to you,
ma chère
.”

“It’s fine.” Armantine could hear the flatness and distance she had put into her voice and was glad for it.

“No, love. Nothing about this is fine.” His voice was tight and he didn’t look away from the water. “She had no right to speak to you.”

“Of course she did. This is her land, her pond. It is no more than I deserve for overstepping my bounds.”

He turned to her. Took her chin, gently, and turned her face to his. “With me you have no bounds, Armantine.”

She pulled away from him. “I have tried to explain to you … ” She shook her head, unable to finish her thought.

The silence stretched on between them until she grew uncomfortable enough to begin drawing again. Anything to distract herself from the feeling that her heart was about to shatter. She loved him. More than she had any right to, and now she would pay the price. Alex sat and watched her work, and she took comfort in his closeness.
For the last time
, she thought.
I will take this memory of perfect happiness with me, to keep near my heart.

She relaxed eventually, taking in everything about the day as she transferred it to the paper in bold, black sweeps. Alex had propped himself back on his elbows to watch her, and when she came out of a sketch she turned to find him smiling at her.

“You are beautiful when you work, love.”

“You can’t say such things.” Her voice was soft, but a new sense of fear bubbled up inside of her. His hand brushed hers and she looked over at him.

“You can trust me, you know.”

But she didn’t.

Fifteen

Her life came to me in pieces, often disjointed and out of order, and because my waking hours were so tedious and lonely, it was so, so easy to slip into her skin. Eventually, the scenes of their lives became as familiar to me as my own, and I began piecing together the events: the invitation from Alex to paint at Le Ciel, the day Josephine confronted her, the way Alex tried to comfort her, the letters carved as a promise in the tree, and finally the kiss that sent her running.

Her entire life, she’d been on the outside of everything, but for the shining instant when they kissed, everything focused on the absolute rightness of the way Alexandre’s lips felt against hers. The firmness of his mouth and the sureness of his arms around her made my head swim, and when she lost herself in that kiss, so did I.

Then, the instant was over, and she pulled herself back from his arms, shaking and startled by what had just happened. Before he could stop her, she was on her feet and gathering her supplies.

“Armantine.” He reached up to her, confused by the way her desire seemed to have vanished. He couldn’t have known it took everything she had to hold herself back.

“No,” she told him, her voice unsteady as she backed away. “This cannot happen. No. Stay there.” She put up her hands and backed away.

“
Ma chère
—”

“No!” More forcefully now.

“At least allow me to escort you home—” His voice was soothing but it was tinged with disappointment. Hurt, or something very close to it, flashed in his eyes.

“No.” She backed away from him. “No, I need to walk. I need to think.”

He took a step closer, his hands fisted at his side, but the shake of her head held him fast. “If anything you’ve said to me today is true, you’ll leave me now. You’ll understand I need time.”

His jaw ticked but he nodded. “Let me at least find someone to take you back. You should not be on the road alone.” His voice was gentle now. “It is not safe, you know.”

The image of Lila’s body flashed in her mind and she nodded, reluctantly.

“Go up to the gate. Someone will be there soon.”

She turned and started walking away from him, one shaking step in front of the other, when he called her again.

“Armantine.” His voice was steady, but she didn’t turn back to him. “We are not done.”

She didn’t answer. Just walked away from him on un-steady legs.

It had not taken long for Solomon to arrive with a wagon. When he yanked her roughly up to sit up alongside him on the rough slat he used as a seat she couldn’t meet the old man’s eyes. They didn’t speak as the wagon rolled along the uneven dirt road.

Twenty minutes later, they came upon Thisbe. Solomon stopped the wagon and helped the old woman climb aboard with noticeably more respect than he’d shown Armantine.

She sat silently beside them as the wagon made its way back to town. While the two talked about people they both knew on the plantation, Armantine focused on the horizon and tried to forget that she’d left part of herself behind.

“I’ve seen you around, with that girl who got herself killed,” Thisbe said suddenly, addressing Armantine with cloudy eyes. “But you aren’t from that house. You most certainly aren’t from the fields, either.”

“
No ma’am.” And she wouldn’t be returning to that house ever again.

“You don’t worry yourself about your friend. Her spirit is where it needs to be.” The old woman patted Armantine’s knee with an ashy hand. “She has a purpose now.”

“Yes ma’am,” she said. She was not thinking about anything but Alex, now that she had finally walked away from him.

Thisbe chuckled, a dry, rasping sound that put Armantine on edge. “You aren’t much for talking, are you?”

“No ma’am.”

“But people have been talking about you, girl. All around these parts, everyone’s been talking about the little mulatter girl who doesn’t know her place in the world. They’ve been saying she’s trying to snare herself a rich man. They’ve been saying she thinks she’s gonna move right up into that big house like she belongs there.”

Solomon snorted, as though disagreeing.

“I know my place,” Armantine said quietly.

“Sure doesn’t seem that way, or you wouldn’t be walking away from it so easy.”

Armantine didn’t answer, and after a few moments of silence, Thisbe made a clucking noise and patted Armantine’s leg again. “You think I can’t see it? It’s as plain as day to someone who knows what they’re looking for. That boy is yours, through and through. But you’re right. You know your place, and I ’spect there’s something to that.”

The old woman’s hand was still locked onto Armantine’s leg. “You listen to ol’ Thisbe, though. When you’re ready, you’re gonna come to me, and I’m gonna help you with what you need.”

Armantine didn’t answer. She watched the low-slung buildings of the city grow larger on the horizon and concentrated on the painful process of stitching her heart back together. And when I woke, the ache that had been so sharp in her chest had settled in mine.

Sixteen

The funny thing about dreams is that when you have the same one often enough, it becomes a kind of reality. Just like Mama Legba had warned me, you can forget where the dream ends and where real life begins. After a few days, I’d gotten to the point where I lived for closing my eyes and slipping back into Armantine.

But I never learned what had happened once she’d returned to the Quarter that day. Every evening, I’d go to bed hoping Alex would come for her, but every morning I’d wake up as she was leaving him at Le Ciel.

Until the day I went back to Thisbe’s cabin. Everything changed after that.

I would have happily stayed away from that place for the rest of forever, but between Byron’s complaints about needing my assistance—apparently coffee doesn’t fetch itself—and my father’s excitement, I found myself heading toward Thisbe’s cabin on an overcast morning late in July.

My dad was standing with Piers and Byron at the edge of Thisbe’s land and talking to someone as I came across the field to meet them. I easily recognized the long, colorful skirt and statuesque posture as Mama Legba’s.

“Lucy, you’ve already met Ms. Legba,” my dad said by way of introduction.

“Yeah. Chloe introduced us.” I ached a little when I said Chloe’s name. We hadn’t really talked since the day after Emaline’s murder.

“Lucy-girl.” Mama Legba smiled warmly. “I haven’t seen you around like I thought I would.” She spoke formally, and her voice held the barest hint of reproach.

“Yeah, well … ” I didn’t have much to say, so I let my voice drop off.

“You’ll come see me soon?” It wasn’t so much a question as an order. I nodded ambivalently.

“Piers thought it might be a good idea to call in an expert to deal with this place,” my dad told me. “I’m not really knowledgeable about the kind of artifacts we found last week.”

“I’m glad you did, and not just because of the objects in the house.” Mama Legba never stopped watching the cottage as she spoke. “You’re gonna need a good cleansing ritual before you mess with anything else in there. You never know what you might have stirred up the first time.”

My dad glanced at Piers for his opinion.

“It couldn’t hurt,” Piers said.

Surprisingly, my dad didn’t argue. “I’ll leave that to you, then.”

“We’ll start with a simple invocation for protection, and then I’ll scrub the whole place here with sage. Never hurts to be too careful.”

I couldn’t believe my dad, my reasonable “there’s no such thing as ghosts” dad, was actively encouraging a Voodoo woman to cleanse anything for him, much less an acquisition as important as the cabin. As Mama Legba got herself ready to begin, I tugged on my dad’s arm. “Can I talk to you?” I whispered, so that the others couldn’t hear.

We walked away from the group a bit. “What’s wrong, Luce?”

“Are you really letting her do that?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Tell me you don’t really believe there could be evil spirits lurking around.” I really, really wanted him to say no.

He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and angled me so I could see across the field, forcing me to look out toward the grassy levees of the river. A small group of people had gathered to watch. “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said. “It does matter what they believe, though. Look, Luce. The university had a heck of a time getting this land. It’s important to the people around here, and many of them
do
believe in spirits. If letting Ms. Legba perform some of her rituals eases the community’s anxiety about our involvement here, then it can’t hurt now, can it?”

“I suppose not.” It made a certain sense, the way he ex-plained it, but the whole thing still made me uneasy.

“Come on, Luce. This should be interesting. Ms. Legba said many of her practices were passed down through the generations of her family. In a lot of ways, she’s like a living history book.”

Mama Legba was already chanting unfamiliar words, her eyes closed and hands to the sky. Piers watched her and jotted down notes occasionally on the pad he always seemed to carry, while Byron busied himself with organizing his equipment. When Mama Legba finished, she lit a stick that looked like a thicker version of the hemp necklaces people bring back from beach vacations. It burned with an earthy, spicy fragrance as she worked to deliberately move the smoke up the dirt path to the cabin and over the porch.

My SLR still wasn’t fixed, so I’d brought one of my other cameras with me that day—an old thirty-five that had once been owned by a guy at the
Tribune
. I took pictures as Mama Legba cleansed the house with the smoking stick, until the mustiness of years gone by was replaced with the sweet smell of the burning sage. It took forever.

When she was done, she extinguished the stick using some red dirt she’d brought with her in a jar and smiled warmly at my dad. “That should do it for you,” she told him.

“Can’t thank you enough.” My dad returned her smile. “I would like to show you what we found last week, if you have some time?”

Mama Legba nodded, and we all followed my dad into the cabin’s back room. I tried not to focus on the daguerreotype lying on the table nearby as my dad opened the blackened box and pulled out the primitive doll. “Piers wasn’t sure what to make of these carvings. We thought maybe you would know something about them.”

“I’ve searched all my sources,” Piers added. “But I couldn’t find any markings in them that matched these. Any idea what they are?”

I raised my camera and focused in on the doll, trying to capture the carvings on its surface. As they came into focus through my viewfinder, my vision swam.

Lila’s body
.
The bloody map carved into her chest
.

I lowered the camera, shaken. But no one seemed to notice—they were all too busy watching Mama Legba examine the tiny figure.

She turned it over in her hand, her smooth face creasing as she studied it, and then she made a low noise in her throat that sounded like disgust. “These marks ain’t nothing to do with Voodoo.”

“But it looks like a Voodoo doll.” Piers sounded surprised.

“Maybe so, but Voodoo doesn’t deal in this kind of magic.” She made the disgusted sound again. “Look here, this red thread. The red is for power, but if this is what I think it might be, you’re dealing with something dangerous here. Something dark.”

“What do you think it might be?” I raised my camera again, trying to focus on the moment in front of me instead of on the images of Lila that kept threatening to surface in my mind.

“When I was younger, my mama told me the story of a powerful shaman who lived deep in the heart of an unknown jungle. It was her version of a fairy tale, you see?” Mama Legba looked up before continuing. “Just a story. He was obsessed with understanding the makings of life itself. He lived alone, working long hours to discover the secrets of life and death, of the spirit world around us. In the story, he went mad when he started dabbling in the black arts. He used to bind his spells with thread like this. He made the thread himself from the silk of charmed insects, and he soaked it in the blood of innocent young boys who wandered too deep into the jungle. More powerful than Clotho’s thread of life, though, because the shaman’s thread could bind a person’s very soul. It was the sacrificed innocence that gave it so much power.” Her voice had taken on a hypnotic quality that even had Byron entranced. “This piece reminds me of those old stories. It feels like it’s been touched by that kind of darkness.”

My dad was clearly captivated by the idea. “Imagine that. Maybe we could get some documentation on those old tales and put them together with a display in the university museum?”

Mama Legba clucked at them. “You want my opinion, you’ll get rid of that thing right now. Burn it or bury it, but don’t let it out in the light of day.”

“Oh, we couldn’t do that,” my dad said with a tone didn’t allow for argument. He was a stickler about preserving the past, and I could tell his opinion of Mama Legba had just dropped a few notches. There was no way he was going to destroy the ugly little doll, dangerous or not. “But we’ll take your recommendations under advisement. Thank you again for coming. You’ll have to come back when we get everything reconstructed.”

Mama Legba seemed to get the message. “Lucy-girl. You walk me out?”

She gathered her bag and we started out across the field. When we came out into the sunlight of the clearing by the pond, she finally spoke. “I was serious about you coming to see me.”

“I don’t know … ” I started.

“That’s obvious,” she said, turning to look at me. “But you need to start knowing. You already on your road, but you can’t see what’s coming down it. You need to figure it out, and soon.”

I started to chafe under the perceptiveness of her comments, but as I was about to look away, her gaze shifted from me to something over my shoulder. Her expression hardened, and the nape of my neck pricked.

I turned slowly, not knowing what was behind me, and was relieved to see it was only Alex standing at the edge of the woods. It felt like it had been so long since I’d seen him in anything but a dream, he might as well have been an apparition. It had been so long that I’d started to worry—and to hope—that maybe he wasn’t anything but a figment of my imagination.

But there he was, calling out to me from across the open expanse of the pond. His usually tussled hair glinted darkly in the sunlight and my heart lurched at how familiar the strong lines of his face had become to me. But his eyes weren’t on me. They were focused behind me, on Mama Legba, as he stalked around the pond toward us.

“Stay away from her,” he told the old woman, halting a few yards away from us. His voice was more a growl than anything human.

Mama Legba ignored the threat in his tone. “Well, well now.”

“I said stay away, old woman.” He glanced at me. “Lucy, please, come away from her. You’re not safe with her kind.”

“And you think she gonna be safe with your kind?” There was a hint of laughter in Mama Legba’s voice. “What you think
you
can do to protect her?”

Alex’s face grew hard, the beautifully sharp planes of it solidifying into a dangerous mask.

“That’s what I thought.” Mama Legba turned to me, ignoring Alex once again.

“You can see him?” I whispered.

“Why wouldn’t I see what’s right in front of me?” Mama Legba gave me a soft, conspiratorial smile. “When you ready, you gonna come see me. We got ourselves a lot to discuss, child.”

I shifted back, uneasy with how sure of herself she seemed. At how similar her words to me were to Thisbe’s words to Armantine. When I glanced over at Alex, his hands were clenched tightly in fists at his side.

“Lucy, stay away from her,” he said, his voice low and dangerous.

I’d spent so much time in Armantine’s mind, experiencing her emotions, that for a moment I hadn’t cared who or what Alex was—just that he was real. But the command in his voice brought me back to myself. I wasn’t Armantine—I didn’t have to feel for him what she felt, and I didn’t have to stand for him growling orders at me like he had some right to.

“What is your problem?” I asked, taking a step closer to Mama Legba. However much her words had shaken me, at least I knew she was real. Human.

He blinked, clearly surprise by my reaction.

“I haven’t seen you in
weeks
. And then you come popping out of nowhere, telling me who I can’t talk to and what I shouldn’t be doing? I don’t think so.” I turned my back on him. “Come on, I’ll walk you the rest of the way to your car.”

Mama Legba laughed. “You sure gonna be an interesting one to watch, Lucy-girl. With the company you keeping, who knows what’s gonna happen.”

I wasn’t sure I was any more pleased with Mama Legba, but I didn’t shy away when she slung her arm across my shoulder as we walked. I didn’t look back to see what Alex would do. I’d had enough for the day.

When we reached the parking lot, Mama Legba withdrew her arm and rested her hands on my shoulders. “How’s Chloe?”

“Not good,” I told her truthfully. She was still not talking to anyone—even Piers.

“I heard the girl they found dead that night was her friend. So much pain.” Mama Legba’s eyes clouded. “You try to get Chloe to come see me too. She needs some healing to get through dark days like this. Here.” She handed me a small pouch. “You give this to her and tell her I said it’ll keep her safe.”

I nodded and took the pouch. It was surprisingly heavy.

“You said, back there, that I wasn’t safe with his ‘kind,’” I said carefully, staring at the pouch. “What did you mean by that?”

She raised her brows. “Just what I said, child.”

“But what
is
his kind?”

“Well, now.” She frowned thoughtfully, as though she was considering her words. “I’d say if you don’t know that by now, it ain’t my place to be telling you, is it?” She touched my cheek softly. “You come see me, Lucy-girl. You been letting your dreams walk all over you. I can help you with that, child. But you be careful with that boy there. I don’t see how nothing good can come from it. Nothing at all.”