The Creole Princess (36 page)

Maintaining the integrity of every asset in place, both in Mobile and Pensacola, as well as here in New Orleans, was critical to the success of that strategy. But he also knew that Simon Lanier had a lot to lose by leaving Daisy Redmond in Mobile.

With his arm across his sister’s shoulders, Lanier turned. Muscles jumped along his jawline. He had apparently heard some of Rafa’s conversation with Gálvez. “Governor, you promised that if I could get that shipment of gold delivered to Fort Pitt, you’d help me find a way to go back into Mobile and bring Miss Redmond out.”

Gálvez spread his hands. “I did. But I can’t afford to precipitate an unnecessary crisis until we are officially at war. If you can give me another six months to lull them into complacency, I’ll send you in to get her before we attack.”

Lanier was clearly unhappy.

“Governor, if I may,” Rafa said, hoping to defuse any reactionary eruption from his hotheaded colleague, “I like your suggestion that I take Miss Redmond a missive from Miss Lanier. Simon and Lyse both know Miss Redmond well enough to craft a message that will be useful and reassuring to her, but still covert enough to escape detection should it fall into the wrong hands.”

Gálvez nodded. “All right. The three of you meet tomorrow morning for that purpose. Rafael, when you’re satisfied with your letter, bring it to me. Meanwhile, Pollock and I will see what we can do about this new request for supplies you brought from Governor Henry. There are enough Americans here in New Orleans, posing as merchants, that the city is secure for now. But I’m hoping
Havana will see fit to send reinforcements before long.” He rubbed his forehead as if it ached. “That’s all for now. Go mingle and listen—and for heaven’s sake, act like you’re having a good time.”

Lyse laughed and hugged her brother. “I am, now that Simon is here.”

Rafa wished she’d said that about him. Patience was not his greatest strength—but perhaps he was learning it, a little, the hard way.

Daylight slipped through the curtains the morning after the Gálvez ball, and Rafa awoke, aware that something about the house was different. He rose and dressed, then slipped down the stairs to prowl for sustenance in the ample larder off the ground-floor kitchen.

The Gonzales family had moved from Havana to New Orleans in the summer of 1769, when Rafa was thirteen years of age. He’d enjoyed a rather idyllic coming-of-age, tutored at home with his brothers and learning the alleys and bayous of the city, until he was sixteen, when his father the colonel decided to ship him off to the Spanish Royal Academy of Naval Engineers. Upon his graduation in 1776, he’d come home to be a sore disappointment to El Papá. When Rafa applied to Governor Unzaga for employment as an officer, the general had, at least in Papá’s opinion, lost his mind and instead introduced Rafa to the Irish merchant Oliver Pollock.

What Colonel Gonzales could not know was that Rafa did indeed go on the governor’s payroll, on a detachment of such a delicate nature that no one outside the governor’s closest staff would be privy to his comings and goings. His very first assignment had been a rather daring foray up the Mississippi River with a shipment of gunpowder that eventually made its way to General Washington, who was then quartered in Pennsylvania. Shortly after Rafa returned to New Orleans, Unzaga was replaced as governor by
the even more cunning and resourceful Gálvez, who saw no reason to interrupt the creative partnership of Pollock and Rippardá.

Rafa had truly enjoyed the clandestine, rollicking nature of his role in Spanish espionage, but he found himself increasingly looking forward to those times when he could sleep in his own bed, wake up to his mama’s
bollos
and
café con leche
, and irritate his sister Sofía. As he padded down the stairs, yawning, the tie-strings of his shirt hanging open at his chest, he wondered if Sofi was awake. She might like to go for a ride before breakfast, if she hadn’t got lazy from staying up late at balls and soirées every other night during the social season.

Grinning, he turned to run back up the stairs—and then stopped halfway up as he remembered what was different today. Lyse was upstairs, asleep in the room next to Sofi.

His brain began an unplanned perambulation through the process of Lyse preparing for bed, dropping the naughty green dress Madame Gálvez had provided, brushing her hair . . . and then he realized where this particular journey would lead him.

You are an imbecile,
he told himself sternly and set about distracting himself by listing, one with every step up the stairs, expressions of the Goldbach conjecture, until his brain was well and truly full of much more than red lips, golden skin, and topaz eyes.

He scratched at Sofía’s door. “Sofi! Wake up and fix me breakfast! I’m hungry!” When a rising moan came from inside the room, he laughed. “Come on, I’ll take you riding afterward. Hurry—get dressed!”

“Go away!”

“Sofi . . .”

“Take Lyse—she actually likes to get up early.”

Rafa glanced at the closed door next to Sofía’s room, desperately shutting down his active imagination. He should probably wake her up anyway. They would need to get started on the coded letter to Daisy.

“Rafa? What are you doing?”

He nearly jumped out of his skin. Lyse was at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at him. She wore a simple, very modest yellow dress, and her hair was pinned up askew, as if she’d done it herself without a mirror. How had he missed her approach?

Snatching at his sangfroid, he began to descend the stairs. “Good morning, little cousin! I see you are not so lazy as my sister, and I congratulate you. Would you like to join me for breakfast and then a ride about the square?”

She shook her head, further dislodging the pile of curly hair. “We don’t eat breakfast here so much. But I have been thinking about how to get a message to Daisy and made some notes. Would you like to see?”

Of course he would like to see. He walked down the stairs feeling exactly like that stupid fellow Odysseus she had once corrected him about, the one who had himself tied to his ship so he could listen to a woman’s beautiful voice.
She
was telling
him
how things were done in his own home? No breakfast? His world was well and truly upside down.

“Yes, but first I’m hungry.” He took her elbow and towed her toward the kitchen. “Is Simon down here with you?”

“He has already gone . . . somewhere.” She waved a hand vaguely. “He said you would likely sleep ’til noon, and he would be back then.”

Affronted, Rafa stopped and frowned down at her. “I do not ever sleep ’til noon. And now the governor will say we are late with the letter, and I have other responsibilities to take care of today that must be postponed.”

“But I’ve been trying to tell you, the letter is almost ready. I just need you to read my notes, and I shall copy it in my best hand, then you can take it to her.”

“How can it be ready when I have not even . . . Oh, never mind. I suppose you have not even had Manuel bring coffee.”

She gave him a perplexed look, then shook her head and pushed
him toward a kitchen stool. “Sit there and I will bring you coffee. Steamed milk too, yes?”

He watched her flit about the kitchen, competently handling the coffee bean grinder, the heavy kettle over the fire, and the milk jug. By the time he had a steaming mug of chicory in hand and a buttered sweet roll on the table, he reached the conclusion that Lyse made quite a useful addition to the family. He should definitely convince her to stay.

She climbed up on another stool with a second mug and blinked at him over its rim. “Better now?”

“You are much more cheerful in the morning than your brother.” And prettier. A hank of ebony curls drooped distractingly beside her ear.

Blushing, she tucked it back. “Daisy and I developed a way of writing to each other, after Simon found my diary and read it aloud one day. Every fourth word is the coded message. We wrote that way for years, just because it was fun.”

“That’s pretty simplistic. What if her father reads it before giving it to her?”

“We are two little girls to him. I doubt he will bother reading it, because he would never imagine us bright enough to pass along anything important. But even if he does, we’ve gotten quite good at using words to imply something other than their literal meaning. The number seven, for example, can mean ‘week,’ the number twenty-four is ‘day,’ and so on.”

Rafa sat up, suddenly wide awake. “That is ingenious. So in this first letter, you set up a series of useful words she can use to pass us information, which will make the code harder to break if someone gets suspicious later.”

“I’d already thought of that!” She grinned at him, drawing a paper from her pocket and handing it to him. “Here is my list of what I thought might be helpful, with their code equivalents, but you might have others to add.”

He studied the list, more and more impressed with her intuition. There were a few things he’d add, but not many. “I’m glad you’re on our side,” he said slowly.

M
OBILE
L
ATE
O
CTOBER
1778

Everyone thought her papa a lion who ruled Mobile and Fort Charlotte with bared fangs and deafening roar. Daisy could have told anyone who bothered to ask that, with proper handling, one smiling young lady with a backbone of iron could bend the lion to her will.

It had taken little more than a week of persistent moping, picking at dinner, and staring out of windows to convince Papa to allow her an hour at the market without making poor, beleaguered Corporal Tully accompany her. With that concession granted, Daisy’s jaunts outside the fort got longer and more distant, until twice she had gone all the way to Spring Hill to visit Justine and Charles Lanier.

Coming back from the second of these trips, carrying a bundle that Justine asked her to take to Luc-Antoine, she turned down the road to the Dussouy mansion. She hadn’t had occasion to visit the French socialite for quite some time. After the onset of hostilities between France and England, the Dussouys had tried to continue entertaining, but British Loyalists were reluctant to associate with anyone of suspect ancestry, and with the blockades restricting trade, former French citizens like the Dussouys had little money to spend on frivolities. Besides, Madame Dussouy’s open persecution of Lyse and her family gave Daisy no incentive to be friendly.

But Justine had been stuck in the house with sick children for weeks and had grown anxious about her eldest. Luc-Antoine used to visit his mama and grandfather on his Sunday afternoons off, but
these visits had abruptly ceased in early October. Daisy agreed to drop by to check on him and notify Justine if Luc-Antoine was ill.

She followed the sandy shell lane under the shade of a series of grand magnolia trees alternating with dogwood and oaks, the white gravel crunching pleasantly under her shoes. There was a nip of fall in the breeze, and several yards away through the trees, she could hear the slight rush of one of the spring-fed creeks that ran into Dog River. Before long she could see the outbuildings, and then the house itself, mildewed and slightly seedy in its old age. Madame’s family, the Hayots, had owned this bit of property for almost as long as the Laniers had theirs, the two families squabbling over the years with varying degrees of amicability over water rights, childish pranks, and wandering livestock. The rupture in relations created by Antoine jilting Isabelle in so public and disgraceful a manner had only slightly healed when she married the aristocratic but penurious Michel Dussouy. She’d brought him to the ancestral home, where they lived in a second bedroom until the old Comte d’Hayot passed to his eternal reward, leaving Isabelle and her brilliant young husband in charge of a shipping business second in profitability only to the Laniers’.

Daisy could only shake her head over the French love affair with dynasty. Families like Isabelle’s, whose ancestors had come to the settlement under the command of d’Iberville and his brother Bienville, walked about with their noses firmly stuck in the air, whether they had money, land, or neither. They still called themselves Creole, in that haughty Gallic way that made one feel like the veriest barbarian.