With One Look (51 page)

"I never did like the woman," he whispered to his father. His father was staring at something and hardly heard. The cistern was made of demonic gargoyles like those of the great European cathedrals. While he understood the historic symbolism of the beasts on church walls— they were believed to frighten away evil spirits—it made no sense for them to be in the mayor's courtyard.

He noticed still other oddities. The elaborate tiles of the walkway leading from the courtyard to the front steps curled in an ever tightening circle, ending in two small black tiles on an oblong shape. He tried to reason what form it took. He shifted suddenly and spotted a black drop beneath his boot. Bending over he touched it. Wax. He stood up and shook his head. "Come now. Let's be done with this."

"Aye," Victor said, and they proceeded up the stairs. They were admitted shortly by a tall Negro butler whom Victor remembered seeing on previous visits. They were told they were expected and were led into a lavish parlor. The butler withdrew.

Red velvet curtains hung over the tall windows opening out onto the courtyard. The curtains matched two sumptuously upholstered couches. A table sat between the two couches. A half dozen matching armchairs were arranged around the room to facilitate conversation. Neither man cared for the ostentatious room. It was meant to impress its visitors with its occupants' wealth, but Victor had seen it many times before and he was not thinking of it now. He was staring at the blood-red flowers that sat in a crystal vase. Abruptly he remembered the flower necklace draped over Jade's neck and decorated with tiny spiders.

In all the drama of what had happened he had forgotten that there was a very real threat to Jade, or at least there had been. His gaze lifted to the picture on the mantel. It was a landscape painting, poorly done. Dark colors drew the small clearing, lending it a hauntingly desecrated look like the very day outside. Odd subject matter, too, for a number of tree stumps had been included, and why would any landscape artist paint nature's ruin?

He turned away.

As Victor had been examining the painting, his father had been examining the intricate hand-carved legs of the armchair across from him. He rose and crossed the room for a closer look. Only to discover that the extremely clever floral arrangement carved into the legs held people in frantic orgy scenes up close. "Victor, look at this."

Victor examined this oddity and shrugged. "There is no accounting for taste in this house."

The faint scent of burning incense and the hint of voices floated down the hall. They were obviously not the only people being received today. Victor just hoped the mayor had the decency not to invite anyone else in for the meeting, and he was just about to comment this to his father when the doors opened and she was there.

She wore a starling blue gown of silk decorated with lace and ruffles, and his first unkind thought was that she wouldn't be able to pull it off much longer. She must be nearly forty-five. He had seen her dozens of times before, but he supposed he had never really looked, and as his gaze came to her face, he was struck speechless by the color of her eyes.

"Pale blue eyes, like ice, or the opposite, the hot blue part of a flame," Jade had said of her vision of the snake woman, and well before she ever saw Lucretia. A terrible coincidence, and probably the awful thing that had triggered this final episode.

The mayor, the new constable, a man named Jackson, and all five people exchanged how do you do's. A servant set a tea tray and brandy down. The constable expressed surprise at Father Nolte's presence, then that he was not in robes.

The mayor was introducing him, and Jackson was extending his hand for Victor to shake.

Victor never realized. He was staring at the ring on Lucretia's hand.

His heart started pounding. He still didn't notice the outstretched arm of the new constable, the man withdrawing it awkwardly, everyone staring at him, realizing something was wrong.

"Victor?" his father said.

Victor continued to stare in horror at the ring on Lucretia's finger. An aqua blue stone surrounded by tiny diamonds. Jade's mother's ring.

She wore Elizabeth Devon's ring.

"Monsieur Nolte, I understand you have come to offer an apology—"

Lucretia stopped, her eyes searching his. She had been prepared to go on, planning to assure him of how unnecessary it was, how very sorry she was, when the intensity of Victor's gaze stopped her short.

Details burst into his mind as he stood there staring at the strange awful eyes, the ring worn like a trophy: the Reverend Mother describing Juliet as blue-eyed and fair, able to pass for white, the death by an older woman's hands, her form dropped in the water, an unidentifiable body found downstream many days later. She could have lived! Sebastian's mother had described Lucretia's ignoble emergence into society many years later....

A hand went to Lucretia's cheek, and the mayor stepped forward with alarm. "Monsieur?"

Victor's eyes narrowed, his blood surged. "Quite the contrary," he answered the woman at last. "My purpose is altogether different. I arranged this visit to coincide with the constable's. You see, Jade is not mad, nor was she mistaken. You were once Juliet, in fact, the murderer of Elizabeth Devon. Your ring, Madame, it belongs to her, to Elizabeth Devon, and was in fact on her hand the day she was murdered."

Father Nolte gasped, his gaze darting from one face to the next, his intelligence as agile and quick as his son's. As soon as these damning words had fallen from his son's mouth, he instantly understood the urgency of this fact: a ring was not enough to force a confession.

Which was why he lied: "Two of my parishioners came forward this morning ..."

Victor still slept in the bed. Jade rose and quietly slipped to the closet. She hurriedly pulled on her old breeches and shirt, then slipped on a pair of moccasin boots that Mercedes had given her. With an anxious glance at her husband, she fitted the plain long green cloak about her shoulders.

She slipped through the door and into the dark hall. No servant was up yet. The house was quiet. She raced down the stairs. A hand touched the latch of the front door.

"Where do you think you goin'?"

Jade swung around. Tessie stood in the parlor, the one leading to the kitchen. Curse her.

Tessie was always the first person up. Tessie always woke at the slightest creak. "You know where."

"Huh." She shook her head, her eyes serious and stern. "You know what he said. “It wouldn't be decent for you to be seen there."

"I have to go Tessie. I have to."

She stated it as a fact, and it was. She had to go. Nothing on earth or in hell could stop her.

Not even Victor's absolute prohibition.

Tessie hesitated. She knew she should go wake Victor and tell him, but the look in Jade's eyes stopped her. She knew that look; they all did.

The madness again.... "Then I'm goin' with you."

She raced back and returned a moment later with her warm woolen cloak. Jade was already out the door and through the front garden. Tessie raced to catch up with her, struggling to get her hood up, shivering as her boots splashed in the flooded street. A light rain fell and it was cold. The barest glimmer of gray light cracked the far horizon over the rooftops in the direction of the river. The cold dark day did not deter anyone. A number of people, mostly all colored, but by no means all of them, emerged from nearby houses. Just across the street Monsieur and Madame Beauregard stepped out, lifting an umbrella in the sleek rain.

The rain wouldn't stop anyone.

Jade walked swiftly and with determined purpose. They reached the stables at the end of the street. They were deserted. Herman, the stable hand, had no doubt left minutes before. Jade expertly fitted her horse with a bit and reins. She leaped up.

Wordlessly, but thankful for Tessie's presence, Jade leaned over and helped Tessie up behind her. She touched Ariel's side and walked her out into the street. She turned her in the direction of Carondelet Street, picked because it opened into the square of the parish prison. She wanted to watch from behind.

"You scared?" Tessie asked.

After a moment's pause, Jade nodded. She closed her eyes briefly as Tessie's thin arms hugged her tightly. She felt terrified. Her heart pounded violently. She felt the combined effects of the sleepless night of waiting for this dawn: her limbs felt numb, her hands were clammy even as she held the reins and the small statuette. She felt as if she moved in a nightmare, a nightmare that had begun long ago and that would end at last today.

Lucretia's confession had come in bits and pieces after Father Nolte's saving lie implicating her as a voodoo practitioner. Throughout the confession, which took over three days, Lucretia never once showed any remorse. She often took pleasure in the most hideous details, pride in her clever plotting. The servants who had helped her in her evil doings had been apprehended as well. Most people felt sorry for them, as it was clear they had aided Lucretia from the unnatural fear she inspired as a voodoo queen.

Still, they would be hung

The first news was that Lucretia still owned the house on Rampart that Jade's father had bought her so long ago. In blissful ignorance, Jade and Maydrian must have walked by that house a hundred times. She had asked Victor to take her there, not knowing why she had to see, only that she did.

The constable's men still had been going through Lucretia's things there, and even though Victor was at her side, she felt a growing numbness as she viewed the various pieces of a nightmare created by this one woman's monstrous hatred. She saw the nun's clothing that had allowed Lucretia to slip unnoticed into her house and kill Maydrian, as well as the ruffian's clothes that made her appear to be a man when she was stalking Jade. She had found her father's small locket, stolen with the aquamarine ring when Lucretia had robbed their graves. Her mother had given her father the locket long ago and inside would be two miniatures: one of her mother and one of

herself. It had taken several minutes before she found the courage necessary to open the locket. A dozen tiny pins were stuck in her mother's picture. Only two had been stuck in hers. Then Victor had opened a drawer to find the knife and an old yellow piece of paper—the banker's note ...

She had not heard the confession herself, but Victor and Father Nolte had been there.

Lucretia claimed she had never meant to kill Jade's father, but when he walked into the room and saw his wife dead, hanging, drenched in blood, he had lost his mind. Lucretia was screaming to try to make him understand that she had done it for him, that now that Elizabeth was dead he would grasp the spell Elizabeth had put him under, that Elizabeth's death was the only way to rid him of this spell. Jade's father had picked up the gun to kill Lucretia. She had lunged for him, and in the ensuing battle the gun had fired ...

Then a thirteen-year-old girl had walked into the room.

Afterward Lucretia had set the house on fire. She had no idea how Jade managed to escape. Someone had carried her to safety. Perhaps it was a servant or a slave. Perhaps Jade had somehow managed to rise by herself. Jade did not wonder about this for long. For she knew better than most that while her life had met with this terrible tragedy, it had also created miracles and rainbows as well....

Lucretia never understood the magnitude of what she had done until she met with the Reverend Mother on the levee that night. She claimed the Reverend Mother had been transformed into an avenging angel, given unnatural strength. As the older woman's hands choked the life from her lungs, she had feigned death. She said she might have even passed out then, for the next thing she knew she was in the water gasping for breath. She emerged miles downstream at that notorious smuggler's island where soon she was in the arms of a captain and aboard his ship headed for France. France, where over the years her new life took shape....

It would be over soon....

Hundreds of people packed the square already, more arriving every minute. Jade drew Ariel up when they were close enough to see. Her green eyes surveyed the solemn faces of the waiting people. The crowd was unnervingly quiet, though a number of people nearby began pointing her out, recognizing her despite the hood that shielded her face.

She never knew who started it. Perhaps it was Sandra, the de Galvezes' maid, or Dominic, the convent gardener, but someone stepped forward and pressed his cross into her hands. Then another and another, and suddenly lines formed. Dark hands, white hands, all hung their precious

crosses over her hand, draping a small wooden statuette of Mary, gently squeezing it with warmth and sympathy. Her gaze blurred, as did Tessie's behind her, and still people stepped forward with this simple token of love and support. ...

A wind rustled and swirled the leaves of the square into space and, gaining some supernatural force, the wind parted the clouds, revealing the glimmer of a gray dawn. Still it rained. Because their houses brought them above the crowd, Jade saw the raised scaffold, two stories high. The black-masked executioner stood by the rope. The smaller figure of a priest, Father Cobez, stood at the bottom of the steps with a Bible in hand, murmuring a prayer. The ex-mayor had left to return to Paris nearly a month ago.

The constable and his men were the only officials to witness it. No other officials would: they called it a spectacle for the lower masses. Necessary, but archaic. Unchristian.

Jade didn't care. She only knew that she had to see it. With her own eyes.

Thunder rolled in the distance like a drum roll, a sound no louder than the murmured anger rising from the people as the woman was led from the small prison. The many months she had spent in jail had taken a devastating toll on her; rags covered her emaciated figure and she wore no shoes. She had aged and now looked fifty or older. Her hair clung in thick mats around her head.

No expression sat on her face as a man stepped forward and swung the blindfold around her eyes. She stumbled, obviously drunk from her last night on earth.