Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “Mon Dieu,” said a scolding voice. “You’ll catch your death, sitting in the night air like that, barefoot, and wearing nothing but that thin old nightdress.” A shawl descended on Emmanuelle’s shoulders, and she hugged it to her, turning with a low, shaky laugh.

  “It’s stinking hot, Rose.”

  “And you’re as cold as ice.” A warm, caramel-colored hand closed around Emmanuelle’s. “Feel you. You’ve had a shock. You should be in bed. Everything always looks worse in the middle of the night than it will in the morning.”

  “This is bad, Rose.”

  Rose let out her breath in a long, mournful sigh and sank into a nearby straight-backed chair. “I know.”

  They sat together for a time in companionable silence, Emmanuelle and this woman who had once been her slave but was now simply servant, and friend. “Why you think somebody killed that old man?” Rose asked, giving voice, finally, to the question that troubled them both.

  Emmanuelle shook her head. “I don’t know. I keep going over the people Henri knew—his patients, other doctors—but I can’t think of anyone angry enough to kill him. And to kill him so deliberately, so coldly. . . .”

  Only, it hadn’t been cold, she thought, that rage she had sensed as she knelt in prayer. It had been fierce, passionate. Then she remembered that Henri hadn’t wanted to go to the cemetery that night, and she found herself wondering if he had known something, if there had been some threat he hadn’t told her about. Or maybe he had simply felt it, too, that sense of menace, of lurking danger.

  She stared out at the rain, her heart heavy with grief and guilt. “I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t insisted on going to the cemetery? Or what if we’d left sooner? What if—”

  “That’s a passel of silly questions you’re asking,” Rose said, interrupting her. “What happened, happened. And if you’re trying to find some way to blame yourself, you can just stop right there.”

  “But I felt something, Rose. A kind of evil, or darkness. A . . .” She paused, struggling to put the unutterable into words.

  “Well, what you expect?” said Rose brusquely. “Cutting up dead people by day, then wandering around graveyards when it’s coming on to night?”

  Emmanuelle let out a startled bark of laughter, quickly smothered. She glanced toward the half-opened door to the back bedroom, where Dominic slept the peaceful sleep of protected innocence. Fear for him rose up within her anew. Not just the fear that something might happen to him, but that age-old mother’s fear: What will become of my child if I should die? Death could strike so quickly, so unexpectedly. It could come out of the night with the poisonous touch of infected air, at the twang of a crossbow bolt, on the sharp edge of a swinging sword.

  “You think it was supposed to be you who died tonight, don’t you?” Rose said, giving solid form, finally, to what Emmanuelle had been groping toward but hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to acknowledge.

  “Oh, God, Rose.” She brought up her hands to cover her face, her breath gusting out in a shuddering sigh. “That malice I sensed, just before Henri was hit? I don’t think it was aimed at Henri, I think it was directed at me. And if I hadn’t stumbled, if Henri hadn’t moved to help me, that bolt would have killed me.”

  “The Yankee major you were telling me about—the provost marshal—does he know?”

  Emmanuelle let her hands fall, clasped, to her lap, her gaze lifting to her friend’s. “That I think Henri was killed by accident?” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t believe me.”

  “He might. And if someone is trying to kill you—”

  “What do you think the Yankees would do? Hmmm? Protect me?” Emmanuelle stood abruptly, her fingers clutching the shawl around her shoulders. “These people aren’t policemen, Rose; they’re soldiers. Enemy soldiers. They could arrest anyone—you, me, anyone—and have us executed after only a travesty of a trial. As far as that Yankee provost marshal is concerned, I’m probably his best suspect.”

  Rose sucked in a quick, worried gasp of air. “You? A suspect? But . . . why?”

  “You should have seen the way he looked at me, Rose. As if he knew I had something to hide.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Don’t I?” said Emmanuelle, her voice dropping when she heard the sounds of stirring from the back bedroom. It had been there in the man’s eyes, she thought, when he’d looked at her; as if he’d somehow guessed all the dark and terrible secrets of her life. And she was afraid, so very afraid that, one by one, he was going to find out those secrets.

  By dawn, the rain had stopped.

  Gnawing absently at the heel of a loaf of French bread, Zach carried his coffee out onto the upstairs veranda that ran along the back of the Greek revival– style mansion General Butler had appropriated for the use of his staff officers. Beside him, water still dripped from the giant, moss-draped live oaks overhead to patter onto the tattered leaves of the banana trees and elephant ears and ferns in the garden below. In the heat of the early morning sun, the dark, wet earth steamed, filling the warm air with a lush odor of dampness and rot.

  Looking out over that tangled mass of dark green vegetation, Zach found himself wondering exactly what it was about this city that stirred him so, that spoke to all that was sensual and dark within him. They were an old New England family, the Coopers of Rhode Island, self-disciplined and businesslike and maybe even a bit self-righteous. But Zach’s mother had come from a different world, a Mediterranean-flavored world of hot nights and exotic flowers and the sultry, blood-stirring thrum of the guitar. Sometimes, she had taken him with her, back to that world. They’d never stayed long, but Zach had eventually come to understand that he was, in some vital way, more his mother’s son than his father’s, that the blood of Castile pumped potent and hot and reckless through his being. His father had known it, too, and had tried to beat it out of him, but it had never worked. That innate wildness was still there, and this city called to it—this city, and a dangerous, enigmatic woman in black named Emmanuelle de Beauvais. Together, they seemed to accentuate that part of him, the part that was dark and more than a bit wicked. And it occurred to him, as he looked out over the lush garden, that this murder might be more of a threat to him—to his equilibrium, to his career, to his entire future, even—than he’d first realized.

  He was sitting in a wooden rocker at the edge of the veranda, his crossed boots propped up on the railing, when Hamish Fletcher found him. “So,” said the captain, pulling a chair beside Zach’s and lowering himself into it. “Did you learn anything from Henri Santerre’s sister last night?”

  Zach shook his head. “Not really. Only that Santerre’s wife and Madame de Beauvais’s mother died thirteen years ago yesterday. In a yellow-fever epidemic.”

  Hamish tugged at one end of his mustache. “Did you think she was lying?” There was no need to specify which “she” he was referring to. The memory of the petite Frenchwoman rode them both.

  “I think Madame de Beauvais is more than capable of lying,” Zach said. “She’s more than capable of a lot of things.”

  The mustaches twitched. “You didn’t like her much, did you?”

  “She didn’t exactly go out of her way to make us like her, now did she?”

  Hamish threw back his head and laughed. “That she didn’t. Refused to say a word to me the entire way to the rue Dumaine, then gave me a curt message and shut the door in my face when I was trying to be polite and say good night. It’s no’ going to be easy trying to get information out of these people. And as it stands, we don’t have diddle to go on.” He glanced sideways in an inquiring afterthought. “The sister had no ideas?”

  “None. But we do have this.” Reaching out, Zach plucked a small object from the tabletop beside him. “The army doctor sent it over. He thought it might be important.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Hamish’s bushy red eyebrows drew together as he leaned forward to stare at the projectile in Zach’s hand. “The lady was right. It is a crossbow bolt. Wh
oever heard of one that small?” He suddenly went quite still. “What kind of tip is that?”

  “It’s a silver alloy.”

  Fletcher sat back hard enough to make his chair creak. “My gawd. What are you suggesting? That someone saw the good doctor wandering around the cemetery last night and mistook him for a vampire?”

  Zach shook his head. “It wasn’t even dark yet, remember? But it is an interesting choice of weapon.” He held the bolt up before him. “Why kill a man with a crossbow—or, more particularly, why this crossbow?”

  “Well,” said Hamish thoughtfully smoothing his mustaches with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. “It’s silent.”

  “So’s a knife.”

  “Aye. But you need to get close to stick a knife between a man’s ribs. That’s risky. And some people might balk at it—the thought of shoving cold steel into yielding flesh. I mean, it’s no’ very pleasant.”

  “All right. Silence and distance. No need to get blood on one’s hands, no chance of being recognized, no chance of a struggle.”

  Hamish shook his head. “Santerre was an old man. He wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.”

  “Not enough, perhaps, to worry a man who was healthy and strong.” In the courtyard below, a plump black woman in a yellow tignon was hanging up wash. Zach watched her shake out one of the officers’ shirts and pin it on the line. It bothered him, knowing the people who served him were slaves. Made him feel unclean, and tainted by an old, old sin that not even this war could wash away. “But for someone who was weak, or incapacitated in some way,” he said, his gaze still on the woman, “a crossbow would be the perfect weapon.”

  Hamish grunted. “You mean, someone like one of the good doctor’s patients?”

  “Or a woman.”

  Hamish, too, had been watching the slave below. Now he swung his head to stare at Zach. “She was standing beside Santerre when he was hit.” He paused. “Or at least that’s what she says.”

  “Huh. Madame de Beauvais could slide a knife between a man’s ribs without any problem at all.” Zach brought his gaze back to the miniature bolt in his hand. Most quarrels were made of metal with a squared tip, but this shaft had been fashioned of wood, stained now with blood. “If she decided to use a crossbow, it was for a different reason altogether. One we haven’t thought of yet.” He tightened his grip on the bolt, then held it out. “The shaft has a name burned into it. DUFOUR ET FILS. See what you can find out about it. If we can track down who sold it, maybe we can find out who bought it.”

  Hamish took the slim, polished length of wood in his hand and frowned. “It’s no’ going to be easy.”

  “I suspect the widow could tell us something, if she wanted to.” Zach let his boots drop to the veranda floor, and stood. “After all, she knew exactly what it was, remember? She could very easily know who shot it.”

  Fletcher looked up at him. “You don’t know that.”

  “No.” Zach reached his arms over his head and stretched, drawing the warm, moist air deep into his lungs. It was already hot. By noon the heat and humidity would make it hard to breathe. “But I think I’ll pay an early visit to the rue Dumaine.”

  “She won’t be there.” Fletcher sucked his upper lip between his teeth, the way he did when he was thoughtful. Or troubled. He dropped his gaze to the bloodstained bolt in his hands. “That was the only thing she said to me. She said if you was to be looking for her this morning, you’d find her at the Hospital de Santerre.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She’d known the Yankee provost marshal would come. She’d known it, and still she felt her stomach wrench when she caught sight of him from an open window on the hospital’s second floor.

  His name was Zachary Cooper, and he was almost as well-known—and feared—as his commanding officer, Beast Butler. Whenever Butler wanted a Rebel house seized, or an uncooperative newspaper editor thrown into prison, Cooper was the man who executed the orders. He was standing across the street, one hand resting casually on the cavalry saber at his side, his head thrown back and his eyes narrowed against the hot glare of the morning sun as he studied the old building’s high facade. He was a tall man, tall and slim, much slimmer than the husky, red-haired Yankee who’d escorted her home last night. And younger, too, she realized now. Seeing the morning light fall on the major’s smooth, tanned face, she realized he was probably no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, although she’d thought him older last night. It should have reassured her, to realize how young he was, but it didn’t.

  Sunlight flashed on the steel hilt of his saber as he stepped from the brick banquette into the street, and she jerked, an unconscious reaction she regretted when the movement drew his eye to where she stood. Their gazes met and caught, and it was as if he had reached out and touched her, as if he held her transfixed by the intensity of his being and the powerful threat of his suspicions.

  She held his gaze until he passed beneath the overhang of the gallery. Only then did she allow herself to turn from the window and move to the bedside of the man she had come to tend.

  “How are you feeling this morning, Lieutenant?” she asked, carefully straightening the sheets he’d torn up in the course of a long and pain-wracked night.

  The young man in the bed was thin and haggard, with labored breathing and a fatally grayish tinge to his complexion. But he managed to smile up at her and say jauntily enough, “Oh, I’ll be out there drinking wine and eating five-course banquets soon enough.”

  “Huh. If you’re not careful, I’ll tell Mademoiselle La Touche you don’t like the food she’s been having prepared for you.” He winced as she helped him sit up, and she said more seriously, “How is your shoulder?”

  “The shoulder’s fine. It’s my right arm that’s been keeping me awake.” He laughed when he said it, for it was a kind of joke. The lieutenant had no right arm; the pains he felt were phantom.

  “Let me take a look at it.”

  She was unrolling his bandages when she heard the click of boot heels on the bare stairs, followed by a firm tread with only a hint of hesitation in its stride as the major crossed the scrubbed floorboards behind her. She’d noticed his limp last night. Noticed, too, how hard he’d tried to hide it. She did not turn around.

  “Dr. Santerre’s office is on the first floor,” she said, not glancing up. “Any of the nurses can show you where it is.”

  The footsteps stopped behind her. “Actually,” said that deep, clipped New England voice she remembered from last night, “you’re the one I wanted to see.”

  She dropped the scissors she’d been using to cut through the old bandage, and had to stoop to pick them up. “I’m sorry, Major, but I am busy.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  A terrible stench filled the room, and she forced herself to concentrate as the last of the lieutenant’s bandages fell away. He’d been a prisoner of war, Lieutenant Emile Rouant, his wound left untreated until he’d been paroled and brought to the Hospital de Santerre. They’d cut off as much of his arm as they could in a desperate attempt to save his life, although they’d all known, even then, that it was too late. He would be unlikely to live through another night.

  Your heart’s too soft, Philippe used to say to her, but you’re still tough. She told herself that now: You’re tough. You know people die. People die all the time. But he was so young, this lieutenant. So young and brave and determinedly cheerful. Emmanuelle felt a lump of sadness rise in her throat and forced it down so she could keep her voice steady when she said, “I think we’ll put a wine compress on this, Lieutenant.”

  The man’s remaining hand snaked out to close about her wrist, stopping her as she reached for her tray. “It’s not good, is it?”

  “No,” she said quietly, meeting his gaze. “If there’s someone you’d like to write—”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll ask Mademoiselle La Touche to see you, when she comes in.”

  The young man lay back and closed his eyes as she went about t
he gruesome task of treating his stump. All the while she worked, she was aware of the powerful presence of the Yankee major behind her, although he said nothing. Once, she glanced back to find him leaning against the wall, his arms crossed at his chest, his hard, darkly handsome face intent as he watched her. She didn’t look at him again.

  “Why were you doing that?” he demanded, planting himself in front of her when she had finished and went to leave.

  “Doing what?” she asked, moving around him.

  He fell into step beside her as she crossed the room. “Bandaging that man’s wound.”

  She stopped and swung to face him, one hand holding the tray balanced against her hip. “Why? Do you think I did a poor job of it?”

  “You know you didn’t. But I’m very familiar with the sort of tasks women normally perform in hospitals, and that isn’t one of them.”

  She should be used to it by now, this attitude so many people had toward the idea of women in medicine, but it still riled her. Some people thought women too emotionally fragile to be exposed to the horrors of a hospital, while others thought them mentally incapable of the rigors of medical study. And almost everyone agreed there was something not quite proper about a woman—a lady—who was familiar with, and touched, men’s bodies. “You’ve obviously never heard of Florence Nightingale,” she said crisply as they passed through the doorway to the high-ceilinged, whitewashed stairwell. “Or the Sisters of Charity. Believe it or not, there are actually places—such as Paris, or even Philadelphia—where women are allowed to be doctors.” She threw him a challenging look. “Does that shock you?”

  He didn’t look shocked. Instead, an unexpected gleam of amusement lit the depths of his eyes. He had unusually dark eyes for an American, almost black, she noticed; flashing Mediterranean eyes set deep beneath gently arched dark brows. With those high, wide cheekbones and his strong chin and darkly tanned skin, he reminded her of some lean, elegant Castilian swordsman . . . or a pirate, she thought, right off the Spanish Main.