“I think so. He admired your intelligence and strength, and still found you desirable.”
Her eyes widened, as if she were surprised he understood. Surprised anyone understood. “Yes, that’s it. The other men I’d met had all been intimidated by my knowledge, or laughed at my desire to learn medicine, but Philippe encouraged me. He admired me. Liked me. It was a heady experience. He was so handsome, so brilliant, so intense and passionate. Not just about medicine, but about art . . . music . . . life.”
“And the sins of the flesh,” Zach added dryly.
“Yes.” Again she smiled, a secret, naughty smile this time that sent a startling and unpleasant wave of jealousy coursing through him.
“And so, for love of him, you gave up your dream of going back to Paris and becoming a doctor. It seems ironic.”
The smile faded. “He filled my world. I couldn’t see anything beyond him. I was afraid his parents would oppose our marriage, but they didn’t.”
They crossed St. Anne Street, passing a billiard hall through whose open doors could be glimpsed white men, and colored ones, too, wearing black coats and brilliantly colored silk vests draped with gold watch chains that gleamed out of the shadowy interior. “Were you happy?” Zach asked, bringing his attention back to her face.
“At first, yes. He introduced me to a world I’d never dreamed existed.”
“The world of the senses,” Zach said. “Hashish and silken bonds and the erotic thrill of that fine line between pleasure and pain.”
They had reached Jackson Square now, with its rows of sycamores and elms moving gently in the river breeze. She turned to face him, her parasol slipping back so that the sun fell full on her face. “Yes.” She tilted her head, that defiant smile curling her lips, the small gold hoops in her ears moving against the dark thickness of her hair. “I enjoyed it. Does that shock you?”
“No.”
She took a deep breath, her chest rising as the breath caught and the smile faded, leaving her expression intense. “Because it’s in you, too, isn’t it?” she said suddenly, her gaze hard on his face. “That wildness, that need to push the bounds of what’s expected, what’s allowed.”
He didn’t deny it. How could he, given what had passed between them? “So what happened with Philippe?”
They turned to walk together along the rusting iron fence that bordered the square. “Dominic happened.” She threw him a quick, sideways glance. “Don’t get me wrong. Philippe was thrilled at the thought of having a child. But he . . .” She swallowed. “He lost interest in me, as his wife. At first I thought it was because he was afraid he might hurt the child I carried, or because he found my rounded body unattractive.” She fell silent for a moment, lost in the past. “Philippe liked women who were thin. Boyishly thin.”
Women like Claire La Touche, Zach thought; young women, built narrow of hip and small of breast, like a boy. The birth of a child would change that.
“I convinced myself that once I had Dominic,” she said, “things would go back to the way they had been.”
“But they didn’t?”
She shook her head, her chin lifting, her eyes narrowing as she gazed toward the forest of bare masts just visible above the levee. “Philippe started spending more and more time away from home. He was teaching at the medical school as well as working with my father and Henri at the hospital, so I didn’t think too much of it. He had his room in the garçonnière by then. He set it up when I was carrying Dominic—to keep from disturbing my sleep, he said, and then, later, because the baby’s crying at night disturbed him.”
She paused, the slim muscles in her throat working visibly as she swallowed. The heat had driven most of the people indoors by now. For a moment, there was no sound but the breeze, mingling with the raucous cries of the seagulls circling overhead. “One night, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I wanted him so badly.” A faint touch of color brushed her cheeks, as if she somehow found it shameful, that a young wife should desire her errant husband. “I decided to go to him. He’d had one of the students from the medical school there with him, earlier, but I thought the boy had gone home by then, it was so late.”
“He hadn’t?”
“No. I found them. Together.” Her hands twisted and turned on the handle of her sunshade, sending it spinning back and forth in quick, angry jerks. “After the boy left, Philippe told me he’d always been more interested in men than in women. He said he would never have married, except that he was his father’s only heir and he needed a son. He said he liked and admired me as a person—he even said that for a time he had desired me. He’d hoped marriage to me might ‘cure’ him. But of course it hadn’t, and he’d realized he didn’t want to be cured, anyway.”
She stared off into the distance, that bitter smile touching her lips again, although he could see the glint of unshed tears, too, in her eyes. “I felt so betrayed. And such a fool, for not having known the truth, for believing everything he’d told me. I think that’s what hurt more than anything, that betrayal of my trust, that lack of honesty. He should have told me before. He shouldn’t have let me think I was marrying one kind of man when I was actually marrying someone I didn’t even know. I remember telling him, that night, that I would never be happy again, and I think that, in a very real sense, I never have been.” In anyone else, the words might have been dismissed as melodrama. Only, there had never been anything the least bit melodramatic about this woman. “You don’t get over it easily,” she said, her voice hushed, “that kind of shattering disappointment in someone you love. Someone you’ve given up everything for.”
“So what happened?” Zach asked quietly.
She shrugged, a vague twitching of one shoulder that was so quintessentially French. “He promised it wouldn’t happen again. And I was so besotted with him, even then, that I believed him.” A fierceness came over her expression, a fierceness that was anger at herself as much as at Philippe. “I wanted to believe him. I wanted the life I’d dreamed of.”
She kept her face half-averted from him, her gaze on some distant point. Zach looked at the smooth skin of her cheek, the sparkling intelligence of those narrowed eyes. He wanted so desperately to touch her, to ease the misery within her, to ease the ache that burned within himself. Instead, he said, his voice hard, “He didn’t keep his promise, did he?”
She shook her head. “Less than a year later, I found him again, with a woman this time. And then I discovered there’d been others I hadn’t known about, men and women, both.”
“A lot of women would have left him, then.”
“I couldn’t. I’d have lost Dominic. The de Beauvaises would never have let him go.”
“Even if the truth had become known?”
She swung to face him, her eyes wide and a little wild as she searched his face. “Do you think I would do that to Dominic? You know how people are, what they would have said, how they would have treated him, how they would have treated Philippe. I couldn’t do that.”
“So you still cared about him? About Philippe?”
“Does that surprise you?” They turned into the square itself, passing through the high, open gates. “I don’t believe that love just . . . disappears. It dies slowly, one day at a time, one hurt, one betrayal. Even up to the end, Philippe and I were still friends, of a sort. We had our shared interest in medicine, the work at the hospital, Dominic. I don’t want you to think my life was miserable, because it wasn’t. It’s just . . . there was so much missing. And as time passed, we became more impatient with each other, more resentful.”
Clouds were building in the sky, to the north. Thick, high white clouds turned a breathtaking gold by the light of the sun. “That day at Congo Square,” Zach said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the distant storm, piling up fast, “Rose told me Philippe would never take a colored mistress because he didn’t want any child of his to suffer the way a child of mixed parentage suffers. She said he understood what it was like, not to be accepted for what you
are, not to feel as if you belong anywhere.” He glanced down at the woman beside him. “That’s what she meant, wasn’t it? He never felt he belonged, did he?”
“I don’t believe it’s something he chose.” Emmanuelle met his gaze, her expression open, vulnerable in a way he’d never seen it. “We can’t choose whom we desire, whom we love.”
“We can choose whether or not we act on those desires.” Yet even as Zach said it, he was aware of his own choice, in defiance of all logic and discipline, to act on his desire for this woman.
She shook her head, that sweet, sad smile touching her lips again. “Philippe was a hedonist. He didn’t believe in denying himself physical pleasures of any kind.”
They walked along in silence, the growing wind sending big dried magnolia leaves scuttling across the pavement before them. After a moment, Zach said, “Tell me what happened that day at the hospital, last spring.”
She blinked, as if she’d forgotten, for a moment, where this was all leading, and it disconcerted her to realize that he had not. “All right,” she said softly, although it was a moment before she was able to go on. “After I found Philippe that second time, we came to an agreement. We would continue to share the same house, to appear to others as man and wife. But he moved permanently into the garçonnière, and we agreed that as long as we were discreet, we would both be free to live our lives as we chose.” She tilted her head, her gaze hard on his face as she stared up at him, as if daring him to be shocked, to condemn her.
When he said nothing, she continued, her voice low, her words carefully chosen. “I never thought I would actually do anything. But as time passed . . .” She wrapped both her fists around the handle of her sunshade, gripping it so tightly, he wondered it didn’t crack. “I used to lie in bed at night and ache, simply ache for a man to hold me, to touch me, to join with me. It was an agony. Eventually I started thinking, If Philippe can take pleasure with others so easily, why can’t I? So I tried it. But it never really satisfied me.”
How many? Zach wondered. How many men had she taken, as she had taken him? The thought twisted his stomach, tore at something deep inside him. “Is that what happened with Charles Yardley?” he asked, his voice coming out harsher than he’d intended.
The wind fluttered the brim of her hat, loosened a lock of hair to send it across her cheek. She nodded, her face pale, one hand coming up to catch the stray curl and tuck it behind her ear in a gesture that struck him as oddly innocent and childlike.
“Did you know he was like Philippe?” Zach asked. “That he found pleasure in both men and women?”
“No. Not until that day at the hospital. Philippe really was in love with him, you know. Violently, passionately in love. We tend to think of those kinds of feelings as existing only between a man and a woman, but it isn’t always so.”
“And Claire? Did she know Philippe also . . . liked men?”
“She knew. She was far wiser about such things than I was at her age.”
It was so simply said, he wondered at her, this woman who could speak calmly of her husband’s infidelities and unorthodox carnal impulses. But then, he supposed she’d had years to accustom herself to it. “So exactly what was the quarrel about?” he asked, knowing that what he’d heard before had contained part, but only part of the truth.
“Claire knew of Philippe’s tastes, but she didn’t care. She loved him, anyway. It was when she found out he was in love with Charles Yardley that she threw the scene.”
Zach thought about that thin, cynical Englishman with his long, straight blond hair and negligent good looks. “What about Hans Spears?” he asked suddenly. “Was Philippe involved with him, as well?”
Reaching up, she collapsed her sunshade in one quick motion, her expression thoughtful. “I honestly don’t know.”
A silence opened up between them, a silence filled with the mournful cries of the gulls and the buffeting of a rising wind that sent the black ribbons of her widow’s hat streaming out before them. The sun had disappeared, overrun by the fast scuttling clouds that had turned darker, more threatening as they piled up. It always surprised him, how quickly it could come on to rain in this city.
“So that’s why you stopped believing in love?” he said after a moment. “Because one man was less than honest with you?”
“That’s not why.” She stared at the gathering storm, her head falling back, her slim neck arching in a way that made her look fragile, vulnerable. “When I first met Philippe, I was so in love with him, I believed it could never end.” A sad smile curled her lips. “How could something so intense, so violent, so all consuming simply . . . go away? But it did.”
“It doesn’t always.”
She brought her gaze back to his face. Her eyes were dark and troubled and a little wild. “Yet it can. No one can really promise forever. They can promise faithfulness, but they can’t promise their love won’t someday die. We can’t choose whom we love, and we can’t control when love dies.”
“So you do believe in love.”
Her breath caught, then eased out in a soft laugh. “Perhaps. Perhaps it’s simply the endurance of love I don’t believe in.”
A spattering of rain hit the pavement, big drops that filled the air with the smell of dust and damp stone. “Tell me something,” he said suddenly. “All those other men you slept with—”
“There were only three of them, including Charles.”
“—you said they didn’t satisfy your ache. Did you ever think it was because you didn’t love them?”
She swung to face him. He was surprised to see she was trembling all over, her face pale, her lips pressed together as if she were afraid of what she might accidentally say. The wind gusted around them, wet, wild, billowing out the skirts of her severe black gown and sending a heavy lock of hair across her face again. Reaching out, he tucked the windbown hair behind her ear, his fingertips brushing her cheeks. “And those nights you spent with me?” he said softly. “Did they satisfy you?”
“You know they did,” she whispered.
It was raining harder now. He could feel it, canted by the wind, striking his face. He put his hands on her shoulders. She was so fine boned and delicate, so damned vulnerable. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her close, hold her safe, and never let her go. And he was so afraid, so terribly afraid that he would never be able to hold her again. “Love is a leap of faith, Emmanuelle,” he said, his thumbs brushing back and forth against the soft, rain-wet flesh of her throat. “It always has been. Yet men and women have been making that leap for longer than anyone remembers.”
Fragrant and soft, the warm rain fell between them. He watched her throat convulse, watched the tears form in her eyes, although he knew she would never let them fall. “I can’t. Not again. I haven’t the courage.”
“You have more courage than anyone I’ve ever known, man or woman.”
She shook her head, a strange smile of sadness and pain touching her full, sensual lips. “Not for this.”
He wanted to dip his head and turn the sweet sadness of that beautiful, beloved mouth to wondrous joy. He wanted to crush her hard against him and hold her forever and make her love him. Instead, he let his hands slide down her arms in one last, desperate caress, and let her go. “When do you leave for Beau Lac?” he asked as they turned together to walk through the rain. They walked side by side, not touching, the gulf between them suddenly seeming so vast and unconquerable, he found it a wonder they’d ever managed to reach across it.
“Friday, early.” She could have put up her sunshade, used it as an umbrella, but she didn’t. “We stay until the end of September, when the weather breaks.”
September, he thought. By September, he would be gone. “I’ve decided to go over Butler’s head and put in a request to Washington that I be returned to my old unit. But I promise you this: I won’t go until I find this killer.”
She glanced up at him, her eyes bruised-looking, shadowed by a myriad of emotions he could only guess
at. Rain streamed down her cheeks, dripped from the ends of her black bonnet ribbons. And he thought, this is how I first saw you, that fateful night, in the cemetery. It was raining, and you were so wet. So wet and mysterious and eternally, seductively alluring.
“And if you don’t find him?” she said.
“I’ll find him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Battered, smudged, and warped, as if it had got wet at some point and then dried, the file landed on Zach’s desktop with a loud clap, a sheaf of loose papers spilling partway out of it.
“What’s this?” Zach asked, looking up into Hamish Fletcher’s florid, unsmiling face.
The splendid, red-blond mustaches twitched violently back and forth as Hamish worked his jaw muscles. “The file on the families of everyone who died or underwent an amputation at the Hospital de Santerre in the last two years.”
“Anything?”
“Not a blessed thing”
Another file hit Zach’s desk. “And this?”
“The report on the pharmacy poison books.” The big New Yorker took out a handkerchief and wiped his sweat-dampened forehead.
“Nothing?” said Zach.
“Nothing.”
Pushing back his chair, Zach stood and went to stare out the office’s window. It faced north, so that the sun never hit it, with the result that the glass in the lower panes had taken on a greenish tinge. Algae, he supposed. It seemed that what couldn’t rust or rot or mold in this town could still grow algae.
“So where do we go from here?” Zach asked, one shoulder resting against the frame, his gaze on the busy street outside. The light was so bright that for a moment it made his eyes hurt. The sun had come up hot that morning, glinting off the puddles left in the streets and baking the city with an intense, ferocious brilliance.
“Damned if I know. It ain’t easy, when your best suspects keep dying on you.” Hamish stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket and sank into the wooden armchair beside Zach’s desk. “I knew there was something off about that Englishman, from the first time I saw him.” It hadn’t sat well with Hamish, what Zach had told him about Yardley and de Beauvais. The gritty truth about Emmanuelle’s marriage, and her involvement with Yardley, Zach had kept to himself.
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