Iron Lace

by Lorena Dureau

  When Bastille Day came around in midsummer, she welcomed the opportunity to display openly to her guardian where her loyalties still lay. On the morning of July 14, therefore, she awakened in an especially martial mood and, together with Celeste, donned the French tricolors.

  When her astonished guardian ventured to ask what might be the cause of that sudden resurgence of patriotism, she instantly informed him that they were celebrating the Fete de la Revolution, when the people of Paris took the Bastille in 1789.

  “When Frenchmen struck their first blow for freedom against tyranny,” she added meaningly.

  Although Vidal didn’t particularly relish the sight of his two treasonous wards parading around the house the rest of that day with red, white, and blue cockades on their frilly white caps, he kept his silence, deciding there was no harm in letting them have their moment of “patriotism” as long as they had it there in the privacy of the plantation.

  After all, he didn’t want to widen the breach between him and Monique with any more arguments than necessary. Whenever he remembered the feel of that soft, sensuous body in his arms, he lost his urge to discuss politics. He had carried the scent of her perfumed warmth in his nostrils for days after their encounter in the vegetable patch; even now, just the sight of her could conjure the memory of that aroma and all the other sensations he had experienced during those brief moments of proximity he had shared with her.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to be casual around Monique. The faint odor of rose petals emanating from her as she whisked past him… a fleeting glimpse into the shadowy depths of her bosom… an unexpected play of light as it sifted through the gold of her hair… they would all set his pulses pounding and reawaken his desire for her. Just the sight of her familiar profile with its saucy upturned nose and those bold uplifted breasts pushing exuberantly against the tight confines of her bodice would immediately set him to remembering the feel of those hard tips boring into his chest begging to be caressed… robbing him of his slumber. Sometimes his desire for her would swell until he felt he would burst for want of her.

  In an effort to lessen the tension, Vidal readily consented to Monique’s suggestion that she and Celeste be allowed to invite some of their friends to the plantation for a party.

  There were difficulties when the girls presented their guest list to him and he felt obliged to strike off Maurice Foucher’s name. Monique flared up again so vehemently that he began to doubt the wisdom of having agreed to the idea of the fiesta in the first place.

  Thankfully, the overall excitement of planning for the party so swept Monique and her sister along that they were far too busy to fret over any single detail for long. Nevertheless, Monique resented her guardian’s refusal to let her invite her favorite beau, and although she knew it would be useless to argue the point further with Vidal, she chalked up the incident as simply one more reason to continue her resistance to his “constant meddling” in her life.

  Taking advantage of the fact that their guardian was off on another one of his weekends in New Orleans, the girls prevailed upon their more lenient grandmother to let them go into town the Saturday before their party to buy some last-minute things for the coming festivities.

  Overjoyed at being in the city once more, the girls led their governess a merry chase as they flitted about from shop to shop, counter to counter, merrily testing the exotic perfumes they longed to be given permission to wear, laughingly inhaling the different kinds of snuff that made them gasp and sneeze, wistfully fingering the softly scented silks and satins that they yearned to wear to the first ball of the next social season, and curiously stopping to investigate every pretty fan, bonnet, muff, and sundry item that attracted their attention along the way. Even the huge, sprawling market by the levee, with its more pungent odors and colorful merchandise, had a lusty, earthy atmosphere that the girls knew and loved.

  Their poor bewildered governess did her best to keep up with them, but whenever her charges put their curly heads together to contrive effective ways to extend their purchases beyond those originally agreed upon or to slip away alone for a few seconds, the two young girls usually won out.

  Consequently, as soon as Monique spotted her friend Maurice, it only took one of her “secret signals” to her sister to enlist the latter’s ready assistance in getting Mlle. Pop-Eyes out of the way for a minute.

  Understanding immediately what was required of her, Celeste proceeded to go into action, deftly pulling the unsuspecting governess along with her to another arcade at the far end of the market so they could purchase bonbons and dried fruit.

  Monique rapidly brought Maurice up to date, telling him first how her guardian had discovered the leaflets under her bed and suspected who had given them to her.

  “But I wouldn’t own up to it,” she assured her friend vehemently as he blinked rather bewilderedly at her over his chin-high cravat, trying to digest all she was trying to relate to him in a flood of breathless phrases before Mlle. Pop-Eyes would begin looking for her.

  The sandy-haired young man had chopped his hair into the shaggy “dog-ears” that characterized the latest style of the revolutionaries in France at that moment, and although he didn’t dare go so far as to go around New Orleans flaunting a red knitted tasseled cap and sans-culotte trousers in the faces of the Spanish authorities, he did presume to tack a tricolor cockade on the folded back brim of his black felt tricorne, as so many other young men of the colony were doing those days, just to remind everyone where his loyalties really lay.

  Without waiting for Maurice to reply, however, Monique raced on to tell him about the party she and her sister were planning to give at Le Rêve that coming Tuesday afternoon. Apologizing profusely, and not without a surge of anger, she explained to him how she had had his name on the invitation list but Vidal had struck it off.

  “Don’t fret yourself about it, my dear,” Foucher consoled her. “I understand perfectly. Besides, from the looks of things, you may be seeing less and less of your guardian anyway.”

  Monique was taken aback. “What… what do you mean?” she faltered.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know where he goes every time he comes to New Orleans? Why, he spends more time at the Ducole town house than he does at yours, I can assure you.”

  She tried to give the impression of complete nonchalance. “Oh, I remember he mentioned the name Ducole,” she said glibly. “The man is an émigré from Saint Domingue who is advising him on how to raise sugarcane.”

  But her friend chuckled in a sly manner that suggested he knew more than he was telling. “And what is Ducole’s pretty young sister Azema advising your guardian about?” he asked meaningly.

  Monique nervously fingered the ruffled edge of her white starched fichu. “A-Azema?” she echoed incredulously. An icy chill was slowly beginning to creep over her.

  “Yes. She and Henri Ducole have one of the most expensive town houses in the city and a plantation near Lake Pontchartrain that they say is like a sultan’s court, where they lavishly entertain only the cream of New Orleans society. Your cousin is one of their most frequent guests, of course, at both the town house and their plantation, since it seems he and Azema have quite a tendre for each other. Some people think there’s just a flirtation between them, but others speculate that your guardian might marry her, even if she is already his mistress, since she’s as rich as she is beautiful and probably has a handsome dowry to compensate for any laxity she might have in her morals.”

  Monique’s wide gray eyes were popping almost as much as Mlle. Baudier’s at that moment.

  “I… I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she insisted indignantly. The thought that her guardian might have a mistress tucked away somewhere so shattered her that she refused to accept it.

  It didn’t matter just then whether she had a right to be angry or not. She was. She felt betrayed. Maurice was saying something else to her, but his words were indistinguishable… far away. In the midst of the chaos within her, the cor
e of her had suddenly gone numb. The threads of her thoughts seemed to have snagged and knotted over that one fact—her guardian had a mistress! Somewhere there was a woman he held in his arms and made love to. While she had been dreaming of the touch of his hand, he had been caressing some other woman’s breasts. While she had wondered how his lips might feel cupped over hers, he had been kissing someone else. And those long, lean thighs of his that had pressed against hers so excitingly had held that other woman between them. What a fool she had been to think that she had pressed against a part of him known only to her!

  Maurice had been babbling on and on, and suddenly she realized by his silence and the expectant look on his face that he was waiting for her to reply. But she had no idea what he’d been saying. It was impossible to hold a conversation with him or anyone else at that moment. There was only one thought in her mind and it overwhelmed all others.

  “I… I’m sorry, Maurice,” she apologized, “but I really have to go.” Her breath was coming in such labored gasps she could hardly get the words out. “I… I don’t want Mlle. Pop-Eyes to see me talking to you. There would be the devil to pay if she did.”

  The freckles on Maurice’s face were more noticeable as he paled behind them.

  “You don’t think your guardian would be capable of going to the authorities and causing me trouble, do you?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, no, I don’t think so. He said he wouldn’t, but then you can never tell about a Spaniard!” she replied absently as she thought that she certainly didn’t know what to think about one particular Spaniard at all.

  She handed the half-filled glass back to Foucher and murmured a hasty goodbye, leaving the young man staring after her in bewilderment.

  The picture of her guardian holding some faceless woman in his arms was all she could see in vivid relief against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the busy marketplace as hot tears scalded her flushed cheeks. Rage was churning inside of her as she ran back down the length of the aisle to rejoin Celeste and the governess. She was furious with Maurice for having told her such disquieting news, furious with her guardian for having had the effrontery to take a mistress, and, most of all, furious with herself for having let the news upset her so much!

  Chapter Sixteen

  Monique’s fury increased as the evening progressed and their guardian didn’t arrive at the town house.

  Celeste sensed that something was drastically wrong, but it wasn’t until the girls had retired to the privacy of their second-floor bedchamber in the town house, where they were to spend the night before returning to the plantation, that they could really talk.

  It didn’t take Celeste long to wheedle the news out of her sister. Brimming over with rage, Monique blurted out the momentous announcement that their guardian had a mistress.

  “He’s probably with her this very minute,” she fumed, “and that’s why he hasn’t come home yet.”

  Celeste sighed sadly but, with all the worldliness of her fifteen years, seemed to be taking the news more philosophically.

  “Well, all considered, I guess it’s to be expected,” she declared resignedly as she sat upright in her four-poster bed with the mosquito netting hanging from the tester drawn tightly closed around her. “After all, our guardian is a man, and a very handsome one, at that.”

  “I… I’m just surprised, that’s all,” said Monique with studied indifference. “I didn’t think he was the type. After all, he’s usually so cold, so distant…”

  In the privacy of her mosquito net, Monique was remembering with mixed emotions how tense and stiff he had been, despite the warm pulsating of his body, when he had held her so close to him in the vegetable patch. “He’s either a hypocrite or a cold fish,” she declared suddenly, with ever-increasing annoyance.

  Celeste laughed at her sister’s extremes. “He doesn’t strike me as either one,” she insisted. “I suspect he’s simply tried to be discreet around us. I heard grandmother and one of her lady friends talking once in the parlor, and they were saying that just about any bachelor, once he’s of age, has at least one mistress—sometimes even more than one— hidden away somewhere.”

  Monique tossed her pale blond mane angrily as the nightcandle on the table between their two beds caught the steel glints flashing in her eyes, despite the tent of misty netting hanging around her.

  “Ah, yes! And I wager our seemingly straight-laced guardian has had more than his share of mistresses over the years, too!” she observed sarcastically. “He probably made the rounds of every courtesan in the king’s court in Madrid, and then some while he was traveling around Europe!”

  Celeste couldn’t help smiling at the bundle of contradictions her older sister seemed to be at that moment. “Well, I wouldn’t say anything to grandmother about what Maurice told you,” she warned Monique. “She’d be angry if she heard us talking about such things, and what’s more, she’d probably say our guardian’s love life isn’t any of our business, which would be right, of course, for it really isn’t.”

  A hush fell over the dimly lit room as the two girls lay back in their respective four-posters, each in her own little island of mosquito netting, lost in her private world of thoughts.

  The minutes ticked slowly by. Then suddenly Celeste heaved a long, deep sigh and her eyes had a soft dreamy look in the flickering candlelight—a look they so often had when she spoke of her guardian.

  “He must be a splendid lover,” she murmured wistfully.

  “Celeste! Hush, you naughty girl!” exclaimed Monique, sitting bolt upright in her bed once more. “What a scandalous thing to say!”

  “But he… he’s so masculine… so virile!”

  “I think he’s horrid… absolutely repulsive!”

  Her young sister giggled. “I bet if he ever kissed you, you wouldn’t say such a thing!” She gave a little shiver of delight at the very thought of Cousin Miguel kissing her, but Monique only gave an angry grunt for a reply and flopped back exasperatedly against her pillow.

  Flipping over then to her side, Monique turned her back toward her sister and closed her eyes, trying to blot all thoughts of Miguel Vidal de la Fuente from her mind. Try as she would, she couldn’t get the picture of him lying with that wanton Azema Ducole out of her mind. She couldn’t check the thoughts of him holding that woman naked in his arms, kissing and caressing her as he passionately pressed her against that fascinating long hard body of his that she could still feel imprinted against the length and breadth of her own being.

  She wondered whether Azema’s body was better than hers. Did the sight of that woman’s breasts set him on fire? Was he passionate with Azema Ducole, instead of tense and controlled as he had been with her? She tried to push back the picture of him holding another woman’s breasts and finding them more desirable than her own.

  Her stomach was tied in a thousand knots. Hour after hour she lay awake, unable to check the torrent of thoughts racing through her mind, each one torturing her more than the other. Then she would be furious with herself for having allowed the news to have affected her that way. Why should she care what Miguel Vidal did in his leisure moments?

  The night candle was sputtering in its holder before she finally dozed off, exhausted from the emotions that had racked her for so many hours. But even then she found no peace, for Miguel Vidal was there again disturbing her dreams. This time, however, it was a sweet torment, for now she was the one he was making love to. Once again she could feel his arms encircling her as they had that day in the fields, but in her fantasy his hands were sweeping up and down her body and lingering on her breasts.

  Even in her slumber, her breasts were swelling to that phantom touch and she could feel the cords of his thighs holding her fast as he pressed them against hers. He was showering her with kisses and telling her what a beautiful, desirable woman he thought she was, when suddenly some brazen naked woman pushed between them and, with mocking laughter, took her place in Miguel’s arms… and he went right on making love to her!

>   With a start, Monique awakened sobbing and trembling, her breath coming in sharp gasps and her pulse pounding wildly. She cast a sheepish glance over in Celeste’s direction, but her sister was sleeping peacefully. The candle had burned out and only a thin wisp of smoke still wafted upward from it, barely visible in the first streaks of dawn filtering in through the shutters.

  She continued to lie there, listening and starting at every noise… waiting… hoping… hoping against hope that her guardian might still arrive and somehow disprove everything Maurice had said about him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Monique awakened cross and sleepy. Mlle. Baudier noted the girl’s sullen mood and scolded her more than usual, commenting that she hoped their stopping off at Sunday mass before returning to the plantation would do her some good, even if it only served to inspire her to mend her ways a little.

  When Celeste and Monique passed in front of the impressive new cathedral, they cast curious glances at it, noting how the work had progressed with surprising rapidity in just those few months since they had been away at the plantation and wondering how much longer it would be before the dedication.

  With the little black lace headscarf that her guardian had given her when he had first arrived from Spain weighing heavily on her head that morning, Monique filed into the makeshift church in the guardhouse and sat fanning herself dejectedly in the Chausson pew beside Celeste and Mlle. Baudier. She hated the prospect of having to sit for at least an hour in that stuffy hall listening to one of those “pangs of hell” sermons she knew to be forthcoming. Nor did she especially look forward to the long, hot ride back to Le Rêve on the dusty, bumpy river road in the scorching heat of that typical August day.