Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  “What in God’s name are we looking for?” exclaimed the indignant sheriff. “Are we to go through that poor lady’s armoire, are we to rifle her linens and her dresses and her undergarments?”

  “You are looking for one thousand dollars in gold coin,” retorted the messenger. “So I would think the armoire might be a very likely place to begin.”

  Sheriff Petit rose ponderously from his desk, lumbered to the door of the prison room, and threw it open with more than necessary force. “Octave,” he shouted into the dim room beyond, “have you got a thousand dollars in gold at your place?”

  “I do not,” came the offended reply.

  The sheriff turned a glacial eye upon the court official. “There you are,” he said. “He don’t have it.”

  The official was not amused by the sheriff’s complacency. A boy was sent out to call in three men to be deputized, and in the afternoon, accompanied by the court official, they set out for the Favrot house.

  Though not grand, this was a comfortable, spacious cottage, with wide porches across the front and the back, the front giving on to a lane of old oaks, the back upon a wide green lawn ending at the sparkling blue of the bayou. A fanciful screened gazebo, with a domed roof and classical columns, appeared to float upon a cloud of pink azaleas near the water’s edge. Odile’s mother, a dignified lady in whose features the original stamp of her daughter’s loveliness was still evident, greeted her visitors without suspicion, for she knew the deputies by their first names. The court official stepped forward, proffering the order to search the premises, while the townsmen hung back sheepishly, embarrassed by their mission. Madame Chopin studied the document, clearly mystified. “What does it mean?” she asked calmly.

  “It means these men must come in now and search your house.”

  “My daughter is ill,” she said coldly. “Surely this can wait until she has recovered.”

  At this the deputies literally hung their heads, but the court official was firm. “I’m afraid not, ma’am,” he said. “The warrant must be carried out without notice.”

  Madame Chopin gave the official, who was young enough to be her son, a long, searching look. Something she saw, perhaps his inherent obstinacy, piqued her interest. “Because you think we might take the opportunity to hide whatever it is you’re looking for,” she observed.

  “That’s not for me to say, ma’am,” he replied. “The court is very clear on the procedure, and it’s my duty to carry out the wishes of the court.”

  “The wishes,” she repeated.

  “The orders,” he corrected. “It’s a court order you’re holding.”

  As she folded the paper and handed it back to the young man, the faintest of smiles played at the corners of her mouth. “I see,” she said. “My daughter is resting in the parlor. I don’t want her needlessly disturbed. I’ll bring her out and sit with her in the gazebo while you gentlemen”—she nodded at the miserable trio skulking on the steps—“go about your business here.”

  As she turned to reenter her daughter’s house, the young man stepped forward, his hand raised as if to make a salient point. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll have to accompany you.”

  Her only reaction was a visible drawing up of the spine, a slight tilt of her chin in the direction of her unwelcome visitor. “Very well,” she said. “Come along.”

  The three deputies retreated to the shade of an oak tree, scarcely speaking as they waited, each of them feeling in his own conscience the burden of this unsolicited employment. Rifling the personal possessions of a wealthy man upon whom adversity had fallen as surely as it falls on the indigent and the poor was not an honorable activity. If Octave had been a skinflint or a brute, there might be some pleasure in seeing him brought low, but he was a gentleman, a fair employer, a man whose sense of duty to his family had been sorely tested and proved sufficient to the test.

  At last the screen door opened and Odile Favrot, supported by her mother and followed with ecclesiastical solemnity by the court official, stepped out. Odile was dressed in black, her pale face partially obscured by her dark hair, which fell loosely over her shoulders. She kept her eyes down, inclining her head toward her mother’s ear and mumbling something the men couldn’t make out. She was spectrally thin; the forearm that showed beyond the sleeve of her dress was nearly fleshless. Nervously she tapped her long, skeletal fingers against her mother’s shoulder. The two women descended the steps and turned from the walk onto the worn path to the gazebo. It was a bright, clear, fresh fall day, but to the men following the melancholy passage of this wraith, whose beauty and vivacity had once entranced the town in a blissful spell, it was as if a cold, dark wave rose in her wake and smote the bright shore on which they wonderingly stood.

  The official summoned the men to the house and directed them into various rooms, reminding them that the gold might not be all in one place, that they were to open every drawer and search under and behind all furniture, inside all sacks and casks in the kitchen. They glared at him as a group, but once separated, each set to work resolutely. Odile’s arrangements were tidy, which made their job easier and inclined them to leave everything as they had found it. The official himself examined the baby’s room, noting that to take the babe without alarming the household, the thief would have had to climb to the porch roof and slip in through the window. He knew it was the prosecutor’s theory that Felix Kelly had never entered the house and that Octave had sold the child to him for a bag of gold. As he opened the chest of drawers, which was a fine oak piece with drawer pulls carved in the shape of leaves and an ebony inlay on the top, he wondered why a man so obviously as wealthy as Octave Favrot would take money from a man he must have despised.

  In the chest he found folded linens scented by a lavender sachet, a drawer of neatly pressed baby clothes, and another containing soft toys, stuffed animals, and a smooth satin ball. The poor child, blind as he was, couldn’t see the button eyes and sewed-on smile of the plush bear, but he could probably feel the shape and make some image in his mind. He was said to be a bright little boy, in spite of his affliction, who learned to speak early, loved music, and walked boldly with his hands out before him, unruffled when he fell, as he frequently did. His mother adored him.

  The official turned to the child’s bed. Surely there was nothing to be found there. Absently he lifted the pillow and stood looking down in surprise at a shiny coin. He picked it up. A five-dollar gold piece.

  Perhaps the money was hidden coin by coin, throughout the house. He carried his find to the parlor, where a deputy was carefully returning a vase to the sideboard. “Did you look inside the vase?” asked the official.

  “ ’Course I did,” replied the man.

  “I found a gold piece,” the official said, holding out the coin. “Under the pillow in the child’s bed.”

  His colleague took the piece and turned it over in his hand. “What in this world was it doing there?” he said.

  “There must be others,” the official insisted. “They must be hidden all over the house.”

  But three hours later, when it was agreed that the search was ended, they had not found another coin of any kind.

  Because of her illness, Odile had stopped visiting her husband, and it was now Madame Chopin who brought the daily meal to the sheriff’s office. The day after the fruitless search she arrived in high dudgeon and made a fuss about the men searching through her daughter’s possessions. Her son-in-law had admitted his offense, she reminded the sheriff. Why should his family be subjected to this indignity? “How dare those fools come lounging around the door and then drive us straight out of the house!” she exclaimed. Her daughter was so ill the doctor feared for her life; was the law not tempered by such mercy as you would show a wounded animal?

  Sheriff Petit had the thought that the mercy she referred to generally came in the form of a bullet, but he kept that observation to himself. Madame Chopin was notoriously full of herself and indifferent to others. She was always will
ing and eager to express her low opinion of the town officials, whom she compared unfavorably to those in Vacherie, where she was from. Still, everyone knew she was devoted to her daughter, and doubtless she had suffered mightily of late, so he counseled himself to be charitable. “Seems Felix took a lot of money out of the bank right before he died,” he replied calmly. “Gold coin. And it disappeared. So they have to look for it.”

  “Why would Octave Favrot have money belonging to that scoundrel, I ask you?” said Madame Chopin, raising her voice, as if, thought the sheriff, he was hard of hearing.

  “I can’t think of a reason,” agreed the sheriff. “But when money goes missing, it constitutes a motive.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “A motive for what?”

  “Well…” The sheriff paused. His sympathy for his interlocutress faded. She had called his men fools for doing their duty, and the dead man a scoundrel, which might have been true, the sheriff couldn’t say, but Felix was dead and couldn’t defend himself. So he decided to set Madame Chopin straight. “Murder,” he said.

  Cesar Denis had worked out various scenarios that might account for the disappearance of the gold, but the one he kept returning to was this: Felix Kelly had offered to buy his blind son from Octave for a thousand dollars, and Octave had agreed. The exchange was made, but somehow Odile found out and sent Octave after her seducer to demand the return of her son. By that time Octave had hidden the money somewhere. He took up his rifle and pursued Felix and the baby into the woods, where he shot them in cold blood. Now he was free of both the man he despised and the usurping son who was a burden to him. The money was secure and he had no immediate need for it. The perfect crime.

  But without the gold, without any witnesses to the crime or to any social exchange, no matter how fleeting, between Felix and Octave, with Odile too sick to attend the trial, the public’s natural sympathy for her and for her husband, and the universal antipathy of the town toward the outsider, Felix Kelly, Cesar despaired of making a case that would persuade even a disinterested jury—which he was not likely to find in Edgard, where the Favrot clan numbered both relatives and investments—that Octave was guilty of anything more serious than involuntary manslaughter. And in fact, when his investigations were complete and the matter was finally brought before a jury, this was the charge.

  The trial lasted two chilly, rainy days in November. The accused, seated next to his lawyer, who exuded confidence, followed the proceedings intently. Octave had never denied that he killed Felix Kelly, and this made his situation before the court less a matter of finding guilt than of assessing its gravity. Cesar presented his findings, speculated upon the possible motives, but with no witnesses and much of his conjecture objected to or prohibited by the laws governing admissible evidence, his argument had a quality of desperation that caused the jurors to study their hands politely. When it was over, these gentlemen deliberated for under two hours, during which time they were served several pots of coffee and some excellent cakes sent over from the baker in Villedeau. When they returned to their box, Cesar noted that several of them gazed directly at the accused with expressions of benignity and that when the foreman stood up to read the verdict, an elderly juror drew two cigars from his breast pocket and offered one to his neighbor.

  So it was with no surprise that he learned the jury had found Octave Favrot not guilty. Not guilty of anything any respectable gentleman wouldn’t have done in the circumstances.

  Octave listened to the verdict; rose from his seat, solemnly shook his lawyer’s outstretched hand, and, without comment, walked calmly and with great dignity out of the court.

  “Some kind of justice was done,” opined my uncle. “And it’s just as well that poor Odile doesn’t have to suffer more than she already has.”

  I tended to agree with him, but as events unfolded, our assumption that justice had been well and properly served and that now our neighbors might return to their ordinary lives proved too sanguine.

  Within a month of the trial, Odile, not in perfect health but having recovered enough of her strength and her wits to make a choice, determined to move to her mother’s house. A flimsy explanation was offered to the curious—and the entire town was curious—that the Chopin house was closer to town, making the care of the patient easier for her principal nurse. Octave professed himself to be of the opinion that this move was the best option for all concerned. The rumor that swirled in the dust the Favrots’ maid Marie swept out the front door was that Odile couldn’t bear the sight of her husband and refused absolutely to speak one word to him.

  Octave occupied himself with his business interests, which thrived so exuberantly that he was soon exporting his rice as far away as Atlanta. Between the trips he made to expand his market and his frequent hunting or fishing expeditions, he was not much among us. When he was, he seemed unchanged: confident, courteous, generous. He employed many of the local carpenters and tradesmen. He enlarged the gardens at his house, bought new furniture for the parlor, had a fishing boat constructed from his own design, and ordered an expensive rifle from a catalog at Mat Girot’s store. Many a young lady gazed upon him as he passed along the main street on his piebald gelding and thought to herself, It’s a shame, such a man, and no wife waiting for him at home with his supper, no pretty child rushing out to greet him on his return.

  Two years passed, during which time I completed my law studies and moved to New Orleans, where I was employed as a clerk in the chambers of Judge Antoine Dubonnet, whose reputation for fairness and exactitude was borne out by my own observation. In the second summer an outbreak of yellow fever sent everyone who could leave as far as they could get from the pestilential streets of the city. Judge Dubonnet closed his offices for a fortnight, and with the encouragement of my dear uncle, I resolved to spend the break in Villedeau.

  I arrived on a torrid afternoon and settled myself in my accustomed lodgings. Villedeau was a welcome and salubrious refuge, and it struck me as unvarying, like a storybook village lost in time. But that evening, over glasses of his excellent cognac, my uncle apprised me that much had changed in the town, most glaringly in the fortunes of Octave Favrot.

  It was as if the fates had turned against him and in three strokes reduced him to dust. The first blow came in the spring, bearing an unprosaic name: sheath blight. This plague transformed his rice fields from ranks of healthy green shoots to scattered patches of blotchy red and tan sticks, each gradually sealed inside what looked like a snake’s skin. When the breeze rustled through them, they made a rattling sound, so that they were as horrid to the ear as to the eye.

  The second stroke, in August, was the stock market panic, which wiped out several of our richest families that year, as many were invested in railroad stock, or in the banks that folded hard upon the revelations of chicanery in the management of those enterprises. Octave, it was said, lost more than most.

  The third stroke was fire. Octave was away on one of his hunting trips, or perhaps he was in New Orleans trying to save his fortune, when lightning struck an oak that shaded the porch of his house. A heavy branch fell onto the roof and smoldered until the dry wood shingles ignited, and because there was no one there to stop them, the flames spread, consuming the house all through the night. It was not until the morning, when Mat Girot, riding from his mother’s house to his dry goods store in town, spotted a thick column of smoke rising over the treetops, that the alarm was raised and the fire brigade set out. By the time they arrived, the house was a mass of charred lumber. Flames flickered in the ruins, consuming the last hard bits of the furniture.

  Octave responded to this thorough reversal of his fortunes with admirable fortitude. He didn’t rave against the gods, as some men might have, or take to drink and appear sullen and sodden in the streets. He sold most of the land adjoining the house and, with the assistance of the neighbor who bought it, constructed a small three-room cabin on the original site. He planted a garden plot, bought a few sticks of furniture, and moved in. No young ladies sm
iled upon him in the town, where he walked now, having sold his horses. He appeared to embrace a stoical solitude that was part of his nature. He spent more and more time hunting, fishing, trapping. He still had his boat, which he lived on, sometimes for days on end. On his return he sold his plunder—all manner of fish and birds; nutria, raccoon, and squirrel skins; crabs and crayfish; the occasional alligator—to his neighbors, who, recalling his largesse in better days, were willing to pay more than he asked. Octave’s fall from grace, my uncle concluded, was a cautionary tale. A lesser man would have been broken by it.

  And what of Odile? I asked my relative. Had she recovered her health? Did her husband’s nobility and suffering reconcile her to him? Did she not, perhaps, send him some message or token of reconciliation?

  “Ah, there,” said Uncle Leonce, taking up the cognac bottle and refilling our glasses, “is the saddest and strangest part of the whole strange and sad affair.”

  Odile had indeed improved in health and was well enough to appear in public, always dressed in black, at Mass and occasionally at her mother’s side in the market. She was now a tragic beauty, enveloped in a nearly palpable cloud of melancholy. One gazed upon her, as she told her beads in the family pew or idly examined a mountain of cooking pears at the fruit stall, and sighed. She wasn’t a widow or entirely a wife. No swain could come forward to court her; her life was closed. Yet she was still young; blood coursed in her veins; the will to flourish might reemerge, and so the town watched her with tender concern.

  But, to her well-wishers’ chagrin, she stubbornly refused to thrive and kept her thoughts on death. She was seen repeatedly, late in the evening, when, as my uncle put it, decent women were in bed with their husbands, gliding through the cemetery in her black mourning clothes, past all the monuments and markers designating the final addresses of the former respectable and much-lamented citizens of our village, to stand in the gloomiest corner at the grave of Felix Kelly. She brought no flowers; she didn’t kneel to offer a prayer or clear the weeds that obscured the stone. She just stood there. The gravedigger, from his shed near the gate, observed her, and Father Paul, returning one night from administering the last rites to a communicant who lived at the edge of town, happened to cross the cemetery and saw her there. He stopped to remonstrate with her, but at his approach she fled, frantic, he reported, as if she had seen a ghost.