Sweet Piracy

by Blake, Jennifer

  On that particular Sunday, it did not boast the attraction of the owner of Felicity and his secretary-cousin. The new gowns and bonnets the ladies wore were wasted.

  Perhaps not quite wasted. The afternoon brought an extraordinary influx of male visitors to the gallery of Beau Repos. Hippolyte Gravier brought with him a half dozen of the young bloods of the area to cluster around Estelle. Amélie was not without her court also, though they tended to be older and more staid. And of course Fletcher Masterson, looking like a sober blond giant among the dark and laughing Creoles, came to sit beside Caroline for a proper half hour.

  He and Caroline talked of the same things they had talked of for the better part of two months. Caroline asked after his mother, a widow and semi-invalid who seldom stirred beyond the walls of her home. He told her of the progress of his crop; he had only that year switched from cane to cotton and was anxious about the success of the venture. He mentioned having met his near neighbor at Felicity one day on the road, and spoke with wonder verging on contempt of his stated aim to refrain from making a crop until the following year. When he picked up his hat and cane and finally took himself off, Caroline realized that beyond a perfunctory inquiry about her health, he had expressed no interest whatsoever in her or her activities.

  The most diverting thing about the entire day was the manner in which M’sieur Philippe hovered nearby while Fletcher was in attendance, directing malevolent looks at the American’s broad back while his target was oblivious of the tutor’s presence. It ceased to be amusing when M’sieur Philippe, with great adroitness, slipped in front of two young gentlemen to take Fletcher’s vacated chair. He did not leave her side for the remainder of the evening. Even when she got up to see about replenishing the refreshments, he went with her. When Colossus could not be found at once, the tutor insisted on being allowed to pull the tasseled rope to summon the butler, for all the world as though she lacked the strength for such a task.

  In the back sitting room that evening the ladies held a postmortem over the afternoon.

  “I think, in fact I am certain, that Hippolyte Gravier is enamored of me,” Estelle announced with simple pride.

  Her mother smiled. “But of course.”

  “I have decided to forgive him for pulling my hair when we were children.”

  “Very magnanimous,” Caroline observed.

  “You are laughing at me, yes? But I do not regard it. I am a woman now with many, many suitors. I have learned the value of being mistress of my terrible temper.”

  Caroline listened to this speech with an inclination to allow her mouth to drop open. “Commendable,” she said when she had recovered.

  “Astonishing,” her mother, a deal more taken aback, dubbed it. “And where did you chance upon such wisdom?”

  “Mam’zelle Caroline has been telling me forever, but it was the Marquis who warned me that nothing gives suitors a disgust of a lady so much as an unbridled display of temperament. Only very great actresses are forgiven such lapses.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Madame said faintly, looking around with a distrait expression for her vinaigrette.

  “You told him you wished to become an actress?” Amélie asked in a tone compounded half of horror, half fascination.

  “Certainement. He was most understanding. He is acquainted with a number of actresses, you see.”

  Madame fell back, grasping the small bottle Caroline thrust into her hand. “Oh, never, never in my life did I ever think to hear a daughter of mine admit to speaking of such things to a gentleman.”

  “M’sieur le Marquis explained to me how it is. He warned me I must be circumspect—”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Madame moaned.

  “And he was kind enough to explain the hard work, the long hours, the uncomfortable lodgings, and the lack of respect, which are the lot of th-thes — ah, bah, I cannot say this word.”

  “Thespians, I believe, is the word you are searching for,” Caroline supplied.

  “Yes, I was most interested to hear these things. Everyone else had told me only that to become an actress was not done. Hein! Of course it is done! There are hundreds, are there not? Knowing the consequences, I am now armed to make my life’s decision.”

  Amélie frowned, drawing winged brows together. “I don’t believe the Marquis can have meant you to take his warning in that light.”

  “Then you do not know him as well as I,” Estelle asserted.

  “Perhaps not,” Amélie agreed unhappily.

  Madame gave another heartrending wail.

  In a rare daylight appearance, Tante Zizi had honored the gallery that afternoon with her presence. After the failure of Rochefort to call, balking the elderly woman of her prey, all expected her to withdraw once again to the sanctuary of her room. She did not. Not only did she take the evening meal in company, she commanded Colossus to arm her into the sitting room where she sat enthroned on the only Louis XIV chair of which Beau Repos was possessed.

  Now she slapped her fan in the palm of one white, clawlike hand. “My faith, Marie, do not make such a to-do about nothing. When I was Estelle’s age, men were expected to be knowledgeable about actresses and the like. Experience in the male was thought to be the greatest guarantee for happiness in a marriage.”

  “When you were young many things were different.” Madame, stung, sat up straight. In her agitation, she took too hearty a sniff at her smelling salts, then coughed, her eyes watering.

  “Very true,” Tante Zizi agreed, “and I do not judge the change for the better.”

  “I wish only that which is right for my daughters,” Madame proclaimed, ruining the effect by speaking through a handkerchief applied to her nose.

  “Let us be truthful,” Tante Zizi corrected dryly. “You wish to ally your daughters with the nobility.”

  Madame’s mouth took on the spiteful twist of the weak enemy outmaneuvered but not quite disarmed. “I wish, at all events, to ally them respectably!”

  This was a telling blow indeed. In her youth Tante Zizi had visited Paris during the last golden days of France, the reign of Louis XV. A girl of great beauty, on her presentation at Court she had attracted the attention of many of the nobility and of the young King. For a short time she had been blissfully happy, living in the elegant rabbit warren of Versailles. And then one day she had climbed into a carriage and had ridden away without looking back. Returning home to New Orleans, she had gone about for a few years steadfastly refusing all offers of marriage. After a time she went out less and less. On the death of King Louis XV of France she donned mourning and ceased to go out at all. Her parents died, and then the brother who was head of the family. The title of family head, plus the responsibility for Tante Zizi, fell to his son, Bernard Delacroix.

  Tante Zizi had money of her own from some unnamed source; she could have lived alone. On the entreaties of her nephew, she had come for a visit — and stayed. She and Marie Delacroix were not especially compatible, however. The elderly woman formed the habit of keeping to her rooms, allowing no one to enter without express permission.

  Tante Zizi could be extraordinarily sensitive; she could also be thick-skinned when it suited her purpose. Spreading her fan, she began to ply it, her black eyes hard.

  “There can be no question of that,” she said. “What must be asked is how?”

  “I declare, the means of it has me quite distracted — one cannot force the man to come, after all. And here is Amélie moping about the house like a shadow and Estelle running to look down the road a hundred times a day and changing her gown each time in between.”

  Tante Zizi waited until the diatribe ran down of its own accord. “The man cannot be forced to come, but he may be invited, may he not?”

  “Would it not look too particular?” Madame Delacroix ventured.

  “You will not invite him alone,” the old lady said stringently.

  “No, it will be a grand ball!” Estelle exclaimed in rapt enjoyment of the prospect.

  “It will be a soirée
of perhaps three dozen guests, with dancing and afterward, a supper,” Tante Zizi said firmly. “Mam’zelle Caroline can play—”

  “And I—” Amélie inserted.

  “If only we could be sure the Marquis is not already engaged for the date we choose.”

  “There is one way to be certain. Ask!”

  Estelle looked at her great-aunt with bright eyes. “I — that is, Amélie and Mam’zelle Caroline and I — could drive over to Felicity tomorrow to discover if the Marquis and his cousin are free.”

  “No,” Tante Zizi said.

  “No, no!” her mother cried.

  Caroline set her mouth in a firm line. “Under no circumstances will I lend countenance to a visit to an unmarried gentleman in his living quarters. No circumstances whatsoever.”

  4

  PREPARATION FOR THE soirée went on apace. Madame Delacroix’s enthusiasm held while the guest list was drawn up and the invitations written. When the missives were placed in a ribbon-bedecked basket and given into the keeping of a groom to be carried from house to house in the district, Madame took to her bed. Not even the tidings that the Marquis would be delighted to put in an appearance on the night in question could bring more than a feeble smile to her lips. Summoning Caroline, she casually laid the burden of the entertainment on the governess’s shoulders.

  Amélie proved unexpectedly helpful. Beneath her quiet exterior she had an intensely practical nature. It was she who organized the maids into a work force which thoroughly cleaned the main reception rooms of the house, cleared the salon of all furniture, and polished the floor with beeswax for dancing.

  Caroline concentrated on the menu, relying heavily on the seafood that was in season and fresh vegetables. Her rapport with the huge woman who presided over the kitchen was excellent, and she suffered no qualms over the food the guests would be offered.

  Estelle, at her own request, had charge of the decorations. She would tell no one precisely what she had in mind in the way of beautification, but she went daily to the garden to the rear of the house to check on the progress of the blooms under cultivation. The elderly gardener, in expectation of seeing his domain denuded for the party, usually disappeared at the sight of Mam’zelle Estelle. On no account could he be persuaded to tell her which of the blossoms might be expected to be at their peak in a week’s time; this, he said, would be a betrayal.

  Estelle grew daily more incensed with the old man and more anxious that the quality of the decorations would not adequately reflect the skill of the person responsible. The afternoon before the day of the dinner party her fears crystallized.

  “Mam’zelle! Mam’zelle Caroline, where are you?”

  Caroline, finding a few minutes free, had taken five-year-old Mathilde out onto the gallery for a lesson in her letters and the English language. She looked up in expectation of no less than a domestic disaster when Estelle came bursting from the house.

  “Mam’zelle, you cannot refuse me, you must not. Say you will come with me to the forest to find the magnolia, the fern, and ivy to make splendid the salon for tomorrow evening.”

  “Oh, Estelle, do you really think—”

  “But yes, certainly, Mam’zelle. The house will look like the abode of the gens du peuple with only a few straggly bouquets. I desire the grand effect, the luxuriance, of much, much greenery. There shall be garlands on the bannisters of the steps, magnificent edifices of flowers in the entrance, sprays of blossom on the fireplaces, and masses of ferns and sweet-smelling boughs in the corners of the salon—”

  “My dear girl, we cannot cart the entire outdoors into the house,” Caroline protested.

  “But we may bring a little inside to fill out the miserable blooms from the garden?”

  “The miserable blooms” included roses, poppies, and lilies, plus the foliage of a number of shrubs. The magnolias could be had by stepping onto the front lawn. This left only ivy for garlands and some species of fern to fill out the garden perennials. It should not be too formidable a task to gather a basket or two of these.

  Accordingly, Caroline and Estelle, accompanied by Mathilde, who begged to come, and a groom, set out. For the trip they took a two-wheeled vehicle called a governess cart. It was pulled by a mettlesome bay mare, and loaded with a pair of large split-oak baskets lined with damp cloths and wet Spanish moss.

  They had not advanced far before Caroline began to realize she had been overly optimistic. No ordinary greenery would do. No dust-covered, tattered, or otherwise imperfect leaves were to be allowed inside the doors of Beau Repos. Every few feet the groom had to jump down and bring a bough or a twining stem for Estelle’s approval, but of these fully three-quarters were discarded as too imperfect. The tender new leaves of wild grape caught her fancy for a moment, then were rejected as possibly lending a too-bacchanalian air to the proceedings. The leathery green leaves of yellow jasmine were satisfactory, but without the flowers just faded, seemed somehow incomplete.

  In the end, Caroline took the reins, allowing the groom to range the woods with his machete while they progressed down the road at a snail’s pace. For a long stretch, sugarcane fields and pasture land intervened, and they moved along at a faster clip with the groom perched on the cart’s tail. Then Estelle espied a track leading beside a split-rail fence back toward the dense growth of the forest.

  Caroline, against her better judgment, pulled into the track. She had a feeling they were nearing the end of the Delacroix acreage, though she could not have said with any certainty exactly how far it extended.

  The road had a well-traveled look despite the grass that grew to axle height in the middle. Hoof prints were plain in the damp sand, as though riders had passed that way since the last rain. No doubt the road led to the back of the fields they had just passed. Caroline could do no more than guess. When driving out, a thing done only when necessary to get from one place to another, the ladies never ventured from the main road. Horseback riding was looked on as too vigorous an exercise for young ladies and was seldom indulged in by the females of Beau Repos.

  The afternoon sun began to lose height, striking down into the avenue cut through the trees. Estelle put up the parasol she had brought, a decorative affair of silk and lace hardly big enough for herself, though she tried to share it with Mathilde. Birdcalls echoed around them, including the musical whistle of a bobwhite. A squirrel, startled by their approach, ran up a tree beside the road and out onto an overhanging limb, chattering angrily.

  Mathilde enjoyed that sight, but she was growing fretful at their slow advance. Even at such a crawling pace, they had come further than Caroline had intended, and she was thinking strongly of turning back. Only the sighting of a clump of ferns kept her from acting on this impulse. A few yards further on, a tremendous vine of shiny green smilax caught Estelle’s eye.

  The groom was bearing this rather scratchy burden back toward the slow-moving vehicle when beneath the mare’s nose arose a flurry of wings. It was a family of quail, the fluffy baby chicks no bigger than a thumbnail, rising like feathers on the wind, and their parents uttering ear-piercing shrieks as though in pain as they flopped and scuttled through the grass in an effort to lure danger away from their young.

  The mare shied, rising in the shafts with a shrill whinny of terror before throwing herself into a headlong gallop! Caroline, her grasp lax as she watched the grooms’ approach, nearly lost the reins. Scrabbling after them, thrown from side to side in the madly jolting cart, she caught a glimpse of the groom as he dropped the smilax and broke into an angling run for the horse’s head. With the reins once more in her hands she found that the fear-maddened animal would not respond to their command.

  Mathilde screamed, clutching at Estelle. Estelle grabbed at Mathilde with one hand and Caroline with the other. As she lost her hold on her parasol, she made a sound of half anger, half terror.

  For an instant Caroline thought the grooms race won, then as he drew level with the mare’s rippling shoulder, he tripped and fell sprawling. He tri
ed to roll but could not avoid the cart’s wheel. It jounced over his ankle with a sickening thump. The bounce, small though it was, threw the cart off balance so that it slew sideways. Before it could right itself, the right wheel grazed a sapling, then the tail of the cart struck full force into the trunk of a pin oak tree.

  Caroline was thrown from the seat to measure her full length in the road, the reins still tightly grasped in her hands. From the floor of the cart came cries and moans. She could not allow the horse to drag the vehicle with its shattered wheel further. Struggling to her feet, she limped to the horse’s head, soothing the fractious, shivering mare until she was quieted. Tying the reins to a tree branch, she moved almost reluctantly to see to Mathilde and Estelle and the groom.

  Estelle, her bonnet hanging drunkenly down her back, was just climbing over the tail of the cart as Caroline rounded the side. She turned to help Mathilde, pale with fright but unhurt except for a few splinters, out from under one of the oak baskets.

  The groom was not so lucky as the two girls. He lay writhing on the ground, his teeth gritted in pain. One of his legs had an odd boneless appearance below the ankle with the foot turned at an unnatural angle.

  Caroline stood for a moment in silent thought after she rose from her inexpert examination of the groom. At last she turned to Estelle. “Jim can’t walk. One of us will have to go for help.”

  “Alone?” Estelle asked with a nervous look around at the silent, encroaching woods.

  “Someone must stay here with Jim and Mathilde. I’m sure your little sister could not walk all the way back to Beau Repos, at least not in good time.”

  “Oh, but Mam’zelle, if we wait—”

  “There’s no use making objections,” Caroline said flatly. “If we wait darkness may find us still here. Do you go or do you prefer to stay here? Choose!”