Louisiana History Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  It came from inside, spreading in vivid, fiery wonder, the crimson tide of surcease. Elene, on a sob, let it wash over her. Ryan felt its surge in her silken depths, and surrendered to it. Held in its fearsome grasp, lost in its rapturous wonder, they were still. And opening their eyes, they stared at each other in silent, useless glory.

  A moment later he rolled to his side, taking her with him, still fused, inseparable. He rocked with her back and forth in an agony of tenderness, inhaling the fragrance of her hair, imprinting the shape and feel of her upon his body. He sought her lips, kissing her hard once, twice. Then, moving as if his muscles were cramped with reluctance, he placed her on her back and rolled away from her.

  Rising, he walked to the washstand where he used cold water and a cake of soap to wash away the stench of perfume. Drying himself with vigor, he tossed the toweling across a chair and moved to the armoire where he took out a pair of leather riding breeches and a rough coat of similar quality.

  Short minutes later, he was dressed, except for a shallow-brimmed hat that he held in one hand along with a strapped roll of extra clothing. He stepped toward the door and put one hand on the knob, then turned back. His gaze traveled over her as she lay there, her skin gleaming palely in the shuttered dimness. With a quiet oath, he left the door, to move swiftly toward her. He swooped to taste the proud nipple of one rounded breast, then snatched a hard kiss from her lips.

  Straightening abruptly, he went to the door once more and pulled it open. Turning back, with bleak pain in his eyes, he said, “If this is victory, I prefer defeat.”

  The door closed behind him.

  17

  HE WAS GONE.

  Elene lay staring up into the soft drapings of mosquito netting looped up for the day until Ryan’s footsteps faded away along the gallery and down the stairs. She did not move until the silence and lack of stir indicated that, like a storm passing, he was no longer in the house. She rolled slowly to her stomach then, burying her face in the pillow.

  She did not cry. Her chest was tight and her breathing came in short, hard gasps, but the tears were locked inside. He had left her. In spite of the perfume. In spite of the union of their bodies. It was not supposed to be possible, but it had happened.

  It had happened because she loved him. She had known it, felt the caring growing inside her. Devota had warned her. To fall in love would be to lose control of the relationship between her and her man. She had said something more, something about a loving heart, but Elene could not quite bring it to mind.

  Ryan thought he had vanquished the spell the perfume had over him, or at least proven to her that he was unaffected by it. Perhaps he had; she no longer knew what to believe. But why had he gone so far away?

  It was not necessary to put his life in danger to prove that she could not hold him. He could be killed on the long ride to Washington City. He was a privateer, not a courier. It was nothing more than male pride that forced him to that long, grueling trek through the wilderness.

  No, that was not true. She must be fair. The mission he was on had nothing to do with her. He was a man concerned with the fate of Louisiana, his native land. The great events stirring in the colony were of vital importance to him, and he had been drawn into their vortex. It was a part of his life in which she had no place.

  There was nothing to say that she had a place in his life of any kind. He had spoken to her of wants and needs and of adoration, the last an intense response that must have been perfume induced. Simple, perfect love he had not mentioned, except when she was ill with fever, when he had thought she needed to hear it to go on living.

  Devota had not promised her love, of course. Desire, yes. A surpassing devotion of the flesh. Enthrallment. The enslavement of her mate. All these things. She had had them in full measure and they had brought excitement, even rapture. But how fleeting they were, and how empty, without love.

  How could it be that two people could share such intimacy, such mutual and total possession and untrammeled joy, and only one of them succumb to love? Was it possible that in duping him, albeit unwittingly, with her perfume, she had traded the chance that he might love her for an ephemeral attachment of the senses? If during those three nights in the dark hole under Favier’s house she had not worn scent, what would have happened between them? Would they have discovered a slower growing but deeper and more abiding attraction, or would they have each sat in their separate corners, making polite conversation, never touching? Which would she have preferred? To have had the passion they had shared, or to have had nothing at all?

  When Devota came into the room sometime later, Elene closed her eyes and breathed in a deep and even rhythm. The woman went silently away again. When evening came, the maid brought a tray with a light supper of baked chicken, crusty bread, and wine, with a crème caramel for dessert. Elene forced down a few bites, but could do no more. She sent Devota away, blew out the candle, and pulled up the covers.

  When morning came, she was heavy and drugged with sleep, but unrested and disinclined to leave her bed. She held the cup of her morning café au lait, but watched Devota with a dull gaze as she bustled about, throwing back the draperies and picking up the scattered clothing. She permitted herself to be bathed and the bed linens to be changed, though more because the smell of the stale perfume was abhorrent to her than because she had any desire for freshness. She wanted nothing, in fact, except a quiet, dim room and the oblivion of sleep.

  “Chère? Are you going to stay in that bed forever?” Devota made her demand with her hands on her hips.

  Elene pushed the hair back from her face and pressed her hand to her eyes. Finally she answered, “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to get up. You frighten me, chère. This isn’t like you.”

  “Get up and do what?”

  “Something. Anything. M’sieur Ryan left money for the shopping. You can go to the market.”

  “Benedict can go.”

  “He worries himself about you, too, Benedict does. M’sieur Ryan will blame him if you are ill when he returns.”

  “Will he indeed?”

  “Benedict thinks so.”

  “He’s wrong. I doubt very much that Ryan will care.”

  “What do you mean? Of course he will care!”

  Elene sat up in bed. Her voice hard, she said, “He left me, Devota!” Then more softly she repeated, “He left me.”

  “He will return.”

  “You said — you told me he would be enslaved to me, that he would only wish to please me.”

  “Is that what you want in a man, a slave?”

  Elene swallowed tears as she shook her head in a quick negative. “But I never thought he would want to go away from me. I didn’t think he could.”

  “This is why you eat little and lie in bed all day?”

  Elene shook her head, unable to speak for the knot of grief in her throat. Tears filled her eyes and spilled over to run in wet tracks down her cheeks. Finally she whispered, “If I get up, I’ll have to leave.”

  A frown gathered on Devota’s soft brown face. “Leave?”

  “Leave this house, find a place elsewhere.”

  “But — why?”

  Elene looked at her in despair for the necessity of explaining the unexplainable. “I can’t stay with a man who doesn’t love me.”

  “How can you say—”

  “He doesn’t. I trapped him, and now he’s set himself free. I will not be a mere convenience for a privateer.”

  “You know he is much more than that,” Devota said sternly.

  “The principle is the same.”

  “This is foolish! You needed him before and you need him now. That much hasn’t changed.”

  “Nor will I use him for my convenience.”

  “Even if he wishes it? Even if the convenience is equal?”

  “Even so. I know the situation is the same; I see that. But I am different. I love him, but there is more to it than that. With this perfume of ours, I first to
ok advantage of him, and now may have embroiled him in something far worse. I can’t stay and let him reap the result of it, whatever it may be.”

  “You mean the murders. That was no fault of mine or yours, I swear it. Can’t you believe me?”

  “I can’t take that chance.”

  “These principles you have so many of, you cannot eat them. How will we live? Where will we go?”

  “I don’t know. I have been trying to think, but nothing seems to come.”

  “Then maybe nothing will come before M’sieur Ryan returns,” the woman said with mingled irony and hope.

  Devota went away. Elene sat drinking her coffee and chewing slowly on a bite of one of the feather-light beignets that was her breakfast. She felt better, now that the decision she had felt weighing upon her had been put into words. However, the problem of what she was going to do remained.

  She had no money, no means to take a place of her own. That meant she must rely on her acquaintances, at least for a short time. If Hermine were alive, her problem would be solved, she thought; the actress would have found a place for her somewhere, a pallet to sleep on and a small job of some kind to do. Josie was not so inventive or so sympathetic. Morven might be helpful, but she was afraid that, with Ryan’s protective presence removed, his aid could well have a price. He had never made a secret of his attraction to her, though there was no great honor in that. There were few, apparently, who repelled him. In any case, the troupe’s accommodations belonged to the widow Pitot, and Elene was not sure she would be too welcoming.

  It was unlikely that M’sieur and Madame Tusard would take her in. There was the problem of Madame’s pride that would not permit anyone to know she had no servant, but the couple was also somewhat pinched for funds. In addition was the fact that Françoise Tusard was a woman of bourgeois attitudes. While she had lowered herself enough to visit with a woman who was being kept by a man, she might be less than overjoyed to have that same woman for a house guest.

  Respectability, Elene suspected, was most important to Flora Mazent also. In addition, she had disappointed and angered the girl over the perfume she had wanted. Flora could hardly be expected, then, to welcome her with open arms, even if there were accommodations for her. Moreover, it would be unacceptable behavior in her to intrude upon the girl’s period of mourning over her father. That Elene had lost her own father should have meant that the two would be able to comfort each other, but Elene doubted Flora would consider their situation to be at all similar.

  That left only Durant out of those who had come from Saint-Domingue.

  Her ruminations were interrupted by the entry of Devota.

  The woman advanced into the room with her hands twisted in her apron and a look of doubt overlaid by distress in her eyes. She came to a halt. “There is something I must tell you.”

  “Yes, what is it?” Elene dropped her beignet back onto her plate and set her coffee cup down.

  Devota hesitated, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She drew a deep sigh. At last she said in a rush, “It’s about the perfume. It has no power.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just that. The perfume I made is only a nice scent, nothing more.”

  Elene stared at her. “What are you saying?”

  “I told you otherwise to give you confidence and courage for your marriage to Durant. I told you it would make any man who held you desire you because I know that desire is a thing of the mind, that a woman who thinks she is desirable, is desirable indeed. One who thinks she can enslave men, often can.”

  “Oh, Devota,” Elene whispered, her eyes wide as the implications began to seep into her mind.

  “So you see, the perfume can have nothing to do with the way M’sieur Ryan took you to him, nothing to do with poison and death.”

  Silence fell. Elene closed her eyes tightly, then opened them again. “How can I believe you?”

  Devota drew herself up. “Because I tell you.”

  “You told me wrong before, or so you say. Against your word I have Ryan’s actions. He loved me while I wore the perfume, and when I left it off he did not touch me.”

  “Always?”

  Elene thought of the last few weeks since most of the perfume had been destroyed. “Not always, but often enough. Anyway, if what you say is true, why did you not tell me before?”

  Devota gave a slow shake of her head. “At first, because I thought you still had need of the power in the idea of it, and later because I knew you would not accept it. As now, you would want to believe, need to believe, too much to allow yourself the relief of it.”

  Was it possible? Could it be true, what Devota said? If so, then Ryan had made love to her, had brought her to his home for his own pleasure, from his own need. More than that, he had asked her to be his wife because he wanted her near him.

  Where was the relief in that knowledge? She could find only pain, pain that she had thrown it all back into his face.

  There was, however, the release from fear concerning the deaths of the three from Saint-Domingue. She was in no way responsible for them if the perfume had no effect, nor, by extension, could Devota be involved.

  Elene moistened her lips. “It strikes me that this confession is very convenient to me at this time, perhaps too convenient.”

  “The harm caused by giving it is less now than the good it might do.”

  “I see. There is one thing more. I have known and trusted you all my life, Devota, and cannot stop now, but the fact must be faced that by absolving me of blame in the poison deaths you also absolve yourself.”

  The other woman considered this in silence. She shook her head. “I never thought, when we took ship for New Orleans, that it would come to this.”

  “Nor did I.” Elene’s breasts rose and fell in a difficult breath. There were tears creeping from the corners of her eyes. She wiped at them with the heel of her hand. “I don’t really think you told me this to remove suspicion.”

  “Yes, I know. You fear I may be lying to help you.”

  Elene gave her a watery smile. “You always did know me too well. Leave me now, please, so I can think.”

  The maid hesitated as if she would say more, but finally did as she was asked.

  It made no difference. Try as she might, Elene could discover few reasons for belief in Devota’s confession, and many to doubt it. Distrusting both doubt and belief, she sat once more in clouded confusion.

  It occurred to her after a time, however, that if what Devota had said were true, if Ryan had been under no compulsion to stay with her, then there was one thing that was changed. It was possible that he had been the man with whom M’sieur Mazent had begun negotiations for the hand of his daughter, the one Flora had spoken of as her fiancé. That would explain why the girl had not wanted to put a name to him in front of Elene. She might have wanted to spare her, or else had feared that as his mistress Elene would attempt to stop the engagement. Certainly it would explain the girl’s excitement over the prospect of her marriage.

  There was nothing unusual in the impending announcement being postponed due to the death of Flora’s father, but what had happened then? This phantom fiancé should have been in evidence, on hand to support and direct the girl. Flora had made it plain that his absence was his choice, not hers.

  Why should her fiancé have failed to remain interested? Had he found himself unable to face life with such a colorless female for a wife? Or was it something else, something to do with money, perhaps, the dowry being of crucial importance to many would-be suitors? Had the future groom discovered that the Mazent property in Louisiana was not so rich as supposed?

  On the other hand, what if M’sieur Mazent had discovered something about the suitor that was not to his liking? Suppose the thing he had discovered was so distasteful that he had forbidden the man to speak to his daughter? Might the rejected fiancé have been so incensed at seeing a fortune slipping from his grasp that he had arranged to dispose quietly of M’sieur Mazent, choosing
poison because it would mimic the man’s gastric problems that were known to all?

  A shudder ran over Elene. Not Ryan. He could not. Could he?

  Certainly not. Even if he could, that did not explain the deaths of Hermine and Serephine. There had to be a connection between them. It made no sense otherwise.

  Hermine had known Ryan before the rescue from Saint-Domingue. He and Morven were friends, had met each other often about the islands as they all moved from place to place. It was possible that Hermine had known some tidbit concerning Ryan that he might not have wanted Mazent to discover. Perhaps she had teased him about it, or else suggested he pay her to hold her tongue. Perhaps he had killed the actress to prevent her mischief.

  Serephine’s death was more difficult to explain. Her whole purpose, it seemed, had been to live for Durant.

  She had, of course, been a fixture of Durant’s life for years, and was therefore knowledgeable about what happened on Saint-Domingue. She might have been killed for the same reason as Hermine, then, because of what she knew. It was a most unsatisfactory idea, however, mainly because it was so unlikely that Serephine would, of her own accord, threaten anyone. The only thing that gave it weight was the possibility that she might have been tempted to tell Durant what she knew. Durant, one could be fairly sure, would have used the information against Ryan without a qualm.

  There was a problem with that line of reasoning. It was that Durant had just as much access, in general, to the gossip of the island as Serephine. It seemed unlikely that Serephine would know something to Ryan’s discredit that had never come to Durant’s ears.

  Unless, of course, it was a matter of women.

  Men gossiped among themselves, there could be no doubt of that, but they did not do so in such graphic detail as women. Also, there were problems and intrigues that never came to the ears of men at all because they were not of general concern, never involved the law or medicine, the public streets or the field of honor that were the provinces of men. It could be something of the bedchambers and boudoirs, of the slave quarters or even the nighttime meetings and rites of the Voudou.