“Tell me why?” Elene straightened from placing her nightgown on top of the items in the trunk that sat on the bed and turned to face her maid.
“I have made a place for myself here. I would rather not leave it.”
“Your place is with me!”
“Your place, chère, is here also.”
“How can you say that? There is nothing to hold me, no obligations, no vows.”
A stubborn expression moved over Devota’s face. “Maybe not spoken ones, but they are there.”
“You don’t know,” Elene said in pain, looking away from her.
“I know a great deal, and part of what I know is that M’sieur Ryan will be in a fury when he finds you gone. Then maybe that’s what you want.”
Elene ignored the suggestion, refusing to even consider it. She didn’t think so. In any case, it was the last thing she expected. “I still don’t understand why you won’t go. You can always return if you’re so sure Ryan will come after us.”
There was a movement in the open doorway. Benedict stepped forward. “Forgive me for the intrusion, mam’zelle. Forgive me also for taking the allegiance of your woman; it was not intentional, I promise you. She does not wish to leave here, I fear, because of me.”
A glance at Devota’s face, impassive and yet flooded with unaccustomed crimson, was enough to confirm what the manservant said. It came to Elene, looking from one to the other, that it had been some time since Devota had been heard railing against the man, longer still since they had looked daggers at one another. They had both begun to be quite circumspect, in fact, from the night they had stood guard together in the dark courtyard.
Elene looked back to Devota, the flecks of silver dim in her gray eyes. “This is a true attachment — not as it was once before?”
“You mean as it was with Favier? I have no secrets, you see, from Benedict. No, it is not at all as before. Benedict is a man who, if the perfume had power, would be worthy of its use.”
Elene lifted a brow a fraction at such praise. “I see. Why could you not have said so, instead of making excuses for staying here that had to do with Ryan?”
“They were not excuses, chère, believe me.”
Elene could order Devota to go, and presumably she would be obeyed. She did not like going without her; it would be like arriving at Durant’s house without an essential protection. She had no desire to force her will on her maid who was also her aunt, however, nor to be cumbered by a rebellious companion.
She said, “Stay then, if that’s what you want.”
“What I want is for us both to stay.”
Elene shook her head with an attempt at a smile. “I can’t do that, but I can wish you happiness.”
“Ah, chère.” Devota said, and coming forward, wrapped her arms around Elene and stood rocking her slowly from side to side. When at last she released her, she said, “About the perfume. I will come and help you whenever you send word.”
“I may well send,” Elene said wanly, “though I have the notes I made, the recipe, and I think I would like to try it on my own.”
“There should be no difficulty. You should take this, just in case, for comparison.” Devota reached to pick up the last small bottle of perfume left of the batch they had made from where it sat on the table near the bed. Tucking it into Elene’s hidebound trunk, she closed the lid.
“There is that last ingredient that I don’t know, of course.” Elene’s inquiry was tentative.
Devota met her gaze a long moment, then gave a nod. Leaning, she whispered in her ear.
Benedict gave them a scathing look, muttering under his breath before stepping around them and latching Elene’s trunk. He hoisted it up onto his shoulder. With great dignity, he said, “Since you will not stay, mam’zelle, we will walk with you to your new place, Devota and I.”
There was an instant when Elene felt a wayward impulse to ask the manservant what he thought his master would do when he found her gone, to demand why Benedict himself did not try to persuade her to stay. At the same time, she knew it would change nothing. Taking up her bonnet and gloves that lay ready, she put them on, then moved from the bedchamber with her head high.
The rooms Durant occupied were located on the top floor of a three-story house. There was a salon and dining room with attached butler’s pantry, and a pair of bedchambers with a single dressing room between them. He insisted that Elene see them, showing her about with derogatory remarks for the inconvenience of the stairs that led up from the lower front gallery then through a stair hall in his mulatto landlady’s apartments on the second floor. He also made excuses for their small size and lack of a view, in comparison to the houses he and Elene had known on the island.
Elene did her best to reassure him, praising their airiness and freedom from noise so far above the street, and the charm of the decorations. As she walked through them, however, it was not the drawbacks that he pointed out that struck her but how very much they reminded her of Serephine. The woman’s presence was in the vivid colors of the wall hangings and the exotic richness of the coverings on the floors, in the faience shaped like palm trees that graced the salon’s mantelpiece, and especially in the miniature of the young boy, her and Durant’s son, that hung over the bed in the second bedchamber. It was a presence Elene had not reckoned with, though not a disturbing one.
Her own room was on the floor below, with its own entrance from the stair hall. It was small and simply furnished with no more than a four-poster bed, a plain dressing table, and a wing chair, but was as comfortable as Durant had promised. Best of all, it was adjoined by another even smaller room, a cubicle meant for the storage of trunks and boxes. This cubicle, with the addition of a worktable, would serve admirably as a place to mix her perfumes.
The mulatto landlady owned a dozen slaves as well as the house, the legacy of the gentleman whose mistress, or placée, she had been for twenty years. Her servants cleaned the rooms and she provided meals from her outdoor kitchen for her tenants. The arrangement was convenient, according to Durant, though it meant that tasks were done only when the landlady had no need of her servants herself, and that food sometimes arrived lukewarm. All that was lacking was someone to run small errands and attend to personal needs, which was why he had been considering a maid for Serephine.
For those times between meals when he required something light to stay the pangs of hunger, Durant relied on the sellers of meat pies, pastries, and candies who roamed up and down the streets outside. He respected Elene’s wish to pay her own way, he said, but if ever she should need funds for such purchases, or even for her larger expenditures, there was always a bowl filled with coins and paper money of all denominations on the central table in his salon. It had been a custom in his father’s house on the island, a tradition it was his whim to continue. She must take what she wished. Elene refused the largesse, of course, but appreciated the gesture.
Despite Elene’s misgivings, there was little in her removal to Durant’s rooming house of which she could complain. He was everything that was considerate, seldom intruding, issuing only an occasional invitation to join him for dinner. He inquired after the progress of her perfume making with what appeared to be real interest, but did not encroach upon her work area or the time she spent in it. Coming and going on his own affairs by day and by night, he disturbed Elene hardly at all.
There was once, however, in the middle of the night at the end of the first week, when she had awakened to the quiet rattling of her bedchamber doorknob.
“Elene?”
It was Durant, his voice slurred with drink. She lay still, listening.
“Elene, let me in!”
She could hear his heavy breathing. The doorknob rattled again and there came the thump of his shoulder hitting the door. It was securely locked; she had made sure of that. He cursed with ragged virulence. After a time, she heard his footsteps as he moved away, ascending the stairs with slow care to his own rooms.
When next they met, Elene wai
ted to see if Durant would mention the incident, or perhaps make some demand. He did not. It seemed best not to speak of it herself for fear it would precipitate the very confrontation she wanted to avoid. If it was repeated, she would be forced to make it plain that he had no automatic right to her bed. It was not, and it passed over as if it had never happened.
September turned into October and the heat of summer finally faded into autumn. The days grew slowly cooler, but sunny and smoke-flavored, colored with the yellow and rust of leaves that clung stubbornly to the trees, the gold and lavender of the spikes of goldenrod and tangles of black-eyed Susans and ageratum in the ditches. The open air market near the levee began to be flooded with fall greens and also with pumpkins and sweet potatoes, sweet figs, persimmons, and pecans, both the tame variety of the last as well as the small and rather bitter wild pecans preferred by many.
The news of the outside world penetrated slowly but surely to New Orleans. That from Saint-Domingue was not good. As Ryan had predicted, the British had blockaded the island. The French soldiers under Rochambeau were holding their own but were expected to surrender before many weeks were out. From the planters and their families left on the island there was, ominously, no word.
It took longer than Elene had expected to gather the ingredients of the perfume once more. When they were assembled, she proceeded with caution, mixing minuscule amounts of the various essences as she experimented with them. She was by no means sure that she had a perfumer’s “nose,” that ability to distinguish individual scents and to blend them into wonderful combinations. In truth, her sense of smell seemed strangely off of late, so that a mixture which seemed delicious in the morning could make her nearly ill as evening fell. She grew cautious, afraid to waste the precious fluids. More than once, she considered sending for Devota, but that would be to admit defeat, something she was not quite ready to do.
Nor was she ready to attempt to copy Devota’s perfume. The cause was not just her growing mistrust of her sense of smell, but also a curious reluctance to put the special properties of the scent to further tests. The longer she put it off, the more afraid she became, though whether from fear that the perfume would not sell, or what it might do to those who bought, she could not tell. Neither did she use her carefully hoarded stores to make any useful quantity of the scents she had fashioned, however. She could not decide which would be best, to gamble that women would buy what she had made, or to put her energies into making and selling a perfume she knew that men enjoyed and women craved.
One day, in the effort to make up her mind, she took the last tiny blue, beribboned bottle that Devota had pressed upon her into her work cubicle and drew out the stopper. It was not just a scent that was released, but an assault of memories. One after the other, they crowded in upon her. The moment when the two black revolutionaries had appeared in the woods on Saint-Domingue. The feel of Ryan’s arms in the darkness of the hole under Favier’s house. Hermine’s pleasure over the bottle of perfume given her. Ryan’s last half-violent, half-tender possession, and the way he looked as he kissed her good-by. With the images came an inundation of terror and joy, ecstasy and regret.
A chill ran along the surface of her skin followed by the prickling of gooseflesh. With it came a perilous certainty that no scent which could evoke such powerful reactions at a single whiff could be powerless.
She was going mad. It was just a perfume. Only a perfume.
It made no difference what it was. To make it again would be to mix together and bottle up tiny doses of purest pain and most virulent desire. Whether that result was in the perfume or in her mind was of no consequence. She could not do it; it would make her ill. Even the breath of its smell that lingered brought a strange nausea. No, she could not. Sometime soon, perhaps, but not now.
Pressing the stopper back into the bottle, Elene pushed it from her to the back of the worktable. She left the workroom, closing the door firmly behind her.
All Hallow’s Eve came and went, the time of reverence for the dead, of flowers and candles in the cemeteries. Elene visited the graves of Hermine and Serephine and even M’sieur Mazent. As expected, the authorities had not troubled themselves greatly over the affair of the deaths by poison.
Elene still mulled over them from time to time, but even for her, the passage of time and the unlikelihood of her perfume being a factor made finding the killer less urgent. Now and then, however, like pulling out a too-complicated needlework pattern that has been cast aside, she attempted to fit what she knew into some recognizable framework.
It was no use. If the perfume was eliminated as a common thread among the three people, then the only thing left to connect them was the fact that they were all from Saint-Domingue. Regardless, they had not known each other there, had not met until they left the island together aboard Ryan’s ship. It was possible something had happened on the ship itself, but try as she might, Elene could not think of what it could have been. Hermine and Mazent had exchanged no more than common civilities, while Serephine had hardly spoken to anyone at all.
In a spirit of curiosity, Elene questioned the maid who cleaned the rooms about Serephine’s last day, asking if she had received any visitors, any messages, if anything at all unusual had happened. She learned exactly nothing. No one had come and there had been no notes or anything else delivered. Serephine had gone out shopping in late afternoon, but returned after little more than an hour, having bought nothing more than a half pound of chocolate bonbons. She had been found dead by Durant when he returned for dinner.
It crossed Elene’s mind to wonder if Durant might not have done away with his mistress after all. He was the one who knew her best, indeed almost the only one who could be said to really know her. On the other hand, why would he have brought her with him if he cared so little for her that he could kill her? Why kill her when it would have been so easy for him to simply discard her? More than that, Durant might have lashed out in rage, but it did not seem likely that he would resort to poison. There was also the immutable fact that even if a reason could be found for his destruction of Serephine, there was no apparent reason for him to effect the other deaths. Sometimes she wondered if the truth would ever be known.
In the first week of November, Colonial Prefect Laussat, certain that the official confirmation for which he waited would be delayed at least another two weeks, left New Orleans for a trip up river to see more of the countryside before his departure. It was said that Madame Laussat, midway in her pregnancy and no longer going into society, was beginning to make lists of the items to be packed when they left Louisiana.
Elene saw Madame Laussat at the market one morning a few days later. The prefect’s wife was standing to one side while her majordomo bought redfish and her youngest daughter played with a monkey being offered for sale by a seaman just off a ship from South America. Her figure, though concealed by the style of her walking dress, had thickened since she was last seen; still, she was not yet ungainly with her condition.
Elene smiled and spoke as she passed the woman, but did not pause. There was no reason the wife of the prefect should recall her from their one chance encounter, and she did not want to seem encroaching.
“Mademoiselle Larpent, isn’t it? Good day,” Madame Laussat said.
Elene, like most people, was charmed to be remembered. She inquired after the other woman’s health, and they stood chatting of inconsequential things.
Finally, Madame Laussat said, “I must not keep you. I only wanted to say how sorry I am that my husband took M’sieur Bayard away from you, and that I trust you will discover that the benefit to Louisiana outweighs the inconvenience.”
Elene could feel the heat of a flush climbing into her face. The other woman apparently did not know that she had left Ryan’s house. Rushing into speech to cover her embarrassment, she said, “I’m sure he was happy to be of service to your husband.”
Madame Laussat laughed. “I don’t know that he was happy! Indeed, he seemed a bit distraught at the ne
cessity when he left us. He is a loyal citizen, however, and as such is performing his duty at the expense of his own desire.”
Had the choice of words been deliberate? Elene, glancing back at the prefect’s wife after she had moved on, could not be sure. She took another step, then looked back again. How very attractive Madame Laussat was in her pregnancy, her skin blooming with health, her face serene, her carriage showing an upright and dignified grace. In a few short months there would be a child, much desired, infinitely loved, no matter the mischief its inconvenient conception might be causing with the couple’s traveling plans at the moment.
Whereas her own child—
Elene was pregnant. She had suspected it for some time; had wondered in fact that Devota had not guessed before she left Ryan’s house. Perhaps she would have, if she had not been busy with her own love affair.
The baby was her responsibility. She would take care of it. Nor was it undesired, or unloved, though she would admit to a certain inconvenience. Now and then she permitted herself to wonder what Ryan would think when he knew. The possibility had never been mentioned between them. They had chosen to ignore it, as if it could not happen. That had been obtuse of them, she freely admitted. No matter. She could not expect a man who would leave her, just to show her he could, to care that she was carrying his child.
Soon Durant would notice. It was not a moment she looked forward to with pleasure, not that she was afraid of him or what he might do. In truth, she hardly knew what to expect. Once she would have expected him to jeer at her; now she was not so certain. He had changed, becoming more lax in his notions of behavior, both his and her own since leaving the island. She should have been glad of it, since it had made these last weeks more bearable. Instead, it affected her with increasing unease.
There was nothing in the jovial mood with which Durant announced his soiree four days later to reassure her. He seemed excited, and at the same time, on edge. He had invited everyone he knew, including the men with whom he drank and gambled, several planters who were in the city with their families, and naturally those who had come with them from the island. He insisted that Elene be his guest of honor, refusing to listen to any excuse. Propriety did not matter, he told her frankly. Everyone knew they had rooms in the same house. That their rooms were on separate floors made no difference to the gossips. The on dit floating about the city was that they were lovers, anyway.
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