by Toombs, Jane
"Because he's my brother—the head of the family—and you must ask him for--"
"Madelaine! We aren't children, we're both over forty."
She bit her lip. "But I've never married, John. It's considered proper. Besides, I—I couldn't have the wedding without my brother here. Guy and I have been through so much together. Please understand."
"I don't understand." He sat up. "I can't understand. In one breath you tell me you've loved me for years and in the next you say you can't marry me unless Guy approves."
"It's only a matter of months before he'll be in New Orleans. We've waited all this time—surely we can wait a little longer. Besides—" she lowered her lashes—"isn't it possible to meet like this in the meantime?"
John got to his feet and began to pull on his clothes. "I asked you to be my wife, Madelaine, not my placee. A wife is what I want, what I need. Will you marry me and come with me to Baton Rouge or not?"
She sat up, clutching the bedclothes about her, chilled to the soul by his anger. "I—I can't until Guy..."
"Damn Guy!"
"John, please ..."
He grabbed his coat and turned toward the door. As he opened it he looked back, hesitating a moment.
"I won't be visiting New Orleans again," he said. "Goodbye, Madelaine." Then he was gone.
She stared at the closed door, unbelievingly.
"No," she whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. John Kellogg didn't call on her again.
Spring passed, and summer. Then fall. The cane harvest was in before Guy arrived at Lac Belle with Cecile.
And with Madame Tanguy La Branche, his wife.
Madelaine was stunned.
"You're very welcome," she told Fabrienne, "but I had no idea my brother intended—that is, I didn't realize . . ." she broke off, staring at the elegant French woman, marvellously dressed in what Madelaine knew must be the very latest Paris fashions. She felt dowdy by comparison.
She resented her attention being taken by this astounding development for she wished to concentrate on her daughter, standing wide eyed beside Fabrienne, her quiet beauty eclipsed by the older woman.
"You're Cecile," Madelaine said.
Cecile's hazel eyes examined her. "I'm pleased to meet you, Cousine Madelaine," she said politely.
Did she look like Philippe? Madelaine couldn't see the resemblance except for the hazel eyes. Cecile did show a certain likeness to the little daughter of Annette Louise and Nicolas. A Roulleaux look?
"Cecile is a La Branche through and through," Guy said heartily. "Aren't you, 'tite.”
Cecile flashed him a shy smile. "If you say so, Cousine Guy."
Guy patted her cheek, then put his arm about Fabrienne. "Here's my prize, Madelaine. I know you'll love her as I do."
"Of course," Madelaine murmured, not at all certain she'd manage such a thing.
"I shall put myself into your hands completely," Fabrienne told her, "as I learn to run Lac Belle properly. Vineyards I'm used to, but sugar cane I know nothing whatsoever about. Nor Negro slaves."
She means to become the mistress here in fact, Madelaine realized, taken aback. Senalda had never really managed the plantation house at La Belle, but this wife was different. Very much so.
"But all that can wait until I'm rested from the journey," Fabrienne went on. "Perhaps we can begin the day after tomorrow?"
Madelaine nodded. "I'm sorry to keep you standing about like this. It's the surprise." She led the way up the stairs, wondering how she'd tolerate another woman as mistress of Lac Belle, the house that had been hers ever since it was built
As the weeks passed, Fabrienne took over more and more. As she has a right to do, Madelaine reminded herself. She spent as much time as she could with Cecile, but the girl was reserved and shy with her, despite all of Madelaine's efforts to become better acquainted.
Fabrienne called Madelaine into the morning room late in January of 1833. "Please sit down," she said. "I think we must have a talk."
Madelaine did as she was asked,
"You should try not to overwhelm Cecile with attention as you do," Fabrienne told her. "I know how you must feel, but the child thinks of you as a stranger. And, I must remind you, as a cousine."
Madelaine stared at her. Guy's told her, then, she thought, a tightness in her chest. I mustn't think of it as a betrayal, she's his wife, she has a right to know, I suppose.
"I didn't realize I was upsetting Cecile," she said.
"It's only natural for her to confide in me," Fabrienne said. "Cecile and I had a chance to become close aboard ship and, too, we're both French. She's a lovely girl—a tribute to the nuns who raised her."
Resentment knifed through Madelaine. I wanted to keep my daughter with me, she thought. Fabrienne makes it sound as though I abandoned her.
She lifted her chin and looked Fabrienne in the eye. "I imagine you've come to think of Cecile as your daughter," she said, "since you've never had children of your own. Perhaps that will change when you and Guy--"
"We will have no children," Fabrienne snapped, interrupting Madelaine.
She can't be more than forty, Madelaine thought. How is she so certain? "Be that as it may," she said, "everything at Lac Belle belongs to you by right of marriage. Everything except Cecile. If, as you say, she still feels insecure in New Orleans, I shan't push her."
"That's all I ask," Fabrienne said.
Madelaine didn't believe her, but murmured a polite leave taking and left the morning room. She has Guy, she has Lac Belle and now she wants Cecile too, Madelaine thought angrily.
"Looks like that little girl be a sweet child," Odalie said to Madelaine. "She come visit me, she be bringing sugar candy for me and talk so nice. You take care she don't do like you, be unhappy."
"Cecile isn't much like me," Madelaine said.
"All women be pretty much the same when it do come to men. You see she be happy."
"That's all I want for her."
"All I wanted for you," Odalie said, "Didn't do no good. It be true, just the same, I be dying happy now I know the child."
"You're going to live to see her married, just as I told you."
But Odalie did not. She died before Mardi Gras and Madelaine wept as she watched the black woman, who'd been a mother to her, laid to rest in her own vault. Now she had no one.
Madelaine tried to tell herself she didn't expect to see John again, but ever since Guy's return she'd hoped she was wrong, that John would come calling. After she buried Odalie she buried that hope as well. A leaden weight rested in her chest when she thought about him. Seeing Cecile's obvious preference for Fabrienne only increased her distress.
As the year passed, Madelaine grew more and more despondent. She tried to busy herself with the quadroon children she taught, but her pleasure in their accomplishments dwindled.
At Cecile's coming out ball in December, Madelaine had no choice but to let Fabrienne take the credit, for her brother's wife had arranged everything—even choosing Cecile's gown at the girl's request.
I'm nothing to anyone, Madelaine thought. Not even to myself.
John Kellogg had never come back to New Orleans. Even though he was in Baton Rouge, there might as well be an ocean between them as the few miles of the Mississippi that separated them.
She'd never felt so alone in her life.
Cecile had looked forward to her coming out ball, but at the same time she feared it. She smiled up at her partner, her lips stiff from polite smiling. So many strange young men, so many hands touching her, whirling her about in the waltz.
She didn't like being handled by men she barely knew, even in the formal patterns of a dance.
Cousine Fabrienne had gone to much trouble to arrange this ball. Cecile adored Fabrienne and Cousine Guy, too. She tried to like Cousine Madelaine, but it seemed Madelaine always wanted to hug her, to touch her in some way.
The Sisters in France had been kind, had loved her, but they didn't show fondness by hugs and embraces. She still wasn
't used to these open displays of affection. Fabrienne understood, but Madelaine didn't seem to.
Yet none of them, neither the Sisters nor her New Orleans cousines, ever answered her questions about her parents, always putting her off.
Who was she?
"You're the most charming girl in the room," her waltz partner said.
Cecile blinked, coming back to where she was.
"Thank you," she murmured.
He was handsome enough, this dark eyed man who twirled her about the floor so expertly. Why couldn't she respond to him?
Cecile glanced swiftly about the room yet one more time, although she was quite certain the only man who counted wasn't here.
"Is there anyone you'd like to invite who I've forgotten?" Fabrienne had asked her before the ball.
Cecile had shaken her head. How could she tell Fabrienne that, unknown to any of her cousines, she'd met a man with eyes the color of sable, a man whose touch she welcomed? Whose kiss she longed for? How could she tell them that the man lived at En Dela—and that his stepfather was Cousine Guy's bitter enemy?
Gabriel Davion hadn't been invited to Cecile's coming out ball.
Chapter 27
On November 13, 1833, Guy sat in his library looking out at the setting sun. He'd been sick with worry that Fabrienne or Cecile, as newcomers to Louisiana, would be visited by Bronze John when, in September, New Orleans was decimated by yellow fever deaths. This epidemic on top of those hundreds struck down since June of the dreaded cholera.
He'd kept everyone at Lac Belle, avoiding the city. Indescribable horrors went on in the town when the epidemic was at its peak: Bodies were thrown into the river, bricks tied to their feet to weigh them down; loved ones were buried within the courtyards interments took place at the cemeteries continuously throughout the day and on into the dark by candlelight.
There were so many deaths that the corpses were stacked like wood—not even in coffins—and in deserted hospitals the wards were filled with putrefying bodies, the doctors and nurses dead beside their patients.
A dark, thick cloud from the constantly burning tar and pitch fouled the city, making breathing difficult. The cannon, fired along the streets in the hope the gunpowder would purify the air caused numerous fires. New Orleans had taken on all the aspects of Hell.
Only two days earlier, a terrible rain storm had roared in from the northwest with violent winds and lightnings, sweeping away the deadly miasma, washing the streets clean, and ridding the city of not only Bronze John but the cholera as well.
Just the same, he'd forego use of the townhouse this year, Guy decided. Lac Belle was safer. Thank le bon Dieu his beloved Fabrienne had been spared. Cecile, too, of course, but Fabrienne was his first concern.
The wisest thing he'd ever done was to marry Fabrienne. She managed Lac Belle with a flair that all the Creole women tried to copy. She'd taken Cecile to her heart and guided the girl suitably, while at the same time encouraging her to come out of her shell of shyness. And she loved him in every way a woman should love a man.
If only he could be as happy about New Orleans. It seemed to him that, while he'd been in France, the city had puffed up like a poisonous toadstool, expanding up and down river and all the way to Lake Pontchartrain. The railroad from the city to the lake was finished, some four and a half miles of track.
"We have the first railroad in the entire south, the first one west of the Allegheny Mountains," Rafe had said proudly. "Think of it!"
Guy hated to. He hated the puffing engine, nicknamed "Smoky Mary" because of the black smoke that choked the countryside every time it passed. He disliked the crowds who rode the cars to the lake of a Sunday. No longer was Lac Belle isolated and peaceful. The epidemic had stopped the excursions for a time, but they'd resume. He was certain of that.
So many steamboats crowded the levee that at night their lights made it seem as if a faubourg, a suburb, had sprung up atop the water. He'd sold his interest in the boats, finding them no longer either amusing or a source of pleasure.
Ocean-going ships, their grey sails furled, mingled with the white steamboats on the river. The waterway both up and downriver from the city was as clogged and busy as the streets.
And the attitude in the city was changing. Never before had the Creoles despised the free blacks. They'd viewed them with some wariness since, after all, one knew who they'd side with if a slave rebellion erupted, but there was no hatred. If a free man of color didn't have the right to vote, he did have many other privileges equal to any Creole.
Now restrictions and curtailments were enacted monthly, it seemed. The new laws changed Creoles' attitudes toward the free coloreds, even though the laws were initiated by Americans.
Damn the Americans for their increasing control of everything. It was ruining his city.
He hadn't yet spoken to Madelaine about giving up her teaching of the free black children. She'd stopped during the epidemics and he was determined she wouldn't start again, for he'd been warned that his sister wasn't safe with those "nigger brats."
He sighed. She was safe enough with the blacks. It was the whites who threatened. She'd been so despondent lately he'd put off the task, but he must tell her soon. Order her, for she had no choice.
He'd do it right now, this moment. Guy rose and crossed the room, only to be interrupted by Leroy's appearance in the doorway.
"A man say he want to see you, Monsieur"
Guy sighed. He'd heard the knocker but
"Who is it?"
"He say he be Docteur Kellogg."
Guy's eyes widened. "Bring him here," he said.
He greeted John warmly, offering him brandy.
"No, thank you. I try not to drink when I'm working."
"Perhaps coffee?"
"Yes, I'd like coffee."
"Did the army send doctors in to assist during the epidemics?" Guy asked.
John shook his head. "I'm no longer in the army. I did come down from Baton Rouge to help out. I've set up a practice there. Thank God the worst is over. There hasn't been a new case of yellow jack or cholera since the storm."
"You'll be returning, then, to Baton Rouge?"
"Yes. I've done quite well since I've been there. I have no worries about money."
"I see." Guy was puzzled. Why did Kellogg tell him how well he fared financially? It seemed unlike the man. "Well, the best of luck for the future," he added.
"Thanks." John took a deep breath and sat straighter in the chair. "Since I'm quite securely established," he said, "I've come to ask you for your sister's hand in marriage."
Guy couldn't speak, so shocked was he at this request.
"Madelaine thought it best that I speak to you first," John said, eyeing Guy levelly.
Rage gathered Guy's wits together. "You marry Madelaine?" he cried. "An American marry my sister? Never! Never while I live!"
Guy glared at John Kellogg. Dieu, he'd challenge this presuming American. They all wanted to take over. The city. The Creoles. His very family. This one, at least, wouldn't get what he wanted.
"Docteur Kellogg," he began stiffly, "I--"
The door flew open and Fabrienne rushed in. She ran to Guy and grasped his arm. "You must come immediately," she cried. "Hurry!"
Guy, who'd been about to order her from the room, stared in alarm.
"What's the matter?"
"Don't ask questions, come quickly!" she demanded, tugging at his arm.
Guy allowed himself to be led toward the door. He'd never seen his wife so distraught. What could be wrong? Was Cecile ill? An accident?
Fabrienne shut the door firmly behind them and took Guy to the foot of the stairs, where she stopped and faced him.
“Don’t you dare challenge that man to a duel,” she said, “He wants to marry your sister—in the nom de Dieu let him! I understand he is perfectly respectable, a doctor. What’s the matter with you that--”
“Enough!” Guy roared. “How dare you interfere in my affairs?”
“Pouf,” she said, They’re my affairs, too. Madelaine is terribly unhappy at Lac Belle, for I’ve taken her place in the house and she has nothing to do. Would you deprive her of the only man who’s likely to offer for a forty-five year old spinster? Don’t be a selfish fool,”
“Fabrienne—“
“I’ll be very angry with you if you don’t listen to me. Being a man you’ll do what you wish, but I warn you—a challenge is not in any of our best interests. I’d like to be friends with Madelaine, but how can I when she resents me so? If she marries the feelings between us will improve.”
“A wife doesn’t interfere in these matters,” Guy repeated, shaken more than he liked to admit by what Fabrienne had said. Was it true?
“You’ll destroy Madelaine if you persist in your wrong headedness,” Fabrienne insisted,
“She can’t be seriously interested in marrying this—this American, Guy sputtered. “It’s true that Kellogg has mooned after my sister in years past, but she? Never!”
“I love him!” As she spoke Madelaine rushed down the stairs towards them and Guy realized she’s been waiting on the landing above.
“I love John Kellogg and I’ll marry him if he wants me. I saw him come to the door. Did he ask you?”
“I was barely in time to stop the challenge Fabrienne put in. “If you hadn’t told me who he was, Madelaine, then we’d be facing a duel.”
“A duel?” Madelaine put her hands on her hips, glaring at her brother. “Tanguay La Branche, how could you? I’m through with you and your ridiculous adherence to the past. I'll leave this house immediately and I will marry John, whatever you say."
Guy looked from one to the other of the women, overwhelmed. What were things coming to when women spoke so to the head of the household?
Madelaine, starting for the library, turned again to her brother. "Furthermore, it's cruel of you to deprive Cecile of the truth about her birth. I can see she's unhappy not knowing. It's wrong to lie to her. As for me—John knows, has known from the beginning about Cecile and he loves me anyway. What do I care how others feel?" She whirled and ran from Guy.
Fabrienne shrugged as if to say—you see?
