Silver-Tongued Devil (Louisiana Plantation Collection)

by Blake, Jennifer

  “You would,” she said shortly.

  “You don’t feel the part? The gypsy is there, inside you, shut up where she can never be seen. But you could let her out if you would.”

  Her gaze cool, she said, “You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “Well, then, perhaps a marionette: wooden, without emotion, pulled by strings in other people’s hands.” The words were acid.

  “Or,” she said with a tight smile, “I could be Lucia di Lammermoor.” The reference was to the heroine of Donizetti’s opera of the same name, a woman who stabs the bridegroom foisted upon her in a marriage of convenience. She had been reading Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor, the story that had been Donizetti’s inspiration.

  “Now this is promising.”

  “I can’t imagine why you would think so,” she returned.

  “There’s scant difference between anger and passion, and it’s at least a sign of some feeling.”

  She gave him a vengeful look. “You may get more feeling than you bargain for one day, and then what?”

  “Then I will shout hosanna and hope for the strength to survive it.” He leaned his head against the lace antimacassar on the chair’s back.

  “I didn’t mean—” she began through tight lips.

  “I know that, but please don’t spoil the visions in my head. They are far too diverting.”

  “I can imagine,” she said.

  “Can you? Then why aren’t you blushing? Or maybe there’s hope for the gypsy yet?”

  “For the last time,” she said, her chest swelling with indignation, “I have no intention of getting into a costume and parading through the streets pretending to be something I’m not.”

  “You won’t have to get into it,” he said comfortably. “I’ll be delighted to strip off what you have on and dress you in my choice. It’s possible I might come to consider obstinacy a virtue if you put me to that trouble.”

  He would do exactly as he said; she had not the least doubt of it. She tried another tack. “I would remind you that I am in mourning.”

  “But you aren’t dead. I’m not offering a day of gay dissipation, you know, only a walk through the streets to see what the city is like on the last day of the carnival season. You will feel more of the spirit of it if you are masked, that’s all.”

  “And you won’t have to introduce me to your friends,” she said in striated tones.

  Stillness closed over his face. When he spoke, the words had the clipped edges of suppressed anger. “Is that what this is all about? You think — you dare think — that I am embarrassed to be seen with you?”

  “I think you prefer to keep me hidden away. Why, I have yet to decide.”

  “How very magnanimous of you. Did it never occur to you that my care might be for your natural reluctance to be put on display? Or was I wrong to bother? Perhaps I should have turned you into Lady Godiva today and paraded you on horseback clothed in your hair. It would have been exactly what you might expect from someone of my nature.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.

  “Oh, I was never more serious. Only think how much easier it would be to get you into costume.”

  There was heat in her brain. It almost seemed she could feel his hands on her, peeling away her gown, unfastening her camisole, loosening the tapes of her petticoats so they fell in a great billowing pile around her feet. His hands on her hair, loosening it, letting it fall around her, the freedom of being unclothed, of having nothing except air and his touch on her skin.

  She wondered from the hot look in his eyes if he shared the same visions now. But she did not want to know.

  She said, “Next, I suppose you’ll tell me that attending one of the balls will be no entertainment, but a means of providing tone for my constitution.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. There’s nothing wrong with your tone.”

  It was an unexpected concession. Just possibly, it deserved some reward. She sighed. “All right, I’ll go walking with you. But only as a nun.”

  “Intriguing. You feel the need for a pretense of purity?”

  That jibe banished her tenuous sense of accord. “I merely thought,” she said, “that you might see yourself as Christ, my savior.”

  “Blasphemy.” His gaze was tinged with irony.

  “Isn’t it?” she said in bright retaliation.

  Her smile dimmed, however, as he flipped aside a costume complete with train and tiara to reveal a nun’s habit. She had the feeling it might have been his final choice. And that she didn’t like at all.

  It was late evening when they left the house to mingle with the crowds that thronged the streets, Angelica in her nun’s garb, Renold dressed like a pirate. Striding beside her in his cavalier’s hat, with seven-league boots and a cutlass swinging at his side, he looked raffish, darkly handsome, and more dangerous than ever.

  The night was cool with a rising wind that set the street lamps to swaying on their brackets so that the shadows danced. Carriages rattled past carrying men and women wearing fantastic masks to the many balls being held over the city. Some of the ballgoers went on foot, led by link boys carrying lanterns and followed by servants carrying dancing slippers to be put on at the ballroom door.

  Music was in the air, drifting from open ballroom windows, or else played by hopeful street musicians with their caps on the banquette in front of them. Waltzes by Strauss alternated with the latest Stephen Foster ballads and tunes from the operettas of the season. Somewhere, a man whistled, in perfect key and with creative trills, the crying song from L’Elisir d’Amore. The melancholy sound of it followed Angelica and Renold as they strolled in the direction of the river.

  They turned a corner and were engulfed in pandemonium. A dozen boys with faces darkened by axle grease and white capes made of flour sacking around their shoulders dodged up and down the street. They threw bags of flour to coat each other and anyone else unlucky enough to be in reach in fogging white powder. Men dressed as Arabs and Indians, wild-eyed with strong drink, capered up and down on horseback. Two women in the uniforms of sailors hung on the arms of a pair of mustachioed barmen. A pack of rivermen brawled up and down the street kicking and gouging in drunken ill-humor. From a carriage rolling past a woman in a pink gown so tight her breasts bulged above the silk slung a stockinged leg out the window and waggled it at a man staring down from a balcony. As one of the boys tossed flour at the woman, she cursed him in words slurred by drink.

  It was vulgar and cheap. It was also uninhibited and exultant, free and weirdly beautiful in the half-light.

  Watching, Angelica felt a curious struggle taking place inside herself. She was repelled, yet enthralled. She wanted to turn away, but could not help looking. She felt she should leave, still she longed, quite suddenly, to be as wild and abandoned as any gypsy. She wanted to fly down the street with open arms, laughing, gathering up folly and foolishness as she went.

  “Look,” Renold said, “here comes the street pageant, one of the things I wanted you to see.”

  There had been a low murmur of sound, scarcely noticed, for some minutes. Now it grew louder.

  From down the street appeared a man on horseback carrying a banner of silk edged with fringe. Behind him came a dozen more men, a score, a hundred. On they came in increasing numbers, men costumed as Bedouins, as English soldiers, and as camel drivers. They came dressed as camels, as lions and wolves, as roosters and ducks and geese. Some were on foot, some in carriages and wagons. Some carried torches for light, others waved lanterns. They weaved and yelled, drunk as lords and deliriously antic with it. And they ducked a hail of flour bags and thrown bonbons, catching them and flinging them back without pausing in their march.

  The last horseman passed by, but that was not the end of it. Behind the marchers came a crowd of maskers, tripping along, bowing to the applause of the people on the banquette, throwing kisses and handfuls of candied almonds known as dragées. Behind them came several carriages of women who could only be l
abeled as ladies of the evening. The women yelled out suggestions to men and thumbed their noses at women while shaking their bosoms and other parts of their anatomies in a fashion calculated to startle and amaze.

  The maskers were spread out, overflowing the banquettes, pushing and shoving to make their way through the crowd. The carriages added to the disturbance, forcing an ebb and flow through the milling throng. The people watching edged close, pressing in upon Angelica. She felt herself jostled from behind. Renold placed an arm around her, drawing her closer against his side.

  She could feel his hard fingers at her waist, the nudge of her hip against his long thigh as they were pushed this way and that. She did not resist, but nestled into his hold. There was comfort and safety there, and she had a fine excuse for accepting both. He turned his head to look down at her with a smile in his eyes. She sustained it only a moment before returning her attention to the spectacle before her.

  The last of the marchers were straggling past. The crowd began to thin as dozens of people surged into the street to join the impromptu parade.

  There was a man in front of them dressed in shapeless and dirty trousers and coat that looked as if he had been sleeping in them nightly for some time. He looked around him with a slit-eyed stare. His gaze fastened on Angelica for a brief moment before sliding away. It was an accidental meeting of eyes, yet a shudder ran down her spine as if she had touched something slimy.

  It was then that she heard the sound of harsh breathing not far away. She turned her head. There was another man just off to her right, half-hidden behind a Roman emperor. His grin showed blackened teeth and lips misshapen by scars. The pockmarks on his face were filled with greasy dirt, and his ears were mangled stubs projecting from his head. He looked beyond her and he winked.

  Yet another man sidled closer on Renold’s far side. Wiry and short, he had a round, brutish face and several teeth missing from his loose grin. His clothes were fairly new, but so tight they might have been taken from some young boy. He licked his lips in a constant motion while pushing his fist into his coat pocket and knotting it as if he gripped something he did not want to be seen.

  Menace surrounded the men like the acrid odor from their bodies. Angelica’s gaze was wide as she glanced from one to the other. The word compressed, little more than a whisper, she said, “Renold?”

  “I see them,” he answered in low tones. “Stay with me, no matter what happens. Don’t get in the way, but don’t let them get between us.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Money, possibly. A fight, maybe. Or you.”

  “Me?” The word was doubtful.

  “For the rut and bruising of joyous rape. Or the price they can get from somebody else for the same.”

  She didn’t understand him, not completely, but there was no time for more. Stepping in front of her, he drew his cutlass from his belt with a rasping whine.

  The fourth man came from behind. Robed as a friar, with his face hidden by cowl and half-mask, he lunged at Angelica. A hard arm whipped around her chest, crushing her breasts, squeezing the breath from her. She gave a gasping cry, at the same time snatching at Renold. Her fingers closed on his shirt and she twisted them into the fabric.

  The friar cursed in obscene rage. He brought his free hand up and around in a vicious slap. It landed with stunning force, jarring her head into a sharp throb, making her ears ring.

  It did not break her hold. Instead, it sent a wave of red fury through her brain. Twisting, she struck out with one free hand and felt her nails rake bare skin, heard a satisfying hiss of pain from somewhere inside the friar’s cowl. His grasp loosened.

  It was Renold who broke her grasp as he swung. Immediately, he ripped her away from the other man, dragged her to his hard frame. The lamplight, wavering in the wind, kissed the steel of his cutlass with an unearthly glow of red and gold, blue and orange. The curved tip winked, ready, vicious, waiting.

  “Now,” he said as he gathered the men crowding toward him with a single glance. “Come on. Sacrifice of blood is an old and venerable Mardi Gras tradition. Sometimes it’s a bull — other times an ass or two will do.”

  One moment the men crouched to spring, the next they were gone, melting, sidling, plunging into the crowd. Within seconds, there was no one near Angelica and Renold except gaily bedecked maskers with vacant, smiling faces.

  The last marcher appeared, then, bringing up the rear. It was a fiddler, playing as he capered in a harlequin costume and a fool’s hat set with jingling bells. He looked neither right nor left, making music only for himself. Then he was gone, and the sound of his fiddle and his bells faded into the night

  Renold made no further excuse to remain in the streets. Piercing the shadows with a stiletto gaze, wary as a dunghill cock in a pigpen, he wound his way back toward his own door. The silent curses in his mind relieved his tension if not his anxiety.

  He should have known. There had been the other attack to warn him, if only he had heeded it. More, there had been his instinct; the whole thing had, until now, been entirely too easy.

  Scum, the dregs of Gallatin Street. Or more likely from the swamp around Girod, that area ten blocks from the river so crime-ridden and depraved that even the police never set foot inside it. He felt sick at the thought of Angelica in their hands. Animals, unfit to touch the hem of her gown.

  But then, he himself was the same.

  It was no surprise to find the man waiting for him outside the gate. Small, quiet, shadow gray and thin-voiced, he stepped forward with his hands held together at the level of his top waistcoat button. His eyes caught the lamplight on their shiny surfaces, making them glisten with a hectic excitement that told its own tale.

  “One moment,” Renold said before the little man could speak. Turning to Angelica, he said, “I won’t be long. Ask Tit Jean to bring a tray of wine and brandy to the salon, if it pleases you, while I attend to this small matter.”

  Her gaze as it rested on his visitor was appraising, but she offered no objection. Stepping inside, she moved away in her demure nun’s garb. He watched her until she was safely in the house before he turned back to his visitor.

  “So have your hounds found the scent, or was it another false trail? Tell me quickly, for my patience is not endless and I’m a little tired of finding myself cornered with nothing to do except stand and draw blade.”

  “You needn’t wait any longer. They’re found.” The mouse-like man’s voice was so soft it did not penetrate more than a foot beyond where he stood.

  “Both?” Renold’s frown turned rigid with distrust.

  “Aye. Two men, right descriptions. Came off the right boat, too, in a manner of speaking. Young one swam ashore, so it seems, but took a while to make his way home. The other caught hold of a log and hung on until the thing fetched up near the bank.”

  “Well away from civilization, I surmise.”

  The other man gave a bobbing nod. “Downstream, clear away from any town, nothing but bottomland and woods. The old man was sick, just about gone when a fur trapper from back in the swamp came across him, took him in. Was some time before he could get word out. T’other went after him then, brought him out.”

  Renold was silent while his thoughts slid swiftly through his mind. He said, “How long ago?”

  “Can’t rightly tell you that, your honor. You didn’t say you wanted to know.”

  “An oversight. You have their direction?”

  The little man drew air through his sharp teeth. “Did have. They left.”

  Renold subdued his irritation with difficulty. “It was in Natchez, perhaps?”

  “Don’t know why you’d think it,” the other man said with a shake of his head. “Was up Baton Rouge way, dive by the wharf where they rested a day or two. They got poor taste in lodging, all things considered.”

  “I assume,” Renold said trenchantly, “that you mean something by that?”

  “Gave themselves airs, or at least the young one did, talking about
a plantation, how rich he was going to be. Stupid, might have got themselves killed, what with folks thinking they had money. Except Mrs. Bowles, their landlady, knew they were nigh broke. She looked.”

  “You are going to tell me that such a fine, upstanding lady, the heart and soul of curiosity, failed to ask where the two gentlemen were going?” Renold drew a purse from his pocket and stood weighing it in his hand.

  The other man licked his lips. His gaze jumped up and down, following the movement of the purse. He said, “Now I think on it, she did ask. The younger one wouldn’t say, the older one just kept raving about his daughter. Sent to find out where she went after that explosion, was told she disappeared, hadn’t been seen since. Drove him fair daft, it did. They left next morning.”

  “The date at the time was?”

  “Better than a week ago, far as I can make out.”

  Not a particle of interest was allowed to invest Renold’s features. His tone musing, he said, “I would expect they went north.”

  “You’d be wrong, now, your honor. Went south, toward New Orleans, asking along the way about a fair-haired lady. Sort of like the one here with you.” The little man stared, eyes bright, face twisted with cunning.

  “Could you possibly be speaking of my wife?” Each word fell in distinct clarity, lethal with warning, from Renold’s lips. “I should not like to think so.”

  “God, no. No, indeed. My mistake.” Retreating, the man stuffed the purse in his hand in his pocket as if fearful Renold might decide to take it back, and his life with it.

  “Remember, then.” He could trust himself to say no more. Nodding dismissal, he stood quite still in the shadows as the slight figure scurried off.

  So Edmund Carew had survived after all.

  He had survived and discovered, perhaps, that his daughter had departed for New Orleans in the possession of a man who could be an enemy. Too wily to confront him head-on, Carew had attempted to pry Angelica from his grasp. The men he had found for the purpose had been inferior, so he had failed.