Decision and Destiny

by DeVa Gantt

  “Charmaine, you don’t have to apologize to me. It was an ugly accident and no one, least of all you, is to blame. But I do accept your condolences.”

  She nodded, cleared her throat, and changed the subject. “Is there a reason you wanted to see me this morning, sir?”

  “Yes, but let us sit down.” He motioned to a chair opposite his desk, and as he moved behind the secretary, she cautiously crossed the room.

  Fatima told George she had sent breakfast into the study for John. George found him there, gathering up the papers on the desk. George didn’t say anything, but put a comforting hand to his friend’s shoulder, then poured him a cup of tea from the untouched tray.

  “I haven’t seen Paul this morning,” John said. “Has he left?”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “I’ve lost track of the days, George—don’t even know when the next ship is due in port.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going back to Richmond, after the funeral.”

  George bowed his head to his tightening chest and stinging eyes. The study fell silent, but for the rustling of papers John mindlessly shoved into a valise.

  The door burst open, and Yvette charged in, followed closely by a sobbing Jeannette and a concerned Paul.

  “Johnny,” she blurted out, “Father is sending us to a boarding school, and he’s called Mademoiselle Charmaine to his chambers. He’s going to dismiss her!”

  “What?” John’s face twisted in feral disgust. He abandoned the papers and headed toward the door.

  “John!” Paul called after him, but George grabbed Paul’s arm.

  “Let him go.”

  “But they’ll kill each other—”

  “Leave them be,” George advised sharply, holding fast Paul’s arm. “They need to have it out, once and for all. You can’t keep protecting them from each other. You’ll only end up being blamed for interfering.”

  Frederic waited for Charmaine to be seated. “How are my daughters?” he asked. “I assume they know about Pierre?”

  “Yes, sir, they know.” She looked down at her hands, reliving the girls’ grief, witnessing the horrific disbelief that contorted their faces when they learned their younger brother would no longer be a part of their lives. “They were asleep last night,” she whispered hoarsely, “but I was there when they awoke. They’re extremely upset and have been in tears all morning. I should be getting back to them soon.”

  Frederic nodded. Charmaine Ryan was the only ray of hope on this dismal day. God had sent his family a blessing when she had come to live in his house. “They are not going to face their loss alone,” he vowed. “This time I will console them. I want you to know that.”

  Charmaine silently thanked God. “They would welcome seeing you, sir.”

  “Would you like to bring them here or would you prefer I visit the nursery?”

  Charmaine relaxed with the query, choosing to answer it with one of her own. “Sir, you’re not going to dismiss me, are you?”

  His brow lifted. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Mrs. Duvoisin said you were sending the girls to a school in Europe.”

  Frederic mastered his instant ire. “Her idea, not mine,” he ground out. “That’s the last place my daughters need to be right now. They need their family, and you, Charmaine. They’ve suffered two terrible tragedies this year. I want to see them emerge from the second as successfully as they did from the first. I want to see them whole and happy again.”

  “So do I, sir.”

  “That brings me back to the reason I wanted to speak to you this morning. John came to my quarters on Saturday morning and asked if—”

  The unfinished statement hung in the air. Charmaine grimaced, and Frederic read the torment in her eyes. “What is it, Miss Ryan?”

  “Nothing, sir,” she lied, suppressing another urge to weep, the sudden chill that left her trembling.

  Her shallow denial left Frederic unconvinced. “Have you seen John this morning?” he asked, dreading some unfathomable answer.

  “No, sir, not this morning.”

  Apprehension gripped her. She did not want to discuss John with his father.

  “Last night?”

  “Yes, sir.” She was back in the chapel, back in John’s arms, reliving his piercing pain, powerless to her tears.

  Frederic was moved by her compassion. “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “He blames himself!” she blurted out. “He lays all blame on himself.”

  Frederic’s eyes grew turbulent, but before he could comfort her, there was a wild commotion from beyond. The outer door banged open, and John charged in, slamming the door shut behind him.

  “You lousy bastard!” he shouted, taking in Charmaine’s tear-stained face. “You’ve reduced her to tears already? How despicable can you be?”

  Frederic’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on, John?”

  “You tell me, Father! Why don’t you tell me?”

  Charmaine jumped up. “John! Listen to me!”

  Her petition fell on deaf ears. For all his apparent outrage, he wasn’t seeing her at all. “You enjoy watching the women in this house cry, don’t you?” he sneered, stepping deeper into the room. “It makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?”

  Frederic shot to his feet, fists clenched, Agatha’s allegations ringing in his ears. “I don’t know what you think is happening here, John, but—”

  “But what, Father? What don’t I understand? I’ll tell you what I don’t understand—how you can rob your children of love and affection! Are you out to hurt the girls now, or just me? Maybe that’s it: hurt Yvette and Jeannette, hurt John. After all, it worked with Pierre, didn’t it? Didn’t it, goddamn you?”

  Frederic paled, the calumnious words a minor attack when set against the torment in his son’s face. “John, I’m sorry about Pierre. I never—”

  “Don’t! Don’t even say it, because I’ll never believe it. Pierre was only a pawn in your cunning game of subterfuge and power.”

  “Please, John, you misunderstand,” Charmaine interrupted, stepping directly between the two men.

  He looked at her for the first time. “No, Charmaine, you’re the one who doesn’t understand. I told you once: my father is the master of manipulation. Pierre was a valuable piece in his scheme, valuable because he was my—”

  “Watch what you say in front of the governess!” Frederic warned.

  “Why, Father? Are you afraid she’ll find out she works for a fiend?”

  “John!” Charmaine gasped. “Please, don’t—”

  “She knows everything, anyway,” John announced, ignoring her protests.

  “So,” his father snarled in derision, “you’ve shared your intimate relationships with the hired help?”

  John chuckled ruefully. “When the ‘hired help’ offers more compassion than my own family—yes. Charmaine knows Colette had a husband and a lover. What she doesn’t know is the lover should have been the husband!”

  “That’s enough! I want you to leave—now!”

  “No,” John growled with a fierce shake of the head, “I’m not going anywhere. I want to know why Charmaine is being dismissed? Why, damn it?”

  “But, John, I’m not!” Charmaine countered in surprise.

  He wasn’t listening. “You wouldn’t give the girls to me when I asked for them, but a boarding school will suit them just fine! Is that how you shower them with love and affection? Or is this just another way to hurt Colette? Even though she’s in the grave, you still want to hurt her! Damn you! Damn you to hell!”

  “John, stop it! Please stop it!”

  “No! I want some answers! You manacled Colette to you by withholding her daughters. You attempted to do the same to me. And now they’re to be sent away? Cast aside? Why, because they’re no longer of use to you?”

  “John, I have no intention of sending them away. I was—”

  “Liar! Always deceit and lies with you! God, how I loathe them! How I lo
athe you! How can you stand there and lie again and again to me—to Colette?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Don’t you? She loved me! Me! We were to be married! But somehow you manipulated her into breaking the banns!”

  Charmaine gasped.

  “That’s right, Charmaine, I knew Colette first, but my father convinced her I’d never amount to anything—that I didn’t have a penny to my name, save what I would inherit from him one day. The great Frederic Duvoisin, on the other hand, could take care of her family here and now, rescue them from poverty. So, Colette sacrificed herself for her poor crippled brother. And what did it gain her but a miserable cripple of a husband instead?”

  “It wasn’t all about money, John,” his father murmured dolefully.

  “What then? Love? Don’t tell me she loved you! She was so sad when I came back into her life she had forgotten how to smile. It didn’t look like love to me!”

  “What would you know of love?” Frederic lashed out.

  “Nothing that came from you!” John fired back, a volley that met its mark. “You say you loved my mother, but I don’t believe that, either. If you did, you would never have done what you did to me. But unlike you, I loved my son. And now he’s dead—dead because of your hatred for me!”

  Frederic inhaled, wounded. Agatha is right: John loathes me, and that will never change.

  Still John persisted. “You’ve taken everything from me, haven’t you? Anything—anyone I’ve ever loved, you’ve managed to wrench them away.”

  “John,” his father attempted again, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t! Don’t you dare grovel with an apology now, for I will never forgive you! And I’m glad Colette came back to me, that she finally followed her heart. When she looked upon you, it was with pity—pathetic pity, nothing more. If only you had died first, that fair lady would now be my wife!”

  Charmaine recoiled, the agony on Frederic’s face piercing. “John!”

  But Frederic was armed for his own battle. “That lady, as you call her, was far below such a title. You blame me for her death, but you don’t even know how she died. She miscarried a child that was not mine. Yes, John,” he sneered smugly, savoring the befuddled expression on his son’s face, “she loved you so much she took another lover.”

  John laughed scathingly, the consternation gone. “Who fed you that shit?”

  “Blackford—” Frederic faltered “—ask Blackford.”

  “No, I won’t ask Blackford. He’s a filthy liar who’d say anything to cover up his incompetence—if he told you that at all!”

  The logic of John’s assertion took hold, making it difficult to breathe.

  When Frederic didn’t respond, John continued, his words low and tight. “I loved her, Father. I loved her because I knew her, knew her to be decent and good. Maybe you can’t comprehend that, and I pity you for it, but I loved her. And unlike you, I doubted her only once. So your newest lie falls upon deaf ears.” He shook his head. “You always believed the worst about her, didn’t you? Even when I first brought her here, you were disdainful of her. She could feel it, she fretted about it. But I told her not to worry, you’d come around. Little did I know. I suppose after she accepted your proposal, it confirmed your opinion of her—that she was out for the Duvoisin money. But she cared about her family—her brother—and that is why she married you. What a fool I was to desert her, not once, but twice, to honor her perverted sense of duty! I should have known you’d destroy her! I should have protected her from that.”

  “John, I never meant—”

  “If only I could do it over again,” John ranted on, “I would never be so stupid as to leave her here with you. I wouldn’t care if you disowned me. I never gave a damn about your fortune. I’d forfeit every penny of it for just one more second of her time!”

  Frederic bowed his head to remorse, the poignant sincerity of his son’s declaration. He was swept back to those last two nights, holding Colette in his arms again, and tears sprang to his eyes. “I know you’ll never believe this, John, but I, too, would forfeit it all.”

  “You’re right, I don’t believe you. It sounds good, but it’s just another lie.”

  Suddenly, everything made sense to Frederic: that one deception, conceived nearly ten years ago, had led to this. “You’ve only been lied to once, John,” he whispered. “I thought you knew the truth. These last few years, I thought Colette must have told you the truth.”

  “Told me what?” John prompted, confused.

  Frederic glanced uncomfortably at Charmaine, then pressed on. “I was attracted to Colette when she first came to Charmantes.” John snorted, but Frederic ignored him. “I mistook her coquetry for something else, and late one night, I seduced her.”

  “I don’t believe it!” John railed, bombarded by a fleeting glimpse of Colette flirting with his father. The nocuous image sent his innards plummeting. “Seduced or raped?” he demanded venomously.

  The chamber fell deadly silent, and in those mounting seconds when no denial came, John’s face drained of color. The memory was gone, replaced by an uglier scenario: the painful truth. “You forced her! Goddamn you to hell, she was pure and innocent, and you forced her!”

  He dove at his father, but Charmaine threw herself in his path, grappling for his arms. “No, John! Stop it! You’re not going to change anything this way! Stop!”

  The sanity of her petition penetrated, and John faltered. He glanced down at the hands that held him, took in Charmaine’s desperate face. He looked back at his father, but Frederic had collapsed into his armchair, head bowed, by all outward signs a man condemned.

  John stepped back, but when Charmaine’s hands dropped away, he clasped one of them, turned, and pulled her from the iniquitous room. Together they snaked through the crowd loitering in the corridor. There was Agatha, aquiver with anticipation, the worried twins, a concerned Paul, George, even the servants.

  The next thing Charmaine knew, they were in her room. Pierre’s body had been removed, the bed made, the furniture dusted, and the French doors thrown wide to catch the soft morning breezes. The tenebrous reminders of those four terrible days were gone. Everything was immaculate, mocking the turmoil that tainted their hearts.

  John leaned heavily on the doorframe, head resting against a raised forearm, eyes staring down at the emerald lawns. When it seemed he’d never speak, Charmaine said, “Your father has no intention of sending the girls away. I wasn’t called to his quarters to be dismissed.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t have been exposed to that.”

  “I should have left,” she concurred.

  But he wasn’t listening. “Rape,” he muttered in revulsion. “But why? Did he hate me that much? Or is he really that evil? Never once, in all those years, did it occur to me that was the reason she deserted me. My God! I wronged her so many times in my mind, chastised her, and still she loved me. She knew I was consumed with jealousy, yet she never told me the truth. Why did she allow me to believe the worst—that she had chosen my father’s fortune over me—that she was to blame?”

  When the quiet room yielded no answers, he looked back at Charmaine.

  “I had no idea you knew Colette first,” she said. “Were you truly betrothed?”

  He stared outdoors once again, transfixed. Charmaine held silent. When he spoke again, the story unfolded.

  The year had been l827 and George, Paul, and he were attending university in France. “We were hell-raisers then, at least I was,” he said, with a sad chuckle, “spending less time at the books and more time carousing. The spring semester was half-spent before I first glimpsed the young lady whom Paul had been squiring from one Paris soirée to another. She was beautiful,” he whispered reverently, “and the moment she wrinkled her fine aristocratic nose at me, I was determined to have her. Such an objective proved more difficult than I had initially imagined, and once I had lured her away from my brother, I found that, although
she pretended at being a woman of the world, she was quite proper and innocent. But it was too late for me. I had fallen in love with her, and she, with me, or so I thought. Torture became my reward, and since I’d been unable to seduce her, I realized the only alternative was marriage. True, I was young, but if seventeen was not too young for a woman to marry, then nineteen was not unreasonable for a young man.

  “Her mother objected fiercely. The woman did not fancy the likes of me for a son-in-law. But thanks to the gossip of a family friend, she was assured of my family’s wealth and the inheritance that would eventually fall to me, and not Paul, as she had originally believed.

  “That same friend suggested the wedding take place on Charmantes so Colette’s mother could meet my father and ascertain my standing as heir to the family’s holdings. I was reluctant to involve him, but Colette persuaded me to return home for the wedding. Her childhood friend would accompany us, along with Paul and George. It would be romantic, she reasoned, and although I didn’t want to wait, I loved her and wanted to please her.

  “So, we laughed over the workings of the adult mind and surmised Colette’s mother hoped to snare my widower father. Her husband had lost most of his fortune to the revolution, and after his death, she had to rely on any device, including Colette, to see that she and her son, Pierre, were cared for.

  “Such assumptions were close to the truth. As soon as we arrived on Charmantes, Adèle Delacroix set her sights on my father. He was not interested…not in Colette’s mother, at least.” John snorted in contempt as he contemplated his sire’s true motives.

  “Over the years that followed, I wondered if Adèle had taken my father’s snub in stride, then manipulated Colette into his arms in her stead. Had she used her son’s infirmity to convince Colette to forfeit me for the immediate security of his fortune? I had walked in on several conversations that supported that possibility. The woman was intuitive, alert to every word my father and I exchanged. It didn’t take her long to size up our strained relationship. When we argued, it only served to heighten her anxiety. He didn’t think I was prepared to step into marriage and work for a living, an assertion I was determined to prove wrong. I started by lending a hand in the fields…” John’s words dropped off, and Charmaine watched him work through the details, his scowl darkening. “Suffice it to say, Adèle fretted over the inheritance that might be withdrawn if I didn’t behave myself. If nothing else, she burdened Colette with talk of responsibility and family loyalty, exploiting Colette’s love and concern for her younger brother.