This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without the written permission of publisher or author, except where permitted by law.
Cover Art by Amanda Kelsey of Razzle Dazzle Design.
Copyright © 1974 and 2014 by Patricia Maxwell
First Fawcett Gold Medal Mass Market Edition: 1974
First E-Reads Publication: 1999
First Steel Magnolia Press Publication: 2014
1
The evening sun hovered over the tops of the trees. Its orange shafts struck through the dark woods, harrying the coach as it swayed along, gleaming on its brass fittings and the cracked blue paint on its sides. The sun’s rays were still bright but they had lost their heat. A damp coolness seemed to seep from the encroaching trees and undergrowth, and the muddy water, thrown up as the wheels jolted through the potholes in the road, had a chill, dank smell.
The driver on the box resettled his hat, pulling the brim lower to shield his eyes, and then he took up his blacksnake whip and sent it cracking over the horses’ heads as he yelled curses at the leaders. The coach picked up speed.
At the windows the dirty brown leather curtains bellied and slapped, doing little to stop the muddy water that spattered in and trickled down the sides. The doors rattled loosely in their frames and the body creaked as it swung on its straps, while above the rumbling of the wheels and the pounding of the horses’ hooves the bumping of a loose trunk could be heard.
The man on the forward seat, a merchant judging from his false shirt front, old fashioned stock, and self-satisfied air, threw back his head and glared upward.
Beside him his wife misunderstood. “That man will kill us all,” she said, with an accusing look at the girl on the opposite seat. “I’m surprised we haven’t overturned a dozen times already!” The woman’s eyes were protuberant and her mouth colorless. The grayish brown hair skewered in a knot on top of her head was pulled too tight, dragging her heavy brows upward in a look of constant surprise.
“Sounds like we be about to lose that lot of gee-gaws I’ve got overhead. Happen I’ll have to charge somebody with ‘em, if they turn up missing.” The merchant eyed the girl also. When she made no answer he pushed the window curtain aside with one long finger, and holding back his chin whiskers, let fly a stream of tobacco juice. It was a comment.
Two small tow-headed boys, their hair like cropped white silk, sat on the middle seat, a plain wooden board. With their arms hooked over the wide leather strap that served as a back rest, they turned guileless blue eyes on the girl to see if she had taken their father’s point.
If she had, Mary Elizabeth Brewster gave no indication. Her deep green eyes were fixed on a point above the heads of the merchant and his wife while she drew the strings of her black reticule through her fingers. She had no liking for the merchant and his wife, but after forty long miles spent that day in their company she could understand their annoyance. Not only were they riding with their backs to the horses, but they were being taken some fourteen miles out of their way. It could not be helped. Callie could not be the one to ride backward, because she turned queasy riding backward. As for the detour, that was the chance they took when they boarded public transportation.
Above them the driver swung his whip in a series of sharp reports. Elizabeth lifted a speculative glance. Perhaps a silver dollar had been too much to offer the man on the box for this side trip. It had been Mexican to be sure, but coins were so scarce these days. She appreciated his efforts to get a little more speed out of the lumbering old coach, although it was anybody’s guess whether it was the thought of making up his schedule which drove him, or, as was more likely, the thought of the drunk possible on his windfall, with whiskey at a quarter per gallon.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself fiercely. What mattered was that she and Callie and the baby got to Oak Shade with as little delay as possible.
Beside her, Callie, her name the inevitable shortening from Calliope, the muse of the soft voice, sat as stolid and immovable as a mountain. In her ample lap the baby slept. When Elizabeth looked down at him, her mouth curved unconsciously into a smile. Such a good baby. Their nine days on this bone-wracking trip over a part of Texas and most of Louisiana would have been very different if he had not been a good traveler. As it was, it had been an endurance test. For the first three or four days they had felt bruised and battered as if they had been beaten. But for the last five they had been so mindlessly weary that they had almost ceased to feel; almost, but not quite. The muscles in Elizabeth’s arms ached from holding the baby mile after mile, spelling Callie. Though she never complained, the Negro nurse must be even more tired. On her shoulders had fallen the main burden of caring for little Joseph, not only in the coach but in the primitive taverns and sleazy inns that had provided overnight accommodation. Callie was good with babies as well as being a wonderful wet nurse. The stillborn deaths of six of her own babies, the last only two weeks before Joseph’s birth, had given her a need and a love for the feel of a child in her arms.
Soberly Elizabeth pleated the black bombazine of her dress without really seeing the nervous reaction of her fingers. Even in repose, however, the pale oval of her face did not lose the look of determination about the mouth and chin that had unconsciously alienated the merchant and his wife. Her emerald eyes, heavily lashed beneath dark arched brows, gave no hint of her inner conflict.
Without Callie, Elizabeth thought, this journey, this masquerade would never have been undertaken. For a moment the thought of what she intended to do sent a shudder of dread over her. Her reasons for what she was doing, so carefully thought out, so important, had fled, and she was left with the feeling that she was being incredibly foolhardy, that she would be found out in the first minutes of meeting the family at Oak Shade. Turn back, a part of her mind cried, and she had to clench her jaws together to keep from giving the order.
Then beside her the baby, Joseph, stirred, waving a plump fist in the air. He smiled in his sleep. Her doubts fell away. No, the consequences of not going through with this masquerade were too great. Besides, it was too late to turn back now. It had been too late from the day she had placed a wooden marker on the fresh grave which lay beneath a cottonwood tree by a rambling log house in Texas. A marker bearing her own name.
Strangely, the thought of the marker gave her a feeling of relief. She had made her choice weeks before. There could be no turning back. All that was needed was a little resolution. There was so much to be gained and so little to lose.
She let her eyes rest for a moment on the merchant and his wife and children. Their bright examining eyes had evaluated her from the gold band on her left hand to the mourning brooch made of hair at her throat, from the black high-button shoes peeping from beneath her skirts to the bright auburn hair drawn back in a knot at the nape of her neck and covered by her semi-transparent mourning veil. She had deceived them. It could be done again.
A mirthless smile touched her generous mouth. How shocked they would be if they knew that, despite her widow’s weeds and the baby in the arms of his Negro nurse, she had never had a husband, never been a mother, and from this day would answer to a dead woman’s name.
“Whoa, whoa!”
The shout was followed by the grinding of brakes. The coach began to slow and finally came to a lurching stop.
“What can it be?” The merchant’s wife clutched her husband’s arm.
He shook her off and twitched the leather curtain aside.
“Some fancy landau seems to have blocked the road. Nabob’s rig, no doubt. Got a black in livery at the ribbons.”
Outside, the servant in the carriage could be heard asking for a Madame Delacroix. With a start Elizabeth realized he meant her, but she made no move to alight and sternly repressed an impulse to lean across and peep out around the slack curtain. In a moment the driver climbed down and pulled open the door.
“Mrs. Delacroix, ma’am, this feller says he has orders to carry y’all the rest of the way.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth replied with the quiet dignity befitting a recent widow.
Turning to Callie, she took the baby while Callie clambered out, and then gave him back into her keeping while she herself accepted the driver’s hand and stepped down.
In a few minutes they had been handed into the landau and their trunks and boxes lashed on behind. With a jerk, they started off, leaving the coach behind them to the difficult business of turning on the narrow road.
Elizabeth threw the veil away from her face, drawing its long length across one shoulder to prevent it from being crushed beneath her, and then pushed her skirts into place around her feet.
“We forgot to say good-by,” she told Callie, frowning.
“So did they,” Callie answered without looking up from the baby who had been awakened by the move.
The landau was well sprung, and it had deeply padded seats and gray velvet upholstery. It seemed luxurious in comparison to the stage, whose hard seats and body swung on straps gave no protection from the jolts. It was an open carriage, however, and the damp dew-laden chill of the gathering dusk made Elizabeth shiver and Callie draw Joseph closer against her breasts.
But this last stage of their journey was not a long one, and soon they were turning into a long winding drive. It was lined with evergreen live oaks that acted as a dust screen, the oaks that gave the house its name. Elizabeth felt their dark shade drop over them as they swept under their arching branches up the drive. She was aware of a sudden depression, and her earlier apprehension swept back in force. The sound of the carriage was loud in the soft black stillness. Through the trees, rows of white pillars gleamed, fleeting and ethereal. Then suddenly the carriage broke from the shade, and the house, like a Grecian temple in a forest, was before them. Insubstantial in the dusky darkness, it seemed cold, distant and forbidding. A flame, like a votive candle, flickered in the wrought iron lantern hanging over the front door, but there was no other sign of life. A desolation that was near to tears closed over Elizabeth at this lack of welcome. Suppose it had been Ellen Marie arriving, gentle, easily hurt Ellen Marie, her sister whose place she was taking?
“Is there no one home?” she asked the driver sharply in an effort to cover her misgivings.
“Oh, yes’m. They home alright. I expect they at the supper table.”
She waited while he wrapped the reins around the whip in its stand and climbed down to come around and hand her out of the carriage. She stepped down and waited until Callie struggled out with the sleeping baby. Then Elizabeth swept up the steps, her long black veil swirling about her knees. With one hand clutching her reticule and the other holding her skirts out of the way, she crossed the brick-floored gallery, Callie hurrying behind as though afraid to lose sight of her.
As she neared the front door, it swung wide and a white-coated Negro butler bowed low and then stepped back for her to enter. She glanced at him inquiringly but he had the impassive countenance of all good servants. In the great central hall she stopped.
The hall stretching through the center of the house was floored with polished squares of black and white marble. Against the right wall stood a massive table with a white marble top and the curved cabriole legs of a Chippendale piece. Upon it sat a silver tray for visiting cards and a heavy glass lamp. The lamp had an elaborate base of small stylized glass dragons, a dark green globe that nearly concealed the flickering flame within, and crystal lusters that tinkled faintly in the draft from the open door. Behind the table the wall was covered with an oriental wall-paper in celadon green with a pattern of drooping weeping willows and pensive, small-faced, slant-eyed maidens.
To the left rose a wide staircase with a mahogany stair rail ending at the foot of the stairs in a serpentine coil that served as a newel post. In the center of the coil was fixed a smooth ivory button, a symbol that the house was paid for, that it carried no mortgage.
Seeing her hesitation, the butler bowed again and begged her to step into the library. Though she had the curious feeling that she was being maneuvered, Elizabeth had no choice but to comply. It was only after she was in the library that it occurred to her that as member of the family she should have been shown into the front parlor, or salon as the Creoles called it, instead of this lesser room.
After holding a spill to the lamp in the hall, the butler lit several lamps for them in the library, saw that they were seated and then went away.
Minutes passed. Elizabeth and Callie were too tired to speak, and the ticking of the ormolu clock on the white Carrera marble mantle over the fireplace was loud in the silence. Callie sighed, shifted in her chair, and patted Joseph, who was hungrily trying to suck his fist. Elizabeth, got to her feet and paced, looking at the somber elegance of the room. Burgundy velvet drapes, heavily fringed with gold tassels, hung over the Swiss lace panels at the windows. A gold rug with a border of swirling green leaves covered the floor, and the walnut settee and chairs were covered with red brocatelle picked out with gold thread. The faint odor of tobacco hung on the air, coming she discovered from a humidor on one of the small tables sitting about the room. There was also a smell of leather which came from the books that lined the walls and from the large leather chair that stood behind a heavy desk that took up the far end of the long room. The two smells combined to give an impression of masculinity to the room.
Abruptly the door swung open and the butler stood back to allow a man to enter. Elizabeth turned to face him and made a move to step forward then checked herself. No, let him come to her, she thought. It would not do to appear too eager. But as the man came toward her she found herself wondering if it would not have been easier to go to him than to sustain that dark and searching regard.
A black armband was fastened over the sleeve of his deep gray frock coat. Beneath the coat he wore a black embroidered waistcoat with fawn pantaloons. Onyx shirt studs gleamed against the white of his pleated and tucked shirt front and at his collar a pure white cravat contrasted with the deep sun bronze of his face. His dark hair was brushed back severely over his ears, and the fine curl threatening to fall from the brush pattern lent no note of softness to the black gaze of his eyes.
“You will be my brother’s wife. I bid you welcome to Oak Shade,” he said with a slight bow.
As she gave him her hand he carried it to his lips. The action was so unexpected that Elizabeth flinched, and then tried to recover the slip by smiling quickly and thanking him. But he had not overlooked her reaction, and an added stiffness came into his manner.
“And you must be Bernard,” she said brightly, trying to overcome her nervousness. “Felix spoke of you often. I must thank you for sending the carriage to meet us.”
“Not at all. I am told my driver could not bring you the entire distance from town. I am sorry. It was most remiss of him, especially since he has met every coach from the north for the past three days. I would not want you to find our hospitality lacking.”
“It was my fault. I had the driver bypass the town to come straight here. It seemed best. I didn’t realize that you would send the carriage for us since I didn’t, in my letter, give you any real idea of when we would be arriving. I had no very real idea myself.”
“In the future you will find it best perhaps to leave such arrangements in my hands.”
“I’m—sure I shall,” Elizabeth murmu
red, noting his obvious disapproval of what she had done, but resolving to maintain her independence. Something about his manner set her teeth on edge, and she found her smile fading until they were staring at each other in near hostility. There was an exactness about him that she did not like, from the precise folds of his cravat and the perfect set of his coat across the shoulders, to the trim of his fashionably long sideburns. There was a chiseled appearance to the planes of his face, in the high cheek bones, firm chin, and the contours of his mouth. Thick black brows divided by two parallel grooves, as of constant anger or irritation, gave him a forbidding look. There had been a faint French accent in his speech that might have been attractive if his voice had not been so cold. The only thing about him that she could approve was that he was clean shaven, though this was a mark of a strong, near arrogant, self-confidence in a hirsute decade.
Callie sighed heavily again, and for the first time, Bernard Delacroix seemed to notice the Negro woman and the fretting baby she held. He stared at Joseph for a long moment, so long that Elizabeth said, “The child is tired and hungry, that is all.”
He brought his gaze back to her face. “Yes, of course. You must all be tired. If you will be seated I will have someone show you to your room.”
He had hardly finished speaking before the door opened once again and the butler bowed a plump middle-aged woman into the room.
“What is this, Bernard?” she said, a glint of avid curiosity in her small black eyes. “Why have you left the supper table? Who are these people?”
“This lady,” he answered her with a stress on the second word as a reproof, “is my brother’s wife, the mother of his child.”
An alarming wave of color rose in the florid face of the older woman. “That’s impossible,” she snapped, “Felix has been dead very nearly a year.”
“I assure you it is so.” There was a stern note in his voice that did not fail to reach her. She looked long and measuringly at the baby, who was fast becoming furious as his hunger rose.
Dark Masquerade Page 1
