by J. R. Rain
He sounded half-French like Dalgo, but with more of a Downton Abbey kind of accent, so I tried to channel that show (a favorite of mine) when I answered.
“Thank you, sir. Unfortunately, I’ve just been savagely attacked by your lieutenant and his constable—that’s why I’m all covered in blood. They meant to do unseemly things to me, but could not agree on who would go first, so they bludgeoned each other near to death.”
Hah! No one would believe that little ol’ five-foot me would’ve been able to beat two men senseless, especially while they tried to rape me in a locked jail cell. If the constable survives, he might not even want to admit I kicked his ass. I doubt his ego could take it.
The grey-haired man appeared rather shocked, but he also believed me. “A falling out between villains,” he said under his breath. Then, “Forgive me, ma’am, I’m Colonel Barthelemy Macarty, deputy mayor of the city of New Orleans and superintendent of the police department.” He sort of bowed, and when I gave him my hand, he kissed it.
“Uh, I’m Mrs. Samantha Moon. Of Fullerton, California.”
“Dupont, Moran, go investigate at once, please. This outrage upon your person took place in C Cell, Mrs. Moon?”
I handed the fat little sergeant the key ring. “The one back there, third door on the left.”
The two policemen trotted off.
“Please allow me to escort you to my office, ma’am, where you’ll be made more comfortable. I’ll send at once to my house for proper clothes for you—and I imagine you’re famished from your ordeal.”
After that, things got weird again, like in a dream. Only this time I experienced a much better class of weirdness. For one thing, the colonel’s office resembled a little palace—servants buzzed around and kept fanning me while others came and went bringing glasses of lemonade and plates of praline candies. A sudden suspicion spoiled all this Scarlett O’Hara stuff for me.
“These are your servants, right, Colonel? I mean, they’re not… well, your slaves?”
“Ah, yes, you hail from our new western state of California, Mrs. Moon, where wisely, slavery is illegal. As it happens, Gaspar and his son Alphonse are longtime family retainers; however, rest assured, I freed both of them several years ago, along with the others of my household, and now they work for modest wages. None of us can fly forever in the face of progress, can we? I believe this Yankee lawyer Lincoln will force abolition down all our throats anyhow, which seems highly likely to me, now that the Democrats are split into three. Luckily, Louisiana is far too sensible ever to go to war over the issue.”
That’s not how I remembered it from middle school social studies, but I didn’t say anything.
“But you will still encounter slavery wherever you go in New Orleans, Mrs. Moon, so I must strongly advise you to hold your opinions in check as much as possible. Not everyone is as liberal on the topic as we Macartys, and my family has suffered a great deal for it socially. Yes, Dupont?”
The fat sergeant came in and unleashed a stream of French, then left.
“He says that all in Cell C is as you described it: both officers hover on the brink of death and have been removed to the infirmary. Odd. I would have had Gosling down for the greater villain of the two, but perhaps he was stricken by remorse. In all candor, Mrs. Moon, I’ve been seeking an excuse to relieve both men of their duties for months. I regret only that you had to suffer so at their hands. Now, I’m afraid I must ask you to tell me all that has befallen you—I take it that you arrived here by packet boat from the Isthmus of Panama?”
I grabbed his meaning from his thoughts and nodded while I munched on my praline.
He went on. “Tell me, were you staying in the city with friends?”
“No, I checked into a hotel—the name escapes me, I think I may have the vapors from the attack still.”
He frowned. The names of two hotels, the Pass Christian or Mobile flickered across his thoughts.
“Mobile, I believe?” I fanned myself.
He looked relieved. “Ah. That would explain why you found yourself in the Reed Jungle. That’s Indian-treaty swampland, which means we may face great obstacles in having your missing property located and returned. Tell me, ma’am—what of your servants? What was their fate?”
My servants? Wow, things really were different here. I’d get a lot more respect as a ‘lady,’ though, and ladies always had servants, so I kept on doing the Masterpiece Theater thing to the hilt. Fortunately, his thoughts gave me plenty of cues to stay in character. “I had two servants traveling with me,” I said, sounding tearful. “Poor, sweet, innocent Kathy and Duane. They were both abducted, and I fear I’ll never see them alive again.”
If I did, I’d probably kill them myself, I thought. Anyway, this had the desired effect, and the Colonel all but wept with me. Gaspar’s wife, Bricky, interrupted us. She breezed in with a bunch of clothes for me, lacy underwear, crinoline petticoats, a big pink silk dress, a pair of shoes, and even a bonnet.
“I do hope everything fits, ma’am—you are much of a size as my dear daughter Pelagie. Now, after you have changed, I must insist that you come stay at my home as our honored guest until your relatives can be notified. Now, I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. I really did feel like crying. “The thing is… I don’t have any relatives.” Certainly not in this time period. “Actually, I’m a widow.”
“A widow at your age?” Bricky raised both eyebrows. “Oh, my dear.”
I looked off to the side. “Some God-forsaken ruffians got their hands on him. They found his body in a cave.”
The colonel stood and bowed gracefully. “Were I but twenty years younger, ma’am,” he said, “you would not be so for long.”
You know what? I can think of a lot of modern guys who could learn a lot from that old coot.
Chapter Fifteen
“Tell me truly, Samantha… have you never given any thought to remarriage?”
This was my new best friend, Pelagie Marie-Jouelle Macarty, ‘Lalie’ to her friends and family, whose ranks I seemed to have instantly joined. Think a young Melanie from Gone With the Wind crossed with Salma Hayek, and you have an idea of what she looked like. She was devout, merry and childlike, had beautiful manners, and talked mostly about love and marriage.
Well, let’s be fair, so did I back at nineteen. Hanging out with her made me feel like I’d been trapped in a Jane Austen novel. All I wanted to do was bust out, track down Marie Laveau and go back to my own time so I could be with my kids again, not to mention Kingsley. Speaking of marriage…
Their enormous townhouse occupied the same building as the future Pat O’Brien’s Bar on St. Peter’s Street, complete with the same interior courtyard filled with potted banana and palm trees.
Anyway, that first night, as I prepared myself for bed, —everything hit me all at once, and I fell onto the big four-poster bed, crying my heart out. I was stuck, marooned in time; I might never see anyone or anything I loved ever again—not just Tammy and Anthony. It was crazy, but I found myself missing the stupidest things from the modern world. Judge Judy on TV. Keurig coffee. New car smell. A decent toothbrush. Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough…
“Oh, ma petite, ma petite,” said Lalie, who must have come in without my noticing. “Ma pauvre petite. I know you have been hurt so terribly. How you must miss your home!”
Another thing I learned about this time period—zero privacy. I mean I couldn’t even take a bath without Bricky—who got the name due to the slightly reddish color in her hair—or one of the other women servants showing up to dump more hot water in the tub or scrub my back. They had no flush toilets; if you needed to pee, you had to do it into a porcelain chamber pot under a cabinet with a wooden seat called a ‘commode’―and then hand it to a servant to empty and wash out. Fortunately, I didn’t need to do that much at all, unless I had to fake eating normal food. Of course, what came out of me didn’t look much different than what went down, so I would
have to play goalie and alter the memories of any servant who tried to empty it for me.
The problem with crying in front of Lalie was that she started crying, too, and damn, was that girl good at it. If crying had been opera, she would have been a major star. She could go on and on for hours, which sort of left me feeling totally miserable and unfulfilled, as if she stole my tears. I know. I’m a mess.
“I think I’d feel better if I could just brush my teeth properly,” I said, once we’d both stopped sobbing. “What is it with everyone here and their terrible teeth, anyway?” Half the people in New Orleans had rotting teeth from their sugary diet, and they all needed orthodonture, including Lalie, who had crooked bicuspids. It almost made me wish I’d gone to dental school; I could have totally cleaned up in 1861.
“Oh, I’d forgotten—I sent Alphonse earlier out to Mr. Goldman’s chemist shop, and he has returned with all the most scientific tooth powders. And look, Sam: a new Wisdom toothbrush from England! With badger bristles!”
A major luxury item, apparently. At least the poor girl totally meant well. The whole household did. Once they’d installed me as their guest, they all acted like their only mission in life was to pamper and cheer me up.
That included Colonel Bart, as Lalie called him. He’d become relentless in his quest to track down my demon rapist-robbers from my night of horror in the swamp. Problem was, there weren’t any, but I could hardly say that at this point. A relentless civic campaign had been launched to ‘clean up New Orleans’ which lasted all of two or three days, but brought a reign of terror to every dockside tavern and whorehouse in the city before public interest died down.
In the meantime, the house had fallen pretty much under siege from the local reporters, especially the ones from the four main newspapers, The Weekly Delta, The Daily Crescent, The Times, and The Picayune. All of which had published articles about ‘our fair lady visitor from the golden far west’ and hinted at the terrible tragedies that had befallen me, complete with printed sketches. It wasn’t like I could sneak off and go anywhere without being noticed, even if I didn’t constantly have one of the servants trailing around after me.
Of course, I had a new and even bigger problem.
Hunger…
Okay, I know what you’re thinking: New Orleans is a town where everybody napped all afternoon, and partied all night. The Macartys, a family of people protecting me and indulging my every whim, no matter how strange-seeming. Pelagie, an adoring young girl practically begging to be a donor… I’d gotten to the point where I’d become acutely aware of every beating blood vessel in every throat around me; hell, I could hear their hearts pounding in my ears. I mean, talk about a living situation custom-made for a vampire. Do the math; it was practically a recipe for an Anne Rice movie.
But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t—they were all just too flippin’ nice. I’d have rather starved to death. Never mind that I refused to give Elizabeth what she wanted. Human blood made her stronger, and too much of it could let her overpower my mental prison.
Alas, I really would starve to death, no matter how much human food I tried to choke down. If I allowed myself to die this way, then I’d never see my kids again. It was a catch-22. I didn’t know what to do about it, aside from the obvious, so I just stayed in bed, saying I felt sick, which was nothing less than the truth. They sent for the doctor, something I’d been resisting ever since Colonel Bart had first suggested it, delicately hinting that I might need examining after my ‘ordeal.’ This time, I was too weak to argue.
What did I expect? I guess some sexist old drunk with a walrus white mustache who would try to bleed or ‘cup’ me and give me castor oil purges or some bullcrap. Instead, I got Dr. James Gordon Bell, a serious green-eyed boy-next-door type with reddish hair, straight out of medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland, and very obviously head over heels in love with Pelagie Macarty.
I daydreamed about him until I realized just how young he was. Here’s the really bizarre thing—he was actually an amazing doctor! Up until Dr. Bell examined me, I’d just assumed that any modern person like me who’d watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy and passed a first aid course or two would automatically know more about medicine than anybody alive in 1860.
Wrong. First, he did the usual stuff, like feel my forehead, take my pulse, look at my tongue, and listen to my lungs with a kind of brass ear trumpet. I gave him a few deep, useless breaths.
Then he thumped my chest and back a few times—I kept my night shift on for all this—and said in his wonderful Scots burr, “Have you been coughing a great deal these past few weeks, Mrs. Moon? Have you vomited or coughed up any sputum or blood?”
Actually, I hadn’t, except I sort of had been puking up any human food I tried to eat or drink lately as my body became starved of blood. So Lalie, who stood at the foot of the bed, said yes.
“Do you find yourself unusually sensitive to light?” he went on. Well, duh; I could barely open my eyes. “You seem unnaturally pale, ma’am, and your body temperature low. I would have said morbidly so, as I’ve never encountered skin so cold among the living, but that may be accounted for by extreme body chills. My first thought was porphyria, the ‘disease of kings,’ but sober reflection instead inclines me, I’m very much afraid, to a diagnosis of consumption. That of poets.”
Lalie gave a loud gasp, and Dr. Bell took my hand and leaned forward gravely. “This needn’t be a cause for the gravest concern, ladies, not in this benign climate. I will write you out a prescription for an immediate course of treatment which has yielded dramatic results in France.” He took out a notepad and laboriously wrote something out in it. “But it must be most scrupulously adhered to every morning. Miss Macarty, I place the lady’s future well-being in your capable hands.”
“It says… ‘blood?’” read Lalie incredulously from the piece of notepaper.
“Yes, but only the purest and freshest of raw ox-blood. You must send a boy down to Broussard’s in the Old French Market first thing every morning for a pail of it. This is to be mixed lightly with red wine and fed to Mrs. Moon throughout the day and evening. I believe you’ll notice some positive results as early as tomorrow night.”
“I’ll see to it straight away!” said Lalie, going out through the French windows facing the balcony onto the private courtyard.
Dr. Bell then looked at me strangely. “My diagnosis of consumption is, of course, a convenient fiction for the sake of the Macartys—I’ve read about your true condition in old medical books, though I confess I’ve never met anyone actually suffering from it. Do you normally feed on human victims?”
“No!” I said. “Christ, one look at Pelagie should tell you that. Back home, I have an arrangement with a butcher. Just like what you’ve prescribed for me.”
He nodded. “We must discuss all of this more fully on another occasion. In the meanwhile, tell me, ma’am, have you suffered any lasting effects from your experiences in the Reed Jungle? Any… lateness in your monthly courses? Or discomfort?” He was being so tactful, it took me a minute to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t raped—sexually violated. Everybody just assumed I was, so I guess it turned into what it was you said. A convenient fiction.”
“I understand.” He stood and closed his medical bag. “Incidentally, Lieutenant Dalgo died without ever recovering consciousness. You will no doubt be relieved to hear that Constable Gosling seems likely to make a full recovery, though he cannot yet speak. Curiously, I found human tooth-marks on his forearm wound.”
See? I told you, young or not, the dude was no dummy. Lucky thing for me he hadn’t figured out DNA all on his own.
“No doubt he and the Lieutenant were locked in a life and death struggle at the time and were biting and clawing at each other. I imagine Gosling will include that detail whenever he is able to make out his sworn statement. I bid you goodbye, for now, Mrs. Moon; I’ll be calling on you again tomorrow.”
So much
for keeping my big fat secret, I thought after he left.
Chapter Sixteen
Weirdly enough, Dr. Bell did keep my secret.
Whether he viewed being a doctor like being a priest at the confessional or whether he was just too crazy about Lalie to want to cause scandal, the buckets of raw ox-blood kept showing up every morning. None of the neighbors said a word about it except to occasionally ask the Macartys how ‘Pelagie’s poor, consumptive gentlelady-friend from California’ was doing.
Mostly they didn’t have to ask. Once I felt better from my new diet, Lalie and her father insisted on taking me out most evenings, occasionally to restaurants or dinner-parties, but most often to the opera or the theater. Half the time we’d be accompanied by Dr. Bell or another of Lalie’s many ‘beaux,’ as Colonel Bart called them.
“It is her kindness and gentle nature that attracts these young fellows like fleas,” the colonel said. “Because her dot certainly isn’t big enough to justify their attentions.” A dot meant a dowry.
We sat in the Macarty box at the French Opera House on Orleans Street chatting during an intermission to an opera called Galatée, which, since they sang it in French, I couldn’t understand a word.
“You see, my dear Samantha, my branch of the family is no longer rich.” The old man sighed. “Once, we Macartys were one of the great families of the city, like the Marignys or Pontalbas. My father served as governor, but after the vile and disgusting affair of my cousin Delphine Macarty Lalaurie, the wretched woman who murdered her slaves in the attic and bathed in their blood, the family fortunes have withered, and we’ve been dogged by scandal after scandal, including that caused by my uncle marrying a colored woman.”
To me, that seemed sort of a plus for them, not a minus, but I didn’t say so. So far, the evening had been like a visit to the dentist, one with a really loud drill. Lalie had explained the story of the opera to me, which was a little like My Fair Lady; you know, some ancient Greek sculptor named Pygmalion fell in love with a statue he’d created and brought her to life. But the real drama was because the two prima donnas (the part of Pygmalion was sung by a woman) were bitter rivals, and the lead singer had cast a friend as the statue instead of her rival, so the moment the statue came to life and started singing, half the audience erupted in boos and hissing.
