April of Enchantment

by Jennifer Blake

  “What happened to the Zephyr?” she asked, smoothing a finger over the chrome edging on the seat.

  “It's at home where it belongs. I trust it for anywhere up to a hundred miles, but I hate to get much farther away from my favorite garage with it.”

  Laura nodded her comprehension, and a small silence fell. Justin broke it.

  “This Mallard bed,” he said, “I realize it's supposed to be special, and I seem vaguely to have heard of one before, but I'm blank on the details.”

  This was Laura's element. “Mallard, whose first name was Prudent by the way, learned cabinetmaking in Paris. He came to the United States sometime in the late 1830s, landing in New York, where he worked with Duncan Phyfe. Not long after that, he moved to New Orleans and opened a shop on Royal Street in the French Quarter. In a period when most furniture was embellished within an inch of its life, he kept his designs simple. Most of his pieces are big, but they also have grace and excellent proportions. He made other things, but it happens that he specialized in beds.”

  “It certainly sounds as if a Mallard fits the bill.”

  “There's no argument about it. The furniture that Mallard made was designed especially for the houses along the Mississippi River, those in the delta region of Mississippi and Louisiana. Nowhere else in the South, or in the United States for that matter, were homes built with ceilings quite so high.”

  “Because of the heat?”

  “That's right. In this part of the country, before climate control, keeping cool was more important than keeping warm. Heat rises and is trapped near the ceiling of the twenty-foot rooms, leaving the air much cooler at the floor level. But this extra height throws the rooms out of proportion. The furniture had to be made to fit, or else it looked squatty and out of place. What happened was that most of it became taller and more massive. The cabinetmakers in New Orleans catered to the planters who owned these types of houses. Mallard, along with another man named François Seignouret, was among the most famous of his day.”

  “I can see why his work is so valuable.”

  “Yes, except you would think the demand wouldn't be that high. It's not every house that can accommodate a ten-foot tester, and the trend generally has been to smaller pieces that will fit into modern, eight-foot-high rooms, or perhaps I should say that's where the turnover is.”

  “Standards change over the years,” Justin said, his tone musing, “whether it's in furniture, houses, or in manners and morals.”

  Laura sent him a swift glance. For all the light tone of his voice, she thought there was a purpose behind his words. She could only agree, however.

  “For instance, there was a time when, if two people, such as you and I, had spent so many hours after dark alone in a secluded, empty house, it would have been grounds for a forced marriage.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “If I understand the way it worked correctly, not even my engagement would have been enough to save us. I would still have been held responsible for your reputation, and that would have been more important than other plans I might have had.”

  “It's almost enough to make you wonder if they were more distrustful of human nature than we are today, or only more realistic about it.” Laura kept her voice light, making an effort to meet his mood.

  “Because they were always ready to assume the worst? In that, at least, people aren't so different now.” He sent her a quick smile, though his expression was hidden by the dark lenses of his sunglasses. “If you haven't guessed by now, I'm trying to ask you how you feel about the gossip that is supposed to be circulating about that night.”

  “I'm not sure there is any such thing,” Laura said, her tone stiff.

  “Myra was certain."

  His quiet comment had the effect of bringing the scene on the loggia and his fiancée's ugly insinuations to mind. Laura kept her violet gaze turned deliberately ahead. “Even if it's so, it doesn't mean anything. I don't hold you responsible. People are going to have to realize that the old standards don't apply, now that women are a part of the work force and have to cooperate closely with men.”

  “Standards may change, but human nature doesn't.”

  Laura sent him a narrow look. Was he saying that people would always talk, or that a man and a woman in a compromising situation would usually behave in a compromising manner? The last was exactly what had happened between them, she realized belatedly, and looked quickly away again. “I see no need for an amende honorable, if that's what you are getting at.”

  “Don't you? Too bad.”

  His tone was wry. He had been joking; he must have been. Laura shook her head, smiling. “No such sacrifice will be called for.”

  It was a moment before he spoke, then he kept his attention on the road. “I've been thinking about Lorinda. Do you suppose it was something such as we were just talking about that caused her to marry so soon after the last ball at Crapemyrtle?”

  “It might have been, or it could be my great-great-grandfather caught her on the rebound.”

  He sent her a quick look. “That makes it sound as if she was jilted, and that wasn't my reading of it at all. The way the situation stood, Jean had asked her to go away with him to Paris while he divorced his wife, then his wife discovered she was pregnant and told Lorinda, who was her friend. Lorinda then broke off all contact with Jean, went to New Orleans for a month, and announced her engagement when she returned.”

  “The way I understand it,” Laura said, “the man she married, who was my great-great-grandfather, of course, followed her to New Orleans and returned with her on the steamboat. Something about the way the last entry in the diary is worded, when she says she has decided to accept him, leads me to believe he had asked her before to marry him, maybe a number of times.”

  “That still wouldn't have prevented her from accepting his proposal for the purpose of scotching any rumors that might have been circulating,” he pointed out.

  “Maybe not, but it seems to me like a poor reason for marrying a man, especially if you're in love with someone else.”

  “Who's to say she didn't feel something for the other man, even if it was only commiseration and affection? At times in a person's life, it may be easier for them to let themselves be loved than it is to refuse.”

  Was that the way it was with Myra and him? The question came unbidden to Laura's mind. She did not dare ask it, however. Murmuring an agreement, she let the moment pass.

  The antique shop was a metal building with a false front featuring cypress shingles and show windows cut into panes by aluminum strips. Inside was a motley collection of furniture, most of it tables and china closets holding cut glass and porcelain. There was also a lot of bona fide junk, the kind of thing a shop acquired when buying wholesale lots of furnishings at auctions. The few good pieces were in the back, ranged without order around the walls, coated with dust. The Mallard bed—or rather its pieces, since it was too large to be put together in the space available—and the armoire stood out like elephants in a flock of sheep.

  The proprietor, a small birdlike woman with quick movements and inquisitive black eyes, came from the back. She smiled, looking from Justin to Laura and back again. “Can I help you?”

  “We just wanted to browse,” Laura said. Justin watched with amusement in his eyes as she worked her way through the odds and ends, asking about first one thing and another, until she came to the items they were really interested in. “This is a tester bed, isn't it?”

  “Not just a tester, but a Mallard,” the woman said. “Anyone with the place to put it wouldn't go wrong investing in something like this.”

  “Investing?” Laura murmured.

  “Such things don't come cheap, but when you consider that a quality set of fine bedroom furniture bought brand-new costs a couple of thousand, it isn't that bad.

  The new stuff wouldn't bring a fraction of its worth a month after you bought it, but this Mallard bed, and its armoire, over there, will double in price, or more, in the next ten
years. Its value is hard to calculate. It's like solid gold.”

  It was a good sales pitch. Laura glanced at Justin. “What do you think?”

  He was studying it. The saleswoman took a cloth from her pocket and wiped the dust from the headboard, pointing out the shell design and the egg motif hidden within it that was Mallard's trademark. He examined the workmanship and smoothed along the mahogany of the tester frame, rails, and footboards to be certain there was no damage. “It looks fine to me, but this is your department,” he said. “Whatever you think.”

  The woman beamed at Laura. “Now there is a man after my own heart. I'm sure if you take this bed, you and your husband won't regret it. There's been a lot of happiness discovered under its canopy, I'm sure but there's still a lot more left.”

  “I—we —” Laura began.

  “We'll take it,” Justin said, cutting short her attempts to explain by taking out his checkbook and identification.

  “Good! I'll just make out a ticket on it.” The woman scuffed away toward an old rolltop desk covered with papers, account books, and dusty ledgers.

  “Why did you do that?” Laura whispered. “We could have gotten it for less if we had bargained and used the dealer's license from the shop.”

  “She's such a nice old lady,” he told her, a warm look in his eyes as he smiled down at her. “Besides, it's nearly lunchtime, and I'm too hungry to haggle.”

  Against her will, Laura felt her lips curving in response. “She flattered you,” she said with mock sternness. “I never knew you were so susceptible.”

  “There's a lot you haven't found out about me yet,” he answered, then turned away as the proprietor of the shop came toward them once more.

  While Justin attended to the details of payment and delivery, Laura wandered back toward the bed. She touched one of the clustered posts with the tips of her fingers, thinking idly of how it should be positioned at Crapemyrtle in the master bedroom. The material stretched inside the tester now, gathered in the center in a sunburst design, was thin red velvet faded to an orange color. It should be replaced with either a soft rose or pale celadon green.

  Myra wanted emerald satin. At the thought of the other woman stretched out on the old bed with its softly glowing wood and romantic hangings, lying beside Justin, pain assailed Laura. It crowded into her chest with a suffocating feeling, its scourging sharpness taking her by surprise. She drew a deep breath, her eyes unseeing. So that was it.

  “Ready to go?”

  It was Justin beside her. She answered his question with a nod, turning with limbs that were suddenly stiff and unwieldy to walk from the shop. He opened the car door, and she slid in, sitting staring straight ahead as he moved around to the driver's side.

  “Where shall we go for lunch?” he asked as he turned the key, starting the motor.

  Laura roused herself to answer, suggesting a motel restaurant a few miles back in the direction they had come, a place she and her mother had stopped at once or twice on their antique-buying expeditions. By the time they were turning into the parking lot, she had herself well in hand again.

  Homemade soup and garden-fresh salads were the luncheon specials offered by the place. They were shown to a table set with silver and linen napery amid hanging plants, stained glass, and antiques ranging from cotton-carding combs and horse collars to wrought-iron gumball stands and wooden iceboxes. They served themselves from the long, curving counter and carried their choices back to their table.

  Justin was in a good mood, it seemed, now that they had gotten their main business out of the way. As they ate, he drew her out, asking questions about her father and other houses she had helped to redo, wanting to know the interior-design courses she had taken and the aspects of restoration that she most enjoyed. They talked of the brown-and-gold color scheme she meant to employ in the library-study Justin intended to use for an office, moving from there to other rooms. His mother was anxious to see the house, he said, and also to meet the young woman who was the guiding hand behind the project. He would bring both his parents out one day when he came.

  From there, they managed somehow to switch to the subject of their childhoods and food preferences, ranging onward to world and national politics, the state of the economy, and also the economy of the state, stemming from policies of the government at the capital in Baton Rouge. They found themselves in agreement on most things, and at least interested enough in each other's opinions to listen to the arguments pro and con.

  They ordered dessert, fresh-fruit pie made from the strawberries in season, grown in the Florida parishes of Louisiana, no great distance away. They lingered over the strong black coffee that went with it. It was only as Laura drained her cup that she glanced at her wrist-watch. She exclaimed at the time, unable to believe they had taken so long over eating. It had not been early when they had stopped. If they started for home that minute, it would still be after dark before they reached it.

  Justin's car floated over the miles. They seemed to have run out of things to talk about at last, for silence traveled with them. The sun went down, its slanting rays striking straight into their eyes before it sank behind the trees. Finally, they were able to remove their sunglasses. Dusk gave way to darkness, and Justin reached to turn on the headlights.

  Laura shifted in her seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Justin glanced at her. “Tired?” he asked,

  “A little.” As if to prove her point, she was caught suddenly by a yawn. With a rueful smile, she smothered it.

  “Lean back and rest, if you like.”

  She shook her head. “I couldn't.”

  “If you can't get comfortable any other way, I have a shoulder you can lean on.”

  It was a tempting prospect, but with determination, she resisted it. There was no point in aggravating a situation that was fast becoming intolerable. She flicked a swift look at the man beside her. His strong features and the cleft in his chin was highlighted by the glow of light from the instrument panel. He turned his head to catch her glance. The headlights of a passing car reflected in his eyes, giving his expression a misleading look of care and concern. With tightness in her throat, Laura looked away, watching the white line unwinding alongside the road.

  Lights shone from the Nichols mansion as they drew up before it. Justin switched off the engine of the car. He made no move to get out, but swung to face her, placing one arm along the top of the seat.

  “I've enjoyed today,” he said, his voice low.

  “So have I.” She might as well be honest about it.

  He picked up a long strand of her hair that had drifted over her shoulder. “You fascinate me. I could spend hours, a lifetime, looking at you, listening —”

  “Justin, please,” she said, a tiny break in her voice. “There's no point in this. You are engaged to Myra.”

  “And you have Russ, or he has you.”

  To deny it might be to remove one of the barriers she needed to protect herself; she let it stand. Putting her hand on the door handle, she said, “I had better go in.”

  “No,” he said, the word a rustle of sound. “Not yet.”

  The next moment, she was in his arms, held achingly close. His mouth came down on hers, burning in its urgency, sapping her will to resist. His hands smoothed over her back, drawing her closer, molding her to the hardness of his chest. There was an ache in Laura's throat, and she tasted the salt of unshed tears. In despair, she clung to him, fighting the sweet rise of longing until suddenly she could do so no longer. Her lips parted under his, while through her veins there ran a fierce gladness, a surging exultation that threatened to merge with the desire of the man who held her, bursting all restraints.

  He seared a trail of kisses across her cheek to the delicate turn of her jaw and along the curve of her neck to the tender hollow of her throat. His hand cupped her shoulder, his thumb brushing across the blue-veined fragility of her collarbone as he eased aside the V neck of her blouse, gently slipping the buttons from their h
oles. The warmth of his mouth followed, an exquisite sensation as the curves of her breasts and the shadowed hollow between them were bared.

  “I want you, lovely Laura,” he said softly, his breath sighing against her skin.

  “Justin, no,” she whispered, a strained sound, though whether it held the timbre of a protest or entreaty she could not have said.

  He went still. The muscles of his arms grew rigid with the effort of his self-control. He drew back, raising his head, his face like a bronze mask etched with the pain of denial. The look in his eyes was suspended; he scarcely seemed to breathe.

  Abruptly she pushed away from him, reaching for the door handle, sliding from the car. She whispered good night, a strangled sound, then she whirled and ran for the house, away from Justin, away from herself and the weakness that urged her to stay, away from the knowledge that she was fleeing from the man with whom in a misguided, unknowing moment, she had fallen in love.

  9

  If she had thought about it, Laura would have known the day she had spent with Justin would not go unnoticed. She did not think about it. There were far too many things to occupy her wayward imagination, too many hopes, fears, and suppositions pushed below the level of her daily problems. It came as a surprise then when Myra came charging down upon Crapemyrtle two days later while she was overseeing the refinishing of the yellow heart-pine floors. She demanded, in a voice that carried even above the noise of a sander, to see the old bed.

  Laura offered to take her upstairs to where the armoire and the bed, not yet put together, had been placed in the master bedroom. The woman hardly waited until she was out of earshot of the workmen before she began.

  “I couldn't believe my ears when Justin's mother told me you and he had gone together to choose the bed we would sleep in as husband and wife. It beats anything I have ever heard for brass!”