“Of course he is. He wasn’t married to Alex. Can you carry this into the sitting room? Miss Ada and Mr. Wells are waiting for their tea.” Foster busied himself folding napkins in the shape of giant bird-of-paradise blooms.
Edward sighed. “I can’t. I’m too upset to do anything but worry. Besides, if I see Miss Ada cryin’, I’ll burst into tears, too. You know ’ow I am, Foster. I can’t ’elp it.”
Foster added the napkins and grabbed the handles of the tray. He lifted it, then set it down again. The fact that he and Edward had tried to make Cord’s marriage work haunted him.
“We should ’ave believed Miss Celine that first night when she tried to tell us she weren’t Jemma O’Hurley. Maybe none of this would ’ave happened if Cordero ’ad married the right woman,” Foster said.
“We should ’ave known when none of the clothes and shoes in ’er trunk fit that somethin’ was up.”
“I’ll never believe she’s a murderer, though. Never. Miss Celine don’t ’ave a mean bone in ’er body,” Foster said.
“I wish there was somethin’ we could do. I wish Cordero would pull ’imself together.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars might ride, Eddie.” Foster hefted the tray again. Edward rose wearily from the stool and held the door, then followed him into the sitting room.
Foster walked over to a side table and set down the tray.
“A spot of tea will do you good, Miss Ada,” he said, pouring her a cup without waiting for her to agree.
She had taken up permanent residence in the corner of the settee, and nothing Howard Wells or anyone else said or did could cheer her. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face was blotched. Foster wanted to tell her that her coloring didn’t lend itself to such crying.
Ada reached for the cup of tea. Her hands were shaking so hard that it would have sloshed over the rim and onto the saucer if Foster hadn’t steadied the cup. He was fast running out of patience with the lot of them.
“What are we going to do, Foster?” Ada stared up at him pitifully. Her eyelids were almost swollen shut. “Even Alyce is so very upset.”
“If you ask me, Miss Ada, I think we should all pull ourselves together.” He looked meaningfully at Edward. “We ain’t a bit o’ good to anyone in this condition.”
Wells reached for a cup of steaming tea and poured milk in it until it was white. “Whenever I think of poor Celine alone and incarcerated in the bowels of a ship, or worse yet, if she is convicted—”
Ada let out a wail. Foster dove for her teacup and rescued it before it tipped off her lap.
“There’s always hope,” he said.
“We’ll never see ’er alive again!” Edward began to run from the room and collided with Auguste Moreau.
“Damn it, Lang,” Auguste said as he grabbed Edward by the shoulders, set him aside and strode into the room. He took one look at Ada and Howard Wells and ignored them both as he addressed Foster.
“Where is my son?”
Foster almost sagged with relief. “He’s in the library. The most terrible thing has happened …”
“I know. It’s all over the island.” Auguste was already out of the sitting room, headed down the hall. “I came as soon as I heard. What is Cord planning to do?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid,” Foster said with a disgusted sigh. When Auguste halted abruptly and turned on him, Foster fell back a step.
“What do you mean nothing?”
“Cordero’s dead drunk. Been that way since they took Miss Celine away.”
Death is kinder than too much rum.
Cord’s head was pounding so hard that he could barely open his eyes. His tongue was too big for his head, his teeth tasted as if they were wrapped in individual wool shawls. He was slumped in a chair, unwilling to move because his heart would pound like a smithy’s hammer every time he attempted to sit up.
He tried and failed to curse whoever was insisting on beating down the library door. He had locked it for a reason, damn them, after the first time Foster had tried to get him to eat.
“Go away,” he managed weakly, just seconds before the frame splintered and the door crashed open.
Cord opened one eye. His father was framed in the doorway, looking every inch a retired gentleman pirate in a crisp white shirt, black pants and coat and a black leather eye patch.
“I said get out,” Cord slurred.
Ignoring the demand, Auguste crossed the room and picked up the vase of flowers that sat off to one side of Cordero’s desk.
“What are you doing?” When Cord sat up a little straighter, the room started to whirl. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples.
“I’m doing what someone should have done for me years ago. If they had, I might not have sent you away and made the biggest mistake of my life,” Auguste said.
The next thing Cord knew, a shower of long-stemmed blossoms and stagnant water came raining down on him.
“Shit!” Wiping his eyes, he shot to his feet and lunged for his father. Auguste easily sidestepped the attack, further infuriating him.
“You have no right to barge in here!”
“I have every right to keep you from letting your life go to hell in a handbasket. What are you going to do to save your wife?” his father asked.
“Nothing.” Water that smelled of rotted flower stems dripped from his hair.
Auguste slammed the palm of his hand on the desktop. “Damn it, Cordero! Why the hell not?”
“Why should I?”
“Because you love her.”
“She lied to me from the day I first laid eyes on her. Lied by omission.”
“You’re angry because you see this as another desertion. You aren’t thinking of Celine, Cordero, but of yourself.”
“I thought I could finally trust her.” Cord longed to return to his mind-numbing drunken state. He’d have preferred anything to this torture.
“Trust her to stay?”
“To trust me enough to tell me the whole truth, but she didn’t …”
“You expected her to tell you she was guilty of murder and take the chance of losing you? If you didn’t love her, you wouldn’t be doing this to yourself; you would be about your business as if nothing had happened. But something terrible has happened, and now you can’t face it, or won’t. I know. I’ve been there. Admit it. You love her so much this is killing you.”
Cord sat back down, hunched over with his elbows on his knees, and propped his head in his hands. His gut churned.
“I tried so hard not to,” he whispered. “I swore I would never love anyone ever again.”
Auguste’s voice came to him from across the room. “Why?”
Cord’s throat was so tight with emotion that the words wouldn’t come. He swallowed, bit his lips and stared at the floor between his feet.
“Because it hurts so bad when they leave,” he admitted.
Auguste knelt beside the chair and slipped his arm around Cord’s shoulders. Cord pressed his hands against his eyes, willing himself not to break down. The only way he’d been able to keep Celine out of his mind had been to stay drunk. Now he was forced to face the fact that she was at sea, no doubt sick, frightened and alone, all because of his blinding anger and his unwillingness to trust and believe in her.
The facts plagued him. He knew Celine loved the old woman who raised her; Persa’s death at Celine’s hands was out of the question. But what of Perot? Had she really killed him in self-defense, as she’d said? And what of Jemma O’Hurley? Where had the girl disappeared to?
Without proof of her innocence, Celine would hang. But how would she be able to obtain proof locked behind bars? She had no family or money to aid her cause. No one to stand up for her—no one but a husband who had turned his back on her.
“I’ve been a fool,” he whispered. “Such a damned fool.”
“I did you a great injustice when I sent you away. I was thinking only of myself and my hurt,” Auguste said. “God help you if you do the
same and lose Celine.”
“How long ago did they sail?” Cord rubbed his hands through his hair, wondering how much time he had squandered on self-pity.
“Two days. Cordero, I’m willing to do everything I can to help. My ship and crew is hidden in a cove six miles away. We can set sail for New Orleans by nightfall.”
“Then let’s go. First, though, have Foster brew plenty of hot coffee and tell Edward to lay out a change of clothes.”
As soon as the words were issued, Foster stuck his head and shoulders around the shattered door frame. “The coffee will be ready in a moment. Edward is already off to see to the packing.”
Twenty-one
Her long journey ended where it began.
The Cabildo, which housed the underbelly of Louisiana society, stood across from St. Louis Cathedral, where she had stepped out of her old life and into Jemma O’Hurley’s carriage.
Celine thought of the irony of having come full circle as she lay naked beneath a filthy, tattered blanket on a cot in her cell. The thin wool provided scant relief from the cold and damp, but the guards had taken her clothes to discourage any notion she might have of escaping.
She smiled in the dim light that dribbled through the window high on the wall. The authorities were fools. There was no one who would shelter her even if she did find the strength to somehow manage to flee the old fortress. She was alone. She had faced that bleak truth from the moment she stood on the deck of the ship and turned her back on St. Stephen.
The voyage was a blur of endless days and nights that melded one into another. Through hours of illness, her body had been tortured by a combination of recurrent swamp fever and the accursed seasickness. Chained to the wall, she had been housed belowdecks, too weak to take the air, to watch the stars above the night sea, to feel the salt air on her face. There was no one to tend her save Jonathan Hargraves. When she had refused to eat, he’d force-fed her.
“The Perots don’t want me to deliver a corpse. They want you alive for the hanging.”
When the hideous voyage had ended she was imprisoned in the Cabildo with the other accused awaiting trials. Presided over by a newly arrived American judge named Bennett, hers was one of the shortest waits and trials in New Orleans’s history. The Durels, the young couple out walking the night of the murder, admitted they had seen her with Jean Perot a scant two hours before his body was found.
Perot’s housekeeper attested to serving Celine hot cocoa. His entire house staff related in bloody detail how they had returned after dark and found their employer’s mutilated body in the courtyard.
Celine’s neighbors could shed no light on her whereabouts the afternoon and evening of the murders. They had not seen her, nor had they seen Persa at all the day of her death.
“She’s a strange one, that girl. Different,” said a woman who had lived behind them for years.
“Never trusted her. I always knew she was odd. It was the eyes, you see. She has strange eyes,” said a man Celine remembered seeing only once or twice in her life.
Throughout the trial Jean Perot’s mother and father sat in the front row, hungry for revenge as they watched her with hard, venomous stares. Who could blame them? Their son was dead.
A heavyset gentleman who identified himself as Thomas O’Hurley spoke with her before the trial. He pleaded with her to confess what she had done to his daughter. O’Hurley begged her to tell him where she had hidden Jemma’s body.
“All I want is to give my little princess a decent burial,” he cried.
Celine told him in great detail, over and over again, what had taken place that rainy night in the shadows of the cathedral. She swore to O’Hurley that she had no notion of where his Jemma had disappeared to. He attended the trial, stymied yet hopeful that she would break down and confess to his daughter’s murder. Who could blame him? His precious angelic girl had disappeared without a trace.
With no one on the outside to prove her innocence, she was found guilty of two counts of murder after a day and a half of testimony. No one, least of all her, had been surprised when she was sentenced to hang.
The judge gave her the opportunity to speak in her own behalf after she was sentenced. Even now, as she languished in her cell, she thought of the pitiful picture she must have made there in the courtroom. She had lost so much weight that her filthy aquamarine ball gown hung from her shoulders. Her hair was matted and dirty, her skin was sallow, her eyes were sunken. She recalled how she had barely been able to raise her voice above a whisper.
“I stabbed Jean Perot in self-defense … I did not leave him the way he was found … I could not have killed Persa … She was like a mother to me … I loved her too much … I do not fear death, for I know I am innocent.”
“Wake up, girl. You have a visitor.”
The jailer’s voice roused her, shaking her out of her reverie. Celine pushed up off the thin moss-filled mattress with one hand. She waited for her head to stop spinning before she turned toward her jailer’s face framed in the barred window of the heavy door. Today it was the fat one who reeked of wine. His ruddy cheeks were webbed with broken lines of spider veins.
She licked her dry lips. “Are you talking to me?”
“I am. Pull yourself together, girl. There’s a gentleman here to see you. No tricks now and I’ll show him in.” His face disappeared.
Over the past few days she had actually grown sorry for her jailers, for day after day they too had to endure the dank, mildewed walls, the stench of overflowing slop buckets, the overcrowding. She drew the blanket tight around herself and swung her feet over the side of the bunk, steeling herself against the shock of the chilly, filthy floor.
As she shoved her hair back off her face, Celine wondered who might have come to see her. She knew no gentlemen—and certainly none who would come here—except perhaps Cordero, and she had better sense than to hope that he would come.
Outside the cell, the sound of approaching footsteps echoed against the stone floor. Her head had stopped spinning, but her hands shook. She prayed for the strength to stand. Someone in another cell screamed, the sound quickly swallowed by the usual shouting and curses that ensued whenever the guards demanded order. The Cabildo had already been the site of more than one inmate riot, and its guards were overzealous. Murderers, criminals and slaves, some insane, some diseased, were pinched together like toes in painfully tight shoes. She was lucky: The condemned were held in solitary confinement.
Celine closed her eyes and rocked back and forth, grasping the edge of the bunk. Unbidden, a vision of Cord came to mind. He was riding along the shoreline against a backdrop of glistening sand and foaming waves, tall and proud in the saddle, sunlight reflecting in the flashing highlights of his hair. On the hill beside him, lush green cane tassels undulated on the tangy breeze.
As she tucked the picture away in a corner of her heart, she couldn’t help but wonder: Does he ever think of me?
The guard’s face appeared in the window again. Keys clanged on a ring. One scraped in the keyhole before the heavy cypress door swung open.
Celine clasped the edges of the blanket together and remained seated on the edge of the bunk as the bulbous-nosed guard led Thomas O’Hurley into the cell. The heavyset middle-aged merchant wore an expensively tailored serge frock coat that was as out of place in the dingy cell as a silk slipper in a bayou. The room suddenly became dwarfed by the presence of the two big men. Her visitor cleared his throat repeatedly as he glanced around the cell.
Celine made no move to speak to him or put him at ease. She merely waited. He had no doubt come to beg her one last time for information as to his daughter’s whereabouts.
When O’Hurley finally spoke, it was to the guard, not her.
“Can you leave us alone?” he asked.
The guard stared at Celine for a moment. “Don’t give him any trouble.”
The warning didn’t deserve an answer. He knew very well she barely had the strength to swat a fly. The guard left the cell, but
even after the key turned in the lock, she could tell he was waiting outside the door.
Celine turned her attention to Thomas O’Hurley. Something had changed since she had seen him in court. There was an air of bold confidence about him. His shoulders were no longer hunched in defeat, his eyes no longer haunted by shadows of despair. He withdrew a folded paper from his pocket and carefully opened it as if it were made of thin, pressed gold.
“I’ve heard from Jemma,” he said softly, staring at the page with something akin to reverence. “She’s alive.”
Celine felt a rush of relief, not only because the missive cleared her name of suspicion, but also because she was sincerely thankful no harm had come to the smiling blond girl who’d traded lives with her.
“Is she in a convent?”
“Jemma? Of course not.” O’Hurley laughed.
“She told me she wanted to be a nun.” Celine had said the same thing when he’d questioned her before. He had not believed her then, either.
“She doesn’t say where she is exactly, just that she is safe and happy and well taken care of. She writes that when she’s good and ready, she’ll come home, but she wants to wait long enough for me to get over the notion that I have the right to choose a husband for her.” He smiled at Celine. “You can believe me, I’ll never try that again.”
He continued to stare down at the words his daughter had penned. “She goes on to say that on the night of the wedding, she changed places with a young woman about her height with dark hair. It’s all here, just the way you explained it. I showed the letter to the authorities and they’ve called off the search for her. I wanted to tell you myself, and had to say that I hope you can forgive me for doubting your word, but you must understand how distraught I was …”
“I do understand. But I’m afraid there is not much left of her dowry money. A great portion of it went to Alexandre’s illegitimate children. I’m sorry …”
He waved away her apology. “I’ve got more money than I can count. I’m just glad Jemma is alive. Celine, is there anything I can do?”
“There is nothing anyone can do without proof that I didn’t murder the others, and there is no time to prove anything now anyway.”
Day Dreamer Page 30
