Tainted Love

by Nancy Morse

  The cathedral bells began to ring the hour, snapping Pru out of her vengeful thoughts.

  “This is what you seek,” Sabine said of the vial of dark glass she held in her hand. “The gris-gris will hold your man to you.”

  “I do not wish to hold him prisoner,” Pru said. “Only that he fall in love with me.”

  “He who drinks this potion will fall in love with the giver,” Sabine assured her.

  With Nicolas’s warning rankling in her mind, Pru dared to ask, “And would the man who drinks this potion ever harm me?”

  “He who drinks the potion will cause the giver no harm. Pour it into his wine so that he does not detect the flavor of the herbs,” Sabine suggested, “and you will have the love you seek.”

  Pru clutched the vial to her breast, feeling hopeful. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew the coins to pay for the potion and laid them on the table, noticing the gold doubloon sparkling in the ray of sunshine that fell across it from the open window. A pirate’s currency. The image of Christophe rushing down the street flashed through her mind, and Sabine’s remark of a customer having sent his man to see her made Pru wonder.

  “What is this la fèe verte you speak of?” she asked.

  Sabine gave a derisive snort. “It is an elixir I make that some men cannot do without. It makes them, how do you say it?” She lifted her hand and whirled a finger beside her head to indicate madness.

  “Are they dangerous when they drink it?”

  “Mostly they are just stupide. Some see things that aren’t there. Some fall into ruin. And some are very dangerous.”

  “And the customer who sent his man to you for some, is he dangerous?”

  “Any man who pretends to be what he is not is dangerous.”

  The cryptic reply made Pru shudder. Was she talking about Stede? Was he only pretending to be a pirate? Was it all just a crazy coincidence? Sabine’s warning flared suddenly in her mind. “There are those who live only to destroy you. Some are closer than you think.”

  “Madame Sejour, there is something more I would ask of you.”

  That brown hand with the strength to tear out a heart closed around the coins on the table and a dark brow lifted with curiosity.

  “I would have you teach me the ways of voodoo.”

  “What’s this? I thought you said you don’t believe in it.”

  “Perhaps I spoke too hastily. I will admit I am intrigued. I can pay you handsomely for teaching me.”

  The voodoo queen’s dark eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You wish to take my place as voodooienne?”

  “Oh, no. Never that. There can be only one queen, and your powers are far superior to whatever feeble spells I could ever work.”

  The flattery tempered Sabine’s suspecting gaze. “Why do you want to learn?”

  “Only for the good I can do. You know what I am. I seek only to atone for an existence that was forced upon me.” A sly thought came to her, and she added with feigned innocence, “If you have ever had anything forced upon you or taken from you, then you understand.”

  Sabine’s lovely face darkened with distress, and Pru felt a measure of triumph in knowing that her words had struck their target. From all Nicholas had told her about Lienore, the existence that had been forced upon her was far worse than Pru’s lot. At least she still had her own body whereas, without a host, Lienore was vapor, nothing more than invisible matter floating in the air, like the deadly yellow fever borne on a foul wind.

  There was a deep pause. Was the voodoo queen fearful of being supplanted by another powerful entity despite Pru’s assurance to the contrary? Was she jealous of a younger woman? She seemed to be undecided. Then she nodded. “I might be persuaded to teach you.”

  “When can we begin?” Pru asked, trying to keep her eagerness from showing.

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  She left the voodoo queen’s cottage, her thoughts fragmented into a hundred pieces. Questions tore like bats through her mind. Had Christophe been to Sabine’s cottage to obtain the elixir? Was Stede under the influence of la fèe verte? He did not appear to be intoxicated the day they drove to the river, nor the evening at his cottage, although she could not say the same for the night he was tossed out of the tavern. And what about Nicholas’s claim that Stede was a hunter? There had to be an explanation for the black bag Nicholas found in the armoire. Was she truly in danger from the man whose love she craved? Was it all a trick that Nicholas was playing on her? Did the voodooienne hold the key to reclaiming her lost soul? To find out, she had set the wheels in motion, and there was no turning back.

  Chapter 13

  September brought thunderstorms to the city. Beyond the tall windows of the house on Rue Bourbon rain lashed the streets, thunder boomed like cannon fire, and lightening streaked the sky.

  Inside the second floor bedroom, the crystal drops of the chandelier scattered candlelight over the room as Pru sat at the dressing table, carefully pouring the contents of the brown glass vial into a decanter of wine.

  A soft knock upon her door drew her head up.

  “Pruddy?”

  She quickly secreted the vial in the drawer of her dressing table and answered the melodic ring of her papa’s voice. “Come in, Papa.”

  James Hightower entered with a candle, the light bobbing with his noiseless footsteps across the floorboards. He set the candle on the windowsill and gazed out the rain-splattered pane. “You’re not going out tonight, are you, Pruddy?”

  “Yes, Papa. I had planned on it.” To take the love potion to Stede’s house, she thought, holding back the tide of emotion that accompanied the thought of him and the possibilities to come.

  “Would you consider changing your plans? I have invited company for the evening.”

  She swiveled to face him. The shifting candle glow cast her expression of disapproval in shadow and light. “You know how I feel about him,” she said with disdain. “Why did you invite him?”

  “Pruddy, you are not the only person in this house. I live here, too. And I can invite anyone I want to visit with me in my home.”

  Even though he spoke softly, Pru felt thoroughly chastised. “You’re right, Papa. I’m sorry.”

  “Besides, he and I have been working on a new piece together, and tonight we will play the completed composition. I would most like your opinion of it.”

  Her gaze shifted to the decanter of wine that held the secret love potion. She was eager to get on with her plan to deliver it to Stede and could almost feel his arms going around her and hear his lilting drawl whisper how much he loved her. Biting back her disappointment, she said, “Very well, Papa. I won’t go out this evening.” Tomorrow, she vowed. Tomorrow Stede would drink the wine and she would have the love she desired.

  “Have I ever told you that you have your mother’s look?” he asked, drawing her thoughts away from the promise of Stede’s love.

  “Yes, Papa, many times. I have the same color hair and eyes and similar facial structure.”

  “Not just the physical resemblance,” he said, coming forward. “That look on your face just now, faintly chastising, reminds me so much of her.”

  “I wish I could see it, too,” she said. “It would make me feel closer to her.” She cast a quick glance back at the mirror above the dressing table in which no reflection shone, not that of her father standing behind her nor of her own to remind her of the mother she lost all those years ago. Something hardened inside of her. Lienore had driven her mother to take her own life, and Nicholas had taken Pru’s mortality. If it was the last thing she did she would get even with them both.

  She turned back to her papa. His face was flushed, and she realized he must have recently fed from the decanter of chicken’s blood she filled for him daily and hid in the rosewood cupboard away from Babette’s prying eyes. It was good to see him smiling again. For so long after her mother’s death he had walked around in a morass of despair. And then Aunt Vivienne, in the form of that evil witch Lienore, had slowly
and insidiously drained the life from him. She supposed she should be grateful to Nicholas for saving her dear papa from the brink of death by infusing him with his vampire blood, but she hated that rogue too much to find any words of thanks for him.

  “Papa,” she ventured, “would you want to be mortal again?”

  He looked at her curiously. “That’s an odd question, Pruddy. I must say I haven’t considered it. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. I’m just curious. If words could be uttered that would give you the chance to live again as a mortal man, would you take it?”

  She watched him for a long, measured moment as he considered how to answer. At length he said, “Once before you asked me if immortality were offered to me whether I take it.”

  “I remember,” she said quietly. “You told me that such a gift could only come from Satan.”

  “That was before I knew our young friend’s true nature and that only his generosity could save me,” he said.

  “Generosity?” she echoed. “You mean selfishness, don’t you?”

  “How was it selfish to save a dying old man?” he asked with a half-frown upon his face. “To give me back my life so that I can play the music I so love?”

  It was his way of getting to her, she wanted to say, but she could not deny that it did her heart good to see her papa playing his beloved violoncello again. Her face flushed a little, as much as her pallid complexion would allow, as it did whenever she thought of that scoundrel. “He is a sinner,” she said. “He is utterly and shamelessly immoral.”

  “That may be,” James replied. “But I wish to have him dine with us tonight and to play the new piece we have been working on.” He bent forward to brush a lock of hair from her face and sweep a pale finger across her cheek.

  She felt the brush of his callused pad from a lifetime of pressing his instrument’s strings, and stifled her vexation. “You are playing your music again, so for that I am grateful.”

  “You were always a good girl, Pruddy,” he said amiably. He walked with soundless steps to the sill, picked up the candle, and gave her a warm smile as he left the room.

  Good girl, indeed. Pru made a face. Why couldn’t her papa see that she had changed and was capable of making her own decisions, particularly about whose company she welcomed and whose she did not? She sighed. Papa still regarded her as a little girl, as all fathers regarded their daughters, she supposed. He’d always been so absorbed in his music she wondered if he’d even been aware of her transformation from child to girl and girl to woman. And now that he had his music again, did he notice the ways in which immortality had changed her? Perhaps it was better if he did not, for he would not be pleased if he knew of her dalliances with men, not to mention the dangerous charade on which she was about to embark to reclaim a lost soul.

  She had left behind the drudgery of the day-to-day obedience that was her life in London all those years ago when her mortality was wrenched from her. Now she was poised to enter a world of darkness and jungle-born magic, where goats and black pigs were sacrificed in voodoo rituals and green elixirs led men to the brink of madness. No, Papa would not approve at all. But that was the least of Pru’s worries. She shuddered to think what Nicholas would do when he found out.

  ***

  The selfish rogue Pru detested lay with his head pillowed in the smooth curve of the neck of a lovely young quadroon. The rain that had battered the narrow streets all day turning the black, loamy soil into greasy and slippery masses of mud had slackened to a steady patter of drops against the windows of the slope-roofed cottage on Rue du Rampart to which she had taken him.

  Earlier in the evening he had visited a little roulette house to do some gambling among the river men, draining one blustering barbarian of his money as well as his blood. With the Kentuckians swarming down the Mississippi to loot the city, there was a wealth of throats from which to feed. To the Creoles they were coarse and vulgar brutes who terrorized the town. To him, they were a ready meal.

  With the river man’s blood pulsing through his veins, he left the roulette house and had gone in search of a whore to ease the pulsing in his loins. He found this little beauty aboard one of the flatboats transformed into a rude bagnio. It was not as sumptuously appointed as some of the bath houses he had frequented in Europe, but it would do for his purpose. She was young—he guessed her to be not more than sixteen—and well schooled in the art of pleasure. She led him to a narrow cubicle built into the cargo box and lifted her calico dress, beneath which she wore nothing at all, although he suspected that her lack of under garments was not due as much to facilitate a hasty intercourse as it was to her downtrodden existence, if her slippers that were badly scuffed and run down at the heel were any indication of her sorry state of affairs.

  What a clever little strumpet she was, holding his potently erect phallus between her thighs to simulate intercourse without penetration. But his appetite was so great this evening that he had curbed the impulse to snap her neck for using such a trick.

  When he suggested that they leave the flatboat for more comfortable quarters, she took him to her little cottage, where he lay now atop the wafer-thin mattress on her bed, having climaxed all over her velvet thighs and threadbare sheet, casting a negligent glance around the room that was sparsely and crudely furnished. He felt sorry for her, and as she slid her curvy body down the length of his and drew his still erect phallus into her mouth, he wondered fleetingly how she had come to this sorry state so young in life. It surprised him that he felt anything at all for her, when there was a time he would have ravaged her without feeling a smidgen of emotion.

  She could have been any whore at any time at any bordello. It didn’t matter to him. As long as his sexual appetite was appeased, he wasn’t particular. He would have preferred to sate his lust with Prudence, but she was being most disagreeable and he was not in the mood for her waspish tongue. He had no one but himself to blame for it, he supposed, although secretly he delighted in Prudence’s extraordinary appetite for pleasure.

  “Oh, monsieur,” the young whore exclaimed when he came a second time and still retained a robust erection.

  He pushed her away and got up. “If you were any good at what you do, I might have been satisfied,” he said, more harshly than intended as he pulled on his trousers. Thinking of Prudence and how much she hated him always made him irritable.

  “I’m sorry, monsieur. I meant only to please you.”

  Nicholas finished buttoning his shirt and turned back to her. Her eyes were downcast and her face drooped with humiliation. When the only thing she had to give was this, he’d made her feel worthless. He was ashamed of himself for it. The mattress sagged when he knelt upon it with one knee and leaned forward to place a finger beneath her chin and guide her eyes to his. “And please me you did.”

  “But—” Her gaze dropped to the place on his trousers that stood out against his erection.

  “Never mind that,” he said. “It’s a physical ailment.”

  Her face brightened a little. “Is there nothing that will cure it?” she asked innocently.

  Yes, there was, and it waited for him on Rue Bourbon.

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a few coins which he tossed onto the bed.

  “This very generous of you,” the little whore exclaimed.

  “I don’t want you going back to that place,” he said as he strode to the door. “It’s unsafe for you.”

  “But I must work.”

  “Why are you not dancing at the quadroon balls? You are pretty enough. Your mother should be able to find a wealthy white man to keep you.”

  He’d been to one such ball himself searching for amusement, only to find a long line of young Creole dandies dressed in long coats of gray and boots with fancy stitching, waiting their turns for the contre-danses with the quadroon belles, while the girls’ mothers sat behind lace-trimmed fans, determining which man would make a suitable match for their daughters. On the night he was there a dispute had ar
isen between an arrogant American who had demanded that the musicians play English contre-danses instead of French and the Creole youths who drew sword-canes to cries of “Contre-danses francaises!” It was all so disagreeable that he never returned, preferring to sate his lust among the city’s whores.

  “The cholera took my maman,” she said sadly. “I must work to feed myself.”

  “You can work for me,” he said.

  She jumped from the bed, her small breasts bobbing as she ran to him, and threw herself against him. “Oh, merci, merci. I will please you all day, every day.”

  “Yes, I believe you shall.” It would do nicely to have her at his disposal at the cottage. And what better way to make his beloved Prudence jealous than to bring another woman into his life? “Pack your things. I’ll have a carriage sent for you in the morning. There’s one more thing.” He looked down into her eager face. “What’s your name?”

  “Marie.”

  “No more tricks, Marie,” he said, waving a stern finger. “I’ll not spill myself all over your pretty legs. Go down to the levee and obtain a good supply of the herbs you’ll need to avoid pregnancy. I won’t be the cause of you conceiving a child.” Or a mortal bearing the offspring of the undead. Those nasty little creatures invariably set out to destroy their parents.

  “Oui, oui. The seeds of Queen Ann’s lace work well.”

  He looked at her wryly. “Who taught you these things?”

  “Madame Sejour,” she answered.

  “The voodoo queen?”

  “Oui. She and maman were like sisters until—” She paused to pull in a breath.

  “Until the cholera,” he muttered.

  “Their friendship ended long before the cholera took maman. Madame Sejour became…” She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Different.”

  Nicholas lifted an inquisitive brow. “How so?”