Creole Fires (4 page)

Unlike the others, Alex noticed, whose shoulders sagged in defeat, the girl stood ramrod straight, shoulders square, chin held high, looking neither right nor left. There was something about her ….
What was it?
Alex moved a little closer, threading his way through the crowd.

“Three hundred dollars,” a gangly man in a stovepipe hat called out. The girl glanced in the man’s direction, then over to a dark-haired woman who stood against the wall. The buxom woman nodded and the young girl smiled at the man, a pleasant smile, tenative, but not insincere.

“Five hundred.” It was Valcour Fortier, a black-haired half-Spaniard, half-Frenchman Alex had known since childhood. Fortier was one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans—he was also the cruelest, most ruthless bastard Alex had ever had the misfortune to meet.

The woman near the wall seemed to agree. She was shaking her head vigorously, trying to warn the girl on the platform, whose face had turned an even paler shade than it was before. Alex could barely make out her features for the worn brown, coal-scuttle bonnet she wore, but her hair, though dirty and matted, appeared to be a warm shade of copper.

Her demeanor a little less regal, she glanced at Fortier, who gestured to the auctioneer. With a lewd smile of understanding, the skinny little man lifted the young girl’s skirts, exposing her slender bare feet,
a portion of her calf, and a glimpse of her thin white cotton drawers, just above the knee.

“Stop that!” she shrieked, jerking her skirts from the auctioneer’s hands. Her defiance brought a ringing slap that echoed above the crowd, but still she held her ground.

“She’s young, boys. Needs a man’s hand to teach her her place, is all.” The auctioneer smiled at the bidders, easing the tension.

“Six hundred,” the gangly bidder said, and again the girl smiled, turning to face him more squarely.

It was then Alex saw them—a pair of aqua eyes so vivid they took his breath away. It was her eyes he’d noticed before, he realized, her eyes that had drawn him into the crowd. He had been sure he had only imagined them.

“One thousand,” Fortier said with finality.

Cursing his bad luck and shaking his head, the gangly bidder walked away.

“Is there none here who can see the potential of this young girl?” the auctioneer asked, hoping to gouge Fortier for a few dollars more. He raised her arm and drew back her sleeve. “She’s got good, strong muscle. Seven years left on her contract. Surely you can imagine the delights she could bring … with just a little patience.” He grinned and patted her bottom, sending a wash of color to the girl’s pale face. She closed her eyes a moment, fighting to bring her embarrassment under control, but she continued to look straight ahead.

“She’s a thief,” Fortier called out. “None will pay more.”

“I’m not a thief!” the girl threw back at him. “I’m not!” That brought a second stinging blow.

“Hold your tongue,” the auctioneer warned, cruelly gripping her arm. “Give Mr. Fortier a smile.”

When he released her arm, the girl proudly drew herself up. She watched Fortier a moment, correctly assessing his determination to own her, looked to her friend who was still vigorously shaking her head, then dropped into a sweeping curtsy. She smiled at Fortier so sweetly it seemed someone had turned on the sun.

“Mr. Fortier,” she said, her voice soft and dripping with honey. “I’m honored that you should find a pitiful creature such as myself worthy of your attentions.”

Alex didn’t miss her faultless speech, nor the hidden venom with which she spoke. He didn’t miss the disdain for Valcour Fortier that her honeyed words belied.

But he almost missed her tears.

When she moved her head, they glistened on her smooth cheeks like raindrops, a sorrowful contrast to the smile that lit her face.

“Twelve hundred,” Alex called out, and could scarcely believe he’d said the words.

“Fourteen,” came Fortier’s bid. After a contemptuous glance in Alex’s direction, he looked back at the girl with undisguised hunger, confirming Alex’s fear that he wanted her in his bed. It was well known in the
Vieux Carré
, the French Quarter, that Fortier had a penchant for young, untried women—the younger the better. This one would more than whet his appetite.

“Two thousand,” Alex said, and the crowd fell silent. Only the rattle of a prisoner’s chains marred the stillness.

Fortier laughed softly, but his laughter sounded forced. “I wasn’t aware your tastes ran to those so young. Had I but known ….” He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of nonchalance, but his dark eyes screamed his fury.

“Have her brought to my carriage in an hour,” Alex instructed the auctioneer, ignoring Fortier’s lewd remarks. “You’ll find it at one twenty-one Royale Street. I’ll have a draft there waiting for you.” The auctioneer nodded, and a fat guard led the girl away.

Before she had disappeared from sight, Alex was regretting his actions.

“What was that all about?” Thomas asked with a touch of amusement that only increased Alex’s self-directed ire.

“I haven’t the remotest idea. Sometimes I even amaze myself.”

Thomas knew better than to comment any further.

The men moved up the stone steps and into the hotel’s elegant interior. The St. Louis was a landmark in New Orleans; its imposing dome, rising above the city, could be seen from blocks away.

“I think we’d better get you that drink,” Thomas said. “You look as though you could use it.”

Alex shoved open the paneled cypress doors to the gentlemen’s bar with a little more effort than necessary, and moved toward one of the tables. Quiet conversation and the sound of men’s heavy laughter rose up around them. Some played cards, others stood at the long, carved mahogany bar.

Alex barely noticed them. He had acted rashly, for reasons even he couldn’t quite fathom. Now he was paying the price.

“I promised Lisette I would take her to dinner.
How do you suppose she’d enjoy an evening with Belle Chêne’s newest dependent instead?”

“I wouldn’t try it if I were you. She’s already in a temper over your soon-to-be-announced engagement.”

“That was settled with a few new ball gowns and a trip up the river on the
Natchez Queen.”
Few women could resist the luxury of the
Queen
, the most luxurious steamboat on the Mississippi. “This is business. The girl’s a two-thousand-dollar investment. I may have been fool enough to buy her, but I’ll damned well guarantee she’ll earn back every penny and then some.”

“Why don’t you just leave her at the prison for the night?”

Alex felt a tightening in his chest just to think of it. He could almost feel the stinging blows the girl had been dealt on the platform—he could well imagine the brutality she had suffered in her rat-infested cell.

“She’s Belle Chêne property now. I want her ready and able to carry her share of the load.”

Thomas just smiled. Alex might talk tough, but he was a man who went out of his way to treat his workers fairly. Each family on the plantation had its own cabin, garden, and chickens. They attended church, observed Christian holidays, were married by a priest, and families were never separated. On Belle Chêne, slaves earned a living much as sharecroppers did, including bonuses for extra effort in the cane fields.

Many of the planters resented Alex’s progressive tactics, but the du Villier family represented power and social status, and had for years. Few were willing to voice that resentment aloud.

Valcour Fortier was among those few.

“You certainly got Fortier’s temper up,” Thomas said with a grin as the two men sipped their fine Napoleon brandy.

Alex swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “He doesn’t like to lose.”

“Why do you suppose he backed off?”

It went unsaid that Feliciana, Fortier’s plantation, was in far better financial condition than Belle Chêne. The depression of 1837, and his brother François’s mismanagement, had seen to that.

“Probably because it just isn’t good business to pay that much money for a thief, no matter how young and tender she might be. Money means everything to Valcour. No woman-child, especially one who can’t be trusted, is worth making a bad investment.”

Just saying the words, which were damned well true, reheated Alex’s temper. “Now, if you don’t mind, let’s talk about something else. I’ve got less than an hour before I’ll be forced to acknowledge my folly. It’s not an evening I look forward to.”

Nicki sat forlornly on the damp straw pallet in her dark and musty cell, her legs drawn up beneath her chin, her arms wrapped protectively around them as she waited for the hour of her departure.

She shivered, though it wasn’t really cold, and prayed she would see Lorna again. Since her friend had been led onto the opposite end of the platform just as Nicki had walked away, they’d had no chance to speak, no chance even for that brief communication that would have warned her about the man who had bought her contract.

Nicki had been certain the black-haired man with the dark eyes and Spanish features would win, though at Lorna’s horrified expression, she prayed he would not. The way he had looked at her had made her skin crawl, but he’d seemed so confident of his purchase, so determined, she’d finally given in to an urge to show him her disdain. Then the other man in the crowd had materialized out of nowhere—saving her from some dreadful fate she could only imagine, or immersing her in something worse.

She had tried to see his face beneath the stylish gray narrow-brimmed high hat he wore, but everything happened so quickly that he was gone before she got the chance. All she had noticed was his height, which was several inches taller than the men around him, and that his shoulders were broad.

He appeared to be a large man—and big meant powerful. Nicki shuddered. Powerful enough to hold her immobile against her fiercest struggles. Powerful enough to do the ugly things the watchmen had done to Lorna and the other women prisoners.

Nicki closed her eyes, fighting down her fears. She had always been so fearless, so confident. Now it seemed, at the most inopportune time, she would remember the beatings she had received from Armand Laurent for her defiance, the suppers she’d missed because of her arrogant nature and too-haughty ways. It had taken some doing, but she’d finally learned to suffer in silence, to keep her bitter retorts to herself. Her reward had been imprisonment for a crime she didn’t commit.

Outside her cell, Nicole heard the watchmen’s weighty footfalls, their ribald laughter as they headed
down the hall.
Wherever I go has got to be better than this
, she told herself firmly. But as the heavy iron door swung wide and she was led away, she wasn’t really so sure.

Nervously wringing her hands, Nicole St. Claire stood beside the gleaming black barouche that waited on Royale Street in front of a sign reading: Thomas P. Demming, Attorney-at-Law.

A gray-haired watchman stood on one side of her while an equally graying black man, dressed in fashionable red and gold livery, stood on the other.

The guard pulled a timepiece from his pocket and flipped open the lid. “We’re a few minutes early.”

“He be here,” the old Negro said. “He be here right on time.”

And he was.

Nicole had just glanced toward the corner when the tall broad-shouldered man she had glimpsed at the auction came around it, striding in their direction. Nicki blinked, blinked again, then swayed against the carriage wheel, gripping the spokes for support.
It couldn’t be!

But it was. Alexandre du Villier. She would know that handsome face anywhere. During her hard days of indenture, as she had huddled on her narrow cot trying to get warm, or scrubbed the hard wooden
floors, or washed a mountain of dirty laundry, she’d thought about him, wondered what had happened to him. Wondered if, back in her other lifetime, he might have come to call on her as she had once wished.

She glanced up at him as he drew near, accepting the papers the guard handed over but perusing them only briefly. When he looked down at her, her heart began to pound.
Would he recognize her too?
Dear God, she prayed he wouldn’t.

She couldn’t bear to face him in her filthy rags and matted hair. But then maybe that was why he’d bought her. He had remembered her and was here to rescue her again. Her heart increased its pounding, and the rags that bound her breasts felt so tight she couldn’t breathe.

He was handing the guard a draft now, just as he had promised, while the driver returned to his seat at the front of the carriage. Nicki fought a moment of panic as a pair of hard brown eyes locked on her face, and his big hand lifted her chin. He assessed her a moment, his dark look traveling over her bruised and dirt-smudged face, then down the front of her soiled brown wool dress, where the bodice hung loose and to all appearances, empty.

A glimmer of something moved across his face, and she wondered if it might have been a flash of disappointment.

“There’ll be no thievery at Belle Chêne,” he said as if an edict had been spoken. “Now get in the carriage.”

With those harsh words, Nicki’s hopes crumbled. She was property, nothing more. He hadn’t remembered her at all.