Dark Masquerade

This is a
work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without the written permission of publisher or author, except where permitted by law.

Cover Art by Amanda Kelsey of
Razzle Dazzle Design
.

Copyright ©
1974 and 2014
by Patricia Maxwell

First Fawcett Gold Medal Mass Market Edition: 1974

First E-Reads Publication:
1999

First Steel Magnolia Press Publication: 2014

The evening sun hovered over the tops of the trees. Its orange shafts struck through the dark woods, harrying the coach as it swayed along, gleaming on its brass fittings and the cracked blue paint on its sides. The sun’s rays were still bright but they had lost their heat. A damp coolness seemed to seep from the encroaching trees and undergrowth, and the muddy water, thrown up as the wheels jolted through the potholes in the road, had a chill, dank smell.

The driver on the box resettled his hat, pulling the brim lower to shield his eyes, and then he took up his blacksnake whip and sent it cracking over the horses’ heads as he yelled curses at the leaders. The coach picked up speed.

At the windows the dirty brown leather curtains bellied and slapped, doing little to stop the muddy water that spattered in and trickled down the sides. The doors rattled loosely in their frames and the body creaked as it swung on its straps, while above the rumbling of the wheels and the pounding of the horses’ hooves the bumping of a loose trunk could be heard.

The man on the forward seat, a merchant judging from his false shirt front, old fashioned stock, and self-satisfied air, threw back his head and glared upward.

Beside him his wife misunderstood. “That man will kill us all,” she said, with an accusing look at the girl on the opposite seat. “I’m surprised we haven’t overturned a dozen times already!” The woman’s eyes were protuberant and her mouth colorless. The grayish brown hair skewered in a knot on top of her head was pulled too tight, dragging her heavy brows upward in a look of constant surprise.

“Sounds like we be about to lose that lot of gee-gaws I’ve got overhead. Happen I’ll have to charge somebody with ‘em, if they turn up missing.” The merchant eyed the girl also. When she made no answer he pushed the window curtain aside with one long finger, and holding back his chin whiskers, let fly a stream of tobacco juice. It was a comment.

Two small tow-headed boys, their hair like cropped white silk, sat on the middle seat, a plain wooden board. With their arms hooked over the wide leather strap that served as a back rest, they turned guileless blue eyes on the girl to see if she had taken their father’s point.

If she had, Mary Elizabeth Brewster gave no indication. Her deep green eyes were fixed on a point above the heads of the merchant and his wife while she drew the strings of her black reticule through her fingers. She had no liking for the merchant and his wife, but after forty long miles spent that day in their company she could understand their annoyance. Not only were they riding with their backs to the horses, but they were being taken some fourteen miles out of their way. It could not be helped. Callie could not be the one to ride backward, because she turned queasy riding backward. As for the detour, that was the chance they took when they boarded public transportation.

Above them the driver swung his whip in a series of sharp reports. Elizabeth lifted a speculative glance. Perhaps a silver dollar had been too much to offer the man on the box for this side trip. It had been Mexican to be sure, but coins were so scarce these days. She appreciated his efforts to get a little more speed out of the lumbering old coach, although it was anybody’s guess whether it was the thought of making up his schedule which drove him, or, as was more likely, the thought of the drunk possible on his windfall, with whiskey at a quarter per gallon.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself fiercely. What mattered was that she and Callie and the baby got to Oak Shade with as little delay as possible.

Beside her, Callie, her name the inevitable shortening from Calliope, the muse of the soft voice, sat as stolid and immovable as a mountain. In her ample lap the baby slept. When Elizabeth looked down at him, her mouth curved unconsciously into a smile. Such a good baby. Their nine days on this bone-wracking trip over a part of Texas and most of Louisiana would have been very different if he had not been a good traveler. As it was, it had been an endurance test. For the first three or four days they had felt bruised and battered as if they had been beaten. But for the last five they had been so mindlessly weary that they had almost ceased to feel; almost, but not quite. The muscles in Elizabeth’s arms ached from holding the baby mile after mile, spelling Callie. Though she never complained, the Negro nurse must be even more tired. On her shoulders had fallen the main burden of caring for little Joseph, not only in the coach but in the primitive taverns and sleazy inns that had provided overnight accommodation. Callie was good with babies as well as being a wonderful wet nurse. The stillborn deaths of six of her own babies, the last only two weeks before Joseph’s birth, had given her a need and a love for the feel of a child in her arms.

Soberly Elizabeth pleated the black bombazine of her dress without really seeing the nervous reaction of her fingers. Even in repose, however, the pale oval of her face did not lose the look of determination about the mouth and chin that had unconsciously alienated the merchant and his wife. Her emerald eyes, heavily lashed beneath dark arched brows, gave no hint of her inner conflict.

Without Callie, Elizabeth thought, this journey, this masquerade would never have been undertaken. For a moment the thought of what she intended to do sent a shudder of dread over her. Her reasons for what she was doing, so carefully thought out, so important, had fled, and she was left with the feeling that she was being incredibly foolhardy, that she would be found out in the first minutes of meeting the family at Oak Shade. Turn back, a part of her mind cried, and she had to clench her jaws together to keep from giving the order.

Then beside her the baby, Joseph, stirred, waving a plump fist in the air. He smiled in his sleep. Her doubts fell away. No, the consequences of not going through with this masquerade were too great. Besides, it was too late to turn back now. It had been too late from the day she had placed a wooden marker on the fresh grave which lay beneath a cottonwood tree by a rambling log house in Texas. A marker bearing her own name.

Strangely, the thought of the marker gave her a feeling of relief. She had made her choice weeks before. There could be no turning back. All that was needed was a little resolution. There was so much to be gained and so little to lose.

She let her eyes rest for a moment on the merchant and his wife and children. Their bright examining eyes had evaluated her from the gold band on her left hand to the mourning brooch made of hair at her throat, from the black high-button shoes peeping from beneath her skirts to the bright auburn hair drawn back in a knot at the nape of her neck and covered by her semi-transparent mourning veil. She had deceived them. It could be done again.

A mirthless smile touched her generous mouth. How shocked they would be if they knew that, despite her widow’s weeds and the baby in the arms of his Negro nurse, she had never had a husband, never been a mother, and from this day would answer to a dead woman’s name.

“Whoa, whoa!”

The shout was followed by the grinding of brakes. The coach began to slow and finally came to a lurching stop.

“What can it be?” The merchant’s wife clutched her husband’s arm.

He shook her off and twitched the leather curtain aside.

“Some fancy landau seems to have blocked the road. Nabob’s rig, no doubt. Got a black in livery at the ribbons.”

Outside, the servant in the carriage could be heard asking for a Madame Delacroix. With a start Elizabeth realized he meant her, but she made no move to alight and sternly repressed an impulse to lean across and peep out around the slack curtain. In a moment the driver climbed down and pulled open the door.

“Mrs. Delacroix, ma’am, this feller says he has orders to carry y’all the rest of the way.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth replied with the quiet dignity befitting a recent widow.

Turning to Callie, she took the baby while Callie clambered out, and then gave him back into her keeping while she herself accepted the driver’s hand and stepped down.

In a few minutes they had been handed into the landau and their trunks and boxes lashed on behind. With a jerk, they started off, leaving the coach behind them to the difficult business of turning on the narrow road.

Elizabeth threw the veil away from her face, drawing its long length across one shoulder to prevent it from being crushed beneath her, and then pushed her skirts into place around her feet.

“We forgot to say good-by,” she told Callie, frowning.

“So did they,” Callie answered without looking up from the baby who had been awakened by the move.

The landau was well sprung, and it had deeply padded seats and gray velvet upholstery. It seemed luxurious in comparison to the stage, whose hard seats and body swung on straps gave no protection from the jolts. It was an open carriage, however, and the damp dew-laden chill of the gathering dusk made Elizabeth shiver and Callie draw Joseph closer against her breasts.

But this last stage of their journey was not a long one, and soon they were turning into a long winding drive. It was lined with evergreen live oaks that acted as a dust screen, the oaks that gave the house its name. Elizabeth felt their dark shade drop over them as they swept under their arching branches up the drive. She was aware of a sudden depression, and her earlier apprehension swept back in force. The sound of the carriage was loud in the soft black stillness. Through the trees, rows of white pillars gleamed, fleeting and ethereal. Then suddenly the carriage broke from the shade, and the house, like a Grecian temple in a forest, was before them. Insubstantial in the dusky darkness, it seemed cold, distant and forbidding. A flame, like a votive candle, flickered in the wrought iron lantern hanging over the front door, but there was no other sign of life. A desolation that was near to tears closed over Elizabeth at this lack of welcome. Suppose it had been Ellen Marie arriving, gentle, easily hurt Ellen Marie, her sister whose place she was taking?

“Is there no one home?” she asked the driver sharply in an effort to cover her misgivings.

“Oh, yes’m. They home alright. I expect they at the supper table.”

She waited while he wrapped the reins around the whip in its stand and climbed down to come around and hand her out of the carriage. She stepped down and waited until Callie struggled out with the sleeping baby. Then Elizabeth swept up the steps, her long black veil swirling about her knees. With one hand clutching her reticule and the other holding her skirts out of the way, she crossed the brick-floored gallery, Callie hurrying behind as though afraid to lose sight of her.