Prisoner of Desire (11 page)

“You have been Anya to me for some time.”

The low timbre of his voice sent a shiver along her nerves, though she did not quite catch the words. She turned slowly to face him. “What did you say?”

Without discernible hesitation, he said, “You have been very kind. Would you be kinder still, and agree to have dinner with me later this evening? That hour of the day is always the worst.”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to see what else requires my attention,” she answered. Swinging away, she let herself from the room.

She turned the key and hung it back on its hook, then went slowly down the stairs with her hand trailing along the rough cypress banister railing. Why hadn’t she refused his request for her company? She had no intention of returning to eat with him, no matter how lonely and confined he might be, and she should have said so at once.

What was the matter with her? It was almost as if she didn’t know her own mind, her own feelings. Usually when she decided on a course, she kept to it without misgivings, without these feelings of doubt and low spirits. She made her arrangements, followed them, and accepted the results, whatever they might be.

Not this time.

Granted, she had never done anything quite like this before, never involved herself in an affair with such potentially serious consequences. There had never before been a time when she felt in danger of losing control of the situation.

Until now.

It was possible that her doubts stemmed from the identity of her prisoner. She had hated Ravel Duralde for a long time, and hate was a powerful emotion. To have the object of it near her, at her mercy, could not help but affect her. The fact that she was disturbed by his presence should not be surprising, nor was it unreasonable for her to be upset by the violent swings in her feelings toward him. Though she had reason to despise him, she could also feel compassion for his predicament, and remorse for her part in it. What could be more natural?

More, she was a normal woman, quite capable of responding to a handsome and virile man in a purely physical way. It was a matter of animal forces, nothing more. It had no meaning. The feeling would disappear once she was away from him. She would forget that he had kissed her, forget the feel of his warm and mobile mouth upon hers, the strength of his arms about her, the hard length of his body against hers. She would.

By this time tomorrow, the ordeal would be over. Ravel Duralde would be gone. In the meantime, she certainly would not be eating her dinner at the cotton gin.

Anya finished weeding the bed of verbena. She and Joseph piled the leaves he had raked around the azaleas and camellias, the hydrangeas and winter honeysuckles and cape jasmines of the back garden. She pruned the huge old muscadine grapevine on its pergola in the side garden, and also the fig trees that grew behind the laundry, then put down the cuttings to root in a shady bed of sand beside the door of the detached kitchen building, where the dishwater as it was thrown out would keep them constantly moist. Now and then she stopped to breathe the fresh air of spring, to smell the wafting fragrances of the spirea and daffodils and white winter honeysuckle, and the rich scent of the yellow jasmine coming from the tangle of vines that grew along the fencerow near the house. She did not, insofar as she was able to prevent it, think about Ravel Duralde.

When the light began to fade, she dismissed Joseph and went into the house. Feeling grimy and gritty from head to toe, she ordered a bath brought to her room. She soaked in the hot, steaming water for a time, then lathered herself with fine-milled Lubin’s soap perfumed with an extract of damask roses. She also rubbed the rich lather through her hair, enjoying the scent and silken feel of it. The smell of roses lingered upon her skin and among her tresses even after she had rinsed the soap away and blotted the water from her body with thick Turkish toweling, after she had dried the shining curtain of her hair before the fire.

She was not in the habit of dressing for dinner while alone at the plantation. When Madame Rosa and Celestine were in residence it was different, of course, but when there was only herself at the dining room table it seemed a needless labor to change into an evening gown. Often, she avoided the dining room altogether, preferring to have a tray in her room. On these occasions, she usually relaxed before the fire in no more than her dressing gown.

This evening, however, she felt an urge to dress formally, to look her best. It had nothing whatever to do with the slighting comments on her appearance made by Ravel, of course. She could permit herself a whim now and then surely? She had been most informal, even sloppy, all day; tonight she would have a
grande toilette.

Denise served as Anya’s maid. The woman had been her nurse when Anya first came to the plantation as a young, frightened girl without a mother. After so many years, Denise felt it her proprietorial right to dress Anya, and also to scold her and to worry over her. On this evening, the older woman helped her into underclothing and tightened the strings of her new empress corset. She lifted her quilted petticoats with their embroidered hems over her head, settling them into place for warmth and to prevent her cage crinoline from swinging like a bell. Next came the crinoline itself, an affair of five graduated sizes of hoops covered with cloth tapes, all together with straps. Over this went another layer of petticoats, also embroidered and edged with lace, and padding to prevent the crinoline’s hoops from showing through like bones under her gown.

The gown itself was of bayadere silk in shades of pink to deepest rose red. It had been made up in France and imported by Giquel and Jaison on Chartres Street, the emporium where she had bought it. Very little had been required to perfect the fit, no more than a minor alteration of the bodice seams to make it conform to her slimmer waist. Madame Rosa and Celestine preferred to have their gowns made by their own dressmaker; they claimed that the workmanship was far superior. But Anya could not force herself to endure the endless fittings required unless absolutely necessary, and so bought ready-made garments when she could find them.

The neckline of the gown was cut low across the bosom, exposing a great deal of her neck and shoulders. In an attempt to distract from that expanse of pale flesh, Anya fastened around her throat a necklace of garnets. It was a beautifully designed piece of glittering, faceted stones, with a Maltese cross at the center surrounded by scrollwork and flanked by tiny tulips, fleurs-de-lis, and arrow points made of jewels on either side. Delicate, yet large enough to be showy, it had been given to Anya by her father. It was not terribly valuable, the garnets being set in base metal with only a wash of gold, but she loved it.

Anya sat before her dressing table with a hairdressing cape about her shoulders while Denise brushed the long mane of her hair and put it up. Denise plaited and shaped a portion of it into a coronet, then brought the hair at the crown through the coronet and allowed it to fall in a smooth swath that curled over Anya’s shoulder to lie in a fat, glossy ringlet. Denise drew out small tendrils of hair at the temples and in front of Anya’s ears, and used a curling iron heated on a bracket placed over the lamp chimney to form them into fine curls. Satisfied at last, she moved about the room putting things away while Anya turned her attention to the array of bottles and jars on the dressing table.

Her hands were dry and rough from her yard work. She smoothed a soothing lotion known as Balm of a Thousand Flowers into them, then shaped her nails and buffed them to a gloss with a chamois skin buffer.

The Creole ladies of New Orleans had been accused by the American women of painting their faces. That was not strictly true, though they were known, on occasion, to aid nature somewhat. Madame Rosa had instructed Anya in that art as naturally as she had pointed out the importance of attention to her teeth.

Now to give her brows and lashes darkness and sheen, Anya applied a touch of a pomatum with her fingertips, then to even her skin tone used Lilly White, liquid
blanc de perles,
smoothing it over her face. Deciding after a critical inspection that she needed a little color, she took a rouge paper from a small box, brushed it delicately across her cheekbones, then, after moistening her lips, pressed it to them also.

She sat for a moment surveying the results in the mirror. Satisfied, she tossed the rouge paper aside and wiped her fingertips on a cloth. She looked rather different than she had earlier. It was a pity, she thought, that Ravel Duralde would not be able to see how different, even if the change had not been made for his benefit.

As with most houses of Creole style, the principal rooms of Beau Refuge were on the second floor to protect them from the possibility of flooding, with the lower floor being little more than a basement built above the ground and used for storage and sometimes for servants’ quarters. There was no hallway in the house. The galleries on the front and back served that purpose, giving access through the many pairs of French windows that opened onto them. In addition, the rooms opened into each other, so that if every window and door in the house was thrown wide, there was free circulation of air throughout, a great boon in the warm, humid climate.

There were nine large, high-ceilinged rooms in the house. Across the front was the library, the salon in the center, and the bedchamber used by Madame Rosa. The second rank of rooms included the dining room in the center and a bedchamber on each side, while across the back was Anya’s bedchamber, a sitting room she claimed as her own, and another bedchamber that belonged to Celestine.

The decor of the house, redone at the time of the marriage of Madame Rosa to Anya’s father, was in wheat-straw gold and olive green. There were heavy brocades at the windows and medallion carpets on the floor; chairs and settees were covered with silk, and the bed coverings were of ecru linen edged with heavy Valenciennes lace. Bronze-framed mirrors topped the fireplaces, and marble statuary was set in the corners of the rooms. The chandeliers were of bronze doré and Baccarat crystal. Sevres porcelain graced the mantels and tables here and there, and the paintings and lithographs that hung on the walls of gentle pastoral scenes in gilded frames.

To reach the dining room, Anya had only to walk into the sitting room, turn right, then pass through the sitting room door into the dining room. The table sat ready, with her place laid, waiting for the meal to be served. No one was in sight however, nor was there any sign of food. She moved to the sideboard where a tray of decanters stood. After pouring a small sherry for herself, she wandered back into the sitting room and seated herself as was proper upon the edge of the seat of the wing chair.

The stiff pose was too uncomfortable to maintain. Unlike many young ladies among the Creoles, Anya had never been forced to wear an apple slat in her bodice to encourage rigid, upright posture. Careless of the possible wrinkling of her dress or the possibility of revealing her petticoats and crinoline, she leaned back in the chair, resting her head against the padded upholstery.

As she sipped her wine, she stared out into the darkness beyond the French windows. It was an uneasy night. The wind had changed its quarter, blowing steadily from the south. It waved the ancient arms of the live oaks so that they creaked and groaned in protest. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a low, threatening sound. Drafts of air finding their way into the room caused the flames in the lamps to flutter on their wicks, casting wavering shadows on the walls. The air smelled of kerosene and the rose-petal potpourri that filled a Chinese jar on the table beside her, of pollen from the trees that were beginning to bloom, and of the sulphurous taint of the coming storm.

There was a copy of the
Louisiana Courier
also on the table. Setting down her glass, she picked up the newspaper, scanning the columns, stopping to read an item from France holding up to ridicule the entourage of postillions, liveried servants, mounted lancers bearing small flags, and equerries thought necessary to accompany the young son of Louis Napoleon of France and his nurse for a carriage outing. She had passed on to a tale of Indian trouble with the Shawnees in the Kansas Territory, when Denise’s son Marcel appeared in the door.

She laid the paper aside, saying with a smile, “Dinner at last? I’m starving.”

Marcel was a grave and intelligent young man near Anya’s age, with a slender frame, waving black hair and soft brown skin. There was enough of the Caucasian in his features so that Anya had been forced to wonder more than once if his father might not have been the man from whom her own father had won the plantation. Denise was reticent on the subject, claiming, when Madame Rosa asked her in forthright Creole fashion about the boys parentage, that she could not name his father. Marcel was an excellent servant, quiet, efficient, and loyal. When he could be teased out of his habitual solemnity, he had a wide and infectious grin. There was never any indication by word or deed that when they were children he and Anya had run and romped together up and down the galleries of the house.

Tonight his face was even more sober than usual, and he did not quite meet her gaze as he bowed. “I’m sorry, mam’zelle. Dinner is indeed ready, but I’m not certain where to serve it.”

“Not certain? What do you mean?”

“I went just now to the cotton gin with a tray. M’sieur Duralde said to me that I must bring your meal also. He will not eat alone.”

She got to her feet with a swish of skirts. “I see. Then he must go hungry. I will eat in the dining room as usual.”

“Your pardon, mam’zelle. He also said that if you should refuse, he will be forced to set fire to the cotton gin.”