Silver-Tongued Devil (Louisiana Plantation Collection) (29 page)

Chapter Sixteen

“Why are you moping out here, Mamzelle?”

It was Estelle who put that question, standing in the garden path with her hands on her ample hips and a belligerent look overlaying the worry on her round face.

Angelica sat up straighter in the teakwood chair placed under the rose arbor, and hastily retrieved the book turned down in her lap as it slipped. Summoning a smile, she said, “Just reading. What else is there?”

“You know well what else. You could be talking to Cook about dinner tonight, consulting with the gardener about what vegetables you want planted; maybe checking the dairy to be sure they are making butter the way you want. You might be having the salon swept and dusted and the rugs put up in the attic for summer. There’s plenty — if you want to worry with it.”

Angelica looked away to where a bee invaded a full-blown pink cabbage rose near her left shoulder. “But my mother-in-law sees to all that, and so well, too.”

“Because you let her.”

It was true, and Angelica knew it. It was almost a month since she had come to Bonheur. The weeks had come and gone, and still Madame Delaup had not given up the keys to the household.

The keys were central, a symbol of power. So many things were kept locked away: the sharp knives in their polished wooden boxes; the tea in its special caddy; the spices in a many-drawered chest; sacks of coffee, barrels of sugar, flour, ground corn meal, and crocks of preserves and jellies in the pantry; the smoked meats hanging in the smokehouse. Each of these things had to be parceled out by the mistress of the house as needed. It was an onerous duty to many women, but a source of pride and responsibility to others.

Madame Delaup appeared to be among the latter. Angelica had not, in the beginning, realized quite how attached Renold’s mother was to her position. She did now.

If the situation had been more normal, Angelica might have forced a confrontation. With the passing days, however, she had come to see to what an extent she would be usurping the only place the other woman had, taking away the one thing that filled the emptiness of her life. So much had been stolen from Renold’s mother already that Angelica found it difficult to take the rest.

Excuses were plentiful. Madame Delaup had a headache. It was wash day, and Madame was too occupied to show her daughter-in-law which key went to what. Madame had visitors, or was expecting visitors, or was just leaving to pay a charity call on a needy family of country people. It went on and on.

At the same time, Angelica had grown increasingly irritated with her position. The house servants of Bonheur, not unnaturally, looked to their longtime mistress and to her son for their orders. No single request that Angelica made was answered instantly. If she asked for a cup of tea and a piece of toast between meals, Renold’s mother must be the one to send to the kitchen for it. If she wanted the sheets on her bed changed, Madame must approve. If she decided to ride, Renold must relay the order for her horse to be saddled. If she wanted the furniture in her bedchamber shifted, both Madame and her son must be consulted. Nothing was so trivial that achieving it could not be turned into a drawn-out procedure.

Then there was the insolence. It was not overt, of course, nothing that could be seized upon as a cause for punishment. It materialized in a crooked smile, a glance from the corners of the eyes, the tone of a voice. Added together, it showed plainly that she was considered negligible, someone to be neither respected nor feared. In the manner of servants everywhere, the people of Bonheur had looked her over, noticed the attitude of their master and mistress toward her, tested her, and decided she was powerless.

The exceptions were Estelle and Tit Jean. These two had become more partisan as the days slipped away. It was as if they felt she was being persecuted and were rallying to her defense. Angelica was grateful, since it meant at least a few of her needs were seen to without complications. More than that, it was good to have someone on her side.

Her side. As if she and Renold’s mother were in some kind of tug of war.

Part of the problem was that she could not blame Madame Delaup for resenting her, even hating her. If she was made to feel like an interloper, she could hardly complain, because that was precisely what she was.

Still, the strain of it was beginning to wear on her patience. Twice in the past week she had snapped at Deborah. Only this morning, she had come very near to lashing out at Renold because he had suggested that his shirts were not ironed to his satisfaction and she might speak to the laundress about it.

The worst of it was that the petty infighting was preventing her from coming closer to Renold. He had ridden out with her once in the first week, and seemed to take pride in showing her the acreage belonging to the plantation, the fields in cane and food crops, the lay of the lands along the river. Since then, she had barely seen him at all during daylight hours. He always had so much to do: talking with the overseer about new plantings; having land cleared, ditches cleaned, or rubbish burned; looking after repairs and even doing them himself so that he came home hot and tired and disinclined to talk.

If these labors did not fill his time, then he went fishing on the river with Michel. Or he rode out to visit with local planters and talk sugar and cotton and land, along with more interesting tales of local misdoings. Coming home, he brought the news he had gleaned to discuss with Michel and Deborah and his mother. An occasional comment was directed to Angelica, but since she knew neither the places nor the people involved, she had little to contribute to any discussion.

It was only at night that she saw him alone. Sometimes, he was too exhausted from his labors, perhaps purposely, to do anything else except sleep like the dead. Other nights, he reached for her the moment the lamp went out and made love to her with such desperate skill that all else was routed from her mind.

She said to Estelle now, “It isn’t as easy as it may look.”

The other woman shook her head. “But it won’t happen at all, Mamzelle, if you don’t try.”

It occurred to Angelica, as it had before when some request created a standoff in the kitchen or laundry and her helpers came flying to her in high dudgeon, that Estelle and Tit Jean might have other motives for being biased in her favor. It seemed they would gain supremacy in the servant hierarchy with her elevation — particularly Renold’s former housekeeper who had been appointed as her personal maid — and were interested in seeing she assumed her rightful place for that reason. There was no point in saying so, however.

Shading her eyes against the sun’s glare, she said in an attempt to change the subject, “Is anything wrong in the house? Did you need me?”

The maid clapped a hand to the side of her face. “Oh, Mamzelle, I almost forgot. You have a visitor.”

There had been visitors before in plenty. As with Angelica’s aunt in Natchez, receiving and paying calls took up a major portion of the time of the ladies at Bonheur. They came in various forms, from the fashionable call in which a lady merely left her card to the formal call which lasted a carefully calculated half-hour and usually included taking some refreshment. There were also informal calls between family and close friends which might take up an afternoon or extend to several days. The practice was a means of renewing the ties of both kinship and friendship. It was also a favored way of keeping abreast of events in the neighborhood.

The advent of a bride at Bonheur would always have been sufficient to bring forth numerous visitors. That the bride was the daughter of the man who had won Bonheur at cards had caused a stampede.

In no sense, however, had these many women riding up and down the drive been considered to be visiting Angelica. They had come, rather, to pay their respects to Madame and Mademoiselle Delaup. They expected, in fact almost demanded, to see the bride, but had little to say to her. They wanted to inspect her, assess her qualifications as a wife, then go away to discuss her shortcomings among themselves.

“A visitor for me?” Angelica said doubtfully.

“She calls herself Madame Parnell,” Estelle said, and handed over the caller’s card between two fingers in a gesture that was a totally unconscious judgment on Madame Parnell’s status, or lack of it.

Angelica stared at the card. Madame Parnell. That was the name of the woman who had been on the
Queen Kathleen
, the former actress who had known her father. The lady had survived, then. But how had she found her way here?

Angelica rose to her feet and shook out her skirts. Consideration in her eyes, she said, “Where did you put her?”

“In the back salon, Mamzelle. It seemed best.”

“Yes. I’ll join her there. Could you bring coffee and whatever else you can find by way of refreshment?”

Estelle agreed, still she stood staring after Angelica with a frown as she moved toward the house.

Bonheur boasted a double salon, a long room divided in the center by tall sliding doors. The front salon thus formed was larger and more formal, the place where important visitors were received. The back salon was considerably less important, a relaxed space used by the ladies of the house for reading and sewing. At this time of the morning the French doors opening from it were closed against the sun, so the room was cool and dim.

Angelica, sweeping inside from the gallery, left the door standing open while she placed the book she still carried on a side table. “Madame Parnell, what a pleasure to see you again. But you have been left in the dark, and that won’t do at all. One moment, while I open the other door to let in the light.”

“Lord, child, no need to worry about that,” came a familiar gravelly voice. “Light or dark, it’s all one to me now.”

Something in the words, the tremor of them, or perhaps the resignation, reached Angelica. She turned from pushing open the second pair of French doors. She stood perfectly still.

Gone was the brassy-haired, loud, comfortably embonpoint woman from the boat. In her place was a thin, frail creature with graying hair slicked back under a bonnet, livid scars on her face, and a swath of bandaging across her eyes.

She was not alone. A plump young woman with snapping black eyes and a belligerent chin sat beside Madame Parnell. She kept the older woman’s hand in hers and her expression was as grim as a bulldog on guard.

Madame Parnell’s lips curved in a tremulous smile. “You’re shocked, I think, my dear, and who can blame you? I know I look a fright, for all that my niece Gussie here tells me different. But it’s you I’m worried about. I heard you were bad off after the accident, that you were taken away by Renold Harden. I had to see that you’re all right. I must say you sound it.”

The concern was warming. Infusing her voice with lightness, Angelica said, “I had a head injury, but am perfectly recovered now.”

The blind woman sighed, a sound of infinite relief. “Yes, and I hear he married you too, after all. I’m so glad. I thought while I was lying half-alive, shut away in this awful dark, that what happened was God’s judgment on me. If I’d been tucked up in my bed like a decent woman should, instead of traipsing along on my way to your stateroom, I’d have been nowhere near the steam that blinded me. Maybe all I’d have had to get through was being near drowned.”

“You were on your way — ?” Angelica paused, said in a different tone. “I don’t think I understand.”

“Don’t you? Oh, dear. Renold will be in such a rage. But I can’t help that now. It was wrong, what he planned. I knew it at the time, but I had such gaming debts run up in his place of business, and he offered to relieve them if I would do this one small favor, it seemed worthwhile, in its way, especially after I talked to you. You weren’t happy, and I did feel for Renold and his mother and sister.”