Silver-Tongued Devil (Louisiana Plantation Collection) (35 page)

Yet if she did not mean to emerge, surely she would have had Estelle tell them. The maid had left her over half an hour ago.

He himself had not seen Angelica since dinner the evening before; she had kept to her room all day as was the tradition. She had been composed and cheerful last night at least. If she had had second thoughts since then, there had been nothing to indicate it

The doorknob in front of him rattled, turned slowly. He exhaled slowly in soundless relief. Then she stood in the opening, and he forgot to breathe at all.

Sublimely perfect in her wedding gown, she was lovely in a way that tore at his heart. She met his gaze, her smile serious, searching, then moved forward to take his arm.

The silk of her skirts made a soft, whispering sound as she walked beside him toward the altar. The nudge of her hoop against his ankle was incredibly sensuous. Pride was a curious thing to feel, yet it surged up inside him along with a wild and reckless desire to take her away somewhere out of all this and make love to her the whole night long.

But the priest was waiting, the look in his old wise eyes a bit severe, as if he knew the impetuous thoughts that raged within the bridegroom. Renold steadied Angelica as they genuflected. The priest stepped forward to receive them.

“My child,” the priest said, smiling at Angelica, “it isn’t often that I must unite a man and woman in matrimony twice over. Still, your scruples become you well, and it is my great pleasure to perform this service. I pray that the devotion you share with Renold be doubly blessed as it is doubly sanctified.”

Renold had not expected such a confirmation of the first ceremony from the priest. He had thought, rather, that seeing Father Goulet, hearing the same vows spoken in the same way, might spark some useful memory. If it had not, he had expected to turn the conversation later to draw it from the priest. He was intensely grateful that it had come without his urging.

The gaze of wonder and sweet, spreading joy Angelica turned up to him made the waiting for the priest’s arrival as nothing, the time spent worth the effort and the hazard. Taking her hand, he pressed his lips to it, smiling into her eyes. Together, then, they turned toward the altar.

There was comfort in the ritual. The response had as much to do with the sounds of the Latin, the smells of the incense and burning candle wax, the movements of kneeling and rising as the meaning of the words. Yet the words themselves had a grandeur that transcended place and intent to bring an upsurge of pure exultation.

So Renold spoke his vows without faltering, and felt them inside where pledges become a matter of honor. Angelica’s responses rang in his ears with soft fervor. The sentence of mutual and inseparable bondage was pronounced. Renold placed the loving kiss of a husband on Angelica’s lips, and they turned to face their well-wishers.

It was then that the voice struck through the sound of applause and the chorus of felicitations. The words were quiet, gently chiding.

“Congratulations, my darling daughter,” Edmund Carew said from the doorway of Bonheur. “I am delighted to wish you happy. I have just one concern: Who gave the bride away?”

Renold stood perfectly still while Angelica turned with the soft stuff of her skirts brushing his legs under his trousers like the stinging silk fluff of nettles. Her eyes burned with blue fire and condemnation.

Her voice was quiet as she spoke, yet he felt every word like a lash on his unprotected heart. “You said he was dead. Did you think — but no, you knew. You must have known. You might have married me once, otherwise, but never twice.”

She turned then and ran from him, flinging herself into her father’s open arms. Above her head, Edmund Carew stared at Renold, the deserted bridegroom, with dark disdain.

Renold knotted his hand into a fist and walked to where the two stood. He might have done more if not for the priest who moved swiftly after him to place a hand on his arm. He spoke for Angelica alone.

“The reason for the excess nuptials, you think, is to make sure of the dowry? I would have married you,” he said, “if you had ten fathers living, and nothing to bring me other than your sweet bare self.”

“Words,” she said, turning in her father’s hold, “always words. They may be pleasant to hear, but how can I tell what they are worth?”

“They are worth what I make them, like the vows just sworn between us.”

Carew’s voice cut between them. “There is such a thing as annulment.”

Renold gave the man no more than a single glance. “Ineligible.”

“Something you saw to with your usual thoroughness,” Angelica said, the words acidly accusing.

“And with all the attendant joy and mindless rapture,” he agreed because he couldn’t help it.

“Swine,” her father said, breathing hard through his nose that was pinched white around the nostrils. “I would like to call you out.”

For a brief flicker of time, Renold evaluated the man as an opponent. Edmund Carew was gray of face and his body skeletal from the effects of the accident and his illness. There was no strength in him. It was difficult to see what held him upright other than pride and concern for his daughter. Renold felt his contempt leavened by a fleeting admiration.

“Do,” he said in provocation, though he hoped the older man would ignore it.

“No!” Angelica cried with the color receding from her face. “No,” she said again as she looked from one to the other. “Neither of you is in any condition to fight.”

“More than that,” Carew said simply, “the game isn’t worth the ante. Come away with me, Angelica. Laurence is waiting outside. We will go to New Orleans where we will appeal to the law to put these people off our property. There is no need to stand here bandying words with the man who took advantage of you.”

Laurence was not outside, Renold saw, but waiting in the shadows of the gallery beyond the door. The younger man was following the exchange with a look of gloating satisfaction on his weakly handsome face.

Ignoring the former fiancé, Renold said, “No, no need at all to bandy words, unless they are tokens of love.” His gaze sought and held Angelica’s as he went on. “You are my wife. This time there is no denying, no doubt, no looking back. Bonheur is only bricks and boards and fallow fields without you by my side. I need you, and I can’t live without the promise of forever we made short minutes ago.”

“Love?” Carew said. “What makes you think you know the meaning of the word?”

In the affairs of men there was a rough justice, Renold recognized. Once, in his arrogance, he had pledged himself to make Angelica love him, then to force her to choose between her father and himself. He had wanted by that means to show Carew what it felt like to lose the thing he valued most, the love of his daughter. Now Carew had put that choice to Angelica, and it was he himself who must fight to keep her.

To his left, his mother was on her feet, her face strained as she watched them. Deborah, who had moved from the pianoforte as the ceremony began, was standing next to Michel. Anger and dismay was mirrored in the faces of the other guests.

“I know love,” Renold said in vibrant certainty. “It’s in a smile, a glance, the sound of a sigh in the night or laughter at noon. It’s the touch that takes ugliness from a scar, that gives and seeks warmth and does not flinch from bleeding wounds. It’s the sharing of pain and comfort in need, company in sunshine and rain. It’s bright beckoning hope, and also the unguarded meshing of hearts and minds that makes words unnecessary, or like alchemy, turns them to rich, indestructible gold. Love is the single person without whom nothing else has meaning. Love is Angelica.”

A strained quiet fell. It almost seemed, as Edmund Carew stared at him, that there was sympathy in the older man’s face.

Still, Angelica’s father shook his head. “I am aging and ill, and can make no pretty speeches. All I have to say is this: I cannot live without my daughter, and I will not try.”

Simple, yet devastating.

Renold saw the pain and pity and love the words roused in Angelica, and stilled himself to face what must come. And because he was fair and preferred a swift end to prolonged agony, he spoke in quiet inquiry. “Go or stay, my love? Which will it be?”

She was no coward. She faced him and met his gaze more squarely than expected, also with more understanding and meaning than he might have wished. “You are my savior and my comfort, Renold. I love to laugh with you, and love with you, and to reach out with some thought and find that you have taken it, turned it, and made it more than I expected. You gave the desire, I gave you the passion you asked, but that isn’t enough. You lied to me for gain, you let me think my father was dead when he needed me. Now his need is greater, while you are so locked within yourself that you need me not at all.”

“That might have been true once,” he said, “but no longer.”

“I would like to believe that, but I can’t. And so the question you asked has only one answer. You know what it must be; you have always known, or you would have done things differently from the start.”

Yes, he knew. But accepting was another matter. He took a swift step toward her.

“Stop,” Laurence said as he strode forward into the double parlor. “Didn’t you hear Angelica? She has no use for you now that we have found her.”

“Laurence!” Carew said, spinning around so quickly he staggered. “I asked you to stay out of this.”

“It looks to me like you might need some help. Come on, Angelica, let’s get out of here.” A faint sneer flitted across the younger man’s face as he glanced at Renold, then he reached and closed his hand on Angelica’s arm.

She gasped at the bite of Laurence’s fingers. That soft sound snapped Renold’s tenuous control. He shot out his hand to grasp the other man’s wrist.

Carew wavered on his feet “Here now. No rough stuff, I told you, Laurence—”

He broke off, his face twisting. Clamping a hand to his chest, he crumpled his shirt and coat in a hard grip. He swayed, gasping. Then he caved at the waist, pitching forward.

Renold saw him falling, spun around in time to receive the older man in his arms. He eased him to the floor and knelt beside him.

Edmund Carew stared up at him. His fine old eyes were mirrors of pain and doubt. They held also the same abject despair that Renold felt inside.

Chapter Nineteen

Angelica sat in a chair in the dimly lighted bedchamber and contemplated, wakeful and desolate as an orphaned owl, the ruin of her wedding night. Only it would not actually have been her wedding night, of course. Renold had, amazingly, told her the truth.

She did not want to be here, still, at Bonheur. Her instinct was to get away. She required distance between Renold and herself so she need not see him, need not hear his voice, need not have any reminder of all the things he had done, the things he had said. She needed nothing to weaken her defenses. Most of all, she wanted her father well away from anything that might upset him.

Impossible.

Did Edmund Carew mind that he had been put to bed at Bonheur? Did he even know it?

His collapse had been brought on by the strain of the confrontation in the parlor on his weak heart. His condition was the same as that which had caused him to be set on seeing her married and secure in the first place. Yet, it was worse now, aggravated by all he had been through in the past weeks.

He had stayed in the water for hours, Laurence said. The two men had been separated. Her father, who had tied himself to a floating log, had been swept to the bank far downstream. It had been touch and go for several weeks; he had been out of his head, among strangers. He had finally sent word back to Natchez. Laurence had gone to get him, at the same time telling him of Renold’s message to her aunt indicating that Angelica was alive.

Angelica could not get over it; He was alive. He was here at Bonheur where he had so looked forward to being. Here, finally, with her.

Her father had been desperately ill, near death, and she had not known, had not been there. Her own injuries would have made her useless, she supposed, but she should have been there.

At least she was with him now.

Heart failure. There was nothing that could be done for the problem. Rest, quiet, an easy mind and a pleasant future, these were the only things that could be prescribed. None of them seemed likely.

Her father was determined to wrest Bonheur from Renold and his mother. She could not permit that, knowing as she did that he had no right to it. What was left, then, except to go back to Natchez and live with her aunt? There, her father would fret and scheme over her future just as he had before; it was inevitable.

How long could he live in such a stew? A few weeks? A month or two? Perhaps a year? She could not bear thinking of it.

There came a soft rustling from the direction of the bed. She was on her feet instantly, moving to stand beside it. Her father was awake, his head turned toward her. There was doubt in his face before it was replaced by a slow smile.

“I thought I . . . might have dreamed that I found you,” he said weakly.

His face was so gray and drawn that it hurt her to see it. She said softly, “I’m here, and it’s no dream. Could I get you something? Water? A little broth? Another pillow? Or perhaps you need Tit Jean to help you?”

“No, nothing. I just — want to look at you.”

It seemed a little of his usual force had returned to his voice. Regardless, she said, “You need to rest and regain your strength.”

“In a moment.” His gaze roamed her face and he shifted his hand, opening the fingers, so that she reached to clasp them in her own warm grasp. He said, “I should have stayed away. It would have been . . . better, I think.”

“No. Never.”

“You have a home, someone to care about you. It’s what I wanted.”

“It was built on lies. No, we’ll go away as soon as you’re strong enough, just as you said last night. I don’t want Bonheur, never want to live in this house. There are too many things here I would rather forget.”

“Can you do that?” he asked, his gaze open, steady.

“I can try,” she answered, unblinking. “Maybe — maybe we could find a little place, a cabin somewhere off to ourselves, just the two of us. We could have a garden and keep a few chickens, I could take in a little sewing. It wouldn’t take so much to live—”

“That’s no life for you,” her father said in revulsion. “I wanted — I wanted so much more. Divorce is difficult, ugly, but can be arranged. Afterward, you and Laurence can be together.”

“No,” she said before he even finished speaking. The word was final, her tone without compromise.

“He won’t hold this marriage against you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Laurence and I — it just isn’t possible. Please, we can talk about this another time. You should rest.”

“I can’t. What will become of you after I’m gone? You’ll be alone, all your life long. I know what that is, you know. After your mother — no, it isn’t good, isn’t right.”

“You weren’t alone,” she said quietly. “You had me.”

He looked away. “Yes, and I love you dearly, but still.”

“It isn’t enough? I do understand; you never remarried.” She went on quickly, afraid the reminder might upset him. “Anyway, I was trying to tell you that I may not be alone. If I’m right, you will have to stay around a long time, after all, to see your grandchild and watch him grow.”

“What are you saying?” There was doubt and incredulity suspended in his face.

Her smile trembled at the edges. “The ceremony last night was not the first; Renold and I were married some weeks ago.” She hurried on to explain as best she was able.

“And you think there may be a child.” Excitement burned bright in the depths of her father’s eyes.

“I would rather not tell anyone yet, especially Renold, but the chance is there. Do you think it makes a difference?”

He watched her face while he gave a slow nod. “It may, yes, a great deal of difference.”

Uneasiness touched her. “It’s far from certain. My — my monthly courses are only a little late, barely more than two weeks. It could come to nothing.”

“You are a healthy young woman, your body has regained its tone since the accident.” He paused, “I suppose all was as it should be with you the month before, just after you were injured?”

She nodded in agreement, though she was a little flushed. These were not matters she had ever discussed with her father.

He pursed his lips in consideration. “Women have an instinct.”

“I would still prefer to be sure before it’s mentioned to anyone.”

“Yes, yes. This is news, indeed. It requires thought.” He closed his eyes as if suddenly exhausted. At the same time, there was much more color in his face.

Angelica stood for long moments beside the bed. It appeared her father had fallen into a sudden light slumber. She turned away at last

The dusky light of dawn was edging around the draperies that were pulled over the French doors. She pushed the long silk panels aside, along with their lace undercurtains, then opened the door.

The air was fresh, clean, and cool. She breathed deep of it, even as she wrapped her dressing sacque closer around her. Obeying a strong impulse, she stepped out onto the gallery.

The quiet was pervasive, broken only by the distant crowing of a rooster. It was welcome; the celebration of the wedding in the quarters, with the music of banjo and fiddle and shouts of laughter and enjoyment, had gone on far into the night. At least someone had wrung some pleasure from the proceedings.

She wondered what had become of Laurence. She had looked around for him while the doctor from town had been with her father. He seemed to have disappeared, perhaps going back to the boarding house where he and her father had put up when they arrived. She had thought to offer a bed at Bonheur, but was relieved that it had not been necessary.

No doubt he would return some time during the day to check on the older man, since he had been looking after him. It would be convenient if he did appear; she wanted to talk to him. She was curious to hear more about how he and her father had found her. Most of all, however, she owed him the courtesy of an explanation and a formal release from any obligation he might still feel toward her.

There was a movement at a doorway farther along the length of the house. Nerves jumping, Angelica whipped around in that direction.

It was Deborah, also in a dressing sacque over her nightclothes and with her hair spilling down her back. The other girl smiled and walked toward her. As she came closer, she asked after the patient. Angelica answered her with guarded optimism.

Conversation ground to a halt. They stood in awkward silence, staring out over the dew-spangled fields of cane that rolled away from the edge of the lawn beyond that section of the gallery. A flock of pigeons wheeled above the house and lit in a silver-white flutter of wings on the roof of the pigeonnier. The morning breeze stirred the two women’s wrappers, lifting the folds and dropping them again.

Deborah glanced at Angelica, hesitated, then said abruptly, “You aren’t really going, are you? I mean, I’ve grown used to having you here and seeing you with Renold. Even mother thinks you are good for him now, though she had her doubts at first. Isn’t there some way to make it work?”

The concern in the other girl’s voice made Angelica’s throat close for an instant. She swallowed before she said, “I don’t think so. There are too many things between us. If they were not enough, there is the fact that I was about to leave him, go with my father. Renold is unlikely to overlook that. I have been told that he — he is not a forgiving man.”

She had heard those words in New Orleans. She had good reason to remember them.

“What things?” Deborah demanded. “What can matter so much?”

“He told me my father and Laurence were dead so that I would be forced to depend on him, to stay with him.”

“He thought they were at first. I know because Michel told me so. Renold would not have given you the pain of thinking them dead if he had not believed it himself. Later, when he learned they were alive, the damage had already been done, and he wanted time to win your love.”

“Time to see to it that the marriage could not be easily dissolved.”

“Oh, please, Angelica! Renold is many things, but I don’t think you can accuse him of being cold-blooded. If he had wanted to do what you are suggesting, he could have accomplished it the moment you regained your senses. Or before. What was to stop him except common decency?”

“He always intended it; he said as much.” The words were defensive.

“Yes, and what could be more natural in a husband? What else did you expect?”

She hadn’t expected anything because she had never been certain she was wed. She still had only the most vague recollection of that first ceremony. And yet, her heart must have known what it wanted and needed.

She said, “Renold set out from the first, even on the steamboat, to use me to regain Bonheur and avenge your father’s death. He did that. He need not have carried it so far, unless — unless the intimacy of marriage was a part of his plan.”

“He loves you; he said so in front of everyone. And you love him. Surely that changes matters?”

“Love, the panacea for all ills?” Angelica lifted a hand to press her fingers to her tired eyes. “It isn’t, you know. There are some things nothing can mend.”

“Maybe it can’t, maybe it can,” Deborah said, “but do you really think, knowing Renold, that he will give up so easily?”

Angelica was afraid he would not, which was why she wanted to get away the instant her father could travel.
“Do you think,” she said, “that I will give in so easily?”