The Creole Princess (10 page)

With her back to the wall and his tall figure between her and the rest of the room, there was nowhere to look except at his snowy, elegantly tied neckcloth and the firm chin above it. “Faith? I barely know you! I must balance your kindness in dealing with my father against the silly way you serenade my friend with love songs and antagonize my brother with nosy questions. For all I know, you are the pirate Monsieur Dussouy was describing earlier.”

His mouth pursed in a soundless whistle as he stared at her. For
a moment the brown eyes had narrowed, darkening to a frightening near-black. She thought she saw a flash of not only intelligence but hurt.

Ashamed that her discomfort had led to thoughtless words, she placed her fingers over her lips. “I am sorry, Don Rafael,” she mumbled. “There was no need to be rude.”

Easy laughter dispelled the darkness in his expression. “A pirate! You have caught me out—and how clever I should be to damage my own ship so that I might steal the gold in my hold and hide it from myself!”

“No more ridiculous than paying someone else to buy gifts for you.”

He bowed in genial self-mockery. “And so we have established that Don Rafael is ridiculous and silly. I refuse to be drawn into bickering over the obvious. I am much more interested in discovering what is your relationship to the pretty little slave named Scarlet—who has already caused you such grief this day.”

Ah. And here it was. If she didn’t tell him, someone else was bound to. Besides, he already knew that she was a fisherman’s sister and daughter of a drunken ferryman. There was little reason to withhold the whole truth.

She focused her gaze once more upon the garnet pin nestled in the folds of his neckcloth. “It is a long, tedious story, I warn you.”

He smiled and tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. “Then let us find refreshment and walk about the room. I am not in any hurry.”

“Very well.”

The refreshment table was a six-foot buffet table placed between the French windows opening onto the front gallery of the house. An obscene amount of sugared pastries on tiered silver trays flanked a crystal punch bowl filled with some pale liquid that might have been champagne but was probably watered lemonade. Rafa filled a goblet and handed it to her.

“Thank you.” She sipped, resisting the urge to make a face. Some drinks were made for decoration.

He toasted her lightly with his own goblet. “I’m fairly certain we shall both survive.”

Arm in arm they began to make the round of the salon. After a quiet moment, Lyse peeked up and found Rafa observing her contemplatively.

“Come,
prima
,” he said. “Out with it.”

She smiled in spite of her reluctance. “You have met my papa.”

“Ah, the papa. I felt certain he must be somewhere in this long tale.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t always so—so—
outré.
”

“
Outré
? I am not familiar with this word.”

“Unconventional. Outside the accepted social norm.”

“And what has your unconventional papa to do with the Harpy of la Mobile?”

This time she did chuckle. “My papa and Madame Dussouy were at one time betrothed!”

5

W
ith a tray of dirty champagne flutes balanced in her hands, Scarlet stood on the back porch, facing the freestanding kitchen. Music and conversation poured through the open French windows at the front of the house, lashing her skin like the thongs of a poisoned whip. Not for you. Not for you, girl. No dancing, and don’t speak to the guests, even if the same blood runs through your veins.

How had Lyse come to be in Madame’s salon dressed like a French doll? She’d nearly dropped that whole tray of sparkling drinks, so unbelievable was the sight of her cousin promenading on the Spaniard’s arm. Judging by the masterful way he had managed Madame this afternoon in the Emporium—she had been all but cooing as he extricated Lyse from her talons—he must have been the one to arrange for Lyse’s invitation. She’d heard it said that Spanish men came equipped from birth with a certain
hubris
, an awareness of masculinity and authority that emanated from their pores like an exotic scent.

Scarlet was the one who had borne the brunt of Madame’s sharp temper afterward. Questions, all the way home from the Emporium. Why would Don Rafael entrust so much money to
barefoot, dirty-skinned Lyse Lanier? Why had Scarlet thought it permissible to ignore her mistress and converse with free persons in a public place?

With nothing to be gained by arguing or explaining, Scarlet had remained silent, further angering her mistress. If she hadn’t been needed to help prepare for the party, Scarlet would doubtless have spent the rest of the day, hungry and alone, in the windowless carriage house. And she wouldn’t have spoken to Lyse—which had only gotten her into further trouble.

She shut her eyes against useless tears. With Madame, there was no peace. Every second she stood here invited reprimand and punishment. Oh, how she missed her mother. Her father, a field hand who had been sold when she was a young child, was barely a memory. But Maman had had a way of reminding her whose bondservant she really was. That persecution was God’s purification tool. That joy was more than beautiful clothes and rich food.

But God had taken Maman away too. Last summer she had died in Scarlet’s arms, gripped by a fever that came with an infected tooth, of all things. Madame had been so angry to have lost her seamstress that she almost sold Scarlet in a fit of pique. But M’sieur intervened, gently reminding his sulking wife of Scarlet’s value as a breeder and her talent with a needle, that Madame would not likely be able to replace her for the money. He’d given Scarlet a compassionate, cautioning look that told her to keep quiet.

M’sieur would release her if he could afford to do so. He had once told her so. But he could not, and that was that. She was lucky that she had been mated with the Dussouys’ young blacksmith, though they couldn’t legally enter into a marriage contract. Cain treated her with shy, inarticulate respect bordering on terror, and she liked him well enough. Her circumstances could be much worse. The field slaves were considered livestock. At least she lived in the house, in a room off Madame’s bedchamber where
her clothes were stored. She followed Madame to church every Sunday morning and sat in the balcony with the other slaves, and she was allowed to spend the afternoon with Cain and his parents and two older sisters.

She almost had a family.

But Lyse
was
her family. Same blood. Free blood under God.

Pulled by some compulsion outside herself, she carefully set the tray of flutes down upon the porch, away from the door so that they wouldn’t be knocked over, then crept down the porch steps and ducked under a low limb of the magnolia tree beside the house. The night was dark and still, thick with spring fog, the ground moist and cool under her bare feet. As she slipped around to the front of the house, the violins grew louder, harmonizing with the music in her head, and the rhythm tugged at her feet until she was dancing. If she were caught here, she would be whipped, but she couldn’t make herself go back.

From the shadows, she watched the swirling guests through the window, and Lyse went by, still on the arm of the Spaniard. She was looking up at him, eyes sparkling like jewels, her black curls beginning to escape from their beribboned tower to dangle against the low neckline of her dress. He bent his head to listen to her, his eyes full of some smoky emotion of which Lyse seemed unaware.

Scarlet caught her breath, pierced by unwanted but inevitable envy.

Not for you, never for you.

She sank to her knees, her heart bleeding aloud. “God, my Father,” she whispered. “Oh, God, my rock and my fortress, my master. Is this truly your will? I’m asking again—deliver me, set me free! I’ll serve until you do, but oh, God, rescue me from this bitterness.” She bent forward, wrapping her arms about her head, heaving silent sobs. There was no knowing how long she lay there before finally she sat up, spent, aching with weariness
and sadness, and dried her swollen face with her apron. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” she sighed. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

Rafa whistled through his teeth. “Your papa was engaged to the Harpy? Truly?” Now this was a turn he had not seen coming.

“Yes—when she was Mademoiselle Isabelle Hayot, and Papa was very young and ignorant. The match was arranged by their parents. You must know that my family has not always been so down on the luck.” She gave him a quick sideways glance, as though daring him to contradict her. “The Laniers came from Canada to Louisiana with Iberville and Bienville, before even the Hayots. Their family is in the transport business as well.”

“But—”

“Be patient, m’sieur, and I will explain. There are two branches of the Lanier family—one being descendants of Tristan Lanier, who settled his family at Mobile Point, near the mouth of the bay; the other, those of his younger brother Marc-Antoine, a soldier of the French Marine. The two lines came together when Marc-Antoine’s son Charles—Chaz, as he is sometimes called—married Tristan’s adopted daughter Madeleine. My grandpére Chaz founded the shipping business and had two sons, my papa being the younger. He was, perhaps, more handsome and impulsive than wise, as things turned out . . .”

Rafa waited while she gathered her thoughts, her expression far away in a distant past. A deep love of story and a natural curiosity fueled his sense that there was more to this lovely young woman than met the eye.

After a moment, she blinked and went on. “As I said, the Hayot and Lanier family businesses were about to be joined by the marriage of Isabelle to Antoine. As a wedding gift, Grandpére Chaz sent my papa to New Orleans with money to buy a ship. But as
you know, the slave market is located near the waterfront.” She paused, as if this non sequitur might explain everything.

He made a noncommittal sound. “Yes. I have seen it.”

“Well, Antoine stopped to observe the proceedings, as he had not seen it before. As it happened, there was a beautiful young woman for sale that day, a mulatto with café-au-lait skin and lips like ripe berries.”

He glanced at Lyse’s lush mouth. “So he bought her instead of the ship.”

“Yes.” She made a face. “But my papa was not content to bring home the beautiful slave instead of a ship. He must set her free and have the priest say words over them, so that she is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh!”

“He married a slave? Your mother was a slave?” He should have made the connection before, and not just in the honeyed pigment of her skin, the springing curl of her hair. Not that her manners were coarse, for they were not—but there was something of-the-earth, something as fresh and natural as seawater, in her expression. And he knew with sudden clarity that, when the time came, Lyse would deeply feel and understand the ideal of freedom.

She shook her head. “She was a freewoman when I was born. But she and Papa didn’t have an easy time of it. Grandpére Chaz wouldn’t disown his son, but he was enraged that he lost the money for the ship and refused to give him more. The Hayots, of course, were insulted beyond redemption, and there has been bad blood between the families ever since.”

“Ah. And thus the shrilling of the Harpy.”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“But what has this to do with the girl named Scarlet?”

She stopped walking, turned to face him. “Look at me, m’sieur. Can you not see it? Our mothers were sisters.”

He did as she invited, for a long moment. He saw the rarity of a soul who dared take on someone else’s battles, housed in a
woman unaware of her own translucent beauty. Dangerous words trembled on his tongue. To keep them from spilling, he looked away. Finally, he managed lightly, “I see that you feel guilty for something that is not your fault.”

“But that’s just it! How could I be so wretchedly cruel as to come here with you—dressed this way, to flaunt my freedom in front of Scarlet—” Her voice wobbled. “Whose fault is that but my own?”

“Señorita—Lyse, listen to me.” He leaned close and spoke quietly, urgently. “You will not help your cousin by raising these sorts of questions in such company as this.”

“Then where am I to raise them? In church?” She laughed. “The people in this room are all good Catholics who attend mass regularly. And if they don’t own slaves, it’s only because they can’t afford them.”

“I agree that there is much injustice all around, and I understand and admire your compassion and love for Scarlet. But we are all buffeted by circumstances that can either shape us into people of strength and character—or make us bitter and vindictive.”

The thick, heavy lashes slowly lifted until she met his eyes. “You would have liked my grandmére Madeleine. She said something like that to me once.”

“She sounds like a woman of great good sense.” He smiled. “And remember, little cousin, things are not always what they seem.” Praying he had not just unwrapped a carefully laid cover, he took her gloved hand and pulled her toward the center of the room, where a cotillion was beginning to form. “Now let us dance away these sober cobwebs before Cinderella must return to her stepmother’s clutches.”