Chapter Eighteen

Though her memory remained hazy, her headache terrific and her annoyance intense at the round and ugly bruise on her breast Laura embraced the thought of a new year in Chapelle with eagerness. She left a day sooner than planned after assuring her family that only some important unfinished business pulled her away from their loving arms. She forged through the ice and snow of the northeast to the rain of Georgia, was delayed by detours outside of Mobile, but at last turned off the interstate at the gas station that had become her landmark showing the road to Chapelle.

With the cane harvested, wide new vistas opened between the windbreaks of skeletal pecan trees and long-needled pines. Just a bit of white furred the roadside weeds and frosted the grass, but this vanished by noon when Laura turned her car up the shell drive of Chateau Camille.

Angelle, lightly covered with a sweater, small hands buried in a black muff on her lap, sat on the steps. Before Laura could park the car, the child’s father stood on the gallery again as if he’d never left the spot where she’d seen him last. Laura caught a glimpse of Pearl’s white uniform in the open doorway behind Robert. The entire household lay in wait for her, and she could not escape them by arriving early as she had with her dawn departure.

Robert came off the gallery taking two steps at a time, took her keys from the ignition and busied himself removing the new luggage and borrowed suitcase from the trunk. The muff held by Angelle materialized into the black cat, Snake, grown fuller with his winter coat and overfeeding. Her pet twined around Laura’s legs as if tying her with invisible bonds of love. Angelle hugged her waist in a grip of iron.

“We’re so glad you’re back.” Angelle sighed and chattered faster than Laura could take it all in while Robert said not a single word of greeting.

“You and Daddy gave me money for Christmas. Madame said that was a good sign. Tante Lil asked me what I wanted, and I said for Snake to come to live with us, too. Tante Lil said no and gave me a book called Little Women instead, and I said I didn’t want her old book, I wanted Snake. So Tante Lil said yes, but he couldn’t come in the house unless he got fixed. I said he didn’t look broken to me. Then Daddy said we couldn’t fix Snake until you came home and gave permission. Permission for what, I asked. Daddy said he’d tell me later. Snake and me have been waiting out here for you for two days. I knew you’d come early because I bought lots of red candles on sale after Christmas at the drug store.”

When Angelle paused to take a breath, her father handed her Laura’s new carry-on bag. “Take that to Miss Laura’s room. Leave the cat outside.”

The child protested, but Pearl’s firm hand grasped her elbow. The housekeeper picked up one of the suitcases Robert had deposited on the front door sill and steered bag and baggage into the house. Robert blocked Laura’s entrance.

“There’s something I want to show you.” Using Pearl’s guidance technique, he took Laura around the chateau by the same side path she’d followed to her embarrassing encounter with T-Bob in the cattle barn. Intensely aware of his strong hand on her elbow, Laura prayed they would not have another awkward moment. She dearly wanted things to be better between them now.

Robert stopped by a large camellia bush protected from the winter by the bulk of the house. Laura smiled her appreciation of its beauty. Large open blooms like wild red roses with golden centers festooned the small tree. She had never seen anything like this in the dead days of a northern January. He broke a blossom from a branch, brushed back her hair and placed the flower by Laura’s ear.

“The Christmas camellia. It blooms earlier than all the others. Sometimes the frost kills the buds, but this one bush always blossoms in the shelter of Chateau Camille.”

“It’s lovely. And so good to be home—I mean back here in a warmer climate.” Forgetting David only for a moment but remembering Benny, Laura allowed herself to sink in the unfathomable black depths of Robert LeBlanc’s eyes.

He smiled, not one of his ravishing smiles, but just a small tender curving of the lips. “They say once you’ve tasted bayou water, you’ll always return.”

Struggling to resurface, Laura babbled, “Heaven forbid anyone would drink from the bayou. You know, I often go to stand on the bridge near the library and watch the water flow by on a nice day, and I’ve never been able to see the bottom of it for all the silt and heaven knows what else. Who knows what’s in there? Sewage, snapping turtles…”

He pressed a finger to her lips as if he were silencing Angelle during one of her talking sprees. “Not now. I have something for you. I hoped you would accept this before you went away, but you left us so quickly and without looking back, I feared the bayou hadn’t worked its magic.”

With the same hand that plucked the camellia, he offered her a small box. Laura took it, and let the bit of red foil wrapping and golden cord drop to the ground among the petals of fallen Christmas camellias. The red velvet of the jewelry box was worn bald around the edges, and its satin interior gone yellow, but the ring inside had aged with grace. The central garnet in its antique setting shone clear and sparkling as newly poured burgundy.

“Vivien never wore it. She had no taste for Caroline Montleon’s heirlooms. My father did not offer it to my wife, but my mother wore it often. She said only a French woman whose own family had lived through World War II in Paris could understand the things Caroline had done. This was Caroline’s engagement ring given to her by her second husband. I want you to wear it.”

Laura did not look at the ring. She gazed again at Robert, waiting for his explanation to end, waiting for his hand, toying with the collar of the pale blue flannel shirt she had partly unbuttoned as the warmth of the day increased, to move around her and pull her close. Her reason tried to tell her this came too soon—she wasn’t ready—they hardly knew each other—but she did not want listen to reason.

The setting and the man all perfect—the surrounding garden, its camellias green and heavy with bud, sable-haired Robert with his back to the one bush flowering in blood red splendor. The many windows of the mansion shone down on them in the winter sunlight like the eyes of approving ancestors as his face moved closer to Laura’s to claim a kiss. She would remember this moment forever, but only with regret.

The kitchen door crashed open. Tante Lil bounced her wheelchair down two concrete steps and mired the wheels in the gravel of the garden path. Her immobility only increased her fury as she tried to reach Laura. Instead, she pitched the vermilion-bound reproduction of the diary Laura had given her for Christmas as hard as she could. The falling book broke a small branch off the camellia bush and sent a shower of spent crimson blossoms to the ground.

“I’d sooner burn them than have you expose my family to shame. Do you hear, you goddamned Yankee! Traitor under my roof!” A fit of violent coughing interrupted the old woman’s shrieks, but her liver-spotted hands, clawing the air, left no doubt of what she wanted to do if she reached Laura.

Laura snapped the ring box shut and thrust it at Robert, but his hands still clutched her collar as if he would never release her. The box dropped to the ground—ring, book, camellias, all fallen, the raucous coughs of Tante Lil making background music for the interrupted romantic interlude. Laura pushed away and popped the button holding her shirt closed across her chest in her attempt to escape. He saw it instantly, the nasty bruise applied by Benny Schweitzer’s flabby lips, an ugly purple stain low on her breast. Robert released her, smiling tightly as if he had been the victim of some tasteless practical joke.

“I thought I was giving you time and space to accept your husband’s death before I asked you to marry to me. My mistake, I figured you wanted me, not some guy back in Pennsylvania. God dammit, must I pay for my stupidity with women for the rest of my life?” He turned his broad back on Laura and went to his aunt, removed her body doubled over in spasm from the wheelchair and carried her inside the mansion.

Laura, alone, looked up at the house that had so suddenly withdrawn its blessing and saw Angelle framed like a portrait of tragedy in the second story window of Miss Lilliane’s old room, not a memory she would cherish. Pearl, not Robert or Angelle, came from the house and gathered up the book and ring box and the crumpled wrapping paper. She led Laura inside through the kitchen to the housekeeper’s room, a space bearing no resemblance to the austere personality of Pearl.

The iron bedstead, pink chenille spread and dresser thickly painted with white enamel obviously had been in place before Pearl’s coming. She’d obscured these fixtures with personal mementoes, gaudy and diverse. Small pillows smothered the bed: a red satin heart, a fringed souvenir of Los Angeles, one of lace resembling a ring bearer’s cushion. A large traveling trunk, battered and bestickered in a way to be envied by stay-at-homes, took up most of the space between bed and dresser. The lid bulged open over the hoard of bright beads and costume jewelry that had turned Angelle into a gypsy on Halloween. Wedged into a corner by the dresser sat an old black sewing machine and a small stool, both buried in swaths of fabric, chains of sequins and small bunches of artificial flowers.

Framed show posters of famous black performers mostly from the forties and fifties, their hair straightened and slicked, dressed in tuxedos and glittering gowns, obliterated the cabbage roses of the wallpaper. Along with the famous, she’d hung more personal photos. Laura recognized one of Tante Lu, who seemed old even in her youth, and another of Pearl and her sisters with arms linked. Short, slightly plump Ruby had frizzy hair setting her apart from the other girls, tall, ever-lean Pearl with just that hint of color betraying her race and the long ago decamped Opal, a young woman with features so sharp and skin so pale and eyes so light, she could have passed for white in any other grouping.

More fascinating still, a shot showed a row of chorus girls, all leggy, all black, all with more feathers in their headdresses than covering their bodies. Given the makeup, costumes and passage of time, Laura wondered if the one just off center could be Pearl. A fuchsia plume thrust behind the frame seemed to confirm the fact.

The intriguing clutter of Pearl’s room distracted Laura from the confrontation in the garden until she turned and noticed the housekeeper still in the doorway, her thin body neatly enshrouded in the white uniform with the stickpin Laura had given her for Christmas thrust through the collar. Laura squinted trying to imagine Pearl dancing in fuchsia plumes when the woman looked as if she never took her hair down from its tight twisted bun even at night. Did the LeBlancs know of about Pearl’s past? None of them came to this room except the child.

“Sit down, girl, and do something with those hands.” Pearl pushed Laura to a seat on the bed and handed her a pile of gauzy material. “Men, think they own a person.”

Laura unclenched her fists. Her knuckles had turned white, and her fingers tingled as she tried to relax them enough to accept the needle that Pearl threaded. “I don’t sew well.”

“Anyone can tack on a few rosebuds. This is Angelle’s dress for Mardi Gras. Comes early this year, so we need all the help we can get. Just sit and talk with me a while.” Pearl picked up a small bodice, mostly complete except for the handwork, and seated herself on the stool by the sewing machine.

“I won’t be here for Mardi Gras, Pearl, not after what happened out there in the garden. You know, I thought I learned something up north. I thought I knew what I wanted. I could hardly wait to come back here and start again. The ring came a little too soon, but you know, I almost accepted it.” Laura pricked her fingertip with the needle and quickly sucked on the wound to prevent the pinpoint of blood from staining the fabric. “Saved by fate from a big mistake, I guess.”

“No, just bad luck and Miss Lil. We tried, me and Angelle, to keep that old woman in the house. She been stewing about you since Christmas, but that one’s so canaille, she sent me off for a sweater. Angelle went upstairs and got too busy watching from the window to pay attention. Miss Lilliane won’t live forever, remember, and that child needs mothering. I can’t give it to her. I tried being a mother once and did a poor job of it. Mr. Bob, he needs you, too, and he knows that. A good man, T-Bob.”

“But now he doesn’t want me. He thinks I have another man.”

“Well, do you?”

“No, no one but David. I’ve finally accepted that he’s gone, and it’s natural to be attracted to someone else. I went to a party back home with a blind date and had a little too much to drink. He put a mark on me before I realized what was happening, but believe me, that mark is as superficial as the man who put it there. All the way here, I thanked Benny Schweitzer for helping me to make up my mind. Now, I hope he chokes himself to death with one of his gold chains!”

“We all been there, girl. Explain. Go to Mr. Bob’s room and tell him. A man don’t get that upset unless he cares a bunch.”

“Why should I have to explain? You said it. Robert LeBlanc doesn’t own me or tell me what to do. If I did sleep with someone back home, he’d just have to live with it. He never tried to take more than a kiss!” Laura tugged the thread too tightly and puckered the material.

“Besides, Miss Lilliane is right. I am an outsider. I have no business here. I’m going to call Miss Lola and see if she can put me up for a few weeks. David’s settlement came. I was going to invest the money, but now I can use it to put a down payment on a small house and buy some furniture. In a year or two after I prove myself here, I can sell and move back where I came from, find an administrative job at a library up north. Isn’t it convenient that I haven’t unpacked yet?” Laura desperately smoothed the material with both hands.

“Now you sit there for a while until you thinking better! He’s gonna get over this.” Pearl tried to reach over the lengths of material separating them, but Laura had discarded her work and gotten to the door. Pearl did not follow her beyond the threshold.

Consumed by an immediate urge to act on her words, Laura rushed to her bedroom. She opened the door into Caroline Montleon’s suite so abruptly she caught Angelle entirely by surprise. The child balanced on a chair by the massive dresser. She held a wooden match to the second of two red candles set in holders on either side of the mirror over the chest. The air of the closed room stank of the odor of burnt hair underlaid with the essence of less familiar herbal scents. Startled, Angelle dropped the lit match on to the crocheted runner covering the dresser top. The match flared briefly, adding the smell of singed cotton to the atmosphere.

Laura rushed to the dresser, knocked Angelle out of the way and crushed the small flame with the heel of her hand. The little girl did not cry out as she hit the hardwood floor with force. Instead, making herself as small as possible, she crawled to the door while Laura remained preoccupied with the fire. Once out in the hall, the child got up and ran.

Resting her head briefly on the dresser, Laura examined the small charred area burnt into the lacquer. Any competent furniture refinisher could remove the slight damage done to the antique, she supposed. Pearl or Miss Lilliane would repair the runner or make a new one. That was hardly the point. Angelle might have burnt the house down. The other red candle still glowed, spilling wax messily down it sides and on to a ring of dust at its base. She had to tell Robert about the incident and her suspicions. Directly after that, she resolved, she would call Lola Domengeaux, put her bags in the car and leave Chateau Camille behind her. Laura wet her fingertips and pinched out the flame of the red candle.

She went to search for T-Bob. Not finding him in the house, she entered the garden, averted her eyes from the Christmas camellia and the ruts made in the gravel by Miss Lilliane’s wheelchair, crossed the yard quickly and found him in the same cattle barn where they met on her first day in Chapelle. Robert LeBlanc stood ankle deep in fresh straw in the holding pen where the calves were put for weaning. He leaned against the partition with his back toward her, just leaning, not working, and staring out the far side of the barn as if he strained to see something out of his range of vision. Laura had not intended to come up behind him so quietly.

She rapped formally on the side of the barn. He turned his dark eyes and sad mouth toward her.

“Is Miss Lilliane all right?” she asked.

“She’ll live if she can keep her temper under control. I gave her a large dose of her cough medicine. She’ll be out for hours.” Still leaning against the stall but facing her now, he made no move to come closer.

“Look, I have to talk to you about Angelle. Then, I’ll go.”

“Talk.”

“I found her lighting candles in my room just now. She could have destroyed the house.”

“But you caught her, so no harm done. I’ll talk to her about it.”

“There’s more. Mrs. Domengeaux noticed her votive candle missing right before the fire in her store. I believe Angelle took it. Look, I’ve read that pyromania can start at a very early age. You have to admit Angelle’s reaction to the fire at Domengeaux’s was hardly normal. And there have been other fires. I saw the marks when we toured the house. How old was Angelle when she set Miss Lilliane’s room on fire?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Angelle!” he bellowed like one of his injured bulls and stepped toward her.

“Your ex-wife is mentally ill, Robert. She could have affected Angelle. If the child gets help now, she might grow up normally.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my daughter! Or me. But what about you, Laura?” He moved swiftly and caught her collar again, roughly this time.

She fell into the straw when Robert hooked one foot behind her leg and toppled them together, his full weight on top of her body. He tore at her buttons and pushed the bra from her shoulders without unhooking it. The straps pinned her arms at the elbows, but Laura did not fight him. He rubbed his heavy beard against her naked breasts abrading them in a way both painful yet exciting, as if he wanted to put his own mark on her and obliterate any sign of the other man.

“Did the family legend repel you the way it did Vivien? We share the same blood, Vivien and me.” His fury ebbed. He kissed her lips more tenderly than he had her breasts. Perhaps, he noticed the tears forming in the corners of her eyes and mistook them as a sign of fear.

Laura cried for herself. She had pictured them joining together at last on her long drive, but not like this. If her arms had not been pinned by the shirt and bra shoved from her shoulders, she would have put them around him and shown him all he said had no truth. When he bent to kiss her a second time, very gently, Laura opened her mouth to respond, but another hand knocked against the barn door.

“Mr. Bob, you want that bull moved to the north pasture?” Tony, the black stockman, swung his eyes from the scene in the straw back to the other side of the barn. He retreated a step as if to go away, as if he had seen nothing.

Robert stood protectively in front of Laura while she sat up and buttoned her shirt. “Yes, move the bull,” he ordered, calmly brushing straw from his sleeves.

“Yessir.” Tony retraced his steps energetically and with a great deal of noise.

Robert offered Laura a hand up from the straw. She took it, but he dropped hers as soon as she stood.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a pained smile. “It’s an old southern tradition not to tell who you saw rolling in the hay with the boss man. It’s my shame that I’ve spent the last few minutes proving I’m not worth having instead of apologizing. I couldn’t stand the thought of you going with another man because I’d held back giving you time, Laura. I’m sorry.”

She would have reached out to him if he had not walked away so swiftly and without looking back. She doubted if he heard her say, “There is no other man.”