Ciji Ware (40 page)

The tune was so familiar… so full of promise for dancers in satin ball gowns and knee breeches who glided across the floor while candlelight danced on the walls. She could hear the tinkle of crystal glasses and bursts of merriment and the crunch of wheels on a gravel drive. Behind her eyelids, she saw horse-drawn carriages pulling up before a magnificent house. A flood of newly arrived guests was ushered past stately columns and across a wide veranda toward an open front door. Inside, a liveried butler greeted the newcomers, taking their cloaks and pointing the way inside.

Through the open windows, the music swelled, and somehow Daphne knew that the night was ripe for romance.

Chapter 17

February, 1798

Don’t y’all hear that music downstairs?” Mammy demanded. The black woman stood with hands on hips, gazing down at her several charges in various stages of undress in an upstairs bedroom at Concord, the governor’s mansion a mile or so down the road from Bluff House. “Time to get up, y’hear me? Kendra’s here to help y’all lacin’ up your corsets,” Mammy announced, drawing the curtains back so that shafts of late afternoon sunshine filled the room, “and I’ll do what I can ’bout your hair. Wake up, sleepyheads! Naptime’s over.”

Daphne Whitaker and her two sisters, along with the other young ladies from the most prominent families in the Natchez Territories, lifted their heads from linen-covered pillows and blinked drowsily. The group of young women had been fatigued after standing on the edge of the parade grounds at the dilapidated Fort Rosalie all morning to greet the late Queen Marie Antoinette’s cousin, Louis-Philippe—the duc d’Orléans—on his arrival by river barge. The youthful nobleman and his ragtag entourage had made a show of marching up the road from the docks, royal flags flying, past the houses of ill repute in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. The visitors, clad in their blue, threadbare French army uniforms, and the local residents, dressed in their finest attire, had reveled in the clear, unseasonably warm February weather and the commanding view of the river.

Governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos had stood at attention, relieved, for the moment at least, of the improbable duty of ruling over Natchez’s cauldron of disparate factions: English, French, American, and his own restless Spanish countrymen. After the formal review of the troops, he extended a courtly invitation to all the young ladies present to repair to Concord to enjoy a rest and refreshments. Later that evening, a grand ball in the young duke’s honor would be followed by a sumptuous repast.

“Y’all are bein’ mighty pokey,” Mammy complained. “Gonna miss supper, if you don’ get up, right now!”

Daphne pulled a feather pillow over her head, wishing she could sleep forever. Beside her in the large, four-poster bed, her sister Maddy, and their baby sister Suki, now fifteen, struggled to sit up. Daphne, however, kept her eyes shut tight, ignoring Mammy’s demands that they get dressed. Instead, she strained to listen to the twittering birds in the larch tree outside the mullioned windows and to the lilting music of the small orchestra wafting up the grand staircase.

I
don’t want to go to the ball! I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!

Daphne’s silent protest would be to no avail of course, for the mourning period for her father was long since past, and Charles Whitaker’s friends and neighbors, believing he had slipped on an icy rock four years earlier, had other thoughts and concerns. Who had time to console a young girl who remembered her father’s reassuring presence in the days before he took to drink to assuage his sorrows? As far as anyone knew, the tragedy Daphne had endured had merely been one among many that struck, without warning, in a frontier society like Natchez.

Napoleon striding through Europe—now
that
was a tragedy for planters like the Hopkins and Gibbs families who had abandoned tobacco and were finally producing plentiful crops of cotton. Simon Hopkins, the Elder, had loyally assumed wardship of the Whitaker children and taken on the responsibility of his late neighbor’s plantation. Thanks to his foresight and Eli Whitney’s new cotton gin, Devon Oaks was finally producing to its capacity. Nonetheless, planters in Mississippi and Louisiana regularly risked their lives and livelihoods getting their goods past blockades imposed by all parties to the conflicts still raging in Europe.

No, Daphne thought, peeping out from under her pillow to stare through the bedroom window at a stray warbler sitting on a bare branch in the cooling afternoon sun, there would be no thought for her father’s demise during tonight’s festivities. Nor would there be special consideration granted Charles Whitaker’s eldest daughter, who was now old enough to realize that she was often laid low by the same dark moods she so abhorred in her mother. Life went on… and nobody knew how miserable it was to keep the secret that Daphne felt like shouting to the heavens.

My
father
drowned
himself! He left us! He didn’t care enough
…

Nobody knew the truth except both Simon Hopkinses, father and son, and during the intervening years they had made an art of rarely alluding to Charles Whitaker. She was alone in a prison of silence. No lively gavotte or pretty ball gown or sweetmeat or fine wine was likely to distract her from the dark tunnel her life had become.

“Oh, Daphne,” Maddy whispered loudly, poking her older sister’s arm. “Look at Rachel’s gown. ’Tis beautiful watered silk in the most heavenly shade of blue. Just look! Simon will be smitten for sure, don’t you think?”

Grudgingly, Daphne shifted her gaze, but merely stuffed the pillow behind her head and refused to sit up. She didn’t give a fig if Simon Hopkins, budding young botanist and sketch enthusiast, proposed tonight on bended knee to that priggish Rachel Gibbs. For all she cared, he could make an ass of himself in front of the gaggle of mincing French courtiers and the entire town of Natchez! Love was not for the likes of her… no,
no
! Daphne thought mutinously. The violent scene she had witnessed as a child between her parents in their upstairs bedroom had been enough to put her off courtship and marriage for all time. If a man took a drink… well, a woman took her life into her hands, she thought glumly.

She regarded Rachel Gibbs with a jaundiced eye as the dark-haired beauty stood patiently, both hands on the bedpost, while Kendra tugged on the laces of Rachel’s corset to create the eighteen-inch waist every self-respecting young woman desired.

Everyone except
her
, of course, Daphne thought with peevish satisfaction. Often, these last four years, she’d refused even to dress and would remain alone in her bedchamber on the second floor of Devon Oaks. Even when the family was in town at Bluff House, she flaunted convention and wore her bed gown downstairs to play her harp.

Daphne’s gaze wandered to the lime-colored silk ball gown draped over a nearby chair that she would be forced to wear that evening. No one had listened to her complaints that the sickly greenish shade gave her complexion a sallow appearance that even a set of diamond ear-bobs and a necklace—given her by Grandmother Drake—could not ameliorate. Her mother still wore widow’s weeds and seemed to take pleasure in her permanent state of grief, Daphne thought resentfully.

Oh, what’s the use?
she cried out silently as the dull throbbing in her head began, as it always did, whenever she thought about her father. There had been safety in his arms before Charles Whitaker began to drink heavily. When she was small, he had petted her and told her she was pretty and that she played her harp like an angel. Her father had
loved
his eldest daughter… surely he had? But he had drowned himself and left his family to fend for themselves. She hated him for that. And she
hated
her dead-eyed, sniveling mother! She hated them all, and she most heartily hated the thought of attending tonight’s ball.

***

Candles illuminated every window of Concord, and cast a mellow glow over the mansion’s ballroom with its satin-clad musicians at one end, and whirling dancers gliding across the polished floor as if on golden ice.

I
will
not
cry!

Daphne plastered herself against the wall opposite the small orchestra playing a lively reel and blinked her eyes hard.

No one had asked her to dance. Adding to her misery, she was hot in her finery and could barely breathe, thanks to the fierceness and determination with which Mammy had laced her into her stays. Her blond hair lay in fat sausage curls plastered against her neck. She felt faint with the heat. The room was filled to overflowing with guests who probably hadn’t risked bathing in many months, and the stench of perfume was nearly as awful as the odors it was meant to mask.

“Miss Daphne?”

A kind voice startled her. She turned as Governor Gayoso gently took her hand with a courtly bow.

“Your Excellency…” she murmured, gazing into the dark eyes of the smooth-shaven gentleman, resplendent in a lacy cravat and ivory waistcoat under a coat of midnight blue velvet adorned with magnificent silver buttons down the front and encircling the deep cuffs.

“I am delighted that you grace us with your presence tonight, my dear
señorita
,” he said compassionately. “May I say… it pleases me to see you looking so well.”

The man was a blatant flatterer, considering the color of her dress, but he obviously meant to be kind. Daphne inclined her head, and murmured, “Thank you.”

“I can only imagine how difficult it has been for you and your poor mother since the loss of our dear
amigo
, your father… a man who contributed much to our society here in the Territories.”

“’Tis good of you to speak of him thus, Your Excellency,” she said a bit stiffly. She was uncomfortably aware that many eyes in the room were observing this exchange.

“Your grandmother,
Señora
Drake, made mention of her recent gift to you on the occasion of your birthday,” he offered genially, referring to Daphne’s magnificent diamond necklace and matching earrings. “These are exquisite and suit you wonderfully well. Wear them in good health.”

“You are very kind, indeed…” she murmured, blushing with embarrassment that so distinguished a personage should have taken such public notice of her.

The governor leaned forward and smiled encouragingly. “Would you do our guests the honor of joining the musicians on Concord’s harp for the next reel?” he asked, his black brows knitted in inquiry above dark eyes. He lifted a velvet-clad arm and gestured toward the orchestra with lace-frilled wrist and manicured hand. “Your father often spoke of your exceptional talent. Would you be so good as to indulge us?”

The governor had indeed been a close friend of Charles Whitaker, and the reminder of this fact touched Daphne deeply. Gayoso was singling her out in memory of her father, and thereby encouraging the young swains in the room to pay her court. She smiled at him with genuine pleasure and nodded her assent before the fright of being thrust unexpectedly into the limelight took hold. She allowed the genial governor to lead her to a padded stool positioned beside a small golden harp and nervously took a seat. Her hands suddenly grew clammy and perspiration trickled beneath the back of her gown. Her stomach lurched alarmingly when the musicians played the first, familiar strains of the lively tune.

Dancers leapt to their feet and skittered about the ballroom. Remarkably, Daphne acquitted herself reasonably well. When she had finished, she was greeted with more than polite applause. The governor stepped forward, still clapping, with a handsome young member of the royal entourage in tow.

“May I present one of the duke’s gentlemen, Monsieur Jacques René Hébèrt?” Governor Gayoso said with a wink. “I should have asked your mother’s permission first, but after listening to you play, Monsieur Hébèrt pleaded with me so eloquently to be introduced immediately that I did not have the heart to refuse him.”

Dumbfounded, Daphne turned to regard the stranger clad in a worn—but once fashionable—burgundy frock coat, buff knee breeches, and discreetly darned ivory silk hose. Despite the loss of their country and their fortunes, the visiting dignitaries had done their best to keep up their spirits and appearances, and Monsieur Hébèrt was no exception. This band of refugees from the French Revolution had straggled down the Mississippi River on a barge from St. Louis en route to what they hoped would be a warm welcome among Francophiles in New Orleans.

“My friend, the Marquis de Vaille, and I were entranced by your command of your instrument,” Hébèrt declared charmingly, “and I wagered him the price of a supper in
La
Nouvelle
Orléans
that I would be introduced first.” Daphne glanced across the dance floor and saw a squat young man in a plum satin suit place a hand over his heart and make a slight bow in salute to his friend’s apparent success.

The sandy-haired Jacques Hébèrt was without powdered wig, but his hair was pulled back and tied with a black ribbon, periwig-style, at the nape of his neck. Slender, of moderate height, he respectfully bowed over Daphne’s hand, and murmured, “You were enchanting on the harp,
mademoiselle.
Beauty
and
such talent… all in one lovely lady.” He was rather attractive in an intense, ascetic fashion, putting her in mind of an underfed, pedigreed greyhound.