Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (11 page)

And, given her past history with Don Carlos, Sevier wanted Annabel to find out.

She pushed aside her accounts book and began to consider ways and means of accidentally encountering Don Carlos Morado y Soto.

Don Carlos was the personal secretary to his Excellency the Ambassador: middle-aged, close-mouthed, and very good at his job. He also had a terrible weakness, of which neither his wife nor his employer was aware, and it was that weakness that had brought him into Annabel’s orbit.

Like many of her other patrons, he considered her a godsend. She was beautiful, notorious; to be seen with her conferred upon a man that certain distinction which only other men appreciated. And yet, in bed . . . She guarded their secrets, and they guarded hers. It was—and Annabel admitted it—a particularly genteel form of mutual blackmail, but it provided her security. There were a shocking number of highly-placed men in Nouvelle Orléans who had a vested interest in keeping as silent as the tomb the fact that Annabel St. Clair was not what she seemed.

Once, Salomé had said severely, “Someday, chérie, you will drop one of these eggs that you are juggling.”

“Yes, and all Nouvelle Orléans will go up in flames,” Annabel had said, laughing. “It will be worth it.”

It was not, however, an eventuality she sought, and thus the myriad careful games she played with her admirers, both those who did not know and those who did. And thus the very little effort it took her to manipulate circumstances in her favor. She would not ordinarily have chosen to attend a performance of the latest German opera, preferring the lighter and more mannered Italian style, but she knew Don Carlos’s tastes, and her surprise when he presented himself at her box during the first intermission of
Tristan und Isolde
was entirely manufactured.

It was a simple matter to cut him out of the pack of her admirers, simpler still to ascertain what she already knew, that Doña Mercedes, Don Carlos’s Haitian-born wife, had returned to the island for reasons Don Carlos did not mention but which Annabel knew had to do with a particularly ugly imbroglio in the Spanish embassy involving Doña Mercedes and the son of the Ambassador’s stablemaster. It was a good time for Don Carlos to be proving himself virile, a very good time for him to be seen in the corridors of the embassy with an amante dorée. She wondered, tucking away a smile before it could become a smirk, if she should write a letter of thanks to his wife.

She promenaded with him through the inevitable soirée in the embassy’s main hall, kept her smile pleasant and her eyes soft. She drank wine with him in his suite, an Amontillado as dry as Don Carlos’s voice when he spoke of his wife. She allowed him to take her into his wife’s bedroom, to remove her clothing one careful button at a time, to remove the pins from her hair and run his hands through its sunlight length. At his asking, she spread herself for him across his wife’s bed; whether he held his wife in any regard or not—a question Annabel was disinclined to ask—Doña Mercedes had grievously wounded his pride.

Don Carlos was a courteous lover, unlike some of her patrons who seemed to wish to punish her for the desires they found unacceptable in themselves. He was never rough, never sought to humiliate her; she thought, if she had asked it of him, he would even have been willing to take her face to face.

She did not ask; she preferred her face to be hidden, just as she preferred the question of her arousal and how she achieved it to be largely academic to the men who shared her bed. Many of them did not care if she reached climax. Others, gentlemen like Don Carlos, wished her to receive pleasure as well as give, and if they were incidental to that pleasure—well, they did not ask, and she did not tell them. Her own hand at her groin and a headful of reliable fantasies did the trick quite nicely. If that night in the Spanish embassy, the man she dreamed of had Quentin’s face and sharp, English-cadenced voice, it was of no concern to anyone but herself.

If it had been Quentin, she would have wanted to see his face when he spent himself. If it had been Quentin, she would not have had to bite her lip to keep from crying out his name. If it had been Quentin, perhaps she would not have wished so painfully to escape his post-coital embrace, would not have had to let her nails dig into her palms to keep from betraying distaste or impatience.

Afterwards, when Don Carlos slept, Annabel slipped out of bed, donned her shift, and made a cautious pilgrimage to investigate his desk.

Don Carlos was a methodical man, and since he was doing nothing wrong, he had not hidden his notes. Between the single candle she dared light and the cold high moon riding full outside the window, Annabel was able to make out the gist of them.

There wasn’t a great deal. Some odd errors in bookkeeping that might not have been errors, a stableman who thought he might have seen Louis Vasquez leaving the embassy very late one night: suspicious circumstances, but hardly what one might call proof of anything. Except that Louis Vasquez had had oddly close dealings with the Spanish for someone claiming to be the rightful king of France. She returned to Doña Mercedes’s bed and the snoring weight of Don Carlos, and lay unsleeping, thoughtful, waiting until the approach of dawn would make it possible for her to whisper gently in Don Carlos’s ear that she had to leave.

But not quite an hour later, she heard footsteps in the hall. The footsteps of an excessively large number of people for that time of night.

The conclusion to which she leapt might have been wrong, but she did not dare to test it. She elbowed Don Carlos viciously, already scrambling up, diving for Doña Mercedes’s massive wardrobe.

“What?” said Don Carlos as Annabel closed the wardrobe behind her and someone pounded on the door of the outer room. She heard him curse, a startlingly pungent oath for a Spanish don, but he was quick-witted, and he must have feared this eventuality as much as she had. She heard him get up, drag his robe on, stumble, cursing, to the door.

Her Spanish was not very good, but good enough for her to follow the outline of the ensuing exchange. Someone demanded to know the whereabouts of the amante dorée. Don Carlos demanded to know what business it was of theirs.
Never you mind that. Where is she?
Annabel pressed her fists against her mouth, praying.
I sent her home,
Don Carlos said and added a particularly unflattering epithet. Coarse laughter; Annabel hated them, silently, fiercely. A further spate of Spanish which she did not understand at all. She heard men moving around Don Carlos’s apartments; she gripped the lip of the wardrobe door as hard as she could, having no other way to hold it closed. Mere moments later, someone tried the door, and she heard him call to Don Carlos,
This wardrobe door is stuck.
Don Carlos’s reply was something about the embassy carpenter that made them all laugh again. And then, blessedly, they were leaving, grumbling about the high fidgets Don Esteban worked himself into.

Annabel was very, very cold.

The door closed, and she heard Don Carlos returning to the bedroom. She stayed where she was, naked among Doña Mercedes’s gowns. When Don Carlos opened the wardrobe, she did not look up at him.

“I am sorry, Annabella,” he said; she realized distantly that he was apologizing for the vulgar name he had called her, and shook her head. It didn’t signify. He offered his hand.

She took it, only then feeling the throb of her fingertips from holding the wardrobe door so desperately. She forced herself not to scuttle for her shift, but to walk calmly. Inside her head, she was screaming, raging, cursing in French and English. Because she could not doubt that she had been deliberately trapped, and if she had been trapped, there was only one person who could have done it, the person who had sent her to Don Carlos’s bed in the first place: Jules Sevier.

She picked up her shift and said, “Why should anyone wish to disgrace you, Don Carlos?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You cannot imagine this was an accident,” she said with asperity, and felt better for being clothed.

“Don Esteban is—”

“Don Esteban is your spymaster. I know that, even if you do not. Why would he wish you to be caught in bed with . . . ”
A man.
But she wasn’t one, and wouldn’t say it. “With me?”

Don Carlos’s face had gone gray, ill. She was sorry, but she did not have time for his sensibilities. “Don Carlos, I must be out of the embassy as soon as possible. Please. Tell me who would wish to see you . . . ”

“No one, Annabella. I swear it on my honor. I have no enemies here, nor wish to. I serve His Excellency, and—”

She saw it hit him; his eyes widened and his mouth went slack behind his neat half-imperial. “But it was only a favor for Don Maurice.”

“Don Maurice . . . Monseigneur le
Duc
?” Her voice squeaked on the last word, but there was only one nobleman she knew of in Nouvelle Orléans whose Christian name was Maurice, and that was the Duc de Plaquemine who held sovereignty over Nouvelle Orléans and the surrounding territory.

Don Carlos shook himself back into his secretarial persona. “Monseigneur de Plaquemine came to me a week ago, after the death of a young traveler, a gentleman of mixed French and Spanish blood named Louis Vasquez.”

“Ah,
merde
,” Annabel said before she could stop herself, but Don Carlos didn’t seem to notice.

“He said that he had heard rumors that we—Spain—had been involved in the death of Señor Vasquez. He was very much distressed, even when I assured him we had not. So I promised I would . . . ” He swallowed hard. “Investigate.”

And although he had found nothing as of yet, it was painfully obvious that that did not mean there was nothing to find. And that whatever it was, it was more valuable to Jules Sevier than she was.

“Thank you,” she said, struggling into her gown as quickly as she could. “I think, if you abandon your investigations, this sort of thing will not happen again.”

“Abandon my investigations? Then it is true? We connived at the murder of—”

“Of a Bourbon pretender.” And because he had always been gentle with her, she lied, “He must have been a threat to the Spanish throne as well. You did say he was half-Spanish.”

“Yes,” Don Carlos said. He sounded dazed and not entirely convinced, but she had done the best she could.

“I must go.” She did not say good-bye, neither
au revoir
nor
adieu
, because she did not want to force either of them to say what they both knew: she would not see Don Carlos again.

Getting out of the Spanish embassy unseen was a challenge, but not beyond her capabilities. A greater obstacle was the question of where she could go once she stood outside its gates. Habit, after a night such as this, dictated that she go to the Sevier townhouse and make her report. But Sevier had sacrificed her like a pawn on a chessboard, and she was not confident that he would be happy to see her. It was possible—for anything was possible in the service of Jules Sevier—that she had not been merely an incidental target in the scheme against Don Carlos.

She could not go home, either, because if Sevier did wish to be rid of her, her house would be watched, and she did not want to bring trouble to Salomé and the servants. She could not go to any of her admirers; even those who could be blackmailed into sheltering her did not deserve the trouble she would bring in her wake.

She
needed
to gain an audience with the Duc de Plaquemine, but showing up on his doorstep at dawn, with her dress crumpled and her hair hanging down her back like a madwoman’s, was not the way to achieve that.

She thought of taking sanctuary in a church, like the heroine of a romance, but while it was true that she could walk into any church in the city and Sevier would be helpless to drag her out, it was also true that that would solve nothing, gain her nothing. It was not time she needed; it was access.

And she could get that access, she realized, if she had the gall to ask for it.

And if Quentin didn’t have her arrested on sight.

She remembered the address that had been on Quentin’s card and found it without great difficulty. The door of the boarding house was opened by a young woman with skin the same café au lait shade as Salomé’s. She seemed more than a little surprised when Annabel asked for M. Quentin, but said, “Yes, mademoiselle,” and invited her into the front parlor.

The parlor was as shabby as Quentin himself, but with that same air of dignity kept under trying circumstances. She did not have long to wait before Quentin came in; his coat had every appearance of having been hastily dragged on, and his fingers were covered with ink. She pretended that she did not feel the acceleration of her heartbeat, that her mouth had not suddenly gone dry. She could not have him; these schoolgirl airs were ridiculous and futile.

“Mademoiselle St. Clair. I did not expect to see you . . . ”

Here?
Annabel wondered.
Again?
He sounded wary, but not hostile. Not, as she had feared, disgusted. “M’sieur Quentin, I beg pardon for disturbing you at this hour of the day, but—”

He waved it off. “I am an early riser, mademoiselle. How may I be of service?”

She took a deep breath and plunged without preamble into her story, telling him what the events and discoveries of the night had led her to: “Louis Vasquez was not a Bourbon pretender. He was an adventurer, in the pay of Spain. I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish, but I think he must have double-crossed them. That was why he wanted to go west, and that was why he was killed.”

“Yes,” Quentin said cautiously.

“But Monseigneur le Duc has asked the secretary of the Spanish ambassador to investigate the matter. Don Carlos has found nothing, but tonight—”

“Wait. Why would the Duc de Plaquemine—”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need to speak to him.”

“Which brings you to me because . . . ?”

“Because, m’sieur.” She stopped, swallowed hard. Told him, her voice growing smaller and smaller, about being very nearly discovered in Don Carlos’s bed, about the involvement of Don Esteban Castillo y Blas, about Jules Sevier’s inarguable culpability.