Kathleen Y'Barbo (47 page)

“What are you going to do?” she asked as she watched him reach into a carpetbag that looked very much like the one he’d brought up onto the roof of the Cotton Exchange weeks ago.

“I’m going to open this box, Millie. That’s what we came to do, isn’t it?”

It took some work, but he managed to pry open the rusted top only to find the box empty. Millie’s heart sank.

“I’m so sorry,” he said gently. “I know you were hoping for something more.”

The trip back to New Orleans passed in a blur of sights and sounds, most of which Millie ignored. Returning to Kyle’s lovely home on Prytania Street was bittersweet.

It was the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

February 14, 1889

New Orleans

The next morning Millie dressed early and then waited until the hour was late enough for visiting. Slipping out without attracting Kyle’s attention, she made her way to Royal Street and the house now familiar to her.

Knocking, she held no hope of an answer. And yet the door opened, and the same tired-looking servant woman sighed.

“I figured you would be back,” she said, and this time she stepped aside to silently invite Millie to enter.

The home was narrow and long, a gently shabby building of elegant proportions and fading grandeur. “Come on back here. They’re outside enjoying the sun. Don’t always happen like that this early into February.”

Millie followed, barely noticing anything but the sliver of sunshine that rippled through a pair of French doors and spilled across faded carpet at the end of the long hall. The servant paused at the doors and sighed again.

Peering around the woman, she could just see the edge of a small New Orleans courtyard, its splashing fountain dominating a lush green landscape only just returning to its spring colors. Two chairs had been set up in the sun, their backs too tall and wide to reveal the persons sitting in them.

The only evidence of anyone inhabiting the space was the pair of hands stretching between the chairs to clasp in the middle. One was small and feminine. The other larger and definitely masculine.

Millie looked over at the servant. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?” she asked, one brow lifted.

“Is that Mrs. Koch?”

“No, that’s Miss Hebert. Now go on. I told her I would let you in the next time you came. The Lord Almighty must have led you here just on
the day when she is visiting.” At Millie’s confused look, she continued. “They only get today, you know. After that, she leaves and doesn’t come back until next year.”

“Miss Hebert?” Millie stepped through the open door, her heart pounding. Family. At last.

The hands remained clasped, fingers entwined. Still Millie moved toward them.

Great arching ferns shaded her as she circled around the couple. A few more steps and their faces would come into view. Millie sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly.

And then she closed her eyes and propelled herself forward. When she opened her eyes again, the first face she saw was Cook.

“Child, it took you long enough to find us,” she said. “Now come here and meet my Julian.”

Julian.

He was wrapped in a quilt of brilliant red and yellow hues, a patchwork of stitches covering a man whose health had long ago left him. And yet his eyes followed her. Searched her face. And she searched his, looking for the man in the locket.

He was there. In those eyes.

“Hello,” Millie said. Just then she realized he was unable to respond, and she looked back to Cook. “Are you Sophie?”

“No, honey,” she said with a gentle laugh. “Not hardly. I’m just plain old Cook.”

“But this is Julian.
The
Julian from the locket. Am I wrong?”

Cook patted her companion’s hand. “No, child. You are not wrong.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. And how are you a relative of mine? There is no Mrs. Koch, is there.”

“No, just me, Miss Cook, or you could call me Miss Hebert, but I had to come up with something on short notice to get you to New Orleans, and I am terrible sorry about that. Now come sit by me.” Cook released her grip as she leaned to place Julian’s hand back beneath his quilt. “Bring that stool over here.”

When Millie had done as she asked, the old woman sighed. “Oh, honey, where to begin?”

“At the beginning.”

“The beginning, it is. Your grandmama, she was Sophie,” Cook said gently. “And Julian was hers, but not before he was mine.”

“But—”

Cook held up her hand. “Let me tell this straight through, child. It’s the only way I can.” When Millie nodded, she continued. “I loved that man, I did. But I was only the daughter of a cook in a servant’s house. What did I know about anything but hard work? But Sophie, oh, now Sophie, she got what she wanted, and what she wanted was my Julian.”

She paused now, looking off past the fountain and the ferns as if recalling things just as they were happening. Millie waited, wishing she could hurry the process but knowing she could not.

“Julian’s people, they were poor. Fishermen from out on Bell Island, they were. When the hurricane hit, the waters got churned up and the fish, they all died. They had nothing. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t fix the roof, nothing. The little ones they were sickly, about to die. So Julian, he tells me we have to do something. I said I would get me a job and would send money, but he was a proud man. He told me that wasn’t what a man did, taking money from a woman like that.” She fell silent for a moment. “So Julian, he goes into New Orleans to get him a job. And Sophie, she hears of it and follows him.”

When Cook once again fell silent, Millie reached to touch her hand. “My grandmother, Sophie...she was from Bell Island too?”

“She was Baratarian, honey. Lafitte’s baby girl. But nobody knew that except me and Julian. She took my Julian, but when he wouldn’t marry her she got him drunk and had her way. I know that’s shocking to you, but I believe it happened just like that.” She reached to pat the old man’s leg. “He wouldn’t tell me something that wasn’t true.”

“Of course,” she said for lack of a better response.

“When Julian came back to me, Sophie was furious. She hunted up her daddy’s treasure box out in the bayou, got that key, and went down to the bank to get herself enough money to forget all about where she came from. It worked too. And just in case, she buried Sophie. Put her dead in the ground and held a funeral and then told everyone she was Sophie’s
grieving cousin, Genevieve. All the menfolk was falling over themselves to
console her. And while they were drying her tears, she was picking herself out a husband.”

“Grandfather Hugh?”

“The very one. He was older than the rest and had himself some money from the cotton business and a big house up there in Memphis. And Sophie, she couldn’t afford to be too choosy, what with Julian’s baby in her belly.”

Millie gasped. “Father?”

Cook nodded. “That’s right, sweet girl. Why do you think your grandmama never trusted your daddy with nothing? Because he wasn’t Hugh’s. Every time she looked at Silas, she saw the only man who didn’t want her. And Hugh? That old man, try as he could, never did put a baby in Sophie. Your daddy was the only one she had.” Cook paused. “And that ought to tell you why I put up with the man, insufferable as he is.”

“Because he is Julian’s son.”

Twenty-Seven

M
illie searched the face of the woman who had offered wise council in the past, still unable to believe her connection to the Copes ran deeper than expected. “Does Father know?”

“He figured it out, I think. Probably got told by Sophie a time or two. Just don’t know that he believed it.” Cook shrugged. “Me, I leave that part of it be. It’s enough to spend my days close to the child of the man I love. That he is Sophie’s too? Well, that explains the part of him I don’t much like.”

“Staying at that house and being a mean and spiteful man’s cook is what you want?”

“Millie, if I didn’t want that, I could have moved out to the house he gave me years ago.”

“Father gave you a house?”

“That’s the story I was told. It’s a pretty place just far enough outside Memphis to make a body feel like the city’s far away.”

Millie’s brow furrowed. “The farmhouse that remains empty?”

“That’s the one. I’ll admit I was curious, so after Sophie—or, rather, Genevieve as she wanted us all to call her—well, after she died I went downtown to check the records and see just who did own that place. The clerk at the city office, he said that a man named Arnaque had set up a fund to keep that house paid up on taxes and taken care of real nice. Me being from the bayou, I knew who Arnaque was, but I didn’t say anything about it.”

“Lafitte. Sophie’s father,” Millie said. Cook nodded. “Arnaque wrote a letter to her. I found it in Mama’s Bible.”

“That don’t surprise me. The old man, he had plenty to apologize for. But then so did Sophie. Whether it was him who arranged it or Sophie who did it and then just tried to pass it off as Silas’s idea, I don’t guess I’ll ever know. But it was a nice gesture, wasn’t it?”

“It was.” Millie was quiet for a moment. “I always thought I would inherit that place, but I’m very glad it’s yours.”

“Oh, child, you can have it. I’ll stay in the house on Adams Street until the Lord Almighty takes me home. Or takes Silas. Like I said, everything is paid for and taken care of in perpetuity. That’s banker’s terms, but the Union & Planters men, they have been good to me.” She smiled. “You know, it’s a myth that old Lafitte didn’t like banks. He did. At least, once he found bankers who were sympathetic to him. Why, in New Orleans he was considered a hero.”

Millie was lost in thought about all of that for a moment, but then by degrees she became aware of the man watching her again.

“He hears you,” Cook said, “but he can’t respond.”

“How long has he been like this?”

“It’s been a long time now. He come home to Bell Island looking for me. Told me what he’d done wrong and how sorry he was he let Sophie turn his head like that. Said he wanted me for his wife. Even told me he made an appointment with the preacher for Valentine’s Day.”

“Today,” Millie whispered.

“That’s right, only it didn’t happen, this marriage of ours. The yellow fever he brought back from New Orleans almost took him, but he didn’t die. And neither did I, though there was times I wished I had.”

“I’m so sorry,” Millie said, and then she shook her head. “I don’t want to call you Cook anymore. That is just not...” Again she shook her head. “What can I call you?”

“Mildred.” This from the man in the blanket, a soft word that came from lips pitifully unused to speaking. “Mildred Hebert,” he said with a bit more strength.

Tears shimmered in the old woman’s eyes as she reached to clasp Julian’s hand again. And then she nodded.

“That’s right, child. My given name is Mildred. The one good thing
Sophie did was to see that you was named after me. Your mama, she always did what Sophie, I mean Genevieve, said.”

Millie rose to leave some time later, her heart full. The woman she now knew as Mildred walked her to the door and kissed her on the cheek. “Will you write to me?”

“Yes. As soon as I am settled.”