Masquerade (25 page)

"She didn't think about what might happen if her brother found out she was seeing Brodie. Which is exactly what happened," she replied. "By that time she'd probably been meeting Brodie secretly for almost a month, no oftener than twice a week. Now, when she came back from seeing him, she never used the stairs; she always came through the courtyard and entered the house that way. She figured if she was seen she always had the ready excuse that she hadn't been able to sleep and had gone outside to take some night air. . . ."

 

Adrienne moved along the cool, dim passage of the
porte cochère
to the scrolled iron gates at the end of it. She paused there and listened to the receding clop of hooves and the muted clatter of the carriage as it departed on Royal Street. She hesitated a minute longer, letting her ears adjust to the new silence and her eyes to the uneven darkness of the courtyard beyond the tall wrought-iron gates. The silvery glow from the moon highlighted the shininess of the magnolia's green leaves and gleamed on the central fountain's bronze statue, of a woman balancing a basin on her head, over which water flowed in a melodic whisper. But there was no sound, no movement other than that. And no light shone from the
garҫonnière,
the narrow wing that extended from the main house and provided private quarters for the unmarried males in the family as well as for the occasional guest. The Lenten season had arrived, bringing an end to the winter's lively social season, so there were no guests, and the absence of any lights in the windows assured her that Dominique had retired for the night.

Carefully, Adrienne opened one side of the double gate and slipped through into the garden patio, closing the gate quietly behind her, then pushing back the hood of her cloak. Deliberately holding her pace to a wandering stroll, she moved along the brick walk that circled the fountain and its reflecting pool. The night air was scented with the fragrance of the shrubs and trees that were planted in abundance throughout the courtyard—honeysuckle vines entwining with the ivy to cover the high brick wall in the rear, sweet olive and fig trees shading the rosebushes, and crepe myrtles, gardenias, and camellias crowding the edges of the informal parterre.

By the time Adrienne reached the outside steps to the second-floor gallery, all her tension was gone. It wasn't necessary to feign insouciance as she climbed the stairs, thinking back on the pleasurable two hours she'd spent with Brodie and savoring the stimulating memory of their moments of lovemaking, warmed anew by it.

As expected, her room was dark, but her black maidservant Sulie Mae wasn't hovering at the French doors, waiting to unlock them and admit her, a necessity forced upon them by the nightly check her grandfather made before retiring to insure that all the doors were securely locked. Adrienne tapped twice on the glass. Almost immediately the familiar shape of the round-bosomed Negro woman appeared on the other side of the glassed doors. She fumbled briefly with the lock, then swung the door inward. Adrienne glanced down the length of the deeply shadowed and empty gallery and then stepped into her room, unfastening the front of her cloak, preparing to remove it and hand it to her servant.

A voice came out of the darkness, low and ominous—her brother's voice. "You may go now, Sulie Mae."

As Adrienne stiffened in alarm and swept her eyes over the black shapes in the darkened room to find him, a lamp-wick that had been no more than a faint speck of light was turned up, throwing a bright glow over the room. Dominique stood beside it.

"Michie Dominique, he say I gots to let him in," Sulie Mae murmured, her eyes round and dark with apprehension as she met Adrienne's accusing look. Then she hurried from the room.

Adrienne turned to face her brother, unconsciously tilting her chin a little higher at the sight of his cold and forbidding expression. "Dominique," she began with forced lightness.

"You were with the Yankee—and do not add to your shame with lies of denial."

She was stunned that he knew. How had he found out? Had Sulie Mae betrayed her? Recognizing that the answers were irrelevant, Adrienne dismissed the questions from her mind and admitted, "I was with him, yes. I love him, Dominique."

"And what of Grand-père?" he challenged in a voice that was all ice, his stare raking her. "How could you betray his trust? How could you bring this dishonor to him, to the family?"

"My love for Brodie is no dishonor, but Grand-père has refused to see that," Adrienne asserted. "He left me no choice."

"And you have left me no choice."

As he came toward her, Adrienne instinctively took a step back, intimidated by this man who seemed so unlike the brother she knew. "What do you mean by that?" she demanded, belatedly realizing that he wasn't approaching her—instead, he crossed to the gallery doors, which Sulie Mae had left standing open. "Are you going to tell Grand-père?"

He paused in the doorway. "I would never deliberately say or do anything that I knew would hurt him—as you have done." He stepped onto the gallery and quietly closed the door behind him.

She believed him. He wasn't going to tell Grand-père about her assignations with Brodie Donovan. She felt momentarily weak with relief, aware that it would have ruined all her plans if her grandfather had found out from Dominique —but now she would have to alter those plans. She couldn't count on Dominique's keeping silent for long.

She realized she had to talk to her brother, make him understand the reasons for her actions. Not now, though. Tomorrow, when he was not smarting so from what he considered to be her betrayal.

Not for the first time in her life did Adrienne rail at society's duality of standards, which demanded strict observance of rigid moral codes by women but imposed no such inhibitions on men, leaving them free to drink, gamble, carouse—and install café-au-lait-skinned concubines in little cottages on Rampart Street.

When Adrienne entered the dining room the next morning for breakfast, only her grandfather and her aunt were seated at the table. Dominique's chair was empty. She murmured a greeting to her grandfather and nodded to her aunt, who was always sour-tempered in the morning, quick to speak sharply to the servants at the least clatter of dishes.

"Dominique is late this morning," Adrienne observed, taking her customary seat on her grandfather's left.

"Non,
he arose early," her grandfather replied as he slathered raspberry sauce over a flaky pastry.

"Then he has left?" Adrienne asked, frustrated that she was being denied the chance to speak to him privately.

"He had his horse saddled more than an hour ago," her grandfather confirmed, then added vaguely, "He made some mention of an appointment."

"Did he say when he would return?" "Not until evening."

All through breakfast, Adrienne debated her next move. Before she'd left Brodie last night, she had arranged to meet him again tomorrow evening. Now she decided that until she reached some type of understanding with Dominique, it wouldn't be wise to keep the appointment. But to cancel it without a word of explanation—she couldn't do that, either. No, she had to advise Brodie of this new situation, and she could do that only in person. She couldn't run the risk of having a note fall into the wrong hands.

The instant she returned to her room, Adrienne summoned Sulie Mae. "I want you to take a message to the old fiddler Cado. Tell him, 'She will meet him at the market this morning,'" she said, deliberately not mentioning Brodie's name and trusting that the mere fact that she would risk a daytime meeting would lend an urgency and importance to her words.

The black woman drew back, shaking her head vigorously. "No, Missy, I can't do that. If Michie Dominique find out, he have Michie Jardin sell me.

In no mood to be opposed in this, Adrienne retorted, "You must, or
I
will have him sell you."

 

Two hours later Adrienne lagged behind her aunt, scanning the throng of shoppers and merchants gathered under the pillared arcade. The din was ceaseless, with hens squawking in their crates, merchants shouting out proclamations of their wares, parrots screeching from their cages, customers calling greetings to this person or that, and all of it abrasive to her as she kept watching for Brodie.

Stall after stall of fishermen proudly displayed their morning's catch, gray-blue bodies of fish gleaming in the sunlight, hard-shelled oysters piled in mounds, crayfish wiggling and brandishing their claws, dingy gray shrimp spread in layers six or seven inches deep waiting for a spiced boiling pot to turn them a delectable pink, and lazy crabs stirring reluctantly. But none of them tempted Adrienne's aunt as she continued on to the fruit and vegetable section to inspect the prickly pineapples for freshness. While she haggled with the vendor, Adrienne surreptitiously looked for Brodie. But he wasn't here either.

Nor was he among the butchers busy carving cuts of meat to order from fresh carcasses—nor among the huddle of flower merchants or the roughly clad bayou hunters with their assortment of wild fowl, turtles, and alligators. Worried, Adrienne looked around openly. Hadn't he got her message?

 

The clinking of foils echoed from the fencing room, followed by a well-modulated voice proclaiming,
"Bien.
Let us try it again." Again there was a ring of steel as rapiers met.

With ill-concealed restlessness, Brodie rose from his chair in the academy's austere office and crossed to the window, clasping his hands behind his back, fingers gripping each other tightly. He stood there—for how long, he didn't know—his tension mounting at the sound of clashing blades.

Then it stopped. There was a polite murmur of voices and then he heard footsteps approaching the door. Brodie pivoted from the window as the door opened and the academy's master walked in, a lean-visaged man with a deceptively warm and pleasant look. His fencing mask was tucked under one arm, and his other hand loosely held a tipped foil. Yet there was ever an alertness about him that spoke of well-honed instincts, muscles, and senses trained to react in fractions of seconds.

"Brodie, how good to see you, my friend. I regret that I had to keep you waiting. It was a rare morning lesson, you understand." Each movement was lithe and supple as he laid his fencing mask and glove on the writing table and placed the rapier beside them. "May I offer you coffee, or perhaps a glass of wine?"

"No," Brodie refused abruptly, and came straight to the point of his visit. "I need your advice, Pepe," he said, familiarly addressing the renowned fencing master José Llulla by his more common name. A Spaniard by birth, José "Pepe," Llulla was unlike most of the fifty or so masters with fencing schools strung along the flagstoned Exchange Alley. He did not dress extravagantly, affect the manners of a dandy, or try to enter the ranks of Creole society. More than that, he saved his money and invested it in various businesses— a sawmill, a grocery, a slaughterhouse, a barroom. It was through his many ventures that Brodie had first met this man who had lived the life of a seaman before becoming a
maître d'armes,
considered by many to be the finest swordsman ever to draw a blade in New Orleans.

"You seek my advice? I am flattered, Brodie."

"I have been challenged."

Merely saying the words recalled the coolness of Dominique Jardin's expression when he'd confronted Brodie outside the offices of the Crescent Line an hour earlier—and brought back the flicking brush of the man's glove against his cheek. There'd been no display of anger, no hot words. The challenge had been delivered in the precise, courteous manner dictated by the duello, the dueling code.

"You have been challenged—this is wonderful,
mom ami!"
the
maître d'armes
declared, smiling in delight. "Congratulations."

"Wonderful?" Brodie snapped. "I see nothing 'wonderful' in it."

"But of course it is wonderful," Pepe insisted with an expansive wave of his hand. "You have been accepted at last. A challenge cannot be issued to one who is not an equal. Tell me, who is your opponent?"

"Dominique Jardin."

A black eyebrow arched sharply. "A formidable rival, and a veteran of many duels—all of which he won with his blade. You are fortunate that he challenged you. The choice of weapons becomes yours. I suggest that you choose pistols."

"I'm not going to fight him."

The Spaniard stiffened, his look turning hard and cold. "You must."

"Dammit, I can't, Pepe. That's why I'm here. That's why I needed to see you. You know the proper procedures. There has to be some way this can be avoided, something within the letter of that damnable dueling code."

"If Monsieur Jardin chooses to accept an apology from you for whatever it is you have said or done over which he has taken offense, then there is no need for a duel to take place, and there is no loss of honor for either party. However, the apology must be tendered within the prescribed time. Once you meet on the field of honor, it is too late."

"You can forget the apology," Brodie said with a sigh. "He wouldn't find it acceptable."

"Then you must meet him."

He shook his head. "I can't."

"Then I advise that you get on one of your ships and leave, M'sieu Donovan. To refuse to meet him is tantamount to cowardice. You would be finished here in the Vieux Carré. And I suspect your American associates would lose their respect for you as well."

"I'm not leaving."

"You came here for my advice. I have given it to you. Since you are afraid—"

"I'm not afraid of him, Pepe. If there was no one else involved, I would meet him with shotguns at a handkerchiefs length. But that isn't the case."

The Spaniard looked at him with new curiosity. "Someone else is involved? Who?"

"His sister, Adrienne. I intend to marry her, Pepe. Now do you see how impossible this situation is? No matter what choice I make, I lose. If I refuse to meet him, I'll be branded a coward. I'm not sure I could live with it, even knowing that it wasn't true. And I doubt Adrienne could bear the shame of it even if she knew I'd done it for her. As you pointed out, I'd be finished in this town, and if she married me, she'd be finished too. On the other hand, if I accept his challenge, she'll never agree to marry the man who killed her brother."