Prisoner of Desire (4 page)

“Don’t be silly,” Anya answered in a rallying tone. “It will probably end in nothing more than a scratch for one of them, a show of blood for the satisfaction of their ridiculous honor.”

“That isn’t how it was with Jean.”

Anya stiffened there in the darkness. If Celestine would only let her go, there might be no duel. “I know,” she said shortly.

“I didn’t mean to remind you.” Celestine’s voice was soft with contrition in the darkness.

“Never mind. I would stay if I could, but I really must go. It’s so warm, too warm for this time of year, and the wind is rising. There will probably be a storm by daylight, and I’d as soon not be caught on the road.”

“You will at least try to return in time?”

The meeting between the two men would not take place for over twenty-four hours, at dawn of the following morning. That much Murray had revealed, as well as the fact that the delay was at his request. His chosen second, a good friend, was out of town and would not be returning until tomorrow afternoon. The delay was not an unusual occurrence, but it was one for which Anya was profoundly grateful, one on which she placed her dependence.

“I’ll try, that much I will promise.”

In a rush, Celestine came to her feet and moved toward Anya to catch her close for a quick hug. “You are the best of sisters. I’m truly sorry if I hurt you.”

“You didn’t, imbecile,” Anya answered, but her tone was gentle, and she returned the affectionate clasp before moving on across the gallery to the stairs that descended to the courtyard.

It had been a long time since Jean’s death had brought Anya the instant pain that it had in the beginning. It sometimes seemed like a betrayal that she now felt only numbness. Often she wished that it did still hurt, that she could feel something so she could be certain that her softer emotions were alive. Most of the time, she was only too well aware that the pain had turned to anger, an anger directed toward the man who had killed her fiancé, and that the love she had felt had turned to hate.

Still, there were moments in the dark hours of the night when she feared that she was a fraud, that she was only playing the part of flamboyant Anya Hamilton, an eccentric and venturesome female dwindling into spinsterhood while dedicated to the memory of a dead fiancé. She felt then a kind of terror, as if she were trapped behind a mask of her own making. And yet she knew beyond a doubt that to remove it would make her acutely uncomfortable, like appearing naked in public.

The carriage was waiting. She stared at it critically in the flaring lantern hanging in the
porte cochère.
It was a simple black landau like a thousand others, neither better nor worse, with nothing to call attention to it. The horses that pulled it were sound and strong, but not showy in any way, not even carefully matched. It would do.

She called up a quiet order to the man on the box, then gathered her heavy cloak of dark blue wool around the costume she still wore and climbed inside. She patted her cloak pocket to be sure her demi-mask was there, then sat down, leaning back on the leather seat. The carriage jerked into motion. She sat staring out the window, seeing nothing. Her mind drifted, and she allowed it free rein, not wanting for the moment to think of what she was about to do.

Jean. His family, staunch Creoles, had owned the plantation that adjoined the land her father had won at poker. They had resented the presence of the Americans, and there had been little communication between the two pieces of property, though there were a number of paths as well as the main river road connecting them. Regardless, each family had always known what the other was doing, whether they were ill or well, when there was cause for grief or celebration. The reason was simple; most of the slaves of the two places were related by blood, and it was their constant visiting back and forth with news that had created many of the worn paths.

Then one morning while out riding, nearly two years after Nathan Hamilton had taken possession of the plantation, Anya escaped the stableboy who acted as her groom. She allowed her pony to wander in the direction of the other plantation, craning her neck in curiosity to see what might be seen. She was not paying attention to her progress, and soon became lost on the winding trails.

It was Jean, a truant also, who found her. He took her home with him, introduced her to his
maman
and his
père,
to his
grand-mère
in her lace cap and his Tante Cici, who was confined to her chair with a bad leg; to his cousins who lived with them, and his Scots tutor, who had been searching for him since breakfast.

His family carried on over her as if she were the most intrepid of young females, to have traveled the few miles separating the two places alone. They fed her bonbons and
dragées,
or candy-coated almonds, and allowed her to sip a small glass of wine. They sent a messenger to Beau Refuge to relieve the anxiety of her father and stepmother, but insisted that she stay for lunch. A holiday was declared, education not being considered a matter of vital importance, and she and Jean and his many cousins played games and rode in a cart pulled by a pet goat, sang and danced to the music played by Tante Cici. Finally, Jean, being all of ten or eleven years old himself, escorted her home, staunchly determined to support her as she explained to her papa how she had come to stray so far. Long before that day was over she had loved him. She had never stopped.

Once at Beau Refuge, Anya invited Jean in to meet her father and mother and baby Celestine. But though Jean had told her about his aunt’s bad leg and about one of his younger cousins who was “slow,” as well as explaining the presence of the older gentleman who was a friend of his father and who lived with his family in a guesthouse with a barn owl in the attic and wrote books about ghosts, she did not tell him about her Uncle Will. That came much later, when she knew beyond a doubt that he would not desert her once he knew.

William Hamilton, Uncle Will, her father’s brother, had arrived one day without warning. Younger than Nathan by a year, his wife and two children had been killed when their house caught fire in the middle of the night. Uncle Will had saved himself, but could not forgive himself for not saving his family. Since Nathan was his only relative living, Will had come to be with him, and to settle in a place where there were no reminders of the tragedy.

At first he had seemed all right, though he made little effort to throw off his depression of the spirits. But always he would moan in his sleep and cry out. Then came days when he would lie and scream until he was hoarse. He began to roam the house at night, beating the walls with his hands. Once he tried to cut his wrists with a kitchen knife and, when Nathan stopped him, attacked his own brother. It was after he broke the lock of the cabinet where Nathan kept his guns, threatened Madame Rosa with a fowling piece, then shot himself in the foot with it that Anya’s father confined him.

It had been the practice at the time to confine those for whom life had proved too much, the insane, in the parish jails throughout the state, there being no other facilities, though since then a special hospital had been built at Jackson to contain them. The jails had not been an ideal solution, for the unfortunates were often preyed upon by other prisoners, or else were a danger themselves to the weaker inmates.

Nathan Hamilton had not been able to support the thought of that kind of life for his brother. He had prepared a room for him in the building that housed the cotton gin at Beau Refuge, a stout structure some distance from the house, so that his cries would not be a disturbance. A fireplace had been installed for comfort in winter, as well as high windows with strong iron bars for air. It had been furnished with a bed, an eating table and chair, an armchair, armoire, and washstand. It also had a leg shackle with a long chain that was attached to a stout bolt set into the thick wall beside the bed.

There in that room above the gin, with a pair of strong servants to tend to his needs, Uncle Will had stayed for four long years. He had endured his confinement without complaint for the most part, though sometimes he begged to be set free in the swamp with a gun and a knife. Then one night he managed to hang himself with a rope he had made, inch by patient inch, season after season, by twisting into threads the cotton fibers that drifted into his room, and twisting the threads into a rope.

The room was still there at Beau Refuge. Like everything else at the plantation, it was kept in order; the floor swept, the bed ropes renewed, the lock and the shackle oiled, and the fireplace chimney kept free of birds’ nests. Now and then baled cotton was stored in it when space became scarce. Once an unruly slave bent on beating his woman to death was kept there until he calmed down. It was empty now.

The carriage rolled through the city and turned into a dark street near the outskirts. Here were rows of narrow shotgun houses, so called because a shot fired through the front door of the house would go completely through the two rooms placed end to end and exit out the back door. Before one such house, the carriage drew up. Anya got down and moved quickly to climb the narrow steps and knock on the door.

It seemed a long time before there was an answer. Then a bolt was drawn and the door opened a cautious crack.

“Samson? Is that you?” Anya asked.

“Mam’zelle Anya! What you doin’ here this time of night?”

The door was drawn open, and in the light of the carriage lanterns could dimly be seen an enormous black man. His head barely cleared the doorframe, and his shoulders and arms bulged with muscles that had come from pounding hot iron in his job as a blacksmith. His voice as he spoke held disapproval not unmixed with suspicion, and he peered beyond her toward the carriage that waited.

“I need to talk to you, and to Elijah. Is he here?”

“Yes, mam’zelle.”

“Good,” she said, and when Samson’s brother, a man larger if possible that Samson himself, appeared, she began to outline what she wanted.

They did not like it; that much was plain. Anya could not blame them. It could not be denied that what she asked would be dangerous. Still, they did not deny her. She had known she could depend on them, no matter the hour or the nature of the request.

It was Samson and Elijah who had tended her Uncle Will. In order to help pass the time of their vigil, Anya had shared her school books with them, teaching them painstakingly to read and write by drawing with a stick in the dirt. Later, after her uncle’s death, the pair had been given jobs in the blacksmith shop. But they yearned for the freedom they had read about in the history books and in the tracts passed out by the abolitionists. They thought they could make their own way, earn their keep in the blacksmith trade.

As Anya’s father lay dying of the injuries from his fall from horseback, the two men had come to her. They asked that mam’zelle intercede for them, that she beg the master to free them. It was still possible then for a man to free a slave by will on his death, and so Anya had agreed. Not only had she spoken to her father, but later, when Samson and Elijah opened their own blacksmith shop, she had told everyone she knew of the delicate and intricate patterns of wrought iron for gates and railings and cornices created by the big men. They had prospered, and they had not forgotten.

It troubled Anya that she must ask them to risk so much now. It could not be helped, however, She would protect them insofar as she was able, no matter what happened.

A short time later, with Samson an Elijah clinging to the rear of the carriage like footmen, the driver turned the vehicle back toward the center of town.

It was growing late, still with everything that had happened, it was only just after midnight. The gas streetlamps on Canal Street and St. Charles Street were burning brightly, and the mule-drawn omnibuses that rattled up and down the thoroughfares were most of them more than half-full. Many of the balls held that night were only just now ending, and the carriage traffic was thick as the guests made their way homeward.

On a street corner Anya saw a Charley, or constable of the city police, in his painted and numbered leather cap. He stood slapping his short club, known as a spontoon, into the palm of his hand as he talked to a pair of men dressed in the flamboyant fashion favored by most professional gamblers. As Anya watched, one of the gamblers thrust what looked like a wad of bills into the pocket of the constable’s coat.

She looked away, her lips curled in disgust, though she was not surprised. New Orleans, one of the richest cities in the United States for many years, had always attracted its share of political scavengers. The current crop of government officials, however, was the most corrupt and venal in living memory. The party in power was the Native American party, known derisively as the Know-Nothing party for the constant refrain of its officials when accused of wrongdoing. So blatantly irregular were the methods they used to come to power and keep themselves there, hiring thugs to attack registered voters of the opposition party and registering names from tombstones for their own party, that people had begun to despair of a political solution.

Some said that behind the Know-Nothing party was a cabal of powerful men who had made themselves rich by manipulating the situation. These men never sullied their hands with the foul business of running the city, nor were their identities known to more than a few, but they had installed as their tool a New Yorker named Chris Lillie who had brought with him a whole new bag of dirty tricks from Tammany Hall.