Dark Masquerade (11 page)

She rose suddenly to her feet.

“I don’t believe I can do what you ask,” she said in a firm voice. “I could not possibly take the risk with my only means of security.”

“Don’t answer too hastily,” he said softly. “You may, perhaps, reconsider.”

There was no anger in his face and the fact worried her. “I can’t think that will be necessary.”

“I disagree. You see, before your portion can be made over to you, you will have to establish your identity. Until such time the money will remain in my hands.”

“And at your disposal? I don’t think it is likely, at least, not legally.” There was a strain in Elizabeth’s voice. What she had intended to be a cool sarcasm came out at a near whisper.

“You are wrong. The disposition of the money has been left entirely at my discretion. And I will do what I think best for you.” His words were accompanied by a mock bow that in its civility struck Elizabeth with a greater chill that what he had said.

There was a silence. The wind made a sighing sound in the surrounding trees, and her hot cheeks.

“Why did you give yourself the trouble of asking me, then?” she asked at last.

He did not answer that. “Come, let us go back to the house.”

Elizabeth looked away from his outstretched hand. “I think I would rather stay here, for a little while.”

“Very well. Don’t tarry long. It will be raining soon.”

Turning on his boot heel, he walked away. The soft black of his coat faded quickly into the wood shadows.

Elizabeth stared after him. Suppose he had asked her permission to use the money in the nature of a test? Suppose he had wanted to see if she would react as the sweet, fragile girl Felix had described in his letters? Those letters. They haunted her.

Another suspicion came to her. Her lack of identification was to Bernard’s advantage. He would keep the widow’s portion in his control until she could produce proof that she was who she claimed. Who else had as good a reason for taking the documents that would identify her as Ellen? He had left her in the library abruptly, and he had been near the stairs when she had left the library. Was it possible that he had just put Joseph down and descended the stairs when he heard her leaving the library and had quickly stepped out of sight until he could appear from the back of the hall to make it look as if he had come from the outside?

In a dazed comprehension she let her suspicions go a step further. What would become of the money left in Bernard’s care if anything should happen to her? It appeared that he would have the unhampered use of it in that case. And if something happened to Joseph also? Bernard would be a direct beneficiary as the child’s next of kin!

A cold fear struck at her heart. If she was right then menace lay in wait for her in the house beneath the shade of the oaks. She was involved in a battle of nerve and wit, one from which there could be no withdrawal; one in which defeat was unthinkable. And Bernard was the enemy.

Bernard.

It occurred to her that his kind of Creole darkness was associated not only with priests, but with pirates. Those who take what they want without respect for the rules of warfare. Those who leave no survivors to bear witness.

A crackling sound in the underbrush behind the pavilion pierced her abstraction. She jumped to her feet, alarmed more by her thoughts than by the noise. It came again, nearer this time, and then it took on the measured rustle of hurried footsteps. A figure appeared, moving through the trees, looking neither left nor right. It was a woman hurrying along with a rolling crouch, a shawl drawn over her head.

Where was she going? Where had she been? As far as Elizabeth knew there was nothing in that direction from the house except miles of virgin forest. Was she going to the big house? She seemed to be.

It was only after her shambling shape had vanished from sight among the trees that recognition came to Elizabeth. It had been the woman who complained of migraines, the one who looked as though she would not dream of stirring beyond the walls of the house. It had been Darcourt’s mother, Madame Alma Delacroix.

Elizabeth lay in bed with her hands clasped behind her head, staring up into the darkness of the canopy above her. The mosquito netting enclosed her like a misty prison. Through it she could see occasional lightning flashes, dim, but growing slowly brighter. The storm had been building all the afternoon and evening. The wind sweeping in the window billowed the netting, so that it rose and fell around her. She reached for the sheet to cover her bare arms.

She was not sleepy. It had been a long time since she had heard a sound from the rooms on either side of her own, or from the rest of the house. She had come upstairs early. She had felt totally unable to sit quietly in Bernard’s presence while her suspicions of him sang like a dirge in her head. She had played with Joseph a little while, but the sight of the puffy cut on his lip had driven all thought of sleep from her mind.

The night before, tiredness had been like a draught of laudanum sending her into dreamless slumber, but tonight her nerves were stretched taut. Sleep was impossible.

The sound of a horse came from outside on the drive, a door slammed below, and then she heard a servant taking the mount away to the barn. Darcourt, probably, she told herself. He had been missing from the supper table. From the remarks about his absence she gathered that there was nothing unusual in that. A while later she heard his footsteps in the hall as he went up to bed.

She had missed Darcourt, his laughing comments and the light of encouragement and conspiracy in his eyes. It would not do, however, to become too fond of him. There could be no future in it. But the time she had spent in the front parlor after supper had dragged amazingly.

Grand’mere had played at embroidery with a piece of linen, a tangle of silks in various shades of heliotrope, and a tambour frame. In a petulant mood she had insisted on a fire to warm her old bones and dispel the damp. Then she had hidden behind a three-legged firescreen stand of woven reeds to protect her face from the flames dancing on the hearth.

Bernard had been moody, with little to say even to Celestine, who practiced her wiles upon him quite openly.

“You must not mind my grandson, ma chére,” Grand’mere had told the girl with a frosty smile. “He often forgets us for hours at a time when more weighty matters occupy his mind.”

Bernard had thrown her an oblique glance but had not in any way changed his attitude. Finally tiring of trying to make conversation with him in his morose study of his booted feet, Celestine had turned her attention to Elizabeth.

By that time Elizabeth, for something to do, had taken the skeins of embroidery silks from the basket beside Grand’mere’s chair to try and separate them. As Celestine sat down beside her she had to pick up a number of strands that the other girl had carelessly swept to the floor with a whirl of her full skirts, which were held out by one of the newly fashionable crins, or horsehair padded underskirts.

There had followed a catechism on Felix, his health, his clothes, his likes and dislikes. She had answered as best she could. It had not been hard, since she had lived in the same house with him for the few short weeks he had stayed with them. As often as not she had planned the meals that he ate and seen to it that the rooms occupied by the couple were as Felix wanted them. She had answered so easily and with such quiet composure that at last Celestine had flounced away in a pet.

For a second she had smiled in amused triumph, but then she had caught Bernard’s dark gaze lingering on her mouth. The pleating on the bodice of her black bombazine had quivered with the sudden thudding of her heart; her fingers had clenched on the silk threads in her hands. Soon after, she had gone upstairs.

“Are you awake?”

Elizabeth sat up, pulling the sheet around her. The door to the hall was still without its key. She regretted not asking Grand’mere for it when she recognized the voice of Alma Delacroix. Without enthusiasm she called to her to come in.

“I can’t sleep for the noise,” said Madame Delacroix. “Oh, I know that it is quiet enough, but the sound of the crickets and the frogs on the bayou drives me distracted. It is so much worse this time of year. I prefer street noises, town noises. You hardly hear those. It’s no use telling me that it’s whatever you get used to, either. I’ll never get used to the country!”

The woman carried a small candle. In its wavering light her face looked bloated and unnaturally pale but determined as she drew near the bed.

“I heard you tossing and turning in here while I waited for Darcourt, so I was sure you were not asleep either. Darcourt came to see me before he retired for the night. He is such a good son.”

Elizabeth murmured something agreeable and moved her feet to one side to accommodate her unexpected visitor on the foot of the bed. Remembering the snub Alma had given her at the dinner table, she was suspicious of her affability. She wondered whether Alma knew Bernard had seen her that afternoon, and whether this was the cause of Alma’s sudden interest in her.

“You are very lucky then,” she said, when she realized Alma was staring at her expectantly.

“Oh, yes, we have our difficulties, our differences, but we never forget, my son and I, that we have only each other. No one wants us here. I get a great deal of pleasure at times out of staying on while they wish me and my children to the devil. So you see, we have something in common.”

Such unexpected forthrightness caught Elizabeth off guard. “What do you mean?” she stammered.

“Oh, please. Don’t let’s play games. You must know you are tolerated for the sake of your child. It has always been thus of me too, except I am tolerated because I was Gaspard’s wife. Oh, I was very happy until he was killed. He was much like Bernard. He commanded respect for me from his sons, and even from the old lady, his mother. She would not have dared to use me then as she does now. Not that Gaspard and I always agreed. We did not. He wanted to treat Darcourt, my own dear heart, just as he did his own sons, Felix and Bernard. I could not have that, of course. Darcourt had never been disciplined so harshly. Besides, I suspected my poor Gaspard was jealous. Darcourt looks so exactly like his father, my first husband. He has his father’s temperament, so many of his charming manners. You understand that I could not allow him to come completely under the power of my second husband. He was my own flesh and blood. I had to take his side. I know you understand this, the fullness of a mother’s love. You have a son of your own.”

“Yes, I see.” Elizabeth said, but she was troubled. She did not understand why Alma was confiding in her. She was not sure that, in the way that confidences often do, the knowledge might not become a burden.

“I would do anything for my son, you know. Anything!”

Alma leaned forward, fixing her small dark eyes on Elizabeth’s face, her voice quivering with intensity. Then as a whiff of the woman’s breath, laden with brandy fumes, crossed the air between them, Elizabeth relaxed. She had been drinking. Relief made her giddy so that she nearly laughed aloud. She had not realized until then how unstrung she had been. With renewed confidence she set herself to reassure Alma, and to persuade her to return to her own room. She succeeded at last.

Alma, with her hand on the doorknob, turned back. “You are a nice girl, not at all a shy violet. Robust girls are not the fashion but a woman in fragile health can be so tiresome, not only to herself but to everyone around her. I know. I have never been in the best of health myself. We quite expected to have to wait on you hand and foot. Bernard had a stout woman chosen from the house servants whose sole duty was to have been to help you up and down the stairs. Isn’t it amusing?”

“Yes, very.”

“Well, goodnight.”

The letters, it had to be the letters. Would she never get away from them? It did not seem so. As long as she remained in ignorance of just what Felix had written about his wife, she would be at the mercy of whoever had them.

Why had she not given more consideration to his letters? The answer was that she knew there could not be many, two or maybe four at the most. Felix had known his bride only two months altogether. And he was not the type to write long detailed accounts to his family.

But one letter could prove fatal. What a relief it would be to know exactly what Felix had written. Then she would know what to do, how to act or what to say to explain away any apparent difference.

Perhaps the letters had been destroyed. It was more than likely, she tried to tell herself. But what if they had not? What if Bernard or Grand’mere decided to read them again? What would they find?

There was no way of knowing. Or was there? If Grand’mere had letters they would be in her room or in the small sitting room where she attended to her correspondence. Bernard’s would more than likely be in his desk in the library.

What else might be in the deep drawers of that great desk? The marriage record and the Brewster family Bible had disappeared. Might they not also be in Bernard’s desk? It was possible. Such an arrogant man would never dream that she would think of suspecting him, or that she would dare to search his property!