Aurore. He turned away for good. No matter his feelings or lack of them, his past was behind him. He had no doubt that Lucien would rally or that Fantome would return in time to help him. Lucien had survived worse. Now Raphael had just enough time to get to the train station, where he had already deposited his bags. Aurore would see the smoke and worry, but he would reassure her. Then, when they were safely on board, he would relive his success, and at last know satisfaction.
He took the stairs three at a time and unlocked the door. As he had expected, the air was thick with ashes. He heard the clatter of a fire wagon and the shouts of men on the riverfront.
He felt a searing blast of heat as he stepped outside. He hadn’t expected that. The wind, which had played softly throughout the afternoon, had picked up. Now it was fanning the flames. He didn’t have time to investigate, but a part of him insisted, even if it meant that he would have to run all the way to Rampart.
The fire mesmerized him. He moved in the direction of the river, through the stave yard and along the same path where he had once led Aurore. The smoke grew thicker and more menacing with every step. Closer to the river, he saw why. The dock was on fire now, but it was the spectacle of the burning ship that held his attention. Never had he seen anything like it. Outlined in flames, the SS
Danish Dowager
was already just a shell of what she had once been. The little fire tug,
Samson,
was gamely trying to relieve the
Dowager
’s agony, but the attempt was hopeless.
He had his revenge. It writhed in the water in front of him. As he stared, the sight merged in his mind with another boat,
a small, frail skiff with three terrified passengers. He felt the skiff buck beneath him, felt the rough wood of a seat against his clinging hands. He shut his eyes, but the moment became clearer. Over the roar of wind, he heard his mother scream. He squeezed his eyelids tighter, but he saw his sister’s body hurtle through the air, to disappear under a wave that was taller than an oak tree. He reached for his mother, but she shook off his hands and disappeared into the water after her daughter.
He had clung to the seat for time unending. Just the way he had clung to his hatred for Lucien Le Danois. Just the way he had clung to his determination to seek revenge.
Raphael opened his eyes and realized it was not elation he felt, but despair. He had prayed and schemed for this moment, yet now that it was his, he knew his prayers had been blasphemy. In one terrible moment of panic and selfishness, Lucien had condemned his lover and his daughter to death. Raphael’s moments had been many, moments calculated and hoarded, moments that had multiplied into years dedicated to destruction and hatred. And none of it could bring back his mother and sister.
“Aurore!” He turned and began to run back toward Gulf Coast and the street that would lead him to Rampart. For the first time he knew what he ran from, and what he ran toward. There was nothing he could do about the holocaust he left behind, but he could protect Lucien’s daughter from what lay ahead. She must never know what had transpired here. She must never know his part in her family’s destruction.
He paused for breath beside Gulf Coast. He could feel the wind at his back, strong gusts that swirled smoke and skipped burning debris along the ground. Something stung his neck, and he brushed a live cinder to the walk. Whirling, he saw a
glow in the stave yard. As he watched, the glow deepened. The lumber, impregnated with flammable chemicals, would go up quickly.
The Gulf Coast building would be destroyed. Even as he heard the clatter of more engines, he knew they would be too late. He looked for Lucien’s carriage, but Fantome was either late returning or had found it impossible to get through.
Lucien was upstairs, and it was only a matter of time before the building collapsed around him. There was time to rescue him, to find someone who would be certain he was taken out of the area. There was time, but was there reason?
He moved toward the door, then stopped, torn between old hatreds and new revelations. He saw Aurore’s face in his mind and knew he couldn’t live with her if he took this final, fatal plunge into revenge. He had flung wide the door and started inside when he heard a shout.
“Étienne!” As if his thoughts had conjured her, she appeared through the smoke, coughing and choking. “Étienne!”
Two people materialized behind her. He recognized Ti’ Boo and Jules from Lafourche. His heart began to speed. Aurore fell into his arms. “What are you doing here?” He pushed her away and grasped her shoulders. “What are you doing?”
“I—we saw the fire. It’s the
Dowager,
Étienne!”
He saw that she was sobbing. Fear gripped him. “There’s nothing to be done about it now!”
“And the dock. Étienne, the dock! Everything my father built. Gone.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to get out of here now. The office is going to go up, too. The wind’s blowing this way!” As if to illustrate his words, there was a roar from the stave yard. What had been a glow was now visible flames.
“We have to save what we can! Anything we can!”
“We can’t carry anything worth saving, Aurore.” He tried to push her toward Jules, but she wouldn’t budge.
“We have to try!”
“No! We have to get out of here. Jules, take her. Start toward Rampart Street. I’ll follow in a few minutes. I have to be sure no one is inside.”
“Inside?” Aurore still refused to move.
“Aurore, you have to go. Now!” He couldn’t think of anything that might start her on the way except part of the truth. “Your father was here. I told him we were leaving the city together. He was furious. I don’t know if he left the building afterward. I have to see, but you can’t go. He can’t see you again, not if you have any hope of leaving with me!”
Her eyes widened, and he knew he would always remember her this way, face pale with shock, eyes wide with tears streaming from them. “My father?”
“Aurore, go!” He succeeded in pushing her towards Jules. “Jules, take her now, and get her out of here. If Lucien is still here, I’ll be sure he’s safe before I follow.”
“No, I have to see for myself!” She resisted Jules’s grip, and before either man could stop her, she dashed for the stairs.
Raphael followed, and he could hear footsteps behind him. He prayed that Lucien was gone, that somehow he’d rallied and left the building when Raphael was at the riverfront. But even as he prayed, he knew what they would find.
Aurore shoved the door open and flew across the room. “Papa!” Lucien was exactly where Raphael had left him. He groaned at the sound of his daughter’s voice. She flung herself to the ground and grasped his shoulder to try to turn him onto his back. “Help me, Étienne!”
Raphael knelt beside her and took her hands. “I’ll get him out of here, Aurore. You’ve got to leave. You can’t stay. If you want to leave with me, you must go now!”
She shook off his hands. “I can’t leave him! Papa!” Jules joined her, and between them they turned Lucien to his back. His eyelids fluttered open, but he didn’t speak. “Papa!”
Something knotted inside Raphael. “If you stay, he’ll never allow you to marry me. Jules will get him to safety for us. But your father knows about us now. We have to leave. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to make a choice!”
“How can you ask me to choose?” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “He’s my father. He may be dying!”
“He’s not!” But even as he said the words, he saw that Lucien’s face was a death mask. Every breath that wracked his body took him one step closer.
“Aurore.” Lucien’s voice was so soft that for a moment Raphael wasn’t sure he had heard it.
“Papa.” Aurore drew his head to her lap. She put her face as close to his as she could. “We’ll get you out of here,” she said. “I’ll stay with you. You’re going to be fine.”
“Étienne…”
She lifted her head. “He’s calling you,” she said.
Lucien’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his hands fluttered wildly. “Aurore.”
“What, Papa? Étienne’s here, too. What is it?”
“He’s…a bastard.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Papa, don’t worry about any of that now. We’ll have time to talk about my future later.” Her hands fluttered helplessly over his cheeks. “Papa, dear Papa, don’t worry. I’ll stay with you.”
“He’s a…bastard. His father was a…slave. Your baby…have
to get rid of it. He did this to you…to get even with me…. Set fire to the
Dowager.
”
She gave a sharp cry. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Papa. You don’t know!”
“I know.” Lucien struggled, as if to sit up. “You’re my child…only child.” He grabbed her hands; his clenched spasmodically. “Revenge. That’s all. A madman. If you love me, get rid of…”
Her sobs were audible now, wrenching cries that shivered through Raphael with the same intensity as Lucien’s words. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying, Aurore,” he said. “He’s sicker than I thought. And he would say anything to make you leave me.”
“Papa!” she cried. She lowered her face to his. “Étienne is a good man! He loves me.”
“No. He hates…me. Wanted revenge. Told me about the baby. Was here when the
Dowager
exploded. Told me he’d done it. His blood…mixed, Aurore. Never loved you. He wanted to leave us with…nothing. Forged papers…in his coat. No insurance.” He struggled to sit up again, then fell back into her lap.
She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak. Raphael reached for her, but she shook him off.
“My daughter,” Lucien said. “Loved you. Wanted…everything for you. Don’t go…Aurore. Stay. Salvage what you can…Gulf Coast. Do what you…” His lips stopped moving, and his eyes stared straight ahead.
“No!” She shook him. “Papa! No!”
From somewhere in the shadows, Raphael heard a woman’s keening. He had forgotten Ti’ Boo’s presence. He lifted his head and saw horror reflected in Jules’s eyes. Jules knelt and
edged Lucien’s body away from his daughter’s. Raphael grabbed for Aurore, to shield her.
“No!” She turned her face to his. “No! Not until you tell me what he meant!” She stared at him.
He was empty, and he couldn’t find words to answer her.
“No!” She shut her eyes and threw her head back and screamed. “No! It’s true! What he said is true!”
He found his voice on the edges of her scream. “There’s more, Aurore. More than he said. I love you. That was never a lie. And I want you and our baby!”
“Did you start the fire?”
He stared at her.
“Did you, Étienne?” She pounded his chest. “Did you?”
“You can’t understand. Not unless you know it all!”
“Did you? Answer me?”
He couldn’t.
“You did!” She drew back in horror. “And the other? Your father was a slave? Your blood is—”
He waited for her to say the word. When she couldn’t even say it, he knew that all his hopes had been foolish, and all his dreams of love had been for nothing.
He stared at her, and for the first time he saw Lucien in Lucien’s daughter.
“My father was a good man,” he said. “You’ll never be able to say the same.”
“No!” She came at him again, fists bunched, but he grabbed her hands.
“Have you forgotten you carry my child?” he asked. “The grandchild of a slave.” He gave a bitter laugh. “You carry the child of a man you’ve already learned to hate! And you’ll hate the child, too, won’t you? You’ll pass on your father’s hatred
and pride to another generation. You’ll teach our child to hate himself, the way you hate me now!”
“I won’t raise your child!” She spat at him. “I won’t have your child!”
He shoved her away. “You’d commit a mortal sin because your father told you to? You would kill your own baby?”
“This child shouldn’t be born!” she screamed.
“Ro-Ro!” Ti’ Boo stepped out of the shadows. “You don’t know what you’re saying! Come away now.”
Jules bent to help her up, but Aurore shook him off. “I won’t have your child, Étienne! I won’t!”
“You will have it, and you’ll give it to me!” He reached for her, and when Jules tried to intervene, he hit him. Jules stumbled backward.
“I will never give you anything!” she screamed.
“The child will be mine.”
“Never.” Her voice dropped, but it shook with intensity. “If you try to claim it, I’ll go to the authorities. I’ll tell them you were responsible for destroying the
Dowager.
I’ll find out about the forgery my father spoke of, and I’ll see it comes to rest at your door.”
“Ro-Ro.” Ti’ Boo took her arm. “We have to get out of here. The fire’s coming closer.” She pointed to the window.
“And if you try,” Raphael said, “then I’ll tell them that Aurore Le Danois carries my child out of wedlock, and that she’s nothing more than a woman scorned and hoping for revenge. There’s not a shred of proof I had anything to do with the fire.”
“Ti’ Boo and Jules heard you admit it!”
“No. I never admitted it.”
She whirled to search their faces and saw the truth. Ti’ Boo
shook her head and took Aurore in her arms. “We must go. Now, Ro-Ro. Jules will bring your father. But we must get out of here now!” She began to drag Aurore toward the door.
“No!” Aurore threw her head back and wailed. “No!”
Raphael watched Jules struggle with Lucien’s body. He stepped back as Jules stumbled; then he watched them disappear through the door to the stairs.
“No!”
He heard Aurore’s cry once more, and it echoed through the void inside him.
T
he convent infirmary had bare walls and a tile floor scrubbed clean each morning and evening by a postulant who moved back and forth on her hands and knees, her white robe fluttering about her. Sister Marie Baptiste had told Aurore not to speak to the postulant, not even to ask her name. Aurore had lain in silent agony each time and struggled not to inhale the fumes of the disinfectant.
She had no doubt that this was part of her penance for bearing a child out of wedlock. Five months ago the sisters had taken her in because she had paid them well and because they had been persuaded it was their Christian duty. They had given her a room, meals and endless hours of contemplation, but there had been no attempt to ease her suffering when labor finally commenced yesterday. This was something Aurore must undergo alone, and if she felt great pain, that was so much the better. Was not woman’s lot to atone for the sins of Eve? And was not Aurore’s particular lot to labor for days to bring this child into the world, a child she must then give away?
Aurore squeezed her eyelids tight and wished for death. The pain was unrelenting. There were no moments when she could escape into sleep. She had lost track of time, and there were no windows in the room to help her gauge. She had been forbidden to eat or drink as she labored, so there were no meals to mark the hours. The sisters who checked on her came and went without speaking, and when she begged for reassurance, they only told her that the baby was not yet ready to come.
Étienne had done this to her. He had taken her virginity, her wealth, her father, and her youth. He had left her with his child and marked it with his blood, so that even if Aurore had wanted it, she couldn’t keep it. Now she struggled in agony to bring into the world one more life that would have to be lived behind unimaginable barriers.
Unless the child showed no signs of its heritage.
Sweat poured onto the sheets, and despite the last sister’s warning, she kicked off the blanket that covered her. Under the best of circumstances, the windowless room would have been unbearable. In August, it was a hell of temperatures and humidity so high that water hung in the air to choke her if she cried out.
Months ago, Cleo had taken her to another room, not a room with clean white walls and a scrubbed floor, but a room with roaches that sailed like small birds from corner to corner and cobwebs that hung from ropes of herbs festooning the rafters. She had lain on another bed and smelled an abortionist’s evil stench. And she had learned that no matter how much money she had paid, no matter how much she hated Étienne Terrebonne, she could not go through with killing his unborn child.
Instead, she had turned to God. She had come to the
convent and promised that after the baby’s birth she would don the mothlike robes of a postulant and dedicate what was left of her life to cleansing her soul.
She had believed the last might be possible, but now, after hours of agony, she knew differently. She would never be free from hatred. Prayers and endless good works would change nothing. She hated Étienne Terrebonne. She would never forgive him. And if cleansing her soul meant she must forgive, then she would die uncleansed and unrepentant.
The door opened. She could not suppress a groan. The sisters were competent and thorough. They took no notice of her cries or protests, going about their business as if she were an animal in the field. She wanted to believe their presence meant the end was near, but she was afraid it was only time for another agonizing examination.
“Ro-Ro?”
She opened her eyes and saw Ti’ Boo’s face. For a moment, she thought she imagined it. “Ti’—?”
“Don’t try to talk. It’s all right now. I’ll stay with you.”
“How—?” Pain knifed through her, and she struggled against it.
“Shhh… Don’t fight so. The pain, you make it worse when you fight.”
“I can’t—” A scream escaped, despite the sisters’ stern warnings that she was not to indulge in self-pity.
“Take a deep breath and squeeze my hand.” Ti’ Boo grabbed hers and held it tight. “Someone’s coming to look at you soon. Sister Mathilde got a message to me this morning. I made her promise she would, when your time came.”
Aurore grabbed Ti’ Boo’s hand as another contraction peaked. Ti’ Boo had arranged Aurore’s stay in the convent
through her parish priest. The small brick building was on a secluded bayou, and it housed a strict, cloistered order of French-speaking nuns with few resources and even less hope for expansion. But it was close enough to Côte Boudreaux that Ti’ Boo had been able to visit twice, and far enough from New Orleans that Aurore had been confident Étienne could not track her there.
“Étienne. Have you seen Étienne?”
“He won’t find you. Ro-Ro, squeeze harder.”
“He wants this child!”
“He wants nothing but to make you unhappy.”
Tears streamed down her face and mixed with drops of perspiration. “He…has succeeded.”
Ti’ Boo wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. “I’ve found a home for the baby. A place he’ll never find it.”
“Do they know… Do they know…” She couldn’t make herself finish the sentence. Did the family know the child wasn’t white? That its father had only passed for white until discovered? Even the thought sent deep shame through her.
“They are light-skinned people of color who live on the Delta,” Ti’ Boo said. “They can’t have children, and want to raise this one.”
Aurore had a thousand questions. She hated this child’s father with the intensity with which she had once loved him. For a time, she had hated the child, too. She still hated the child’s race, if for no other reason than that it was not her own. She could escape to the North with her baby and hope that its racial heritage would never be detected. But whose face would she see looking back from the cradle? What excuses would she make as the child matured and questions were raised?
And what kind of mother could Aurore Le Danois, once the heiress to Gulf Coast Steamship, be to the grandchild of a slave?
She rested a little, trying to draw strength from somewhere to survive the next pain. “Are they…good people?”
“Of course. Would I send your child to bad?”
“What…what if the child looks white? Wouldn’t it be better…a white family?”
“It’s better that the child be what it is, Ro-Ro.” She murmured something low.
Aurore heard her. “Blood will tell.” She sobbed out the last word.
“There have been enough lies.”
Aurore knew the life to which they were dooming her child. She knew the plight of Negroes, no matter how light their skin, although she had never given it more than a passing thought. She had always been surrounded by them, nurtured and attended and advised, but she had never imagined herself tied to them in any way. Now she was to give birth to one.
And would her child suffer the humiliation of always serving and submitting to the white man and woman? Would her child forever ride in the back of a streetcar, say its rosary in the back of a church, have no voice in politics and little or nothing to say about its future? Her child, a Le Danois, no matter what the hue of its skin, the texture of its hair. Her child.
“They are good people, happy people,” Ti’ Boo assured her. “They will raise your child to be good and happy, too.”
“That’s not enough!” She gripped Ti’ Boo’s hand. In the same moment, she felt an overwhelming urge to expel the child from her body. “No!”
“What is it?” Ti’ Boo leaned over her, saw her expression, and guessed. “I’m going to get Sister Marie Baptiste. I’ll be back, Ro-Ro. I’ll be right back!”
“No!” Aurore had prayed for nothing more than this. Now she was paralyzed by fear. Until this moment, she had been able to protect her son or daughter from what lay ahead. She had felt the child grow inside her, felt her own concern grow until it overshadowed the hatred she felt for Étienne. Now she could protect it no longer.
She felt another urge to bear down, and even as she struggled against it, she knew there was nothing she could do. The baby would become the son or daughter of light-skinned strangers on the Delta. The child would be lost to her forever. She would never be allowed to protect it from a world that wished it had never been born.
“No!” But even as she screamed her final protest, the child began to emerge.
Clarissa lay quietly in the basket that the sisters had provided for her. She had cried little since her birth twelve hours ago, and she had rarely slept. She lay with her eyes open and her fists and legs waving spasmodically, as if to challenge the air she had only recently begun to breathe.
Aurore bent over her, defying the orders of Sister Marie Baptiste, who had told her not to get up or hold the infant. Clarissa was to be brought to her at regular intervals to nurse, then she was to be put back into the basket. Aurore wasn’t to look at her as she held her; she was not to attach herself to the child in any way.
Clarissa was the most beautiful baby Aurore had ever seen. Her eyes were an indeterminate color, a hazy, smoky hue that
would not be brown like her father’s or blue like her mother’s. Her skin was light, though it might darken with time, but it was not the rose-tinged white of Aurore’s. It had a warm golden tone, as if she had already been kissed by the sun. Her head was covered by a mop of brown curls, soft as a duckling’s down.
Aurore carefully lifted her new daughter and cradled her in her arms. Clarissa gazed somewhere in the direction of Aurore’s face. Aurore held her tighter. “What do you see, Clarissa? The woman who tried to kill you? The woman who doomed you to a shack on the Delta and a job in a white woman’s kitchen?”
But even as she stared at her daughter, she knew the last would never be possible. With a mother’s wisdom, she saw that Clarissa was going to be beautiful, remarkable—and therefore dangerous—in the tradition of many women of mixed blood. No white woman was going to allow her in the kitchen or any other part of her house.
Tears ran down Aurore’s cheeks. “Do you see the woman who wants to take you and fly away to some land where nothing matters except that you’re her beloved daughter?”
Aurore realized she was crying. She didn’t know how she could have tears left. She lifted Clarissa to her shoulder and cradled her there. Slowly she began to rock back and forth.
She heard a noise in the doorway, but she didn’t turn.
“You were told not to hold the child.”
Finally she did turn. Sister Marie Baptiste, covered in sweltering black, stood in the doorway. Sister Marie Baptiste, who was to have control over every minute of the rest of her life, whose every whim would be Aurore’s cross to bear until one of them met God face-to-face.
“This is my child,” Aurore said softly. “In two weeks I will
never see her again. Are you so heartless, so empty of human feeling, that you have no pity left?”
Sister Marie Baptiste didn’t answer. She dissolved into the darkness and left Aurore to wonder about the years ahead.
They had been given two weeks together, because it was deemed best for the child’s health that she be nursed that long by her mother. Aurore’s breasts had rapidly filled with milk, and each time Clarissa murmured, Aurore felt them tighten and throb unbearably until Clarissa began to suck.
She told Clarissa all the stories of her childhood. Of Ti’ Boo and the hurricane, of her
grand-père
Antoine, of her father and the proud steamship company that had been her heritage. She tried once to assure her daughter that she had been conceived in love, but the words caught in her throat. The night on the
Dowager,
other nights afterward, were the memories of another woman.
Ti’ Boo came again at the beginning of the second week, bringing Pelichere, who at eight months could negotiate Aurore’s tiny, airless room on her hands and knees. Aurore knew that Ti’ Boo meant to cheer her, but the presence of the two Guilbeau females, most content when they were only a short distance from each other, filled Aurore with despair. Ti’ Boo thought she knew the sorrow Aurore would feel when Clarissa was taken from her. But she had no idea how distraught Aurore felt already.
Nor did she know the hatred Aurore felt for Clarissa’s father. Each day she hated him more; each moment she grew closer to his child, she found herself wishing harder for revenge. His heritage separated her from her child. He had destroyed her future, and now it was to be spent behind the
suffocating walls of a convent, with only the torpid waters of a bayou to remind her of the river her family had ruled and the life that had been taken from her.
Only one glimmer of light pierced the darkness of those weeks, Étienne’s vow that he would raise their child. Aurore had stayed in New Orleans long enough to see her father buried and to be certain that Tim Gilhooley had the legal authority to salvage what he could from the catastrophe that had befallen Gulf Coast. Then she had begun a circuitous journey to the convent, crossing and recrossing her own path until anyone who followed would be hopelessly lost.
If Étienne knew where she was, he would have appeared by now. His absence was proof that she had bested him. He would never see their daughter, much less have a voice in her future. She only wished that she could face him and tell him that in this, if nothing else, she had won.
On the evening before Clarissa was to be taken to the Delta, Aurore prepared herself for prayers in the chapel. Tomorrow she would give up her child. Next week, in a ceremony as old as the order itself, she would give up her freedom. She wanted to pray for understanding, to beg that the poison draining through her would one day abate.
She had prayers to say for Clarissa, too. She would say them each day for the rest of her life. Blessed Jesus, let Clarissa find peace and happiness. Blessed Mary, watch over her always. Blessed Father, let my daughter know that her mother loved her and did the best she could.
Clarissa was asleep when Aurore left their room. Aurore had just nursed her daughter, rocking her slowly afterward until her tiny eyes closed. Compline had ended. Since her confrontation with Sister Marie Baptiste, no one had
demanded her attendance at scheduled devotions. But she knew that when Clarissa was gone, the demands would begin and never diminish.