CHAPTER FOUR
The first sign came from Alderman Delahoussaye, who cornered Remy in the corridor outside the council chamber with the air of a man doing a great favor.
“A word, Mr. Mayor. As a friend.” Delahoussaye was sixty and pink and had never in his life been anyone’s friend. “There’s talk.”
“There always is.”
“They’re saying you’ve installed a woman in the house. Your own house, mind, not the Storyville place.” He lowered his voice with obvious relish. “Young. A brunette. Bought out of Giselle’s.”
Remy allowed a beat of silence to stretch, which was a trick he had learned early and used often.
“And?”
“And it’s an election year,” Delahoussaye said.
“A gentleman’s arrangements are a gentleman’s business, but there’s a difference between discretion and a young woman coming down your front steps in a new coat where the whole street can count her.
” He spread his hands. “Set her up on Basin Street like a Christian.”
“Thank you,” Remy said, “for your interest in my household,” and walked into the chamber, and did not hear a word of the drainage report.
It was worse than he’d let himself expect and precisely what he should have expected.
Servants talked. Tradesmen talked. Mrs. Stratmore was discreet, but Mrs. Stratmore had two apprentices and a delivery boy.
A driver had brought a woman from Giselle’s door to his own at eleven o’clock at night, and men had been standing on that street corner, and half of them had known his carriage on sight.
He had been mayor for six years. He had known exactly how this worked for all six of them, and he had done it anyway, and the strange thing—the thing he examined all the way home in the cold—was that he could not make himself regret it.
He was still turning it over when he came through his own front door and heard a woman’s voice in the front parlor.
It was not Laurell’s.
Winston was hovering in the hall with the stricken expression of a man who had been outmaneuvered on his own ground.
“Sir. A Miss Beaumont called for—for our guest. She was most insistent, and she gave the name of the family, and I couldn’t well leave her standing in the street—”
Remy handed over his hat and coat. “How long?”
“Ten minutes, sir.”
“Bring tea,” Remy said. “Slowly.”
He crossed the hall to the parlor door, which stood ajar, and something in the pitch of the voices stopped him with his hand raised.
“—positively wild, Laurell. Mother took to her bed for a week. Do you know what it has been like for me?”
“I can imagine.”
“You cannot. Everyone knows. The Bergerons didn’t invite us at Christmas. Marie-Claire says her mother won’t have my name on a card until it all dies down, and it will not die down while you are living in the mayor’s house in a green wool dress.”
Through the gap in the door Remy could see a slice of the room: Laurell on her feet by the mantel, very straight, and a young woman in blue perched on the edge of the settee.
Golden ringlets. A pretty, pointed face.
Not much past seventeen, and already possessed of a voice that could take the paint off a wall.
“Papa has said he’ll take you back.”
There was a silence.
“He hasn’t,” Laurell said.
“He has. I begged him and he has, and you might at least sound grateful.” Fabric rustled.
“There are conditions, naturally. You can’t come home like—like that.
Mrs. Aucoin knows a woman on Rampart Street.
It’s perfectly common; the Fontenot girl did it two summers ago and she was married by the following spring and no one says a word. ”
Remy’s hand closed on the doorframe.
“No,” Laurell said.
“Or the other way, if you insist on being squeamish. Papa would send you to Aunt Odile’s at Bayou Lafourche until it’s over, and there are people who take them, Laurell, there are places, and afterward you would simply have been in the country for your health and it would be as though none of it ever—”
“Rachel. No.”
“Then what do you imagine is to become of you?” Rachel’s voice rose, and lost every scrap of its coaxing sweetness.
“Do you think he’ll keep you? Do you think a man like that keeps a woman who’s already spoiled and swelling with another man’s brat?
He’ll have his amusement and put you out by summer, and then where will you go?
Back to Giselle’s, and this time Papa won’t even get paid for it. ”
“Perhaps.”
“You always did this. Always so quiet and so good and so pitiable, and everyone forever asking after poor patient Laurell—well, look at you now.” A laugh, high and unlovely.
“You may as well have handed me the whole city. Do you know Philip’s mother stopped me in the street to say how sorry she was for our family?
Sorry for us. And I stood there and I let her, and I smiled, because that is what one does when one’s sister has ruined everything. ”
“You smiled when Papa signed the paper, too,” Laurell said quietly.
The silence went on a beat too long.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I was standing in the doorway of the front room. Madam Giselle had her back to me and Papa was writing, and you were by the window, and you smiled, Rachel. You looked at me and you smiled, because it wasn’t going to be you.”
“You had ruined yourself,” Rachel hissed. “Why should it have been me?”
Remy pushed the door open.
Both women turned. Laurell’s face was white to the lips; the girl on the settee sprang up, and in the space of a breath rearranged herself into something charming and distressed.
“Mayor Vincent. Forgive me—I’ve come about my poor sister; the family is frantic—”
“Winston,” Remy said, without raising his voice. “Miss Beaumont’s carriage.”
Rachel blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You may tell your father that his daughter is under my roof and under my protection, and that if any member of your family sets foot on my step again I will have the police chief explain to them personally what the law has to say about selling a woman to Madam Giselle for the settlement of a gambling debt.” He held the door wide.
“He might find it educational. So might the newspapers.”
The pretty face curdled. “You’ve no right—”
“I have eight hundred dollars’ worth of right, Miss Beaumont, which I understand is roughly what your family thought your sister was worth. Good afternoon.”
She went. She said several things on the way out, none of them worth remembering, and the front door shut behind her hard enough to rattle the fanlight.
The parlor was very quiet.
Laurell was still standing by the mantel with one hand curled around the edge of it. She hadn’t moved at all.
“You heard,” she said.
“Most of it.”
“Then you know she’s right.” Her voice was perfectly steady, which frightened him more than tears would have.
“Not about the rest. About there being nowhere. My father is the only person in the world with any obligation to me, and his terms are that I get rid of it, and I won’t, and so I have—” She stopped.
Her chin came up, wobbled, and held. “I have no family. I’ve been telling myself for months that when it was born they’d soften.
That Mama would want to see it. And she smiled, Remy.
My sister stood in our own front room and watched him sign, and smiled, and I have been making excuses for her since we were children. ”
“Laurell.”
“I’m quite all right.”
“You’re not remotely all right.”
And then it came—not the storm he’d braced for, but something far worse: a small, wrenching sound she tried to catch behind her hand, and then her whole frame folding, and she sat down hard on the hearthrug because her legs had simply stopped.
Remy crossed the room and went down on one knee beside her, and after a moment’s hesitation that cost him something, he put his arm around her shoulders.
She turned her face into his coat and wept as though she meant to be finished with it forever, and he sat on the floor of his own front parlor with a young woman’s tears soaking through to his shirt and thought that he would have gone to Esplanade Avenue that night and beaten Philip Marchand into paste, and that he would have gone to her father’s house afterward, and that both of these things would have been enormously satisfying and of no use to her at all.
So he stayed where he was, and let her cry, and said nothing until she was done.
At last she drew back, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand, mortified. “Your coat.”
“It has survived worse.” He passed her his handkerchief. “Blow your nose.”
She did, and hiccupped. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” He waited until she looked at him. “Now listen to me, because I intend to say this once and then never again, and I want you to have it.”
Her eyes searched his face.
“You have a home,” Remy said. “Here. For as long as you want one.”
Laurell went very still.
“Not until I find somewhere to put you,” he said.
“Not until the child comes and other arrangements can be made. Not until it becomes inconvenient, or the aldermen grow restless, or Giselle sends her man round with a letter.” He held her gaze.
“As long as you want. If that is thirty years, then it is thirty years, and my staff will simply have to become accustomed to you.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“I have been called a great many things in my life,” Remy said. “Sentimental has never once been among them. I don’t say things I don’t mean; I haven’t the temperament for it.”
She stared at him, and he watched something move behind her eyes that he did not, at that moment, have the sense to identify.
“Why?” she whispered.
Remy opened his mouth, and found that the true answer was standing there in plain view, and that he was nowhere near ready to look at it.
“Because the room was empty,” he said, “and the house is too large, and I have grown accustomed to somebody at the other end of the table.” He rose and offered her his hand. “Come. Mrs. Curry has been listening at the door for a quarter of an hour and her knees won’t take much more of it.”
There was a distinct scuffling in the hall.
Laurell’s mouth twitched, and then curved in spite of her, and she put her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet.
Later, alone in the pink room, Laurell sat on the edge of the bed with his handkerchief still balled in her fist and understood, with the cold clarity of someone watching a carriage come on and knowing she cannot get out of the road, exactly what had happened to her.
She had lost her family at three o’clock in the afternoon and stopped caring by half past four, because a man had knelt on the floor beside her and said as long as you want.
This was going to be so much worse than Philip.
Philip she had loved greedily and in a hurry, mostly for what he made her feel about herself.
This was different. This was a man who had bought her, who had signed a paper for her as though she were a horse at auction, and who had then spent every day since being scrupulously, maddeningly decent about it, and who had gone white about the mouth when she said Marchand’s name.
He was forty. He was the mayor of New Orleans. He had a dead wife he still kept a room for, and Laurell was carrying a child that belonged to a man who had laughed at her.
“Don’t,” she said aloud to the empty room. “Don’t you dare.”
Through the connecting door, she heard him moving about in the next room, and she lay awake for a long time listening.