CHAPTER FIVE
January turned, and the house changed.
It began with the linen. Laurell came upon Mrs. Curry in the hall with an armful of tablecloths and a face like thunder over a laundry maid’s scorching, and by some instinct older than manners she found herself sorting the ruined from the salvageable on the dining room table, and then reorganizing the press, and then, three days later, going over the household accounts because Mrs. Curry had mentioned in passing that the fish man was cheating them and she couldn’t prove it.
She could prove it. It took her one afternoon and a column of figures, and when she laid the page in front of Mrs. Curry, the housekeeper looked at her with an expression bordering on love.
“Eleven dollars since November,” Mrs. Curry breathed. “I’ll have his ears.”
“You might simply pay him what he’s owed and tell him you know.”
“I’d rather have his ears.”
After that it was everything. The menus.
The candles, which were being bought at a shameful price.
The upstairs maid who was being worked half to death because no one had ever assigned the third floor to anybody.
Laurell had run her mother’s house since she was seventeen—it was the only thing she had ever been praised for—and she fell on Remy Vincent’s neglected household like a woman coming home.
She told herself it was to earn her keep. It was very nearly true.
There were bad mornings. She was ill three days out of five now, wretchedly and reliably, and Mrs. Curry brought dry toast and weak tea to the pink room before dawn without ever once being asked, and never said a word about it in front of the master.
Laurell was grateful beyond expressing. It was the one part of her condition she could still pretend belonged to her alone.
She was wrong about that, as it turned out.
“I’ve asked Dr. Lasalle to call on Thursday,” Remy said at dinner, in the tone of a man mentioning the weather.
Her fork clattered. “You’ve what?”
“He’s discreet, he’s expensive, and he attended my sister-in-law through four confinements in Baton Rouge. He is also seventy-one and entirely deaf on the left side, which I’m told improves his discretion further.”
“Remy—”
“You have been sick every morning for a fortnight,” he said, “and you have lost weight rather than gained it, and I have no earthly idea whether that is ordinary or alarming, and neither do you, and neither does Mrs. Curry, though she has opinions.” He returned to his soup.
“So a doctor will come and tell us, and then we may all stop pretending we haven’t noticed. ”
Laurell sat with her face burning and something enormous swelling behind her ribs.
“He’ll want to know who I am.”
“He’ll be told you are my ward’s cousin, recently widowed, staying with me while your affairs are settled.” Remy glanced up. “You’re a Mrs. Devereaux. Try to remember it; I invented you in a hurry.”
“And when the child comes and there’s no Mr. Devereaux in the churchyard?”
“Then we shall have been found out by a deaf man of seventy-one,” Remy said, “and I shall bear it.”
Dr. Lasalle came on Thursday and pronounced her healthy, underfed, and roughly nine weeks along, and told her briskly that the sickness would pass by spring and that she was to eat red meat and stop climbing stairs at a run.
He shook Remy’s hand in the hall on the way out and said something Laurell couldn’t hear, and Remy said, “Yes,” in a peculiar voice, and did not come in to dinner for half an hour.
Nine weeks. A date, now. A month with a name in it: August.
That night Laurell lay in the dark with her hand flat on her own stomach, where there was still nothing at all to feel, and thought: you have a doctor.
Remy stopped going into Storyville on the second Tuesday in January.
He did not decide it. There was no moment at which he sat down and resolved upon virtue; he simply came out of a late meeting at the Cotton Exchange, saw his own carriage waiting at the curb, and heard himself tell Beaudry to go home.
He had been going down twice a week for eleven years. It had been, if he was honest, less about appetite than about the hour between eleven and midnight, when the house was quiet and there was no one in it.
The house was not quiet now. There was a woman in it who argued with the fish man and had opinions about candles, who read the paper before he came down and left it folded to the municipal news with a small pencil mark beside anything about him, who had put a bowl of camellias on the hall table, of all the ridiculous things, in January.
By the third week the servants had noticed.
He caught Winston and Mrs. Curry breaking off a conversation in the butler’s pantry with the guilty synchrony of two people who have been discussing their employer for some time.
Beaudry began polishing the carriage lamps on Tuesdays out of sheer disappointment.
And there was the letter, which had come on the fifteenth, on heavy cream paper, in a hand he knew.
My dear Mayor Vincent,
Six months is a very long time, and I find myself concerned for your health. My door is of course closed to you by the terms of your own contract, but I trust you have found the girl satisfactory. Should she prove otherwise, you will recall there are no refunds.
I have been asked after her twice. I have said nothing, naturally.
Yr obedient servant, G.
Remy had read it three times and thrown it in the fire, and the phrase that stayed with him was not the threat. It was asked after her twice.
He said nothing to Laurell about the letter.
He said nothing to Laurell about a great many things now, which was itself the trouble.
He came home earlier than he had in a decade.
He listened to her tell him about the household accounts as though they were a matter of state, and asked questions, and once found himself explaining the entire ward system of the city to her over the port because she had asked why the Sixth always voted together, and she had listened with her chin on her hand and then told him, quite seriously, that the drainage contracts were being let to the same three families and he ought to look at it.
He had looked at it. She was right.
“I don’t know how to explain to my council,” he told her, “that this came to me from a woman who’s not supposed to exist.”
“Then tell them it came to you in a dream.”
“They’d believe it. Half of them believe in ghosts.”
She laughed easily now. He had done that, and was disgracefully proud of it. She reached to refill his glass, and he watched her hands and thought, with the clear and simple terror of a man watching a levee go: I am in love with her, and I have no right to be.
It was a Thursday when Laurell finally asked.
They were in the library. The fire had burned down and the clock had struck eleven some while ago, and Remy had a report on his knee that he had not turned a page of in twenty minutes.
“Remy. May I ask you something impertinent?”
“You may ask. I make no promises.”
She kept her eyes on her sewing. “You don’t go out anymore.”
The report went still.
“In the beginning you went out two nights in the week,” she said.
“I heard the carriage. I used to lie awake and listen for it coming back, and tell myself it was none of my concern, which it isn’t.
And then it stopped.” She looked up. “Mrs. Curry says you haven’t been to Storyville since Twelfth Night. She says it as though I’m responsible.”
“Mrs. Curry talks a great deal.”
“Is it because of me?” Her voice was quite level. “Because if you have stopped on my account—if you feel you can’t, with me under your roof—then I would rather you went. I couldn’t bear to be the reason for—” She stopped and started again. “I have taken enough from you. I won’t take that too.”
Remy set the report aside.
“It isn’t on your account,” he said. “Not in the sense you mean.”
“Then in what way?”
He should have lied. He had spent twenty years in public life and could lie beautifully, and sitting there in his own library he found he couldn’t do it.
“I stopped,” he said, “because I don’t want another woman.”
The needle stopped.
The room was suddenly so quiet that Remy could hear the settling of the coals, and he watched her set the sewing down on the arm of the chair with enormous care. She had put down her fork with that same care the night he asked for Marchand’s name.
“Say it again,” Laurell said.
“Laurell—”
“Please.”
He stood, because sitting had become impossible. “I don’t want another woman. There. You may do as you like with it.”
She rose too. She came across the hearthrug and stopped in front of him, close enough that he could see the pulse going in her throat, and Remy put his hands behind his back like a schoolboy because he did not trust them.
“I have been so frightened of you,” she said.
That went into him like a knife. “Laurell—”
“Not of you. Of the arrangement.” Her fingers twisted in her skirt.
“That first night, I lay in that bed and looked at the door between our rooms and thought, he has bought me, and if he comes through that door there is nothing on earth I can do about it. And you never came. Not once. And every day since then you have found new ways of handing me back to myself—the dresses, and the doctor, and the accounts, and as long as you want.” Her voice shook.
“Do you know what that has done to me? I would rather you had been a monster. A monster I could have survived.”
“I want you to be safe,” Remy said. “That is the whole of what I want.”
“It isn’t.” She lifted her chin. “Is it?”
“No,” he said. “God help me. It isn’t.”
And Laurell Beaumont, who had been sold twice and told once, in a garden on Prytania Street, exactly what her body was worth to a man in a hurry, put both hands flat against his chest, went up on her toes, and kissed him.
It was clumsy. She was trembling and she missed his mouth by a fraction and had to try again, and Remy stood absolutely rigid for the space of two heartbeats. Then he gave in.