CHAPTER SIX
They were unfailingly polite to one another for nine days.
Laurell came down to breakfast. She discussed the menus. She asked after the council and he answered, and she said thank you when he passed the marmalade, and Remy would have given a year of his life to have her throw something at his head instead.
On the tenth day, Abelard Gauthier came to see him at City Hall.
Remy knew him at once, though he’d taken pains over eleven years to be in other rooms. Gauthier was a narrow, elegant man of fifty-odd with beautiful gray gloves and a way of looking at a person as though pricing an animal at market.
He did not remove his hat until he had been in the office for a full minute, and even then he did it slowly.
“Mayor Vincent. You’re a difficult man to see.”
“I’m a busy one. Sit, if you like.”
“I shan’t be long.” Gauthier sat anyway, arranging himself. “I understand you’ve been enjoying the winter. A young woman in the house, they tell me. Brunette. Hazel eyes. Quite tall for a girl.”
Remy did not move a muscle.
“You’ve me at a disadvantage, sir. I don’t discuss my household.”
“No. Nor did I discuss mine, when I paid Madam Giselle four hundred dollars in October for a Beaumont girl.” Gauthier smiled. He had very good teeth. “Seventeen years old, she told me. Rachel. That is what I paid for.
“What I have learned since is that the girl in that house was two-and-twenty. That her name is Laurell. That she stood there for weeks under her sister’s name with the full knowledge of the mayor of this city.
And that the mayor of this city then bought her out from under me for eight hundred dollars. ”
The clock ticked.
“I paid Madam Giselle for a girl I never received,” Gauthier said pleasantly, “and Madam Giselle, when pressed, was very forthcoming about who had her and why. She’s a businesswoman. I’ve bought her interest in the entire matter, contract and all. She was glad to be rid of it.”
“Then you’ve bought a piece of paper with a name on it that belongs to a girl still living on Royal Street with her mother,” Remy said. “I congratulate you on your investment.”
“Yes.” Gauthier drew off one glove, finger by finger.
“That’s just it, isn’t it. Neither of those documents is worth the ink.
Mine names a person who was never delivered; yours names a person who was never sold.
I could take neither of them into a courtroom and neither could you.
” He looked up. “Which leaves us in the realm of reputation. Where I understand you have a considerable investment of your own.”
“Say what you came to say.”
“Very well.” Gauthier laid the glove across his knee.
“The mayor of New Orleans, an admitted and frequent patron of Madam Giselle’s establishment, purchased a young woman out of that house at eleven o’clock at night for the sum of eight hundred dollars and installed her not in his Storyville property, where a gentleman keeps such things, but in the family wing of his own home, in the room adjoining his bedchamber.
” He tipped his head. “Have I the details right? I’m told you had the seamstress in. ”
Remy said nothing.
“And by summer,” Gauthier went on, “that young woman will be visibly with child. And no living soul in this city will believe for one instant that the child is anybody’s but yours.
You will be a man who bought a girl out of a brothel and got her pregnant in his own house while wearing the chain of office at Mardi Gras.
” He spread his hands. “I don’t say it would finish you.
You’re popular, God knows why. But it would finish something. ”
“You’re a great deal more concerned with my career than I am.”
“I’m not concerned with it at all. I’m concerned with being made a fool of by a woman who runs a whorehouse and a man who has spent six years congratulating himself on being better than the company he keeps.
” The pleasantness had gone out of Gauthier’s voice, and what was left underneath was flat and cold and entirely without hurry. “Give her to me.”
Remy couldn’t help himself. The sound that came out of him was closer to a cough than anything else.
“No.”
“Consider it. She’s spoiled goods; she’s carrying; she can be nothing to you but a liability from this day forward.
Hand her over and there’s an end. Giselle keeps her mouth shut, I go quietly, and you go on being the most beloved man in this city.
” He shrugged one shoulder. “Refuse, and I will tell this story in every parlor and every counting-house and every newspaper office in New Orleans, and I will tell it well. And when they’ve finished with you, they will start on her.
They always do. Do you know what this city does to a fallen girl once it has a name for her? ”
“I know precisely what it does,” Remy said. “I have watched it do it for twenty years and said nothing, which is a thing I intend to spend the rest of my life making up for. You may go.”
Gauthier drew his glove back on.
“You’re a sentimental man,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I hadn’t heard that about you.”
“Neither had I. It’s been a remarkable winter.”
“I’ll ruin you both.”
“Get out of my office.”
At the door, Gauthier paused. “You know, I don’t particularly want the girl. I never did. I want what I paid for, and I want the man who took it from me to understand what that costs.” He settled his hat. “It’s a small distinction. I find it makes me a great deal harder to bargain with.”
He put his hat on and left.
Remy sat alone in the office for a long while, staring at the door.
Something Willauby had said the previous winter came back to him—that Abelard Gauthier had a grown son who was nothing whatever like his father, who had taken rooms of his own and hadn’t sat at the man’s table in above a year, and that it was a pity the promise of the one couldn’t be traded against the other.
Then his heart settled into something hard and steady, and an idea began to form that would, in the space of six hours, be the worst thing he ever did.
BECAUSE there was, of course, an answer. There had been an answer since the first week, and he had been circling it for a month like a man walking around a fire he didn’t dare warm his hands at.
If she were his wife, there was nothing Gauthier could do.
Gauthier had no claim on her now and would have none then—that had never been the danger.
But a wife had a name that wasn’t Beaumont, and a home nobody could turn her out of at a whim, and a husband whose position, whatever else it did, made her socially unassailable to a man like Abelard Gauthier.
There would be talk—there would be a great deal of talk—but talk about the mayor’s wife was an entirely different animal from talk about the mayor’s purchase.
Society would count on its fingers and reach a scandalous conclusion, and society would then, within two years, decide it had always known the marriage was a love match and that the child had simply come early.
It solved everything. Every last piece of it.
Remy went home at four o’clock, an hour before he was expected, and asked Winston where Miss Beaumont was, and was told the winter parlor, and stood outside the door of it for a moment putting his argument in order. He had done the same before every close vote of his career.
That was the whole of the trouble, though he did not know it yet.
He had spent the entire carriage ride marshaling reasons, and not one second asking himself what he wanted.
“Laurell.”
She was at the small writing desk with the household books, and she rose when he came in. She had taken to wearing the dove gray, and it no longer sat quite flat at the waist.
“You’re home early. Is something wrong?”
“Sit down. There’s something we must discuss.”
She sat. He did not.
“Gauthier came to my office this morning.” He watched the blood leave her face and pressed on.
“He knows everything. The switch, the name, the money, this house. He’s bought Giselle’s interest in the whole affair, and while he has no legal claim on you worth a damn—I want you to hear that plainly, he has nothing—he can do a great deal of harm with a story. He intends to.”
“What sort of story?”
“The obvious sort. That I bought a girl out of Storyville and got her with child in my own house.” He made himself say it. “By July there’ll be no hiding your condition, and nobody in New Orleans will believe the child isn’t mine.”
Laurell’s hands folded very tightly in her lap. “Then I must go. I’ve thought so for weeks; I only didn’t know how to say it—”
“You’re not going anywhere. That’s what I’ve come to say.” Remy took a breath. “We should be married.”
There was a silence of a particular quality.
“It answers everything,” he said, and it was going wrong already but he had built the argument and he could not stop delivering it.
“Gauthier cannot touch a mayor’s wife. He has no claim on you and never had one; what he has is a story, and the story dies the day the announcement runs, because a man who marries a woman is not a man who bought one.
The talk will run six months and then run out; it always does.
Your father can make no application for you. Giselle’s paper becomes so much waste.”
She said nothing.
“The child gets a name,” Remy went on. “Not a name in a parish register with a blank beside it—a name people know, one that will get him into any school in this state. You would have the house, and an allowance in your own right, and settlements written so that nothing I have could ever be taken from you or the child, whatever became of me.” He spread his hands.
“You would be entirely secure, Laurell. For the rest of your life. It is the only arrangement I can think of that leaves you at nobody’s mercy—not mine, not Gauthier’s, not anyone’s. ”
He stopped, rather pleased, God forgive him, with how thoroughly he had covered the ground.
Laurell rose.
“No,” she said.
Remy blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“No. Thank you.” Her voice was perfectly composed and about half a degree above freezing. “It is a very generous arrangement and I am sensible of the honor. My answer is no.”
“Laurell, be sensible—”
“I have never in my life been anything but sensible; look where it has got me.” She came around the desk.
“Do you know what you have just described? A settlement. A schedule of terms, benefits, and protections, offered by a man to a woman who has no other choice, in order to solve a problem she has created for him.”
“That is not—”
“My father sold me to Madam Giselle to settle a debt.” She was counting on her fingers, and her hand was shaking.
“Madam Giselle sold me to you for eight hundred dollars. Gauthier has bought whatever was left over, and now you propose to convert your purchase into a marriage contract to keep it out of his hands, and you have stood in this room for five full minutes telling me every single reason it is a good bargain.” Her voice broke, and she dragged it back.
“And not once—not once, Remy—did you say anything about wanting me.”
Remy stood as though someone had struck him across the face with a plank.
“I won’t be bought again,” Laurell said. “Not even by a kind man. Especially not by a kind man, because I could learn to live with it, and that would be the end of me.”
“You think I don’t—” He stopped. Started over, and made it worse.
“Ten days ago I stopped in that library because I would not have you say yes to me when I hold everything you have. How can I possibly say it now? With Gauthier at the door and nowhere for you to go? You’d never know whether you meant it. Neither would I.”
“So you thought you would leave the wanting out entirely,” she said, “and offer me the terms instead. As if that were kinder.”
“I thought it was honest.”
“It was safe.” She wiped her face angrily with the back of her wrist. “You are the bravest man I know and you are a coward about exactly one thing.”
The clock ticked in the hall.
“I’ll go to the Kilnworthys,” Laurell said, quieter now. “Lilian would have me, and James would help me find somewhere, and Gauthier has nothing at all to gain from a woman nobody can find. If I’m not in this house there is no story. The mayor’s election is in the autumn.”
“Damn the election.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I have never meant anything more in my life.”
“Then you should have led with it,” Laurell said.
She walked out. At the door she stopped, without turning round, and Remy saw her hand go flat against the doorframe as though the room had tilted.
“You have been the greatest kindness that ever happened to me,” she said. “That is why I can’t take this. You’d never be able to tell the difference, afterward, between a wife and a woman you rescued. And I would spend thirty years watching you look at me and wondering.”
Then she was gone, and Remy Vincent stood alone in the winter parlor of his enormous house.
He had gone in to solve the problem of Abelard Gauthier.
It occurred to him now, far too late, standing in a room that smelled faintly of the camellias she’d cut, that he had walked in there and offered her a fortune, a name, a settlement, a house, and the protection of his office, and had not managed, in the whole of it, three syllables.
“I love you,” he said, to nobody at all.
The house did not answer.