CHAPTER EIGHT
Madam Giselle received him in the front room at half past seven, in garnet silk, with the air of a woman who had been expecting him for some while.
“Mayor Vincent.” She smiled. “You’ve come a long way for a man forbidden the premises by his own contract.”
“Where is she?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
Remy crossed the room, took hold of the back of the chair on either side of her, and leaned down until his face was a foot from hers.
He had never in his life frightened a woman. He discovered that he did not much care.
“Eleven years,” he said. “Eleven years I have come through that door and paid your prices and told myself I was a decent man because I was polite about it. I have made you rich. I have kept the police off your steps. When Alderman Delahoussaye wanted this district cleaned out in ’93, it was my hand that stopped him.
” His voice never rose. “You have four hundred dollars of Abelard Gauthier’s money and a girl of two-and-twenty in a locked room somewhere in this parish, and she is carrying a child, and if she is harmed, I will take everything you have.
Not the house. Everything. The lease on the property, the licenses, the man who does your books, the police protection, the aldermen you pay, the mortgage the Hibernia Bank holds on this building—every last one of which I can reach by Friday, and every last one of which I will, and I will do it in public, and I will enjoy it. ”
Giselle’s smile had gone. Her eyes, which had always been cold, were now merely careful.
“And if I tell you?”
“Then you get nothing,” Remy said. “No favor, no promise, no protection. I am done buying your goodwill. Whatever happens tonight, I am going to spend the rest of my time in office making it impossible for you to purchase another girl from another drunkard in this city. That is not a threat, madam. That is a program.”
“Then why on earth should I help you?”
“Because Gauthier made a fool of you,” Remy said, “in your own house, over four hundred dollars, and you have never forgiven anything in your life.”
For a moment the woman was absolutely still.
Then Madam Giselle made a low, unpleasant sound that was very nearly admiration, and reached for the bell.
“The Marais Street house,” she said. “Third from the corner, blue shutters, boarded above. It’s leased in his son’s name, which I have always thought said everything about the man—and the boy doesn’t know the half of what it’s used for.
He keeps it for the sort of evening he can’t have at home.
” She paused. “She was alive at four o’clock.
He sent Cobb round for a woman to sit with her, which I did not supply, and I will tell you why—because I sell women to men who use them and I have never once in twenty years sold one to a man who breaks them, and Abelard Gauthier breaks them. ”
“That distinction,” Remy said, “is worth precisely nothing.”
“I know it,” said Madam Giselle. “Get out of my house.”
The key turned at half past eight.
Laurell was standing behind the door with the chair held up by two legs and her heart going like a bird in a box. She had rehearsed it forty times. Wait for the door to swing. Swing at the head. Then the stairs, then the street, and scream the whole way.
The door swung. She swung with it, and the chair connected with something and there was a shout, and then a hand caught the chair and wrenched it out of her grip so hard her shoulder tore.
“Little cat,” said Abelard Gauthier, from the corridor, holding his cheek. He looked at the blood on his fingers with an expression of pure astonishment. “Cobb, get the—”
Downstairs, the front door came off its hinges.
It was a sound Laurell felt in her teeth: an enormous splintering crash, then men’s voices, a great many of them, and Cobb’s heavy tread going away down the corridor at a run, and someone below bellowing “Police!”
Gauthier moved with extraordinary speed for a man of fifty. He had her wrist before she could get back through the door, and he dragged her out onto the landing at the top of the stairs, and she went down on one knee and heard her sleeve tear at the shoulder.
“Laurell!”
She would remember, ever afterward, that she knew his voice before she saw him.
Remy was halfway up the stairs with a lamp somebody had thrust at him, and behind him were Chief Willauby and two constables, and behind them was James Kilnworthy with a pistol he plainly had no intention of using and every intention of showing.
Remy’s coat was open and his hair was wild and he looked nothing whatever like the mayor of New Orleans.
He looked, Laurell thought dizzily, like a man who had driven a gig through Storyville himself.
“Stay where you are,” Gauthier said.
Everyone stopped.
He had Laurell’s arm twisted up behind her, and he had backed them both against the landing rail, and she could feel it shift against her hip. Below, the hall was full of men and lamplight.
“You’ve nothing,” Gauthier said. “You understand that. A girl in a house. Whose house? A house on a lease in my son’s name, in a district where nobody sees anything.
She walked out of the mayor’s home this morning of her own free will—I daresay there’s a letter to prove it—and if she says otherwise, she is a whore out of Giselle’s who was bought and paid for, and I will say so, from a witness box, in the newspapers, with names and dates and the sum on the bank draft.
” He was breathing hard. “You know what that story does to you, Vincent. You have known it since Tuesday. Now put down the lamp and let me pass, and you can have her, and the whole thing goes quiet forever.”
There was a silence.
Laurell looked at Remy through the tangle of her own hair and thought, with perfect calm: he has an election in the autumn, and the newspapers love him, and he built all of it out of nothing, and I will not blame him for what he does next.
“No,” Remy said.
“Think, man.”
“I have thought about nothing else since eleven o’clock this morning.
” Remy set the lamp down on the stair, very deliberately, and straightened.
“Print it. Every word. Tell them the mayor of New Orleans went into Madam Giselle’s house in December and paid eight hundred dollars for a woman, because it is true, and because I would do it again tomorrow for eight thousand.
” His voice carried, and every man in the hall below went still.
“Tell them I put her in my own home, in the family wing, where I could see that no one touched her. Tell them she is expecting a child that is not mine, and that I do not care, and that I intend to give that child my name if its mother will have me. Tell them the whole of it, Gauthier, and add whatever you like, because there is not one thing you can say about me in a newspaper that I would trade for one hair on her head.”
Nobody moved.
“You’ll lose the city,” Gauthier said.
“Then I lose the city.” Remy took one step up.
“I am forty years old and I have been mayor for six of them, and I have spent twenty-one of those years guarding everything I built because I was too damned afraid to want anything else. She is worth every last bit of it. And you—” another step “—are a man holding a pregnant woman over a stair rail in front of the chief of police, and if you do not let go of her arm in the next two seconds I will throw you down these stairs myself and let the newspapers print that.”
“There’s also,” Chief Willauby said mildly, “the matter of the lease.”
Gauthier’s head turned.
“Marais Street. Third from the corner.” Willauby came up two steps, unfolding a paper with the leisurely satisfaction of a man who had waited eleven years for exactly this evening.
“Which is in the name of your son, Mr. Etienne Gauthier, who came to my office at five o’clock this afternoon entirely of his own accord, and gave a statement, and then gave me the key.
” He looked up. “He asked me to tell you he’s sorry.
I promised I would. Personally I thought it was more than you deserved. ”
Something went out of Abelard Gauthier then—Laurell felt it in the hand around her wrist, a slackening, like a rope losing tension—and in that half second she wrenched free and stumbled forward, and Remy came up the last three stairs and caught her against his chest.
She heard the constables go past them. She heard Gauthier begin to say something about his solicitor, and Willauby say something dry in return, and she did not attend to any of it, because Remy Vincent had both arms around her and his face in her hair and was saying her name over and over like a man who had forgotten every other word in the language.
“You’re hurt.”
“My shoulder. It’s nothing—Remy, it’s nothing.”
“Your sleeve is torn.” He was running his hands over her arms, her face, as though checking a child after a fall. “Did he—”
“No. No, nobody touched me.” She was shaking so badly now that her teeth chattered. “I hit him with a chair.”
Remy stopped.
“You hit Abelard Gauthier,” he said, “with a chair.”
“I had eleven paces and one chair and I made a plan,” Laurell said, and burst into tears.
He picked her up. She was not a small woman, and he carried her down the stairs of that house and out into the wet street as though she weighed nothing at all, past a knot of constables, past the fair-haired man Cobb sitting on the step in handcuffs looking sullen and rather relieved, past a young reporter from the Picayune who had followed the police wagon and was writing so fast his pencil tore the paper.
At the carriage, Remy turned around with her still in his arms.
“Get it right,” he told the reporter. “Her name is Miss Laurell Beaumont. She is not a whore and she never was. She is the finest woman in this city and I have loved her since the second week of January.”
Then he put her into the carriage, and told Beaudry to take them home.
IT was past eleven before the house was quiet.
Mrs. Curry had wept into her apron and then thrown herself into a frenzy of hot bricks and hot broth.
Josie had been sent for a fresh nightgown, and then for a second lamp, and then for nothing at all, simply because Mrs. Curry could not stop giving orders.
Dr. Lasalle was hauled out of his bed at ten o’clock, pronounced the shoulder wrenched and not dislocated and the patient frightened, chilled, and perfectly sound, and told Laurell to eat something, and went home.
James and Lilian came and stayed an hour. Lilian sat on the edge of the bed in the pink room and held Laurell’s good hand and did not say a single wise or comforting thing, which was exactly right.
“Ann saw you from the window,” she said. “She was over the sill and up the stairs shrieking before the carriage turned the corner. That child has saved two women in three months and she is nine years old, and James has given her a raise she cannot possibly spend.”
Laurell laughed, and then cried a little, and Lilian sat with her until she stopped.
At last the house emptied.
Laurell lay propped against the pillows in the room that had been Mary Vincent’s, with a lamp turned low and her shoulder strapped and a cup of Mrs. Curry’s broth going cold on the nightstand, and listened to the man in the next room not going to bed.
He had not come in. He had not so much as looked in at the door since he carried her upstairs.
She looked at the connecting door for a long time.
Then Laurell Beaumont pushed back the covers, got out of bed, crossed the room, and slid the bolt back.