Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09

Charlotte,

I know I’ll probably never be able to make it up to you and your family—my family—for what I did to you and the Hotel Marchand back in New Orleans, but somehow I’m going to try. That’s why it’s important to me to keep in touch with you.

I think our grandmother Celeste meant to punish me by sending me out here to Cajun country, but even she’s got to be happy with the way things are going. Her old Creole cottage, La Petite Maison, is now a beautiful B and B with paying guests. I never thought of myself as a small-town innkeeper, but I have to admit, the village of Indigo is growing on me. You’d love the little opera house the locals are hoping to restore, and you can’t beat the turtle soup and gumbo. There are some real characters in the town, but I have to admit, their friendliness is still something I’m not used to. The only one who looks at me with suspicion is Alain Boudreaux, the chief of police, but since he knows my past, I can hardly blame him. Let me know how you and your sisters are doing, and give my love to Aunt Anne. One day I’ll make you proud to have me in the family.

Luc

Dear Reader,

Marian and I live nearly a thousand miles north of Indigo, Louisiana, but the town itself is very familiar to us. It is filled with hardworking men and women to whom family and country mean a great deal. Neighbors look out for each other and rejoice in the good times and comfort each other during the bad ones.

But even the residents of an idyllic small town like Indigo have to face the realities of life in the twenty-first century—including the high cost of health care and prescription drugs.

That’s why chief of police Alain Boudreaux’s mother and grandmother decide, with the help of a few friends, to begin smuggling their medications across the border from Canada. It saves everyone a bundle of money and isn’t really
too
illegal. The plan works fine until Sophie Clarkson, Alain’s first love, arrives back in town to settle her godmother’s estate and stumbles onto the scheme.

Then all heck breaks loose.

Won’t you please join us in Indigo and…
laissez les bons temps rouler!

Carol and Marian

Indigo, Louisiana, January, 1900

A
MELIE
V
ALOIS
stood in the cold, misting rain of the late-January afternoon and looked at the beautiful little opera house her Alexandre had built for her so many years before. She lifted the heavy silk veil that had shielded her from the curious eyes peering from behind lace curtains across the square. What did it matter if strangers saw her tears? She cried for him, for herself, for the loneliness of the years she’d spent without him.

Alexandre Valois, her husband, her lover. Dead of a nameless fever in a Yankee prison camp, nearly forty years in his grave. He would be an old man now, as she was an old woman, no longer the dashing young Creole gentleman who had swept her off her feet and married her, against the wishes of his wealthy family, and her own, oh, so long ago.

She lifted her long wool skirts and accepted the hand of the rail-thin black man who stood waiting patiently at the carriage door. “
Merci,
Titus,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Miss Amelie.” As a boy Titus Jefferson had been a slave on her in-laws’ indigo plantation. Now he owned a livery stable on property that he had once labored on. Not all the changes time wrought were bad ones, she reminded herself.

She tilted her head to look at the building, designed for her husband by the famous New Orleans architect, James Gallier, Jr. The whimsical copper weathervane still graced the pinnacle of the cupola on the roof; the brickwork was in good repair; the cypress pillars that supported the wrought-iron balcony freshly whitewashed. The glass panes of the huge carriage lamp that hung above the carved double doors were polished, gleaming fitfully in the gray afternoon light. “It looks good, Titus.”

“Yes, ma’am. The Lesatzes, they take good care of it. Bring in some money for the town, too. Had two revival meetings here last year with a preacher man out of Baton Rouge. So many people came that every spare room for three miles ’round was rented out. And they’re talking about a Vaudeville troop coming all the way down from Chicago come spring.”

“Vaudeville?” She looked up into his dark, leathery face with a wry smile. “Oh, dear. Well, at least there will be music.”

“Just like the old days when you used to sing here, Miss Amelie. I remember all us field hands listening outside when the windows was open. You sure did have a nice voice, Miss Amelie. Like an angel singin’. I sure would like to hear you sing again.”

“I’m afraid my singing days are past, Titus. But thank you for remembering.”

“Do you want to go inside now?”

She laid her arm on his and stepped heavily from the carriage. Even the short walk to the three shallow steps that spanned the width of the pillared entry exhausted her. The opera house was a small building, not much larger than St. Timothy of the Bayou Catholic Church, across the grassy town square, where generations of her family had been baptized and married and, in the fullness of time, buried in the cemetery behind the church.

Alexandre was there, waiting for her.

Titus opened the heavy carved door and she stepped into the lobby. It needed paint, she could see that even in the watery light. And the scars from Yankee boots on the wide plank floors had never been repaired. The Lesatzes were good managers, but she couldn’t provide them with the resources Alexandre and his family had enjoyed before the War of Northern Aggression, as she still thought of the conflict that had torn apart the country of her birth.

Once more Titus preceded her as she entered the auditorium with its faded velvet seats, removed and hidden during the war, on either side of a central aisle leading to the stage. She was glad she had been able to hang on to the opera house through the lean years. She looked up at the two small gilded boxes on either side of the stage, reached by narrow balconies connected to matching staircases situated to the right and left of the doors.

“My
maman
will not sit with hoi polloi,” Alexandre had laughed when Amelie, her practical Acadian soul shocked at the expense, had protested the extravagance of their construction. And he had been right. The few times Josephine Valois had deigned to attend one of her daughter-in-law’s performances, for friends and family, never the public, she had indeed sat in the small gilt chairs that graced the boxes, in regal and solitary splendor.

It hadn’t mattered to Amelie, then. Not Josephine’s coldness, not her own family’s disappointment that she had married away from their close-knit Acadian community. Nothing else had mattered when she had Alexandre. Even the ache of no babies of her own was kept at bay when he was at her side.

But then war had come. The invading Yankees had turned the opera house into a hospital, commandeering the plantation house for their headquarters, displacing the womenfolk to La Petite Maison, a cypress cottage on the Bayou Teche. Amelie had not minded returning to the simpler life she’d known as a girl, but the shock and humiliation had nearly killed Josephine Valois.

The war was almost over when word came that Alexandre was dead, and with that devastating news, for Amelie, everything changed. Her in-laws resented her, blamed her for Alexandre’s death because she had given him no sons, no reason to stay out of the conflict. Her own parents were broken by the loss of their farm in the aftermath of the war. Her brothers had died in the fighting; her sister, also left widowed, had three young children to raise alone. When, at the urging of distant cousins, they all decided to move to Acadie—Nova Scotia, as it was called in the newly formed country of Canada—Amelie went, too.

Later, after they had lost the plantation, Josephine and Henri Valois and their surviving son and daughter had followed. The years passed, her family prospered once more. Amelie took comfort in her nieces and nephews and returned to Indigo from time to time when she could bear to be parted from her love no longer. Lately the longing had been even stronger, urging her to undertake a winter journey her relatives and her doctor all cautioned against.

Her breathing was still labored and shallow. She didn’t attempt to mount the stage. Instead she handed the pale-cream camellia that she had kept sheltered near her heart to Titus. “Will you put this on the stage for me, old friend?”

“Of course, Miss Amelie. My, this is a pretty one. Just like the ones Mr. Alexandre always gave you to wear in your hair before you sang.”

“Yes, Titus.” She watched him walk forward to place her token to a lost love on the stage. In her mind she could hear all the wonderful music that had been performed in this building in those happier times: Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, traditional Acadian ballads, classic French opera, the village children singing Christmas carols, even, daringly, Negro spirituals. She and Alexandre had loved them all.

As she still loved him. “Let’s go, Titus,” she said, warmed and strengthened by her memories. “I want to visit my husband’s grave before darkness falls.”

“Yes, Miss Amelie, we’ll do just that. I expect Mr. Alexandre, he’ll be right glad to see you again.” Once more he offered his arm, leading her out of her opera house for the last time.