The Creole Princess (5 page)

Determined to pass along the benefit of her expensive education, she tried to convince the young mothers she met socially that their children would make more capable artisans, businessmen, fishermen,
citizens
, if they knew at least the basics of arithmetic, reading, and writing. To her joy, her little class had grown to the point that they must soon look for a bigger room.

Until then, she must find ways to contain the chaos.

She had just written “decision” in her best copperplate when footsteps sounded on the steps outside. Someone was early today, she thought, glancing over her shoulder. Probably nine-year-old Emée Robicheaux, precocious and hungry for learning. Daisy could hardly keep up with her requests for more books to read. She’d had to ask Lyse to start bringing books from her grandfather’s magnificent library.

But when she recognized the tall figure standing in the doorway, backlit by the morning sun, she almost dropped the chalk. “Simon!” She laid the chalk on the rail under the blackboard, dusted her hands, then the front of her dark-blue worsted dress. “What are you doing here?”

He sauntered in with his rolling gait, his usually pleasant expression replaced by something . . . odd. “I’m looking for my sister. Have you seen her?”

“Lyse?” Of course he meant Lyse, little Geneviève was only four. “Yes, she spent the night with me, but she left the house early this morning. She was going to . . .” Then it occurred to her that Simon might not know anything about Don Rafael Gonzales. She had never lied to Simon, but perhaps she shouldn’t blurt that out.

“Going where?” Now Simon was scowling, one of his famous
Lyse is in trouble
scowls. He braced himself against her desk and folded his arms.

Daisy practically worshiped the ground Simon walked on, but he could be overprotective of his little sister. “I’m so glad you came into town this morning,” she said, swishing closer to him with a smile. “I need fresh water from the spring for the children. Would you mind taking the bucket and—”

“Of course. After you tell me where Lyse is.” He wasn’t angry, at least not with her, not yet. Just implacable as only Simon could be.

Daisy had known him since she and Lyse were six and Simon was a ten-year-old miniature version of his handsome father. The day they met, shortly after her mother died, she’d been trailing behind her bewildered, grieving father in the Emporium. The Lanier children, ragged but happy, had been engrossed in racing a box turtle against a frog down a back aisle, while their beautiful mulatto mama bartered at the front of the store with Monsieur Gerard over the price of a pair of men’s stockings for her husband.

Daisy had of course instantly fallen in love with Simon and followed him around for months—until he took to jumping out at her unexpectedly from behind trees and making her cry. For a while after that, she refused to acknowledge his existence. Then on the day of her thirteenth birthday, she came upon him sitting on her back steps. He was waiting for Lyse and puzzling over a pamphlet that Reverend Garrett had left in a stack for Papa to distribute among the soldiers.

“What is this—this—nonsense?” He’d thrust the paper toward her, black eyes blazing. “
Papist idolaters
? Is that what you think of me?”

“I—I—of course not.” She shut the kitchen door, took the paper, and sat down beside Simon. She turned it over in her hand. “Where did you get this?”

“It was lying on the ground right here by the steps. Your family is Anglican, don’t try to deny it.” His voice, deepened to a
velvet rumble since the last time she’d spoken directly to him, shook with something that almost sounded like hurt. It pierced her tender heart.

“Yes, but I don’t believe everything in that pamphlet. In fact, most of it I don’t even understand. Please, Simon, you know I’m your friend—Lyse’s friend, I mean.” Afraid to look at him, she gripped her hands tight in her lap.

“Well . . . I love God just like you do. And you shouldn’t leave things like this around where they will hurt people you care about, especially if you don’t even believe it.”

She peeped at him, relieved to hear the softening of his voice, to see the calming of those stormy eyes. Lyse’s aggravating older brother had turned into a man while she wasn’t looking—harder along the jaw, leaner and bonier in body, tall enough to tower over her.

And she was thirteen now, a maiden who had just that morning put her hair up for the first time. As he stared back at her, something bloomed between them. She felt it in the heating of her cheeks, saw it in a subtle shift in his expression. He was no longer angry, just intrigued.

Now, three years later, standing in the schoolroom with her desk between them, she was fully aware of her power over him. If she wanted to distract him, all she had to do was walk a little closer, lay a hand on his wrist.

But he suddenly grinned and stood up. “No, you don’t, my lady. You will not look at me with those blue eyes and hope I forget all about what I came to find out. What mischief is my sister up to this morning?”

She gave him the pouting smile that usually got whatever she wanted. “Simon . . .”

He stared at her, unmoving.

She looked at the clock and sighed. She wasn’t going to finish the spelling list now. “It’s seven-thirty, and the children will be here
at eight. Come sit on the porch with me, and I’ll tell you about Don Rafael Gonzales de Rippardá.”

Rafa lounged back in his seat on the
Princesse
—an ancient but apparently seaworthy bateau captained by its scowling owner, Simon Lanier—and tried to convince himself that his only interest lay in ascertaining British strength along the Gulf of Mexico.

Unzaga would not be pleased at his delay. At least, not until he heard Rafa’s report of intelligence gathered during this delightful interlude with his charming little Creole maiden. That she was one of
those
Laniers was an interesting detail indeed. That she had the alluring face of a gypsy princess was a delicious fact that his commander need not know.

She sat facing him with one hand gripping the side of the boat, the black spirals of her hair coming loose to blow like silk ribbons in the wind, eyes narrowed to topaz slits against the fierce morning sun. Every so often, she would lean and point, drawing her dress so snug across her bosom that he could hardly focus on landmarks with musical names like Bay Minette, Chacaloochee Bayou, Mullet Point, and Bay Bon Secours. And then the peevish brother Simon—who had apparently discovered the proposed tour from Daisy Redmond and then raced to the pier to chaperone—would give him a warning look, reminding Rafa that he could not afford distraction.

“Señorita Lyse,” he said to divert the protective brother, “you must tell me how it is that you come to be related to the Laniers of New Orleans.”

He watched Simon Lanier’s expression shift from protectiveness to outright hostility. Where the girl’s eyes were that innocent dark gold, his were black and stony, the eyebrows slashing above an arrogant nose. His skin was baked a darker brown, the curly black hair pulled into a no-nonsense queue. The similarity between
the siblings was in the generous mouth, the design of the white teeth—which were now bared like a wolf’s fangs.

“We have nothing to do with them,” Simon Lanier said coldly. After a moment he looked away and applied himself to adjusting the sail.

Lyse leaned closer to Rafa, her hair blowing across his lips, her frown apologetic. “There is bad blood among my family.” She glanced at her brother. “It has to do with the former Louisiana governor, O’Reilly—”

“Lyse, you will not speak that man’s name.” Simon spat over the side of the boat.

“But Simon, this is unreasonable! We cannot bring back Uncle Guillaume—”

“I said, don’t speak of it! I let you bring this Spaniard onto my boat because we need his silver, but you will not divulge our private business to him. Pére wouldn’t like it.
Comprendre?
”

Lyse stared at her brother, her delicate pointed chin trembling, tears standing in her eyes. “I understand you are a big blockhead. The world is a chessboard, and King Louis got himself mated out of the game. But we who are neither black nor white still have to live here, and discourtesy will not undo what has been done.”

Simon clamped his lips together. After a moment or two he looked away and began to vigorously pole the boat away from an approaching sandbar.

Lyse met Rafa’s eyes, her expression distressed. “I beg you will overlook—”

“Please, señorita, it is of no moment.” He took her hand and gently kissed the scarred knuckles. “I have the habit of impertinent questions. My mama beats me for it daily.” When he won a small smile, he sat back, satisfied.

Maybe he hadn’t been able to coax the so-beautiful English rose into taking him about the city of Mobile. But as a substitute,
the French camellia looked to be blooming under his touch. There was no end to what she might divulge before the day was done.

Don Rafael had gone back to New Orleans, leaving Lyse to help Simon tie the boat up at the pier and wait for another ferry customer.

The very fact that she had conversed with someone who bore the title
don
caused her to look at the world differently. Before today, she had felt some of her brother’s resentment for the Spanish race. She hadn’t known her uncle Guillaume as well as Simon had, but she understood the grief his death had caused her father and her grandfather. Defending this particular Spanish gentleman, however, painted a different color on the canvas of her feelings.

She elbowed Simon, who sat beside her on the dock with feet dangling over the side, fishing pole in hand. “Simon, why do you suppose Uncle Guillaume got involved in the revolt against the Spanish but Papa didn’t?”

Simon gave her a funny look. “It was the same year Maman died, don’t you remember?”

“Maybe I’m like Papa and blocked out everything except that.”

She’d been about eight, old enough to understand that when people died, they went to heaven and never came back. Maman had been sick with something that made her beautiful café-au-lait skin turn ashy, the whites of her amber eyes the yellow of poached corn. For days she had burned in an agony of fever, twisting in her bed until the smell of the room became nigh unbearable. Papa, for one, couldn’t stand the sight of his beloved Cerise fading like a tide going out. He’d begged Grandmére Madeleine to come attend Maman, while he’d retreated to his fishing boat and a brown jug that turned him surly as a dog with a sore tail.

On that day—that horrid, endless day of defeat and sadness—Grandmére called Lyse and Simon into Maman’s room and bade
them say goodbye. Grandmére had washed and tended Maman, then changed the bedclothes, so that Maman looked like the frail, translucent shell of a sleeping angel. Simon, uncharacteristically diffident, gripped Lyse’s hand so tight her fingers ached and approached their mother with lagging steps. He’d brushed a kiss upon her brow, then backed away with his stringy young throat working. Abruptly he dropped Lyse’s hand. Releasing a guttural sob, he ran.

Lyse looked up at her grandmother, who placed a gentle hand upon her head. “Go ahead,
cher
,” Grandmére murmured. “She knows you’re here, and she won’t leave without your blessing.”

Her heart felt as if it would melt from her chest, but Lyse found courage in her grandmother’s presence. She swallowed and knelt beside the cot. “Maman,” she whispered. “I love you. I’ll take care of Papa and Simon.”

Her mother’s eyelids fluttered. “My precious girl. Strong and sweet as a rose.” A faint smile curved the blistered lips. “Listen to Grandmére. Read every . . . every book in Grandpére’s library.”

“I will.” Because she didn’t know what else to say, Lyse knelt there, praying wordlessly with tears dripping off her chin.

After a time, Grandmére touched her shoulder. “Come,
cher
. It’s time for your father to say goodbye.”

Lyse hadn’t known he was there, but as she rose and reluctantly backed toward the doorway, the strong scent of spirits overpowered the sickroom smell. She turned.

His face was awful in its grief. Pushing Lyse aside, he stumbled into the room, grabbed fistfuls of his own hair, bent double as if he were the one in death throes.