Hagar Read Online Free

hears…
hmpf!”
    “You mean the maid?” Rose hadn’t even been
aware Livia had followed the crowd – a startling lacuna,
considering her outfit.
    “Everyone from New Orleans to Jesuit’s Bend
knows about Jèrôme Neuville buying Ariette for his wife’s maid and
then taking her as his mistress. And Leonie had to sit still for
it, that her hair was brushed and her wash-water fetched by the
woman her husband was bulling. Not that Leonie Neuville deserves
anyone’s pity, for a colder-hearted witch you’d go far to find. But
what Neuville thought would be the end of it, if not this, I can’t
imagine.”
    Rose shivered, and rubbed her arms beneath
the shabby coat. “I wonder the woman didn’t take the first chance
when her husband was absent, and get rid of the poor girl.”
    “You don’t know Jèrôme Neuville.”
    “It doesn’t sound like I want to.” Rose tried
to keep her voice light, but her mother-in-law gave her a sidelong
look from those dark, brilliant eyes.
    “No dealer with a mind to avoid a lawsuit is
going to buy from a woman whose husband is away. Likely they know that situation all too well. I’m told Leonie had the little
hussy whipped, the first time Neuville was from home, but when
Neuville came home and heard of it, he whipped his wife for it
himself, stroke for stroke, so there was nothing more heard of that . Since her land was all Mistress Leonie had to bring to
the marriage, and it was her brother-in-law who sold this place to
Arnaud before he took himself and the rest of the family off to
Georgia – and why Pauline Giffleurs thought that marrying a
jumped-up Irish American animal was a good idea in the first place
I’ll never know! – Leonie has no one really to turn to. Their
parents – hers and Pauline’s – were dead four years ago in the
cholera, and neither of those girls would give a cup of water to
the other or to anyone else to keep them from dying of thirst.”
    Livia shrugged, and Rose inwardly marvelled
at her mother-in-law’s comprehensive command of the slightest and
most recherché threads of gossip, not only in New Orleans
but evidently for a considerable distance up and down the
river.
    Still her mind returned to the charred-out
oven of that bedroom, with the torchlight throwing her shadow
before her. To the walls that were burned in some places and in
others not, to the mattress that hadn’t taken fire – wool,
probably – and the pillow that had, to the gray-and-lavender
gown that lay so unrumpled over the dead woman’s legs, while her
hands and face had been charred nearly to the bone. To the smell of
sulfur, and of nitre.
    Below the gallery, the murmur of the slaves’
voices lowered, but did not altogether cease. A child cried and was
hushed; Rose caught drifts of cane-patch French, so thick with
African words that she couldn’t distinguish what was being said. Benjamin probably could , she reflected. Even so, she could
guess what was being said. Beyond doubt, there were those among the
Belle Jour hands who wived or husbanded “abroad” to those enslaved
on Marais. Knowing the law in such cases, and aware – through
whispered extrapolation of things seen and heard at Marais when the
militia rode up – that laudanum had been found in the room, that
the fire had been deliberately set.
    When a slave killed a master, the law was
that all slaves of the household would die.
     
    *
     
    Candide Levesque was a little surprised at
Rose’s request, but wrote out for her a “pass” for a slave to
travel by night. “It is vital that word of the fire at Marais
Plantation reach the proper authorities in New Orleans by morning.”
Though she had never been a slave, for seven years she had lived on
her white father’s tiny plantation on Grand Isle, and her best
friend, Cora, had educated her in a wealth of detail about the
things slaves had to put up with and watch out for.
    Gabriel volunteered to go, mounted on one of
the Belle Jour riding-mules and openly