Page 27 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Laurell, who twelve months ago had been sold to settle a card debt, looked up at Mrs. Aucoin with perfect composure and did not say a word, because she knew precisely what was standing behind her.

Remy came around the settee and took his son out of his wife’s arms.

“No,” he said, tucking the blanket back from the small furious pink face. “He favors his mother, thank God, and he has her temper, and by Easter he’ll have her way of looking at a man as though he’s said something foolish, which he generally has.” He looked up, and he smiled, and the smile did not go anywhere near his eyes. “He is my son, madam. His name is Julien Vincent. He’ll have my house and my name and my seat on the Charity Hospital board when I’m done with it, and any man or woman in this city who cares to suggest otherwise is welcome to say it to me directly, at any hour, in front of as many people as they can gather.” He shifted the baby to his shoulder. “Do have some of the punch. Mrs. Curry makes it herself.”

Mrs. Aucoin had some of the punch.

She did not stay long.

“That was unkind,” Laurell murmured, when the corner had filled up again with people determinedly discussing the weather.

“It was extremely unkind. I enjoyed it enormously.”

“You will be talked about.”

“My darling,” said Remy, “I have been talked about since the second page of the Picayune on the eleventh of February, and I won the autumn election by nine hundred votes, and the Ladies’ Benevolent Society has just made me an honorary member, and I no longer care what anybody in this city says about anything.” He kissed the top of his son’s head. “Also, three separate men told me tonight that they have always considered me a romantic. It is a burden.”

It had been a strange, full year.

Abelard Gauthier had been convicted in April and was serving eleven years, and his son had sold the Esplanade house and gone to Mobile, and Remy had written him a letter that he never showed to anybody.

Madam Giselle was still in Storyville. There was an ordinance now, passed in June after the ugliest council session of Remy’s career, and a second one coming in the spring, and a house on Camp Street with eight beds in it that Lilian Kilnworthy ran and Laurell kept the books for, where four women were currently living who had walked out of Giselle’s establishment and had somewhere to walk to. It was not enough. Remy had come to understand that it would never be enough, and that this was not a reason to stop.

Laurell had written to her mother in June. The letter had come back unopened, in a different hand, and she had sat with it in her lap for a quarter of an hour and then put it in the fire and gone to see about the linens.

She thought about them less than she would have believed possible. That was the thing nobody told you. She had spent twenty-two years being a daughter of that house, and it turned out that a family was not the people who had made you; it was the housekeeper who brought dry toast up before dawn without being asked, and the butler who opened a nursery and lied about it, and a small girl from a brothel kitchen who had climbed out a window shrieking, and a baroness who never once said a wise or comforting thing, and a man of forty who put his hand flat on your belly in the lamplight before he did anything else at all.

A card had come from England in November, forwarded twice: Lord and Lady Cresthaven send their felicitations to Mayor and Mrs. Vincent on the birth of their son. Neither of them had ever met the Cresthavens. Lilian had laughed until she cried.

By eleven o’clock the house had emptied.

The candles on the tree had been snuffed. Mrs. Curry had gone to bed under protest. Somewhere below stairs a maid was still washing glasses and singing very slightly off key, and there was a pine needle in the coffee and a smear of somebody’s icing on the parlor door and a child’s wooden horse abandoned in the middle of the hall, because Ann had brought it for Julien on the grounds that he would need it eventually.

Laurell stood in the parlor doorway with her hand resting low on her stomach, where in eight months there would be another one.

Her husband was sitting in the chair by the fire with his son asleep against his shoulder, one enormous hand flat on the baby’s back, talking to him very quietly about the drainage contracts.

A year ago she had stood in a doorway on Royal Street and watched her father sign her away, and her sister had smiled.

She had thought, that night, that her life had ended. She had thought it again in a locked room eleven paces by nine. She had been so certain, for so long, that the best she could hope for was somewhere to be tolerated.

Instead she had built this. Out of the wreckage of everything they had thrown away, she had built a house that was noisy and full and hers.

“He’s asleep,” she said softly.

“I know it.” Remy didn’t look up. “I’m not finished.”

Laurell crossed the room and sat down on the arm of his chair, and he shifted without being asked to make room for her, and she leaned her head against his and looked at the two of them in the firelight—the man who had kept a room for twenty-one years for a wife he lost, and the child of another man’s promise, sound asleep on his chest.

“Remy.”

“Mm.”

“Thank you for buying me,” she said.

“Rescuing you,” he corrected.

“You paid eight hundred dollars.”

The sound he made was low and rueful and it stirred the baby, and he turned his head and kissed her.

“Best eight hundred dollars I ever spent,” said the mayor of New Orleans.

THE END