"To free Louisiana," Charite numbly tried to explain once more, her voice meek and her hands primly folded in the lap of her soberly black mourning gown. "For France, Papa, for-"
"Empty-headed, patriotic nonsense/" her elegantly tall and lean, distinguished father cruelly shot back. "Fervent twaddle for things an ocean away, and nothing to do with us, I tell you! And if the Spanish ever learn of what you did, we're all ruined. You're… debile! You led your brothers into your-"
"Your sweet and gentle cousin, poor Jean-Marie, aussi," Maman coldly fumed from the other side of her father's study, plying a fan as if to drive off summer heat. Charite didn't know which of them was crueller to her, her dashing beau ideal father or her elegantly gay and flighty mother, for Marie de Guilleri had been, still was, one of the most beauteous belles of her generation, the toast of the city and of the grandest Creole society. "Rubio Monaster, who might have married one of your sisters had he lived, made the. finest match between us and the Bergrands," she accused, daintily daubing at her dry nose with a laced silk handkerchief.
Their banker, Monsieur Maurepas, had summoned them and had spread a plausible lie to explain Charite's stumbling return to New Orleans in a nameless Acadian's pirogue and care. Maurepas's sorrowful tale had hardly been necessary, for a week or more at least, since New Orleans had been rocked by the fire that had levelled poor Monsieur Bistineau's old store and warehouse, and the simultaneous fire that had erupted aboard a newly arrived ship for sale, on the south bank of the river, and the way the used ship had lost all her mooring cables and had drifted onto the American emporium ship, burning her to the waterline as well! It had required the garrison turn out, the forts to be manned against any attempt to seize the port city. On top of that, only two of the three treasure schooners had come up the Mississippi, the third feared lost, and that caused even greater consternation.
Given the circumstances, the tragic murder of four of the town's most promising young gentlemen at the hands of the cut-throat runaway rebel slave St. John's evil band, while hunting and fishing on Lake Barataria, had almost gone un-noticed! Rumours had flown. Charite had escaped; been raped by the negres; had stopped off with an Acadian family due to slight unhealth and hadn't been with them… yet had almost lost her complete wits in grief. Quel dommage, n 'est-ce pas.? It was well known that Charite had been the too-bold, outdoorsy, and de-sexed sort of girl, too outre, too modern, so…
"To think I nursed you at my breast, viper!" Maman Marie snapped. Her fan beat like a hummingbird's wings. "Drinking, gambling, running the streets in men's clothing, associating with whores and rogues… and reeling home as drunk as a negre/"
"Maman…" Charite weakly beseeched, eyes grimaced in misery.
"Carrying weapons, playing at pirate like a… " Maman accused. "Whoring, most likely, too! Shameless, thoughtless, little… slut!"
"But, Maman!"
"You as good as murdered my fine sons yourself, whore! How I wish you had been the one taken from us instead!" Maman swore.
"I wish I was, I wanted to die, I… "
"Scheming as bold as a dragoon in public, where anyone might've heard you," her father chimed in from the other side of the study, his worries of a different stripe. "God knows how many other grand, distinguished young people you will end up dragging to the garotte if the Spanish ever learn the truth. How many parents will be blamed as well, though they knew nothing!"
"We will end up penniless at the least, idiot-child! Hounded from New Orleans and Louisiana," her mother bewailed, rocking with impending ruin on her gilded chair. "All our wealth and security, lost. Forced to flee among the filthy Americains, mon Dieu! Penniless, you hear me, girl? Penniless and damned by every good Creole family whose happiness you have destroyed, bah!"
"She is mad, cherie" her father sternly declared. "Her mind is gone. I have spoken to Docteur Robicheaux, who thinks she is utterly debile … perhaps has been for some time."
"That will not excuse what she did, Hilaire!" Maman wailed, then sniffed into her handkerchief. "The Spanish won't care when she…"
"Only if they ever learn the truth, Marie," Papa cautioned, one hand raised to make his point in peaceful deliberateness. "If we play our parts properly, they never will. The bishop knows nothing, and he will preach a fervent sermon against the rebel slaves, as if our sons truly died at their hands." Hilaire de Guilleri hitched a deep sigh and daubed his own eyes as he said that. "We must be too stricken to speak, so we will not be forced to say anything to the contrary. After, we will quickly return upcountry, along with Iphegenie and Marguerite, and may stay for months and months. She, well… will be too grief-stricken to attend, n'est-ce pas? Though the thought of placing deer bones and rocks in our dear sons' coffins, to rest forever in our mausoleum is… Ah, well. According to what she admitted to us, and what Capitaine Balfa wrote us, there can be no trustworthy witnesses to her perfidy. Maurepas too frightened of exposure? Bistineau, too? That Capitaine Lanxade and most of his crew dead or captured by the Anglais, who will quickly hang the rest on Jamaica? The three Anglais sailors, the deserters, are scattered to Baton Rouge or Natchez and have just reason to fear that the Spanish learn where they got their money…"
Charite stared unseeing at her hands, clenched white-knuckled in her lap,
her eyes averted and her chin down, as she had contritely been ever since she had reached New Orleans and saw her parents. She was just as heartbroken as they, perhaps even more so, just as deeply wounded by her brothers' deaths, the utter end of her dreams, hopes…
Yet Papa and Maman had scathed her for days, sputtering in spiteful, hateful rages or accusing tears. Speaking of her as if she was dead, too, over the top of her head as if she was not there, and frankly, she was getting irked by their waverings from dangerous hostility to bitter but arch grief. As if sorrow was the proper "thing" to do, the sham to portray, whether their hearts were touched or not! And being spoken of, not to, worse than a dog, given less regard than a piece of furniture…!
"… only living witness would be her, in fact," Papa Hilaire declaimed, sitting on the edge of his ornate desk, swinging a booted foot, a brandy glass in his hand, and a so-clever smile on his face. Charite snapped up her head to goggle at him, chilling with dread. Her parents had always been testy about anything that might taint their family's repute; beyond their semi-secret amours, of course, and everyone in Creole Louisiana would forgive those, Charite thought. But how far would they go to protect themselves, she had to wonder?
Her father gazed dispassionately at her for a long and somber moment, then shook his head in disappointment. "Docteur Robicheaux is already convinced of her derangement," Papa said as he turned his attention to his wife again. "He has written us a letter to that effect. Such a condition will require years of… care."