Danielle Steel - Legacy (2010)

She sent her carriage for them, an elegant French-made Berline drawn by four horses, and a separate carriage for their trunks. Jean smiled at Wachiwi as they set out for the long ride to the plantation, thinking how far they had come. He looked at her proudly, and took her hand in his own. He didn’t doubt for a moment that his cousins would fall in love with her too. It was the first time he had ever traveled anywhere with a woman, but the New Orleans Margeracs were his family, and had always been wonderfully hospitable to him. He was sure that this time would be no different.

Chapter 10

Angélique de Margerac was actually married to Jean’s father’s cousin, and she was from an illustrious family of aristocrats in the Dordogne herself, directly related to the king. She had married Armand de Margerac forty years before, and he had brought her to New Orleans under protest. She had been willing to live in Paris, but not the New World. He had fought hard to convince her. New Orleans had been founded by the French thirty-five years before they got there, and her husband had done everything imaginable to make her happy. He had bought her a house in town on Toulouse Street and a splendid plantation with an enormous house in the West Indies style, which he let her fill with all the antiques her family sent her from France. Armand planted cotton and sugarcane, and it became one of the most successful plantations in the region, and Angélique’s home the most elegant in the district. Their children were born there, and eventually acquired plantations of their own, and by the time Jean arrived from France, she held a decades-long reputation for being the most gracious hostess in Louisiana.

The Spanish had acquired the colony by then, but Angélique and Armand were close friends with the Spanish governor, and he dined often at their plantation and at the house on Toulouse Street. Angélique had closed the house in town the year Jean arrived, after the great fire that destroyed nearly a thousand buildings on Good Friday. Miraculously, their home had survived, but she said she was too nervous to be there any longer. She was afraid of another fire and preferred staying on the plantation. It was so much more comfortable and infinitely more grand. She loved having houseguests and had convinced Jean to stay with them for several months before he began his travels north to Canada, and eventually toward the Great Plains in the west. She had been extremely hospitable and introduced him to all their friends and several very attractive young ladies. He had shown no particular interest in any of them, but everyone had found their newly arrived French cousin very charming.

The area around New Orleans was very international, there were not only French and Spanish people living there, but a large community of Germans, which, as Angélique said, made their soirées and dinner parties so much more interesting. She was particularly proud of the balls they gave, and the many important people who had stayed there. The plantation itself was situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and it took Jean and Wachiwi two hours to get there in his cousin’s elegant horse-drawn carriage, which had come by ship from France. There were two footmen riding behind, and the coachman kept the horses at a brisk pace. Angélique wanted them there in time for dinner, which Jean already knew would be an elegant affair. He had coached Wachiwi for it the night before, and he hoped she would be equal to it. He felt comfortable in the knowledge that the dresses he had bought for her in St. Louis would be perfect, not as elegant as Angélique’s of course, who still had her gowns made in Paris and sent to her by ship in the New World twice a year. And she had a clever little dressmaker in New Orleans who could copy anything she saw, even some of the gowns from Paris.

They approached the plantation, which had been named after Angélique when her husband acquired it, along a seemingly endless driveway lined with oaks. The grandeur of the West Indies house came into view fully ten minutes later. Jean smiled at Wachiwi and patted her hand. Her understanding of the language wasn’t strong enough yet for him to reassure her as much as he would have liked to.

“It will be fine,” he said quietly, and his tone said as much to her as his words did. He was wearing a beautifully cut dark blue wool coat that he had brought with him from France when he arrived, and seldom had a chance to wear now. He kept it carefully rolled in his bags. Their visit to the plantation was the perfect occasion for it, as well as for the satin coat and knee breeches he would wear at dinner, which he had left at his cousin’s home before, for his return. He was grateful that he didn’t have to wear a wig or powder his hair as he would have in Europe. Fortunately his cousins were not quite that formal, and his own dark hair would be fine.

Wachiwi was staring at the house as they approached it. Her eyes were huge in her lovely face, framed by the bonnet he had bought her. She glanced at him nervously, and it struck him that she was far less frightened on a horse, going at full speed, which would have terrified almost anyone, than she was in the situation he had put her in here. It had been brave of her to come with him, and he had a strong urge to protect her and shield her from harm as one of the footmen handed them out of the carriage.

There were six liveried servants waiting for them on the front steps, all of them black and perfectly groomed in matching uniforms. They were slaves, Jean knew—hundreds of them worked in the fields on the sugarcane and cotton crops that had made his father’s cousin an almost limitless fortune. Before Jean could say anything more to Wachiwi, Angélique de Margerac swept grandly through the front door to greet them. She was smiling warmly at Jean, and for an instant she didn’t notice Wachiwi, standing just behind him. After embracing Angélique, he stepped aside and introduced them. The look on his cousin’s wife’s face was instantly one of shock mixed with horror. She pulled back the hand she had extended, took a step backward, and looked at Jean in amazement.

“Oh … I see …” she said disdainfully, and walked back into the house without a word to Wachiwi, who followed Jean into the grandeur of the front hall, with a look of terror. “Why don’t we have the young lady taken to her room immediately so she can be comfortable after the drive,” Angélique suggested as she signaled to one of the liveried servants and whispered something to him. He nodded, and then motioned to Wachiwi to follow him. She disappeared from the room almost before she had entered it, and then Angélique embraced her cousin again with a warm smile, immensely relieved to have dispensed with Wachiwi so quickly. And as she did, her husband Armand appeared from the library where he had been smoking a cigar in peace. He looked delighted to see Jean, and couldn’t resist teasing him a little.

“I understand you brought a young lady with you. Is there to be great news soon? Perhaps we can convince you to settle in New Orleans, instead of running around all those uncivilized places you enjoy so much. So where is she?” He looked around, surprised to see Jean talking to Angélique alone. They had both been a little startled that there had been no mention of a chaperone for the young lady traveling with them, an aunt, mother, sister, or cousin. And they hoped she was suitable for him, and of distinguished birth. They knew he wouldn’t bring a mistress with him to their home.

Angélique’s look of violent disapproval when she saw Wachiwi with him had not been lost on Jean, and he was afraid that even without proficiency in the language, Wachiwi had understood it too. His cousin had made it as clear as possible that she was not welcome in their home. There was no hiding the fact that she was an Indian. It was all Angélique needed to know. For her, at that moment, Jean’s traveling companion ceased to exist. She couldn’t believe he’d brought her here. It was a shocking impertinence and insult to them.