Page 16 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Upstairs, through the wall, he heard the connecting door’s bolt slide home.

It was the first time in seven weeks she had ever thought to lock it, and he sat in the dark until three o’clock in the morning knowing precisely whose fault that was.

CHAPTER SIX

They were unfailingly polite to one another for nine days.

Laurell came down to breakfast. She discussed the menus. She asked after the council and he answered, and she said thank you when he passed the marmalade, and Remy would have given a year of his life to have her throw something at his head instead.

On the tenth day, Abelard Gauthier came to see him at City Hall.

Remy knew him at once, though he’d taken pains over eleven years to be in other rooms. Gauthier was a narrow, elegant man of fifty-odd with beautiful gray gloves and a way of looking at a person as though pricing an animal at market. He did not remove his hat until he had been in the office for a full minute, and even then he did it slowly.

“Mayor Vincent. You’re a difficult man to see.”

“I’m a busy one. Sit, if you like.”

“I shan’t be long.” Gauthier sat anyway, arranging himself. “I understand you’ve been enjoying the winter. A young woman in the house, they tell me. Brunette. Hazel eyes. Quite tall for a girl.”

Remy did not move a muscle.

“You’ve me at a disadvantage, sir. I don’t discuss my household.”

“No. Nor did I discuss mine, when I paid Madam Giselle four hundred dollars in October for a Beaumont girl.” Gauthier smiled. He had very good teeth. “Seventeen years old, she told me. Rachel. That is what I paid for.

“What I have learned since is that the girl in that house was two-and-twenty. That her name is Laurell. That she stood there for weeks under her sister’s name with the full knowledge of the mayor of this city. And that the mayor of this city then bought her out from under me for eight hundred dollars.”

The clock ticked.

“I paid Madam Giselle for a girl I never received,” Gauthier said pleasantly, “and Madam Giselle, when pressed, was very forthcoming about who had her and why. She’s a businesswoman. I’ve bought her interest in the entire matter, contract and all. She was glad to be rid of it.”

“Then you’ve bought a piece of paper with a name on it that belongs to a girl still living on Royal Street with her mother,” Remy said. “I congratulate you on your investment.”

“Yes.” Gauthier drew off one glove, finger by finger. “That’s just it, isn’t it. Neither of those documents is worth the ink. Mine names a person who was never delivered; yours names a person who was never sold. I could take neither of them into a courtroom and neither could you.” He looked up. “Which leaves us in the realm of reputation. Where I understand you have a considerable investment of your own.”

“Say what you came to say.”

“Very well.” Gauthier laid the glove across his knee. “The mayor of New Orleans, an admitted and frequent patron of Madam Giselle’s establishment, purchased a young woman out of that house at eleven o’clock at night for the sum of eight hundred dollars and installed her not in his Storyville property, where a gentleman keeps such things, but in the family wing of his own home, in the room adjoining his bedchamber.” He tipped his head. “Have I the details right? I’m told you had the seamstress in.”

Remy said nothing.

“And by summer,” Gauthier went on, “that young woman will be visibly with child. And no living soul in this city will believe for one instant that the child is anybody’s but yours. You will be a man who bought a girl out of a brothel and got her pregnant in his own house while wearing the chain of office at Mardi Gras.” He spread his hands. “I don’t say it would finish you. You’re popular, God knows why. But it would finish something.”

“You’re a great deal more concerned with my career than I am.”

“I’m not concerned with it at all. I’m concerned with being made a fool of by a woman who runs a whorehouse and a man who has spent six years congratulating himself on being better than the company he keeps.” The pleasantness had gone out of Gauthier’s voice, and what was left underneath was flat and cold and entirely without hurry. “Give her to me.”

Remy couldn’t help himself. The sound that came out of him was closer to a cough than anything else.

“No.”

“Consider it. She’s spoiled goods; she’s carrying; she can be nothing to you but a liability from this day forward. Hand her over and there’s an end. Giselle keeps her mouth shut, I go quietly, and you go on being the most beloved man in this city.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Refuse, and I will tell this story in every parlor and every counting-house and every newspaper office in New Orleans, and I will tell it well. And when they’ve finished with you, they will start on her. They always do. Do you know what this city does to a fallen girl once it has a name for her?”

“I know precisely what it does,” Remy said. “I have watched it do it for twenty years and said nothing, which is a thing I intend to spend the rest of my life making up for. You may go.”

Gauthier drew his glove back on.

“You’re a sentimental man,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I hadn’t heard that about you.”