Page 23 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

At the carriage, Remy turned around with her still in his arms.

“Get it right,” he told the reporter. “Her name is Miss Laurell Beaumont. She is not a whore and she never was. She is the finest woman in this city and I have loved her since the second week of January.”

Then he put her into the carriage, and told Beaudry to take them home.

IT was past eleven before the house was quiet.

Mrs. Curry had wept into her apron and then thrown herself into a frenzy of hot bricks and hot broth. Josie had been sent for a fresh nightgown, and then for a second lamp, and then for nothing at all, simply because Mrs. Curry could not stop giving orders. Dr. Lasalle was hauled out of his bed at ten o’clock, pronounced the shoulder wrenched and not dislocated and the patient frightened, chilled, and perfectly sound, and told Laurell to eat something, and went home.

James and Lilian came and stayed an hour. Lilian sat on the edge of the bed in the pink room and held Laurell’s good hand and did not say a single wise or comforting thing, which was exactly right.

“Ann saw you from the window,” she said. “She was over the sill and up the stairs shrieking before the carriage turned the corner. That child has saved two women in three months and she is nine years old, and James has given her a raise she cannot possibly spend.”

Laurell laughed, and then cried a little, and Lilian sat with her until she stopped.

At last the house emptied.

Laurell lay propped against the pillows in the room that had been Mary Vincent’s, with a lamp turned low and her shoulder strapped and a cup of Mrs. Curry’s broth going cold on the nightstand, and listened to the man in the next room not going to bed.

He had not come in. He had not so much as looked in at the door since he carried her upstairs.

She looked at the connecting door for a long time.

Then Laurell Beaumont pushed back the covers, got out of bed, crossed the room, and slid the bolt back.

CHAPTER NINE

Remy had been sitting in the chair by his own cold fireplace for an hour and a quarter, still in his shirtsleeves, still with Storyville mud on his boots, when he heard the bolt go back.

The door opened. Laurell stood in it in a white nightgown with her hair over her good shoulder and the strapping showing at the neck of it, and he was on his feet before he knew he had moved.

“You should be asleep.”

“So should you.”

“I was—” He gestured vaguely at the chair, the fireplace, the last four hours. “Thinking.”

“You were sitting in the dark listening to see whether I was breathing,” Laurell said. “I could hear you not turning the pages.”

Remy’s answering breath came out ragged.

She came in. She looked around the room with frank curiosity—she had never been in it, in two months, not once—and she took in the plain bed and the shaving stand and the single photograph in a silver frame on the mantel, and her eyes went to it and stopped.

“Is that her?”

“That’s Mary.”

Laurell went and looked. A young girl in a stiff collar, her hands folded, unsmiling because the exposure had been long.

“She’s lovely.”

“She was eighteen.” Remy heard his own voice as though from some distance. “So was I. I met her in the spring and we married that September, and fourteen months later she and the baby were both dead, and I was nineteen years old with no idea on this earth what to do with myself.” He came and stood beside her. “So I went to work. That’s all it was. I went to work for twenty-one years, and I bought a house too big for one man, and I furnished a room in it for a girl who never saw this city.”

“Remy—”

“Let me. I’ve been sitting here an hour getting it in order and if you stop me I shall lose my nerve.”

Laurell was quiet.