Secrets in the Tallgrass

Newton, Kansas

June 18, 1866

Steady rain fell onto the sea of swaying buffalo grass. Alongside a dirt road, a single hickory tree stood above several wooden crosses, which sat atop a couple of dozen oval mounds. Some of the graves were heaped high with fresh dirt, while others had settled over time and grown over with Berlandier’s Flax, the yellow-orange flowers now drinking up the storm water.

Standing over one of the newest burial sites, a priest recited prayers. The woman next to him, dressed in all black, held an umbrella over her head with one hand. With the other, she clutched a large silver cross that dangled around her neck. The tears that flowed down her cheeks were indistinguishable from the ones God was spitting out from the heavens above on this moody afternoon.

Off in the near distance stood a gruff and unkempt figure. The man wore a rain-soaked poncho that hung over his lumbering frame. His head was gently bent down in reverence, causing the water to rush off the brim of his hat, past his stubbled chin, and into a pool of pity alongside his boots.

As the priest finished and made the sign of the cross, the man lifted his unshaven face, and as he did so, he caught the woman’s eyes, causing her to stop herself in the middle of a sob.

“You savage!” she screamed at him over a chorus of thunder.

For a moment, he held her gaze as if he were Ares and she Athena, both gods of their realms and siblings. Yet each was committed to war, though he was motivated by outright fury and she cold calculation.

At last, the man was broken by the moment, turning to walk to the horse that was standing nearby. He mounted his steed quickly, then rode it hard across the vast plains toward his barely visible homestead, which was but a lone and distant dot of civilization on an endless landscape.

“I’ll never forgive you for killing my sister . . .” the woman’s voice receded into the wind.

Chiverie

New Orleans

May 1, 1866

“Alone at last,” Remy declared in a husky French accent, closing the hotel room door behind him.

Phreddie backed up against the wall as he moved toward her, 175 pounds of newly minted husband. Remy might as well have been a team of wild horses pulling a wagon of lead downhill the way he roared forward.

“And now,” he declared as his lips closed in on her neck, “you cannot deny me what I have wanted all of these long weeks of betrothal . . . Mrs. Delaroux.”

The streetlamp flickered outside the window, but all the fiery gas in New Orleans was nothing compared to what burned in Phreddie’s belly at Remy’s touch. She could not help but get lost in the kisses that made their way over to her lips, and she let out a moan half made up of desire and half fear.

“God, I love you,” she said through labored breath.

“No more protests of chastity. We are wed now,” Remy said as he moved in. “We have a few short hours alone, and then we must catch the first of our ships to the continent and my waiting father.”

His forceful tongue pinned her head against the bedroom wall, and his hands freely roamed her bosom. They plunged into the top of Phreddie’s bridal dress until they released her breasts, which encouraged Remy’s mouth to move down toward the erect, ripe nipples that sat atop those soft mounds.

“Remy,” Phreddie called out in between her cries of ecstasy. Never before had a man touched her so intimately. Had she known the power of passion, and had she not been so afraid, she might have let herself slip into his grasp sooner.

Their lightning-speed romance had been a surprise to those around them, but most of all to Phreddie. Only six weeks had passed since Remy and she met at the Guidry Mansion over on St. Charles Avenue. Phreddie had worked there as a laundress for the past two years since she aged out of the orphanage.

Just out from under the ever-watchful eyes of the Catholic home’s strict nuns, Phreddie had adapted easily to Mrs. Guidry’s nonnegotiable rule that her household staff be like the famous New Orleans spirits. Ghosts drifted between moments the way maids and laundresses were expected to pass between the rooms of the house: unseen and unheard, unless their betters chose to notice them. And in the rare air of life at the Guidry, there was little expectation that family members or guests would behave as coarse mediums and call forth to the cold souls of that world’s somber spirits.

That was why, when Phreddie tripped on a rug with a basket full of clean linens right in front of the visiting Delaroux son, who had just concluded his business luncheon with the elder Guidry, she lost her position instantly. However, much to the disappointment of Mrs. Guidry, who believed in clear lines of class demarcation, Phreddie gained the interest of the young man whose handsome features had caused her to trip in the first place.

“And your name is?” Remy had asked as he helped her back onto her feet. She could not stop herself from getting lost in his eyes. They were like the fine blue porcelain teacups in which Mrs. Guidry served all of her visitors steaming Earl Grey. Yet hot water over dried leaves and bergamot would have seemed as cool as a fall evening compared to the warmth Phreddie felt in her loins when she looked at Remy’s deep eyes and those full, long, dark eyelashes. She caught herself staring and bit her lower lip to calm her nerves.

When he stooped down beside her and handed her the corner of a fallen bedsheet, his hand brushed up against her own, and a small moan escaped her. “Phreddie,” she released in answer to his question, though she was not sure if she had actually spoken or only mouthed it, because she had now caught sight of his beautiful lips.

By the time Remy had helped her refold all of the sheets, Mrs. Guidry’s ire had been invoked beyond repair, and the unstoppable passions of two young lovers from different worlds had been ignited.

“I will make love to you, my wife,” he whispered to her now in their hotel room.

While the urgency of his words filled her with unimaginable fire, the truth gnawed at her insides.

Why didn’t I tell him weeks ago? she wondered to herself as the seconds grew more heated. Love was so heady that it pulled her downstream, as if she had been caught in a flash flood, and that one moment in which she’d sought to lay herself bare had never quite presented itself. It was too late now, as she had already been swept away and over the falls.

At last, though his caresses made her head spin, just as his words and deeds had during these last six weeks, she knew that she must declare herself, as the hour to do so had long passed.

“Do you really love me?” she blurted out frantically.

“Oui,” he answered into her breasts.

“Is it unconditional, the same way I love you?”

“Of course, mon amour.” He sighed as he made his way back up to her mouth and plunged his tongue inside.

She pushed him out and pressed, “No matter what?” Her voice trembled from something between terror and ecstasy.

He moved his mouth toward her ear, and his hot breath tickled her lobe. “Oui, Phreddie. Yes,” he declared. “There is nothing you can do or say to change my love for you.”

She was on the verge of completely losing herself once more, but she regained her composure just long enough to lift her own lips up to his lobe this time. Her jaw clenched before she sucked in a breath and released a soft and tentative whisper into his ear.

Suddenly Remy’s kisses ceased, and his arms grew stiff. Then, he reached down, his hands disappearing beneath Phreddie’s ivory hemline.

“Quoi?” he asked, confusion spreading across his face.

“I wanted to tell you sooner,” she blurted out in a panicked shrill, but it was too late.

Her husband’s eyes widened.

“I couldn’t b-b-bring myself to . . .” she started to stutter. “I was afraid to . . .”

“To do what, you chienne?” he asked, venom in his voice. “To tell me the truth?”

Phreddie’s lips quivered as she watched Remy’s beautiful face begin to twist with rage.

“I expected one thing from you, Phreddie,” he spat. “Honesty.”

The word hung in the air like smoke exhaled from the lips of a cheating parlor room card player.

“My love is honest,” she began, but the words fell to the floor in bereavement, just like his smile had done seconds ago. Remy and she had only just declared their love as husband and wife in front of a minister hours before, and here it seemed to be dead before it had lived legally for even an afternoon.

“My father warned me that Americans were greedy.” Remy started to pace. “He told me that they would stop at nothing to get their hands on our fortune, but this? I thought you were different. A quiet little field mouse that I plucked out of the gutter, who would make the perfect mother to my children.”

Phreddie watched him put his head between his hands, and they both stood there in silence for a moment, until his frame began to shake.

“I picked you!” Spittle flew out with his words. “You were nothing to begin with but a set of meek tits and fertile loins to unassumingly bear me Delaroux babies, and again, to nothing you will return!”

“Remy—” she started, but he held up his palm to silence her.

“How could you have kept this a secret for so long? How could I not have known? And why in merde’s sake did you not tell me rather than let me go to the altar in God’s presence?”

“You have no idea how many times I tr—” Phreddie started to cry, but Remy’s fist found her mouth before she could finish her answer.

Blood drooled out from between her lips and spilled onto her white dress.

“Thief,” he said as he lifted his hands once more. “You will not get a silver penny from me for this charade.” His right fist jabbed into the air.

“Remy, please! I don’t care about your money,” she sobbed as she threw herself out of his line of fire. On the bed, she picked up her veil and pressed its lace against her mouth. “I just cared about your love.”

“Je vais te tuer, putain,” he screamed, more violently than before.

Remy turned around and lifted up the wooden chair that had been placed in the corner of their well-appointed hotel room. He hoisted it into the air, then slammed it down onto the floor, where it shattered into pieces. He tore off one of the legs, now attached only by shards of broken timber, and lifted its jagged knifelike point into the air.

“Did you think that I would accept your duplicity?” He fumed as he stepped over to her. “You will not make an imbécile out of me.”

Phreddie tried to back away further, but there was no place left to go. “But if you love me . . .” Her heart hurt worse than her jaw.

“Amour?” he roared. “I might have loved, had it been born in truth. Had I been given the chance to decide. But I cannot love a falsifier. And I cannot be wedded to a . . . a . . .”

Phreddie cried as Remy lunged for her with the spike. Letting out a small yelp, she nervously leapt aside, which caused Remy to miss and slam hard into the wall.

“You are a connasse,” he yelled. Then he stood up and began to laugh at his own words. “A cunt?” He chuckled to himself. “If only.”

At first, his laugh was ironic, then it became maniacal, and Phreddie knew now that she had only seconds to escape the room before her worst nightmare came to pass. The one she feared more than anything in the world. The horrible dream she knew would become her reality. She would die at the hands of the first man who bedded her.

It was too late to escape, though. Remy was already halfway across the room, and she would have no time to open the door, let alone turn her body around in acres of bridal dress and get out of his way. So she closed her eyes and braced herself for death’s impact, but it never came.

Instead, there was a loud crash.

When Phreddie opened her eyes, she looked down and found Remy on the floor, his ankle caught on the edge of the bed. His body was stretched out, and the wooden stake he’d pulled from the chair was lodged in his throat.

The only thing Phreddie could think was that, in his flight toward her death, Remy must have tripped and impaled himself on the wooden blade.

“Oh, Remy,” she screamed. She threw herself onto the floor in an attempt to save her new husband.

“Let me pull this out,” she said frantically, but he shook his head no, all while his throat gurgled with blood and his body convulsed.

Thinking removing the makeshift blade would save his life, Phreddie ignored him, and with a quick tug of her rapidly shaking hands, she yanked it from his body. Blood began spurting out in rhythmic beats, until Remy’s pulsing heart pumped no more and the flow slowed, then stilled.

Phreddie stood up and moved away from her husband’s body until she had backed up against the door. With her eyes as dead as her love, she slid down onto her backside. There, in shades of white meant to signify eternal commitment mixed with the blood of her “till death do us part,” Phreddie held up the bloodied wooden shaft and cried uncontrollably.

#

Phreddie did not know how long she had been slumped against that hotel room wall. It might have been seconds, or it could have been days. But when the stupor lifted from her clouded head, she realized that if she stayed there any longer, if she did not get up off that floor and make a plan, she would be as dead as Remy.

Any woman found with Remy’s blood all over her dress and a makeshift spike in her hands would be headed for the noose for his murder—or worse, if his family were the judge and jury. It would not matter that Phreddie had not killed him. It would not matter that she was more frightened wallflower than criminal and that it had been an accidental death. She hadn’t even known or employed any form of self-defense against her enraged husband, though her split lip and the torn-up room might imply otherwise. No one would believe her, especially once the full story came to light.

One simply did not harm anyone in the Delaroux family, for it was a powerful clan both in Europe and in New Orleans. During their courtship, Remy had told Phreddie about his father, Aloïs Delaroux, one of the wealthiest men in Occitanie. He’d made his first fortune on the backs of slaves at a series of sugarcane plantations his family owned on the Caribbean island of Martinique.

He’d found his second, even bigger, pot of gold when he founded a manufacturing and distribution empire in New Orleans that saw the cane’s fine, crystalized grains rolled out by cheap labor and sent all over the world. The war had impacted many of the sugar refineries in the lower confederacy, but due to Aloïs’s ruthless business sense, his was one of only a handful of plants that managed to keep lucrative contracts on both sides of the conflict. After all, whether they supported the gray or blue, no one liked their coffee bitter. The profitable powder might as well have been diamonds, as people from far and wide craved it with an addictive passion that meant the Delaroux’s riches knew no end.

When Aloïs had recently returned to his home town of Toulouse to attend to family matters, Remy and his older brother, Oscar, were left to see to their father’s interests in the Crescent City. With money came potency, and sugar had given the Delaroux men the force to control many aspects of life in their city.

Over candlelit dinners, Remy explained to Phreddie how he spent most of his time filling orders and outsmarting competitors, ensuring that the Delaroux financial engine flowed unhindered at any cost. During these heady champagne evenings of conversation and courtship, the couple, both dressed in their finest, shared as much of their souls as either was willing to offer prior to entering into I dos, when warts and character flaws tended to reveal themselves.

And while handsome women, single and married alike, batted lashes and heaved their bosoms toward Remy wherever he and Phreddie went, and though he described himself as somewhat ruthless at business, Remy had given Phreddie nothing less than his undivided and gentle attention. So much so that for a time she had even forgotten that she was different from most other women. Remy had loved her, and when he got down on one knee, her difference left her mind completely. In its place was the thrill of acceptance and even adoration.

The thought of their romance made her foot begin to go numb, so Phreddie shook it to wake it up. She begged it to fold up under her body and propel her legs to push her up off the now sticky floor. But instead, her foot and the rest of her body lay lifeless, her toes stinging with pins and needles. The tingle caused Phreddie to remember the first time she had met Remy’s brother, Oscar.

It was the night he had taken her to see Jules Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore at the Théâtre de l’Opéra. Her head had still been filled with visions of Sita and Alim in the Temple of Indra, and Remy was walking her toward her modest lodgings when they came upon a fight between two men.

Up until this point, Remy had said little about his older brother beyond mentioning his insatiable interest in women and his enjoyment in pulling the heads off bugs. Phreddie had laughed at this description of Oscar, as she’d believed that her fiancé was merely referring to a childhood remembrance of a rough-and-tumble brother. After all, all men had once lived their youth as boys somewhere between lustful hormones and an interest in creepy things that crawled in the dirt.

However, as they turned the corner onto Esplanade Avenue, near where Phreddie let a room in a nearby boarding house, Remy’s eyes widened. “Merde,” he shouted, unhooking his arm from Phreddie’s and running the few paces down the block to the scene of the altercation.

When Phreddie approached, she saw a man with his boot on the face of another man, who was quivering on the ground. The attacker looked similar to Remy—his hair was a mess of blond curls instead of brunette, but his eyes were the same pools of azure.

“Please, Mr. Delaroux,” a man called from between cement and a leather sole in an Italian accent, “I meant no insult.”

“Just do it already,” shouted a woman who was standing nearby with hands on her hips. She was wearing a tight fitted corset, and her bare ankles advertised her position. “I told you he reached out and slapped my bum when we passed by.”

Remy put his hand on this man’s shoulder to steady him, but it was too little, too late. Oscar’s foot lifted slightly, then fell hard onto the crying man’s European peasant features. There was a crack, and Phreddie cringed as blood shot out from under Oscar’s shoe. The street woman laughed crudely, and Oscar looked up and smiled at her before he joyfully walked over and introduced himself to a trembling Phreddie, wiping his boot on the sidewalk as he spoke.

“At last, la femme qui a le cœur de mon frère. I can see why you have captured my brother’s heart,” he cooed, as if he had not just gravely harmed a man on a public street.

The casualness of the assault terrified Phreddie. She thought about breaking things off with Remy right then because of that fear. Oscar’s boot might be a welcome response in comparison to what he’d do when Phreddie’s own offense was uncovered. But her feelings for her lover were too strong, and she convinced herself all would be well if she just trusted those feelings.

Phreddie had never been in love before, and so she’d believed that Remy would protect her from the world. Only in the end, he had proven as reliably unreliable as all men, and as a result, his kindness had melted into hot fury. Now he lay as motionless as that Italian man on the street, and Phreddie would not escape blame.

So, she finally lifted herself off the floor with great effort, then changed out of her wedding clothes. Once she had on one of the fresh, blood-free dresses she had packed for the honeymoon trip they had been set to embark on later that evening, she bent down over the body and lifted Remy’s wallet out of his breast pocket. Phreddie took all the money and the tickets her dead husband had on him. She folded them up and placed them into her small handbag before she made her way out of the room and down into the lobby, where she smiled and nodded nervously at the staff who extended their congratulations to her on her marriage.

Once she made it outside, she realized she had been holding her breath since she left the hotel room, and so she gulped and heaved to take in some air. Then she made her way down the streets. Occasionally she would glance suspiciously at the handful of Union troops who remained behind to guard the city even after the great capitulation at Appomattox last year. But mostly she kept her head down and pressed her feet onward, until at last she reached the Port of New Orleans.

Her hands shook as she forced a smile and handed the docked ship’s attendant the papers she had taken from Remy’s breast pocket.

“Ah.” He smiled widely as he led her up the gangway. “Congratulations, Mrs. Delaroux, but we were expecting both you and your mister on this passage.”

Phreddie handed the man a dollar bill. “Mr. Delaroux had important business come up unexpectedly and urged me to go ahead of him, as he now plans to take the train to meet me when we port in several days.”

“And your bags?” the attendant asked.

“Coming soon by servants,” she replied coolly.

The man clasped his hand around the tip and shrugged. “Not a bad life, marrying one of the richest men in New Orleans, then?” he joked. “You get a stateroom on the newest steam engine all to yourself. That’s a holiday no woman, including my own wife, would say no to.”

Phreddie feigned a giggle, then turned and boarded the ship. She walked to the top deck, where she leaned on the rail and looked out at the city.

You will die alone, Phreddie, she heard the harsh voice of Sister Adrienne echo in her mind. Not even your parents wanted you. Though the memory saddened Phreddie, the nun’s prediction looked to be coming true.

“What was I thinking?” she asked herself.

Chaton, the gulf wind purred, and she recalled how Remy had often whispered this term to her. She had been his kitten from their very first moment together. Remy was warm and inviting, so unlike the sisters and the other children at the orphanage with their cruel taunts and fists. Phreddie had melted at the affection Remy had supplied and the gentle words with which he would caress her heart as if they were rose oil. But those soft words were gone in a hurricane of blood, and now all that she could do was wait for the storm surge to subside and calmer weather to return. Phreddie decided that she would start over in a new location, but this time, she would not allow herself to dream. She would never trust a man, and more importantly, she would under no circumstances ever allow herself to fall in love again.