licentiousness, so hypocritically, sinfully… Catholic!
Mr. Pollock himself was a rock-ribbed Scot Presbyterian.
'You wish me to ask in the markets about your mysterious young girl, cher?' Colette quite innocently posed. Seemingly innocent.
'Hmm… what?' Pollock flummoxed, with a twitch of his head at the picture of her sauntering and sashaying past hordes of leering and lustful idle Creole 'gentlemen,' returning the sly grins of a muscular Free Black dandy, even of an impressive slave horseholder! 'No, no… '
'Can it be you tire of me, cher Gideon?' Colette gently teased. 'And your m'sieur Willoughby 's White Creole girl in male clothes fires your imagination, hmm?'
'Oh, rot!' Pollock replied with a shuddery laugh to realise he was being lovingly twitted, as all older lovers would be by their much younger and more desirable paramours.
'My dearest love,' Colette said, turning serious as she put down her coffee cup and folded her hands together on the table. 'You allow me to be… decorative, but you never let me be the wife partner that I am to you, cher. Hermione and I,' she said, naming her stout and darker older maidservant, 'have many sources. She knows the slaves to all the grands blancs families, and they see everything, n'est-ce pas? I… am on casual speaking terms with many of the town's young ladies. The jeunes filles de couleur who are… kept. Their masters and beaus share their gossip when they come home from the cabarets, the pillow talk, the amusing tales? I know you wish to protect me from…'
'No, dearest, I must insist that…' Pollock began to splutter.
As dearly as Colette actually loved her wry little Englishman, there were times that his not-so-hidden jealousy, his fear of losing her, was maddening!
'Allow me to aid you, please, Gideon? Just this once?' she almost begged, reaching across the table to take his hands in hers and squeeze reassuringly, batting her long lashes like a fearful kitten. 'I already know… Hermione and I have already learned… that this girl is not a Bonsecour. They have no young, unmarried daughter. And the Darbone brothers you mentioned have not been in New Orleans for at least a month. Their manservant boys were disgusted that they had to leave the city and go up towards Pointe Coupee to the Darbone lands… They despise the crude field slaves and are terrified that anything could happen to them so far away, if old man Darbone or madame takes a dislike to them. Three sass-mouth Darbone house slaves already died of whipping, after the Pointe Coupee rebellion, Gideon. Comprendre?'
'Well…'
'Let me call Hermione in, please, cher Gideon? Let her tell of what she has already heard?' Colette cajoled.
'Hmm, I s'pose… ahem,' Pollock grudgingly assented, unable to deny his entrancing mistress anything. Almost anything. He did desire an answer to Lewrie's mystery-just so long as he could keep Colette from laying eyes on the impressive lout!
'Hermione?' Colette said, tinkling a porcelain bell by her place setting. 'Ici, s'il te plait. '
'M'amselle wish?' the husky older woman asked, coming in from a mostly unused kitchen, wiping her square hands on a dish-clout, swiping at her garish satin headcloth. 'Oh la! Dat girl who go about at night like ze gentilhomme? Mon Dieu.'
The gist of her gossip (gleaned from a kitchen maid who was friendly with one of the oyster shuckers owned by the proprietors from the Pigeon Coop cabaret) was that the girl, who was uncommonly pretty, was no Bonsecour at all, but lived in a grand pension on Rue Dauphine and could be seen sneaking home arm in arm with two young men, always the same two. Both a groom and a girl body servant belonging to one of the houses on Rue Dauphine -'No bettah'n dey should be, and mon Dieu, don' get me started on dem, m'sieur Gideon!'-said that they had both seen her, sometimes with the two young men, when all three of them would go into a house together. Sometimes the girl alone, dressed in suitings but with her hair free, would come traipsing in at cock-crow. For sure if Hermione asked a slave who worked a produce plot on Bayou St. John and came into town at dawn with his owner's cart of greens to sell, he'd tell her the same and could show her the right house, even tell Hermione which floor where the candles got lit, after she went up to her appartement/
'Oh, dey say she a high-born Creole gal, m'sieur Gideon… but not de finest sort, hein?' Hermione concluded.
'But we could ask about her for you, cher,' Colette perkily assured him, 'and I'd lay you any wager you wish that the secret is not a secret at all… That sort of delicious gossip surely is already the common coin in this town! Let us try for you, mon cher!'
'Well… just so long as you don't stray into a neighbourhood where Hermione could not protect you, dearest. Perhaps you had best take Scipio along to chaperone both of you. He may be getting on in years, but he still can appear forbidding, does he put a scowl on… ahem, ' Pollock at last conceded.
'You are the dearest man, Gideon,' Colette murmured, her eyes locked on his with the promise of a most magnificent night of reward.
'The mails, m'sieur,' Henri Maurepas's personal assistant and clerk announced with his usual unctuous air as the banker entered his inner sanctum. A fashionable thimble-shaped hat, gloves, and cane were taken from him and placed securely in a tall oak armoire that had come all the way from Paris as Maurepas strode to his imposing desk and sat down with a sweep of his coat-tails. Without a word spoken, a slave in formal livery tiptoed in with a tray bearing a coffee service and a candle-warmed silver-plate pot.
'Merci,' M. Maurepas said in a distracted and bored grunt, as he almost always did to indicate that he had taken note of the service done him… but they should both now get out and let him get to work.
He sorted through the many letters. There was one pile that was local business; those he shoved aside to concentrate on the few others that had come aboard the naval cutter. To his disappointment, none of his latest correspondence was from France, not even from distant kin. Certainly, there had yet to come a reply from the Directory in Paris to his many letters urging support for a rebellion in Louisiana… though there were some outdated newspapers.
Ah! Two letters directed to the bank, one from Havana, with a date scribbled on it that was much earlier than the second, which came all the way from Ciudad de Mexico.
Both were in Spanish, a language he detested. No matter how flowery and elegantly written, Spanish could not hold a candle to the grace of a cultured man's French.
.., to inform you, Most Esteemed Senor Maurepas, that, given your previous requests directed to His Excellency the Captain-General, combined with the humble pleas of your fellow bankers in the Colony of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans, His Most Catholic Majesty has graciously given assent to the shipment to the Colony of a considerable sum of silver specie, with which to ease the regrettable shortage of coinage which has, of late, caused such a hardship upon his Most Catholic Majesty 's subjects residing in Louisiana, due to the regrettable outflow of specie which the import of diverse American trade goods has caused. The Captain- General of His Majesty's American possessions having received His Majesty's gracious permission, the Captain- General at Havana has ordered the Captain-General of New Spain at Ciudad de Mexico to order the mines at Potosi to refine, mint, and prepare for shipment pieces-of-eight and dollars to the amount of-
'Sacre nom de Dieu!' Henri Maurepas almost screeched in amazement, choking on the smoke from his morning's first cigaro, doubling over and hacking for a good two minutes before he could trust himself to reread the sum, and breathing very carefully 'til
