Blaze and Empress were ecstatic. A miracle had occurred, they all agreed.
And when Louis returned with Etienne's milk, he was directed to take any further calls.
"We don't wish to be disturbed," Etienne said.
"Would you like dinner later, sir?"
"Much later."
"Yes, sir."
Cook was informed without inflection or insinuation that the Duc and Miss Daisy would be dining very late that evening. "I suggest you take a nap, Mrs. Devisment, now while you can." No one understood the subtleties of Etienne's moods better than Louis.
The merits of warm almond milk were tested in a variety of spontaneous revelations that afternoon. Nonscientific experiments. But gratifying. An empirical demonstration of almond milk's potential as an aphrodisiac.
The Doucet at-home gowns were taken from their boxes and used for the purpose for which they'd been designed—shameless and brazen adjuncts to heated passion. The Duc's leather chair was tested for both its design possibilities and its palpably sleek texture on naked skin. The velvet couch had been purchased for a variety of reasons, one of which was self-evident and conspicuous for its comfort. Even a man as large as the Duc was easily accommodated in an unreserved variety of carnal positions.
And much, much later, lying in each other's arms in the shambles of the bed, they contemplated the rich intensity of their feelings. Heated, sweat-sheened, their breath still irregular, their hearts warm with contentment, they smiled at each other in silent communication. The white silk coverlet trailed on the floor, the sheets were in tangled disarray at the foot of the bed, the cadence of their breathing fitful and erratic, the only sound in the fire-lit silence of the room.
"You haven't… lost your touch," Daisy panted, finding enough breath to speak first, gazing up at Etienne from where she lay in the curve of his arm, her dark hair like a black river of silk in the moonlight.
Half turning so his lean muscled body touched hers down its long length, he smiled from very close range, his celebrated smile sending tingles down her spine. "Well, thank you, ma'am," he said, still breathing hard, his heated body sleek with sweat, his smile angelic. "We… try."
FOOTNOTES
1. Lyda Burton Conley, of Kansas City, was the first Native American woman lawyer in the United States. Admitted to the Kansas bar in 1910, she'd begun studying law in 1904 in order to represent herself and the Wyandotte tribe in a lawsuit against the United States government. The Wyandotte tribe had settled in Kansas in the midnineteenth century and were nearly wiped out by a smallpox epidemic that killed Conley's mother and three hundred others in 1844. The victims were interred at Huron Park in separate burial grounds that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior had authorized razed in 1904 to make way for a commercial development project. Lyda and her sister Lena, outraged that the sanctity of the burial grounds would be violated in such a cavalier manner, built a hut on the grounds, close to the graves of their parents, loaded their guns and sent word out that the first man to turn a sod over one of the graves would either turn another for the Conley sisters or have some other person perform a like service for himself. Armed with a musket and standing watch in the shack, Lyda Burton Conley studied for the bar examinations and prepared research for her upcoming litigation. For nearly six years, the rightful ownership of the cemetery remained in doubt. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court where not unexpectedly, the Court refused to interfere with the decision of Congress and the Department of the Interior. But while the Con-ley sisters lost the case, they won the battle, for their actions had brought so much attention to the proposed land deal that in 1912, the House Indian Affairs Committee reported a bill prohibiting removal of the cemetery.
2. There actually was a Judge Nott who expressed this sentiment to Belva A. Lockwood, a Washington, D.C. attorney during the Raines case in c. 1875 when she was attempting to plead a case in a federal court. She was denied admittance, the substitute male lawyer lost the case, allowing her the opportunity to appeal and argue the case before the United States Supreme Court. She was however also denied the right to practice in the Supreme Court.
The opinion of the Supreme Court in the Lockwood denial is typical of the arguments used at the time to bar women from the courts:
"By the uniform practice of the court, from its organization to the present time, and by the fair construction of its rule, none but men are admitted to practice before it as attorneys and counselors. This is in accordance with immemorial usage in England, and the law and practice in all the States until within a recent period; and the Court does not feel called upon to make a change, until such change is required by statute, or a more extended practice in the highest courts of the States… As this Court knows no English precedent for the admission of women to the bar, it declines to admit, unless there shall be a more extended public opinion or special legislation."
As for the argument made by the Court that women in England could not practice law, Myra Bradwell, an Illinois woman trained as a lawyer who published the Chicago Legal News, noted in one of her editorials: "According to our Canadian and English brothers it would be cruel to allow a woman to 'embark upon the rough and troubled sea of actual legal practice,' but not to allow her to govern all England with Canada and other dependencies thrown in. Our brothers will get used to it and then it will not seem any worse to them to have women practicing in the courts than it does to have a queen rule over them." (Queen Victoria reigned 1837-1901.)
Realizing federal legislation would be required,
