In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [66]
She took her place on the lawn chair again, watching as he poured coffee into two china beakers. “Sugar and cream, ma’am?” He looked inquiringly at her.
“You have nice manners.” She settled the ratty fur elegantly around her shoulders as though it were a luxurious sable. “I’ve taken coffee black all my life, thank you, and I’m not about to change now. Though of course the doctors say I should. Bah, what do they know, silly old fools. I always tell them if they know so much, how come they die too?”
She took a sip, seeming not to notice that it was scalding. Theo had just burned his mouth on it. “Pass me a bit of that baguette, young man, with some butter.”
He had never seen a sterling silver knife before, and this one was elaborately carved on the haft. “It’s too beautiful to use,” he said, amazed, turning it over and over in his hands.
“Remember this, young man.” She stared into his eyes. Hers were a clear transparent blue, paler than a winter sky. For a second he almost believed that if he looked hard enough, he would see into her soul. He shivered, wondering if she was a witch. “Remember,” she said again, “that a thing of beauty is even more beautiful if it has a use.”
Theo thought about that for a minute. Maybe she was right.
“Isn’t it about time you introduced yourself?” She was sitting up, drinking the coffee, perky as a sparrow now, with a touch of pink in her cheeks as the drink warmed her.
Theo put down the hunk of baguette smothered in butter. It was the best thing he had tasted in almost a year and he was reluctant to leave it even for a second. But he remembered his manners, and that this lady was responsible for his breakfast and his current good fortune. “Ah’m Theodore Rogan, ma’am. Youngest son of Farrar Rogan, deceased, of Hainsville Township, East Tennessee.”
“Never heard of it. But then, I can’t think many have. Hainsville doesn’t exactly sound like a metropolis.”
“That it ain’t, ma’am,” Theo agreed.
“Well then, I am Dorothea Jefferson Duval, kin to the famous president on my mother’s side of the family. And to the Creole Duvals on my father’s side.”
“Is that so, ma’am. Mrs. Duval.” Theo was polite, but he was itching to get back to his breakfast.
“Mademoiselle,” she corrected him sharply. “That is Mademoiselle Jefferson Duval. Remember that, Theo Rogan.”
“Oh, Ah will, ma’am, Mam’zelle Jefferson Duval,” he agreed hastily.
“Finish your breakfast,” she instructed, taking a sip of her coffee again. “And then we shall talk.”
I slept in the conservatory every night after that, Ed remembered. And every morning, MamzelleJefferson Duval would show up with the old carriage with the bread and butter and hot coffee. I stopped asking her how she got it, and where she spent her time, and where she slept at night. She never talked about herself over our shared breakfasts, but she did ask a lot of questions. I was more surprised than she when I found myself telling her about Mitch and the murder of my family. About how ashamed I was that I had not tried to save them. And how much I had wanted to kill my brother.
Holding the tumbler, newly replenished with bourbon, in both her small, blue-veined hands, Mamzelle Dorothea took another sip. Her pale, penetrating eyes met Camelia’s. “So I asked, ‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ And do you know what he replied? ‘Then Ah would have had blood on my hands too,’ he said. ‘My ma would not have wanted that.’
“I told him it was a rational answer, and then I asked him, ‘And what exactly do you propose to do with the life that was spared you?’ ”
Her hand holding the empty glass shook as she placed it carefully back on the stained antique table. “ ‘I want to become someone,’ he told me. ‘A real person.’ And I thought to myself, And I am the one who can help you do just that.”
She leaned back against the cushion, her skull-like face fading into the shadows until it seemed she was