“No carriage today. We’re walking.” Gabriel handed the box back to her and picked up the two large baskets he’d set outside the gate before he walked into the courtyard earlier.
“Walking? To Poydras Street? Walking?” With each question, her volume had increased so that by the last one, Lottie had attracted the attention of a passing marchande selling tiny nosegays of Spanish jessamine and carnations tied together with lace. She held out a bouquet to Lottie. “Un picayune?”
Gabriel could not even see Lottie’s face. Just a field of lilacs on cream-shaded linen swaying side-to-side. “No, no. I do not have any coins,” said the bonnet. The merchant shrugged, returned the flowers to her tray, and continued down the street. She probably had regular customers who lived on the street, especially in this section of the city. The flowers did not simply serve as an adornment for a lady’s dress. Their fragrance provided a bit of perfume to the air for both the wearer and those around her to compensate, in a small way, for the offensive city smells. Sooner or later Lottie would be purchasing nosegays herself. When she lived in her own home. With a husband. Which is exactly what Gabriel did not want to be thinking about.
“We are going to the boys’ home on Chartres Street, a few blocks away. Last time we visited the girls. I thought today, the boys.” He had to lean over just to be able to see her face under the wide brim. “May we start walking, or else the men will be lighting the lanterns on the street when we return.”
Lottie shifted the distance of a whisper when she saw his face. “Of—of course,” she said. He didn’t know if she appeared to be uncomfortable because he had startled her or because she didn’t appreciate his being so close to her. This awkwardness between them was unfamiliar, and even though Gabriel didn’t like it, he sensed that it moved into their relationship like an uninvited relative with no money. And he would have to boot it out or learn to live with it.
“I brought a few bananas and oranges I’d asked Agnes to save for me.” Lottie opened the lid of the box she held and showed Gabriel the fruit inside. “She didn’t ask why I wanted them. I suspect she knew they were not for Henri, after our last visit to the girls’ home.” She closed the box, and when she spoke, her voice sounded as delicate as her features looked tucked inside her bonnet. “Grand-mère didn’t even know these had not been eaten.”
Gabriel wanted to tell her that her grandparents probably did not concern themselves with what happened to food left over, either. Agnes, he was certain, managed it wisely. “How fortunate for the boys we’ll see today that the fruit wasn’t eaten and that you thought of them.”
He suspected that Lottie’s compassion for the orphans grew from her own parents having died before her second birthday. She spoke little of them and had shared with Gabriel that her grandparents did not encourage questions, saying that to talk about their son and his wife caused too much pain. Not one portrait of her mother or her parents had even been shown to her. Too afraid to ask her grandparents why none existed, Lottie had asked Agnes, who told her there had not been time for portraits.
But if not for her grandparents, Lottie might have been one of those downcast, heart-starved young girls they visited weeks ago. And because of his parents, Gabriel did not have to fear being one of the boys they would soon see.
Between what they carried and Lottie’s skirt requiring most of the space on the narrow banquette, the two of them didn’t converse much on the way to the orphanage. A few times, Gabriel had to set down his baskets to pull a board over the foul ditches along the street so Lottie could cross. Even maneuvering the banquettes necessitated her lifting layers of the skirt and petticoats she wore to avoid dragging her hem along the refuse, much of it questionable. And when they passed the rotting carcass of a dog or a slave emptying chamber pots, Lottie’s gloved hand would fly to her face to pinch her nose and cover her mouth. Gabriel, had his hands not been holding baskets, would have done the same. He held his breath until he saw evidence of a reprieve or was about to collapse.
“I am sorry we won’t be able to stay long today,” Lottie told Gabriel as he lifted the iron door knocker at the Asylum for Boys.
“You don’t need to apologize. It is generous of you to come here at all,” he answered.
The door opened and one of the Sisters Marianites of the Holy Cross who ran the home greeted them.
“May I help you?” She appraised them with the experience of one accustomed to having people on the doorstep, her eyes quickly moving from their faces to their feet. A collar of stiff white fabric encircled her head and a band of it covered her forehead, so that it appeared as if she peeked through a flowing curtain of black. “Oh,” she said and smiled broadly, “you are here to help us. Come.” She opened the door wider. “Come in, please.”