Gabriel recalled the conversation he had with his cousin. How André warned him about the futility of this attraction to Lottie. But to know in his head, logically, that whatever he felt for Lottie would be considered impossible in their society, was one thing. To feel that knowing in his heart was something else entirely. Just that morning he had walked the same streets to the LeClerc house. But now those streets spanned a distance that would forever be more than physical.
* * * * *
“My grandparents have decided it is time for me to marry.” Lottie stabbed the back of the sampler with her needle, pushed the needle through the fabric, and missed the edge of the border. She tried and missed again and felt a hot sting, which was followed by a crimson blot on the fabric.
Justine froze, her sampler in one hand and her needle in the other, as if she sat for a portrait. “What wonderful news. How exciting!”
“Please, stop being so excited,” said Lottie, her voice as sharp as the needle that had drawn blood from her finger. She released the unfinished sampler from its hoop and rolled it closed. “I can’t do this now.” She shivered in the glinting morning sunlight that poured over their shoulders as they sat in the gallery.
Her friend set her sewing on the nearby table, moved her chair closer to Lottie’s, and, pushing the jumble of pin-striped muslin skirts aside, reached out and held Lottie’s hands in her own. “Why are you so distraught?”
Lottie lifted her head to meet Justine’s gaze. “It’s…it’s so sudden. I hoped…” She hesitated. “I prayed, even, that they would wait until I was ready.”
Justine cocked her head. “Sudden? We have been raised to be wives and mothers. Our families have never kept that a secret.”
Lottie looked away for a moment and wondered if Justine were capable of understanding the confusion, the frustration, and the fear that shadowed her, kept her awake at night, met her in the morning when she awoke. And could she confess that the one man she felt she could entrust her life to was the one man who would be forbidden to her? “Yes. But why does no one ask if we want to be or if we are ready to be wives?” Lottie slipped her hand out of Justine’s and slid her damp palms down the garnet-and-cream-striped skirt of her gown.
Justine leaned against the back of the wicker chair. “They don’t ask us because—”
“Because our answer doesn’t matter,” Lottie retorted, standing and pushing the chair aside as she started to pace the length of the room. “What makes women different from slaves? Agnes, you, me—we may look different, but we really are not that different at all.”
“My word, Lottie,” Justine gasped, “how can you say such a thing?”
“I can say it because it is true. Are we allowed to pursue the same jobs as men? Do men take classes in music or how to keep one’s eyes downcast or what to discuss while they are dancing? Are they trained to be husbands and fathers? We are all kept from being something or someone we want by people, by a world we have no control over. For Agnes, it is because she is a slave. I am white, but I am a woman. In my world, it seems women have a color all their own.”
Justine picked up her hoop and resumed sewing. “I suppose you think me foolish for looking forward to being married, to having babies.”
Lottie sat across from Justine again. “No. I do not. Not if that is truly what you want.”
With the right man, it might be what she wanted too.
Chapter Seven
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Grand-mère manufactured a polite greeting for Reverend François as she, Lottie, and Grand-père passed him on the way out of Saint Louis Cathedral on Sunday. The poor reverend probably had no idea that Grand-mère thought him un blanc bec because he chose not to adhere to the smallest details of protocol. She told her husband almost every time they attended services that only a novice would be so negligent. “He would bury a thief with full sacraments. Does he not understand that laisser les bons temps rouler does not apply to the holy church? The good times rolling by should be confined to Carnival,” she’d say.
Grand-mère paused before the steps and opened her parasol, twisting it so that the heavy gold fringe untangled itself before she lifted it over her head. Grand-père held his hand out for her to hold as she made her way down the worn stone steps. Lottie noticed that after her grandmother descended and reached her grandfather, he pressed her hand between both of his and gave her grandmother a smile Lottie wasn’t used to seeing. A smile like she and Justine shared when the deportment teacher pretended to be a woman when teaching the curtsy. Each knowing what the other thought. Grand-mère rewarded him with a flimsy upturn of lips as if a more enthusiastic smile might be costly.