Page 64 of Frankly, My Dear

A short time later, Selene stood back, admiring the new Etienne. His black hair fell barely to the collar of his shabby but clean shirt, accenting his sparkling clean face. His pale blue eyes were shaded by magnificent ebony lashes, almost feminine in their thickness.

“Oh, Etienne…I mean E.T., you are beautiful.”

“Beautiful? Beautiful?” he shrieked with outrage. “Where’s a mirror? Mon Dieu! If you made me beautiful, I’m gonna get back at you, I swear I am. I don’t care if you do pop my pizzle. Beautiful! Oh, shit!”

It was past five o’clock when James sent the slaves and other workers back to their quarters for the day. They’d been laboring since six that morning. Other plantation owners worked their slaves from dawn to dusk, but he felt guilty keeping them out in the grueling sun this long. There was just so much work to be done.

He would like nothing better now than a bath and dinner. Then he would have to check over the repairs on the sugar boilers, see to the mare that Ezekiel had told him was about to foal, try to coax his mother out of her rooms, talk with Rufus about the yard work he’d asked him to start today…

Sacrebleu, his responsibilities never ended. But he wasn’t unhappy. There was a satisfaction in working hard and seeing some tangible results at the end of the day.

“When will dinner be ready?” he asked Blossom when he entered the kitchen. She smacked his hand away when he picked a freshly peeled crayfish off a plate she was about to dump in a stew kettle on the potager. His stomach growled at the wonderful aroma, and he popped the raw shellfish hungrily into his mouth, noting that the kitchen table had not yet been set. That was where he and Etienne had been eating whenever his mother was “indisposed.”

“Mam’zelle Selene says you all should be eatin’ in the dining room, like civilized folks. I asked Fergus and Reba if they wants to come for dinner, too.” She grinned with some secret knowledge at that last bit about Reba and Fergus. He was too tired to inquire further.

“Where’s Etienne?”

Blossom chuckled and rolled her eyes in one of those “You don’t really want to know” ways she had.

“What’s he done now?”

“He ain’t done nothin’…leastways, nothin’ I knows about. He’s takin’ a bath.”

“A bath?” James repeated dumbly.

“Yup. Miz Selene is givin’ him a bath. Di’nt you hear the screamin’ out there in the fields?”

“No.” He filched another piece of crayfish before Blossom could swat him with her cane. Leaning against the wall lazily, he asked, “Who was screaming? Etienne or Selene?”

“Both, I reckon. Oh, Lordy, what a day this has been. You seen Reba yet?”

“No. Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“I reckon you won’t believe it. Nosirree, you won’t believe your own eyes when you see her.”

When Blossom refused to tell him more, turning back to her food preparations, he started up the back stairs, deciding to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Just outside the bathing-chamber door, he heard Etienne exclaim, “Oh, shit!” James gritted his teeth. Something would have to be done about the boy’s coarse tongue.

Trying the door, he realized it was locked. “Etienne? Selene? What’s going on in there?”

There was a long silence before Etienne replied sweetly, “I just took a bath, Papa. Like you tol’ me.”

“Why is the door locked?”

Another long silence.

“I threw the key out the window,” Selene said finally, with no explanation offered.

He turned around with a grunt of disgust and walked down two flights of stairs, then outside to find the key. He returned and unlocked the door. At his first sight of the room, and of Etienne and Selene, he jerked back with shock.

The bathing room was a shambles. A black scum covered the top of the water in the tub, which was still half full. The other half of the tub water was on the floor…and the walls…and Selene.

Both Etienne and Selene had had haircuts. Etienne’s was drying nicely about his face…his recently scrubbed face. But Selene’s hair was plastered wetly about her head, looking as if she had been in a dog fight. She probably had…but the dog was Etienne. And at this point she looked as much like a dog as that Dreadful animal who’d followed him up the stairs and was whining behind him in the hallway, wanting to enter the room.

Black hair was scattered about the room—on the wash-stand, on the lamp, floating on top of the tub water.

“I wuz just about to clean up here, Papa. Would you like me to draw some bathwater for you when I’m done?” Etienne asked with sweet consideration.

Selene gaped at James’s son as if he’d just popped one of his eyeballs, which was, of course, her trick, not his.