Sweet Piracy by Jennifer Blake Page A

me only that to become an actress was not done. Hein ! Of course it is done! There are hundreds, are there not? Knowing the consequences, I am now armed to make my life’s decision.”
    Amélie frowned, drawing winged brows together. “I don’t believe the Marquis can have meant you to take his warning in that light.”
    “Then you do not know him as well as I,” Estelle asserted.
    “Perhaps not,” Amélie agreed unhappily.
    Madame gave another heartrending wail.
    In a rare daylight appearance, Tante Zizi had honored the gallery that afternoon with her presence. After the failure of Rochefort to call, balking the elderly woman of her prey, all expected her to withdraw once again to the sanctuary of her room. She did not. Not only did she take the evening meal in company, she commanded Colossus to arm her into the sitting room where she sat enthroned on the only Louis XIV chair of which Beau Repos was possessed.
    Now she slapped her fan in the palm of one white, clawlike hand. “My faith, Marie, do not make such a to-do about nothing. When I was Estelle’s age, men were expected to be knowledgeable about actresses and the like. Experience in the male was thought to be the greatest guarantee for happiness in a marriage.”
    “When you were young many things were different.” Madame, stung, sat up straight. In her agitation, she took too hearty a sniff at her smelling salts, then coughed, her eyes watering.
    “Very true,” Tante Zizi agreed, “and I do not judge the change for the better.”
    “I wish only that which is right for my daughters,” Madame proclaimed, ruining the effect by speaking through a handkerchief applied to her nose.
    “Let us be truthful,” Tante Zizi corrected dryly. “You wish to ally your daughters with the nobility.”
    Madame’s mouth took on the spiteful twist of the weak enemy outmaneuvered but not quite disarmed. “I wish, at all events, to ally them respectably!”
    This was a telling blow indeed. In her youth Tante Zizi had visited Paris during the last golden days of France, the reign of Louis XV. A girl of great beauty, on her presentation at Court she had attracted the attention of many of the nobility and of the young King. For a short time she had been blissfully happy, living in the elegant rabbit warren of Versailles. And then one day she had climbed into a carriage and had ridden away without looking back. Returning home to New Orleans, she had gone about for a few years steadfastly refusing all offers of marriage. After a time she went out less and less. On the death of King Louis XV of France she donned mourning and ceased to go out at all. Her parents died, and then the brother who was head of the family. The title of family head, plus the responsibility for Tante Zizi, fell to his son, Bernard Delacroix.
    Tante Zizi had money of her own from some unnamed source; she could have lived alone. On the entreaties of her nephew, she had come for a visit — and stayed. She and Marie Delacroix were not especially compatible, however. The elderly woman formed the habit of keeping to her rooms, allowing no one to enter without express permission.
    Tante Zizi could be extraordinarily sensitive; she could also be thick-skinned when it suited her purpose. Spreading her fan, she began to ply it, her black eyes hard.
    “There can be no question of that,” she said. “What must be asked is how?”
    “I declare, the means of it has me quite distracted — one cannot force the man to come, after all. And here is Amélie moping about the house like a shadow and Estelle running to look down the road a hundred times a day and changing her gown each time in between.”
    Tante Zizi waited until the diatribe ran down of its own accord. “The man cannot be forced to come, but he may be invited, may he not?”
    “Would it not look too particular?” Madame Delacroix ventured.
    “You will not invite him alone,” the old lady said stringently.
    “No, it will be a grand ball!”