Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

that!” Better than those slaves who came to market day after day from the outlying farms.
    Of course it was positively shocking.
    He was delighted by it! And mesmerized by her grace, he went after her out of the shocks and smells of the market, the gap closing between them, so that he was all but hovering in her wake with an air of protective menace. Let some sneering shopkeeper utter one word as he stopped to lean on his broom in an open door. Marcel would kill him.
    But soon he was sick to see that they had all but reached the Rue Dauphine, and her gate lay only a few paces ahead of them. He drew up behind her so that he could almost touch the fringe of her shawl.
    She stopped. Her arm went up, graceful, the wrist bent, and steadying the load on the top of her head, she turned as if on an axis.
    “You’re following me!” she said. He was stunned.
    Shoppers pushed past them, but she didn’t move. She was looking down at him, seemed in fact to tower over him, though they were almost the same height. She adjusted the teetering basket and he saw that her face was not cross at all, merely inquisitive.
    “Come now, why?” she asked, and as she studied him her lips drew back in a cunning smile. He felt his heart slowing gradually to its regular pace. Her voice was lilting, rich with some suppressed laughter.“You are going to tell me?” she asked with a gentle lift to her eyebrows. There was something in her speech which made him think of his aunts, even his mother, something that he connected with the wilds of Saint-Domingue where all of these women had been born.
    And suddenly he felt the thrust he had awaited all the long day.
    “Madame Mercier,” he said. “It’s a matter of what I’ve read in the Paris papers! Today! I have to speak to you about it, please, please forgive me for approaching you this way, but I have to…”
    She was regarding him with mild astonishment, but seemed at once bored, as though she could not understand what he was saying. She gestured to something at his feet.
    It was the black cat. It had been following them all the while, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, and now it rubbed its back on Marcel’s boot. He gathered it at once and lifted it to her outstretched hand. Clasping it to her bosom, she turned away and stepped off the curb.
    “But it’s about Christophe!” Marcel said desperately.
    “Christophe,” she whispered. She turned her head majestically to look at him over her shoulder. Something vicious showed itself in her eyes, and the change of expression was altogether so violent that he was frightened.
    But with an indefinable sense of what must work, he went on, “The papers…they say he is coming home.” That was it.
    “No!” she gasped, turning full round again. “They say this, Paris papers?” Behind her a cart had come to a halt, and a red-faced white man was shouting at her.
    “But tell me,
cher
—” she started. The horse shied, and whinnied. “Where is this Paris paper, what does it say?” She looked Marcel up and down, on the verge of frenzy, as if she might see the paper bulging from his pockets and attack him in an instant to lay hands on it. He felt a ruthless regret suddenly for ever having surrendered the clipping to Richard.
    “I saw it this morning, Madame, with my own eyes. I don’t have it with me, but I read it so many times I memorized it, I can tell it to you word for word.”
    “Tell me, tell me!” she burst out. And at that moment the driver of the cart began to bellow. He raised his whip over Juliet’s head; shearing the leafy stems from the load in her basket. Marcel clenched his fist and started forward in a rage; but Juliet, faster by far, jerked around and lifting the black cat in her right hand, heaved it over the horse’s head into the man’s face.
    A cry went up from the loose crowd on the banquette and someone in the door of a shop laughed. The carter was furious. The catscratched wildly, only to get a hold, and he could