Iron Lace by Emilie Richards Read Free Book Online

she was still a little girl and frightened to get wet.
    A gust of wind lifted a curl off her neck and plastered it against her cheek. She giggled and held out her arms to embrace her unseen playmate. In a moment she was under the oaks, whirling to the wind’s rhythm. She scampered past the dining room. There hadn’t been a shout from her cottage or any of the others. In the summer, fifty people would haveseen her and asked questions. But now, on the last day of September, not even Mr. Krantz, who was such a large man he seemed to be everywhere, had spotted her.
    She wanted to see the waves once more. Her family was leaving for New Orleans on Monday. Last night, her father, Lucien, had come from New Orleans to escort them home. And though they wouldn’t go to church tomorrow, because Papa said that the chénière, where the church was located, wasn’t a suitable place for his wife and child, her mother would pray in their cottage, and Aurore would be forced to stay inside.
    Aurore knew that her father wouldn’t discover her escape. Earlier in the afternoon, she had heard her mother and father arguing. Papa had wanted to go sailing, but Maman had begged him not to. M’sieu Placide Chighizola had warned her of an approaching storm, and she believed him. Hadn’t he made her stronger with his herbs and diet? How could she believe he was wrong?
    Aurore’s father had scoffed, saying M’sieu Chighizola knew nothing. The old man’s cures were voodoo, no better than the gris-gris bags carried by the blacks who still believed Marie Laveau, dead though she was, would save them from some imagined curse. His prediction of a storm was nonsense. Couldn’t Claire feel the slight chill in the air? Every sailor knew a big storm never followed a cold front.
    Aurore had watched her mother grow paler. Her father had grown paler, too. As she continued to plead with him, he had raised a hand, as if to strike her. Then he had turned and stalked away.
    Aurore thought her father was the handsomest man in the world, but at that moment his face had been twisted into ahorrifying carnival mask. She had seen his lips move under his luxuriant drooping mustache, and she had been afraid of the words he muttered.
    Aurore had told Ti’ Boo about the angry words. Ti’ Boo had said that parents sometimes argued, and that once her mother had chased her father with a broom.
    Aurore wished she was as old as Ti’ Boo. To be twelve, and able to leave your parents for the summer to work as a nursemaid! True, Ti’ Boo had to visit her aunt and uncle each day and submit to their questions, but Ti’ Boo’s life still seemed like freedom itself.
    Someday Aurore would be twelve, too. She tried to imagine it, but she couldn’t. To be twelve. To be free!
    The waves seemed to call her, with their own promises of freedom. Her mind made up, she started toward the water, following the iron rails. In the distance, she saw the roofs of the bathhouses where she and her mother changed before entering the water. Far to one side there were other bathhouses for the men. Ti’ Boo said that the men bathed without clothes, and that was why their houses were so far away. More than once, Aurore had tried to imagine such a thing.
    As she reached the dunes and followed the track through them, she saw there were no fishermen today. Against the horizon, several boats with colorful triangular sails rode the angry waves, but no one fished in the surf.
    She drew a sharp breath at the majesty of the waves. She was not foolish enough to get close. The waves ate into the shoreline hungrily, and they would eat a little girl, too. As she inched forward, the trunk of an ancient cypress, snatched by wind and water from some mysterious swamp, was flung against the sand, then snatched back.
    She clasped her hands, as she had on the gallery. Far away, there was a silver flash, beyond the boats, beyond the waves. Light drifted down to the water between black thunderheads, as it did in the