Free Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave by Barbara Hambly

what she's going to wear to the wedding....”
    January let her chatter, drank his tea, and listened, knowing that it was all that he could do. Her friend Iphigenie, he guessed, had been full of advice-as far as he knew she was still trying to get Dominique to abort the child that would certainly be a desperate liability should Henri in fact be forced by his new bride and her family to repudiate his mistress. And Phlosine, with her own second child on its way, was a wellspring of well-meant tricks to hold Henri and deceive his wife. And their mother, January knew, would 6e no help. Other people's problems bored her, except as a source of gossip with her own friends.
    So he listened, hearing how many times Dominique spoke Henri's name, as if repetition would serve as proofor conjuration-of his continued devotion. And he won dered where hope ended and folly began. His own love for Rose, maintained in the face of her fear that might prove too strong for him-or her-to conquer ... What of that? Was it madness to love a woman who could not respond?
    Would that love turn to hate when he finally came to understand that there truly was no water in that well?
    But there is, he thought, recalling the passion of her kisses when times were gentle and good. I know there is.
    “I was saying to Henri only... only last week”-her voice hesitated a little-“that there is no reason on earth for his poor sisters to be stranded all the way downriver at Bois d'Argent for the summer. Poor things, they're all starting to look exactly like his mother's sisters! The family has four plantations, after all, and Viellard itself is only across the lake. And Henri agreed with me that the older three are never going to be married if their mother persists in dressing them in that petunia-colored gauze....”
    Before he left Milneburgh, January walked along the lakeshore to the handsome boarding-house where his mother rented rooms every summer, so that the lakeside cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her could be let out to a white sugar-broker and his wife. His mother had offered to let him stay in her house in town-at only the smallest of rents and could not understand why he had refused, any more than he could understand, he supposed, why Rose would not be beholden to him, who loved her.
    “Oh, it's Henri this and Henri that now,” sniffed Livia Levesque, after January had delivered an account-unsolicited-of how he'd found his sister. “Sneaking away from that mother of his, and the St. Chinian girl, to see her. They'll put a stop to that, and so I told her, though, of course, she wouldn't listen.”
    She fanned herself with a round of stiffened and painted silk, as beautiful as she had been on that night twenty-three years ago when she'd dressed before her mir ror for General Humbert's birthday dinner. There were more lines around her enormous pansy-brown eyes, and at the corners of her wide, secretive mouth, but a steady regime of crushed strawberries and wafer-thin slices of raw veal had so far held Time's more serious graving-tools at bay. She dressed as exquisitely as ever, in delicate shades of turquoise and buttercup-she'd worn mourning for the late Christophe Levesque for precisely the prescribed year and then had put it aside with the comment that black did not become her-and still kept the slender upright figure that was the envy and despair of her contemporaries. The only difference between that slim, elegant plaçee and this slim, elegant widow lay in her eyes, and the briskness of her voice and movements, at variance with the languid gait and murmur of a rich man's concubine.
    Livia Levesque was her own woman now, well-off and beholden to none.
    “If Henri Viellard thinks that marriage is going to give him one pennyworth more say in the ordering of the family plantations, all I can say is he doesn't know that mother of his particularly well. She ruled old Jean-Charles Viellard like the Empress of Russia, and you can see what she's made