Free Bride of a Stranger (Classic Gothics Collection) by Jennifer Blake

three deep, surrounded on three sides by galleries to shade and protect the house from the sun and rain. Built up on tall, massive brick pillars in the manner known as a raised basement, its lower floor was used for storage only, since in the spring it was subject to flooding from the bayou that looped and curved around the plantation. The raised basement gave the house the look of two stories, a look enhanced by the hipped roof pierced by dormers. The main floor was the only one used by the family, and was reached by sweeping staircases, front and back, leading from the ground to the second floor.
    In the center front of the house, directly before the stairs, was the salon which opened by high, wide double doors into the dining room, which in turn gave onto the back loggia. On each side of these rooms ran the bedrooms, each opening out onto the gallery and often into the rooms next to them, so that during the hottest weather the entire house could be thrown open to the free circulation of the slightest breeze.
    Claire’s room, at the back of the house, had a greater privacy than most. Though it had access to the side gallery, there was none to the back loggia and the one other door which gave into Octavia’s bedroom was fixed with a large and efficient silver-plated lock.
    In her own room, there was a bell pull that rang one of the different toned bells outside. Justin used it often to summon his valet or for a servant to bring a meal, a hot bath, or simply a boy to carry messages for him. But since the pull was located beside the fireplace, Claire could not reach it from where she lay. The bell that had rung, she thought, was for the personal maid of Justin’s mother. Helene, the mistress of the house, must be about to rise.
    In the days that she had lain in bed she had come to recognize the different bell notes and the members of the family to whose rooms they were connected. Sounds had a way of echoing through the house. She had learned that Justin’s mother was a demanding mistress, constantly requiring something. She had learned, too, that across the back loggia from her own room was the room of Justin’s father who was an invalid—though the servants were slow to answer his bell, perhaps because it was rung not by him but by his manservant. She knew that there was another woman in the house, Berthe Leroux, Justin’s aunt. Claire suspected that Berthe was the widow of Justin’s uncle, the man he had killed. But Justin had not told her anything of the matter.
    Berthe Leroux seemed to be a woman of modest requirements, for her bell seldom rang, though apparently she too had her own maid, a shuffling older woman given to muttering beneath her breath. And there was also Berthe’s son, Justin’s cousin, who had the room beyond Octavia’s; a pleasant enough man from what she could tell. He laughed often, sang in his bath, and woke in an ill-humor, for his voice was perfectly audible as he castigated his valet in colorful language in the morning hours. But though Helene might be mistress of the house in name, Claire had decided that it was Octavia who stood at the center of it. It was she who planned the menus, supervised the maids, spoke to the gardeners and often stepped out on the gallery to meet Justin when he returned from the fields. There they would talk for a time about the crops in the home fields, the kitchen gardens, the orchards of peach, pear, and bushy figs and the animals that must be cared for to provide the bounty that came to the table. And though Octavia, it seemed, should have used her bell often with her many activities, it almost never rang. Claire knew, because of the closeness of their rooms, that the older woman had little use for a maid, that she bathed and dressed herself, did her own hair, and was much more likely to go in search of the servant she wanted than to set her bell to clamoring.
    As she bathed, Claire considered the people who lived in the house with a rising interest. At last,