Beautiful, Jessaline thought, and marveled at herself. Her tastes had never leaned towards women like Eugenie, pampered and sheltered and shy. She generally preferred women like herself, who could be counted upon to know what they wanted and take decisive steps to get it. Yet in that moment, gazing upon this awkward, brilliant creature, Jessaline wanted nothing more than to be holding flowers instead of a fake package, and to have come for courting rather than her own selfish motives.
Perhaps Eugenie felt the weight of her longing, for after a moment she wrinkled her nose and sat up. “Oh,” she said blearily, seeing Jessaline. “What is it, a delivery? Put it on the table there, please; I’ll fetch you a tip.” She got up, and Jessaline was amused to see that her bustle was askew.
“Eugenie,” she said, and Eugenie whirled back as she recognized Jessaline’s voice. Her eyes flew wide.
“What in heaven’s name—?”
“I haven’t much time,” she said, hastening forward. She took Eugenie’s hands in quick greeting, and resisted the urge to kiss her as well. “Have you been able to refine the plans?”
“Oh – yes, yes, I think.” Eugenie pushed her glasses straight and gestured toward the papers that had served as her pillow. “This design should work, at least in theory. I was right; the vacuum-distillation mechanism was the key! Of course, I haven’t finished the prototype, because the damned glassmaker is trying to charge pirates’ rates—”
Jessaline squeezed her hands, exhilarated. “Marvelous! Don’t worry; we shall test the design thoroughly before we put it into use. But now I must have the plans. Men are searching for me; I don’t dare stay in town much longer.”
Eugenie nodded absently, then blinked again as her head cleared. She narrowed her eyes at Jessaline in sudden suspicion. “Wait,” she said. “You’re leaving town?”
“Yes, of course,” Jessaline said, surprised. “This is what I came for, after all. I can’t just put something so important on the next dirigible packet.”
The look of hurt that came over Eugenie’s face sent a needle straight into Jessaline’s heart. She realized, belatedly and with guilty dismay, what Eugenie must have been imagining all this time.
“But … I thought …” Eugenie looked away suddenly, and bit her lower lip. “You might stay.”
“Eugenie,” Jessaline began, uncomfortably. “I … could never have remained here. This place … the way you live here …”
“Yes, I know.” At once Eugenie’s voice hardened; she glared at Jessaline. “In your perfect, wonderful land, everyone is free to live as they please. It is the rest of us, then, the poor wretched folk you scorn and pity, who have no choice but to endure it. Perhaps we should never bother to love at all, then! That way, at least, when we are used and cast aside, it will at least be for material gain!”
And with that, she slapped Jessaline smartly, and walked out. Stunned, Jessaline put a hand to her cheek and stared after her.
“Trouble in paradise?” said a voice behind her, in a syrupy drawl.
Jessaline whirled to find herself facing a six-shooter. And holding it, his face free of bootblack this time, was the young man who had invaded her quarters nearly two weeks before.
“I heard you Haitians were unnatural,” he said, coming into the light, “but this? Not at all what I was expecting.”
Not me, Jessaline realized, too late. They were watching Rillieux, not me! “Natural is in the eye of the beholder, as is beauty,” she snapped.
“True. Speaking of beauty, though, you looked a damn sight finer before. What’s all this?” He sidled forward, poking with the gun at the padding round Jessaline’s middle. “So that’s it! But—” He raised the gun, and to Jessaline’s fury, poked at her breasts none too gently. “Ah, no padding here. Yes, I do remember you rightly.” He scowled. “I still can’t sit down thanks to you, woman. Maybe I ought to repay you that.”
Jessaline raised her hands slowly, pulling off her lumpy headwrap so he could see her more clearly. “That’s ungentlemanly of you, I would say.”
“Gentlemen need gentlewomen,” he said. “Your kind are hardly that, being good for only one thing. Well – that and lynching, I suppose. But we’ll save both for later, won’t we? After you’ve met my superior and told us everything that’s in your nappy little head. He’s partial to your variety. I, however, feel that if I must lower myself to baseness, better to do it with one bearing the fair blood of the French.”
It took Jessaline a moment to understand through all his airs. But then she did, and shivered in purest rage. “You will not lay a finger upon Eugenie. I’ll snap them all off fir—”
But before she could finish her threat, there was a scream and commotion from the house. The scream, amid all the chaos of shouting and running servants, she recognized at once: Eugenie.
The noise startled the bootblack man as well. Fortunately he did not pull the trigger; he did start badly, however, half-turning to point the gun in the direction of Eugenie’s scream. Which was all the opening that Jessaline needed, as she drew her derringer from the wadded cloth of the headwrap and shot the man pointblank. The bootblack man cried out, clutching his chest and falling to the ground.
The derringer was spent; it carried only a single bullet. Snatching up the bootblack man’s sixgun instead, Jessaline turned to sprint toward the Rillieux house – then froze for an instant in terrible indecision. Behind her, on Eugenie’s table, sat the plans for which she had spent the past three months of her life striving and stealing and sneaking. The methane extractor could be the salvation of her nation, the start of its brightest future.
And in the house—
Eugenie, she thought.
And started running.
In the parlor, Norbert Rillieux was frozen, paler than usual and trembling. Before him, holding Eugenie about the throat and with a gun to her head, was a white man whose face was so floridly familiar that Jessaline gasped.
“Raymond Forstall?”
He started badly as Jessaline rounded the door, and she froze as well, fearing to cause Eugenie’s death. Very slowly she set the sixgun on a nearby sideboard, pushed it so that it slid out of easy reach, and raised her hands to show that she was no threat. At this, Forstall relaxed.
“So we meet again, my beauteous negress,” he said, though there was anger in his smile. “I had hoped to make your acquaintance under more favorable circumstances. Alas.”
“You are with the White Camellia?” He had seemed so gormless that day on Royal Street; not at all the sort Jessaline would associate with a murderous secret society.
“I am indeed,” he said. “And you would have met the rest of us if my assistant had not clearly failed in his goal of taking you captive. Nevertheless, I too have a goal, and I ask again, sir, where are the plans?”
Jessaline realized belatedly that this was directed at Norbert Rillieux. And he, too frightened to bluster, just shook his head. “I told you, I have built no such device! Ask this woman – she wanted it, and I refused her!”
The methane extractor, Jessaline realized. Of course – they had known, probably via their own spies, that she was after it. Forstall had been tailing her the day he’d bumped into her, probably all the way to Rillieux’s house; she cursed herself for a fool for not realizing. But the White Camellias were mostly philosophers and bankers and lawyers, not the trained, proficient spies she’d been expecting to deal with. It had never occurred to her that an enemy would be so clumsy as to jostle and converse with his target in the course of surveillance.