Page 37 of Nineteen Eighty
“Did you know that means I’m old enough to decide things for myself?”
“You’re no ordinary twenty-two-year-old, and you know it.”
“When I die, I’ll be no ordinary—” Elizabeth stopped herself. She couldn’t reveal what Tristan had told her. Not to anyone. “I won’t be ordinary, then, either. But I can be who I am and make it useful. When I see things, maybe I can use them to help. Maybe being around others who aren’t afraid of their abilities will make me less afraid of mine.”
Colleen checked her watch with a reluctant sigh. “I have to meet with my advisor.”
“I’m serious about this.”
Colleen met her eyes. “I know you are. And I need to think about it.”
“That’s all I ask.”
Colleen dropped cash on the table and leaned in to kiss her sister. “I will, Elizabeth. Okay?”
Elizabeth nodded, biting back tears, as she watched her sister leave Brennan’s.
Charles couldn’t remember the man’s first name. His last was easy. Fontaine. Like that hot broad from that movie his dad used to watch, Suspicion. Joan Fontaine.
He was a supervisor, or overseer, or foreman. Charles didn’t fucking know. He didn’t know fuck-all about rice mills, other than he was now the proud owner of three. This one, in Abbeville, was about two hours from home, the farthest away. But Colin always said that the business you keep away from you is the business that fails, so Charles decided this was the one he should spend time learning about.
Charles liked to say Vacherie was the bayou, and it was, but not like this place was. Folks in these parts were country folk in a way the uptown transplants from Vacherie only wished they were country folk. Lafourche Parish was small towns upon small towns. Hebert Rice Mill was one of several in the area, and was, Charles was told, also the biggest. He liked that. It’s what sold him on the business. He wasn’t used to being anything but the biggest.
The world around him was alive with sounds made by nature. He was used to most of them, but there was something altogether different about the soft echoes here. He was in God’s country here, and although he wasn’t here to worship anyone but his own damn self, he didn’t shirk the almost constant reminders that there were bigger things in the world than his ego.
He’d never met the namesake, Hebert. Old man Hebert died, and the business went to auction, so Charles saw an opportunity.
Fontaine walked him through the tour, telling Charles in unusual animation about things called sorters and shellers, explaining a process he’d never in a million years find a need to know. All he cared about was the profitability, and that no one here had any mind to steal from him.
“My wife, Angelique, she’s got lunch waiting for you,” Fontaine was saying, and this caught Charles’ attention. Lunch. He was starving. Just as quickly as he’d lit up, Charles frowned. He hoped it wasn’t something fucking weird, like gator.
“We have a shift change coming up, and I need to make sure everything is in order.” Fontaine looked guilty at this, but Charles really didn’t give a shit about kernels and hulls anyway, so he forced a smile and told the man to go on about his business.
This was his twentieth or so tour in the past six weeks. Charles couldn’t even remember all the businesses he’d bought up, adding to his growing portfolio. The day after Lisette’s funeral, he’d marched into Sullivan & Associates and asked about profitable businesses in Louisiana, and they’d all looked at him like he’d sprouted four heads and started speaking Middle Persian.
There’s a lot to learn.
I don’t want to learn it. I want to hire people to learn it for me. I want to turn it into an empire.
After hours of discussion, both fruitful and not, Colin came around to what Charles was after. Perhaps he recognized the addict in him was in need of a healthier addiction, and there was nothing he could spend of the family’s money that would put their wealth at risk. A few days later, Charles had a list of profitable mills, fisheries, and other local industries, and a restored sense of purpose.
He didn’t think of Lisette at all after the day they put her in the cold cement of the family tomb.
And, though this wasn’t intentional, he didn’t think much of his daughters, either. Cordelia had it under control, she said, and though she’d been so weird these past weeks, he didn’t think she was lying. She refused Colleen’s offer of a nanny, which was even weirder given her stance on children, but he didn’t know the first thing about kids, either, so who was he to judge? His dream of having a dozen daughters died with Lisette, but he could make new dreams. New empires.
Tiny pins of guilt nagged at him. He missed all five of his children. He needed them, more than they’d ever need him, he suspected. But a dark voice within him called from the abyss, telling him that the more he stayed away, the brighter their lives could be. Charles knew what his gifts to others were, and they fell nowhere on the nurturing spectrum. His love was violence. Passion. Two things that had no room in a child’s life.
But he would build them an empire unlike any other. Unlike anything that had come before for the Deschanels. A foundation upon which they could build their own lives. That, he could do.
He found the small shack deep in the bayou, making several wrong turns along dirt roads before finally ambling down the right one. The approach was narrow and shallow, beset by encroaching knees from the nearby cypress. Spots of light peppered through the canopy of trees, dotting the path. A plume of smoke rose from a crooked chimney.
He wondered what Hebert had been paying Fontaine, for him to live like this.
Yet, there was something altogether inviting about the small, homely shack deep in the swamp. It beckoned him, filling his belly with a wave of welcome warmth.
The gumbo cooking on the hearth smelled incredible, but the woman tending it was what ensnared Charles’ attention.
Angelique. Long golden hair swaying with her hips. Hardness painting her soft, sculpted features. Angelique.