Bride of a Stranger (Classic Gothics Collection) Read Online Free PDF Page B

cavil at anything your future husband takes it into his head to do!”
    “No,” Claire said. “I find I do not care when we go, if go we must.”
    “That is fine for you. You don’t have to stay here and answer all the curious questions.”
    “I would have thought that you had become expert at that after these last few weeks.”
    “Yes, I have sworn grand comme le bras that you are blissfully in love, and you are not going to make a liar of me. Lie down now. Here, let me place this bolster just so, under your neck. It will protect your coiffure. It quite reminds me of the neck rests we used to use when I was a girl to protect the elaborate frizzed, lacquered, and powdered styles we affected. You have never known agony until you have worn one of those structures of pins and curls, garlands and ribbons and beads for two weeks. They weighed pounds, I do swear.” Having seen Claire settled, her aunt rang for the maid and stood waiting.
    When Zaza appeared she instructed her to prepare a bath, and since Zaza had already heated the water it was soon done. The maid went to the armoire to lay out the wedding gown, and she had it in her arms along with the matching chemise and the underdress, when suddenly, with a scream, she let the silken garments fall.
    “A gris-gris! ” she babbled. “A gris-gris! ”
    She turned wide, terrified eyes toward them, pointing with a trembling finger to the bottom of the armoire.
    “What are you talking about, you stupid creature?” Madame de Hauterive demanded, moving toward the girl. “Pick up that gown at once!”
    “Yes, madame, but—but it is a doll of death! For Mam’zelle Claire!”
    Madame de Hauterive hesitated, then leaned into the armoire and gingerly picked up a scrap of dirty white material. It was a doll, a rag of stuffed cloth dressed in a caricature of a wedding gown and veil, and impaled through the body by a long, sharp splinter of wood. As she moved it from its resting place a black ball fell from the rags, landing on the floor with a dull thump.
    Zaza gasped, and, snatching the gown from the floor near the ball, moved hurriedly away to stand shivering in the far corner.
    “What was that?” Claire asked, sitting up in bed so that she could see.
    “It is the conjure ball, mam’zelle,” Zaza whispered. “It—it is of wax—and black—for evil—”
    Even Madame de Hauterive had lost a little of her color. “How did this loathsome thing get in here?” she asked stridently. “Who dares to strew my house with this immoral, heathen voodoo magic?”
    “The—the woman who was here, the hair-dresser,” the maid stammered. “It is said that she knows the Voodooienne.”
    “And she was near the armoire.” There was a look of revulsion on the older woman’s face.
    “But why?” Claire said. “I hardly knew her, and I certainly never harmed her.”
    “For Belle-Marie, I would imagine. It seems the kind of thing you might expect from her kind. I expect she paid the hairdresser to get it into the house.”
    “What did she expect to gain? I’m not a servant to be frightened into illness.”
    “Revenge, I would imagine, was her aim. She must think you are the cause of her displacement. And as for effectiveness, you have felt unwell since she placed this—this thing in your room.”
    “It is the hairstyle, the tightness!”
    “Are you certain?” her aunt asked in a strained voice.
    “Yes, of course! It couldn’t be anything else.” What was the matter with her aunt? Surely she didn’t believe in this voodoo cult so favored by their African slaves and the free men and women of color in New Orleans?
    “I knew a woman once, a French woman, whose husband took a mistress. She went to a voodoo queen called Sanitè Dèdè who made a gris-gris for her to use to keep her husband at home. She carried the woman one of her husband’s gloves and Sanitè Dèdè filled it with—oh, I don’t know, dust, and bits of bone and sugar. She also gave her powders in paper