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the state, there’s a barrier island called Grand Isle. At the end of the last century, people of wealth used to go there to spend their summers. We went therewhen I was a child. A young child. My mother was…ill, and there was hope that the climate there would make her better.”
    “That seems like a good place to begin.”
    She met his eyes, but she didn’t smile. “It is. Because everything else I’ll tell you is connected to that summer in 1893.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Louisiana Gulf Coast 1893
    A man took a wife for children. A man took a mistress for pleasure. In the latter, Lucien Le Danois had been most fortunate. He had taken a mistress who could bestow such pleasure that the most demanding of Creole men, had they known, would have knelt at her feet. But as fate would have it, Marcelite Cantrelle was also more capable of bearing children than Lucien’s wife, Claire.
    A man merely looked at Marcelite and she grew heavy with new life, like the seed of the love vine, swollen with spring rain. Her body, wide-hipped and sturdy, was made for child-bearing. Her breasts were a lush invitation to suckle and grow strong. Lucien knew well the mystical wonders of her flesh against his lips, the enticement of her earthy fragrance.
    Marcelite had already borne him one child, a daughter brought into the world in a matter of hours, nourished on mother’s milk and the freshest, sweetest fruits of the Gulf ofMexico. Angelle was a black-haired, laughing nymph, brown from the sun, like her black-haired mother. When Marcelite went down to the beach to mend nets, two-year-old Angelle knew how to dance away from the white-tipped waves. At home, as their house filled with the spicy scent of the day’s catch cooking in the fireplace, she could climb the lone water oak outside their front door and, hidden among its moss-draped branches, call greetings to the fishermen who passed by.
    Lucien attempted to think only of Angelle and Marcelite as he sailed across the Jump, the shallow pass that separated Grand Isle from Chénière Caminada. But, despite his best efforts, it was other faces that he saw.
    The Jump separated more than two bodies of land. Earlier in the afternoon, he had said a stern farewell to his wild-eyed wife, and to Aurore, his only legitimate child. He could still feel Claire’s fingers clawing at his arm as he pushed her away, still see the accusations in Aurore’s pale eyes.
    Why should he feel guilty? Hadn’t he made the steamboat trip to Grand Isle well after the summer season had ended so that he could escort Claire and Aurore back to New Orleans? Hadn’t he given Claire permission to stay these extra weeks, weeks she claimed to need in order to face the final months of her pregnancy?
    As a husband, he could not be faulted. Perhaps their house in New Orleans was not as grand as the home she had once shared with her parents, but many men envied the large property he owned on Esplanade. Claire lacked for nothing.
    And he had been patient. By all the saints, he had been patient as she lost baby after baby. A man could be outraged at a woman for less. He had watched and waited in silence as she failed to bring a son into the world to carry his name. Evennow, she was pregnant again. Even now, he waited for the day when she would take to her bed and disappoint him once more.
    For all Lucien’s patience, Claire had given him nothing but one frail daughter whose skin was so translucent he could almost see her heartbeat. No one believed that five-year-old Aurore, their only child to be born alive, would live to adulthood.
    So was he to blame if he took an afternoon for himself? He had promised Marcelite a visit before he returned to New Orleans. Months would pass before he saw her again, months when he would dream of her body under his.
    The wind suddenly filled his sail, the harsh sigh of a God impatient with his excuses. The small skiff bobbed closer to the shoreline, carried by the waves breaking against the sand. The