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m’sieur! I shall hate you for the rest of my life!”
    The words echoed through the walls
of the unholy purgatory that had already closed around Julian Devereux’s heart.

Chapter Three
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    New Orleans ,
1851
     
    Sitting in the elegant dining room
of his town house on Royal Street, Julian Devereux scowled at the terse missive
he had just received from the mistress of St. Mary’s School:
     
    Monsieur Devereux:
     
    I must see you at once on a matter of great urgency
concerning your ward, Mercy O’Shea.
     
    Mother Anise Simone
     
    With a fierce sigh, Julian tossed
the letter aside and took a sip of his cafe au lait. His breakfast of couscous
and Cajun sausages lay untouched on the fine Paris china plate. He wondered
what the “matter of great urgency” concerning Mercy could be. Certainly, the
girl was a handful, had always been a trial for the good sisters. Still, she
was shaping into a comely young woman.
    Quite a comely young woman ,
he amended wryly. Too bad she still hated him .
    Julian strode into the parlor and
over to the window draped in mauve velvet and Belgian lace. His was a masterful
figure, with the hard-muscled, robust physique of full manhood. He wore an
impeccable brown velvet frock coat, a pleated linen shirt, a black silk cravat,
and fawn-colored trousers tucked into gleaming black boots.
    At twenty-nine, Julian sported not
a streak of gray in his thick, jet-black hair; his features were hard-chiseled
and arresting. Yet his blue eyes had lost the warm, trusting glow of youth;
instead they gleamed with the penetrating cynicism of a man who had lost his
illusions.
    He idly watched a cala lady go by,
chanting in her patois, entreating the passersby to buy the delicacies piled
high on her sumptuous tray. He observed a dray lumbering past, loaded with
sacks of grain. In the distance he could hear the sweet peal of the cathedral
bells. The mid-May morning was still cool, and the scents drifting in the
window were those intrinsic to New Orleans—French bread and Creole sauces,
mingled with the ever-present odor of garbage rotting in the streets and the
slight saltiness of the air.
    He’d best go to St. Mary’s Parish
House, he thought wearily, and see what tempest in a teapot the girl had
stirred up this time. Mercy’s education at the convent was pretty much
concluded anyway, and he must start thinking about her future.
    His mind drifted back to the
tragic time when he’d first met Mercy. There had been so many changes, he
mused, since that fateful night nine years ago when the girl had first come
into his life. Following the demise of both of her parents, Julian had taken
responsibility for the child. The municipal court of the Vieux Carré District,
headed by his friend, Paul Rillieux, had been only too eager to dispose of the
matter of Mercy, and had swiftly granted Julian’s petition and appointed him
her guardian. Julian had established her with the Gray Ladies at Ursuline Academy, and later on with the Sisters of Charity at St. Mary’s School. He’d seen
that she never lacked for anything. At first, she’d treated him with blatant
hostility, then with cold suspicion, and finally with a grudging, detached
respect that he knew mirrored a deeper, still-simmering animosity.
    In due course, Mother Anise had
told the girl the official version of how her father had died—ostensibly in a
fight in a grogshop—and how the authorities had held her guardian, Julian
Devereux, blameless. No matter. To Mercy O’Shea, Julian would always be the man
who had murdered her father.
    It was ironic, he thought. The
girl still believed her father had died in a barroom brawl. To this day, she
had no idea that Brendan O’Shea had also been a murderer—
    For the minor wound Brendan had
inflicted on Genevieve Dupree had putrefied, and, two weeks later, she had died
of blood poisoning. Even now, Julian’s eyes gleamed with remembered anguish.
Genevieve had known she was dying, and she had been