This again.
“Lordy,” Louisa went on, eyes darting toward the altar. “What if he’s ugly as sin?”
I sighed, adjusting the angle of my veil to block both her and the altar.
“It’s not about his face. I’m restoring our name. I’d marry a haint to keep from smiling in their faces for the next fifty years. You will never see a scandal attached to my name.”
My engagement to Ealy Washington was a declaration. Let the world see how a Bliguet recovers. With poise. With purpose. With monogrammed gloves and a railway ticket out of this collapsing soufflé.
I unfolded the telegram for the hundredth time, its corners softening from wear. I didn’t need to read it. I knew every word.
MISS CAROLINE BLIGUET STOP
ARRIVAL EXPECTED AND ACCOMMODATIONS PREPARED STOP
A NEW LIFE AWAITS IN CARSONDALE STOP
— E. WASHINGTON
Five short lines, but it read like scripture. It promised structure. Placement. A version of myself with title and dignity intact. It saidsomeonewas waiting. That the table had been set. That I still belonged somewhere.
“I don’t want to see that old paper again, Caroline. It’sbreaking my heart,” Louisa said, sniffing into her sleeve. “What kind of name is Ealy anyway?”
I hadn’t met him yet, but Ealy’s telegrams were spelled correctly, and his mother was “Dearly Departed.” If that isn’t the foundation of a strong marriage, I don’t know what is.
“I just don’t understand what went wrong,” Louisa continued, looking ahead to Eliza stumbling shakily over her vows.
“Nothing,” I say, and I mean it. I had followedeveryrule. No scandals. No musicians. I cut out articles fromWoman’s Home Companion. I earned a nursing certificate from Spelman Seminary, and my hair obeyed a comb with the proper amount of docility. Iexcelledat order.
Toussaintwas the one who had done wrong. Men like him didn’t marry women like her. Not in public. Not with a brass band.
Now Eliza, with her too-loud laugh and dirty hems, gets to occupy Pemberly House. She would bring them low with scandal. I knew it.
If the world insisted on descending into chaos, I didn’t have to follow it.
Let Toussaint D’Arcy and his brown bride keep New Orleans. I was choosing the world. The wide one. The untamed one.
But scandal—well, scandal has a way of chasing you clear across the country, doesn’t it?
What follows is the entirely true (and only slightly embellished) account of how I, Caroline Bliguet, a cautious girl from averyproper family, became embroiled in the most whispered-about scandal west of the Mississippi.
And honestly?
I regret very little.
TAME THE WILDERNESS
For all my grand declarations about being done with New Orleans, when the day came to leave, I was misty-eyed. In one gloved hand, I held a ticket to Colorado, folded three times and wilting in the heat. At my feet: three valises, each the size of a small person. My family stood in a semicircle, awkward and expectant. I felt more like I was departing for war rather than the West.
First, Louisa, my sister—moonfaced and round with pregnancy. She clutched her belly then pressed my hand to it.
“I’ll write you as soon as the baby comes,” she said. I looked up to blink away wetness. Her husband stood beside her, simple and good-natured. I wished them both well.
Next came my brother—smiling, softhearted, and entirely unprepared for the weight of marriage to that Damned Benoît Family. His arm was looped through that of his wife: Janey Benoît. Too sweet to be openly cruel to, though God knows I had tried. But if there was one principle I believed in: If you cannot do something wholeheartedly, don’t do it at all.
I had failed to hate her properly. So I stopped.
Though I did not cry, my vision took on a slight shimmer when I saw Toussaint. He hugged me the way a gentleman might brush crumbs off a tablecloth—swift, impersonal. His cheek never touched mine. No breath, no scent. Just the quiet, final words between us: “Bon temps.”
