Dreams of Glory by Thomas Fleming

Author:Thomas Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

I heard you at the door last night. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 P.M. in Fitzpatrick’s store.

FLORA LOPEZ

The following afternoon, I went to my music lesson near the convent on Chartres Street and pretended to feel ill. My teacher permitted me to leave a half-hour early and I met William Coleman at Fitzpatrick’s store. The place was full of men packing merchandise into crates. Mr. Coleman was wearing a suit of pure white Madras silk and a mauve waistcoat embroidered with roses. Once more he seemed to be the embodiment of aristocracy—and honorable affection.

“How kind of you to let me see you again,” he said. “It will make my visit to New Orleans a happy memory. I don’t envy your future in this city. Too bad your revolution didn’t succeed. I hear it was led by a Jew who sounded like an English radical.”

“He was my father,” I said, almost weeping.

William Coleman was enormously distressed. He took an emerald on a gold chain from a tray of jewelry that was being packed and gave it to me. “I seem to cause you nothing but pain,” he said. “Accept this as a token of—my regret. In another country we might have become more than friends.”

I refused the gift. I knew my mother would never let me keep it. Mr. Coleman asked me about my father. I told him of his affection for England. “Since I was a child I’ve lived with descriptions of London in my head,” I said.

William Coleman told me how much he wished he could show me London. He said that men and women could find more happiness there than in any other place on earth. They could also find unhappiness—if they lacked protection and guidance. He took my hand and said I had stirred something in him that he had never felt before—a wish to protect as well as to love a woman without any other motive but the reward of her affection. The women he knew in London presumed that he sought them for their wealth and influence because he himself was not a rich man. They had so disillusioned him he had retired to a government post in the West Indies to escape their mercenary ways. He had been on his way back to London when his ship was rerouted to New Orleans to help Mr. Fitzpatrick. He had resigned himself to marrying one of these London women. Until he saw me.

Everything in my past combined to make his appeal irresistible. “When are you sailing?” I asked.

“Tomorrow at dawn,” he said.

“I’ll be there.”

It was still dark when I crept from our white house on Rampart Street, leaving a note on my pillow to explain my resolution and to implore my mother’s forgiveness. William was waiting for me on the dock. He had bribed the customs officers, who were conveniently absent. He rushed me aboard and hid me in his tiny cabin. By sunrise, the ship Delilah was in mid-river. Soon after we reached the Gulf of Mexico, the captain married us.

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