A Season For Love. Bj James

and injustices of prejudice.

      He was thirteen the day of their talk, and admittedly naive. But before she was through, he understood the facts, the myths, the foibles, and the pain of the wealthy Southern gentleman’s penchant for keeping a mistress and even a second family. He understood that once it had been a common, expected social institution.

      Grandmère had saved the Delacroix women for last. With her back ramrod straight and her chin tilted, she’d spoken of a family of daughters. Girls of lesser means, noticed first for their comeliness, then their innate soft-spoken gentility. Traits that became consistent as their name and beauty became legend.

      They were few, their intelligence and style always unique. Making their liaisons the most sought after, bringing the highest prices on the bidders’s market. Eventually it became an accepted fact that the prettiest Delacroix girlchild would be groomed from birth to be a courtesan. Yet, only if the young woman accepted the terms of the bidder. If she accepted, the relationship would be permanent.

      “It was rare, almost unheard of, that a Delacroix ever had more than one lover,” Grandmère emphasized. “Beyond his wife, neither would her patron.

      “Not a good practice, Jericho.” Almost too softly to be heard, she added, “But not the worst that could have happened for all who were involved either.”

      There was more, Jericho remembered. Over lemonade and Grandmère’s special sugar cookies, she explained many customs of the past. Some good. Some bad. Some a mix of both. Some silly. Some confusing. Some surprising.

      But the greatest shock of all was learning that his own grandfather, in the course of a life cut short, had kept a mistress.

      “Ah, yes,” Grandmère assured him. “She was a pretty little thing. Not big and horsey as I. Your grandfather kept her in exquisite style for years. With my blessing. But, thank God, there were no children.”

      Faded eyes that once had been the exact color of his own, searched his face. “Rest assured, Jericho, my sweet boy, you have no secret uncles, or aunts, or cousins strolling the streets of Belle Terre. Your grandfather might have been a bounder, he might have thrown away half a fortune, his excesses might have led to an early death, but, in the little he did right, a second family was not an added complication.”

      “Didn’t you care, Grandmère?”

      He could still remember how his voice trembled when he thought of how the man who had never been more to him than a portrait over the dining room mantle and a name on a gravestone must have hurt this grand and beloved lady.

      But when she’d glimpsed his sickened expression, Letitia Rivers had taken his face between her pale beringed hands, saying the words he had never forgotten.

      “Jericho, my sweet child, your not-so-dear departed grandfather is proof one’s station in life does not guarantee a good and wise, or even a kind, person. That you must always understand.

      “But most important, you must know and believe that your grandfather’s having kept a mistress doesn’t make you a bad person. No more that the Delacroix women having been mistresses makes your little friend anything but what she is—a sweet, beautiful, and intelligent child.”

      “Then I should keep on being her friend, Grandmère?” he asked, too preoccupied by all she’d told him to wonder how at seventy-two Letitia Rivers could know that Maria Elena was sweet, beautiful, intelligent, or anything at all.

      When he remembered later, he’d shrugged it off. After all, in his eyes, Grandmère Rivers, grand dame of Belle Terre society, knew everything.

      She’d peered at him over the lorgnette she stubbornly preferred to glasses. As if she’d assessed his courage and approved, at last, she nodded. “Of course you should.”

      “Good,” he replied as he leaned to kiss her wrinkled cheek, “’cause I intended to all along.”

      Grandmère Rivers chuckled, delighted with him. As he left the room, she called after him, “Bring little Miss Delacroix by to see me one day. We’ll have lemonade and sugar cookies.”

      “I will,” he promised.