Lamia [NaNoWriMo 2018]

Prologue

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1826

The cottage shook with the sound of glass shattering as Cecile Cavineaux slammed into the wooden china cabinet behind her. The sound—like the ones before it—came mostly from Cecile's attempts to evade her attacker's fists, but from the upstairs wardrobe where her three girls hid, it sounded like the woman was on the brink of reaching her death.

Another round of porcelain plates crashed to the wood floor, causing Amélie, the youngest Cavineaux girl to flinch. She shook with fear, too afraid to move for fear that her father would hear all the way from downstairs and come for them next, that she didn't even react to the feeling of Cecilie's arms circling her shoulders. Or the urine sliding down her leg.

Marielle Cavineaux reached out to press her younger sisters' heads together so that she could cover their ears, even as the strong smell of waste wafted into the muggy air of the closet and soaked their slippers. A single tear streaked down her grey eyes, but she refused to let on to the weakness; someone needed to be strong for the girls.

Not that their mother was weak. On the contrary.

She'd withstood the uncertainties of being birthed on a slave ship from Haiti, followed by sixteen more years of servitude at the hands of a brutal and abusive owner who had sold her mother and father to separate buyers and kept her for his own sick pleasure. That is until a French nobleman by the name of Maurice Cavineaux darkened her quarters. The affair had lasted three months, resulting in both Marielle's conception and the purchase of her mother's freedom. But rather than being a knight in shining armor, he'd proved nothing more than a devil in disguise, setting her up in lavish cottage amongst other Gens de couleur libres and sending Marielle to school in France where she'd be too far away to help Cecile when Maurice's true nature reared its ugly head.

Marielle was sure that her mother's abuse had ended with her own father's cardiac arrest a week after her academic intermission had begun.

And now the same thing was happening at the hands of the girls' father.

After what seemed like hours, the cottage door shut with a final bang, signaling Monsieur Dansereau's leave, and the three girls burst from the wardrobe in an attempt to get to the window. Down on the street below, Marielle, Cecilie, and Amélie watched as Dansereau strode up to a black carriage, his equally opaque cape flapping behind him like a veil of darkness. The sun shifted behind the clouds just a little, casting a long shadow on the ground below their window. Marielle could have sworn that, for just a second, Dansereau's shadow stilled and looked up at her as the real Dansereau reached over to take his top hat from the coachman. But then, the carriage dipped a bit under the weight of the well-built man as he lifted himself into the carriage, causing the horses—who already seemed a bit uneasy—to whine in protest, and the illusion vanished along with Dansereau himself.

Marielle felt Cecilie let out a sigh of relief beside her, but Marielle wasn't as pacified. In fact, there was a fire raging beneath the sinews of her bones that took her back to a decade-old memory of her eight-year-old self watching her own father hold her mother's unconscious body over their water basin. If it hadn't been for the heart failure he'd suffered after the dinner he demanded Marielle prepare, then...

No, Marielle shook the painful memory away, determined to push away the acid in her veins and focus on the tasks at hand. "Cecilie, go get Amélie cleaned up and ready for her harp lesson. Governess Marion will be here any minute," she told her younger sister, shooing the two younger girls out of the room so that she could get to work on mopping and airing out the wardrobe.

Afterward, Marielle made her way downstairs to tend to their mother's wounds, put her to bed, pick up the shards of glass and porcelain, and set to work on supper. As she chopped onions and peppers in the kitchen, she caught sight of her reflection in the knife she was holding, making her stop and peer a little more closely. At just eighteen years of age, Marielle had seen and done things that most women with her complexion could hardly claim, especially outside of New Orleans.