Chapter 9 - The Garden at Sunset
The courtyard of the Orsini estate was hidden behind sixteen-foot walls of old St. Joe brick, topped with jagged shards of bottle glass embedded in lime mortar to keep the river rats and political rivals from scaling the perimeter.
Inside, however, the space was an Eden of southern shade.
Three massive live oaks, their branches weeping with long curtains of Spanish moss, shaded flagstone paths bordered by sweet olive, night-blooming jasmine, and rows of terracotta pots filled with winter rosemary and mint. In the center of the lawn stood the circular brick oven that Carmine’s grandfather had built in 1912—an outdoor hearth constructed of refractory firebrick from the old iron works, fitted with a heavy cast-iron door that bore the Orsini crest: three acorns beneath a crescent moon.
It was five o'clock on Saturday evening.
The sun was dropping behind the levee, casting long, coppery shafts of light across the flagstones, turning the muddy surface of the Mississippi into a ribbon of beaten gold.
Nell stood before the outdoor hearth, wearing a simple dress of gray linen with the sleeves pinned above her elbows.
She was not carrying a tray. She was holding an eight-foot wooden baker’s peel, its blade worn smooth and white by forty years of flour and cornmeal.
Beside the oven, kneeling on a wooden crate, was Carmine.
He had discarded his jacket and waistcoat; his white shirt was open at the throat, his suspenders hanging loose at his hips, his forearms smeared with black soot where he had been stacking seasoned red-oak splits into the firebox.
"The draft is too strong on the river side," Carmine said, his voice muffled by the iron door as he checked the flue. "The wind is coming off the bend at ten knots. It’ll burn the crust before the center sets."
Nell did not look down at him. She tapped the edge of the peel against the stone apron of the oven with the rhythmic, casual authority of a ship’s captain checking the lead line.
"The draft is fine, Carmine," she said. "The stone has been soaking heat since noon. When the oak burns down to white ash, we push the coals into the back corners and close the damper halfway. The retained heat in the brick will carry thirty loaves without another stick of wood."
Carmine sat back on his heels, wiping his forehead with the back of his forearm, leaving a dark streak of ash across his brow.
He looked up at her.
"You speak to your mother's people like that?" he asked.
"My mother's people were bakers from Alsace," Nell said, smiling down at him with those clear, dark eyes that no longer carried the gray fog of the laundry room. "They didn't argue with men who tried to build fires with green pine. They just took the shovel out of their hands and showed them how to stack the split."
Carmine laughed—a short, clean, startled sound that made the sparrows in the fig tree flutter their wings.
He stood up, towering over her by a foot, his broad frame blocking the last of the red sunlight that was filtering through the wrought-iron gates.
He reached out, his soot-stained thumb gently brushing a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear.
"Your father arrived in Houston three hours ago," Carmine said.
Nell’s hands tightened on the ash handle of the baker's peel. "Did he tolerate the train?"
"He slept from Beaumont to the terminal," Carmine told her. "Dr. Chen said his oxygen saturation was ninety-four percent on room air. They’re putting him in the chamber on Monday morning."
Nell lowered the peel, leaning its head against the brick facade of the hearth.
She stepped closer to him—not with the hesitant, frightened deference of a servant in a hallway, but with the steady, unhurried certainty of an equal stepping onto her own ground.
"You went to the nursing home in Kenner before they moved him," Nell said softly. "The orderly told me. He said a tall man in a dark coat stood by the bed for twenty minutes while my father was asleep."
Carmine’s jaw tightened. "I had to see if he looked like Guillaume."
"Did he?"
"He has Guillaume’s hands," Carmine said. "Wide across the knuckles. The kind of hands that don't know how to drop a line when the river gets rough."
He looked down at her small, scarred fingers where they rested against his rough linen cuff.
"Like yours," he added.
Nell leaned her forehead against his chest, right over the heavy, rhythmic thud of his heart. She inhaled the scent of him—woodsmoke, clean sweat, dried port, and the faint, permanent tang of the river that ran through both their lives like a brown thread.
Carmine wrapped his arms around her, his large hands resting flat against her back, pulling her into the shelter of his strength with a slow, protective permanence that felt like iron gates swinging shut against a century of winter.
"My grandmother wants the wedding in the cathedral," Carmine whispered into her hair. "She says the Archbishop owes the family three favors for the roof repairs on the convent."
May you like
Nell chuckled softly against his linen. "The Archbishop will have to wait until the dough rises, Carmine. I have sixty loaves of rye going into the ovens at five in the morning."
"The Archbishop can wait," Carmine agreed, his voice dropping into that deep, sovereign calm that made the vast city outside the brick walls feel distant, quiet, and completely powerless. "The Archbishop has plenty of bread."
