The Grand Masquerade (The Bold Women Series Book 4) Read Free

have to break up their fights. This morning was no exception. After settling in on the girl’s shoulder, Vivian looked down at the dogs.
    “Nooo,” Sydnee warned. “Let them be.”
    Even though the bird looked away, the canines stole glances at her warily. They were afraid of Vivian.
    A light breeze blew Sydnee’s cinnamon-colored hair. “Let’s go,” she said, slapping her hands on her knees. Vivian flapped her huge wings and returned to her favorite tree. Sydnee rolled off the step clumsily. Her belly made navigation difficult lately.
    She started down an overgrown path. The Sauveterre claim was a heavily wooded piece of land on the Natchez Trace in southern Mississippi. Their one room cabin was nothing more than a shack, covered with a crumbling moss covered roof. It had one window and crooked front porch. The cabin faced Plum Creek which was spanned by a rickety bridge that Victor Sauveterre built twenty-five years earlier.
    Plum Creek was a picturesque little waterway lined with weeping willows and swamp grasses. It drifted lazily along, twisting and turning until it joined the Pearl River to the East and eventually the Gulf of Mexico to the south. The terrain was flat and thick with tangled underbrush, oaks, claw footed cypress, soggy marshland, and a myriad of water fowl and wildlife.
    Hacked out through this wilderness, the Natchez Trace ran in front of the Sauveterre stand. After twenty-five years of heavy traffic, deep ruts had been ground into the thoroughfare. In spots, a man could not see over the banks of the trail because the path had been carved so deeply into the earth.
    In fourteen years, Sydnee Sauveterre had never left her father’s homestead in the Mississippi backwoods. The child’s knowledge of the world beyond The Devil’s Backbone was limited, and she had experienced more than a lifetime of privation. Hard work and using her body to earn a living was a way of life for her.
    In 1807, her father erected the stand along The Natchez Trace to sell food and liquor to travelers, but the past few years, business had declined.
    “Those rich bastards in New Orleans ruined everything,” Sauveterre raged. “Their goddamned steamboats took my living. No one uses The Trace anymore.”
    It was true. For years, stands like The Devil’s Backbone prospered along the 400 mile path from Natchez to Nashville. “Coon Box Stand”, “Buzzard Roost”, “Shoat’s”, “French Camp”, over fifty stands in number, dotted the rugged trail. But with the invention of the steam engine, there came a new and easier way to travel on the Mississippi; by paddle wheeler, and the golden years of the Natchez Trace came to a close.
    Sydnee walked over the little bridge and then up a path alongside the creek toward her favorite spot under a willow tree. She brushed aside the long green tendrils of the tree and sat down. Baloo and Atlantis ducked in after her.
    Sydnee eased herself down onto the moss. The verdant chamber was the only place she felt safe. With the green curtain surrounding her, she could lower her guard and allow her imagination to soar. Ever since she was a small child, she would come to this hideaway, armed with stories from Margarite about Martinique and a city called New Orleans.
    “The ladies gowns are the color of the finest flowers,” Margarite told her. “Fabric as blue as cornflowers, reds like christmasberry blossoms, and yellows as brilliant as the flowers on lily pads.”
    Sydnee would listen with her chin cupped in her hand, memorizing every word.
    “And the houses, child,” Margarite would continue. “They all have balconies bordered with lacey iron railings and courtyards filled with magnolias and camellias.”
    Sydnee would try to imagine the big river to the west, called the Mississippi, where the “Trace” began in Natchez. She had never seen a cake, but Margarite told her that the paddle wheelers on the river looked like gigantic, white layer cakes, all trimmed in