Jean Lafitte's Warehouse

Where Élise met him, when it couldn't wait

One candle, no clerk, and a room full of goods that never once appear in a customs record. Lafitte kept his accounts the way Élise kept hers, mostly in his head and never where a magistrate could find them, which made the two of them, by the family's account, unusually easy to do business with and unusually hard to prosecute. When something needed arranging in person rather than through a go-between, this is where she came.

It mattered more than usual in the weeks before January 1815, with a British fleet in the Gulf and Lafitte's own smuggling fleet suddenly very much wanted by the general he'd spent years evading. Whatever passed between them on nights like this one, neither kept a written record of it: only the same single river stone that marks every name Élise never explained.